Thorne Smith: Collected Works
Author: Thorne Smith
Date: 1917-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Humor; Ghosts; Fantasy; Paranormal fiction
Description: A collection of wickedly witty, ribald, satirical tales. Many of these tell of everyday folks in collision with the supernatural, but chuckles are to be found in others as well. For some surprise departures from Smith’s usual style, take a look at the superb murder mystery “Did She Fall?” and the engaging childrens’ book “Lazy Bear Lane.” ~ ~ ~ ~ Due to copyright restrictions, this collection excludes “The Passionate Witch” (1941), which was completed by Norman H. Matson (1893–1965). ~ ~ ~ ~ Thorne Smith was an American writer of humorous supernatural fantasy fiction; he had a brief but prolif
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+80” or less

THORNE  SMITH:
COLLECTED  WORKS

MobileRead Edition
2021

A collection of wickedly witty, ribald, satirical tales. Many of these tell of everyday folks in collision with the supernatural, but chuckles are to be found in others as well. For some surprise departures from Smith’s usual style, take a look at the superb murder mystery Did She Fall? and the engaging childrens’ book Lazy Bear Lane.

Due to copyright restrictions, this collection excludes The Passionate Witch (1941), which was completed by Norman H. Matson (1893–1965).

(See table of contents below)

* * * *

James Thorne Smith, Jr. (March 27, 1892 – June 20, 1934) was an American writer of humorous supernatural fantasy fiction under the byline Thorne Smith. He had a brief but prolific career as a best-selling comic novelist. He is best known today for the two Topper novels, comic fantasy fiction involving sex, much drinking, and ghosts. With racy illustrations, these sold millions of copies in the 1930s and were equally popular in paperbacks of the 1950s. His writings have had a lingering influence in popular culture: witness, for example, the television series “Bewitched” and “I Dream of Jeanie” and the films Beetlejuice, Ghostbusters, and Night at the Museum.

* * * *

Contents were originally published 1918 ~ 1934. This book is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+80” or less.

CONTENTS:

- … Author’s Note

SUPERNATURAL
SHENANIGANS

- Topper
- Topper Takes a Trip
- The Stray Lamb
- The Night Life of the Gods
- Turnabout
- Skin and Bones
- The Glorious Pool

THE SILLY SIDE

- The Bishop’s Jaegers

- Rain in the Doorway

THE SEROUS SIDE

- Did She Fall?
(murder mystery)

- Dream’s End
(gothic romance)

THE OSWALD DIARIES
(WWI NAVY)

- Biltmore Oswald

- Out o’ Luck

TWO SHORT STORIES

- Yonder’s Henry!

- Birthday Present

CHILDREN’S BOOK

- Lazy Bear Lane

POETRY COLLECTION

- Haunts and By-Paths

Thorne Smith’s Writing
As Thorne Smith Saw It

Without so much as turning a hair I freely admit that I am one of America’s greatest realists. And I’m not at all sure that this calm statement of facts does not take in all other nations, including the Scandinavian.

Like life itself my stories have no point and get absolutely nowhere. And like life they are a little mad and purposeless. They resemble those people who watch with placid concentration a steam shovel digging a large hole in the ground. They are almost as purposeless as a dignified commuter shaking an impotent fist after a train he has just missed. They are like the man who dashes madly through traffic only to linger aimlessly on the opposite corner watching a fountain pen being demonstrated in a shop window.

Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved and no reader improved.

The more I think about it the more am I convinced that I’m a trifle cosmic. My books are as blindly unreasonable as nature. They have no more justification than a tiresomely high mountain or a garrulous and untidy volcano. Unlike the great idealists and romancers who insist on a beginning and a middle and an ending for their stories, mine possess none of these definite parts. You can open them at any page. It does not matter at all. You will be equally mystified if not revolted. I am myself.

TOPPER

DESCRIPTION

Topper is also known as The Jovial Ghosts. This and its sequel, Topper Takes a Trip (set in the French Riviera), are probably Smith’s most famous work, about a respectable banker called Cosmo Topper, married to his depressingly staid wife Mary, and his misadventures with a pair of ghosts, Marion and George Kerby, who introduce him to other ghosts. He is romantically attracted to Marion, who at one point tries to kill him so that they can be together always.

Dedication

TO CELIA
— to say the least —

CHAPTER ONE

No Change

For some minutes now Scollops had been gazing searchingly at Mr. Topper. And Mr. Topper was troubled. Not definitely troubled, but vaguely so, which to some persons is the most troublesome form of trouble. Mr. Topper was one of such persons. In fact he was highly representative of the type. So free from trouble had Topper’s days been that gradually he had come to regard with suspicion all creatures not likewise unencumbered. An earthquake, an eruption or tidal wave would mildly move Cosmo Topper, arouse him to the extent of a dollar donation which would later be deducted from his income tax; whereas a newspaper story dealing with bankruptcy, crimes of violence or moral looseness would cause him speedily to avert his eyes to less disturbing topics. Mr. Topper could excuse nature and the Republican Party, but not man. He was an institutional sort of animal, but not morbid. Not apparently. So completely and successfully had he inhibited himself that he veritably believed he was the freest person in the world. But Mr. Topper could not be troubled. His mental process ran safely, smoothly, and on the dot along well signaled tracks; and his physical activities, such as they were, obeyed without question an inelastic schedule of suburban domesticity. He resented being troubled. At least he thought he did. That was Mr. Topper’s trouble, but at present he failed to realize it.

He experienced now something of the same resentment that came to him upon being delayed in the tunnel on his way home from the city. Things were going on round him in the tunnel, dreadful things, perhaps, but he did not know what they were. He sat in a blaze of light in the midst of clanking darkness. Surrounded by familiar things he felt stuffy and uncomfortable. Even his newspaper lost its wonted stability. Yes, it was a decidedly objectionable feeling that Mr. Topper had tonight as he gave himself to the solicitous embrace of his arm chair and followed with a dull gaze the rug’s interminable border design – a Doric motif, clean-cut and geometrically accurate. Once this design had appealed to his abiding sense of order. Tonight he hardly saw it, although without his knowledge it was wearying his eyes, and had been doing so for several months.

In Scollops’ eyes there was an expression difficult to fathom. Mr. Topper held the opinion that the expression was uncomfortably insinuating, making him in some sly way an accessory before the fact. But hang it all, what was the meaning of Scollops’ look? The cat had been fed. He had seen to that himself as he had seen to it ever since he had adventurously brought her home from Wilson’s, the grocer’s, one evening four years ago. Four years. As long as that in this house; and once it had seemed so new. Now it was an old house, an uninteresting house. Perhaps he was old, too, and equally uninteresting. Mr. Topper felt that he was, and for the first time in his life permitted himself to wonder about such things.

His intellectual debauch was rudely shattered by Scollops. The cat yawned and tentatively thrust her nails into her benefactor’s thigh. It was rather a plump thigh. Long years of well-regulated commuting had despoiled it of its youthful charm. It was a tight thigh and a fleshy one, yet it still reacted to pain. To such an extent, in fact, that Mr. Topper’s sensation of trouble instantly gave way to one of mild reproach as he dropped Scollops softly thudding to the floor.

This faint discord in the domestic tranquillity caused Mrs. Cosmo Topper to look up from her needlework. Mr. Topper, glancing across the table, met his wife’s eyes. It was just for a moment, then he looked quickly away, but why, he did not know.

“She yawned,” he remarked by way of explanation. “Yawned and scratched.”

“I know it,” apologized Mrs. Topper, mistaking his words for a direct accusation. “I’ve been doing it all evening. It must have been the veal.”

Topper watched his wife remove her sewing-glasses and place them in their case. With an absorbed gaze he followed her movements as she folded her sewing and wrapped it in a piece of linen, which she then deposited in a basket. At this point his expression became almost desperate, then hopeless. No, there was going to be no change in the nightly routine – glasses, case, linen, basket. If she would only reverse the procedure, or for once forget her glasses, that would be something. Meantime Mrs. Topper, unconscious of tragedy, rose from her chair, came round to where her husband was sitting, and brushed his forehead with her lips. Then, referring once more in a pained voice to the haunting qualities of veal, she left the room.

Mr. Topper listened to her firm step upon the stairs. A certain squeaking of boards apprised him of the fact that she had achieved the landing. For a moment he thought idly about veal in relation to his wife. Then he did an unusual thing. Instead of knocking out his pipe and locking in the cat whose vagrant nature had caused him some rather trying experiences in the past, he gently retrieved that animal from the floor and fell to studying an old atlas which he had plucked from an obscure shelf.

“It made me sleepless, too,” murmured Mrs. Topper an hour later as her husband settled down beside her.

And that night Mr. Topper dreamed of eating curried veal in Calcutta. He was surrounded by many maidens all of whom partook amply of veal, and none of whom complained. It was delicious. He gorged himself.

CHAPTER TWO

Scollops Looks Inscrutable

Not until the following afternoon, which was Saturday and therefore free, was Mr. Topper able to localize his trouble. The discovery came to him as a shock which gathered intensity as the days passed. It marked an epoch in his life. Even Mrs. Topper, who steadfastly refused to recognize changes taking place around her, detected something new and therefore annoying in her husband. But she reassured herself by believing that all stomachs have their off seasons, and became almost pallidly cheerful when she considered the fact that her stomach’s off season was always on – it prevailed the year around. To Mrs. Topper it was an endless source of comfort to be able to trace all mystifying cases of conduct, even her own, to such a tangible and well-established institution as a stomach.

It was Scollops again.… Scollops draped on her master’s knee with a Saturday afternoon mist swimming in her eyes.… Scollops, the inexplicable, narrowing infinity between two orange-colored slits.

This it was that gave Mr. Topper the shock. For the first time in their four years of companionable association Topper realized that the cat saw nothing, that is, nothing immediate. Although her yellow, searching gaze included him, it passed far beyond him down distant vistas from which he was excluded. Caressing and condoning on their way, Scollops’ eyes seemed to be roving through the ages, dwelling on appalling mysteries with the reminiscent indulgence of a satiated goddess.

Looking into Scollops’ eyes, Mr. Topper discovered that there were things he did not know, colors of life beyond his comprehension, impulses alien to his reason. With his wife’s eyes it was different. He knew their every shade and meaning. Nothing in them lay unrevealed. He was familiar with the direct gaze denoting finance, the confidential gaze denoting scandal, the patient gaze denoting servants, the motherly gaze denoting superiority and the martyred gaze denoting dyspepsia.

Suddenly Mr. Topper realized what was troubling him. It was eyes. Old familiar eyes. He felt that he knew them all. He knew the eyes at the office, from the president’s to the elevator boy’s. It was surprising, he thought, how desperately well he knew eyes. Mr. Topper saw eyes. Mr. Topper understood them. And he had an uncomfortable feeling that they understood him.

Now, however, he was alive to the fact that Scollops’ eyes escaped all classification. This both pleased and shocked him. He realized that in spite of four years of close companionship he had not the slightest idea of Scollops’ private opinion of him, or of anything else, for that matter. To what was going on behind her eyes Topper had no clue.

Mr. Topper found himself thinking that it would be a relief to have someone look at him in the manner of Scollops. Preferably a woman. Not that Mr. Topper was loose, or romantic, or both. He had never loitered to pluck forbidden flowers beside the marital path, but had mechanically kept to his schedule with Mrs. Topper at one end and the office at the other.

Once in his youth he had nerved himself to lurch in reckless pursuit of a shop girl in a skating rink, but the meeting with her had been so sudden and demolishing that when he arose from the dust of the floor he departed with a far sharper pain in his spine than in his heart. After that he confined his amorous pursuits to the nice girls of his own set. He never called on them alone, but always with a jolly company of youths, which gave him a sense of security. Later he had met Mrs. Topper, who had already achieved individuality through smoldering dyspepsia, and he had decorously followed her through a summer of neat suburban Sundays, after which he had made the arrangement permanent in the presence of an orderly gathering of neat suburban property owners. And that ended that side of Mr. Topper.

Now, however, he was getting along. Nearly forty and acquiring flesh. Ten years married. He neither had to stretch to reach the electric light nor stoop to walk under the bulb. His face was unremarkable save for his eyes, which were extremely blue and youthful, as if the fire in them had been banked for the sake of conservation. His features would have been delicate had his appetite not been so good or his habits less sedentary. Had their union been blessed with issue, one of the children, probably Cosmo, Junior, would have been a sandy blond like his father, for Mr. Topper’s hair was of an indifferent shade. But there were no little Toppers. Scollops was undisturbed.

He rose, stretched and walked to the window. Scollops merely stretched and resumed her repose, with the austere resignation characteristic of cats when bent on slumber or theft.

“Guess I’ll go for a walk,” said Topper. “I’m in need of a bit of a change.”

“There’ll be a roast for dinner,” replied Mrs. Topper. “Lamb,” she added as he left the room. “You like lamb.”

Mr. Topper winced as he collected his hat and stick. Why should he be thus openly reminded that he liked lamb? Couldn’t a person creep up on a roast and surprise it sometime? As a matter of fact he was not particularly lustful for lamb, or at least he would strive hereafter to dissemble his emotions.

But all he said was “Good!” The exclamation point stuck in his throat.

CHAPTER THREE

Mr. Topper Pursues the Sun

The street down which Mr. Topper strolled was a nice street. No one needed to feel ashamed of it. No one did. And the people who lived on this street had nice homes; nice, neat homes with well-groomed lawns, well-shingled roofs and well-stocked larders. The style of architecture showed a sincere desire to impress the eye favorably. The effort had been based more on hope than on inspiration. The houses could have been – and frequently were – termed “homey,” “quaint,” and “comfortable,” but after these terms had been exhausted little remained to be said save, perhaps, “sweet.”

Mr. Topper and his neighbors were quietly proud of this street, and had borne their assessments as a tolerant father bears the extras of an extravagant son at college. One could bring one’s friends from the city to this street and let it speak for itself, which one seldom did. Sewerage, real estate and the cost of building were subjects far too fascinating to be left to the imagination. So the visitors from the city heard all about these things, and were not amused.

Being on a slightly higher elevation than the rest of the town, the street was happily called “Glendale Road.” It is rather terrifying to think that the real estate promoter responsible for this name is perhaps still unhung and busily engaged in giving equally stultifying names to other nice little streets in other nice little towns situated in other nice little localities throughout the United States.

“You know that swamp?” he is, perhaps, saying to his wife at this very moment as he lights his cigar.

“Which one, my dear?” she asks. “You’ve bought so many swamps.”

“And sold ’em, too,” he replies with a boyish chuckle. “But the one we drove by last week. I pointed it out to you. It was where they found the body of – —”

“Oh, yes,” his wife exclaims, “the rag-picker’s wife! They had to vacate their shack, didn’t they?”

“Well, that doesn’t matter,” replies her husband rather quickly. “I’ve decided to run a drive through it. What do you think would be a good name?”

Deep silence for several minutes. Her husband watches her anxiously. She reads a lot of books. Good things, books.

“Mayblossom Drive,” she murmurs at last, with a dreamy look in her eyes. “That would be charming. Let’s call it that.”

Business of writing name down on back of soiled envelope. Husband departs for development in car and another street has come into being.

Nevertheless Glendale Road was really a nice street. It was wide and well paved. There were trees on it at orderly intervals. And, now that June was here, there were leaves on the branches of the trees and there were birds among the leaves.

For some reason Mr. Topper’s mind was not occupied today with thoughts of sewers, real estate or building costs. Community pride was absent from his mood. He heard the birds chirping and listened to them intently. How many of them there must be and what a great to-do they were making. Little birds were always so excited. He had held a sparrow in his hand once and felt its heart beat. Somehow it had made him feel like crying. The little thing had been so excited, so bent on living. Life to the little sparrow had seemed so necessary and important. Topper had released it immediately. How busily it had flown away. Well, these chaps up in the tree were having a good time just the same. They never needed a change. They could come and go as they pleased. A nest here and a nest there. A family hatched and a family fledged. Fresh branches in new lands. Adventurous flights in pursuit of the sun. Not a bad life, that. Be a bird and see the world.

Topper smiled and stopped in front of a public garage. He was now on a side street of the town proper, but Mr. Topper was not altogether sure as to how he had gotten there. He had been flying in pursuit of the sun, and on the following day, after church, two ladies protested to Mrs. Topper that he had looked right through them. What had they done to be so dreadfully treated, and what had come over her husband, who was always so polite to the ladies?

“Sparrows,” said Mr. Topper at this point, and walked away, leaving his wife to explain as best she could the meaning of his remark.

Seeing Mr. Topper smiling at him, the owner of the garage rested from his labors and called out an enthusiastic greeting.

“Isn’t she a pip?” he asked, pointing to the machine on which he had been working.

Impressed by the man’s earnestness, Mr. Topper approached the car and surveyed it with the vague gaze of an amateur.

“A regular pip,” he said, looking hopefully at the man. “A regular pip of a car, Mark.”

Mark beamed.

“It’s the coyest little car in the town,” he declared, “and it’s carried more than gasoline in its time, though it is only this year’s model.”

“Bootlegging?” asked Mr. Topper, deciding, now that he came to consider it, the car did have rather vicious lines. Too much nickel and a trifle too low to the ground.

“No, victims,” said Mark. “There was a bottle in every flap when they found it.”

“Then did the car manage to get lost?” Mr. Topper asked with growing interest.

“Wrecked,” replied Mark briefly. “Head on to a tree. I’ve practically rebuilt it, but the motor’s good as new.”

“It’s had rather a sad life for such a young car,” remarked Topper. “Whose is it?”

“Mine,” replied Mark with pride. “But it did belong to George and Marion Kerby. You remember. Both killed three months back. The estate owed me money so I took the bus in settlement.”

Mr. Topper now looked at the automobile with unfeigned interest. Surely he remembered George and Marion Kerby, the fastest young couple in town. At least, they had been. People had always predicted that they would come to some such end. Kerby had never worked. No commuting for him. Rich young devil. And he and his wife had been laid to rest to the tune of “I told you so.” Kerby’s wife, a slim girl, good looking, quick in her actions, a mocking sort of a creature. Then, like brushing against a cobweb on a dark woodland path, Mr. Topper’s thoughts were suddenly arrested by little clinging threads of memory. Marion Kerby’s eyes? Ah, yes, he remembered them. The Kerbys had not belonged to his set, the solid, substantial, commuting set, but had gathered round them, from all parts of the country, a group of irresponsible spirits, who would suddenly appear in a swarm of motors, riot around the town and countryside for a few days, and then as suddenly disappear in a cloud of dust and a chorus of brazen horns. No one had really known the Kerbys, that is, no respectable, accredited member of the community. But Topper had seen them often enough as they darted through the streets of the town, and once he had met Marion Kerby at the dedication of the new twenty-thousand-dollar fire-house.

“Comic operas cost more and are less amusing,” she had remarked, with a smile, then asked in a serious voice: “Do all white duck trousers have to look so self-conscious?”

Mr. Topper, being a charter member of the organization, had loyally donned his outfit and joined the ranks of his fellow fire-fighters. Now, at the question, he looked down at his ducks and blushed. Marion Kerby mingled with the crowd, but she left behind her the seeds of rebellion in Mr. Topper’s mind. He had never felt in sympathy with white duck trousers, and now he actually hated them. They did look self-conscious, but it showed poor community spirit on Marion Kerby’s part to ridicule the uniform. What would a fire company do without white duck trousers? Evidently she was one of those modern young women who had no respect for tradition. Furthermore, nice women did not talk about trousers on such a slight acquaintance.

A few days after this he had encountered Marion Kerby on the morning train. She had nodded to him and smiled, and somehow her smile had seemed to convey the impression that they shared between them an unholy secret of a most delicious nature. Marion Kerby’s smile had caused Mr. Topper to feel much less married. He had puzzled all the way in that morning about her eyes. He had found himself unable to place them. They were never quite the same. Thoughts danced behind them like fountains in the sun, hiding their liquid depth in a burst of dazzling spray.

And now as Mr. Topper stood in the glittering presence of the car in which Marion Kerby and her husband had met their death, he remembered her eyes and felt dismayed that their light had been snuffed from the world. A June heaviness settled down on Mr. Topper and he became conscious of his stomach. It was too large. Indecent. Yes, he was certainly in need of a change.

Mark’s monologue swam in on his ears.

“They were a wild pair, Mr. Topper,” the man was saying, “but nice people at that. The nicest couple I ever knew. One minute they’d be fighting with each other like a pair of wildcats and the next they’d be guying along like two tramps. Why, the way they went on would make you think of a couple of kids. They were always arguing about who was the best driver and often they’d ask me to decide. There’d be tears in their eyes, they were so in earnest. You’d have thought it was a matter of life and death with them.”

“That’s about how it was, Mark,” said Mr. Topper thoughtfully. “A matter of life and death. A gay life and a quick death.”

“What’s the odds,” replied Mark, with a shrug. “They liked it that way and they got what they wanted.”

“I’ve a feeling they got just a trifle more than they wanted,” said Mr. Topper. “They didn’t look like a pair that were extremely anxious to die. They were too crammed with life.”

“But that’s the way it goes,” continued Mark, waxing philosophic. “There are lots of people in town I’d rather have seen get in trouble with a tree.”

This remark made Mr. Topper feel a little uneasy. He realized that he had never enriched Mark’s coffers with the purchase of gasoline or automobile parts. To Mark he was perfectly useless, a fit subject for a tree.

“They had good stuff,” Mark went on reminiscently, “and they were generous with it, too. I always had a drink whenever they came in the place. We used to have regular little parties in my office over there.”

Mr. Topper walked deliberately to Mark’s small office and peered through the door. In his mind’s eye he could see Marion Kerby seated at the desk. He had a remarkably vivid picture of her. It was almost as if he had been present at the parties himself. There she sat, her slim ankles crossed, her mad eyes dancing beneath the brim of a smart little hat, and her lips parted in a sarcastic smile. In one hand was a glass which she was holding on high and in the other a cigarette. “Truly an unedifying sight,” thought Mr. Topper, and yet he was fascinated by it. He dwelt on the delicate lines of her face, the small impertinent chin and the fine lips curved in a roving, debonair smile. Then he returned to her eyes and became lost in contemplation.

“They were mad,” he mused to himself. “They could laugh the devil down.”

Fearing that that was what they were probably doing at the very moment, Mr. Topper turned away from the door and looked at Mark, who was in the act of hanging a “For Sale” sign over the radiator cap of the automobile. The deed done, Mark stepped back and surveyed his handiwork ecstatically, head on one side and hands on his hips. “Here,” thought Mr. Topper, “is a master craftsman, one who loves his work for its own sake.”

“So you’re going to sell it,” he said, walking over to the bewitched garage man.

“Sure thing,” replied Mark. “And cheap too. Couldn’t get anyone to believe she’s sound. But she is, every nut and bolt in her. The Kerbys themselves wouldn’t know the difference except that she’s quieter now. They always kept the old bus rattling.”

“Well, they rattled their toy once too often,” remarked Mr. Topper, looking moodily out at the street. “I hope the next owner will have better luck.”

“Lightning never strikes …”

“Twice in the same place,” interrupted Mr. Topper. “I know, Mark, but an automobile can, and if it isn’t the same place it’s some place equally unyielding.”

With a nod to Mark and a lingering look at the automobile, Mr. Topper left the garage and walked slowly down the street to the main thoroughfare of the town, where he stopped and looked with unseeing eyes into a butcher’s window. Behind him a steady trail of automobiles passed by. He was dimly aware of their swift, hissing tires whirling evenly over the smooth road. They were all going somewhere, he thought to himself, without troubling to look around, all out for a good time – a change. Some of them were going to new places, no doubt, places miles and miles away, maybe as far off as the coast. People did such things, camping at night by the roadside or putting up at inns.

Presently he became aware of the fact that he was looking a leg of lamb full in the face. There the thing was, hardly a foot from his nose. Back at home its mate was probably sputtering in the oven by this time. And Mrs. Topper was twittering about preparing new fields for dyspepsia while the cook struggled to swallow her spleen. It was appalling. Mr. Topper considered the lamb with smoldering eyes, but the lamb held its ground, and for a moment they confronted each other like two antagonists. Then Mr. Topper, at last outfaced by his less sensitive opponent, whirled about and walked back to the garage, this time with purpose in his step. But as he approached the garage he became troubled in his mind, and this trouble made him shuffle slightly in his gait. He had no doubt as to the ultimate outcome of his visit, but how to get it over with was what dismayed him, forcing him to drift about uneasily in front of the garage like a criminal released from the gates of durance. The sight of the “For Sale” sign on the glittering object of his quest stimulated him to action. He lifted his head and walked casually up to the car. Mark, emerging from the shadows like a proud but jealous god, greeted Mr. Topper with a slight show of surprise.

“How does the thing start?” asked Topper, without any preliminaries.

“How?” repeated Mark dumbly.

“The automobile,” said Topper. “How do you start the damn thing?”

“Oh!” exclaimed Mark, now sparklingly alive to the situation. “Why, it starts like any other automobile. Put your foot on it and off she goes.”

“Interesting if true,” thought Mr. Topper. Nevertheless he regarded the starter with a contemplative eye.

“Is it hard to learn how to work them?” he continued. “I mean for a person like myself?”

“Why, Mr. Topper,” Mark admonished, “there are bigger boobs than you messing up the roads everywhere.”

“You shock me,” remarked Topper, “but don’t let’s dwell on it. Now what is this thing for?”

“That’s for the ventilator. It lets in the air.”

“On what?”

“On your feet.”

“An unpleasant inference,” murmured Mr. Topper, “but I dare say the thing has its advantages. And this?” he added aloud.

“That lights your cigars.”

Mr. Topper produced a cigar. Mark spoke the truth.

“A nice thing,” said Mr. Topper, a little more at ease now that his lungs were refining smoke. “A handy thing, that. Very nice. Clever, too, isn’t it?”

Mark, becoming more than serious, agreed that it was.

“Yes, yes,” continued Topper, sliding into the front seat of the automobile as if he were not thinking of what he was doing. “A convenient little gadget. Adds to the pleasure of driving. Now come here, Mark, and show me what you do to make the old bus go, but first take that invitation off the front of the car. Some woman might come along and buy me. Hot stuff! How about that, Mark?”

“Ha! Ha!” laughed Mark, whose false mirth was arrested by a sudden slap on the back.

“Take the damn sign off, Mark,” commanded Topper, a new light gleaming in his eyes.

CHAPTER FOUR

Mrs. Topper Is Not Delighted

The first stage of Mr. Topper’s secret life dated from the Saturday on which he purchased the Kerbys’ ill-fated car from Mark, the ecstatic garage owner. And this stage lasted only a week, coming to a grand anticlimax on the following Saturday. But during that time Mr. Topper, a novice in secret living, was hard pressed to maintain his customary calm either at home or abroad. The fire was no longer banked in his eyes, but seemed to be smoldering through, and occasionally he found himself scrutinizing his friends as if they were total strangers.

His introductory driving lesson was of an anatomical nature. The automobile was discussed to its most intimate parts from which only the finest mechanism could have refrained from shrinking. The lesson completed, Mr. Topper abjured Mark to silence and returned to his home, where he settled his feud with the leg of lamb through the process of absorption. In other words it became one hundred per cent Topper and for that reason acquired merit while Topper acquired flesh.

“I knew you would like it,” said Mrs. Topper as though she were addressing a skeptical cannibal who had just made a meal of a questionable victim. “I’ve always said you liked lamb.”

Mr. Topper could not deny the truth of her words, but in spite of their truth they made him wish that he could uneat the lamb. Not knowing how to do this decently, he smiled at his wife and said, “I walked farther than I thought. Worked up an appetite.”

The false smile and the black lie quelled the rebellion in his stomach. Without realizing it, Topper was already far gone in sin.

On Monday morning, after exchanging pennies with a small Italian child for a stillborn edition of a New York paper, he greeted his friends with his habitual placidity. No, he had not heard the new one about Bill’s furnace. He was sorry that Mrs. Thompson was having servant trouble. Too bad. Was that so? Jennings had made a killing again. Great stuff. Surely, he’d bring the Missus over first thing. Wednesday evening? Good! Good! His tulips? Doing splendidly! A whole bed of them – all blooming. No, not brewing, just smousing about. Is that so! How about your own cellar? None of that stuff, Jack! The whole town knows about you. The farmer’s daughter and the tramp? Sure he’d like to hear it. Wait till they got aboard.

And off went Topper with his boon companions, all of whom he decided were perfect strangers to him.

At the office Topper treated the president with a commendable show of tolerance. Cosmo Topper really and sincerely pitied the man, pitied him from his heart. He was a good old thing, but out of touch, pathetically inadequate. However, his chauffeur looked like a keen enough young chap. Funny foreign-looking mustache, but then a good driver was like any other real artist. Better in fact. They had to have a little leeway. Topper would have a word with him one day. Exchange views on cars. Democratic. That was it. A man in his position could afford to be democratic. It went. As for the president, it was too bad. Topper felt sorry for him.

Now the strange thing about it was that on this particular morning the president, sighting his world-weary eyes between the bronze ears of his Great Dane desk ornament, felt pleased to permit Topper to occupy his gaze.

“A solid man,” thought the president. “A good man and a worker. I can count on him. The others” – and the president’s eyes never flickered – “brilliant, but they’re waiting to cut my throat. To them this bank isn’t home, it’s something they want to control through votes and money and chicanery. Now Topper’s different. He’s a man, at least. Loyal to a fault.”

And the president, rousing his great body, towered like a devastating sun over the gleaming surface of his desk, then slowly advanced on Topper.

“You’re looking fit, Topper,” he said. “This man from Texas has been in again. Don’t want to see him.… Come upstairs. We’ll talk it over.”

Topper followed.

“Why this?” he thought. “Why have I been selected?”

Topper little realized that there was a new light in his eyes that set him apart from his fellow men. It was young and fresh. The president was an old man, and, like Topper, he had grown weary from watching eyes. He had peered into them for more than half a century … too deeply.

•   •   •   •   •

Topper is speeding through the shadows like a virgin to a forbidden tryst. He is thrilled with secret alarm. In the close embrace of the night there is something almost personal. It clings to Topper like a wronged woman, filling him with a desire to be elsewhere.

For nearly a week now Topper had been lying steadily, mostly to his wife. Once he had stooped so low as to lie to the garbage man. Topper had come to that. It was excusable in this case, for the man collected garbage of the better sort throughout the town, and in order to forget his occupation, he continually busied his tongue with other people’s affairs.

The seal of sin is settling on Topper’s brow. He looks healthier and less uninteresting. He suspects everyone and, without being aware of it, he has been having a tremendous change.

At the garage, Mark is waiting for him. Good old Mark. Topper loves the man.

Topper arrives. There is a hurried conversation. Then each through his appointed door slides into the seat and they are off like a pair of conscience-stricken grave robbers. Mark is driving and Topper is doing strange, futile things with the brim of his felt hat. Instead of concealing his face, he succeeds in making himself look like a foppish desperado. He is hoping that he appears both sinister and repulsive so that people will avert their gaze without recognizing him, whereas, in truth, had any of Topper’s friends seen him at this moment, they would have been astonished beyond measure, their cherished belief in the eternal sameness of things completely demolished.

The car proceeds down a side street to that section of the town near which no nice people care to build. In this belittered and uncorseted neighborhood Topper feels more at ease. This place which he once considered a reproach to the community, when he considered it at all, has become pleasantly familiar to him, a part of his secret life. It is the hidden door that leads to the open road. The dour houses and dim shops no longer make him uneasy. He regards them with a friendly eye which does not drop disapprovingly at the sight of a woman nursing her child on the least populous step of a front stoop. And when a mulatto maid swings down the street and stops to talk with the technically white youth in the livery stable, the moral responsibility of the race question does not weigh down Topper’s heart. “Whose business is it?” he thinks to himself. “People should mind their own affairs.” Anyway, she was an upstanding figure of a woman.

Soon the town is left behind and the car spins along an unfrequented road.

“What did you tell her tonight, Mr. Topper?” asks Mark.

“Meeting of the Town Guardians,” replies Topper, emerging from his hat.

“Last night it was a Fire Council,” continues Mark. “What’s it going to be tomorrow?”

“The Assessment Club,” snaps Topper promptly.

Mark gives a low whistle of admiration and the conversation languishes.

“They were killed down the road a piece,” Mark announces presently. “Want to see the tree? It’s on the other end of the old bridge.”

“Certainly not,” says Topper. “To gaze upon the departing point of my predecessors would hardly add to my skill. I want to shift the gears, not chatter through them.”

“All right,” replies Mark, bringing the car to a stop. “You take the wheel and turn her around. Drive down the line a bit and then come back. Keep turning, and if anything comes along pull in close to the side and stop. I’ll keep an eye out.”

Like a dog beneath the caress of an unfamiliar hand the gears shivered nervously at Mr. Topper’s touch. They did not exactly chatter, but from time to time uttered cries of protest, like a child aroused from sleep by a convulsive pain in its stomach. Mr. Topper drove wisely but not well. He obeyed all the dictates of common sense, but still there was something lacking. Through no discernible fault of his own he seemed to bring out all the wayward traits of the car. It stopped without reason and started without grace. It darted as if pursued, then loitered alluringly. It displayed all the varied moods of a temperamental woman, one moment purring soothingly, the next scolding petulantly, now running ahead blind to caution, now holding back in virtuous alarm. It strayed from the path and returned again, and it treated its ardent possessor with the arrogant indifference of a beautiful thing. Mr. Topper was charmed. Not so Mark. Nevertheless after three-quarters of an hour of conscientious objecting the car was turned over to Mark, and Mr. Topper, moistly relinquishing the wheel, surveyed the June evening and found it good.

“You’ll get by,” remarked Mark as he headed the car for home.

And Mr. Topper did get by, what with the influence of Mark and a handful of cigars. Characteristically enough it was not until Mr. Topper held in his hands the official card entitling him to drive that he felt sure of his ability. The card dispelled all lingering doubt. He belonged to the brotherhood of the road. He had been tested and received. He could now speak on equal terms with the boy who delivered the ice. He had something in common with practically all the world.

•   •   •   •   •

There were several surprises in store for Mrs. Cosmo Topper on the Saturday following the purchase of the car. The first one came when Mr. Topper, returning from the city, announced without previous warning that he was starting a two weeks’ vacation. Mrs. Topper successfully punctured the glory of this surprise by feeling audibly sorry that she was hardly up to going anywhere. Topper, not to be outdone, snatched her fleeting triumph by saying that he was just as well pleased. Of course he was sorry about her not feeling well, but then he was always sorry about that – stoically so, thought his wife.

Her second surprise came when Topper informed her that immediately after luncheon he proposed to attend a meeting of the Defense Society. Mrs. Topper saw scant reason for this, but made no comment until the meal was finished.

“What’s this?” she said as he rose from the table. “What are all these meetings about? First it’s the Town Guardians, then the Fire Council …”

“The other way ’round,” corrected Mr. Topper, artistically cherishing his lies.

“Well, it doesn’t very much matter, does it?” she replied. “What’s gotten into this town? All these meetings!”

“Sparrows,” said Mr. Topper as he jauntily left the room.

Mrs. Topper followed her husband with wondering eyes. What a terse and uninforming answer. How unlike the usually explicit Cosmo. Sparrows. Why that?

A few hours later a third surprise caused Mrs. Topper to emerge with unwonted haste from the house. Topper, abandoning his secret life, was sounding his horn in the driveway. Mrs. Topper, from the front porch, saw a rather flushed and foolish-looking man of middle age gazing brightly at her from the driving seat of a glittering automobile.

“Well, what do you think of us now?” asked the man in a voice which conveyed the impression that Mrs. Topper would never be able adequately to express her admiration in words.

Mrs. Topper did not answer immediately. He had not expected her to. That was partly the fun of it – the dawning of delight, the wonder and unbelief and then the appreciation. Dyspepsia would be forgotten. A new era would start for them.

“You gave me such a start,” said Mrs. Topper. “What on earth are you trying to do with that garish-looking car?”

“Trying?” replied Mr. Topper, making a brave effort to retain his smile. “Trying? Why I’m not trying, my dear. I’m actually driving it. I drove it here all the way from the garage. It’s ours. Yours and mine. We own it.”

“You might own it,” Mrs. Topper said, “but we don’t. Keep me out of it. I won’t be involved. Everybody in town knows the Kerbys’ car. Even I recognize it. I’ve seen it thousands of times. A second-hand car. What a thing to do!”

Topper’s smile would not stay fixed. No matter how he strove, his lips refused to respond. Everything was so different from what he had expected.

“I know,” he explained, looking down at the wheel. “This is only our practice car. New one next year. Nice though, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think it’s a bit nice,” said Mrs. Topper. “Nor do I think it nice of you to sit there and enjoy yourself. Buying an automobile and not letting me know, picking up the most vulgar car in town, coming home at this hour and making noises on the lawn, upsetting my nerves and spoiling the leg of lamb …”

Then Mrs. Topper received her last surprise.

“Damn the leg of lamb!” he shouted, embittered beyond endurance by his wife’s reception of his surprise. “I’m going for a drive.”

An offensive honking of the horn overfilled Mrs. Topper’s cup of woe.

“He seems to be able to drive it,” she reluctantly admitted to herself as the automobile wavered down Glendale Road.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Nebulous Lap

It could not be said of Mr. Topper that he was in a brown study as he drove away from his wife. He was keenly alive to the fact that he was sitting alone in a moving automobile entirely dependent on him for pace and direction. He alone was now responsible for the safety of the car as well as for his own safety. This knowledge never for a moment left his mind. In spite of it, Mr. Topper was preoccupied, or as preoccupied as a person in his position could afford to be. Violence had been done to his feelings, and a reaction had set in. After a week of tremendous lying, during which time life had seemed to be disclosing new and splendid vistas, Topper suddenly felt that after all life was no whit different. It was as flat and stale as ever. Automobiles were no use, nor were little attempts, nor anything.

“Oh, damn that leg of lamb,” he muttered, slowing down with elaborate caution at the sight of a car two blocks distant.

As the automobile passed Mr. Topper, the eyes of the man at the wheel grew incredulous with wonder. He leaned over the side and looked back. He came to a stop and continued to stare.

“That’s Hart,” said Topper to himself. “Well, damn him, too. He’ll spread the news around. Let him. See if I care.”

And Topper stepped on the gas.

Through force of habit he took the same road he had learned to know so well with Mark. This was not the drive he had intended taking – not if she had been decent and friendly about things, but now it did not matter. He drove along, occupied with his thoughts, keeping his eye on the road and paying very little attention to the scenery. Presently he became aware that he had passed his usual limits. Ahead of him was the bridge on the other end of which the Kerbys had met their fate. Topper had never driven over a bridge before and the rattling of planks unnerved him. He stopped on the after-side to regain his composure.

The tree must be somewhere close at hand, for Mark had said it was just at the end of the bridge. Topper got out of the automobile and looked morbidly about him. At the edge of the road stood a stunted tree with a gashed and splintered trunk. Undoubtedly it was the one, the very tree that had caused George and Marion Kerby hastily to withdraw from their questionable circle of friends. Topper surveyed the tree thoughtfully. Two human lives, two warm and vigorous creatures, had been sped into eternity against the age-old bark of that tree. He glanced up. Leaves were out on the upper branches, and wings were flitting through them. Life still went on with the tree. It drank in the moist earth and tossed its palms to the sun. It was made of sterner stuff than mortals. It was more firmly rooted to the earth. Topper had a funny thought. If he had had a son this tree would still be green and filled with birds when the boy was gray and gazing back on life. Topper wanted a son, he felt the need of youth, an enthusiastic, unspoiled soul, to stimulate his ebbing interest in the automobile, someone to admire his daring and to speak favorably of his newly acquired art. Topper was on the point of becoming a shade self-sympathetic.

An observer of character seeing him at that moment would have paused to ponder over his unremarkable figure. He looked rather small beneath the majestic reaches of the tree, and his stomach seemed pitifully brave, thrusting itself out aggressively into a world that could trump with mountains. The observer would have noted Topper’s stomach and the sturdily planted legs, and without exactly forgetting these features, would have really remembered Topper’s face. There dwelt the Prince of Denmark, shadowed and filled with trouble, an inarticulate prince, perhaps, run to flesh and bland of mien, but a prince withal, probing the problem of life and the mystic charm of death, a man existing reluctantly, unconsciously seeking release.

Mr. Topper turned from the tree and wormed himself into the automobile. And the observer, had he been endowed with cattish curiosity, would have noted by the laborings of Topper’s body that he had not long been familiar with the driving seat of an automobile. Once in he relaxed, then, collecting his scattered members, arranged his feet and hands as Mark had patiently instructed him.

“Just the same,” thought Topper with an important feeling of ownership, “these trees shouldn’t grow so close to the road. There should be a law about trees. A sort of a movement. Something done.”

At this particular time Mr. Topper’s conception of the ideal tour was limited only by the skyline of the Sahara Desert, a wide, unobstructed expanse affording adequate room for turning. Topper’s social instincts did not extend to motoring. He preferred an unfrequented road where only nature could hear the neighing of the gears, and where there would be naught of alarm to galvanize his nerves.

Mr. Topper made the customary movements, and with delightful regularity the scenery began to slide by. He became aware of an oncoming line of trees, flashing things filled with shadows, he felt a dip and a gentle rise and gazed across a sunken plain soft with grass, scarred by fences and heckled by an astonishingly undecided brook that turned and doubled on its path. Mr. Topper found himself enjoying this hollow expanse of green. It was longer than it was wide and it seemed to extend for miles. Only the woods on the other side put a stop to its triumphant march. There were dots of trees on the sunken plain, intimate groups of clustering green, but they did not rob the plain of its vastness. Instead they emphasized its majesty like a contentious family huddled beneath the vaulting dome of a deserted railroad station.

“Take those fences down,” thought Topper, “and what a space you’d have. Cavalry could charge across those fields.”

What a lovely place it was … the unexpectedly good road, the sunken fields, the sky closing them in and the occasional farm house bereft of life. The road puzzled Topper. It was as if the world had planned a secret path to nowhere. He felt that he was riding on through an endless dusky solitude. He no longer troubled about the car. It seemed to be running itself. There were trees on one side, green curving space on the other, and an unobstructed road ahead. Topper had become blended with his surroundings. His body was blotting up the landscape and his mind, no longer functioning, seemed to be absorbing the lights and shades and smells along the road. The color of the sky, now churning red with sunset, dropped like a mantle on Mr. Topper and filled the world with stillness.

And out of the stillness a voice spoke to Mr. Topper.

“Topper,” it said, “Topper, perhaps you do not realize you are sitting on my wife’s lap – or do you?”

Topper’s hands grew white on the wheel. He made an effort to stop the car, but as the machine seemed disinclined to stop he abandoned the effort and looked steadfastly in front of him, blindly refusing to admit the fact that he had heard a voice without seeing its owner. The thing just could not be. He, Topper, was at fault, or at least he heartily hoped so. Driving had overtaxed his imagination. The strange solitude of the place and the calm, mysterious beauty of the landscape had affected him. It would have affected anybody.

So Mr. Topper drove on. The behavior of the automobile disturbed him, although he would not admit to himself that it was acting in any way unusual. Nevertheless it was. It had become a self-propelled vehicle in the fullest sense of the term. It no longer concerned itself with Topper, but obeyed the dictates of its newly acquired independence. It did not hitch and spurt along the road, but progressed smoothly at a speed which the discreet Topper viewed with sincere alarm. Once when the motor slowed down he made an attempt to shift the gears, only to be paralyzed by a voice exclaiming irritably:

“Don’t do that!”

After this Mr. Topper withdrew completely from the management of the car and dropped to the rather unimportant position usually allotted to a pig iron image arbitrarily spiked to the front seat of a toy fire engine. And Mr. Topper looked the part. His face was a mask and his arms had become angular and rigid. He was certain of this, however: the first voice had been a man’s, whereas the second had been unmistakably feminine. After making a mental note of this Mr. Topper closed his mind. It was better not to think – safer.

“Topper,” began the first voice, sounding quite polite and reasonable, “must I remind you again that you are sitting on my wife’s lap? Why not squeeze over now and …”

“Stop!” cried Mr. Topper, coming to a quick decision, and with an extraordinary effort arresting the speed of the car. “Stop,” he repeated, “and for God’s sake don’t begin again. I can’t stand it.”

“Come, come now, Mr. Topper,” admonished the voice.

“Don’t,” pleaded Topper. “Let me speak. Please listen. I’ve bought and paid for this automobile. With great mental anguish I’ve learned how to make it work, but I’ll give it to you, give it gladly, if you’ll let me step quietly out, and you then drive on as fast and as far as you can.”

Mr. Topper looked earnestly at the vacant seat beside him. He wanted a reply and yet he waited for it with dread.

“Why so tragic?” the voice began. “Why shun our company? Three can sit just as comfortably on this seat as two. We’ve done it often. Just squeeze over a little.”

“You don’t seem to understand,” said Mr. Topper, with the patience of desperation. “If the seat were a thousand leagues wide I would still feel cramped. Take the car. You’re welcome to it. Take it to some far place. Have a nice drive, a good time, but leave me behind. Let me get out. I’m not enjoying myself.”

“Still tragic,” retorted the voice. “And all the time you are wallowing on my wife’s lap.”

Topper had a strange and uncomfortable sensation. He felt, or imagined he felt, a pair of arms passing through his body on their way to the wheel. He was almost sure that for some minutes these arms had been playfully hugging him around the waist, and once more he became painfully aware of his stomach. It was indeed an objectionable feature.

“How about my wife’s lap?” questioned the voice.

“Hang it all!” Topper exclaimed. “Why doesn’t she move over? I didn’t sit on her lap, you know. She got it there.”

“Topper,” rebuked the voice. “You surprise us. I might say, you offend us. I might, mind you, Topper, but I don’t.”

“Offend you!” cried Mr. Topper. “Great God! What next?”

“Now, taking up the matter of my wife’s lap,” continued the voice, “I still maintain …”

Mr. Topper became mentally unfit to hear the remainder of the remark. He had passed into one of those distracted calms that precede lunacy. Out of this calm he heard himself saying, with tastefully garnished sarcasm:

“After all, the car really does belong to me. I bought the thing, but not your wife’s lap. I’m sorry, but I wash my hands of your wife’s lap. You can take the lap or leave it. I’m not responsible. If her lap insists on sitting under me I’m not to blame. However, if you and your wife and her everlasting lap would disappear as speedily as possible, the countryside would not bear witness to my grief. Certainly not.”

“We’ve already disappeared as much as possible,” said the voice rather gloomily.

“Not enough for me,” replied Topper.

“All right then,” said the voice. “Move over, Marion. Topper wants to hog the car.”

“Hog the car!” retorted Mr. Topper. “Whose car is it? Answer me that. Answer me fairly that. Whose car is it, I ask you? If your wife’s lap were at all ladylike …”

“What’s this about my wife’s lap?” interrupted the voice, a trifle excitedly. “Make one unfavorable reference to my wife’s lap. Just one. Let me hear it.”

“Now, for God’s sake, boys, don’t let’s have any trouble,” put in a woman’s voice pleadingly. “Come on, let’s get together. That’s how it happened the last time. Be sensible, George. Topper seems to be a game old bird.”

“Old birds are inclined to be gamey,” remarked Topper.

“Ah, there, Topper,” said the woman’s voice. “Getting common? And still sitting on my lap?”

“Just so,” joined in the man’s voice. “Don’t go any further. Try to remember that you’re still sitting on my wife’s lap. I don’t want any trouble.”

Topper’s whole mental system was undergoing a revolution. It did not occur to him that he was having a row with space, or that he was being calculatingly nasty to nothingness. So absorbed had he become in the injustice done to himself that, for the moment, the unconventionality of the situation had slipped his mind. Topper was thoroughly aroused.

“Prove to me that I am sitting on your wife’s lap,” he said.

“Do you understand the fourth dimension?” politely inquired the man’s voice.

“Why should I?” said Topper.

“Well, we do,” continued the voice. “As a matter of fact you might almost say that we are the fourth dimension. Not of the oldest families, perhaps, but pretty well sponsored at that. It would be a waste of time to attempt to explain it to you, so you’ll have to take my word for it. You, Topper, are sitting most heavily, most grossly, on my wife’s lap. No man has ever done it, with my knowledge, for the same length of time that you have. I repeat – with my knowledge.”

“Don’t indulge your jealous nature,” said the woman’s voice. “Don’t irritate me.”

“I’m going to leave this car,” announced Topper. “I hate bickering.”

Topper made an effort to rise, then sank back in his seat. He had an odd feeling. Two arms were holding him round the waist. They were the most material arms he had ever encountered, yet he could not see them. They held him firmly, and made a noticeable depression in his stomach. This impression without the arms was too much for Topper.

“She’s holding me,” he gasped, sweat beading his lips. “Tell her to take her arms away.”

“Not until you promise to be good,” replied the woman’s voice.

“Let me go,” pleaded Topper, “and I’ll promise anything. If you’ll only take your arms away from my – my – —”

“Your stomach?” suggested the woman.

“All right,” exclaimed Topper. “Have it your way. If you’ll only remove your arms I’ll slide over gladly.”

Topper drew a deep breath as he felt himself released. Casting a timid glance on either side of him, he slid to the middle of the seat with a movement which for him was voluptuously sinuous.

“At last you’ve succeeded in getting me between you,” he said with spiteful resignation. “Go on now and drive me mad. Finish the job. Smash the car. I don’t want it and my wife can’t stand it.”

“Why can’t your wife stand it?” asked the woman’s voice.

“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Topper. “All her reasons are rather obscure. She says the thing belonged to the Kerbys and that’s enough for her. It’s too notorious.”

“Go on, Mr. Topper,” said the woman’s voice as the automobile gathered pace. “What else did she say?”

Mr. Topper was neither the wisest nor the most observant of men. His ears were attuned to only one danger signal, Mrs. Topper. The beautiful simplicity of the man lay in the fact that at his age he still thought of his wife as being quite an exceptional woman. His optimistic nature led him to believe that she alone of all her tribe had been cursed with an unfortunate disposition, that she alone was the victim of implacable dyspepsia, that she alone was the only woman who considered herself a martyr and who forced her husband so to consider her. There was only one Mrs. Topper. It was inconceivable that there could be two. Topper clung to this hope. It comforted him a little to imagine that all the other women in the world were different, that they had no small animosities, that they did not spend an hour in saying something that could have been as easily stated in three minutes, that they did not take advantage of the fact that they were women and as a consequence nervous wrecks, that they did not spasmodically attempt to please their husbands while consistently endeavoring to crush them, that they were not interested in the puerile mystery surrounding the sudden departure of Mrs. Smith’s cook or the Robinsons’ trip to Maine, or the fact that the Harts were still in town. Mr. Topper honestly believed that his wife had been especially set aside for him by a kind but casual god. In this belief he accepted her, but not without some mental reservations.

“What else did Mrs. Topper say?” continued the woman’s voice.

“I forget,” he replied. “She’s said so many things.”

“For instance?”

“Well, that Marion Kerby was no better than she should be and that her husband was a sot who consumed all his time and money in keeping himself numb with drink.”

“That will do,” broke in the man’s voice. “I’ve heard enough. Do you happen to know who we are – or were?”

“I had hoped that our acquaintance would never become so intimate,” said Topper with the utmost earnestness.

“Well, it has,” said the man’s voice. “You are speaking to and driving with both George and Marion Kerby. Now how does that make you feel?”

“I ceased to feel some time ago,” replied Mr. Topper, “but if I hadn’t, your information would be like tossing a paralytic in a blanket.”

“The old crow,” came contemplatively from the driving seat. “So that somber old moll said that I was no better than I should be. Did you hear what he said, George? Hit him.”

“He didn’t say it,” said George. “Be reasonable. He’s not responsible for his wife’s remarks. No man is. The race would perish.”

“But just the same she said it,” the wheel replied broodingly.

At this point Mr. Topper felt forced to interpose an objection. Routine loyalty compelled him to speak.

“In the first place you are a woman,” he said, “and in the second you’re invisible, and for that reason you’re taking a doubly unfair advantage of your sex and lack of substance by calling my wife an old crow and a moll.”

Mr. Topper made a mental note of the two expressions. He would never apply them directly to his wife, but it would be quite a comfort to think them at times.

“Say, listen,” exclaimed the man’s voice, “I’ll knock your block off if you begin to pull that first and second place stuff with us. Where do you get …”

“Now for God’s sake don’t let’s have any trouble, boys,” the wheel pleaded. “Remember, George, we were smashed up the last time.”

“Then why did you start things now?”

“Start things? Me?”

“Yes, you, with all your personal injuries.”

“I must say you’re extremely unreasonable.”

“Me unreasonable? Hell’s bells! That’s a good one.”

“Don’t be despicable.”

Mr. Topper had been watching the casual conduct of the car with increasing anxiety. He thought that it was now high time to enter into the discussion.

“I hope,” he said, carefully considering the advisability of each word, “that you won’t take it in ill part if I say that at present I have no desire to join your nebulous state. The situation, bad as it is, would be less desperate if I could only feel that someone, no matter how invisible, was paying attention to the car.”

Topper was silent for a moment, then his true feelings triumphed.

“I hate bickerings,” he said.

He was astounded by hearing a hearty peal of laughter from the steering wheel. Manifestations of mirth encompassed him.

“Stick to the road,” he urged.

“ ‘Stick-to-the-road-Topper!’ ” the woman’s voice exulted. “That’s a good name. Let’s call him that.”

“Only for introductions,” replied the other voice consideringly. “Too long for ordinary use. ‘Cosmo’ is rather crisp. Why paint the lily?”

“What do you mean about introductions?” inquired Mr. Topper uneasily. “Have you any friends? I don’t want to meet them. Remember that. Absolutely no.”

“I hope you wouldn’t embarrass us in case we met a group of our friends,” replied the man.

“Embarrass you? Oh, I don’t know what I’d do. My God, a group! Not just a friend, but a group!” Topper’s voice was distracted.

“Well, how about meeting some of yours?” suggested George. “There are quite a few over here. Not an honest piece of ectoplasm in the bunch.”

“Look where you’re driving,” breathed Topper, reaching for something to cling to, yet unwilling to thrust his arms through the invisible bodies beside him. “I never wanted less to die in all my life.”

“Tactful Topper,” said Marion.

A slight difficulty with a rail fence momentarily retarded conversation. When the car emerged from the dispute bearing a battered fender Topper voiced his unhappiness by remarking that there was scant comfort to be gained by sitting between two ethereal bodies while one’s very soul was being shot through space.

“I have nothing to cling to save hope,” he said. “And even that grows dim.”

A turn in the road disclosed in the distance the lights of a small town. Mr. Topper gave a sigh of relief. During the course of the conversation he had not actually believed in its reality. He had preferred to accustom his mind to the fact that he had gone mad, mildly mad, and, as he fervently hoped, temporarily so. The best way to combat this madness, he concluded, was to give in to it, to make no effort to regain sanity, but gradually to feel his way back to his normal state like a man delicately shaking a leg that had fallen asleep. Topper felt that a village street, stark and solid beneath the glare of the lights, and thronged with the usual Saturday night collection of rustics, would do much to restore his mental poise. He would leave the car and mingle with these people. He would not actually kiss and hug them, but he would feel like doing so. Spiritually he would shower them with embraces, and as he absorbed the life of the town the imaginings of the road would fade away and he, Topper, would once more be a full-fledged member of the human race instead of a rebellious participant in an occult phenomenon.

“For the sake of appearance,” he remarked to the wheel, “we had better exchange positions as we drive into the town. People have grown accustomed to seeing someone sitting at the steering gear of automobiles. It may seem silly to you, but if we drove down the main street of this town under the present arrangement I would probably be burned for a witch or thrust into solitary confinement.”

“You need never fear solitude, Topper, so long as we’re around,” replied Marion.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” Topper hastened to explain. “I have no fear of solitude. I yearn for it … absolute solitude unbroken by the sound of a voice or the knowledge of a presence.”

“All right,” said Marion. “Let’s change seats. Move over.”

“How can I be sure that we are changing seats?” Mr. Topper inquired.

“I’ll see that she does,” replied George Kerby. “Stop at the nearest garage. We need gas.”

A few minutes later Mr. Topper drew up at a garage. He had never before bought gasoline. The situation perplexed him.

“How much shall I get?” he whispered over his shoulder.

“Ten gallons will be enough,” Kerby announced. “Get some oil, too.”

“Not so loud,” Topper pleaded as he got out of the automobile and approached the unenterprising deity of the place. The deity regarded Topper with aversion and his car with disgust. He was almost hostile in his disapproval. Topper could sense it by the angle of the man’s hat and the tilt of his cigar. Nevertheless Topper addressed the deity, tactfully suggesting his cooperation in procuring oil and gasoline.

“Bring your car under the pump,” commanded the deity, filling Topper’s face with smoke. Topper objected to the smoke, but felt that at least it was more tangible than phantoms.

“One moment,” he replied, turning round, then he froze in his tracks, his last hope banished. After all he was not mad, not even mildly so. The automobile apparently unassisted was busily edging itself up to the pump. He glanced guiltily at the deity as if to seek comfort in his repellent countenance, but no comfort was there to be found. The deity had momentarily become a mortal. You could tell that by the gold fillings in his teeth twinkling through his widely separated lips.

“How did you do that?” asked the man.

Topper laughed a trifle wildly, as he waved a protesting hand at the car. “Quite a trick, eh? Well, I had her all set, but I guess the brakes slipped.”

The man’s face cleared, his mouth closed and once more he became a deity. But as he approached the tube to the tank his features again altered. This time his eyes became prominent. As he gazed at the brass cap of the gasoline tank they were much more eloquent with astonishment than the gold fillings. The thing was slowly and mysteriously unscrewing itself. Suddenly it moved through the air, then came to repose on the mudguard of the car. Topper stood by fascinated.

“How did you do that?” demanded the man.

“What?” said Topper wearily, taking out his handkerchief and hiding his face therein. “I wish you’d stop asking me how I do things. I just do them, that’s all. Automatic springs. New device. Haven’t time to go into all that.”

As the man filled the tank with gasoline Topper hurried to the front of the car and leaned in.

“For God’s sake stop trying to be so helpful,” he whispered. “I’ll do everything.”

An ineffectually stifled giggle smote his ears.

“Who’s laughing?” called the man from the rear of the car.

Topper had not the time to answer. Something was taking place in front that demanded all his attention. A water bucket insecurely balanced on thin air was emptying its contents into the radiator. Topper sprang forward and seized the bucket.

“I’m just giving her water,” he shouted. “You must have heard the gurgle. This car always gurgles like that. It’s a habit.”

When the radiator was filled Mr. Topper became engaged in a violent struggle with the bucket, for George Kerby, still bent on being helpful, was trying to take the thing back to the garage. For a few moments the bucket danced crazily in the air, then fell clattering to the ground from which it was seized by some unknown agent and carried swiftly in the direction of the garage. Mr. Topper sped after the bucket, his outstretched hand separated from the handle by several inches of space.

“I’m just returning the bucket,” he called over his shoulder. “I’ll be right with you.” Then under his breath, “Kerby, don’t run so fast. Let me at least catch up with the bucket. I merely want to pretend I’m carrying it.”

The deity, now transformed into one of the most disturbed creatures that had ever watered gasoline, stood watching Topper’s pursuit of the bucket. He saw it describe an arc in the air, and Topper leaping after it with great agility and determination. He saw the bucket rolling rapidly across the floor and Topper, lost to dignity, rolling after it. Finally he saw Topper rise triumphantly with the bucket in his hand and place it under the water faucet, where for a short space it bounced gaily up and down, then settled to rest beneath the weight of Mr. Topper’s body. The man did not stay to see any more, but faced about and hurried down the street. As he did so the automobile began to honk vociferously, a door flew open and a woman’s voice called impatiently to Mr. Topper. The man increased his pace, then broke into an earnest dog-trot. Still honking madly, the automobile turned into the road and sped away in the opposite direction. But the man did not stop to watch its tail light disappear.

In the automobile Topper was sitting in silence and perspiration. George and Marion Kerby were talking to him at the same time, but Topper refused to answer. He was a crushed man, a hurt man. The scene still lived in his eyes, that ghastly pursuit of the bucket. And it lingered in his eyes until the automobile came to a stop beside the great tree that had dispatched the Kerbys. Here Topper began to laugh softly to himself. He was thinking of the amazement on the garage-man’s face. Mr. Topper’s laugh gathered in volume. It was swelled by the laughter of George and Marion Kerby. The night was filled with their mirth. The old tree rustled its remonstrating branches above the automobile, but the laughter mocked its rebuke. A farmer driving home from market warily skirted the glare of the headlights and clicked to his mare. Down the road and through the night the wild laughter followed the creaking cart.

“They were all sittin’ in the front seat huggin’ and kissin’ and carryin’ on crazy,” the farmer told his wife at the end of the drive. “I could see ’em as plain as day. Women smokin’ and goin’ on scandlous.”

“Them townspeople drink too much,” replied the wife as she filled the old man’s glass with a generous allotment of good old Jersey applejack.

CHAPTER SIX

Disaster at the Curb

Thus began for Mr. Topper an unusual experience, to say the least. Not knowing the circumstances, his friends chastely called it demoralizing. But not so Mr. Topper. For the first time in his life he consciously, nay, deliberately, assumed a minority rôle. For the first time he permitted himself to deal with abstract things without feeling that he had sinned. For the first time Topper’s established routine of living gave place to a disorderly desire to live. And for the first time on an evening in June, Topper wonderingly considered the stars not in their relation to a smart New Jersey town, but in the relation of the town to the stars.

This was the second phase of Topper’s secret life. It was in this phase that he came to regard the place in which he lived as a pool fed by the withering souls of people who had passed up life. They were usual people, the people who fed this pool. They had been accepted and asked out to places. They commuted, propagated, and entertained with impartial uniformity. In all the things of life they used the same time-table. Mr. Topper could not call them vicious. That was the trouble. Topper bent his brain over an abstract problem. His friends would have been surprised had they seen the man actually screwing his face into childish wrinkles over such a time-consuming thought.

And all was not well at home with Topper. He had cursed a leg of lamb. He had actually damned the thing. Mrs. Topper could not forget that. Had he cursed her she might have dimly understood, but to hurl imprecations at a tender leg of lamb, a thoughtfully selected leg of lamb – oh, no, that could not be forgotten. Men might rebel against their God, but a leg of lamb, a household deity, a savory roast … sacrilege, its very seat and circle!

In spite of her husband’s offense Mrs. Topper maintained the brooding sameness of things. It gave her a better opportunity than an open breach to confound him with the seriousness of the situation, the utter hopelessness of it, the black despair. They still occupied their appointed chairs on opposite sides of the sitting room table. Topper still read his paper while Mrs. Topper did darting things with her needle to a piece of linen. Each dart picked a little fiber out of Topper’s nerves. So terrible did it all seem that at times he could hardly restrain himself from dodging as the needle sought its mark. On these occasions Topper clung to Scollops for bodily comfort and moral support. And Scollops with luxurious undulation yawned callously in the face of tragedy. It was not of her making. She was gloatingly out of it. What was important, however, was a good sound sleep. Topper’s thigh was a comfortable place for a good sound sleep, though of late, Scollops daintily decided, this erstwhile unimpeachable mattress had been growing a trifle too muscular.

In vain did Mr. Topper try to recapture romance in the eyes of Scollops. Her eyes were closed in slumber. In vain did he seek distraction in market quotations. Industrial bonds no longer inspired him with a feeling of solid security. In vain did he let his eyes shift round the room in search of some object to hold his attention. The room was filled with objects, but for Topper they were bereft of interest. Once, in a fit of desperation, he faltered out an invitation to Mrs. Topper. It was a beautiful afternoon, pervaded with dripping sunlight and carpeted with leagues of green. It would be nice to go driving on such an afternoon. The roads would be almost free from traffic and nobody much would be around to observe them. It would be quite exciting. Mrs. Topper would enjoy it. He imagined that there would be a nice, fresh breeze and that the fields would look quite young and new. They could stop at a road-house, a respectable one, the “Rose-Marie,” and have tea. Well, what did she say to that?

Topper looked hopefully at his wife, then looked away. He knew exactly what she was going to say to that. He could have said it for her. But he did not have to. She said it for herself. She was just a little too tired today to risk the roads. They might upset her even more than she was already if such an upheaval were possible. Last night had been a bad one – sleepless. A dragging night. Anyway she was not particularly interested in automobiles, but he, Topper, was. Why didn’t he go out and take a nice drive? She too was sure there would be a lovely breeze and that the fields would be lovely also. She would stay at home. A sigh. She was better off at home. A look. Home was the place for her. A sigh and a look.

“But,” said Topper, his voice trembling slightly as he rose from his chair and confronted his wife, “you haven’t even so much as looked at the automobile. You haven’t touched one part of it with the tip of your little finger. Aren’t you interested at all? There’s lots of nice things about it. Come out and watch me light a cigar. You’d be surprised, Mary.” His voice grew low with excitement. “I’ll teach you how to drive. You could do it. Look at me! It would help you with your dyspepsia.”

Mrs. Topper put down her sewing and looked up at her husband’s earnest face. What absurdly young eyes he had, she thought. Behind her unsympathetic expression struggled a sincere desire to smile at Topper, to go out and pat the automobile, to marvel over the cigar lighter, to sit in the front seat and to tell Topper how wonderful he was. Just a little smile would have altered the situation, but the smile was not forthcoming. Topper was making her resentful. He was committing a terrible crime. He was destroying her good opinion of herself. Topper was making her realize how calculatingly cruel and unsympathetic she was, how stubborn as a wife and inadequate as a friend. No man could make her feel like that and gain her forgiveness. No matter how the reconciliation came about she must be the generous spirit and Topper the self-centered. She could not conceive of herself playing any other rôle. Furthermore, Topper was showing himself up in altogether too favorable a light. She was aware of that. She realized that Topper was an exceptionally decent person. This added to her resentment. What right had he to be like that? Was he deliberately trying to emphasize the difference in their characters? Finally, Mrs. Topper had no desire to lose her dyspepsia. It was the very last thing in the world she wanted to lose. Mrs. Topper needed her dyspepsia. She lived in and for her dyspepsia. It took the place of a child. She was tender about it. And in her mistaken mind she hoped that, like a child, her dyspepsia would help her to hold her husband. It gave her an extra claim on him. Mrs. Topper, folding her hands in her lap, spoke to her husband in a dead, level voice deliberately tuned to dash all hope.

“You bought the automobile,” she said. “You bought it behind my back. You selfishly robbed me of my pleasure. Selfishly. Yes, that’s it. You’re so selfish and self-centered, so interested in your own affairs that you don’t know I’m alive. And I’m not. I’m not even – —”

“I know, dear,” Topper broke in. “You’re not even half alive. I realize it. That dyspepsia! But really now I wasn’t selfish. That is, I didn’t mean to be. I figured on surprising you and I worked so hard to – —”

“Don’t!” commanded Mrs. Topper. “You have told me to my face that I’m not even half alive.”

“But I thought that was what you were going to say,” hastened Topper. “I just wanted to agree.”

“You had better go driving,” said Mrs. Topper coldly. “Find somebody who is a little less dead than I am.”

Topper drooped his shoulders and turned away without answering. He was thinking to himself that there was more excitement in the company of two completely dead persons than he would ever find at home.

When he had gone Mrs. Topper buried her face in her hands and presently tears trickled through her fingers. “Why am I this way?” she whispered. “I don’t want to be. I don’t mean to be. But he shouldn’t look so hurt. I hate that look.”

She started up and ran to the window. Topper was laboring in the driveway. He looked like a man driving to his own execution. Mrs. Topper hurried out on the porch and called to him.

“Let me get my things,” she said. “I’ll be right out.”

Inside she dried her tears on the precious piece of linen.

Topper was radiant as his wife got into the car.

“See here,” he said, pulling at the electric lighter. “Too bad I lighted my cigar, but here’s how it works. See how red she’s getting. Put your finger near it. Feel that heat. Some heat, eh?”

Mrs. Topper obediently approached her finger to the lighter and agreed that it was indeed some heat. However she was not quite satisfied. Topper should say something more. He had not admitted that he was selfish and self-centered. Nor had he drawn favorable attention to Mrs. Topper’s generous conduct. She suffered an acute relapse and heartily wished herself out of the car, but Topper was already turning down Glendale Road.

“Now I’m shifting the gears,” he explained. “Not so hard when you get the knack. I’m not an expert yet, but you don’t have to worry. Gee, Mary, it’s great you’re along,” he added a little bashfully.

No, it was not quite adequate. It should have been longer and laden with a deeper appreciation of her character. Mrs. Topper was not mollified. However she kept her peace. She would not spoil the drive – not yet.

Now it was unfortunate that as they crossed the main street of the town Mrs. Topper decided she wanted to shop at the butcher’s. It was doubly unfortunate because Topper was not accustomed to stopping on the main streets of towns and had a perilous time wedging himself in between two intimately parked automobiles. It was even more unfortunate that, after Mrs. Topper’s departure, Mr. Topper attempted to improve on his position by ramming, with no little violence, the automobile directly in front of him. People stopped and stared at Topper then stared at the assaulted car. Several examined the damaged fender from which Mr. Topper hastily averted his woeful eyes. Where was the owner? Topper hoped that his wife would hurry so that they could get away as speedily as possible. Topper could never face the man. He felt like pinning a twenty-dollar bill to the fender with a note asking forgiveness. He would sign it “An Unknown Admirer,” to make the man feel better about it.

But more unfortunate than anything else was the reappearance of Mrs. Topper in company with Clara Stevens. Mr. Topper little realized how really unfortunate this was. Clara was talking brilliantly and Mrs. Topper was absorbing with gloomy interest.

“And so Harris told him to his face that he would as soon consider buying a second-hand car as oil stock from a third cousin,” she was saying as the two women drew near Topper.

The remark did not sound reassuring to Topper. But then, Mary was a sensible woman. Everyone knew how Clara went on.

“Clara was in town last week buying a new car,” announced Mrs. Topper, with meaning in her voice, after the customary hypocrisies had been exchanged. “She spent a whole week going from place to place until she was completely satisfied she had made a wise selection.”

Topper thought that it was rather remiss of Clara to make no reference to the fact that he was lounging picturesquely over the steering wheel of an automobile, but perhaps he looked so natural that the unusualness of the situation had not occurred to her.

“Clara picked out the car herself,” continued Mrs. Topper, “and it’s registered in her name. She says Harris was a dear about it, so patient with her and unselfish.”

“And here it is!” exclaimed Clara, turning to the victim of Mr. Topper’s skill. “Why … what … has … happened … to … my … car … my … nice … new … car?”

Topper thought she would never finish.

“Oh, God,” he prayed to himself, “take me out of this. Translate me to the heavens. Make me a fixed star or a shooting star, I don’t much care which, but deliver me now from these two women. Let me be somewhere else.”

“Whatever will Harris say?” Clara tearfully asked the street.

Topper could see that the girl was moved, that her reputation as a driver was seriously involved. He knew Harris, and he knew that he was neither patient nor generous, nor was he a dear. Topper was also afraid that some helpful bystander would point a denouncing finger at him before he had time to explain.

“I guess Harris will have to talk with me,” said Topper quietly. “You see, I did it. I did it with my little car. Fix it as good as new. Stick on another fender in a minute. Sorry. The man behind me just wouldn’t budge.”

Mrs. Topper was being repaid for her momentary weakness. Before Clara could speak she did, which showed that she had been toeing the mark.

“You should at least have thought of me,” she said. “Come, Clara, take me home, will you? I am not feeling well. I knew it would be this way. Cosmo will see that everything is arranged.”

“Just a minute,” called Cosmo, as the two women entered the other machine. “Aren’t you coming driving with me?”

“With you?” said Mrs. Topper, her eyebrows slightly arched.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Topper Calls on a Tree

Mr. Topper viciously pressed his foot down on the self-starter. In his imagination he was crushing the human race, especially the female branch of it, and in particular Clara Stevens. He had one desire now and only one. He wanted to cut himself off entirely from people and faces and eyes, and from tongues, too. Idle, insincere tongues. He was an embittered man and a confused one. Events had occurred too rapidly. Mentally he tried to catch up with them. There had been a little unpleasantness at home. That had fortunately subsided. Then quite amazingly he had found himself driving off in triumph with his wife. He had talked to her engagingly about gears and electric devices. She had appeared to be interested. After all it was going to be a successful afternoon. Everything was set for it. Then that fatal butcher shop and the accident – a slight thing. Swift on this had come Clara Stevens and exposure, followed by the contained but depressing departure of Mrs. Topper. That was the sequence of events, but Mr. Topper searched in vain for the logic. What was the good of scaling an emotional ladder if only to have its topmost rung yield beneath one’s feet? “No good,” thought Mr. Topper.

He was driving now with a purpose. He was going back to the tree beneath which nearly a week ago he had taken light-hearted leave of George and Marion Kerby. He was going back to the tree now and he was glad he was going back. In spite of their rather peculiar ideas of a good time Mr. Topper felt that he understood the Kerbys far better than his more obvious friends. And George and Marion Kerby were vastly more acceptable to him than the people who constituted his social circle. He was surprised at this, but not alarmed.

Since his first experience with the Kerbys, Mr. Topper had steadfastly refrained from driving past the tree. Several times he had felt like doing so, but discretion had forced him to master the temptation. He considered communing with spirits much in the same light that he regarded the smoking of opium. It was unnatural. For all he knew it might even be habit-forming. God knows where it might end. If the Kerbys had only been sensible spirits, orderly and law-abiding, and much less active, the situation would have been different – better. Mr. Topper could have created a little club around them. On Thursday nights, for instance, they could have given interesting and uplifting talks to his friends. He, Topper, having sponsored them, would have become famous in a serious and conservative way. “There goes Topper,” people would have said. “Psychic devil. He controls two spirits.” He might even have corresponded with Sir Oliver Lodge. As a matter of fact there were commercial possibilities in a pair of good tame spirits. Mr. Topper could have incorporated them. But not the Kerbys. They could hardly be trusted. Many of their actions would be too difficult to explain. If they were not quite so willing, so callously unabashed about being dead. A certain reluctance would seem more fitting.

Nevertheless Mr. Topper was strangely attracted to the Kerbys. They were different, refreshingly set apart from the usual run of people. On his modest excursions during the past week George and Marion Kerby had been much in his mind. He had come to accept them without reservation. The ringing quality of Marion Kerby’s voice still lingered in his ears. He was able to recall without too great compunction that her arms had quite unmistakably encircled his waist. Mr. Topper’s vanity was secretly gratified by the fact that the Kerbys had accepted him in all good fellowship. He knew that they considered the rest of his friends as alien beings endowed with singularly worm-like qualities. But with him they were perfectly natural. Almost too natural.

So Mr. Topper was on his way to the tree, quite definitely on his way. Like a dead eye in a gray face the sun above him gazed starkly through a film of sickly clouds. There was going to be rain or something else equally unpleasant. Topper hoped that it would clear up, and no sooner had he hoped this than it did clear up. The cloud slipped from the face of the sun and the world grew bright again beneath its rays. Mr. Topper became suspicious. There was something ominous in the alacrity of the weather to comply with his wishes. Nothing ever happened the way he hoped. Why should the weather be so obliging? Perhaps through his brief acquaintance with the Kerbys he was becoming endowed with occult powers. To test this alarming suspicion he tentatively hoped for rain. The sun plunged its face into a scum of gray vapors, and Mr. Topper immediately stopped hoping. His credulity was becoming stronger than his nerves. He feared that if he indulged further in this dangerous business of hoping he might innocently commit an entire community to a swift and painful death, Clara Stevens and Mrs. Topper prominently included.

A sudden rattling of planks startled him from his thoughts. He was crossing the dilapidated bridge. Directly ahead of him the old scarred tree shook its vigorous branches. To Mr. Topper this ancient landmark was not so much a tree as a place of residence. And he approached the tree in that spirit. When he came abreast of it he stopped the automobile and waited. Nothing unusual happened and Mr. Topper began to feel a little self-conscious.

“Anyone want a ride?” he moved himself to call. His voice sounded lonely in the branches of the tree. “I say there, Mr. Kerby, would you and your wife like to take a spin?”

“Why, it’s Topper!” a voice cried out excitedly. “Hey, Marion! Topper’s back. How about a ride?”

“Who’s back?” came a woman’s voice as if from a great distance.

“Topper is,” shouted the first voice. “Wants to know if you’d like a ride. He’s waiting.”

“If you don’t mind,” Topper suggested, “I wish you’d stop that shouting. There’s a wagon coming. Just run over to your wife and ask her quietly if she wants to use the car. Hold a whispered conversation.”

But George Kerby was far too excited at the prospect of a ride to follow Mr. Topper’s injunctions.

“Damn it, Marion,” he shouted. “Make up your mind. Do you want to go or don’t you? Say yes or no.”

“Come, George,” admonished the woman’s voice. “Pull yourself together. Mr. Topper will think you never saw an automobile before. Of course I want to go riding. It was lovely of Cosmo to call. I’d about decided that he had deserted us.”

The wagon had stopped beside the automobile and the driver was gazing at Mr. Topper with obstinate curiosity. Ordinarily this driver was not one easily aroused from his trance-like contemplation of his horses’ moving flanks, but these strange voices coming from God knew where gave him an unpleasant sensation. Mr. Topper glanced at the man and winced.

“Come on out of the woods, you two,” he commanded. “Where the devil have you gotten to? Why I can’t even see you.”

“We’re picking flowers,” called Marion Kerby. “We’ll be right with you.”

The driver’s face resumed its normal mold.

“Nice day,” he said to Topper.

“Splendid,” Mr. Topper beamed.

The driver settled back in his seat and waited. Mr. Topper, closely regarding the man, decided that from his expression he was prepared to wait indefinitely. It was an unfortunate situation. Mr. Topper got out of the automobile and surreptitiously pinched one of the horses. The offended animal immediately put himself in motion. The driver, as if desiring to conserve his energy, allowed his team to have its head. Mr. Topper returned to the automobile and waited.

“We’re so forgetful,” said Marion Kerby remorsefully as soon as the wagon was out of earshot. “But George is such a common creature with his great throat.”

“Then why are you always moping about?” demanded George Kerby angrily. “If you had any mind at all – —”

“I would never have married you,” his wife triumphantly interrupted. “And I certainly wouldn’t have died with you. When I was alive I put a great deal of faith in that optimistic line ‘until death do us part,’ but it tricked me.”

“May I put in a word?” began Mr. Topper, but Kerby’s voice cut him short.

“I know,” he recriminated bitterly. “You tried to poison me more than once.”

“When the bootleggers failed I tried my hand just for the sake of the experiment,” his wife replied, “but your stomach defied all natural laws.”

“It seems that you both are defying a few natural laws,” put in Mr. Topper.

“Listen to this,” said George Kerby hurriedly. “You can judge the sort of woman she is, Topper – the terribleness of her. She claims that we’re not married any more and that anything goes just because we were bumped off. How’s that for depravity. Not that I care. The line said, ‘until death do us part.’ Well, as a matter of fact death didn’t us part. And so there you are. Tell her how silly she is, Topper.”

“It’s a delicate point for an outsider to settle,” Mr. Topper cautiously replied. “Suppose we go for a ride. It’s rather trying to be listening to the pair of you squabbling all over the landscape.”

“All right, let’s forget it,” Kerby agreed. “Come, Marion. Topper’s right.”

“Just the same it isn’t legal any more,” said Marion. “I want Topper to understand that.”

“Are you both in?” asked Mr. Topper.

“All set,” replied Kerby.

“No funny stuff now,” warned Mr. Topper as he started the car. “I’ve had a hard day, a terrible day. I’d like to have a good time.”

“You would?” cried Kerby. “Then let me take the wheel. Marion drove last time. I’ve got a great idea.”

“Frankly, I mistrust your ideas,” said Mr. Topper, “but rather than be sat on I’ll let you take the wheel.”

“He’s all right,” Marion said in a reassuring voice. “Especially when he has an idea. For a fool he’s funny that way. Slide over to me.”

As Mr. Topper slid over the car gathered speed. Once more he let his eyes wander over the sunken plain. It was smooth and green and peaceful, and it was bathed in a subdued light which recalled to Mr. Topper’s mind a certain matchless Easter egg he had once possessed in the days of his youth. It was made of sugar and tastefully decorated with pink confection. The egg was hollow and there was a piece of glass set in a peephole at one end. Mr. Topper had applied his eyes to this peephole and he had never quite forgotten the beauty of the scene on which he had gazed. Never on earth could he catch again such completely satisfying beauty. Never would he meet such a shepherdess or see such lamb-like lambs. The sunken plain had some of the romance of that Easter egg. He felt like running across the dipping meadows in search of his lost shepherdess. Perhaps she was waiting for him in the woods on the other side. The woods looked cool and interesting. They ran away along the skyline like the mysterious fringe of a new life. Mr. Topper keenly appreciated this spot. It had something to do with him. For the moment he forgot that he was sitting between all that remained of George and Marion Kerby. As on the previous occasion, his mind now dropped into a dim repose which was lined with green and tinted by the glowing rays of the sun. Romance was close at hand, but before it could come any closer Mr. Topper’s repose was shattered by an alarming report from the automobile and an oath from George Kerby.

“Damn it!” said Kerby. “A puncture.”

Mr. Topper looked helplessly about as the car came to a sudden stop.

“What do we do now?” he asked. “I don’t know the first thing about changing a tire.”

“But I do,” Kerby replied briskly. “Don’t worry your head about it. You and Marion get out and sit down somewhere. I’ll be finished in ten minutes. You’ve got a brand new spare all loaded and everything.”

“Come on, Cosmo,” said Marion. “Let’s crouch in the grass and leer at George. He’s good with tires and corks.”

With a feeling of relief Mr. Topper abandoned his car. He felt really grateful to George Kerby. In spite of his reputation there must be some good in the young devil. He did not appear to be afraid of hard work. He was as willing as the next to soil his hands in disagreeable toil. Mr. Topper idly wondered if spirits ever washed their hands. What with, if so? Just the same George Kerby was decidedly helpful in an emergency. To Mr. Topper a punctured tire was an emergency of the first order.

“You’d better follow me,” said Mr. Topper, “because I can’t follow you. When I come to a place you like just let me know.”

“This will do,” she announced when they came to a smooth, grassy space near the roadside. “Let’s seethe here like a pair of indolent worms. Do you like seething?”

Topper hardly knew. He had never tried it.

“Wallowing is more in my line,” he remarked. “I’m afraid I’m not built for seething, as you call it. Too fat.”

“It’s easy for me to seethe,” she went on, and from the direction of her voice she was lying at Mr. Topper’s feet. “All I do is wriggle a hole in space and curl up.”

This sounded horrible to Mr. Topper, but he made no reply as he lowered himself to the grass, his mind and body occupied with the grace and agility of his descent.

“Do you find it pleasant the way you are?” he began in a conversational voice after he had carefully arranged himself.

“How do you mean?” asked Marion.

“Being a spirit,” replied Topper.

“It’s rather thin at times,” she said, “but fortunately I’m not always this way.”

“No?” said Mr. Topper with a rising inflection.

“Oh, no,” she answered. “Sometimes I’m quite different.”

“How?” Topper bluntly demanded.

“I materialize,” she said. “I get thick like you, only not quite so thick, if you get what I mean.”

“I’m afraid I do,” Mr. Topper replied. “You mean that it would be impossible to achieve my state of thickness. Go on.”

“I didn’t mean that at all,” she said. “Don’t be a zug.”

“Don’t be a what?” he demanded.

“A zug,” she replied.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“It’s my name for a person who doesn’t act the way he feels,” answered Marion.

“Oh, you mean a gentleman,” said Topper. “Well, if I acted the way I felt I probably wouldn’t be here now.”

“Why?”

“I’d probably be in jail for wife-beating or arson or poisoning wells,” Mr. Topper said thoughtfully. “I’ve felt like doing all those things today.”

“I rather suspected you were down on your luck,” Marion answered sympathetically. “Poor old Topper.”

“If you must be good to me,” replied Mr. Topper, “try to be practical about it. Don’t get me into any more scrapes like the last time. Don’t giggle at people and don’t fight with your husband. Emotional people are bad enough, but emotional spirits are impossible. That’s that. Now tell me what you meant when you said that at times you were quite different.”

“It’s like this,” she began. “We are what you might call low-planed spirits, George and myself.”

Topper nodded appreciatively.

“I can well understand that,” he said.

“We are authentic spirits,” she continued. “Quite authentic, but still low-planed.”

“And no doubt you rejoice in it,” put in Mr. Topper.

“We do,” said Marion, “particularly after what we’ve seen of the high ones.”

“Death has changed you little,” remarked Mr. Topper.

“That’s exactly what I tell George,” replied Marion. “If anything it’s made him worse. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you, but that man is actually mad. I wouldn’t admit it while I was alive, but now with a lot of space on my hands …”

“You were telling me about low-planed spirits,” interrupted Mr. Topper.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Well, low-planed spirits to keep well must have a certain amount of ectoplasm. High-planed spirits don’t need it, wouldn’t know what to do with it, but low-planed spirits must have their ectoplasm.”

“Do they serve it in glasses?” asked Mr. Topper.

“All things you cannot be told,” Marion replied, “but it’s like time with you. We can squander it or use it wisely just as we please. It doesn’t matter. We get so much ectoplasm and no more. They’re strict about it. Just to show you. George went to the races last month. He’d been saving up his allotment. He loves races. That’s why, according to vital statistics, we’re officially deceased. Well, this track was down south. George went there and no one recognized him at first. Even when they did they acted as if they hadn’t. People are funny that way. They hate to be disillusioned. That’s why so few of us ever come back. George cleaned up on the horses. Whenever he wanted to place a bet he faded out and listened to the wise ones. George knows where to listen. But the money got the best of him. He started in drinking and didn’t stop until his ectoplasm had run out. About a week later he came back to me with a terrible hangover and a sad story about a twenty-dollar bill he hadn’t been able to spend because no one had the nerve to pluck it from the air. He said that he had wandered over several counties with that twenty-dollar bill until he got so sick of it he threw it away. Since then he’s been saving his ectoplasm. I’ve got a lot of it, but I never feel like using it. I’m afraid I’m becoming high-planed, but I might be persuaded to materialize for you.”

“Don’t trouble yourself,” said Mr. Topper hastily. “Some other time. I’ve had a particularly hard day. Don’t upset me.”

Marion Kerby laughed. Topper liked her laugh.

“I wonder what sort of a little boy you were,” she said, musingly.

“Not much of a sort,” Mr. Topper admitted. “A pretty poor type of little boy. I mussed around a lot and didn’t go right or wrong. I guess I must have been rather an unofficial little boy.”

“And what did you plan to become?” she asked.

Mr. Topper looked uneasily around him. He had a strange feeling that a pair of lovely eyes were floating in the air. It was like being lost in a fog with a strange, but desirable, person.

“I never got so far as planning,” he said in a low voice, “but I wanted to be an actor.”

“And no one encouraged you?” Marion Kerby’s voice was equally low. There was a deep, feminine quality in it which to Mr. Topper was more intimate than a caress, more tender than a smile. The sound of her voice fortified him against all the perils of life. Everything could go to smash as long as that voice continued. He could sink to the sunless depth of a lonely sea with the memory of such a voice still living in his ears.

“One person encouraged me,” he replied. “A drunken uncle. He gave me a book.”

“What kind of a book?” asked Marion.

“It was a very thorough book,” replied Mr. Topper. “It’s old now, of course, and no doubt there are better books today, but this one had recitations in it, and photographs that showed you how to do Hate and Fear and Modesty and Surprise and practically all the emotions.”

Unconsciously Mr. Topper pressed his hands to his cheeks and did Surprise. The effect was startling, but he failed to realize how startling it was until he found himself staring into the eyes of three seemingly fascinated bystanders who had quietly gathered from nowhere. It was an interesting grouping. Mr. Topper appeared to be leading a class in dramatic elocution. His pupils were registering the most eloquent surprise. Mr. Topper’s expression congealed.

“I’m rehearsing for an act,” he explained, with a hesitating smile.

The first young farmer looked at the second young farmer and the second young farmer looked at the third, then all three looked at Mr. Topper and Mr. Topper looked away.

“I’m rehearsing,” he repeated in an obstinate voice. “Go away.”

But the youthful group held its ground. Mr. Topper was on the point of doing Fury with extras when he saw the spare tire of the automobile neatly detach itself from the rack and roll jauntily up to the denuded wheel. Then he saw the flat tire wobble over the ground and with a delicate leap attach itself to the rack. Topper’s eyes turned to glass. He was no longer able to register his emotions, but the features of the three young farmers were contorted with amazement. They could find no comforting explanation for the purposefully acting tires. And when they saw a wrench performing masterful revolutions in the air they decided to go somewhere else to think things over. With great speed and with admirable solidarity they departed. Nothing could have separated them. Mr. Topper breathed a sigh of relief as they disappeared in single file formation. Like the three witches in Macbeth, they were destined to appear later at an equally unpropitious moment in Mr. Topper’s life.

“You’re splendid!” exclaimed Marion Kerby before he could voice his woe. “Prepare to be hugged.”

For an instant Mr. Topper presented the appearance of a man with a stiff neck, whereas in reality he was resting his troubled head on Marion Kerby’s surprisingly adequate breast. It was just for an instant, but Mr. Topper never quite succeeded in ridding himself of the memory.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Wayward Ghosts

Kerby’s destination was shadowed by the woods. It was an old abandoned inn, lying far back from the roadway in the arms of its guardian trees. Like a royal drunkard, spent by years of purple debauchery, the ancient structure wearily settled down among the trees and listened to tales of vanished splendor drifting through the branches overhead. Hard days had fallen on the inn. It attracted no longer now the flower of the land. Laughter warmed its heart no more and the silvery chiming of goblets filled with honest liquor was forever stilled. And the great paunch-like cellar of the inn was empty. Gone the bottles that flashed beneath the lamplight. Gone the stout old soul who used to carry the lamp. Even the smell of the place was different. The inspiriting fragrance of old wine had been subtracted from the air, leaving it flat and dead. The spiders, too, had lost caste. There was not a cork to cling to, only empty bins that had once contained the mellow yield of distant vineyards stepping up the hillside to the sun that had given them life.

The inn was built on sandy soil. The sea had once been there. If you looked between the trees at moonlight you could see white patches of sand lying in the woods. And if you stood quite still and listened to the wind thrumming through the pines you could catch an echo of waves falling on vanished beaches. The sea had once been there. The rhythm of its surf still lingered in the air, and the healing tang of its salt blended with the smell of pine. All was silent in the woods. Nobody ever came to them now. No couples flitted across the patches, no whispering voices were heard among the trees.

Mr. Topper stood on the back veranda of the inn and gazed into the woods. A breeze, fresh and soothing, filled with a lonesome fragrance, brought peace and a strange excitement to his heart. He felt happy and almost young. He had forgotten about his stomach. It was as if he had withdrawn from the old life and was digging with his toes in new and magic soil. How unreal and far away Mrs. Topper seemed. How delightfully remote from him was everyone he knew. Only Scollops retained her personality. Mr. Topper wanted his cat. Scollops would have loved this place. She would have approved of the rambling old inn with its soft, brown shingles and its long veranda broken by sun-filled angles, ideally arranged for a quiet nap, a warm, sensuous, sun-bathed nap. And Scollops would have found many interesting things in the woods. Mr. Topper unconsciously possessed one of the rarest and most precious faculties of the memory, a graphic and olfactory sense of childhood. He could visualize Scollops stalking between the trees, enter into her little, but intense, curiosities, and smell the things she smelled. There were grasshoppers and ant hills and exciting holes in the trees. What a place for Scollops. Mr. Topper let his eyes travel along the weather-browned side of the old inn. Far away in the distance the checker-board fields cupped down to an indolent river. Mr. Topper did not know the name of the river. He was equally ignorant of its beginning and its end. These things were matters of small importance to Mr. Topper. He did know, however, that the river added another touch of beauty to the landscape. It garnished the general effect. Curving out in a great leisurely horseshoe, it moved between smooth banks, and here and there a tree or two had crept up to its brink to gaze at its pretty limbs in the flowing mirror below. The sky swept down over the world and dropped behind the stepping hills on the highest of which rose the turrets of a castle dating back as far as 1922. Under ordinary circumstances Mr. Topper would have become involved in calculations regarding the probable cost of building such a place, but today he was content to accept it as a part of the scene that was filling his eyes with beauty.

“You sort of like it here,” said a quiet voice behind him. “What makes your eyes so sad?”

“I didn’t know they were sad,” replied Mr. Topper, with an uneasy smile. “Perhaps they’ve looked too long on desk tops and plumbing and legs of lamb. Perhaps they’ve looked on loveliness too late.”

“Perhaps they’ve looked on loveliness too late,” Marion Kerby softly repeated. “The world does wicked things to us with its success and routine and morality. Topper, it either cheats us with wealth or numbs us with want, steals away from us all the color and wonder of being alive, the necessary useless things. Only savages and children do proper honor to the sun, and children soon grow up into perfectly rational – —”

“Toppers,” interrupted Mr. Topper rather bitterly. “I know what you’re thinking. Those white duck trousers. I never wore them again, not since the day you said they looked self-conscious.”

There was a flash of laughter in the air and Mr. Topper felt a small hand brush lightly across the top of his.

“There was something wonderful about those trousers,” she said. “Something pitiful, too. Do you know what I mean?”

“Perfectly,” replied Mr. Topper. “The pitiful part was me.”

“No,” she continued. “I mean that they expressed in a futile way the desire to be dashing and picturesque, the need to slip a little beyond life. They were the starched symbol of rebellion. I liked you the moment I saw you in those white duck trousers. You were shifting from foot to foot, rather guiltily, I thought.”

“Don’t go on about those trousers,” Mr. Topper pleaded. “Try to forget that I ever wore them.”

“If it will make you feel any better,” Marion said comfortingly, “I’ll try to forget that you ever wore any trousers at all.”

“You don’t have to go so far as that,” he replied. “You and your husband have taken my dignity, I have only my decency left.”

“Look!” exclaimed Marion. “The sun is sinking behind the castle. How fine it is.”

Topper took a deep breath. His very being seemed to merge with the crazy-quilt of colors streaming across the low sky.

“It is fine,” he said. “The way it fans out above the towers makes me think of Ivanhoe. I don’t know why. There was a girl in it named Rebecca. She was always jumping out of windows.”

“Well, the Rebecca living in that castle isn’t jumping out of any windows,” said George Kerby jarringly, his voice coming from the doorway of the inn. “You couldn’t even push the old dame through. She’s fat, quarrelsome, and very rich. Always falling in love with her gardeners. That’s why she loses them all the time. She’s too tough a bud even for a gardener to pick.”

“George, dear,” Marion remarked in her sweetest voice “you always sound the right note at sunset. It’s a part of your irresistible charm. You’re so deliciously low at all times.”

“Oh, so that’s it,” replied Kerby. “I’m not too low to be collecting wood for a fire. While you two have been idling out here detracting from the natural beauty of the scene, I’ve been looking for stuff to keep you warm outside and in. I’ve been useful and busy while you’ve been useless and – and – —”

“Indolent, supine or loutish,” suggested Marion. “Take your choice.”

“You’re awfully funny,” Kerby retorted.

“Please go away and continue being useful and busy,” said his wife.

“All right,” answered Kerby in a sulky voice, “but if Topper wants anything to drink he’d better tear himself away from that meager-looking sunset and help me hunt. I’ve a good idea that the law didn’t know all the ropes of this cafeteria.”

Topper obediently turned from the sunset. He would much rather have remained with Marion to watch the evening die, but Kerby was a man demanding a man’s cooperation in an enterprise that smacked of devilishness. Topper felt that he could not afford to be found wanting. There was something rugged and masculine about leaving a sunset flat to go in search of grog. He would show Marion Kerby that he was as game for a good time as the next one.

“Are you coming, Marion?” asked Kerby.

“Not now,” she replied.

“Come on, Topper,” said George Kerby briskly, then in a lower voice, “If we find anything to drink we’ll jolly well help ourselves before we let her know.”

He nudged Topper in the ribs and Topper sprang back, startled.

“Pardon me,” he said. “I must have been crowding you.”

Kerby laughed.

“No,” he replied, “I’m merely over-eager. I’m a dead man parched for a drink, an intangible body with a palpable thirst. Search diligently, Topper. We must find a bottle.”

Kerby’s voice trailed away across the twilight of the inn. Topper heard things moving about, felt clouds of dust descending upon his head, saw empty boxes sliding mysteriously through the gloom, and in the midst of this he stood unmoved. The room had taken possession of him. He looked about like a tourist in a tomb.

The vague, slanting roof extending above his head was filled with ancient dusk solidified by cross-beams, great reaching things, rough-hewn and low. High up in a pointed section of the wall a small window strained through its dirty panes the departing light of day. The little shaft of yellow light sifting through the darkness fingered a yawning fireplace, filled with bits of wood and dusted white with blown ashes. From where Topper stood the room on either side of him ran on forever into shadows. Cross-beams and shadows and ebbing daylight – Topper absorbed these elements, but was unable to blend them harmoniously in his mind. He was like a man in a dream, quite willing to accept, but unable to explain.

And as he stood there, in the great dark room, the wood in the fireplace suddenly sprang into flame. Waves of red sparkled over the stones and warmth carved a pocket in the dampness of the place. The cross-beams, caught in the glow of the firelight, twisted and swam in the quivering parade of the flames. Shadows that had once been dead came back to life and trembled rhythmically on the floor. The old inn seemed to sigh and find itself, like a man waxing expansive after a long period of rigorous domestic hypocrisy. Topper edged up to the fireplace and absorbed reassurance from its warmth. He had a feeling that something was taking place in the room, something very near him. An unseen person was breathing heavily almost at Mr. Topper’s feet.

“Topper!” exclaimed a strained voice as a square section of the flooring flew open. “Topper, my heart’s blood, the world is ours.”

Firelight fell into the aperture disclosed by the lifted boards. Little jets of flame danced redly on deep green glass. Golden fire-beams trickled through jackets of spotted straw and girdled the liveried necks of ancient bottles. A box emerged from the pocket and cut a swath through the dust. With a businesslike snap the board settled back into place. Mr. Topper gave a slight start, then smiled nervously in the general direction of his invisible accomplice.

“You’ve found a lot, haven’t you?” said Mr. Topper with false enthusiasm.

“I’ve a good mind to materialize just for tonight,” muttered Kerby in a preoccupied voice.

Mr. Topper drew a quick breath. From where he was standing he had an excellent view of this much discussed phenomenon. It was, if anything, a trifle too excellent a view to suit Mr. Topper. He would have preferred to have witnessed it from the back row of a crowded hall. “Why,” he thought to himself, “should I of all people be privileged to undergo such unpleasant experiences when thousands of spirit hunters would gladly take my place? Why was not Sir Conan Doyle selected? I am not the man.”

Mr. Topper stopped asking himself questions. He became incapable of self-interrogation. An appalling thing was taking place before his eyes. George Kerby’s legs were appearing, quietly and without undue haste, but nevertheless his legs were quite unmistakably appearing. Mr. Topper began to shiver as if caught in a chill wind. With perfect self-possession and unconcern the legs arched up from the floor. With dilated eyes Mr. Topper followed the ribs in the golf stockings and dwelt reluctantly on the crisscross pattern of the trousers. No detail of those legs escaped him. Years after he could have modeled them in clay. Then, quite suddenly, he realized that another section had been added to the legs. It was the central and after part of George Kerby’s anatomy. In a thoroughly detached manner it was flaunting itself in the air. Mr. Topper’s feet began to shuffle wistfully. They wanted to go to the door and be let out, but, before they had time to obey this impulse, they clung to the floor like expiring flounders. Mr. Topper was gazing into George Kerby’s face, gazing into it, not as Mr. Topper would have liked but in a peculiarly upsetting way. Kerby’s face was oddly suspended between his legs, and it was upside down. Mr. Topper had no precedent to follow. Not even in a sideshow had he ever seen a face placed in such a novel position, but this fact seemed to make no difference to the face, for it smiled up at Topper as gayly as if it had been in its conventional location. The wide-mouthed, inverted smile nearly did for Mr. Topper. He found himself unable to return it.

“Oh, dear,” he said, moving back, “oh, dear me, is that the way you’re going to be?”

“What way do you mean?” demanded the face, its mouth wagging snappily in a manner most horrifying to Mr. Topper.

“The way you are,” muttered Mr. Topper. “You know. Is it always going to be like this?”

“Now what the devil’s gotten into you?” asked Kerby, rising to his full height and confronting the troubled Topper with a bottle in either hand. “Can’t a man bend over?”

“My mistake,” replied Mr. Topper, licking his dry lips. “I thought that probably you’d sprained your back in the accident and that …”

Kerby cut him short with a laugh and moved over to the fireplace.

“You still believe in ghost stories, I see,” he said, good-humoredly. “Well, I’m all here, every inch of me. Never felt better in my life. Shake. I’m glad you see me.”

“I’m overjoyed I do,” replied Mr. Topper, gingerly accepting the proffered hand. “Would you mind opening one or both of those bottles? A drop of something would help a lot.”

“Topper, I love you,” whispered Kerby, hurrying away in the gloom.

Topper looked consideringly after the retreating figure. He found it rather hard to accept Kerby in his materialized form after having with great difficulty become reconciled to his voice. Topper felt that there was a lamentable lack of stability in his relationship with George and Marion Kerby. They should be either one thing or the other, but certainly not both. It required too swift and radical an adjustment of the mind to be talking with space at one moment and the next to be shaking hands with a perfectly tangible body. After all, a person could absorb only a certain limited number of shocks in a lifetime. Mr. Topper felt that he had already absorbed his full quota.

With the firelight at his back, Topper, his eyes now grown adjusted to the darkness, looked about the room. At one end he saw a gathering of shadowy tables, one table carrying the other on its back as though retreating from the field with a wounded comrade. The legs of the wounded tables formed a forest in the darkness. At the other end of the room a huge, many-caverned sideboard flattened its rugged back defiantly against the wall and waited. It was a sideboard that would stand just so much and no more. After the limit had been reached all the prohibition agents in the world would be unable to make it budge. One more indignity, another outrageously intimate searching of its secret recesses might cause it to fly from the wall and fall on its tormentors. Like the last of the barons it stood guard over the desecrated inn. Dust covered its honorable veneer with a delicate pall, but the old sideboard remained at its post and guarded the room it had so often seen filled with the revelers of a freer generation.

George Kerby was standing in front of the sideboard, diligently rummaging through its drawers. As Topper watched the deftly searching hands he decided that Kerby was bereft of fear and respect. Certainly, no ordinary person could thus casually search through such an imposing piece of furniture. With a low exclamation of satisfaction, Kerby left the sideboard and returned to the fireplace with a corkscrew in one hand and two glasses in the other.

“Hold these,” he said, giving Topper the glasses, “but don’t make any noise. Marion’s really childish about nature. If we don’t disturb her she’ll blither around outside all night and let us peacefully fill our skins.”

With professional skill he extracted the cork from one of the bottles, then filled the glasses and politely extended one of them to Mr. Topper, who was extremely glad to receive it. He was honestly convinced that if any man in the world deserved a drink, he, Topper, was that man. Kerby emptied his glass at a gulp and pulled a couple of boxes within range of the fire’s warmth.

“Take it easy, Topper,” he said. “This Scotch is worth a couple of yards of ectoplasm. Do you get drunk?”

Topper, emerging with a brilliant color from his glass, paused before answering the question. A swift, rollicking revolution accompanied by a pleasant tingling sensation was taking place within him. He felt himself growing lighter and less material. Perhaps he was going to disappear altogether. That would be splendid. Then he would be a spirit, too, like George and Marion Kerby.

“Never had much chance,” he replied, “but I did get drunk once. No one noticed it, so I didn’t have much fun. They were all so stuffy at the party. The kind that know when they’ve had just enough. Then they become heavily jolly and wink at each other with wise eyes. I went to sleep in a hammock. Mrs. Topper doesn’t like drinking, it makes her nervous. I suppose you get drunk most of the time?”

Kerby replenished the glasses before he answered.

“Whenever I get the chance,” he said. “Marion says I’m never sober. And she sticks to it, but of course she exaggerates. The moment I take a drink she begins to remind me about the last time and helps me along by auto-suggestion.”

“It’s really too bad about women,” Mr. Topper answered sympathetically. “They don’t seem to have any sense of proportion at all. If Mrs. Topper should walk into the room right now I’d be forced to speak to her quite pointedly to keep her from raising a row. But I’ve never beaten her,” he went on thoughtfully. “Not yet, I haven’t.”

“Thanks, Kerby. This Scotch is delicious. Do you feel like dancing?”

Kerby quickly looked up from his drink. Mr. Topper appeared to be perfectly normal. He was sitting solidly on his box and gazing into the fireplace.

“Do I feel like what?” Kerby demanded.

“Dancing, George,” replied Mr. Topper in a reasonable voice. “Dancing or singing.”

“Certainly not,” said Kerby, shortly.

“That’s odd,” replied Mr. Topper. “I seem to.”

“Well, don’t do it,” Kerby commanded. “You’ll spoil everything.”

“Then let’s each have a bottle of our own,” suggested Mr. Topper. “It will seem more abandoned.”

“Drink up this one first,” said Kerby.

Mr. Topper promptly extended his empty glass.

“Listen, George,” he asked humbly, “if I just sit quietly here by the fire and feel like dancing it will be all right, won’t it?”

“But don’t let your feeling get the best of you,” admonished Kerby. “We’re all set for a good party.”

“I suppose you’re a pretty swell dancer,” Mr. Topper said rather moodily after a short silence. “I dare say you know all about road-houses and gay parties and the latest steps and everything like that.”

“What’s gotten into Topper?” Kerby demanded. “Why are you so broken-hearted about dancing?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mr. Topper replied, resting his chin on his hands and staring into the flames. “I’ve passed up all the good things of life, the dancing and the singing and the drinking. I haven’t had any good times at all. I’ve had a sad life, George. You can’t imagine how terribly sad my life has been. I’ve only one friend in the world and she sleeps all the time. You ought to get to know Scollops, George. She’s a good cat.”

A tear trickled down Mr. Topper’s glowing cheek.

“Open another bottle,” he said in a broken voice. “Open two.”

George Kerby was a creature of quick sympathies. The sight of Mr. Topper in tears moved him profoundly. In the presence of his companion’s sorrow his rude humor deserted him. He was plunged into grief. Getting up from his box, he came over to Mr. Topper and placed an arm round his shoulder.

“Don’t cry, Topper,” he said. “I’ve had a sad life, too. At the age of five I lost both my parents. Then I was struck down in the prime of life. Look at me.”

Mr. Topper tearfully looked at him.

“Then you’re an orphan, too,” said Mr. Topper.

Kerby bowed his head.

“By all means make it two bottles,” continued Mr. Topper. “The occasion calls for it.”

Kerby hurried over to the box.

“That’s a funny thing,” he remarked, returning with the bottles. “There were twelve bottles of Scotch in that case when we found it and now there are only eight. These two and the one we had make three. Where’s the other one gotten to?”

“Maybe you left it about some place,” replied Mr. Topper as he wiped away his tears and smiled upon the bottles. “We’ll come across it later on. Let’s be thankful for what we have.”

For several minutes they sipped their drinks in silence, then Mr. Topper suggested timidly: “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind if I danced quietly around on tiptoe. You can give me some pointers, seeing we’re both orphans.”

Fearing that Mr. Topper might once more break into tears, Kerby reluctantly consented.

“Do it nice and easy,” he warned. “Don’t fall down or knock anything over.”

Topper finished his drink and arose with purpose.

“Now this is the way I waltz,” he explained, spreading his arms and gliding away in the darkness with surprising agility. “Are you watching me, George?”

A humming noise floated through the air. Mr. Topper was supplying his own music. As he revolved through the firelight on the first turn around the room his body was swaying alluringly from the hips, and his arms, rising and falling airily, gave him the appearance of a large bird in fastidious flight. George Kerby watched Mr. Topper with growing astonishment. Evidently the poor chap’s soul had taken wings. It must have been starved for dancing.

“How am I doing?” breathed Topper as he once more passed through the firelight.

“It’s beautiful!” whispered Kerby. “Didn’t know it was in you.”

“Do you like it?” said Topper in a pleased voice, as he circled into outer darkness.

Kerby’s spontaneous praise awoke in Mr. Topper a desire to be worthy of it. Accordingly he redoubled his exertions. His feet flew over the floor and his arms stirred up whirlpools of life in the shadows. A chair got in his way, but he kicked it aside without losing a step. It fell clattering in a corner and Kerby cried out:

“Lay off, Topper, you’ve danced enough.”

But Topper was deaf to Kerby’s entreaties. His blood was up. He was both surprised and delighted. It was like a dream in which one found oneself riding a bicycle with the utmost ease and confidence.

“Will you stop ricocheting around the room like the Dancing Faun of Praxiteles?” asked Kerby, threateningly.

Like a blooded horse Topper continued his maddened flight. His veins were quick with Scotch and his imagination fired with a new realization of the rapture of motion. Nothing could stop him now save forcible intervention. This was supplied by the revengeful chair. Mr. Topper still contends that the thing sprang at his legs, deliberately tripped him and hurled him to the floor. However this may be, the chair put an end to Mr. Topper’s dancing. Like a spent lizard he uncoiled himself from the courageous piece of furniture and returned to the fireplace.

“That’s how I waltz,” he said, looking anxiously at Kerby. “How was it, George?”

“The most convincing demonstration I’ve ever witnessed,” replied Kerby. “You deserve a drink.”

“It’s so good of you to like my dancing,” said Mr. Topper with becoming modesty as he swallowed what he deserved. “You know I think I could learn how to live. I can drink all right and I can dance pretty well. Now about singing – let’s try a song.”

“Let’s,” said a voice from the cross-beams. “Why not?”

Topper and Kerby regarded each other uneasily, then Kerby hastily took another drink and Topper, with dog-like fidelity, followed his example.

“I was an orphan at nine minutes past eight of a blue Monday in the great blizzard of 1891,” continued the voice. “And what’s worse, after all the weary years I’m still an orphan.”

“It’s Marion,” groaned George, setting down his glass. “I wonder how long she’s been there.”

Topper looked up at the cross-beams and became partially sober. On one of the cross-beams an angel, or a woman who gave every indication of being an angel, was reclining. The angel had Marion Kerby’s eyes. Topper was sure of this. The angel also had a bottle, the contents of which she was transferring to a glass. As Mr. Topper watched this dangerous operation he shivered for her safety. The angel dexterously sipped her drink and began to speak in a voice that was far from angelic.

“So you thought I’d blither around outside all night,” she said, “while you acquired a skin-full, Gentle George, deceitful George, drunken Topper!”

“She’s heard every word we said,” muttered Kerby under his breath.

Topper took a drink and looked defiantly at the angel. All his married life he had been quietly insulted by his own wife, but in his present mood he objected to being insulted by another man’s wife.

“Chase her down, George,” he said. “She’s calling me names.”

“Why don’t you come up and get me, you drunken dervish?” challenged the angel, sticking her tongue out at Mr. Topper.

Topper blinked his eyes and looked up as if he were going to bark at her.

“I refuse to be called a drunken dervish,” he said with dignity.

“Well, that’s what you are,” replied the angel calmly. “And George is an unsuccessful little snipe.”

“Don’t mind her, Topper,” said Kerby, with resignation. “That’s where the other bottle went. I should have known it all the time. What are you doing up there, Marion?”

“Loathing a couple of orphans,” she replied.

“But why the funny disguise?” he asked. “You look awful in that outfit. Why not your usual regalia?”

“I had planned to impress your twin orphan until I discovered how depraved he was,” she answered. “His name should be Toper instead of Topper. But let’s see. Topper rhymes with cropper.” She began to laugh, then stopped suddenly and recited in a tantalizing voice: “Topper, Topper, the big grasshopper, tried to dance and came a cropper. How’s that, Cosmo?”

Mr. Topper was stung to the quick. His recent triumph was being held up to ridicule.

“I don’t like it,” he said, seating himself heavily on his box. “It’s very poor, very poor indeed. Furthermore, you seem to be drinking yourself, so how can you talk?”

“Less thickly than you, plump orphan,” she replied.

“Kerby,” said Mr. Topper in an offended voice, “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to request your wife not to talk to me any more. I can well understand why you drove her into a tree. With such a wife heroic methods are the only way out. Use your influence. If you haven’t any, beat her.”

“All right, all right,” replied Kerby, his resistance yielding to his alcoholic contents. “Anything for peace. I’ll talk to her.”

“Topper wants to sing,” he began mildly. “We’ll all sing. Come on down, Marion, and make friends.”

Marion looked suspiciously at her husband.

“You’ll take my bottle,” she said.

“If you think I’m capable of such a trick you can roost up there all night,” Kerby replied haughtily as he returned to the fireplace.

“But how am I going to get down?” the angel asked in a more reasonable voice.

“How did you get up there to begin with?” demanded Kerby.

“I materialized here for safety’s sake,” she said.

“If you were any kind of a spirit,” interposed Mr. Topper, “you’d let go and float down like a zephyr.”

“And if you were any kind of a man you’d let me float down on top of you,” she replied.

Mr. Topper accepted the challenge. Swaying slightly as he walked, he maneuvered himself to a position directly under the cross-beam on which the white figure was reclining. As he stood there with outstretched arms he looked like the statue of a grieving father pleading with his young. Marion Kerby laughed.

“I’m waiting,” said Mr. Topper.

George Kerby poured out a drink and regarded the scene with happy detachment. All the parties in his life returned to him. He remembered impossible situations and dwelt lovingly on them. Things as silly as this he had seen, had been a part of, had played, perhaps, the leading rôle. He shrugged his shoulders and laughed without much merriment. Pageants of past escapades passed before his eyes.

“Hurry up, Marion,” he called out. “Topper’s waiting.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Marion Kerby slipped from the cross-beam and descended on Mr. Topper’s aggressively upturned face. After several seconds of Homeric indecision, he decided to give up the struggle and to accompany his charge to the floor. It was hardly a matter of choice with Mr. Topper. Marion Kerby’s weight bore him to the echoing planks, whereon he lay concealed beneath a smother of celestial raiment.

“I’m dying,” he groaned in a muffled voice. “Drag this woman off.”

“A fat man has his uses,” Marion Kerby remarked, carefully picking her way across Mr. Topper’s stomach.

“Had I known you were going to say that,” he managed to get out of him, “I’d have given you the shock of your life. Help me up, George. I’m crippled.”

When Mr. Topper had been restored to his seat he looked across at Marion Kerby sitting opposite him on a box near the fireplace. She was clinging to her bottle and looking watchfully about her. There was something in her bearing that reminded Mr. Topper of a defiant child at a party at which none of the other children wanted to play with her. She was prepared for the slightest hostile move. Her little face was filled with resolution and glowing color, and her eyes were bright and darting like those of an inquisitive young bird. The white robe floating about her made her small head, appearing so bravely above it, seem a little lost and pathetic. Mr. Topper decided that the robe was not a success. Marion Kerby had never been intended for an angel. She was far too alert and human, and a trifle too suspicious.

“Well, if I looked silly in white duck trousers,” he announced, “you certainly take the cake in that. It does my heart good to see you look such a fright.”

Marion Kerby gazed at him out of her large, serious eyes, then most surprisingly her lips began to tremble and she buried her head in her lap. Stifled sobs issued from the folds of her robe. Mr. Topper experienced a strange sensation. It was one of triumph and alarm, but as the sobs continued with unabated anguish he began to feel sorry for his unkind remark.

“Give her another bottle, George,” he suggested.

“Don’t want another bottle,” she replied without looking up.

“Then give it to me,” said Mr. Topper. “I can’t stand hearing her make that noise. Do something about it, George.”

Kerby tried to put his arm around his wife, but she flung it off angrily.

“You go ’way from me,” she sobbed. “I never made fun of his trousers, although God knows they were funny enough, and now he calls me a fright simply because I tried to dress up like an angel for him.”

“I’m sorry, Marion,” said Mr. Topper. “I was only fighting back, honestly I was. Let’s take a drink and make up. We were good friends this evening.”

She raised her head and looked at Mr. Topper’s troubled face. He smiled at her and held out his arms. More than ever she appealed to him as a small child recovering from some devastating disappointment. This impression was heightened when he found her clinging to him and pressing her wet cheeks to his face. Mr. Topper swayed beneath this outburst of affection. For a moment he thought he had been attacked, but when he felt two soft lips kissing the lobe of his ear he concluded that the demonstration was of a peaceable nature.

“That’s all right now,” he said, thumping her back with the flat of his hand. “I was only getting back at you for calling me a plump orphan. It’s true enough. I’ll admit it.”

George Kerby was regarding the scene with surprise.

“I say, Marion,” he remarked, “don’t you think that just shaking hands would be sufficiently convincing? This is a party, not an orgy, you know.”

Marion laughed and sprang away from Mr. Topper.

“He was such a penitent old sot,” she explained. “I just had to hug him. Do you want one for yourself.”

Kerby submitted himself to her violence with the polished indifference of a tolerant husband.

“Now that that’s over,” he remarked, “we can all have a drink.”

His suggestion was received with enthusiasm and acted upon several times. The crest of Mr. Topper’s wave was on its downward curve. It had been an eventful night for him. He bowed several times in the direction of Marion Kerby and at last in an excess of politeness he bowed himself off the box onto the floor, where he rested motionless on his nose. When he had been replaced by George and Marion Kerby, it was learned that he had been trying to ask Marion for the honor of a dance, but before she had time to accept his invitation he closed his eyes in sleep. Presently, however, he had a confused impression that he was flying through the colors of an evening sunset with an angel clasped in his arms. Two bright stars were looking into his eyes and two red lips, parted in a smile, were thrillingly close to his. An odor of Scotch whiskey filled the sky and made it friendly and stimulating. Mr. Topper breathed deeply. New vigor was returning to his body. The president of the bank was peering at him over the glistening edge of a burning cloud. The old man looked pained and puzzled. Mr. Topper gracefully blew the president a kiss and the venerable financier ducked behind his fleecy barrier. On another cloud, that resembled the platform of his station, Mr. Topper saw a number of commuters. They were holding an indignation meeting and pointing furiously at Mr. Topper, who, as he sailed by, made a vulgar gesture in their direction and laughed down at the angel. The commuters fell screaming from the cloud and were lost in the darkness below, their cries of anguish drifting pleasantly up to his ears. Low down on the horizon Mr. Topper distinguished the pale eyes of his wife. They sent a path of reproach across the interweaving colors. He tried to look away, but the eyes clung to him. His anger mounted and he shook his fist at the eyes.

“Damn that leg of lamb!” he shouted. “I’m in love with Kerby’s wife!”

“One minute,” whispered the angel. “I must take a tuck in my ectoplasm. This dress is tripping me.”

George Kerby, gazing over the rim of his glass into the dying embers of the fire, was oblivious of his surroundings. So Mr. Topper danced with the angel as the room grew dark. A visitor standing in the doorway of the inn would have seen nothing, but would have heard a soft, humming sound in the darkness and the scraping of flying feet. And had the visitor listened very closely he might have heard George Kerby pouring himself a drink and poking the cooling embers with the charred end of a stick. Little breezes sighed round the old inn and tiptoed along its rambling verandas. Like a cat closing a watchful eye the last red spark winked out.

CHAPTER NINE

Local Historians Disagree

Later that night, in a near-by village, Mr. Topper’s automobile stopped aggressively in front of a cheerfully lighted drug store. This much has been established and freely admitted, but what follows has become complicated by a multiplicity of facts, furnished by various local historians, dealing at white heat with events still too vivid in their minds to be impartially recorded. In spite of this it is to these local historians that one must turn for further information, because, unfortunately, Mr. Topper alone of all the participants is unable to present his version. To be more accurate, it should be known that Mr. Topper had no version to present, his mind having ceased consciously to function some hours earlier in the evening.

The collected data are full of conflicting statements and unconsidered conclusions. Vanity and prejudice have as usual played havoc with the truth, and Mr. Topper’s reputation has been tossed into a furnace of frantically wagging tongues. The druggist and his soda clerk are still in disagreement on many important points, and it is doubtful if anyone will ever agree with the chief of police, although many may sympathize with him. On one point, however, all are in complete accord, the point being that Mr. Topper was to blame for everything, and that, had it not been for him, the little village would have continued to lead its tranquil existence to the end of recorded time.

It seems then that around eleven o’clock in the evening, Mr. Topper, after driving with great speed down the main street of the town, stopped abruptly in front of a drug store in which were gathered the flower and youth of the neighborhood. As witness to this fact we have three young rustic wing-singers, who, having finished their evening’s singing, were comparing notes in the ruddy glow of the drug store window. It is to be regretted that these three gentlemen were merely the washed and oiled refinements of the farm hands who earlier in the day had been privileged to come upon Mr. Topper by the roadside in the act of doing Surprise. This incident had made a profound impression on their minds, and had only been forgotten for the more serious business of convincing various skeptical maidens that shadows and moonshine do not necessarily lead to perdition. The first wing-singer supplies the prelude. He is speaking to an attentive audience and he does not have to be cajoled to speak. He is saying:

“As soon as he staggered outer the orter I knew his face and I says to Joe, ‘Damn if it ain’t the same guy and he’s still drunk.’ Joe laughed right out loud because the guy had fallen down on the pavement and was sprawling there at our feet. Then the guy got up unsteady like and asked in an ugly voice just who had been doing all the laughing, and Joe in that comical way he has said that he had and that he was the mayor of the town and a lot of other funny things. Well, the guy didn’t say much for a minute because he was brushing his pants and looking at Joe, and Joe was about to give him a push so he would fall down and we could laugh some more, when the guy asks Joe in a dopy voice how he’d like to get a punch on the nose. At that Joe just laughed in his face, it was so comic, and Joe having such a good sense of humor, but before Joe had laughed much he stopped sudden because that guy had hauled off and hit him on the nose. Then Joe said, ‘Come on, boys,’ and we all pitched in and showed the guy just where he got off.”

From this naïvely significant account of the opening of the hostilities it must be concluded that Mr. Topper’s question concerning Joe’s nose was purely rhetorical, as Joe was given hardly sufficient time in which to answer and what little time he did have was wasted in ill-advised laughter. In his lust for action, Mr. Topper was perhaps at fault, but a plea for tolerance might be advanced on the ground that after all Joe was such a “comical feller” and for this reason, if for none other, deserved to have his nose punched whenever and wherever the opportunity conveniently offered itself to any public-spirited person.

Thus far Mr. Topper’s actions have been traced up to the moment when he was borne down to the sidewalk beneath the combined weight of his opponents. Just what he did there will never be clearly known, for Mr. Topper was, of course, hidden, and the three young rustics refuse to tell. But according to the throng gathered inside the drug store, the cries issuing from the avengers of Joe’s deflowered nose were so eloquent with anguish that everyone rushed to the door. It may be inferred then, not without reason, that Mr. Topper did as well, if not better, than could be expected of him under the rather trying circumstances.

The druggist, a person of authority and much unsavory knowledge, adds his contribution to the history of this tremendous fray.

“As I was crowding there in the doorway,” he is explaining to an absorbed group of loungers, “the strangest thing happened I ever saw in my life and you’ve got to admit that us druggists see some mighty queer things.”

This being admitted without the slightest opposition the druggist proceeds:

“I’d have sworn on the stand that the automobile was empty. From where I was standing I could look right into it and see every inch of leather on the seats. There wasn’t nobody there – nobody. They couldn’t even have crouched. But as I was saying, I was crowding there in the doorway just where that dog is now and I was watching this out-of-town drunk getting what was coming to him when right out of the automobile swarm two people, an angel and a guy in golf pants.”

“Not a real angel,” objects one of the loungers.

“Can’t say about that,” the druggist earnestly replies, “but she looked the part, flying robes and all. She didn’t act like an angel though, except maybe an avenging one, but at that there was something about her different. Nobody but an angel could have been in so many places at once. She was the busiest party I ever saw. She and her friend with the golf pants on sort of took the boys by their legs and just naturally threw them away. Joe went up the street a piece, and Fred went down, and Alf landed up against the hitching post, where he stayed looking quite natural with a sort of gentle smile on his face. Then the angel and her gentleman friend lifted up the drunk and pushed their way into the store, the angel cussing like mad and the man with the pants telling her not to mention names.”

“When the three of them came in I was standing behind the counter,” proclaims the soda clerk, rudely breaking in on his employer’s story.

An imperceptible shifting of shoulders indicates that the center of interest has been transferred to the boy.

“Well, I was that surprised and excited,” he continues. “The angel walks up to the counter dragging the drunk with her and asks as cool and sweet as you please for some spirits of peppermint.”

“You keep calling this angel her,” breaks in one of the loungers. “Angels ain’t neither one thing nor the other. That’s why they’re angels. Was this here angel a woman?”

“Sure,” says the boy. “She had black silk stockings, thin ones, and she was a good looker to boot. ‘Mix it up, Alonzo,’ she says to me, ‘and don’t stint,’ but before I could do any mixing the crowd came surging in.”

“Thin ones,” remarks one of the listeners.

“And black silk,” says another.

“Some angel,” puts in a third, rolling his eyes unpleasantly.

“And that’s when the man with the golf pants on began to get gay with my siphons,” the druggist hastens to explain. “When he saw the crowd coming at him, up he jumps on the counter with a bottle in each hand and lets loose two streams on the nearest heads. Everybody stopped and some went away, and the angel yelled after them, ‘Come back here, you boll-weevils, a bath will do you no harm.’ While this was going on, the drunk had gotten behind the counter and was playing with the soda taps. You’d have thought he was at a party, he was that pleased and satisfied. ‘Look, George,’ he kept calling out. ‘See the damn thing fizz.’ The man jumps down from the counter and says to the angel, ‘Get him, kid, we’ve got to organize.’ Then the angel collected the drunk and told him that they’d go somewhere else and have a lot of fun and he suddenly came to life and made for the door, his head down and his arms swinging. And all the time he’s yelling something about a leg of lamb he didn’t seem to like. The angel and her friend with the golf pants on closed in on each side of him and the three of them charged through us to the street and got into the automobile and then they were nabbed.”

It is generally admitted that the three of them were, as the druggist put it, nabbed. The method of nabbing is also a point of local harmony and is acclaimed as being nothing short of a stroke of sheer genius. The method, it must be admitted, was not without its more imposing features.

When Mr. Topper and his companions emerged from the drug store they found that their only means of escape had been more or less surrounded by several and various circles of civic activity. The Quoits Club was staunchly occupying the car. As a club it was none too cheerful. Around the automobile itself, in hushful alertness, marched the local fire brigade. This depressed body of manhood was comfortingly reënforced by an outer circle composed of the more active members of the Security Association. A rotary movement, far on the outskirts, dimly illuminated by a fiery signal, gave staunch assurance that the business element of the town was heartily, if not helpfully, endorsing the procedure. This latter organization was making up in activity what it lacked in actual contact.

In the face of this display of civic cooperation neither Mr. Topper nor the Kerbys were convinced. They continued on. Like a splendid truth they denied facts. It has not been refuted that, on his way to the automobile, Mr. Topper assaulted and felled the chief of police and that the Kerbys scrambled over the body of the stricken man, cursing him vilely the while for being in their way. A submerged and vague-looking person, over whom the chief of police was chief, is responsible for this illuminating addition to the record of Mr. Topper’s swift descent from the dead crater of suburban virtue:

“I was practicing away on my clarinet, practicing away like a good one, the Belvedere concert being only ten days off, when in rushes William, little William, you know, he’s always rushing in, and he tells me that a riot has broke out in the town and that a couple of guys with an angel were smashing up the drug store. Well, I wasn’t much set back by the riot, because I knew that if everybody in the town should get drunk or go mad at the same time there would still be plenty of room on the street for a quiet stroll, but the angel part of it did set me back. It did certainly set me back, that angel part of it.”

To make this record strictly unbiased it should be mentioned that the chief of police’s staff was not the most popular young man in town. The only thing he could do was play the clarinet and he did not do that badly enough to make him funny nor well enough to win him fame. When not engaged in playing or practicing on the instrument of his choice he had an unfortunate way of making unconstructive observations about life in general and the town in particular, and these observations in spite of their sincerity did not add to the young man’s popularity. His casual lack of faith in the town’s ability to work up a first-class riot alienated from him even the sympathy of the most tolerant member of the community, and according to the wiser heads of the town his story should not be taken too seriously.

“So I put my music away,” his story goes, “and I went out to take a slant at this angel. Up by the drug store it looked like a rehearsal of the ‘Covered Wagon.’ Everybody was swarming around so and making such important noises. So I edged in and stood there, waiting to look for the angel, when, all of a sudden, I realized that I was the police force. This thought started me edging out, but before I could get away they came through the crowd and I saw them. They looked like nice people to me, and a little drunk. The woman was just beautiful. She must have been an angel because she did queer things to my eyes, sort of made me glad I had them, and that’s more than any of the girls round this place ever done. I couldn’t make head or tail out of the fight. It struck me as being sort of unfair. I thought of monkeys and lions and dogs and I decided that they wouldn’t have acted like that under the circumstances and I sort of felt sorry about it all and a little ashamed. But I felt better when I saw them walking on the chief, although I felt sorry for him, too, realizing all the time that a little walking on would do him no harm. So when these people had passed completely over the chief I helped him up and shoved him in the car. ‘You come along too,’ he said in a shaky voice and took me along with him. He seemed to want me for some reason or other. The car was already crowded, but I got in with the chief and watched them all pile down on the angel and the two men. It seemed kind of silly and overdone to me and I tried to help the angel a little, but the fire brigade, not having had any fires for a long time, was wild for action and did fine, considering that there were only twelve of them against three, not counting the chief and myself, and the Quoits Club, and I didn’t count for much of course. Then after a while everybody stopped squirming and began to get up, and when they looked at what they had, there was only the drunken man seeming less drunk, but much more battered. ‘Where my friends?’ he says, but nobody could give him the right answer so they told him to shut up and mind his own business, and began looking about for the other two, who just weren’t there at all. And that’s a strange thing. I could say something else, but it wouldn’t do any good. So they put the battered man in the lock-up and stood outside chewing the rag.”

What he could have said, but did not say, was withheld because the boy had been endowed with an instinctive sense of delicacy, a shred of which still survived in spite of its unfavorable environment. He was right. It certainly would have served no useful purpose had he told his friends that, as he was walking down the street in the direction of the lock-up, he stopped beside a hedge to inhale its fragrance. Vaguely he was aware of the fact that the hedge had no business to be smelling the way it did at that time of the year, or at any other time, in fact. It was not intended to be a fragrant hedge and had never previously laid any claims to fragrance, but tonight an odor rose from it which stopped the boy and held him wondering. It made him think of a forest swept by the notes of violins. He saw a deep cathedral filled with nude, white figures dancing madly in the radiance of stained-glass windows. Romance descended on the village youth, and for the moment carried him away to realms where only his dreams had dared to dwell. That was all there was to it, but he knew there was more. He felt that he had stood very close to someone who was both beautiful and real. The impression perhaps remains with him today.

The “battered man” was borne in triumph to the lock-up. An uninformed observer might have mistaken the event for a procession staged in the honor of some honored local deity, so well was it attended as the automobile moved down the street and stopped before the jail. Here Mr. Topper was produced without ovation and disappeared from view without acknowledging the silent tribute of his followers. He was felt, searched, written about in a book, refelt with great interest and thrust into a cell from which he did not emerge until the following morning. When he asked to be allowed to telephone Mrs. Topper, the chief of police refused this request, but agreed to convey his message.

“Tell her I’m well and happy, but that I won’t be home tonight.”

Nothing loath, the chief aroused Mrs. Topper from a sleepless bed.

“Your husband is well and happy, but he won’t be home tonight,” said the faithful chief. “Yes, he’s safe all right. We’ve got him safe enough – too safe for him. He’s in jail, locked up in jail. What for? Why I wouldn’t like to keep you up all night telling you what for. He’s done plenty. Yes. It will be held in the morning. You’ll hear about it then – all about it.”

After a few more words the chief hung up the receiver and sat back, looking pleased. The enemy was his. The village knew how to deal with out-of-town drunks; and he, as chief of police, stood for the village, guarding its dignity, defending its rights, incarcerating its victims. Who could tell? Next year he might be postmaster. He got up and surveyed Mr. Topper, who was thoughtlessly sleeping on his cot. The chief felt grateful to him, but just a little disappointed in him.

CHAPTER TEN

The Haunted Courtroom

Owing to the public nature of Mr. Topper’s various offenses, the trial was held in the Town Hall in the presence of the town’s entire population, minors and morons rightfully included. Even dogs were not successfully barred from the trial. Mr. Topper noticed several of them and was favorably impressed by their non-partisan attitude, their utter detachment of mind. On the morning of the trial very little business was transacted in that village, the majority of its inhabitants being either complainants or voluntary witnesses. Instead of opening his hardware and furniture store as was his accustomed wont, the Justice of the Peace arose with unhabitual briskness from the breakfast table, and, surrounded by the numerous members of his family, proceeded with Jove-like mien to the place of the trial, where for some minutes the more vociferous members of the community had been impatiently awaiting his coming.

That much was expected of him the Justice clearly realized. And he solemnly promised himself that not even the most sanguine expectant would be left unsatisfied. There was a duty to perform. A public duty in a public place. That was good. In a public place. That was very good. If only the baby would forget to cry. He hoped that the baby would forget to cry, but in his heart of hearts the Justice knew that the baby would not forget to cry. It never did. In vain had he tried to prevail on his wife to leave the baby at home, impressing on her the importance of the business before him. “Who with?” his wife had asked quite reasonably, and, rather than participate in a breakfast table riot, the Justice had refrained from nominating one of his numerous daughters. So the baby, not at all appreciating the fact that it was to be present at one of the most brilliant passages of its father’s all too few moments in the sun, was conveyed to the trial of Mr. Topper in its mother’s resolute arms.

The Town Hall was a barn-like structure, harsh without and unsympathetic within. Two long rows of benches, now filled with eager spectators, formed a narrow aisle down which the Justice walked a little in advance of his family, as if anxious to leave it behind. It would scarcely have surprised him had his wife and children followed him to the platform and arranged themselves behind him in a proudly silent semicircle. They were forever basking in the luster of his name.

No such misfortune occurred, however, and, after making much noise himself, the Justice succeeded in reducing the village to silence. This was the cue for the chief of police to become active. He responded promptly. With the air of one producing a rabbit from a high hat he pulled Mr. Topper through a side door and modestly displayed him to the multitude. And Topper looked not widely unlike a rabbit, a rather battered rabbit that had nibbled on something more potent than cabbage leaves.

This tableau over, the chief of police pushed his pearl into the presence of the Justice, while the chief’s reluctant staff, like a hostage maiden being led naked through an alien street, brought up an unenthusiastic and highly skeptical rear.

“The prisoner, your Honor,” announced the chief.

“So this is the prisoner,” said the Justice, rubbing his hands juicily and beaming down on Mr. Topper.

Topper felt that had not so many spectators been present the Justice would have kissed him out of sheer gratitude.

“So this is the prisoner,” repeated the Justice, his grateful countenance now shedding its rays over the entire room.

Mr. Topper made friendly movements with his features.

“I am,” he said. “You’re about the first person in this place, with the exception of the chief, who seems really pleased to see me.”

The beam was blotted from the Justice’s face.

“Silence, prisoner!” he boomed.

Topper stepped back affrighted.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “I knew there was a string to that smile.”

“He’s a tough bird,” the chief hastened to explain. “I didn’t close my eyes all night. He kept singing. Your Honor, he sang in three different voices, one of them quite girlish and off key.”

“That lie alone should discredit him forever,” Mr. Topper protested with unexpected heat. “Anyway, his remark is unimportant.”

The Justice swooped down over the table like a conventional eagle trademark.

“Prisoner,” he said, “it is all important. In fact, it is exactly three times more important than if you had sung in only one voice. I shall make a note of it.”

Mr. Topper looked up hopefully. Surely the Justice was exercising his sense of the ridiculous. After all the man was human. But when he met the direct gaze of the Justice, Mr. Topper looked wearily away. The Justice was not human. He was in deadly earnest. He was even making notes. No hope from that quarter.

After a portentous interlude, devoted to the scanning of official documents, the Justice raised his head.

“Your name is Topper,” he announced. “Cosmo Topper. Everything is known. Now, prisoner, speak up in a clear voice and tell us where you live and what you do for a living. I am asking you to verify rather than testify, if you can make that distinction.”

The Justice felt that he was doing very well. The principal of the Grammar School had laughed out loud. That was a plume.

“But I thought that they didn’t do things like that until after you’d been convicted,” Mr. Topper replied. “My pedigree comes later, doesn’t it?”

“We are trying to save that time,” said the Justice.

“But you don’t have to hurry so far as I am concerned,” replied Mr. Topper earnestly. “My time is at your disposal. As a matter of fact, I’d rather waste a few minutes here than spend several years elsewhere, if you can make that distinction.”

“Address the court as ‘your Honor,’ ” put in the chief of police, using an unfriendly elbow on Mr. Topper’s ribs.

“You make me feel embarrassed for you,” said Mr. Topper. “Try to remember where you are. This is serious, now.”

“Stop!” whispered the Justice, a pleading note in his voice. “Don’t quarrel. I’ll get him sooner or later, chief. Let him hang himself.”

“You don’t have to let me hang myself,” said Mr. Topper in a resolute voice. “Let me say right off that you’ll have to make me hang myself. If I killed anyone last night I’m sincerely sorry, terribly, terribly sorry, but for all that I deny everything. I’m innocent to the tips of my fingers.”

Once more the Justice beamed. The case was shaping up.

“Deny this, then,” he challenged, his eyes greedily watching the faces of the spectators. “Deny that you, Topper, struck, attacked and maimed the body and person of one Joseph Williams, and that not satisfied with this unwarranted display of ferocity you brutally assaulted Fred Scafford and Alfred Slides, both of whom together with Joseph Williams are in good standing in this community.”

“All right, then, I deny it,” said Mr. Topper. “I deny everything so long as you’re going to get stuffy about it.”

After the night he had put in Mr. Topper was feeling none too well. Standing there, in the presence of the Justice and the hostile throng, a nauseating dizziness swept down on him. He swayed slightly and for support placed his hand on the edge of the platform. Little beads of perspiration gathered round his lips and eyes. He mopped his face with a crumpled handkerchief and tried to look defiantly at the Justice, who was obviously enjoying Mr. Topper’s discomfiture. With a swimming head and a morbid sensation in his stomach, Mr. Topper braced himself and waited. The situation was slowly dawning on him. He was beginning to realize that he, Topper, a man who up to the past night had been a respected member of his community, was now actually a prisoner before the bar of justice, that for all he knew he was a murderer and that he was being tried in the presence of a large gathering of hateful people, in a little village very close to his home – too close to his home. This realization still further depressed his stomach and brought dismay to his mind. He thought of the bank, he thought of his wife, he thought of his reputation and fearfully he thought of George and Marion Kerby. And, as if in answer to his thought, Mr. Topper felt two hands fumbling at his bare throat and was petrified to find that the collar which had gone by the board in the course of the evening’s activities, was being replaced by a fresh one. The Justice, who had never seen a collar attach itself to a prisoner’s neck, can be excused for the interest he displayed in the phenomenon. He moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue and looked fixedly at Mr. Topper.

“The collar,” said the Justice. “There’s something wrong about your collar. It seems to be getting beyond control.”

For a moment Mr. Topper was too busy to reply. His head was being violently jerked from side to side as invisible hands attempted to adjust the knot in a new tie, insisting on getting it just right.

“We’re trying to spruce you up a bit,” whispered the voice of George Kerby. “How do you feel this morning? There, that’s about right. Hold your head on one side so I can see.”

“This is no place for a talk,” muttered Mr. Topper, pretending to arrange the tie. “I feel like hell. Go away.”

Then he glanced up at the Justice and smiled.

“Had them in my pocket,” he said. “Thought I’d make myself a bit presentable.”

The Justice looked unconvinced. Then his eyes once more grew large with interest. A comb was being passed through Mr. Topper’s hair and a washrag was spreading itself over Mr. Topper’s face. Mr. Topper became suddenly active. With one hand he attempted to control the comb and with the other he snatched at the washrag.

“Don’t produce a towel,” he whispered. “It would be too hard to explain.”

Again he smiled at the Justice.

“There,” he said, thrusting the comb and washrag in his pocket. “I feel better already. Where were we?”

“Frankly, I don’t know,” replied the Justice. “You’ll have to stop all this.”

The hall was in an uproar. People were asking questions and standing on the benches to get a better view of this strangely-acting prisoner. The Justice banged on the table and the chief of police raised his voice in admonition. His staff looked sympathetically at Mr. Topper, who, taking advantage of the noisy interlude, was attempting to explain the situation to his over-zealous friends.

“You’ve been lovely,” he whispered. “Very thoughtful. I appreciate everything, but don’t go any further. You can see for yourself.”

“We’re with you, old boy,” replied Kerby. “We’re with you to the end.”

“But don’t be with me here,” pleaded Mr. Topper. “Go outside and wait for the end. It’s a lovely day. Take a walk round the village. It’s not half bad. I’ll join you later.”

“Marion won’t budge,” Kerby whispered. “Says she wants to see that you get a fair trial.”

“They’ll put me away for life if this keeps up,” breathed Mr. Topper. “Tell her to go away.”

“Not a step do I budge,” whispered a voice in his other ear. “I’m going to stand right here and hold your hand. Get ready now, old Zobo is going to ask you something. Brush him off, George. He’s all mussed.”

“Righto,” said George.

“Please, please,” Mr. Topper whispered. “Not so loud.”

As the Justice fixed Mr. Topper with a distracted eye, Topper felt himself being vigorously brushed and adjusted. His coat flew back and Kerby’s busy hands yanked his vest into position. The activity was then transferred to Mr. Topper’s trousers, which were spanked and patted with surprising energy. Mr. Topper, attempting to follow the rapid movements of Kerby’s hands, looked like a man fighting hornets.

“Prisoner,” said the Justice, “I wish you’d stop making such peculiar movements with your hands and body. If you want this case to continue you’ll have to give up trying to bewilder me.”

“A nervous eccentricity,” explained Mr. Topper. “Sometimes it gets the best of me.”

“It’s almost gotten the best of me,” replied the Justice. “Let’s get back to business. As I remember it you were denying everything. Were you?”

“It seems to me that I was,” said Mr. Topper.

“Very well then,” continued the Justice. “Deny these charges if you have the temerity. Deny that you, Topper, Cosmo Topper, forced entrance with your companions into Frederick Schultz’s drug store, that there you attacked a body of peaceable citizens, using the most offensive language against them, that you resisted arrest and made possible the escape of your companions, and finally, that you were driving an automobile while under the influence of strong drink. Deny these charges. Did or did you not commit them?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said Mr. Topper, truthfully, “but I’m glad it’s not any worse.”

“We shall try to refresh your memory,” replied the Justice. “Joe Williams! Step up, Joe, and testify.”

Joe Williams was not loath to appear. He hurried down the aisle and stood before the Justice.

“Now look well at the prisoner, Joe,” said the Justice, “and tell us if he is the person who assaulted you in front of Schultz’s drug store.”

Joe looked so long and so well at the prisoner that Mr. Topper thought the young man was trying to hypnotize him.

“He is, your Honor,” answered Joe emphatically. “As I was standing there talking – you know, calm and peaceful-like – down the street comes this …”

“Later, Joe, if ever,” interrupted the Justice promptly.

Joe’s face clouded with disappointment as he turned reluctantly away.

“Are you satisfied, Topper?” the Justice asked.

“I am if you are,” replied Topper, “but Joe doesn’t look so pleased.”

“Perhaps then you will tell us the names of your two friends,” continued the Justice. “We might try to make things a little easier for you.”

“George and Marion Kerby,” said a voice unlike Mr. Topper, but apparently issuing from him.

“And where do these two depraved people live?” the Justice asked.

“They’re not depraved,” snapped the voice. “And anyway they are safely outside your jurisdiction.”

“Try to speak in your natural voice,” the Justice commanded. “Do you refuse to answer my question?”

“Well, it’s mighty hard to answer,” said Mr. Topper. “You see they travel about a lot – almost too much.”

A note was passed by the chief of police to the Justice, who, after reading it, looked severely at Mr. Topper.

“I have a note here from your wife,” he said. “She states that you are either drunk or crazy, because the people you refer to were killed in an automobile accident several months ago. Such attempts to deceive will not succeed with this court. Nor will they materially strengthen your case.”

Mr. Topper looked through the hall until he had located his wife. She was sitting with several friends. He recognized Clara and Harris Stevens.

“Thanks,” he called out with a terrible smile. “You are very helpful, my dear. The Justice thanks you, too.”

“Silence! prisoner,” shouted the Justice. “I’ll not have you abusing spectators.”

“Not even if she’s my wife?” asked Mr. Topper.

“Not now,” said the Justice. “Later.”

“You don’t know her,” replied Topper.

“That’s neither here nor there,” the Justice complained irritably. “You’re always getting me off on something else. This is a trial, not a conversation. Answer questions and stop asking them.”

“All right, what shall I answer now?” asked Topper.

“Were you driving your automobile while drunk? Answer that,” said the Justice.

“You’ll have to ask someone else that question,” replied Mr. Topper. “I can’t answer it.”

The Justice motioned to the chief’s staff.

“Come here, Albert,” he said. “Did you smell whiskey on the prisoner’s breath?”

“Why, your Honor,” answered Albert, in a voice of surprise, “I didn’t even try to.”

“Answer the question,” the Justice commanded. “Did you smell whiskey on the prisoner’s breath?”

“I’m not in the habit, your Honor, of smelling perfect strangers’ breaths,” said Albert with quiet dignity.

“Albert,” explained the Justice, “I’m not inquiring into your habits. I’m trying to establish a fact. Please answer the question.”

“Well, your Honor,” said Albert, “at that time of night everybody’s breath smells of whiskey in this town.”

A wave of protest from the outraged spectators fortunately drowned the Justice’s remarks to Albert. When order had been restored Mr. Topper turned to the Justice.

“If you’ll only stop making this public inquiry into the state and nature of my breath,” he said, “I’ll admit everything.”

A cloud of disappointment settled down on the Justice’s brow. “Do you mean to say you’ll plead guilty to every charge?” he asked.

“Most elaborately,” replied Mr. Topper.

At this moment the wailing of an infant filled the hall. The Justice reared his head like a stricken war horse. This was indeed unfortunate. He felt that he was going to have a violent attack of nerves. So far the trial had been a complete failure and now without the slightest consideration for his feelings the prisoner was pleading guilty. It was too bad, the whole affair. And the baby was not making it any better. With a sigh, the Justice decided to put an end to an intolerable situation. He refused to compete with his own child to see whose voice should dominate the hall.

“So, prisoner,” he said in a loud voice, a false light of triumph in his eyes, “so at last we have forced you to plead guilty.”

“Driven me to it,” said Mr. Topper.

“I am glad that you have at least decency enough to admit your guilt after we have clearly established it,” continued the Justice.

“I couldn’t resist you,” smiled Mr. Topper. “Haven’t a leg to stand on.”

“Don’t I get a chance to tell about all the strange things that happened in the lock-up last night?” asked the chief of police in a peevish voice. “Ain’t you going to hear about the disappearing clock, and how cigarettes kept smoking in the dark, and matches striking without any hands holding them, and all the funny noises, the hooting and insults and everything.”

“It seems that I am,” replied the Justice curtly. “But I don’t want to and I don’t think I shall. Now, Topper, I have it in my power to do either one of two things. I can hold you for the county court or fine you and let you go. I would like to do both. It would give me pleasure to do both, but as I can do only one I am going to fine you and adjourn the court.”

“A thrifty decision,” said Mr. Topper. “I’m unusually well supplied with ready cash.”

“You won’t be long,” replied the Justice. “Hand over one hundred and fifty dollars.”

The Justice thrust the bills in his coat pocket and rose to his feet.

“The court is adjourned!” he shouted. “Clear the hall, chief!”

As the Justice was about to descend the steps leading from the platform he suddenly gave the appearance of a man who had been violently pushed from behind. With an expression of incredulity on his face he flew through the air and landed prostrate on the floor. As the chief bent over to assist him to rise, he, too, as if not to be outdone by his superior, gave a remarkable demonstration of levitation. Without any apparent effort he projected himself through space, sailing lightly over the Justice and stopping with a thud against the base of the platform. The room was filled with wild laughter and the table at which the Justice had been sitting danced crazily in the air. Luckily Mr. Topper could not be held responsible for this disorder. He was standing outside the hall talking with his wife and her friends.

“Why didn’t you bring your luncheon with you and make a real picnic of it?” he asked with elaborate politeness.

“You’re hardly in a position to be sarcastic,” answered Mrs. Topper. “A little common humility would be more becoming.”

“I can hardly see that,” said Mr. Topper. “I’ve afforded you more enjoyment than you have me. There will be a tremendous demand for the company of those who attended the trial. You’ll be fed free for weeks.”

“Come, Topper,” put in Harris Stevens. “We were only trying to help you.”

“By writing nasty notes to the Justice,” said Topper.

“Well, I merely dictated it,” replied Stevens. “Your wife thought of it. We didn’t want you to get into any more trouble. You’ve been through a lot. What a time you must have had. Was there a woman in the party?”

“The Follies Chorus,” said Topper. “In tights. Pink, blue, red and green.”

“Come, Clara,” Mrs. Topper interrupted, “we’ll be getting home.”

“And some of them were in less than that!” Mr. Topper shouted furiously as the party moved off. “Much less than that! Tell everybody I said so.”

“May I get a few lines for the local paper?” asked a young man, stepping up to the gesticulating Topper.

“Yes!” cried Mr. Topper, “a few lines in your face if you don’t take the silly thing away.”

The youth withdrew and Mr. Topper was left comparatively alone. That is, he was surrounded, but at a distance, by an absorbed circle of observers.

“Now where the hell’s the car?” he muttered.

As he spoke he heard a loud honking of an automobile horn and the car, like a playful puppy, came darting through the crowd. The Justice, standing on the porch of the Town Hall, witnessed the scene and shut his eyes tightly. The car was driverless. He could not stand that. As he leaned against the wall he feared he was going to lose his mind. When he opened his eyes again Mr. Topper had stepped into the automobile and was driving off while the people stood about with panic in their midst.

“Here’s the money,” said George Kerby. “I snatched it out of the old bird’s pocket.”

A roll of bills found its way into Mr. Topper’s hand.

“Oh, my God,” he groaned. “Are you two back again?”

“Sure,” said the Kerbys in a breath. “Aren’t you glad?”

Mr. Topper was unable to reply.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Antics of a Hat Stand

The Toppers’ house was not one of mirth. Great quantities of gloom had descended upon the place. Women had hastened to Mrs. Topper’s side as if in the hour of her bereavement. They sat in subdued rooms and conversed in subdued voices. Mr. Topper came to regard himself as a corpse, without, however, enjoying a corpse’s immunity to its surroundings. At any moment he expected Mrs. Topper to place candles round him. He had been requested to withdraw from the Town Council and the honorary residue of the now professionally organized fire brigade. Why a person had to be moral in order to be useful at a fire was difficult for Mr. Topper to understand. Nevertheless, he sent in his resignation and felt better about it. He was now officially divorced from white duck trousers. That was something to cling to in the ruins.

Twenty-four hours after his release from durance the craving for a smoke had driven him into town. On that trip he had purchased enough cigars to relieve himself of all further necessity of appearing again in public. Topper had only a hazy idea about fallen women, but he imagined he felt very much as they did when adversity had forced them to return to their home towns. Topper had lost everything but his money and because that still remained he was not stoned. He was still a solid man, but terribly soiled. He read about himself in the local press and stopped reading almost immediately. Mrs. Topper displayed no such delicacy. The paper was seldom out of her hands. Topper, observing her absorbed expression, wondered what pleasure she could be deriving from poring over such morbid stuff. Mrs. Topper was deriving a lot of pleasure. Seeing her husband’s crimes in print gave her a feeling of security. There could now be no doubt about it. The story was down in black and white. Mr. Topper could not deny it. She was vexed with the reporters, however. They had used altogether too much literary restraint. Now if she had been writing the report – headlines flashed through her mind. It was well for Topper that he could not read them.

Three days had elapsed since Mr. Topper’s arrest. Three days passed by him for the most part in the backyard. Whenever sympathetic callers arrived Mr. Topper disappeared. He feared that the women might ask his wife for the privilege of viewing the remains. For this reason he quietly removed himself and his bruises to the backyard. To this retreat Scollops followed him. She was waiting impatiently to resume the repose that had been so rudely interrupted by his unwarranted absence from the house. The man must sit down sometime. This tragic stalking about was all very well for a while, but on the other hand something was due a cat, especially such a cat as Scollops. There was little comfort in a peripatetic couch. If Topper wanted to think and be gloomy let him do so in a stationary position. But why think? Sleep was much more vital. There were a few slight irregularities in her own life. Scollops remembered, not without pride, a certain alienation affair in which she had become involved, but she had no intention of letting the memory make her haggard. Several times she had honestly tried to think about the affair, to figure out if in any way she had justified various backyard references, but the effort had made her drowsy. Why was not this man affected in the same manner? Human beings placed too great importance on the game of morals. That was why they were constantly breaking the rules. They really did not want to play and yet they insisted on giving the appearance of playing. So Scollops waited while Topper walked. Then Topper sat and Scollops slept. And in the darkened house Mrs. Topper delicately arched her eyebrows and was happy, quite, quite happy in a sane and refined manner.

After three days of morbid seclusion Mr. Topper came to a decision. His secret life was developing, growing more complex. When he came to the decision he was sitting on the lawn roller because it had been previously warmed by the sun. And what made him come to a decision arose from a sudden and upsetting realization that at heart he felt neither grieved nor chastened by anything that had come to pass. He found himself actually gloating over his night in the lock-up – what little he could remember of it. He relished his memory of the old abandoned inn tucked away among the trees. He felt with pleasure that he had done some fairly splendid dancing and he was sure that for the first time in his life he had sung without constraint and fought without fear. Sitting there on the lawn roller, he was surprised to find that each little memory brought him some satisfaction and no regret, and as the indirect rays of the sun sent courage through his spinal column he deliberately denounced the town and all its works in terms both round and rough. His whole past life had been modeled on false standards which would have to be adjusted at once. There was only one way to accomplish this. Mr. Topper’s fingers abstractly touched one of Scollops’ ears and Scollops with equal abstractness scratched one of Mr. Topper’s fingers. But Topper disregarded the sleepy rebuke of his cat. He was going away. He was going quite far away. That was Mr. Topper’s decision. He would drive himself to some great distance from the town and his wife and her friends. Before he officially proclaimed the new order of things he must first be alone. He had to think a little. That was quite important. He wondered now how he had ever gotten along so far with so little thought. He became quite elated about his brain. It was like a new toy to him. He had always believed that it had been providentially arranged for the purpose of making money, acquiring possession and paying for legs of lamb. He found that his brain was quite playful, that it broke rules and was indifferent, that it entertained the most disreputable thoughts without becoming panic-stricken. Mr. Topper felt like dancing, but he restrained this inclination. He realized that if Mrs. Topper saw him making movements of joy she would immediately call in another mourner for a whispered conversation. And Topper felt so liberated that he feared he might assault the next woman who heaved a sigh in his house.

So instead of dancing he buried his head in his hands and held on to himself. It was silly about his eyes. He did not feel at all like crying. Yet his face was growing wet.

The next day Mr. Topper went to the city. To show his indifference to public opinion he took the usual commuting train. His appearance at first caused the respectful silence usually accorded to criminals in transit to the place of incarceration. As he walked down the platform he felt that life had not been lived in vain. He enjoyed the situation. Men who had once greeted him with respect now slapped him on the back with hands that were moist with condescension. Friends who had hitherto received him warmly nodded thoughtfully in his direction and resumed their conversation. Two representatives of civic virtue were honest enough to ignore his presence. Harris Stevens, however, was not to be downed. On seeing Topper he threw himself headlong into the rôle of official protector. Stevens’ mind was so tolerant that he could have attended a lynching every day without becoming critical. He thrust his arm through Mr. Topper’s and led him up to a group of mutual friends.

“If I were handcuffed to him,” thought Mr. Topper, “his happiness would be complete.”

Nevertheless Topper made no protest. He was still enjoying the situation.

“Look out, boys!” cried the jovial Stevens, “he’s dangerous. Wild women and everything. What do you think of our Cosmo now?”

Of course the assembled gentlemen hardly said exactly what they thought of their Cosmo now, but to a man they all displayed a glittering interest in the mysterious and therefore immoral woman in the case. Several commuters of the more serious and orderly type even went so far as to draw Mr. Topper aside and intimate roguishly that they would appreciate his confiding absolutely in them. Mr. Topper understood all too well and gave each inquirer a different name and address. He was thanked by each, nudged playfully in the ribs, and assured that everything would be done on the quiet.

“What vile devils they are,” thought Mr. Topper as he smiled knowingly into their eyes, already touched with the fever of the hunt.

His trip to the city that morning provided him with much food for thought, each morsel of which was more unpalatable than the last.

The atmosphere was clearer at the office. News of Mr. Topper’s evil ways had not entered there. Boys were answering bells, girls were serving the files and customers were beginning to transact business.

“To what end all this?” speculated Mr. Topper, making his way to his desk and hanging his hat and stick on a near-by stand. From his position on the platform he could look down over the activity taking place on the bank’s vast floor. Like a lesser god he observed with preoccupied eyes the ordered movement of those below him. What he saw neither pleased Mr. Topper nor made him feel particularly proud of his elevated place in this little world. Mr. Topper had already progressed too far for that, but the quiet briskness of the bank, the crisp little people coming and going on sure feet beneath the vast dome of the place, and the massive splendor of the institution’s architecture gave him a feeling of permanence. Men and women were engaged in earning a living here. They were paying strict attention to their own affairs. Round him on the platform his brother officers were busy with callers and correspondence. Here Mr. Topper felt safe from the oily eyes of his friends. He drew a sigh of relief and touched a bell. Miss Johnson appeared with his letters and he thanked her with elaborate politeness. His secretary was a middle-aged woman who valiantly strove to draw attention from that depressing fact by decorating various parts of her body with the tender ribbons of infancy. Mr. Topper’s attention was not so easily misdirected, but nevertheless he was fond of Miss Johnson. He had seen the ribbons increase with the years and had decided that when infirmity at last forced the good woman to withdraw from the bank she would depart under full color like an aged but fluttering May-pole. In spite of her little weaknesses Miss Johnson knew her business, or, better, Mr. Topper’s business. She knew how to save him both time and trouble and the more time and trouble she saved the more tolerant was Topper, the more he forgave the ribbons. As far as he was concerned Miss Johnson could have appeared in beads so long as she made up the difference with efficiency.

Mr. Topper’s first letter was from a wholesale grocer in Texas, an old fellow on whom the bank had been making a decent profit for years. He was now in trouble. Things were bad. He wanted an extension of credit. As Mr. Topper read the letter he caught a mental picture of the old man laboriously writing it from an old-fashioned roll-top desk in Texas. Mental pictures are not good for banking. Mr. Topper was well aware of this, but the knowledge did not succeed in closing his eyes on the man’s plight. Instead he opened them all the wider and dispatched a telegram designed to bring back the courage to a cornered customer thousands of miles away. It was not an outstanding stroke of business, but on this particular morning Mr. Topper relished it the more for that very reason.

Up to eleven o’clock Mr. Topper occupied himself with routine details, then he rose and informed the president that because of various considerations due to certain hitherto unknown maladies of both mind and body an extended vacation was highly essential. Should such an extension be withheld Mr. Topper’s physician would not be responsible for the consequences. Mr. Topper felt inclined to agree with the physician, a thing he seldom did. The extension was not withheld, although its cause was not fully believed. With an unnecessarily spiritless step Mr. Topper returned to his desk as if reluctant to leave it. Now that his vacation was assured he lingered over the parting. He had already set his affairs in order, but he diligently began to reset them now. He dallied with meaningless papers and dictated meaningless memoranda. There was a certain satisfaction in wasting the precious minutes in useless drudgery now that they were his to waste. In the back of his mind, however, danced colorful thoughts of golf stockings, caps and outing shoes, and other equipment necessary to his trip. Soon he would arise and purchase these things, going out into the street like a free man with a new consignment of golden days. For a moment he delayed, prolonging anticipation. In the middle of his fifth meaningless memo he was surprised by Miss Johnson’s unusual behavior. Instead of gazing devoutly at her notes as was her invariable custom, her eyes had become disconcertingly jerky. For a moment they would remain fixed on the point of the pencil, then, as if drawn against their will by invisible wires, they would painfully lift and stare with a fascinated gaze directly over Mr. Topper’s left shoulder. At the sound of Mr. Topper’s voice they would struggle for a moment before they were able to descend once more to the pad. Mr. Topper was at first puzzled, then hurt and at last exasperated. Finally he could stand it no longer.

“What the devil’s the matter, Miss Johnson?” he exclaimed.

“Look!” was all Miss Johnson said, pointing over his shoulder.

There was something in the tone of her voice that made Mr. Topper disinclined to look. In spite of himself he turned in his chair and followed the direction of her finger. He would have been more relieved had he seen a party of bank robbers quietly slaying the entire office force and looting the safe deposit vault. It would have seemed less personal, less fraught with complications. Yet what Mr. Topper saw would not have arrested the attention of the casual passer-by unless he had chanced to be especially interested in hat stands. This particular hat stand was situated in a corner near Mr. Topper’s desk. On it were Mr. Topper’s hat and cane, or rather, on it they should have been, but the terrible part of it was that they were not where they should have been. The cane had assumed an independent position and was standing unsupported on its own tip. The hat was rakishly poised above it about three feet in the air. As Mr. Topper turned, the hat and cane resumed their normal position as if afraid of being discovered out of place.

At this Miss Johnson gasped and once more uttered, “Look!”

Mr. Topper swung quickly back to his desk. He would look no more. Already he had seen too much.

“I wish, Miss Johnson,” he said in a reproving voice, “I do wish you’d stop telling me to look. I see nothing and my time is valuable. What was I saying?”

Training came to Miss Johnson’s aid. She dropped her eyes and studied her notes.

“You were saying,” she said, “that, owing to your enforced absence, steps should be …”

“Ah, yes,” interrupted Mr. Topper. “I was saying that.”

His voice trailed away and he began to tap on the edge of his desk with the tip of a pencil. Now why had he been saying that, he wondered. Was it possible that the Kerbys had followed him to town? Marion had said that George occasionally ranged abroad, but he could hardly believe that Kerby would follow him to the bank. Miss Johnson’s eyes were lifting again. Topper cleared his throat and hastily began to dictate.

“Owing to my enforced absence,” he repeated, “I feel that it is important for certain steps to be …”

Unable to stand Miss Johnson’s eyes he stopped dictating. What was happening behind him? At any moment the hat might thrust itself down over his eyes and make him appear ridiculous. The Kerbys were capable of such an outrage.

“Look now!” exclaimed Miss Johnson.

Mr. Topper turned quickly, and just in time to see his cane and hat retreating to the stand. He noticed with dread that this time they had ventured farther away from their appointed place.

“Oh,” murmured Miss Johnson in an expiring voice “Oh!” she repeated.

“Miss Johnson,” said Mr. Topper with fatherly severity, “you must be ill, otherwise you would not be trying to upset me with your wild exclamations.”

“Didn’t you see anything?” asked Miss Johnson, studying Mr. Topper’s face with troubled eyes. “Anything strange?”

“Nothing,” lied Mr. Topper. “Nothing strange at all. Now let’s try again.”

“Then I must be very sick,” replied Miss Johnson. “Sicker than I’ve ever been before.”

“It will pass off,” Mr. Topper assured her. “Pick up where I left off.”

“Certain steps should be taken,” began Miss Johnson. “You keep saying something about certain steps.”

At this point Miss Johnson capitulated and seized Mr. Topper’s hand. The hat stand was swaying from side to side and the cane was rattling against its post.

“I’m not as sick as that,” she said with conviction. “If you don’t see what I see you’re the one that’s sick.”

“All right, all right,” Mr. Topper called out, this time directly addressing the hat stand. “I’ll finish up at once. Don’t worry about that last memo, Miss Johnson. Go home and take a rest. Your nerves are upset. Stay home for a week or so. I won’t be needing you for some time.”

Mr. Topper got up briskly and swept some papers into a basket. The animated hat stand came to rest. Miss Johnson, her hands full of ribbons, was gazing at it with horror in her eyes.

“See, Miss Johnson,” said Mr. Topper, walking over to the stand. “See, it’s nothing after all. Only your nerves.”

But before he could reach for his hat and cane these articles eagerly sprang from their pegs and presented themselves to his grasp. He snatched them from the air and turned to Miss Johnson.

“Nothing at all,” he said with a forced smile. “It was purely your imagination.”

For a moment they looked into each other’s eyes. There was a prayer in Mr. Topper’s. No missionary ever struggled more fervently to implant belief. Miss Johnson was regarding the hat and cane suspiciously, and Mr. Topper realized he had failed.

“Nothing at all,” he repeated in a dead voice as he felt himself being gently pushed by some unseen force. “You can see for yourself, Miss Johnson. Go home and take a rest. And if I were in your place I wouldn’t speak with anyone. You might be misunderstood.”

This last remark was tossed over his shoulder, for by this time Mr. Topper was being propelled with increasing rapidity across the floor. As he left the bank he looked like a man leaning against a strong wind.

“Not so fast,” he muttered.

The doorman, thinking the remark intended for him, arrested the speed of the revolving doors.

“That’s a queer way for a body to walk,” he thought, peering after the slanting Topper. “Especially an officer at this time of day.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

A Smoky Lady in Step-Ins

Mr. Topper was in an unspeakable frame of mind. He shook himself free from the invisible grasp that had made a retreat of his departure, and fumed up the street, escape his one desire. And every time he passed a drug store a slight tugging at his sleeve informed him that he was not alone, that for him escape was impossible.

“Stop doing things to my sleeve,” he growled. “Stop pushing.”

“But I want you to buy me a soda,” came the whispered reply.

“After all you’ve done to me you ask me that?” exclaimed the outraged man, for the moment forgetting his fear of being caught talking to himself in the streets. “Fiddling with my hat and stick. Giving my secretary a nervous fit. Why didn’t you bawl and scream?”

“But you took such a long time in that horrid old place,” the voice pleaded. “And that ridiculous woman looked at you so familiarly. I wanted pull her ribbons off, but …”

“Let me understand this,” interrupted Mr. Topper, seeking refuge in a near-by doorway. “Am I no longer to dictate to my secretary? Do you object? By what right? I’ve never compromised you, although God knows you’ve ruined my reputation – you and your husband. Why don’t you torture him and leave me alone?”

“He’s left me,” the voice replied with just a hint of moisture. “He’s gone to sea for a change.”

“He needs one,” said Mr. Topper. “Haven’t you any friends?”

“None that I like as well as you. Please don’t go on any more. It would be funny to see tears dropping from no place in particular.”

The woman was actually hugging him in broad daylight. Mr. Topper swayed forward, then with a supreme effort regained both his balance and his composure.

“Don’t do that again, ever,” he commanded.

“Let’s be glad,” Marion pleaded. “I didn’t mean any harm. George was gone and I didn’t have anything to do so I just went down to the station to see the trains come in and then I saw you and I wanted to go along. It’s awfully lonely being a low-planed spirit. You don’t know.”

Now there had been very little wheedling practiced on Mr. Topper in the course of his married life. Mrs. Topper had arranged everything and Topper had followed the arrangements. On those rare occasions when he had balked Mrs. Topper had instantly assumed the rôle of a martyred woman and in pallid silence cherished her dyspepsia. It was a strange, fearful and fascinating sensation that Mr. Topper now experienced as Marion Kerby clung to his neck and asked him to buy her a soda. He forgot the humiliation of the office out of sheer sympathy for the poor, parched spirit who had been the cause of it.

“But hang it, Marion,” he said in a softer voice, “be reasonable. How can I buy you a soda?”

“You can pretend to be drinking it,” she replied eagerly, “and when you hold your glass aside to look at your newspaper I can sip through the straw. No one will notice it. Just hold your glass a little to one side and I’ll come close to you and sip through the straw – little, quiet sips. But you must only pretend to be drinking it. Don’t forget yourself.”

“I’d rather risk the chance of a scandal and have you materialize,” said Mr. Topper thoughtfully.

“All right,” replied Marion. “I’ll do that in a jiffy.”

“Not here!” Mr. Topper protested. “For once show some restraint. Can’t you go somewhere to materialize and then come back to me?”

“How about that store?” suggested Marion.

The store she referred to was a small notion shop which owed its existence to the fact that women, regardless of their means, must be clad in silk or near silk against the ever-present dangers of being run over, unexpectedly married or caught in a sudden gale. The shop seemed suitable to Topper for the business of materialization. He said as much and Marion Kerby departed, declaring that she would be right back in a minute. Mr. Topper waited ten before he became impatient, then he walked slowly past the shop and peered through the door. As he did so a hatless woman came bounding forth with stark terror gleaming in her eyes. She was speedily followed by a small boy, who in turn was closely pursued by a man whose features were working frantically. Before Mr. Topper could recover from his surprise three girls dashed from the store and joined their companions in flight, now huddled compactly at a safe distance from the shop. Mr. Topper felt like running, too, but curiosity overcame his fear. He approached the group and asked questions. One of the girls looked at him and began to cry.

“Mamma!” she gulped. “Mamma!”

He quickly transferred his gaze to the man.

“What’s happened in there?” asked Mr. Topper.

“Don’t go in, sir,” pleaded the man, for the first time in his life discouraging a prospective customer from entering his place of business. “For God’s sake, sir, stay here with us.”

Topper looked at the boy.

“Little boy,” he said, “tell me what frightened all these people.”

“I’m not frightened,” declared the boy, “but they all started to run and I just got ahead.”

“Yes, but why did they start to run?” continued Mr. Topper patiently.

“Because of her,” said the boy, pointing to the shop.

“Of whom?” demanded Topper.

“The smoky lady who was trying on step-ins and everything,” answered the boy.

At this point the woman who had been the first to seek comfort in flight found her tongue. A crowd had begun to gather and she addressed herself to the crowd.

“She was all smoky,” the woman announced. “And you could see right through her. How I first came to notice her was when I pulled back a curtain to show one of these girls some step-ins. There she was, as calm as life, trying on a pair of step-ins, a pair of our best step-ins, and she was all smoky and transparent so that only the step-ins seemed real. When she saw us she got scared and went bounding round the shop so that it looked like a pair of step-ins come to life and gone mad. I started to run …”

“And I made a grab for the step-ins,” interrupted the man, “but the smoky woman wouldn’t let go, so I just decided that, before any trouble started, I’d run out and see what had happened to Lil.”

“It was awful,” proclaimed one of the girls. “I’ll never forget those step-ins dancing round the store.”

“Our best step-ins,” said the woman.

“A good pair,” added the man.

“Perhaps they are not a total loss,” Mr. Topper suggested. “Why not go back and find out? I’ll buy the step-ins if this smoky woman hasn’t walked off with them.”

As attractive as the offer was to the proprietor he seemed reluctant to accept.

“Come on,” said Mr. Topper. “I’ll lead the way.”

“But, sir, you don’t understand,” the man protested earnestly. “Have you ever seen a transparent woman dancing about in a real pair of step-ins?”

“That depends on what you mean by transparent,” replied Mr. Topper judiciously. “Anyway it’s much better than seeing a real woman dancing about in a transparent pair of step-ins.”

At this remark the young lady who had been sobbing for mamma suddenly giggled and looked archly at Mr. Topper. The proprietor seemed unconvinced.

“No, it isn’t,” he said, with a shake of his head. “Now-a-days you can see that at most any good show, but not the other, thank God. It isn’t what I call natural entertainment – not for me at any rate.”

“And while you’re standing here talking,” Mr. Topper reminded him, “the smoky lady is probably trying on every blessed thing in your shop.”

“Well, I’m not going back to watch her,” the proprietor proclaimed to the crowd. “If any of you gents want to see a smoky woman trying on underwear you can step right in, but I don’t budge without a cop – two cops,” he added as an afterthought.

Mr. Topper felt a soft, flimsy article being thrust stealthily into his coat pocket. His hand flew to the spot and shoved the thing out of sight. A gentle pressure on the arm indicated that it was time to depart, and a policeman, pushing through the crowd, strengthened Mr. Topper in this belief. He permitted himself to be led away by his invisible guide. After several blocks of silent companionship he could no longer restrain his annoyance.

“Now what the devil do you mean by trying on a pair of those things?” he demanded.

“What a crude question,” Marion murmured.

“Your conduct has given me the privilege to ask it,” replied Mr. Topper.

“Cosmo,” she whispered, leaning heavily against him, “I just love nice things.”

“You should leave all that stuff behind you now that you’re dead,” he answered.

“Even spirits have to be modest,” said Marion. “And anyway they frightened me. I was getting along fine until that woman pulled back the curtain. I was pretty nearly completely materialized, but that made me so startled I couldn’t finish it.”

“That was fortunate to say the least,” replied Mr. Topper, “considering the condition you were in.”

Topper heard a low laugh.

“You’re vile all the way through,” said Marion Kerby. “Here’s a soda store. Come on in – chocolate with vanilla ice cream.”

Mr. Topper felt himself being pulled in the direction of the soda store. He resisted feebly, feeling that he had gone through enough for one day.

“Must you have that soda?” he asked.

“Oh, no,” Marion replied in a resigned voice. “I can do without it. I’m used to being miserable. One more disappointment will make no difference. Keep me hanging round your office all morning, then send me in to a place to be scared to death, and after that refuse to buy me a soda. Go on, I like harsh treatment. You remind me of my husband, the low creature.”

With the chattering courage of a man being placed in the electric chair, Mr. Topper walked into the soda store and seated himself at the counter.

“Vanilla soda with chocolate ice cream,” he muttered darkly in the direction of a white-clad individual.

“No! No!” whispered Marion excitedly. “You’ve got it all wrong. Tell him quick. It’s chocolate soda with vanilla ice cream.”

Mr. Topper could feel her fluttering on his lap.

“Be still,” he whispered, then smiling ingratiatingly at the clerk he added, “I’m afraid, old man, I got that wrong. I want it the other way ’round.”

The clerk looked long at Mr. Topper, then walked to the other end of the counter and engaged a colleague in a whispered conversation. From time to time they stopped talking to look back at Mr. Topper, whose anxiety was mounting with each look.

Marion Kerby in her eagerness was pinching Topper’s hand. He pulled his newspaper from his pocket and hid behind it.

“You and your sodas,” he growled. “Why can’t you keep quiet?”

“But you had it all wrong,” protested Marion. “Look out, here he comes now.”

When the attendant had placed the glass on the counter Mr. Topper idly reached for it with the air of one too deeply engrossed in the news of the day to be interested in a trivial beverage. Leisurely he placed the glass to his lips, then held it aside.

“The straws,” whispered Marion. “Must have straws.”

“My God,” murmured Mr. Topper. “Won’t you ever be satisfied?”

He procured two straws, plunged them viciously into the soda, then held the glass behind his paper. The liquid immediately began to descend in the glass. From the rapidity of its descent Mr. Topper decided that George Kerby had bought his wife very few sodas during her earthly existence.

“Now dig out the ice cream with the spoon,” she whispered. “Pretend to be eating it. I’ll nibble it off.”

“This is going to be pretty,” murmured Mr. Topper with as much sarcasm as can be packed into a murmur. “You’ll have to do better than nibble. You’ll fairly have to snap it off.”

The nibbling or snapping operation required the use of both of Mr. Topper’s hands and forced him to abandon the protection of his paper. With an earnest expression, which was perfectly sincere, he endeavored to give the impression of a man publicly lusting after ice cream. The spoon flew to his avid mouth, but, just before his lips concealed their prize, the ice cream mysteriously vanished. It must be said in favor of Marion Kerby that she met the demands of the occasion. Not once did she fail to claim her own. Not once was Mr. Topper allowed to sample that which he most abhorred. When the ice cream had run its course Mr. Topper resumed his paper and waited, with a knowledge bred of experience, for the dregs of the soda to be drawn. He had little time to wait. Hollow, expiring, gurgling sounds loudly proclaimed the welcome ending of the soda. With a sigh of relief Mr. Topper was about to return the hateful vessel to the counter when he met the eyes of the clerk peering at him over the top margin of the newspaper. They were cold, worldly eyes, yet curious, and they fixed themselves on Mr. Topper like two weary suns regarding a new-born star. A nervous muscular reaction contorted Mr. Topper’s mouth into a smile.

“Do that again,” the clerk said. “Do that trick again without me guessing it and I’ll give you this.”

He dangled some crumpled bills alluringly in Mr. Topper’s face.

“I can’t,” replied Mr. Topper. “It’s hard enough to drink one of your nauseating concoctions, much less two.”

“You didn’t drink the first one,” said the attendant. “What’s your game anyway? I was watching you all the time. Trying to be funny?”

“Not funny,” Mr. Topper answered, delicately slipping from his seat. “You’re wrong there. That was one of the most serious sodas in my life – one of the worst.”

“You’re one of those funny guys,” said the attendant menacingly. “Come back here and I’ll tell you exactly what you are.”

But Mr. Topper did not wait to be told. He hurried from the store and mingled with the crowd.

“It’s awful to be cut off from sodas,” breathed Marion Kerby.

“I have no sympathy to waste on you,” said Mr. Topper.

He was hungry, yet he dared not eat. If she had behaved so excitedly in the presence of a soda, what would she do at the sight of food. Mr. Topper shuddered. He was thinking of a plate of soup. No, it would never do. He would have to forego luncheon. This was an overwhelming decision. It left Mr. Topper shaken. Never had he missed a meal save when his adenoids had been surreptitiously removed many years before. Mr. Topper gazed up at the lean cascades of the Woolworth tower through the tragic eyes of a deflated stomach. There was no fortitude in him. He was the abject slave of a passion he longed but feared to indulge. All his friends were eating luncheon now. He wondered what they were having. Menus danced before his eyes. The “blue plate” of the day brought savory odors to his nose. Strangely enough it was in this dismal crisis that Marion Kerby came to his aid.

“Isn’t it time for your luncheon?” she suggested.

“Past time,” said Mr. Topper, “but how can I eat with you with me?”

“Food means nothing to me,” she replied. “I can take it or leave it as I choose, but you’re different. You must eat.”

“I feel that way about it myself,” admitted Mr. Topper. “For once I think you’re right, but, frankly, I’m afraid to enter a public place with you. My nerves can’t stand it. Too much has happened.”

“Come,” she said in a changed voice, taking him forcibly by the arm. “I’m going to see that you get your luncheon. Don’t bother at all about me. I’m different now. The city went to my head at first. I’ll admit it. Those step-ins and the ice cream soda got the best of me. I lost control of myself, but now you don’t have to worry. Just a cup of tea – nothing more.”

“That ends it,” declared Mr. Topper. “That’s enough. I don’t eat. I dare say you fully expect me to crouch under a table and hold a plate of tea while you make strangling noises.”

Marion Kerby laughed softly.

“I was only joking about the tea,” she said. “Honestly, now, I don’t really want it. That’s true. I should want it, but I don’t. There was only one person I ever knew, not counting myself, who couldn’t stand tea, and he was a fine but fanatical drunkard. Graze with the herd and I’ll keep quiet.”

So Mr. Topper had his luncheon. It was a tense luncheon, a suspicious, waiting sort of luncheon, one filled with false starts and empty alarms. In spite of everything it was a good luncheon and Marion Kerby behaved splendidly. Once, when Mr. Topper used the pepper too violently, a fit of sneezing came from the opposite chair. The waiter was momentarily startled, but immediately adjusted himself to the situation. He realized, as does everyone who knows anything at all about sneezing, that there are no two sneezes alike and that most anything can be expected of a sneezer. He regarded Mr. Topper with the commiseration of one whose sneezes were infrequent and well under control, and departed in stately search of pie à la mode. Nevertheless, he considered Mr. Topper as being not quite the usual customer. He had noticed certain little things. Nothing you could put your finger on, but still a trifle different. For instance, why had the tray containing bread risen to meet Mr. Topper’s outstretched hand? And why had the salt stand behaved so obligingly? How could one account for a menu tilted in space? And, if that was perfectly natural, why had Mr. Topper made such strange fluttering movements with his hands? Deep within himself the waiter sensed that all was not well with his table, but the clatter of plates, the demands of his occupation, and the deep-rooted instinct of all people to deny the existence of the unusual successfully maintained him in his poise of sharply chiseled indifference. The generous size of the tip he washed up in his obsequious hands completely restored his faith in the normal order of things. There had been nothing unusual. Mr. Topper was a man who desired to dine. The waiter hoped he would do so more frequently at his table. The waiter was one of those people whose tolerance increases with the size of the tip. For a ten-dollar bill he would have respectfully tidied up after a murder and made excuses for the toughness of the corpse.

Later that afternoon Mr. Topper was trying on a cap. He was a diffident man about such things, but on this occasion his heart was in his task. The brownish thing that was making his head ridiculous had vague, temporizing lines in it of a nervous blue, but to Mr. Topper the cap was lovely. To a man or to a woman he would have said harshly that the cap “would do,” but to himself he had to admit it was lovely. He admired it hugely. It was a good cap. Mr. Topper had no difficulty in convincing the salesman that it was a good cap. With suitable apologies the man agreed that it was a very good cap and that it suited Mr. Topper well. Mr. Topper found himself admiring the salesman. He knew his business, this man – one of the few salesmen with unimpeachable taste. The cap was practically Topper’s. All the salesman had to do was to snatch it from Mr. Topper’s vainglorious head and wrap it up. Mr. Topper was willing. He had never purchased such a cap in his life. With the eager timidity of a virgin he hoped to demolish the record of years. He was brazen about it, yet he was shy almost to the point of tenderness. The cap was in the salesman’s hands. Mr. Topper was reaching for money. The salesman’s free hand was politely waiting for the object of Mr. Topper’s reaching. Then something happened. A new and different cap appeared in the salesman’s outstretched hand. With the instinct of his calling he automatically began to sell the new cap. Then he stopped in confusion and looked helplessly at Mr. Topper, who was convulsively clutching a roll of bills. Mr. Topper refused to meet the salesman’s gaze. Instead he glared at the new cap. It was a terrible cap, an obscene, gloating, desperate cap. Its red checks displayed the brazen indifference of deep depravity. Mr. Topper was revolted.

“Take it away,” he said. “I don’t want it.”

At this remark the new cap shook threateningly in the salesman’s hand. He tried to give it to Mr. Topper, but was unsuccessful. Mr. Topper backed away.

“I don’t want it,” he repeated. “I don’t like that cap. Please take it away.”

The salesman was deeply moved.

“I’m not trying to sell it to you, sir,” he said in a low voice, “but somehow I can’t help it.”

He stood before Mr. Topper with a cap in either hand. One cap he held almost lovingly, the other he clung to in spite of himself, like a man with a live coal in a nest of dynamite. His lips trembled slightly. He tried to smile. He was mortally afraid that at any moment Mr. Topper would depart with a bad opinion of the store. He could never permit that to happen. With an effort he turned away, but before he had gone many yards he abruptly swung around and came back at a dog-trot. To Mr. Topper he gave the appearance of a man who was being held by the scruff of his neck and the seat of his trousers by someone intent on motivating him from the rear. He stopped suddenly in front of Mr. Topper and, in an attitude of supplication, offered him the red checked cap. Mr. Topper again refused it.

“I must apologize,” the man said rather breathlessly, “but I really think you had better take this cap.”

In spite of his irritation Mr. Topper regarded the salesman with quick sympathy.

“Why have you changed your mind?” he asked. “I’ve already told you that I hate that cap. It isn’t a nice cap. I don’t like it.”

The salesman was almost chattering. He shook himself like a dog and glanced quickly over his shoulder. Then he approached Mr. Topper.

“I haven’t changed my mind,” he whispered. “I’ve lost my mind. It isn’t the store. It’s me. I’m mad.”

Mr. Topper was beginning to feel extremely sorry for the salesman. He wanted to do what he could, but he refused to be bullied into buying a cap he utterly loathed, a cap that went against all his instincts.

“It’s too bad about your mind,” said Mr. Topper, “but I don’t want that cap. I won’t buy it. And if I do buy it I won’t wear it. I’m honest about that.”

“Listen,” whispered the salesman. “I’ll give you the cap if you’ll only take it away.”

“If you’re as anxious as all that to get rid of the cap,” Mr. Topper replied, “I buy them both. How much are they?”

“Practically nothing,” said the salesman, his face clearing. “I’ll wrap them up myself.”

He hurried away.

“But I won’t wear it,” said Mr. Topper, addressing space. “You won’t be able to force the thing on my head.”

“Here they are,” announced the salesman, returning with the package. “You’ve been very nice about it, I’m sure.”

As the elevator bearing Mr. Topper to the ground floor began its descent a low gasp was heard in the car.

“I can’t stand these things,” whispered Marion Kerby “They always take my breath.”

At each floor the gasp was repeated, whereat Mr. Topper cringed under the curious eye of the operator. Mr. Topper pretended to gasp in order to protect himself. He smiled sickly at the operator and said:

“Did it affect you that way at first? It always does me.”

The operator continued to look at him but made no answer. He was glad to see the last of Mr. Topper. He was afraid that the man was going to swoon in his car.

On the train that evening Mr. Topper tried to hide himself in his newspaper, but was unsuccessful. Marion Kerby insisted on turning back the pages and scanning the advertisements. At last Mr. Topper abandoned the newspaper and looked out of the window. Presently he became conscious of the fact that several passengers were regarding the vacant seat beside him with undisguised interest. The newspaper was slanted against the air as though it were being held by unseen hands. Mr. Topper seized the paper and thrust it into his pocket.

“Rotter!” whispered Marion Kerby.

“Fiend!” muttered Mr. Topper.

A heavy personage attempted to occupy the seat, but arose with a grunt of surprise. For a moment he regarded Mr. Topper bitterly, but that distraught gentleman was gazing at the landscape with the greedy eyes of a tourist.

At the end of the trip he hurried home. His day had been crammed with desperate events. There would be nothing for him at home save Scollops, but at present Mr. Topper preferred a sleepy cat to an active spirit. He yearned for repose.

“Goodbye,” said Marion Kerby as he was turning into the driveway. “I’ve had an awfully nice time and I want to thank you.”

“Why did you make me buy that cap?” demanded Mr. Topper.

“Because I knew it would look well on you,” she answered. “George had one once and everybody liked it.”

“Well, I don’t, and I won’t wear it,” said Mr. Topper. “Goodbye.”

Marion Kerby clung to his arm.

“Don’t be angry,” she pleaded. “I’ve got to go back now and it’s going to be lonely out there without even George to haggle with. Say goodbye nicely and call me Marion.”

Mr. Topper had a twinge of conscience. He was going away in the morning without even telling her about it. He was running away from her. Although he realized that he was in no way bound to Marion Kerby he nevertheless felt guilty in abandoning her, particularly in the absence of her irresponsible husband. However, if he confided in her everything would be ruined. She would be sure to come along. He knew he would never be able to drive her off. After all why should he not take her along? Then he remembered the events of the day and decided that there was every reason in the world for leaving her behind. He was going away for a rest and not a riot. With Marion Kerby with him rest would be out of the question.

“Well,” he said in a mollified voice, “it’s not going to be any too crisp for me at home, but I’ll look you up in a few days. We’ll take a ride together.”

“Goodbye,” she said, her voice sounding strangely thin and far away. “Don’t forget. I’ll be waiting for you.”

The house had lost none of its funereal atmosphere during Mr. Topper’s absence. Mrs. Topper was sitting in the shadows with her hands folded in her lap. She was the picture of resignation.

“Are you feeling better, my dear?” asked Mr. Topper.

“I haven’t been thinking about myself,” she replied. “There are other things on my mind.”

Mr. Topper discreetly refrained from asking her what they were. He sat down and read the paper until the maid announced dinner, then he followed his wife into the dining room, where the evening meal was consumed in silence. He felt like a convict being entertained by a member of a Christian Endeavor Society. Mrs. Topper made it a point to see that he was properly served. She seemed to derive a sort of mournful pleasure in watching him chew his food.

When they were once more in the sitting room Mr. Topper announced the fact that he was going away for a trip. It was a difficult announcement to make and Mrs. Topper was not helpful. She listened in silence until he was through, then she said without looking at him:

“I hope that for my sake you’ll try to keep out of jail.”

“It’s not a habit,” replied Mr. Topper. “It was an accident, an unfortunate misunderstanding.”

Mrs. Topper bent over her sewing and compressed her lips.

“I’ll never forget it to my dying day,” she said. “The shame and humiliation of it.”

“You could forget it if you wanted to,” answered Mr. Topper. “If you liked me instead of yourself you could forget a lot of things.”

Mrs. Topper regarded her husband with melancholy eyes.

“You ask me to forget that?” she asked.

“Come, Mary,” replied Mr. Topper in an earnest voice. “I don’t know what got into me. I was all wrong, but just the same …”

He stopped and, pulling the step-ins from his pocket, began to mop his face with them. They were orchid-colored step-ins heightened in attractiveness by crimson butterflies and lace insertion. They gave Mr. Topper a foppish appearance. As he stood before his wife with his face nonchalantly buried in the silken fabric Mr. Topper looked almost giddy. A new light came into Mrs. Topper’s eyes. It was the light of despair masking behind outraged modesty. At the height of his mopping Mr. Topper must have realized the situation, for he suddenly withdrew his face from its tender concealment and peered at Mrs. Topper over the step-ins. Mrs. Topper had risen. As she confronted her husband she was trembling slightly. He tried to speak, but she held up a restraining hand.

“I refuse to remain in the room and have you flaunt your infidelity in my face,” she said. “Don’t speak to me. Don’t try to explain. Everything is perfectly clear.”

“But I bought them for you,” gasped Mr. Topper. “They were to be a surprise.”

“They were a surprise,” replied Mrs. Topper, recoiling from the offending garment. “They were a shock.”

As she left the room Mr. Topper hurled the step-ins to the table and departed to the garage, where he remained the rest of the evening. Scollops curled up on the evidence of guilt and tried to forget the late unpleasantness in sleep. When Mr. Topper returned to the house the step-ins had disappeared from the table. Upstairs a tear-stained woman was clutching them in her hand. Gradually her sobbing quieted and she looked timidly at the step-ins. Perhaps after all he had bought them for her. But she never wore such things. Mr. Topper knew it. Why didn’t she wear such things? She was startled. Perhaps that was the reason. With a feeling of guilt she slipped on the step-ins and looked at herself in the mirror. She thought they were vulgar and pointedly immoral, but in her heart she gloated over them. After all they were quite nice if worn in a proper manner and for an equally proper purpose. Beauty for beauty’s sake. She would have to consider step-ins and other things. Absorbed in these thoughts, her eyes traveled up the mirror and encountered her face. After a moment’s scrutiny she turned away, her shoulders drooping. She felt foolish and defeated. Desolation filled her heart. As she lay on the bed in her startling attire she looked like a bedraggled doll which some worldly person had dressed in a moment of caprice and then abandoned for other pursuits.

Her outburst of grief expended, she sprang up and, tearing off the offending garment, trampled it under her feet. Then quite reasonably she picked up the step-ins, carefully folded them and put them away for safe keeping. After this she prepared herself for bed and switched off the light. Later, when her husband wearily sank down beside her, she pretended to be asleep.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Escape

Before the sun had set Mr. Topper had left a trail of dust across his native state and carried warfare deep into the heart of Connecticut. Like a floating mine in an ocean lane he endangered the safety and ruined the happiness of all creatures who came his way. His intentions were above reproach had he been able to execute them, but in this he failed lamentably. He was a traveling display of frightfulness, a menace to moving traffic. The curses of his fellow creatures followed him down the road. He had never before realized how vindictive, how utterly given to fury, automobilists were. Sarcasm, insults and jeers, all were flung at Mr. Topper, and all found their mark. He shrank within himself and placed his destiny in the hands of God. But long hours of sustained driving effected a gradual change in his spirits, and towards sunset it was Topper who was shouting bitter oaths at passing automobiles. Each oath increased his confidence and self-respect until at last he came to regard with malicious pleasure the approach of another car, epithets fairly boiling on his tongue.

“They’ve tried to ruin my day for me,” he thought. “I might as well get back at them now.”

When not engaged in roadside altercations, Mr. Topper’s thoughts strayed back to home. He was heavily depressed to find that he lacked the thrill of escape.

In the early morning, under the stimulus of the previous evening’s scene, he had left his wife, his bed and the step-ins to settle the dispute among themselves, and stolen forth to the garage, where the secretly prepared automobile was waiting to carry him to liberty. As he passed through the sitting room Scollops, abandoned to sleep, was lying in his chair. Lying is hardly the word. Molded would be more descriptive of the cat’s contact with the yielding upholstery. Given a sufficient length of time, Scollops might have grown to the chair, so much a part of her had she made it already.

It was not without pride that Topper regarded his cat. She had selected his chair for her slumbers. Possibly she sensed he was near. Topper’s unconscious craving to be loved made him overlook the fact that his was the most comfortable chair in the room and being such naturally recommended itself to Scollops’ practical mind. His knowledge of cats was hardly more extensive than his knowledge of women. In some respects Topper was more fortunate than he realized.

He had stooped over the sleeping creature and run his hand along her luxurious side. A short, surprised bubbling sound signified that although she appreciated the attention she could do nothing about it at present, complete rest being her most urgent need. However, he could stand there and continue to stroke her if it gave him any pleasure. She rather enjoyed it.

Topper was now thinking of Scollops as he had last seen her. He was wondering whether he should have brought her along. Perhaps she might be forced to suffer vicarious atonement for his sins. That would be too bad. After due consideration he decided that an automobile was as much as if not more than he could well manage, and that Scollops would have complicated things to the breaking point. Yet the fact remained that he was lonely. He almost wished he had taken Marion Kerby along for at least the first stage of the trip, but when he recalled the humiliation of the previous day he felt glad that he had not given in to this weakness – nay, madness.

A slight misunderstanding with an interurban trolley car forced him to concentrate on the business of keeping alive, and when next he had time to glance at his surroundings he found with relief that he was in a town which gave the appearance of being large enough to support life.

The hotel was even more than he had hoped for or expected. It was so self-consciously modern that it wore an injured air. A negro bell boy fairly snapped at his bags and bore them away in triumph down a colonnaded hall. Mr. Topper, hardly less triumphant at having arrived intact at some destination, no matter where, followed at a more leisurely pace. Then it was that the hotel, or at least that part of it assembled in the lobby, received a decided shock. As Mr. Topper approached the desk two books pursued him down the hall. The negro bell boy on seeing the phenomenon dropped the bags and began to look for wires or for any other rational explanation of this unprecedented occurrence. Unable to find a comforting solution, he held on to the desk and shivered while looking pathetically at the clerk. Unfortunately for the bell boy the clerk was too much preoccupied with his own feelings to share his moral courage with others. By the strained attention of the clerk’s features Mr. Topper could tell that something was wrong. And when the two books thrust themselves under Mr. Topper’s arm he knew that all was wrong. He snatched at the books and offered them to the clerk.

“They’re not mine,” announced Mr. Topper, lyingly. “You’d better take care of them.”

“I won’t touch them,” replied the clerk, withdrawing from the books.

“Well, you take them,” said Mr. Topper, turning to the bell boy. “Someone here must own them.”

The bell boy shivered himself out of reach.

“They followed you,” he muttered. “They didn’t follow me. I don’t read, boss. Please point those books the other way.”

“Damn it, then, I’ll throw them here,” exclaimed Topper, tossing the books into a chair. “Give me a room and bath.”

The clerk, still eying the books suspiciously, reached for a key and handed it to the reluctant bell boy.

“Take him away,” he said, briefly.

As Topper turned to follow his bags he cast a swift, pleading glance at the abandoned books.

“Don’t follow me,” he muttered. “This is serious.”

On his way to the elevator he could not resist the temptation to look back. He felt sure that he saw the books fluttering entreatingly in the chair. It was like leaving a dog behind, one that was not to be trusted. Only when the elevator door had closed with a satisfying clang of finality did Mr. Topper breathe a sigh of relief.

Once in his room he endeavored to regain his composure. Looking coldly at the bell boy, he said, “Bring me some ice water and the evening paper, a New York paper if they have them here.”

The sound of the closing door synchronized with a terrible scream. Mr. Topper, completely unnerved, rushed to the door and looked out. Two books were coming stealthily down the hall. The bell boy was flattened against the wall, and every time he screamed the books stopped as if undecided what course to pursue under the circumstances. And every time the books stopped the bell boy put his hands over his eyes and replenished his spent lungs with air for further efforts.

Mr. Topper was speechless. He wanted to tell the bell boy not to scream, but he could only speak in a whisper.

“Don’t scream, little bell boy,” he heard himself saying. “Don’t scream and I’ll give you a dollar.”

But money made no impression on the bell boy. Avarice had been cleansed from his soul. He was purified by fear. And as the books drew abreast of him and made a vicious dart in his direction he sank to the floor. For a moment the two volumes danced wickedly over the fallen negro, then with surprising swiftness flashed into Mr. Topper’s room and with an ill-tempered bang deposited themselves upon the table. Mr. Topper closed the door, but not before he had had time to catch a glimpse of the bell boy worming his way in the direction of the elevator.

Still unable adequately to express his feelings in words, Mr. Topper sank into a chair and gazed down on the street. The worst had happened. Nothing hereafter could ever be quite so bad. Had he remained at home with Scollops he would have been far better off. Even Mrs. Topper with her dyspepsia and her sighs would have been preferable to this. He should have stopped at the local madhouse instead of the hotel. What were they talking about downstairs? The long twilight was streaming out and the room was growing dark. Fearfully he let his eyes rest on the books. He cleared his throat suggestively.

“Well,” he said at last, “you might as well speak. I know you’re here. Why deny it?”

“But I haven’t said a word,” came a surprised voice from the direction of the wastepaper basket.

“Then don’t,” said Mr. Topper. “And try to pick out less disturbing places to settle in.”

There was no reply, but the window shade rolled down with a sudden snap and the electric lights as suddenly flashed into being. Mr. Topper started nervously.

“You’re always trying to be so helpful,” he remarked petulantly. “Where the devil are you?”

Like a blind man endeavoring to locate a voice he looked round the room, a baffled light in his eyes.

“For God’s sake say something,” he exclaimed. “What are you doing now? What are you going to do?”

“For the moment I’m roosting on the chandelier,” came Marion Kerby’s familiar voice, “but I’ll be down presently.”

“When are you going for good?”

“Why, I hadn’t intended to go,” she replied. “I’d decided we’d better take a good long rest and make an early start in the morning.”

“We,” he said. “How do you mean ‘we’? I won’t ever go to bed unless you clear out.”

“What’s the difference?” she asked. “What’s so strange about ‘we’?”

“You’re too depraved to understand,” replied Mr. Topper. “Merely because you claim you’re not legally bound to your husband don’t get the idea that you are to me.”

“But there are twin beds here,” she protested. “And it’s been such a long day.”

“If they were triplets it wouldn’t change my mind,” said Mr. Topper.

“Prude,” she jeered.

“Why?” asked Topper. “You seem to think that you should enjoy not only all the privileges of a spirit but also the few comforts that are left to mortal beings.”

“Why not?” she answered. “You forget I am quite low-planed.”

“Not for a moment,” said Mr. Topper. “You never give me the chance.”

Marion Kerby laughed.

“I choose the bed by the window,” she said. “You can sleep on the inside. You’ll be out of the draft.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you,” replied Mr. Topper, “but you don’t quite understand. I have a lot of things to do, none of which requires an invisible audience. I must shave and exercise and take my bath, and damn me if I’ll have you floating about this room while I’m doing these things.”

“I’ll hide my head in the pillow,” she suggested.

“But it wouldn’t be humanly possible for you to keep it there.”

“Don’t judge others by yourself.”

“I can’t in this case,” said Mr. Topper. “It isn’t fair. You’re invisible and I can’t see you, but I’m quite solid and you can see me.”

“Are you making advances?” asked Marion Kerby.

“Not at all!” exclaimed Mr. Topper.

“For if you are,” she continued, “I can very easily alter the situation. Just to show you what a good sport I am I’ll materialize.”

“Don’t do that,” said Mr. Topper. “Most emphatically not. Get the idea out of your head. There are laws against such things, unpleasant, illogical laws. Do you want me arrested again?”

As Marion Kerby began to laugh at Mr. Topper’s consternation there was a knock on the door and a bell boy entered, a new bell boy.

“Stop laughing,” commanded Mr. Topper.

“But I’m not, sir,” said the bell boy.

“Oh, I thought you were,” replied Mr. Topper. “It must have been my suit-case. It squeaks.”

A smothered sound descended from the chandelier. Both Topper and the bell boy glanced up.

“That pipe needs fixing,” remarked Mr. Topper.

“Anything else, sir?” said the boy, hastily placing the water and the newspaper on the table.

“I hope not,” Topper replied earnestly. “I certainly hope not.”

The bell boy withdrew without waiting for a tip. Mr. Topper locked the door.

“That sounds interesting,” said the chandelier. “I’m so excited.”

“Don’t be lewd,” Mr. Topper snapped. “Do you realize I haven’t dined?”

For an answer he felt two arms twining round his neck and two lips touching his cheeks. In spite of himself he was thrilled.

“Stop all this,” he said. “I dislike any show of emotion.”

A low laugh sounded in his ears and his hair began to move strangely on his head. Marion Kerby was playfully rumpling her victim.

“Please,” protested Mr. Topper. “This is most uncanny.”

“I’m just telling you good-night,” she replied. “You lied to me about going away, but I’ll forgive you. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t sleep in here if you begged me. You go down and have your dinner, get a good night’s sleep and I’ll be waiting for you in the morning.”

“Where?” he asked suspiciously.

“In the car,” she replied. “Good night.”

Topper suddenly felt himself alone. He could not tell why, but he knew that Marion Kerby was no longer in the room. The place seemed empty. And strangely enough he did not feel relieved. Nevertheless as he left the room he took the precaution to remark aloud:

“I’m not going to read. Leave the books alone.”

After a hearty dinner, taken outside the hotel, he returned to his room and prepared himself for bed. For some reason he trusted Marion Kerby. He felt sure that she would not take advantage of his solidity. Yet why had he not taken advantage of her offer to materialize? Topper was not accustomed to sleeping alone. It would have been jolly to have had a companion. A real one. With a backward thought of Scollops and a forward thought of the morrow he switched off the lights and settled into bed. Mrs. Topper stalked his dreams. She was standing at a crossroads gloomily directing traffic, and every time he attempted to go her yellow hand held back his car.

It was after one of these irritating dreams that he awoke to hear regular breathing coming from the bed at his side. He was shocked beyond words. What an outrageous thing to do after her promise. He thrust his hand out in the darkness and shook the bed.

“Wake up,” he whispered piercingly. “Wake up. You can’t stay in here.”

“Oh, let me alone,” came the sleepy rejoinder. “Don’t bother me. I’ve had to stand your driving all day long.”

“Don’t argue,” whispered Mr. Topper. “Get up at once and go away. Sleep in the garage.”

“Sleep there yourself.”

“But, Marion,” continued Topper, trying another tack. “This isn’t right. Your husband is a friend of mine.”

“Well, I slept with him for years.”

“How shameless.”

“Not at all. One would think I was trying to seduce you.”

“I know you’re not, but you’re making a nervous wreck out of me. I value your husband’s friendship.”

Marion Kerby laughed mirthlessly.

“It wouldn’t be worth a cent if he saw us now,” she said.

“When’s he due back?” asked Mr. Topper, after a moment’s thought.

“You can’t tell,” she replied. “He might drop in at any minute.”

This information contributed little to Mr. Topper’s happiness. He looked morosely out into the darkness.

“I could never explain,” he remarked as if to himself.

“You wouldn’t have time,” said Marion.

“Then why not be sensible and go away?”

“Because I’m very comfortable where I am, thank you.”

“Oh, dear,” he said to the darkness. “I’d rather sleep in the bathtub.”

“Go on and sleep in the bathtub. Turn on the water and pull it up over your ears.”

Mr. Topper made no answer, but sat hunched up in his bed. Suddenly he jumped. Marion Kerby was yawning in his ear.

“Aw, give us a kiss,” she said, “and let’s get some sleep.”

“This is downright ghastly,” he muttered. “Haven’t you any morals at all?”

“Hardly any.”

“Well, I have a few left. Try to remember that.”

He sank back into the bed and gathered the coverings tightly about him. Several minutes of silence passed as he listened to Marion Kerby’s regular breathing.

“Won’t you please go away?” he said at last.

“If you don’t stop waking me up,” she replied irritably, “I’ll start screaming and get in the whole hotel.”

Before this threat Mr. Topper wilted. He buried his head in the pillow and remained silent. His desperate desire to be elsewhere drove him into oblivion, but this time Mrs. Topper did not disturb his dreams. Instead, he was in his pajamas and Marion Kerby was chasing him through the corridors of the hotel. All the doors were open and people were crowding in them. As he sped down innumerable miles of carpet, grinning faces greeted him on either side and ironical cheers of encouragement followed his headlong flight. And the most terrible thing of all was that his pajamas were threatening to part.

“If I trip now,” he thought to himself, “I’ll be a marked man for life.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Singing Shower-Bath

Like a spent runner breasting the tape with his last stride Topper awoke in the morning. By languid stages he rolled himself to the floor, where his feet unconsciously fumbled the carpet for their slippers. As he stood in the middle of the room tentatively fingering his disordered hair, he allowed his eyes to dwell on the other bed. For some moments he regarded this object with scant interest, then gradually his sluggish faculties assimilated the fact that what he beheld gave every appearance of having been occupied. The coverings of the bed presented a scene of opulent disorder. Once Mr. Topper fully appreciated the significance of this discovery it was but a matter of a moment for him to act on it. With far greater speed and decision than he had displayed in quitting his own bed the dismayed man now returned to it. There, huddled in the coverings, he considered his desperate plight, his eyes bleakly searching the room for some source of comfort.

“Marion,” he called at last, his voice softly pleading with space. “Marion, I must get up now. Do be a good girl and run along.”

As if in answer to his words the shower began merrily to prattle in the bathroom. To Mr. Topper’s shrinking ears it sounded like a deluge. And out of the rush of water a slight song came winging through the door. The words and music belonged to Marion Kerby. Topper’s fingers nervously plucked at the sheets as he listened to the song:

“I once was a lady as you may divine,

Though the fact it is hard for to see.

Rare beauty and riches and romance were mine.

Before I ran into a tree.

My husband he did it. The devil would drive,

The high-flying, low-lying soak.

And that is the reason I’m no more alive,

For he ran me smack into an oak.”

Mr. Topper shuddered at the word “smack” and sprang from the bed. It was all too horrible. How could she sing about the accident? And such a song. “Smack into an oak” – a ghastly picture. Casting his robe round him, he walked with dignity to the door of the bathroom, upon which he knocked vigorously.

“Come out of there,” he commanded, transferring his attention to the knob. “Stop that wailing noise. You’re splashing water all over everything.”

“You just leave me alone now,” came the reply with unexpected heat. “I’m tired of your airs and graces. Only wait until you take a shower. I’ll raise hell with you then.”

Topper regarded the door with a mixture of fear and reproach. What a creature of fury she was. And he had only said a word. The possibilities of her retaliations made him thoughtful. There was no telling what she might do. Then once more the indignity of the situation overtopped his better judgment. He returned to the combat.

“I’d very much like to know,” he demanded, “why you persist in considering this situation as normal when obviously there’s nothing normal about it. Answer me that. What right have you to become so threatening and furious? You’re haunting me. I’m not haunting you. This is my vacation. Can’t you get that through your head?”

“Nonsense,” came from the shower. “Ladies must bathe.”

“But, Marion, you’re not a lady,” Mr. Topper protested. “Not any longer. Once you might have been, although I have good reason to doubt it. You’re only a spirit now and you’re supposed to have taken your last bath. If you overlooked your opportunities when you had them why monopolize mine now?”

“What low insinuations,” the shower retorted. “Just wait till I get you in here.”

“You’ll never get me in there,” Mr. Topper answered. “Never!”

“But it’s such a lovely shower.”

“Then hurry up and come out of it. I’ve lots of things to do.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking,” came insinuatingly from the shower. “You see I materialized just for the occasion, but if you insist …”

“I don’t,” Mr. Topper interrupted hastily. “Only please dematerialize and go away.”

“Then where are my step-ins?”

“Good God, what a question to ask! I know nothing about your step-ins.”

“You do so. We stole them in New York.”

“Oh,” he replied, his face clearing, “I gave them to my wife.”

The shower was seized with convulsions.

“She’d look like a staggering sunset in those step-ins,” it gasped moistly.

“Stop saying things about my wife,” Mr. Topper replied, shaking the door knob.

“Not unless you try to be more pleasant.”

“How about yourself? Will you try to keep within reason?”

“Yes,” she replied. “I’ll try. I’ll do my best.”

“And you’ll respect my privacy hereafter and get me into no more scrapes?”

“Absolutely, my little chastling.”

Mr. Topper thought quickly. He realized the futility of continuing hostilities. Marion Kerby had every advantage in her favor, and she would use it without honor. Perhaps after all it would be wiser to call a truce with this untamed spirit.

“All right,” he said. “I’m game. From now on we’ll try to enjoy ourselves. This sort of thing is spoiling my trip. What do you say to a truce?”

“I say yes,” she heartily agreed.

The flood suddenly subsided and the door flew open. Topper stepped back, but not in time to save himself from the embrace of two fresh though invisible arms.

“Behold,” said a voice in his ear, “your instruments of torture have been laid out by loving hands. Come in and see what I’ve done.”

“That’s all very nice,” replied Mr. Topper. “And I appreciate your thought, but don’t go too far. I know all about shower baths. I will join you later.”

“Then hurry like everything,” she urged as she released him. “Let’s prepare for fresh adventures now that we’re friends again.”

“No more fresh adventures,” admonished Topper, thrusting his head through the partly opened door. “Leave fresh adventures out of it. The few I’ve had with you will never stale.”

Topper was one who dwelt lovingly over his toilet. In his blood there was something of the Roman emperor. He gloried in steam and tiles. He was never happier than when allowed to occupy his bathroom unmolested, an occasion which occurred only too rarely in his own household. He made the most of his new-found freedom and soaked himself to his heart’s content. When at last he emerged glowing from the sweating walls he was both surprised and delighted to find breakfast already awaiting him. It was appetizingly arranged on a table, from which a fork was busily engaged in conveying scrambled eggs to nowhere. To Mr. Topper it was a painful sight. As the fork rose from the plate and daintily poised itself for the thrust he watched with fascinated eyes the amazing disappearance of its burden. Marion Kerby’s voice interrupted his contemplation.

“Sit down,” she said briskly. “Everything is getting cold. I couldn’t wait.”

The fork made a quick jab in his direction.

“Don’t apologize,” he replied, sliding into a chair. “I’ll sit down, but before I begin to eat answer me one question. How is it that you can put something into nothing and make it disappear?”

“It’s a gift,” she explained. “I just gulp it down into the fourth dimension and there it is changed into so much extra ectoplasm.”

Mr. Topper tried to smile, but he felt that he was rapidly losing his appetite.

“It’s all clear,” he said, “but the gulping. Do you have to gulp when you eat?”

“Don’t be insulting,” she replied, with the fork poised in midair. “It’s merely that I’m ravenous after the shower. Absolutely starved. I don’t get a chance to eat very often.”

“Then don’t let me stand in your way now,” Mr. Topper urged gallantly. “Go right ahead and gulp. I’m a trifle greedy myself.”

For several minutes no sounds disturbed the tranquillity of the room save those occasioned by eating. Presently, however, Mr. Topper, who had been glancing at his companion with increasing alarm, was forced to speak.

“You’ll pardon me,” he said, “if I seem to turn away when you gulp your coffee. I can’t quite get used to the sight and it gives me the strangest feeling. Every time you tilt your cup I expect to see the coffee splash all over the table.”

“Oh, you’ll get used to that in time,” she answered encouragingly.

“I’m no longer in rompers,” he remarked.

“But I never miss,” she assured him.

“That’s just it,” he replied. “It would seem more natural if you did.”

In the middle of his next mouthful a new fear interrupted his activities.

“How,” he demanded, swallowing quickly, “how did you manage to bring this breakfast into being?”

“I telephoned for it,” she answered.

Mr. Topper started from his chair.

“My God!” he cried. “They’ll think I had a woman in my room all night.”

“Sit down,” she commanded, “and don’t be so jumpy or I will spill my coffee. I imitated your voice perfectly. In fact, I was quite ladylike.”

As Mr. Topper resumed his chair Marion Kerby began to laugh.

“Why that?” he asked.

“Because I made one mistake,” she answered. “I told the boy to set the tray down outside the door, but when I went to get it he was still there. Well, naturally you can picture to yourself how mystified he was when he saw the tray slide in, as it were, by itself.”

“Only too vividly,” said Mr. Topper.

“He did look so upset,” she added.

“Don’t dwell on it,” pleaded Mr. Topper. “I’ve seen too much tragedy as it is. Was it the first boy?”

“It was.”

“Then you have probably killed him.”

He poured another cup of coffee and drank deeply.

“If not you have driven him mad,” he concluded. “Completely unhinged his mind.”

He rose wearily from the table and prepared to depart. Marion Kerby made herself helpful. Combs and brushes, shirts and shaving things moved mysteriously across the room and arranged themselves in the suit-case. Mr. Topper, observing this, felt surprised that he was no longer alarmed. He was becoming accustomed to the situation. Placing the books securely in one of the bags, he strapped his luggage and locked it.

“Remember,” he said, “I trust you. No monkeyshines, no helpfulness. If I’m not arrested I’ll meet you in the car. Wait for me there.”

“I won’t do a thing,” she promised. “Our first night was delightful.”

“Such remarks are better left unsaid,” he replied as he closed the door.

Marion Kerby was as good as her word. She allowed him to leave the hotel without further complications. In spite of this Mr. Topper was hardly regarded with warmth by the personnel of the establishment. The bell boys seemed inclined to avoid him, and had he desired to take advantage of his sinister reputation it is highly possible the management would have accepted his absence in lieu of payment. The leave-taking was characterized by a spirit of mutual relief. As no one offered to take his bags he carried them himself and was well satisfied with the arrangement. Marion Kerby was waiting for him in the car.

“You know,” she said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to take me shopping. If I’m to go along with you I’ll need a few things.”

Mr. Topper protested strongly, and it was only after the threat of strange and fearful embarrassments swiftly to follow his refusal that he finally agreed to stop his car in front of the lavishly littered windows of a department store. Here at the girl’s dictation he wrote out a list of purchases.

“Not that,” he objected after the mention of a certain article.

“Absolutely,” she insisted. “You gave my step-ins to your wife. Now you must buy me step-ins. I revel in them.”

“Well, you won’t revel with me,” he said as he mopped his face and made for the store.

Marion Kerby kept close to his elbow and nudged him whenever she had decided on a purchase. In a faint voice Mr. Topper asked for the various articles and stood perspiring until his invisible companion had made her selection. The saleswomen eyed him suspiciously, but he refused to meet their eyes. Had it not been for a disturbing disposition on Marion Kerby’s part to possess herself unlawfully of certain small articles by slipping them into his pockets, Mr. Topper would have found nothing radically wrong with her conduct. Whenever he endeavored to replace the things, she pinched his arm so viciously that he was forced to abandon his attempts to remain an honest man. After innumerable purchases he consulted the list, then mutteringly addressed his arm.

“We’ve bought all the things,” he said. “Let’s get out.”

“All right,” she whispered. “I’ll go first.”

As she did so she succeeded in attaching herself to a red cape and sport hat draped on a near-by model. The model swayed perilously as it was being bereft of its attire. Mr. Topper stepped back and regarded the scene with despairing eyes. Then he looked about for another exit, but could find none. The model, looking rather summery, settled back to rest, and the hat and cape proceeded jauntily down the aisle. At first no one save Mr. Topper noticed the unusual spectacle, but as the hat and cape continued on their triumphal progress the early morning shoppers began to fall back until finally the passage was lined with mute, inquiring faces.

Mr. Topper, vividly recalling his dream of the previous night, refused to follow the retreating garments. He mingled with the crowd and pretended to look surprised. The effect was that of a dangerously ill man.

“I would have bought the damn things,” he kept thinking. “Why didn’t she give me the chance?”

Finally, a floorwalker caught sight of the animated hat and cape. Perhaps he did not fully understand the situation, but he did seem to appreciate the fact that high-class merchandize was rapidly departing from the store in a new and altogether unauthorized manner Whether he was an intrepid man or an extremely dull one can never be established. Perhaps he was both as so often is the case. The fact remains that this particular floorwalker uttered a cry of protest and darted in pursuit of the hat and cape. At the sound of his voice these articles stopped and the hat peered back inquiringly over the shoulder of the cape. It was a bizarre effect. A woman screamed and fainted, her parcels rolling over the floor. The hat and cape as if startled bounded down the aisle and, with a final flourish of red, disappeared through the door. But the floorwalker followed no farther. He had completely changed his mind. All resolution had departed from his body. The poised, almost near-sighted expression of the hat as it had looked back over the shoulder of the cape had overcome his sense of duty. He recalled the awful galloping motion of the runaway articles and pressed his hands to his eyes. Before he would involve himself any further in this strange business every stitch of clothing in the establishment could march away in ghastly single file.

For a few seconds after the disappearance of the hat and cape a solemn silence settled over all beholders, then this was shattered by the babble of many voices. Mr. Topper, suddenly realizing that his pockets were bulging with stolen goods and that his arms were filled with bundles, took advantage of the confusion and hurried to his automobile, driving off at full speed. He thought he heard voices, but he refused to look back.

“I would have bought those things,” he muttered. “Why didn’t you ask me?”

“But you had bought so many things already,” Marion Kerby’s voice replied. “I didn’t want to put you to so much expense … and they were so attractive. I’ve always wanted something red.”

“I’d rather be paupered than paralyzed,” he retorted, eyeing the road ahead for some luckless automobilist to assault.

A promising candidate came in sight, but at the same moment a red cape swam before his eyes and out of the mist he heard Marion Kerby saying:

“Look at it, old dear. Wasn’t it worth the trouble?”

“Put that thing away,” he shouted. “I can’t see to drive. You’ll have us arrested and killed both.”

The cape fluttered dejectedly to the floor of the car.

“From the way you fling it about,” he grumbled, “you’d think I’d been born in a bull ring.”

The cape quivered timidly.

“Stop doing that!” he exclaimed. “It makes me nervous.”

Several miles of silence ensued, then Mr. Topper remarked moodily, “I wish I had.”

“What?” asked Marion Kerby, unable to restrain her curiosity.

“Been born in a bull ring,” he flung back. “I might never have lived to see this day.”

At this the cape rose from the floor and sat down by Mr. Topper. Its shoulders were shaking gleefully. He regarded the garment with a jaundiced eye.

“Your sense of humor,” he remarked, “would do justice to a hangman.”

At this moment an automobile flashed by and Mr. Topper automatically transferred his insults to its driver, but Marion Kerby paid no attention to his mood. She was happily counting the bundles and searching through his pockets with nimble fingers.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Such a Restful Place!

Mid-afternoon on a back country road. Shadows from close-pressing trees cast scrolls across the dust. An automobile snakes gracefully past a farm wagon and disappears round a bend in the road. With a disturbed expression in his eyes, the driver of the wagon gazes after the vanished automobile. Presently he sighs deeply, and gathering up the reins in a preoccupied manner urges his team onward. Little profit, he decides, in idle speculation. What he has just seen he has not seen. That was the only satisfactory way out of it. In spite of this philosophic conclusion the man knew in his heart that the driving seat of the automobile had been unoccupied, and that the machine had performed a difficult passing apparently unaided by any human guidance. He never spoke of the incident to any of his friends. The mere thought of it gave him a helpless feeling. But the memory lay buried in his heart and to his dying day it remained a mystifying and inexplicable fact, but nevertheless a fact.

A few miles down the road the automobile had halted in a clearing. From the automobile emerged a red cape and hat accompanied by several bundles. This singular group, after a moment’s hesitation, disappeared into the woods. Presently from the automobile drifted a blue cloud of smoke. The smoke had in turn drifted from Mr. Topper. He was smoking one of his favorite cigars and feeling quite set up about it. In spite of her momentary weakness in the department store, Marion Kerby had succeeded in restoring him to a high state of good humor. So much so, in fact, that he had permitted her to drive the car. It had been a secret relief to him. He had sat and rested his nerves.

“I know every road in the state,” she had said. “Let’s get off the beaten track.”

“By all means,” he had answered. “As far off as possible.”

Now Mr. Topper sat smoking and comfortably considering life. He was far off the beaten track and soothed by a feeling of security. After all, he mused, Marion Kerby was not so hopeless as at times he had considered her to be. Unscrupulous she was, to be sure, and unreliable to a fault, but just the same she was an amusing companion. What experiences he had been through since he had first met her. What mad, unbelievable adventures. And he, the staid Topper, had played a part in them. Almost too prominent a part, he thought, as he leaned back with a smile and fondly eyed his cigar. Then, as if from the sting of a wasp, he straightened up. Hadn’t she told him the previous night that her husband might return at any moment? It was an alarming thought. Topper knew he was blameless, but would George Kerby take a similar view of the situation? Marion had deliberately wished herself on an upright man. Any reasonable person would quickly understand that. However, George Kerby was not a reasonable person. Anything but that. Charming and generous he might be, but certainly not reasonable. Topper moved uneasily and glanced at the woods.

“Marion,” he called in a subdued voice.

“Presently,” came the cheerful reply. “Just a minute now.”

It was slightly more than a minute before the hat and cape came out of the woods, but Mr. Topper felt well repaid for waiting. The looted garments were now splendidly filled by a sprightly young woman whose disturbing eyes impertinently mocked at Topper from beneath the brim of an exceedingly smart red hat. Mr. Topper, observing her with approval, had to admit that she had stolen with discrimination.

“You look great,” he said with eloquent inadequacy.

“Do you think so?” she asked. “I’m just as pretty all over. Want to see? Everything’s so new.”

“Don’t,” exclaimed Mr. Topper. “You’re always trying to upset me.”

“Very well,” she replied, getting into the car, “but just the same I am. I’m very pleased with me.”

“Then don’t be childish.”

“I’d like to be,” she sighed. “It was so lovely there in the woods.”

“And you were the loveliest thing in them,” Mr. Topper replied, in spite of himself.

For an answer she violently embraced him, smiting his cheek with a kiss. Topper, highly indignant, managed to free himself.

“Every time I say a kind word to you,” he complained, “you practically assault me.”

“But I receive so few kind words,” she explained. “And I’m terribly impulsive.”

“Then try to appreciate my position,” admonished Mr. Topper, “and try to respect it. And while we are on the subject, when do you expect your husband back? Last night you said …”

“Oh, that was just to frighten you,” she interrupted. “George won’t be back for months, and even if he did return he’d never find us where we’re going.”

“Where’s that?” asked Topper with interest.

“I’ll show you presently.”

“Not presently, but instantly,” he urged. “Let’s go there without delay. I long for peace and quiet.”

Marion Kerby took the wheel and, after several hours of what seemed to Mr. Topper to be exceedingly obscure driving, they paused on the crest of a high hill before taking the dip into the valley below. Far across the intervening space, many green leagues away, Topper saw the setting sun sending its streams of colors across a field of deepening blue. The clouds seemed like castles with ramparts edged with gold. There was turmoil in the sky. Cohorts of silver and scarlet charged down the west and assaulted the castle clouds. And in the vast confusion of the sunset Mr. Topper saw, low to the horizon, dim lights drifting behind the trees. Both Topper and his companion watched this kaleidoscopic overthrow of nature with deep, thoughtful eyes, a little touched with the melancholy appreciation of those who look too long upon the sun at its setting. Topper moved a cramped leg and looked at the girl beside him.

“It’s quite good,” he remarked diffidently. “What do you think?”

“Don’t ask me what I think,” she replied. Then with a shrug of her shoulders, “I find the damn thing garish.”

“It struck me, too, as being a trifle overdone.”

She threw him a quick smile and pressed his hand.

“Remember the last one we saw together?”

Topper made no reply, but looked unhappily at his shoes. He had a feeling inside of being quite lost. He attributed it to hunger, but strangely enough he was wishing that for once in his life he had fallen desperately and forgetfully in love. It was like trying to trace a vague perfume to its source. Once in the lobby of a hotel a woman had passed Mr. Topper’s chair. After she had gone there remained behind a subtle, disturbing fragrance. Mr. Topper had failed to notice the woman, but he had become keenly aware of the perfume lingering in the air. It was floating round him now. Why had he not risen and followed the woman instead of sitting troubled by the faint breath of romance? Why had he always lost himself in the evening paper instead of looking over its edge for possible adventures? Had Mrs. Topper anything to do with it? Perhaps. He remembered that on this occasion he had been patiently waiting for her. Romance? No go, there. She had arrived with voluble dyspepsia and a secret craving for food. In propitiating the one and appeasing the other, the desire for romance and adventure had collapsed in Mr. Topper’s heart. Instead of following a haunting fragrance he had followed his wife through the tube, while listening to the trials of an unsuccessful shopping day.

With a start he came back to his surroundings and glanced down at the small brown hand resting lightly on his rather fleshy one. At his glance the hand was quickly withdrawn and Topper was surprised to see two spots of pink appear on Marion Kerby’s cheeks. He had not believed it possible. Even now he was suspicious. She was probably plotting some crime.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said.

“Like what?” Topper asked.

“Like a thwarted pup,” she answered. “A pup bereft of milk. I never could stand hungry eyes.”

“Are mine hungry?”

“Starved.”

“Well, so am I. It’s been a full day, but we’ve succeeded in remaining rather empty. When and where do we eat?”

“Do you see that lake down there?” she asked, pointing to the valley.

“I do now,” he replied, “but I hadn’t noticed it before. It looks so lost among the trees.”

“That’s just what it is,” she answered. “Years ago that little lake strayed away from its mother, and ever since then these hills have been nursing it here in secret. And every year the mother lake sends the streams and rivers in search of her lost lakelet, but these hills, which are inclined to be barren, consider the foundling as theirs and jealously keep it locked away in the valley.”

“Well,” remarked Mr. Topper, after a short pause, “now that you’ve about rung the change on that theme, let’s go down and take a look at this lost lake of yours. Perhaps there’s some food to be found.”

“No doubt there is, you prosaic beast,” the girl replied as she started the machine. “There used to be a store at one end.”

As the car descended the winding way the road grew deeper in shadows, and when they reached the border of the lake a dim film of daylight still lingered over its still surface as if reluctant to leave this quiet spot.

To Mr. Topper the lake seemed truly lost. And everything about the place partook of the same atmosphere. On its shores he could distinguish only a few cottages and even these had an abandoned look about them. He felt that they must have crept away from some populous summer colony and hidden themselves among the trees to rest. About halfway up the opposite hill a large stone house cut a breach in the trees. A few lights twinkled in the upper windows, these golden specks of life serving only to intensify the solitude of the scene. For the first time in his life Mr. Topper felt really secure from the world and all its works. In such a place as this Marion Kerby could do her worst without disturbing his peace of mind. It occurred to Mr. Topper that it would be a delightful sensation to strip himself naked and go running through the trees, to feel the night on his body and to meet the earth like a free, unabashed creature of the earth. This was a radical thought for Mr. Topper, and happily, some may feel, a passing one. It left him slightly sobered.

“Have you ever been here before?” he asked, sensing the precarious condition of his mind.

“Didn’t I just tell you?” she answered. “I’ve been here lots of times. I used to come here to hide from George when he got on my nerves.”

“God grant that we may be as successful this time,” Mr. Topper breathed with unfeigned sincerity.

“Don’t worry your head about him,” she replied carelessly. “He’s probably sound asleep in some low café at this very minute. We’ll drive down to the other end in search of food and shelter.”

“Is there some sort of an inn about?”

“No, but the cottages look deserted.”

Mr. Topper did not entertain with enthusiasm the prospect of breaking into a deserted cottage, but as the only other alternative lay in sleeping in the automobile he held his peace.

At the end of the lake they found a small store from which they purchased provisions of a compressed nature. By the time they had completed their transactions under the suspicious eye of the storekeeper daylight had faded from the face of the lake. A world of stars looked down on them and showered the dark water with a spray of golden coins, which danced and sparkled whenever a breeze moved from the shore.

“We’ll have to park the car on this side,” Marion Kerby said in a low voice. “The road ends here. We can walk round to the cottages by the path.”

They arranged the automobile for the night and Mr. Topper, taking a suit-case in either hand, followed his guide along a root-filled path. From time to time he tripped and cursed bitterly, but Marion Kerby urged him on to greater efforts with derisive words of encouragement. After passing two cottages steeped in shadows, she selected the third and more imposing one. Leaving Topper perspiring on the veranda with his luggage, she disappeared in the darkness. After what seemed to him an eternity of time he was startled to hear the door opening stealthily behind him.

“It’s all jake,” Marion whispered. “I found a reasonable window. Bring in the bags. This is a plush abode.”

“It may be plush to you,” he grumbled, stumbling in with the bags, “but to me it’s far from homelike. We don’t even know the owners.”

“Would you like to meet them?” she asked from the darkness.

“Not at this minute,” he admitted, dropping the bags to the floor. “Light up and let’s see where we are.”

With the lighting of a candle the house sprang into terrifying reality to Mr. Topper. Every corner contained a shadow and every shadow contained a possible danger. But Marion Kerby was delighted. The house, after a swift investigation, proved to be in a fair state of order. There were beds and they were ready to receive occupants. Other equipment was present. Most gratifying of all there was an oil stove all ready to fulfill its destiny. These discoveries which, to Marion Kerby, were occasions for congratulation were, to Mr. Topper, sources of dismay. As Marion flitted cheerfully round the place he edged towards the door.

“Stop chirping like that!” he exclaimed at last. “It’s all clear to me. The owners have just gone out. They’ll be back at any moment. Let’s go.”

“You’d make a dangerous detective,” she answered. “Doesn’t your nose tell you that this place hasn’t been open since last summer? Look at this glass. It’s dusty. And the table. I could write your name on it.”

“Don’t,” said Mr. Topper. “Write yours. I require no publicity.”

“Come back here then and sit down,” she replied. “I’m going to air out the beds in our room.”

Mr. Topper looked at her in blank astonishment.

“Do you mean to tell me,” he finally managed to get out, “that in spite of all the beds in this house you’re so depraved as to insist on sleeping with me?”

“I just thought it would be more fun.”

“Fun,” he repeated. “What has that to do with it? It might be fun to live in a harem, but right-thinking men don’t do it. Fun fills the divorce courts and digs untimely graves. Anyway, under the circumstances, I don’t feel funny.”

“Why don’t you get up on the table and preach down at me?” she jeered. “Bring me back to the fold. Point the way to salvation.”

“You should know more about the hereafter than I do,” he remarked moodily.

She came over to him and placed her hands on his shoulders. He stepped back and tried to avoid her eyes.

“Now don’t begin to coax me,” he said. “I won’t hear a word of it. It was bad enough before you materialized, but now it is utterly out of the question. Absolutely.”

“Aw, give us a kiss,” was all she said, and she took it.

Topper, though remarkably pleased, remained adamant, and after a certain amount of haggling they arrived at a compromise. They would occupy connecting rooms. Topper thought that that was compromising enough.

“You know,” she explained to him, “it’s better that I should sleep close by so that I can protect you in case somebody comes.”

This last argument struck Mr. Topper with so much force that he was tempted to ask her to disregard his previous objections. His conventional training, however, overcame his natural timidity.

While Marion Kerby was preparing a supper of soup, beans and coffee he watched her with a mixture of admiration and dread. And when at last she placed the provender before him, dread faded away and only admiration remained. Truly she was a remarkable woman for one so loose. He thought of his wife and sighed. Then his thoughts reverted to Scollops. He wondered how life was treating his cat, and whether or not she still slept in his chair. While wondering he ate diligently with the appetite of a famished man. Food had never meant so much to Mr. Topper. Presently he halted and looked up from his plate.

“Do you like cats?” he asked.

Before his companion had time to answer Mr. Topper’s jaw dropped, his face changed color, and with dilated eyes he gazed over her shoulder. For a moment she was too startled to complete her chewing. Then she rose from her chair and hurried to him.

“Are you choking?” she asked. “Can’t you swallow?”

And with this she began to pound him on the back. Mr. Topper almost fell from his chair.

“I’m not choking,” he gasped, “but I can’t swallow. Oh, look!”

Marion was too alarmed to heed his words. She stopped thumping and began to tear at his shirt.

“I’ll open your collar,” she said, “and then you’ll feel better.”

At this Mr. Topper returned to speech.

“Hell, no!” he shouted. “Don’t open my collar. Open a window instead. He’s standing in the doorway right behind you.”

In an instant the situation was clear to Marion Kerby. Slowly and with great dignity she turned and beheld a rough-looking individual standing exactly where Mr. Topper had said, in the doorway. In one hand he held a lantern, in the other an ugly-looking stick.

“Will you be good enough to tell me just what you are doing here?” she asked in a calm voice.

The man hesitated and looked at her with a surprised expression.

“Protecting the master’s property,” he replied. “He don’t allow squatters here.”

“Squatters,” she replied in a puzzled voice. “Squatters? Now what exactly are squatters? Sounds like some sort of a pigeon, or perhaps a fish. Are squatters fish?”

“If yer don’t understand what squatters is,” said the man, “I’ll change it to house breakers, trespassers, undesirable people, thieves, loafers – —”

“It’s quite clear,” interrupted the girl. “Don’t go on. Now tell me who is the master you referred to?”

“He’s Mr. Wilbur,” the man replied.

“And where is he now?”

“He’s in Europe, that’s where he is.”

“How odd,” she mused. “So is my husband.”

“I’m her brother,” put in Mr. Topper in consternation. “Her eldest brother. We’re nice people and …”

The man glared at Mr. Topper and raised his stick threateningly. Mr. Topper sank back in his chair.

“Leave this to me,” Marion whispered quickly, then advanced on the unwelcome visitor.

“For some unfortunate reason,” she said, “I haven’t taken a fancy to you. It might not be your fault. I hope it isn’t, but the fact remains that now you must go. Take your little lantern and swagger stick and hop off. If not, God protect you.”

“Quit yer bluffing,” replied the man, “or I’ll use this club on the both of yer.”

Then a strange and terrible thing took place. The woman, facing the intruder, crumpled to the floor. Nothing remained of her save an inert bundle of clothing. Even Mr. Topper, as accustomed as he was to unexpected occurrences, sat horrified in his chair. The man looked down at the clothing and strove to collect his wits.

“She’s fainted,” he suggested, looking hopefully at Topper.

Mr. Topper began to laugh hysterically.

“What’s that?” asked the man suddenly as his hat snapped down over his eyes. He raised his hands to his hat, then quickly transferred them to his stomach. As the stick fell to the floor it was seized by an invisible hand and brandished in the air. With great force and accuracy it descended on the now prominent region of his reverse exposure, causing him to snap erect. His face was a study in terror as he fell on his hands and knees and began to crawl to the door.

“Here’s your lantern!” a voice cried. “Clear out quick!”

The voice was too much for the man. He staggered to his feet and without waiting for the lantern fled from the cottage; the lantern, following in close pursuit, danced crazily in the darkness. Mr. Topper could trace the retreat of the man by the crashing of the bushes and the cries that disturbed the night. Gradually these sounds subsided and silence settled down. Some minutes later the bundle of clothing began to stir. Mr. Topper saw a confused mass of feminine apparel arrange itself in the air and assume the outlines of a woman. He closed his eyes to blot out the sight and when he opened them again Marion Kerby was standing before him.

“What were you saying about cats?” she asked, seating herself on the table.

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Topper. “Was I saying anything about cats?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she replied. “That bird won’t be back tonight. I couldn’t get him to take his lantern so I was forced to throw it at him.”

She slid over to the dejected Topper and, curving an arm round his shoulder, sat heavily on his lap. Too weak to protest, he allowed her to sip his coffee.

“I doubt if he ever comes back,” she added reflectively.

“What do you mean?” asked Mr. Topper uneasily. “I hope you didn’t kill him or maim him for life. Did you?”

“Not quite,” she replied. “Almost though. He called us squatters. I don’t mind about myself, but I can’t bear to think of you as a squatter.”

“I don’t mind being called a squatter,” said Mr. Topper thoughtfully, “but I couldn’t stand that club of his. Every time I looked at the thing it gave me the shivers. There were knobs on it.”

Marion Kerby jumped from his knees and squeezed his hand.

“Don’t think of him any more,” she said. “Let’s go outside and contemplate the stars.”

“I hope that’s all we’ll contemplate,” replied Mr. Topper.

They sat on the steps of the veranda and Marion rested her head on Mr. Topper’s knee. Once more he thought of Scollops. Then he looked down into the girl’s eyes and saw that in them, too, there was an expression he could not fathom, but on this occasion he was thrilled instead of being troubled.

“You know,” she remarked, smiling up at him, “you’re not my eldest brother. You’re my first and only child.”

“Well, from the way you’re bringing me up,” he replied, “you must be one of those Spartan mothers I read about in school.”

“Sure I am,” she answered. “I’ll make a man of you yet.”

“Then keep the door open between us,” said Mr. Topper. “I’m feeling far from well. If I dream about clubs tonight I’m likely to die in my sleep.”

He lit a cigar and looked down on the lake.

“Nice night,” he suggested.

“Swell,” she replied, snuggling closer to him. “I’ll try a cigar, too.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Enter the Colonel
and Mrs. Hart

A shaft of hazy sunlight sifting through moist green leaves found its way into Mr. Topper’s room. After fingering the bedspread delicately it finally crept up to his strangely innocent-looking face, now lying unprotected beneath a nocturnal gathering of whiskers. Topper stirred fretfully and rolled over on his side. In his heart there was a fierce desire to remain oblivious of life, but somewhere within his subconscious lurked a painful suspicion that all was not well with the world, or at least, that part of the world which he, Topper, personally occupied. He half opened his eyes and squinted at the room. Had there not been a man with an ugly club? Yes, there had been such a man. And had not Marion Kerby done violence to this person? The fact was not to be denied. Topper was clear about that.

“What a life,” he thought to himself. “What a series of calamities. Every morning I wake up in a different place and under more depressing circumstances. It’s like a curse.”

Nevertheless, when he arose and stretched, he felt within himself a spirit of freedom and buoyancy that had never come to him during his more orderly régime. He liked the smell of the room. The forest had gathered close to the walls and drenched them with the fragrance of its fresh green life. And he liked the way the sunlight sprayed upon the matting. Matting was a pleasant sort of an arrangement. He enjoyed the way it felt on his bare feet. It made him think of swimming. Why it did he could not tell, but it did and that was enough. Topper could swim quite well. He was satisfied about his swimming. It was his only accomplishment. Marion Kerby would be surprised when she saw him in the water. His new bathing things were in the suit-case in her room. Rather bearishly he moved across the matting, examining unfamiliar objects and thinking half thoughts. One of these thoughts was connected with Marion Kerby’s room. It occurred to him that it really was not her room, nor was this one his. The rooms belonged to someone else. They were being unlawfully occupied. Topper trod the matting no longer like an aimless bear. His step was more like the stealthy tread of a criminal, a modest, unassuming criminal. He hurried to the open door between the two rooms and thrust in a frightened face.

“Get up,” he said. “We can’t stay here forever. The whole neighborhood will be down on us at any minute.”

No answer came from the bed for the reason that the bed was empty. As he regarded the tossed coverings an alarming suspicion chilled his heart.

“My God,” he thought, “she’s left me. At any other time I’d let her go gladly, but not now. She got me into this fix and she ought to get me out.”

With a heroic display of modesty, considering his overwrought condition, he flung on his bathrobe and hurried outside. The object of his quest was not in sight, but he found on the table a partially empty cup of coffee. The pot on the stove was still warm.

“She’s had coffee,” he thought bitterly. “She would. Then she left me without even a word – left me sleeping.”

He went to the door and peered miserably out on the sparkling face of the lake. The scene hurt his eyes. How could the world look so happy when he felt so sad? And how could he ever hope to escape in the full light of day with a suit-case in either hand? He was reluctant to face the day and was about to withdraw from it when something resembling a song floated to his ears. He recognized the voice and was filled with relief. The song drifted mournfully to him from somewhere close at hand.

“Oh, I was a daisy and highly adored,

The boys said as much to my face.

But now I’m a spirit and terribly bored

With oodles and oodles of space.”

Topper did not care for the words, nor was he impressed by the long-drawn-out plaintiveness of the voice, but he was overjoyed to know that the singer was approaching the cottage.

There was a thrusting sound in the foliage, and, after a few muttered imprecations concerning a certain blackberry bush, Marion Kerby, wild and disheveled, appeared at the foot of the steps. Topper regarded her with thankfulness, but not with approval. That he could not do. In either hand she held a bottle and under one arm there nestled another one. Altogether, Topper decided, it was a convincing display of greed. Her face was flushed and her eyes sparkled dangerously. She was obviously pleased with herself and expected Topper to be.

“See,” she said, wiggling the bottles. “Look what I brought back.”

Topper looked and observed that one of the bottles, the one under her arm, was not altogether full. It was nearly half empty. This sorrowful fact did not add to Topper’s spirit of tolerance.

“What do you mean by drinking at this time of day?” he demanded.

“No harm, old dear,” she answered. “No harm.”

“Have you no sense of decency?” he continued.

“None at all,” she replied with unclouded cheerfulness. “Never had. You cornered the market at birth.”

“Well, I’ll tell you now it’s far from decent to be in your condition at this time of day,” said Topper.

“My eye,” she replied, leaping up the steps. “That’s simply a question of time. Whether you drink it at dawn or at dusk, you get fuzzy just the same. The earlier the better, say I. Now, if you’d take a good stiff hooker of this Scotch, I’ll lay you odds you’ll jolly soon forget about being decent. You’ll be as happy as a lark, a decent bird, I’m told.”

“But I haven’t even had breakfast,” Topper protested.

“Nonsense!” she replied, with a magnificent sweep of her arm. “Look at the sunlight playing on the windstruck lake. Catch the breath of the morning drifting through the trees. See the young earth sending forth her, her – whatever they happen to be. Feel the world throbbing with new life and impulse. Get wise …”

“But I can’t eat sunlight and young earth,” complained Mr. Topper, rudely cutting in on her poetical outburst. “A cup of coffee and some scrambled eggs also have their decent points.”

She looked thoughtfully at his troubled face.

“Take a drink and I’ll get you some breakfast,” she said. “This is good stuff. I stole it from Mr. Wilbur, our absent host. He has a cellar full.”

She filled a glass and handed it to Topper. Feeling the need for courage, he gulped it down and looked startled. The effect was almost immediate. Like the young earth to which Marion Kerby had referred, his blood began to throb with new life and impulse. With a regal sweep of his bathrobe he threw himself down in a chair.

“Did you see our friend, the caretaker?” he asked.

“I did,” she replied, splashing some eggs into a pan. “He’s still on his feet, but somewhat unsteady. There’s a bandage round his head. He limps.”

Topper took another drink and placed himself at the table. “On with the eggs,” he commanded. “Now that you’ve crippled him, I’ll try to kill him.”

Marion Kerby watched him with a kindling eye as he fell upon the eggs.

“That’s right,” she said. “Eat and acquire flesh. I’ll drink and acquire merit, after which we’ll both go swimming.”

“Great stuff!” exclaimed Topper. “I’ll swim clear across the lake and back in my brand-new suit. It’s in your room.”

“Braggart,” the girl replied. “I’m going in to dress.”

“Just wait and see,” said Topper, refilling the glasses. “Throw me out my rompers.”

“Hand me in a drink,” she called back, flinging his suit through the door. “I’m Eveish all over.”

She thrust out a bare white arm and wiggled the fingers impatiently. Topper placed the glass in her hand, then, seized by a sudden impulse, bent over and kissed her smooth, cool arm. Marion gave a little gasp of amazement.

“If I wasn’t afraid of spilling my drink,” she said, “I’d come out and smash your face.”

“You’d do nothing of the kind,” announced Mr. Topper, straightening up and looking proud. “Nothing at all of the kind. I’ll kiss you as much as I want.”

He finished his drink and walked unevenly to his room. At the door he uttered a triumphant laugh, which ended ingloriously in a hiccough.

“Merciful heavens,” came Marion Kerby’s surprised voice. “What has come over our Cosmo? He’s actually getting aggressive.”

“Make no mistake,” he shouted back, desperately weaving his legs into his trunks. “I’m the master in this house. From now on I rule.”

Marion Kerby dashed into the room and Topper began to scream.

“This isn’t fair,” he protested. “Wait till I’ve gotten my shirt on.”

Marion refused to wait. Like a white flash the slim figure darted around Topper, raining blow after blow on his well upholstered body. Fighting his way into his shirt, he attempted to defend himself, but his efforts were futile. She closed in on him and tickled his fat ribs. With a series of girlish squeals he sank panting to the floor, whereupon she danced on his stomach and uttered a cry of victory. Like a jovial porpoise Topper rolled from side to side, sweating profusely from too much Scotch and exertion.

“Who’s the master of this house?” she demanded, digging a toe in his side.

“You are,” he gasped. “Stop tickling me before you give me a stroke.”

With a final kick she withdrew from combat and stood looking down at the vanquished male.

“Get up, you tub,” she said. “From now on I rule. Get up and swim across the lake.”

“You’re a fiend in a one-piece bathing suit,” Topper muttered in a husky voice. “Go get that bottle. I’m all in.”

“Keep a civil tongue in your head,” she warned as she hurried from the room.

When she returned with the bottle they sat down on the edge of the bed and eyed each other suspiciously. Topper gratefully swallowed his drink and sighed deeply. Then he reached over and clumsily patted his companion.

“You know,” he announced rather thickly, “I haven’t been so happy in years. Take me out and show me the lake. Something seems funny about my legs.”

She threw an arm round his shoulder and together they left the room, their voices raised in song.

“My husband he did it. The devil would drive,

The high-flying, low-lying soak.

And that is the reason I’m no more alive,

For he drove me smack into an oak.”

“I can’t get used to that word ‘smack,’ ” said Mr. Topper. “Otherwise the song’s good.”

Throughout the uneven progress of the journey Topper was more helped than helpful. He had a decided tendency to a starboard list, which the girl bravely endeavored to offset. Once she failed and the great weight of Topper bore down on her with full force. For a moment there was a threshing of arms and legs emerging from a cluster of deep-seated grunts. Eventually she succeeded in extricating herself and Topper was helped to his feet.

“Don’t trip me again,” he panted. “It’s not at all funny.”

Marion felt her bruises and laughed sarcastically.

“Do you think it’s my idea of a good time to be crushed to earth by a hulk like you?” she asked.

“Then why didn’t you dematerialize?”

“Because you’d have broken every bone in your gross body,” she answered with heat.

“Hadn’t thought of that,” Topper apologized. “Very much obliged.”

“Don’t mention it,” she replied. “What’s a little fall between friends? Here we are at the landing. It’s your first move.”

Topper swayed dangerously on the edge of the landing, then with surprising agility rose in the air and disappeared neatly into the water. As soon as he reappeared he stroked out with a tremendous show of purpose for the opposite shore, about a quarter of a mile away. As the space grew wider between them, Marion Kerby watched him at first with anxiety and then with admiration. His arms flayed the water rhythmically and a trail of foam followed his churning feet. Topper was swimming as if possessed. Everything was in his favor. He was unable to fall and too fat to sink. When Marion had eased her mind as to his ability to keep above water, she arched her back in a businesslike dive of her own. Like a water sprite she played around the landing, not troubling so much about swimming as creating a great confusion. By the time that the aquatic Topper had achieved the other side she had exhausted the possibilities of the lake. Like a fretful child she stood on the landing and stamped for Topper to come home. The keen morning air was not the warmest of blankets. She raised her voice in a long cry.

“Come on over,” she shouted. “I’m going back.”

Upon the reception of this message Topper placed an admonishing finger to his lips and with his other hand swept the surrounding hills. He was partially sober now and wholly fearful.

“Why does she have to arouse the neighborhood?” he muttered as he watched her dancing form.

Ceasing from this activity, she threw her head back and, thrusting her thumb into her mouth, gave an eloquent but vulgar pantomime of drinking. Then she turned and ran up the path, her white legs flashing in the sunlight. The effect was registered on Topper. He plunged back in the lake and put forth his best efforts.

“She has no conception of honor,” he thought, gloomily as he wallowed along. “She’d cheerfully drink while I was drowning.”

A little surprise in the form of a tall, distinguished-looking gentleman was waiting for Topper when he reached the landing. Upon seeing this stranger, Topper’s first impulse was to sink forever beneath the protecting surface of the lake, but there was still enough Scotch in his veins to give him the semblance of courage.

“Good morning,” said the distinguished-looking gentleman in a suspiciously friendly voice. “You seem to be enjoying yourself.”

“I am,” replied Topper. “I deserve to.”

“I’ll not dispute that,” said the man on the landing, “but I doubt if you could prove it.”

“My own enjoyment is proof enough,” Topper answered.

“And how do you arrive at that conclusion?” asked the other.

“I’ve already arrived,” said Topper.

“That I see, but how I don’t,” the distinguished-looking gentleman pursued.

“By the simple process of reason,” Mr. Topper explained as he laboriously trod water. “Any creature, man or beast, who has the capacity and desire to enjoy life deserves that enjoyment.”

“You preach hedonism,” replied the other, briefly.

“Whatever that means I doubt it,” said Mr. Topper, “but, whether it is or isn’t, I’m not going to drown myself to discuss the point further.”

“And that’s quite sensible,” the gentleman answered. “Come out and I’ll give you a lift.”

Stooping over, he firmly seized Mr. Topper’s extended hand and helped him out of the water, after which he continued holding the hand, shaking it cordially the while. Topper feared he was captured.

“Delighted to meet you,” said the distinguished-looking gentleman, beaming down on Topper. “I greatly admired your skill in the water.”

“Thanks,” replied Topper, weakly, “but before we go any further let’s settle one point. You are not by any chance remotely connected with the law, are you?”

“I am afraid not,” said the stranger.

“I’m glad not,” declared Topper.

“As a matter of fact,” the other continued, “I’ve devoted most of my life to breaking the law. I have been a soldier, a legalized and official killer, a person beyond the law.”

Topper drew a sigh of relief and rose to his feet. For some reason he had taken rather a fancy to the distinguished-looking gentleman. It occurred to him that he had not spoken to a man for several days. He had been too long in feminine company. He would cultivate this stranger.

“If you are beyond the law,” said Topper, “you’d probably not balk at a glass of Scotch.”

“I’d do more than balk,” the gentleman answered. “I’d actually lie down to it.”

“Then come along with me,” Topper said, turning up the path.

“One moment,” the man called. “I happen to have a wife about somewhere. Would you balk at her?”

“By no means,” answered Topper. “Although convention prevents me from going to the same extremes as you, I should be delighted to meet her.”

“The opportunity is at hand,” replied the gentleman.

Topper looked up the path and saw a tall, fair-haired woman approaching. There was something engagingly rakish in her bearing. He placed her age as a good-humored thirty-five. She was carrying some early flowers in her hand and puffing a cigarette.

“My dear,” called the man, “this gentleman has been so good as to ask us to share his Scotch.”

My dear dropped her flowers and flooded Mr. Topper with a delighted smile.

“He is heaven-sent,” she exclaimed in a rich voice. “Let’s hurry before he drops dead or changes his mind. Watch the roots. He might trip and lose his memory.”

“Truly,” thought Mr. Topper, as he led them up the path, “this is a frankly thirsty pair.”

The gentleman began to whistle and call the name of Oscar. Topper looked back in surprise, but seeing no new arrival, ascribed the gentleman’s conduct to a spirit of fun caused by the prospect of a drink.

On arriving at the cottage Topper hurried up the steps and looked inside. Marion, still in her bathing suit, was sitting at the table with a glass in her hand. She was smoking one of Topper’s best cigars.

“I’m bringing some friends,” he announced under his breath. “Are you sober enough to receive them?”

“Trot ’em in,” she replied brightly. “But are you sure they’re friends?”

“Positive,” said Topper. “Good sports.”

Marion went to the door and greeted the pair.

“I am delighted,” she said sweetly, “to meet any friends of my husband. Come right in.”

The gentleman thoughtfully removed the glass from her hand and, bending low, ceremoniously kissed it, after which he waved to his wife.

“We are Colonel and Mrs. Scott,” he said. “And I am sure we are all happily met. Lie down, Oscar.”

“That’s a joke of his,” whispered Topper.

Marion laughed agreeably and took Mrs. Scott’s hand.

“Why, you’re so beautiful, my dear,” she said, “that I can’t keep my eyes off you. Come in and give me a cigarette. I’m tired of my husband’s cigars. Cosmo, do the honors.”

She took the glass from the reluctant Colonel and led the way indoors.

“And you,” said the Colonel, “look like a creature from another world – the spirit of the lake, the priestess of the woods.”

Marion threw him a narrow glance, then bowed gravely.

“Sit down, Arthur,” said Mrs. Scott in a calm voice. “You’ll get your drink anyway.”

“My darling,” exclaimed the Colonel, “what a cynical remark. Down, Oscar.”

Both Topper and Marion laughed politely, thinking that this was expected of them. Then Topper distributed the drinks and the party sat down at the table.

“This seems,” announced the Colonel judiciously, after he had sampled the Scotch several times, “this seems to be prime whiskey. Of the best.”

Topper, who as a result of his long swim and liberal hospitality had been showing a decided disposition to slumber, opened his eyes at this remark and squinted at the Colonel.

“It seems to me,” he said unpleasantly, “that you do a devil of a lot of seeming.”

“I do,” agreed the Colonel with winning affability. “Because things are not always as they seem.”

For a few moments Topper concentrated on this reply. To him it was fraught with meaning. It covered his whole life.

“You’re right, Colonel,” he said at last. “You’re dead right there. To you I seem to be a sleepy man in a bathing suit, whereas I’m a fat banker running away from his wife.”

The Colonel elevated one eyebrow just sufficiently to betray surprise.

“Then the present arrangement, I take it, is not permanent,” he suggested with a delicate inflection.

“Neither permanent nor tangible,” Topper answered, solicitously filling his own glass.

“I see,” replied the Colonel thoughtfully, showing equal solicitude for himself. “Then, indeed, we are happily met as I have already remarked. Neither is our relationship of a lasting nature. Mrs. Hart and myself are just visiting each other. Regards!”

Slightly scandalized in spite of the liberalizing influence of the Scotch, Topper mechanically raised his glass.

“Regards,” he said absently. “Happily met.”

“Isn’t it too funny for words,” exclaimed the newly discovered Mrs. Hart, leaning over to Marion Kerby. “Give that man a few drinks and he becomes as frank as a fool. I never do.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what’s happened to Cosmo,” Marion replied. “Usually he’s the world’s worst hypocrite.”

“Not at all, my love,” he protested. “Usually I’m the world’s best hypocrite – and that in spite of you.”

“Down, Oscar!” the Colonel irritably interrupted. “Damn it, go to sleep.”

At this point Topper sprawled back in his chair and laughed uproariously, while the Colonel watched him in dignified silence.

“Tell me,” asked the Colonel, when Topper had subsided, “why do you always laugh when I call my dog?”

Topper wiped his eyes and looked admiringly at the Colonel.

“You’re a scream, Colonel,” he said. “And you say the funniest things. Why I thought you wanted me to laugh. You haven’t any dog.”

“But I have a little dog,” declared the Colonel. “Want to see him?”

“Don’t be silly, Arthur,” interposed Mrs. Hart.

“Nonsense,” said the Colonel. “I’ll show him my little dog. Come here, Oscar. Do your stuff.”

Topper glanced down and saw a vague stirring in the atmosphere around the Colonel’s feet. Then gradually the rump of a small, shaggy dog appeared. Its tail was wagging excitedly.

“That’s the boy!” cried the Colonel. “Keep it up, Oscar. Make a whole dog for the gentleman.”

A few more inches of dog appeared, but evidently Oscar had exhausted his talents. The tail continued to wag as if asking to be excused from further endeavors.

Topper rose unsteadily from his chair.

“Please, please, Colonel,” he pleaded, “don’t make him do any more. He’s done enough already. Ask him to go away.”

“Very well,” agreed the Colonel reluctantly, “but he can do much better than that. Sit down, Oscar, like a good chap.”

Apparently forgetting the condition he was in, Oscar, or rather the rear end of him, settled to rest. The tail gave a final wag, then came to repose on the floor.

“I feel in need of a little fresh air,” Topper remarked in a strained voice. “This has been a very unusual occurrence.”

He turned to the door, then took a step back. Three large men were crowding in it, and in the background stood the caretaker.

“We’re surrounded!” Topper exclaimed, turning back to the table.

But Topper found no comfort there. The table was empty.

“God,” said one of the men, “they’re all gone but him.”

“He’s enough,” replied the caretaker. “Go in and drag him out.”

The men advanced and Topper automatically retreated.

“And when you get him,” continued the caretaker, “give him a few for me.”

This sent Topper shivering to the wall. It was at this stage in the proceedings that the command, “Sic ’em, Oscar!” rang through the room. Immediately a low growl was heard and Oscar’s hind quarters became involved with the legs of the bewildered attackers. Thus began the Battle of the Lake, one of the few decisive engagements, on record and one which Mr. Topper did not linger to witness.

Out of the din and confusion that filled the room Topper heard Marion’s voice shouting, “Break for the car, old thing. We’ll bring the luggage along.”

Topper did not wait for further bidding. Stepping on the face of a prostrate man, he fought his way to the door.

“Don’t forget my trousers,” he called back. “They’re on the chair in my room.”

“Hell, no,” grunted the Colonel. “Run for it, man.”

Topper dodged past the crippled caretaker with the agility of a fawn and darted down the steps As he raced along the lake path cries of anguish followed his flying feet.

“I don’t hold with this at all,” he thought to himself as he sped over the roots. “Is my life to be one mad pursuit, all summer long?”

As he rounded the bend two suit-cases flashed past him at a dizzy speed and these in turn were followed by a carefully poised bottle and a bundle of Marion’s clothing.

“Speed, O lout,” a voice panted, and Topper redoubled his efforts.

The rear was brought up by Topper’s trousers, snapping in the wind and Oscar following after, his rump low to the ground and his claws kicking up dust.

Few persons have ever lived to witness such a remarkable sight – Topper and half a dog chasing a pair of runaway trousers, not to mention a flying bottle and a couple of bounding suit-cases. Even at the moment Topper was impressed by the novelty of the situation.

Like a rallying standard in a headlong retreat, Topper’s trousers danced in the morning breeze. And Topper followed his trousers with his last spark of energy. Far behind him he heard shouting voices, but he kept his eyes to the front and a trifle raised. He could not bring himself to look at the contortions of Oscar. The impatient honking of a horn urged him onward, and with a final burst of speed he reached the car and flung himself into the front seat. Oscar was sitting beside him, his invisible section panting audibly. The automobile was already in motion, hurtling down a branch road that led through the valley. Mr. Topper collected himself and moved a little away from Oscar, whose hind leg was busily engaged in dislodging an unseen flea.

“Well, Topper,” came Marion Kerby’s calm voice, “we got you out of that fix.”

“You got me into it, too,” replied Topper. “Why didn’t you tell me they were all spooks?”

“Didn’t know it myself,” she answered, as the car lurched round a bend.

“I suspected something all the time,” said the Colonel, “but I wasn’t sure of Topper.”

“Yes,” put in Mrs. Hart. “What’s the matter with him? Isn’t he a low-plane?”

“No,” replied Marion. “He’s solid through and through.”

“How very, very interesting,” continued Mrs. Hart, poking an inquiring finger into Topper’s shoulder.

“Make her stop,” said Topper to Marion.

“Stop tickling my boy friend,” she called back. “He’s so bashful.”

“Here, Topper,” said the Colonel, passing the bottle forward, “take a drink, my buck. You need it.”

Like a greedy baby Topper closed his fingers round the bottle and brought it to his lips. It was difficult drinking, what with the speed of the car and the condition of the road, but Topper refused to remove the bottle until he was convinced that he felt better.

“Don’t forget the driver,” said Marion Kerby.

“And don’t forget that we are still your guests,” Mrs. Hart suggested sweetly.

“That’s the last bottle,” said the Colonel. “We’ll have to do something about it.”

“Well, you go ahead and do it,” replied Topper. “I’ve done enough for one day.”

“Trust me,” agreed the Colonel. “I never fail. Stop at the next town and I’ll visit a few of the best houses, guided by my unerring instinct.”

“In the meantime do you want your dog?” Topper asked. “I’m afraid he’s crowded up here.”

“Not at all,” the Colonel answered. “Don’t worry about Oscar. He loves the front seat.”

Topper closed his eyes and let the rushing wind cool his face.

“There are three of them now,” he thought, as he clung to the side of the car. “Three spirits and half a dog. I’m as good as done for already.”

“Colonel,” he called, continuing aloud, “give me another drink. I’ll have to keep myself numb until I’ve gotten used to the situation.”

“Eat, drink and be merry!” cried the Colonel, “for tomorrow …”

“Don’t finish it,” interrupted Mr. Topper, hastily reaching for the Scotch. “I am intimate enough with death as it is.”

“I won’t,” agreed the Colonel, “if you don’t finish that Scotch.”

Topper did his best.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Colonel Orders Dinner

In the cool of the evening four flushed faces peered from Mr. Topper’s automobile at a rain-washed sign bearing the legend: “The Sleeping Fox.” After a whispered conversation within the machine, the four flushed faces once more emerged. Topper now was completely clad and his companions had neatly materialized. To all outward appearances they gave the impression of being four quite normal persons bent on an evening’s pleasure.

“With our thirst and Topper’s money we should do very nicely here,” remarked the Colonel, casting an anticipatory eye at the road-house.

“Don’t frighten him before we get him inside,” Mrs. Hart said warningly. “This looks to me like a lovely layout.”

“Fear is my constant companion,” replied Topper. “Don’t consider me.”

He was standing in need of a little judicious propping and the women were furtively assisting him. They were endeavoring to give the appearance of two ladies being escorted to dinner by a prosperous and dignified gentleman. In carrying out the deception Topper was of little value. With the most casual regard for dignity he ambled up the path.

“You women are so good to me,” he murmured, and, as if overcome by his effort, sank heavily back in the supporting arms.

“For the love of Pete, stand up,” Marion tragically whispered. “Remember, everything depends on you.”

“I know it does,” he gloated. “I know damn well it does. And you remember this, from now on I rule. No more foot-racing, no more queer dogs, no more disorderly parties. Remember all those things.”

“Of course we will,” the Colonel hastened to reply in a mollifying voice. “Didn’t we throw Oscar away half a mile down the road?”

“Half a mile is a short distance to throw that dog,” observed Mr. Topper.

“I know,” continued the Colonel, “but it showed that our spirits were in the right place.”

“Don’t mention spirits to me,” Topper retorted. “The very word is revolting. And furthermore you’re not in the right place. If you were you’d be far, far away.”

“Ah, Topper, how cruel you are to us all,” Mrs. Hart protested. “I’m sure you don’t mean that.”

He looked scornfully at the women, then plunged free from their grasp.

“Stand back, the pair of you,” he commanded, “and I’ll show you how a gentleman takes his ease at an inn. I am weary of your arms.”

He squared his shoulders belligerently and with heavy dignity began to mount the steps. As if he were performing an acrobatic sensation his companions clustered watchfully round him, ready to spring to action at the slightest show of weakness. An immaculately clad individual, appearing in the door of the road-house, stopped with surprise on seeing Mr. Topper, then hastened forward with a smile of welcome.

“Why, Mr. Topper,” he said. “This is an unexpected pleasure. How are things at the club?”

At the mention of the word club, Mr. Topper swayed perceptibly on his feet.

“Club,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Club. Why is it I don’t like that word? Ah, yes, I remember, Williams. I have just recently escaped from the most terrifying of clubs.”

“And Mrs. Topper?” asked Williams, tactfully changing the subject.

“And Mrs. Topper, too,” replied Topper. “I’ve just escaped from her.”

As if cheered by this reflection, he turned his back on the astonished Williams and beckoned to his companions, who were hovering like hopeful orphans at the head of the steps.

“It’s all right,” he assured them. “Williams is an old friend. Knew him when I was a respectable member of the country club. He was our steward then. First-class steward.”

More for support than friendship he turned to Williams and extended his hand.

“Don’t mind my friends,” he continued. “They’re thoroughly low. And remember this, Williams: silence is crisp and green. Here’s a little silence now.”

Williams, who had hitherto considered Topper as being rather a painfully proper man, was both surprised and delighted at this lighter side of his character. He deftly pocketed the money and with a murmured expression of gratitude ushered the party to a table where he spoke impressively to the waiter.

“Hear what he said,” gloated Topper. “He told the waiter to bring us anything we wanted. That’s because I’m along.”

“Then tell him to bring us some cocktails and we’ll be even more impressed,” Marion remarked.

“I’ll boost it one,” put in Mrs. Hart.

“And I’ll double it,” said the Colonel promptly.

“Bring them double cocktails,” Mr. Topper explained to the waiter. “And bring me one, too.”

“Any particular brand, sir?”

“Dry Martinis are more businesslike,” the Colonel suggested. “It would be wiser to stick to them.”

When the waiter had departed the Colonel set himself the task of planning the dinner, and in this he displayed such a lack of self-control that finally Mr. Topper felt called upon to interrupt.

“Don’t look upon this as a barbecue, Colonel,” he remarked. “Regard it rather in the light of a quiet little dinner. Don’t stint yourself, but at the same time don’t stuff. Perhaps you once saw service in a famine district. There is no danger here.”

Marion Kerby turned on Topper with venomously flashing eyes.

“Are you trying to humiliate me in front of my friends?” she demanded.

“Not at all,” replied Mr. Topper. “I was merely trying to introduce a little reason into this sordid discussion of food. It’s not humanly possible to consume at one sitting all of the things he’s planning to order.”

“You forget that we’re not human,” Marion replied briefly. Then, turning to the Colonel, she continued with a sweet smile, “Go ahead, Colonel. Order the whole damned card. Don’t mind him.”

“Let’s see,” said the Colonel blandly, as if the interruption had never occurred. “Where were we now? Oh, yes, here we are. We’d gotten down to the fowl.”

“The fowl,” breathed Mrs. Hart, clasping her hands in delight. “I’m a perfect demon with a duck.”

“Well,” remarked Mr. Topper, with weary resignation, “you’re the most material-minded spirits that ever returned to earth to drive a mortal mad.”

“Why, the more irregularly I live the more regular I feel,” said Mrs. Hart, taking Topper’s hand. “Aren’t you that way?”

“I am not,” he answered shortly, withdrawing his hand from the table.

“The cocktails are among us,” Marion announced as the waiter arranged the glasses. “Cheer up, everybody. I propose a toast to Topper, our reluctant and respectable host.”

She rose from the table and raised her glass.

“Here’s to Topper,” she said. “A good sport in spite of himself. I know him by the back.”

“That’s about the only way anybody knows me now,” observed Topper. “I’m always running.”

“You poor old dear,” she said, and, bending over, quickly kissed him. Topper grew red in the face and looked guiltily about him.

“The last shred is gone,” he remarked. “Nothing remains but blackmail – blackmail, divorce and disgrace.”

He tossed off his cocktail at a gulp and gazed solemnly at his companions.

“From now on,” he announced, “I cast decency to the winds. Let’s strip ourselves naked and run around screaming.”

“Hear! Hear!” cried the Colonel. “That was spoken like a man. Waiter, another flock.”

And another flock was brought. Nor was it the last flock. Nor even the next to the last. Great execution was done that night at the inn, prodigious eating and lavish drinking, the Colonel leading the way by example and encouragement. Topper danced with Marion until his collar became a rag and his feet two nests of blisters. When finally, through a combination of complications, he was forced to retain his seat at the table, he lived happily in the memory of his dizzy flights through space. Marion Kerby sat close to him, whispering surprisingly pleasant words in his ear, and Topper, being in too expansive a mood to be suspicious, sweated in his seventh heaven.

This state of things was suddenly demolished by an unexpected arrival. The Colonel and Mrs. Hart were engaged in a highly enterprising type of dance when the unexpected arrival occurred. And the unexpected arrival was none less than Oscar, or at least that portion of Oscar which he had chosen to show to the world. Topper was the first to see that portion, and at its appearance his happiness vanished. Oscar dragged himself wearily through the door of the inn, displayed an undecided rump to the assembled guests, then set off patiently to follow his master’s exuberant heels.

Unaware of this singular attachment, the Colonel continued to dance with the blissful Mrs. Hart. And even the other dancers appeared to take no notice. It was at that stage of the evening when one would rather not see such things. Without a shadow of a doubt there were many diners and dancers who really did see Oscar in his unfinished condition, but those who did see him refused to report the fact, fearing that it might be a serious reflection on their own sobriety. So Oscar followed the Colonel until the Colonel passed Topper’s chair. Here his gyrations were interrupted by Topper’s hand on his sleeve.

“Oscar’s back,” whispered Topper. “For God’s sake do something about it. I knew you hadn’t thrown him far enough away.”

“But, my dear man,” the Colonel expostulated, “there’s a limit to my strength. I can’t chuck him back into the fourth dimension the way he insists on going about.”

“Then sit down,” said Topper, “and get him under the table. Some of these people might throw a fit. I’m sober myself already.”

“If they don’t like my dog,” fumed the Colonel, “they can throw as many fits as they want.”

“It’s not that they don’t like your dog,” explained Topper, “it’s merely that they don’t understand your dog. Oscar to them is not quite clear. Please get him out of sight.”

“I’ll agree with you there,” replied the Colonel, seating himself at the table. “Oscar is no ordinary brand of dog. There’s more to him than greets the eye.”

Oscar crawled under the table and Mr. Topper drew in his feet.

“That’s just what I’m worrying about,” he remarked. “Does the invisible part of him bite? If it does it is sure to bite me.”

“Have no fear about Oscar,” said the Colonel. “He never harbors a grudge. He was kicked around too much in life for that.”

“I’m sorry,” declared Mr. Topper, sincerely. “Perhaps he’s hungry now. I’ll give him this bone to gnaw on.”

He held a bone under the table and it was instantly snapped from his hand.

“He is hungry,” Topper continued, quickly withdrawing his hand. “Very hungry. Listen to that.”

The bone was rattling on the floor and from beneath the table came the busy sound of crunching. The waiter, who had just arrived with coffee and ices, on hearing this small commotion, raised the tablecloth and peered down at the massed feet in the center of which lay Oscar engaged in appeasing his hunger. The waiter dropped the tablecloth and leaned down to Mr. Topper.

“Don’t tell the ladies,” he whispered, “but the funniest thing is going on under your table. Half of a dog is messing around with the leg of a duck, so help me God.”

Topper glanced under the table, then looked stonily at the waiter.

“You might be right,” he said, “but I don’t see it. One of the ladies has dropped her fur piece and I myself dropped that duck leg. Bring the check and say nothing more about it. No one will know you’ve been drinking.”

“Sorry,” apologized the waiter. “I hadn’t realized it myself, but the Colonel kept on insisting.”

“Then don’t abuse his liberality,” advised Topper. “Hurry with the check.”

“Yes,” put in Marion Kerby, “hurry with the check. This place begins to irk me. I’m dying to take a stroll.”

The waiter hastened away and Topper leaned over to Marion.

“Collect that dog,” he told her, “and keep him under your cape until we get out of here.”

“Only for you,” she replied, “would I do such a thing.”

She reached down and after a little scuffling succeeded in gathering up Oscar. For a moment his tail waved frantically above the edge of the table, then flashed from view beneath Marion’s cape, which from time to time thereafter became suddenly convulsed with life. The waiter arrived with the check and in his preoccupation handed it to the Colonel, who, upon scanning the total, promptly disappeared. It was like the flashing out of a light.

“There isn’t that much money in the world,” floated through the air.

Only the check remained, still poised above the table. It was trembling slightly as if the invisible holder were shaken by an attack of nerves.

“The shock was too much for him,” whispered Mrs. Hart. “I’ve seen it happen before.”

“He’s gone,” said the waiter, looking inquiringly at Mr. Topper. “He’s not here any more.”

“Of course not,” laughed Mr. Topper. “He never was. Pass that check to me.”

Before the waiter could reach it the check moved across the table to Mr. Topper’s outstretched hand.

“You’re welcome to it,” a voice murmured.

The waiter moved away from the Colonel’s empty chair and stood close to Mr. Topper.

“Mr. Topper,” he pleaded, “please don’t say he wasn’t here. I could never bear that. Why his cup is still half full of coffee and there’s his smoldering cigarette.”

In the face of this undeniable evidence of the Colonel’s recent presence, Mr. Topper was forced to alter his bantering tactics. He opened his wallet and selected several colorful bills.

“Take this money away,” he said, “and stop asking questions. Let us admit that the Colonel was here. What of it? As you accurately pointed out, he isn’t here any more. He slipped away somewhere as all of us must do at times. If I were in your place I wouldn’t press the investigation any further.”

“I certainly wouldn’t,” remarked Mrs. Hart. “It has gone far enough.”

“I’m sorry,” replied the waiter, “and I’m very much obliged. As you say, Mr. Topper, he must have just slipped away in a hurry like.”

Marion Kerby burst out laughing and patted the waiter on his back.

“That’s it,” she said. “That’s exactly it. He slipped away in a hurry like, or, to put it differently, with all possible speed.”

The waiter smiled nervously and bowed, then emulated the Colonel’s example to the best of his ability. Mr. Topper, despite his eagerness, was forced to be more leisurely in his retreat. With earnest but wavering dignity, he followed the women from the room. Oscar lent distinction to their departure. Every time he kicked his legs Marion Kerby suddenly bulged out in the back in a most grotesque manner, an occurrence which caused Mrs. Hart to burst forth into hysterical laughter to the greater humiliation of Mr. Topper. Once safely outside in the darkness he mopped his face and gave vent to his feelings.

“After eating and drinking his fill,” he complained, “he plays us a trick like that. And he calls himself a soldier.”

“A Colonel, no less,” said Marion Kerby, “and he allows me to protect this unlettered hound.”

She dropped Oscar to the road and readjusted her cape.

“He couldn’t help it,” Mrs. Hart defended. “The check was too much for him. I’m sure he didn’t mean to do it. At the size of the figures he lost control, and anyway, think how much he drank.”

“I never saw a man do better,” admitted Marion, “and for that reason I forgive him. We all play tricks in our cups.”

Without paying attention to their direction they wandered down the wooded road until they came to an open field, a meadow slanting off in the darkness. In the distance, above the trees, an old battered moon was sailing low in the sky. The night was quiet and peaceful round them, filled with secret rustlings and a thousand fragrant smells. The Sleeping Fox seemed miles away, its brilliance vanished and its orchestra stilled. Without knowing it they were soothed and subdued by the quiet beauty of their surroundings. And out of the quiet beauty of their surroundings a singing voice, deep and undaunted, came storming towards them down the road.

“It’s the Colonel,” exclaimed Mrs. Hart. “He has a splendid voice. Listen!”

Marion and Topper listened without enthusiasm to the following chanty:

“Oh, dark and stormy was the night

When last I left my Meg.

She’d a government band around each hand

And another one round each leg.

“Yo ho, my boys, yo ho,

And a-sailing we shall go.

We’ll sail no more on England’s shore—”

“A splendid voice,” remarked Mr. Topper, sarcastically interrupting the booming flow of the old sea song. “Caruso must be fairly spinning in his grave.”

“What’s this about Caruso?” asked the Colonel, looming large in the darkness. “Why, I taught him his do, re, mi’s.”

“So you are once more with us,” said Marion Kerby. “What was your hurry to go?”

“Couldn’t help it,” explained the Colonel. “The size of the check destroyed my resistance. There were no such figures in my days. But I’ve brought along gifts as a show of atonement.”

He slipped his hands into his pockets and produced two large bottles.

“In view of the size of the check,” he continued, “I took the liberty to remove these from the pantry. I have still another.”

The gifts of atonement proved more than acceptable and the Colonel was reinstated with full honors and privileges. With a bottle circulating freely between them they wandered off into the meadow until wandering no longer suited their mood. Mr. Topper insisted on demonstrating the fact that he was rapidly becoming a spirit himself. With the utmost conviction he would throw himself into the air, but being a little heavier than that element he invariably returned with great speed to the earth, from which his companions would lift him and once more set him in motion. It was a night of magnificent distances and headlong enterprise. They sang and danced and made patriotic speeches and pursued each other across the meadows to the intense delight of the gamboling flanks of Oscar. To Topper, it was like a dream, one in which he was liberated and given tremendous strength. His steps seemed as light as feathers and as long as leagues. The field was filled with dancing forms that swirled in wild abandon until they left the earth and went circling round the moon. And through the darkness he heard shouting voices as the party searched for one another. The Scotch with which the Colonel plied them became transmuted in their brains into the glory of the night. Nature became intensely beautiful and their bodies madly alive. It was such a night as comes seldom to a man and which fortunately for his peace of mind is seldom remembered after it has gone. Topper remembered but little when he awoke the following morning on the bank of a slow-moving river. Oscar’s bushy tail was draped across his chest, and that was all that remained of Oscar. He had lost ground during the exhausting activities of the night. Topper slid cautiously from under the tail and looked down into the clear water of the river. His body was feverish and his head an aching weight which he balanced with the greatest difficulty. Several yards away Marion Kerby was sleeping sweetly in Mrs. Hart’s lap. The Colonel, deep in slumber, was sitting erect as if he had forgotten to lie down. Topper turned his eyes away from his companions and looked longingly at the river. His body craved to feel the soothing flow of its cool waters. Unable to stand the temptation any longer he crept away into a clump of bushes and divested himself of his outer garments. With a last timid look at his sleeping friends he slid down the bank and insinuated himself into the water, his hot blood leaping with gratitude as the river closed around him. But Topper was not alone. A flaunting tail had followed him to his tryst. Round and round it circled, splitting the water neatly like the periscope of a submarine. Topper was hardly pleased with the presence of Oscar, but he was enjoying the river too thoroughly to leave it undisturbed to the dog. His enjoyment was interrupted by a greeting from the bank.

“Good morning,” the Colonel called to him. “Will you join me in a drink?”

“That’s all I ever seem to be doing,” replied Topper, swimming over to the Colonel. “But just for once I will. After this I’m going to swear off for a while.”

The Colonel passed down the bottle and Topper refreshed himself.

“My dog seems to have grown less,” observed the Colonel, watching the sportive tail. “I’ll have to do some hard work on him today.”

“If you make him disappear altogether you’d be doing me a favor,” said Mr. Topper, holding up the bottle.

“The creative spirit is too strong in me for that,” replied the Colonel. “I must make him a whole dog or bust.”

His head was withdrawn from the bank and in a few minutes he reappeared accompanied by Mrs. Hart and Marion Kerby, very sketchily attired in improvised bathing suits. With little screams of delight they plunged into the river and swam friskily round the dismayed Topper, who, submerged up to his chin, was modestly treading water.

“An auspicious beginning to a new day,” cried the Colonel. “This will set us all up splendidly.”

“This and a good breakfast,” added Mrs. Hart.

“What a night it was, Cosmo,” said Marion, swimming up to him and resting her hand on his shoulder. “Did you ever have so much fun?”

“It was fun,” admitted Topper, “but whether I should have enjoyed it or not I am too vague to remember. What did we do with the automobile?”

“It’s still at the road-house. We’ll get it presently and move along.”

“I don’t move along an inch,” replied Topper, “until all of you have cleared out of here.”

“I’ll get them out,” said Marion. Then, turning to the others, she said, “The last one out forfeits a drink. Only three are left in the bottle.”

This announcement was immediately followed by an undignified scramble up the bank of the river, the Colonel doing his best to block Mrs. Hart’s progress. With great good humor Mr. Topper watched the three pairs of legs speeding over the grass. Marion Kerby was leading the way, running like a frightened deer, her flimsy draperies streaming in the wind. After a final turn in the water, Topper emerged from the river, and, casting a cautious glance about him, sought concealment in the bushes, his eyes still filled with the grace and beauty of Marion Kerby’s flying form.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Mr. Topper
Does Not Celebrate

In this convivial manner began one of the most active and interesting periods of Mr. Topper’s incredible vacation. He had originally decided that he needed a change. Now his needs were more than satisfied. No man’s life could have undergone more radical alterations. The Colonel and Mrs. Hart garnished his trip with their misconduct, lending to an automobile tour the atmosphere of a raiding party.

For three weeks the four of them cruised perilously about the countryside, upsetting the entire New England States and leaving ruined and shattered nerves in the wake of the hard pressed automobile. At night they slept wherever they chanced to find themselves and frequently they found themselves in strange and unaccountable places. Tonight it might be a road-house, on the following one a field. And there were moments so fraught with danger that they retreated to the woods until the hue and cry had subsided.

Despite the many discomforts of this open-air existence, Mr. Topper accepted his lot for reasons of economy, Mrs. Hart and the Colonel being rather fastidious in their tastes. Whenever the party put up at an inn they loudly demanded the best of accommodations, for which they graciously allowed Mr. Topper to pay. That neither of them had been asked to become permanently attached to Mr. Topper never seemed to occur to them. They were childlike in their faith that they were wanted. Topper occasionally wondered about this, reflecting that his invitation to the Colonel to share his Scotch had turned out to be one of the most costly acts of hospitality he had ever performed.

Nevertheless, Mr. Topper appeared to have profited by his outing. His body had grown lean and alert, ready to run at a moment’s notice, and his skin had been tanned by constant exposure to the elements. His character had also toughened considerably and his drinking capacity enlarged. True, he was hardly what one would call a desperate and reckless man, yet he had learned to accept danger with fortitude and delinquency with tolerance. Nor did his reputation weigh too heavily on his mind. By day he flaunted it in the face of the world and at night it dangled in jeopardy. And strangely enough Mr. Topper, in spite of his disorderly life, or rather, because of it, had become a better member of society; more self-reliant, more capable and far more interesting. He discovered in his heart the first faint whispering of pure Christianity, and in some way he continued to keep his virtue intact by keeping his vices active.

After the swimming party in the river he had eschewed strong liquor, and Marion Kerby had followed his example. Of course there had been a few slight lapses, but these had been such trifling affairs that they no longer counted with Topper. The Colonel and Mrs. Hart, however, were implacable in their thirst, to the quenching of which they devoted most of their energy and thought. For several days at a time they would absent themselves from the company of Mr. Topper and Marion to revel in more congenial surroundings. From these little side trips they invariably returned in a state of moral collapse; Oscar, more or less visible, close on his master’s heels.

During the absence of this unedifying couple, Topper and Marion dwelt together in comparatively quiet and peaceful companionship. On one of her flights from his side she had acquired, without cost, a copy of the “Odyssey,” and this brave tale they read together throughout the long, still, summer days.

For the first time in his life Topper came to realize that loose living and large thinking could get along quite comfortably together, that they were in fact boon companions. Under the influence of Marion Kerby he developed along altogether new and improved lines. But whenever the Colonel and Mrs. Hart returned from their excursions, Marion reverted to her former ways and joined them in a conspiracy to destroy Mr. Topper’s tranquillity.

On this particular occasion there were good reasons for rejoicing. Oscar at last, after a tremendous burst of concentration, had succeeded in materializing up to the ears. This was the farthest north the dog had ever achieved, and as a consequence the Colonel was bubbling over with gratification and pride.

“Just mark my words,” he went about saying. “I’ll make a whole dog of him yet.”

Oscar, rather dizzy at his unexpected success, swaggered aggressively in his gait and danced incompletely around. Up to this time he had shown but little interest in his personal appearance, being satisfied to remain at whatever length of dog he happened to find himself. On some days he was only an animated tail, on others a leaping rump, and on several occasions he appeared simply as a leg and let it go at that. Mr. Topper had never grown thoroughly accustomed to Oscar because of his continually changing appearance, but the man’s natural love of animals gradually overcame his first decided objections. Today he shared in the joy of the others and complimented Oscar on his brilliant showing, saying that he hoped someday to see his face.

“If ever there was an occasion that justified a celebration that occasion is now at hand,” declared the Colonel with conviction. “I know of a first-rate hotel near-by and I strongly suggest that we put up there for the night.”

“You’re a particularly ingenious person in finding occasion to justify a celebration,” replied Mr. Topper, “but on this one, Colonel, I’m with you. I’d do anything in my power to encourage that dog of yours to go one way or the other, preferably the other. Let us descend on this hotel.”

“Never have I seen such an improvement in a man in all my life,” exclaimed Mrs. Hart in rapture. “Marion, you’ve done him a world of good.”

Topper cast her a critical glance. “You look terrible,” he remarked. “You should cut it out for a while.”

“But our visit is nearly over,” she replied with a little sigh. “Let’s all raise hell while our ectoplasm lasts. You don’t have to worry, Topper.”

“What a tough baby she is,” Mr. Topper mused to himself. Then he added aloud, “Is your husband still alive?”

“Yes, thank God,” she replied with fervor, “and I wish him good health and a long life.”

“Amen,” said the Colonel piously.

“Beautiful characters,” remarked Mr. Topper. “What about this celebration?”

To deprive the hotel of its legitimate profit it was decided that Mr. Topper should engage a large room and that the others should, as the Colonel tactfully phrased it, “join him there.”

“The idea is good,” agreed Mr. Topper, “but for one consideration. What about Oscar?”

“We can cram him into the trunk on the back and cut an air hole in it,” replied the Colonel, proceeding to act on his words.

“If Oscar can stand it I can,” remarked Mr. Topper. “What’s to prevent him from dematerializing and joining us at some ill-chosen moment?”

“I hardly think he’ll do that,” said the Colonel. “He’s so pleased with himself as he is that he wouldn’t lose an inch for the world.”

“Let us devoutly hope so,” said Mr. Topper, as he watched the Colonel and Mrs. Hart unceremoniously cram Oscar into the trunk.

The hotel lay far back on a deep green, floor-like lawn which supported the weight of many trees, large trees whose generous limbs showered the benediction of shade upon the opulent persons who sat beneath them discussing golf, bridge and gin and appraising the new arrivals. The hotel itself was a rangy structure, having been added to in various styles of architecture as its popularity spread abroad. However, through sheer massiveness, it succeeded in presenting a harmonious whole, being sufficiently antique and modern to appeal to the comfortably artistic.

Around dinner time the front of the hotel afforded a striking study in modesty. Some of the ladies dressed directly in front of their windows, some dressed a trifle removed, but no lady, it seemed, ever dressed entirely out of sight. It was around dinner time when Mr. Topper arrived and so naturally he had no eyes for the blue sea that swept away to the horizon nor for the tent-like sails that slanted against the sky. As he followed the bell boy down a dark corridor along which trunks were parked like so many automobiles, a tinkling sound of an unmistakable nature issued from every door. Patriotic Americans were paying their evening tribute to the sacred laws of the land.

“If it were not so confounded hot,” thought Topper, “I’d think I was on a sleigh ride. That tinkling makes me thirsty.”

With the foresight bred of experience he halted the bell boy at the door and took the key from his hand.

“I can do very nicely now myself,” he told the boy, giving him a generous tip. “Don’t bother to come in.”

It was well that he took this precaution, for, when he entered the room, he found his companions in varying stages of incompleteness. The Colonel was practically present, but Mrs. Hart and Marion Kerby were still sufficiently vague to have given the bell boy a decided shock.

“Sorry to have kept you waiting,” he remarked, dropping the bags to the floor. “This is a decidedly musical hotel, isn’t it, Colonel?”

“It is,” replied the Colonel. “And our room alone is silent. What do you say to my taking steps?”

“Under ordinary circumstances I’d say no,” said Mr. Topper, “but as this is a celebration, and incidentally a hot evening, I quite agree with you. Steps should be taken; but step, Colonel, with the utmost caution. Don’t, for God’s sake, stumble.”

“Leave everything to me,” replied the Colonel as he swiftly faded from view.

“I don’t have to,” remarked Topper. “You’d take it yourself anyway.”

In a few minutes a gleaming cocktail shaker was seen to float through the open window. Without taking the time to reappear, the Colonel poured out a small drink and tasted it.

“Terrible,” the voice remarked. “I’ll take it back and throw it in his face.”

The shaker floated away and after a short wait another one, accompanied by a bottle of gin, appeared at the window and, drifting across the room to the table, settled there with a silvery tinkle. The Colonel emerged from obscurity and sampled his plunder.

“Excellent!” he exclaimed. “Excellent! Now we can all have a drink.”

From down the hall came the babble of excited voices mingled with the sound of running feet and slamming doors.

“Somebody seems to be upset,” remarked Marion Kerby.

“It sounds so,” said Mr. Topper. “How did your victims behave, Colonel?”

“Very nicely,” replied the Colonel. “As is usual in such cases they were too confused to realize what had happened until after it had happened. The man was standing with the shaker held aloft, poised for the downward shake. I snatched it from his hand, seized the bottle of gin and fled, casting back a fleeting glance at the petrified company. The man was still holding his hand in the air like Ajax defying the lightning or Liberty bereft of her torch. One woman, I believe, had fainted. That was about all.”

He knocked the shaker against the table and made a slight dent in it.

“In case of a search being instigated,” he explained, “we can identify our property by this mark. All gin looks alike, but to make assurance doubly sure we had better drink this up as speedily as possible.”

“Justifiable inebriety,” Mr. Topper suggested.

“Exactly,” agreed the Colonel. “Telephone for some glasses, ice and a few oranges.”

When Mr. Topper went down to dinner half an hour later he was in a state of high good humor. Marion, the Colonel and Mrs. Hart had elected to remain behind, the Colonel judiciously pointing out that the dinner hour was the ideal time for looting, so many guests being absent from their rooms. Moreover, there was still some gin left to be turned into cocktails. Mr. Topper, relieved to escape from his boisterous companions, was delighted with this arrangement.

“Don’t hurry back,” said Marion as he was about to leave. “We can manage everything. Stroll about and amuse yourself.”

With a grateful look Mr. Topper innocently departed and made his way to the dining room. Here he was seated at an enviable table occupied at the moment by a handsomely gowned woman. She was plump and pretty and appeared to have been in this life long enough to have learned how to enjoy it without too many qualms. Mr. Topper bowed and the woman smiled, and before the end of the dinner he had gleaned the information that the woman’s name was Mrs. Brewster and that her husband had died some years ago of Bright’s disease as she had repeatedly warned him he would. On leaving the table she favored him with a particularly promising smile and intimated that there were many beautiful walks about the place if one cared for that sort of thing. That sort of thing, Mr. Topper said flatly, was exactly what he cared for most. She smiled again and undulated away, Mr. Topper following her departure with glowing eyes.

When he had finished his dinner he repaired to the general assembly room of the hotel and mingled complacently with the guests. A tall, perspiring gentleman was raffling lace garments for the benefit of some worthy cause, and round this gentleman the ladies were milling, their ears eagerly attuned to catch the numbers he called out as he drew small bits of paper from a hat.

As Mr. Topper was standing there enjoying this little flurry of excitement, the woman directly in front of him gave a most undignified start and rubbed herself tenderly. Then she turned and glared at Mr. Topper, whispering a few words to the woman next to her as she did so.

“Why, what a thing to do!” exclaimed the woman, looking indignantly at Mr. Topper.

This was too much for Topper. He shrank guiltily away to the other side of the circle, where he stood wondering what it was all about. But here the same thing happened, only more publicly. A woman, brushing past Mr. Topper, suddenly stopped and, uttering a little cry of pain, looked at him with a shocked expression.

“Sir,” she said, “if you do that again I’ll have you ordered from this hotel.”

“But what have I done?” asked the bewildered Topper.

“You know very well,” she replied significantly. “If you were a gentleman you wouldn’t even ask.”

Before the disapproving glances of a number of guests, Mr. Topper abandoned all hope of clearing himself and fled to the smoking room. Here he sat down on a sofa beside an elderly gentleman who was snoring with childlike candor, his half-smoked cigar still held in his hand. Topper produced his handkerchief and mopped his flushed face. When he looked up the eyes of the elderly gentleman were fixed reproachfully on him.

“Why did you do that?” he demanded.

“You were snoring,” replied Mr. Topper for lack of a better answer.

“That was no way to stop me,” said the gentleman. “Don’t do it again or I’ll call for help.”

Topper, at his wit’s end, thereupon decided that his room was the only safe place for him. Taking the precaution to stay as far away as possible from anyone, he made for the stairs, but here his retreat was cut off by the charming Mrs. Brewster. He was on the point of hurrying past her when she gave a sudden little cry of surprise and looked coyly at him.

“Why, you naughty man,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m not angry. Just for that you must take a walk with me.”

Mr. Topper, too alarmed to inquire what “just for that” signified to Mrs. Brewster, obediently followed her from the hotel. She led him to a gathering of boulders overhanging the beach and gracefully arranged herself thereon, using Mr. Topper’s hand for support and forgetting to give it back to him.

Mr. Topper’s mind was in a state of siege, unhappy thoughts attacking it from all sides, as he vainly strove to figure out what curse had overtaken him. He was convinced that Marion Kerby was in some way involved in his predicament, that she was, in fact, directly responsible for it. Mrs. Brewster’s cooing voice interrupted his moody reflections.

“I was such a lonesome girl until you came,” she said. “There’s not a single man in all this hotel that’s half alive.”

“But I’m not a single man,” Mr. Topper replied cautiously.

“Oh, I don’t mean that,” she laughed. “And anyway I hate single men. They always propose marriage.”

Not feeling quite sure as to what proposals were expected of him, Mr. Topper made some pleasant reference to the character of the night.

“It’s delicious,” murmured Mrs. Brewster, moving closer to him and extending one hand to the sea.

Then a strange thing occurred. A white arm suddenly darted from the night and the hand at the end of it, seizing Mrs. Brewster’s, shook it violently up and down. With a cry of terror she fell back into Mr. Topper’s arms, and when he had succeeded in propping her up, a headless dog was sitting calmly before them on the rocks. Mr. Topper recognized Oscar immediately, but Mrs. Brewster had never met the dog. Nor did she stay now to be introduced. With little moaning noises she rose unsteadily to her feet and scrambled over the boulders with goatlike agility. The sound of maniacal laughter bursting in the air above her hastened her departure. Mr. Topper turned back to the ocean with thoughts of suicide, only to find that Oscar had vanished and that Marion Kerby was standing in his place.

“So that,” she began in a voice of cold fury, “so that is the way you make use of your liberty. Picking a woman up at dinner and taking her out on the rocks. You love walking, don’t you? Yes, you do not. I know. I know everything, heard every word you said, saw every look you gave her. Sitting here holding hands and expecting me to go rustling up grog for your fat paunch. Quite a ladies’ man, aren’t you? Having a grand time and me hanging around like a dope. Well, let me tell you one thing, I’m through. See? I’m through. I quit now, but if I ever catch you with that moth-eaten old troll again I’ll scare the living lights out of her. Of all the nerve. Sitting here on the rocks. Disgusting. Don’t talk to me, you’re too low for words. Come along, Oscar, and I’ll shove you back in your trunk. We’ve intruded too long already.”

Oscar appeared from the shadows and followed Marion Kerby’s swiftly retreating form. Topper, awaking from his daze, sprang to his feet and cried after Marion.

“Don’t go away,” he pleaded. “Give me a chance. I can explain everything. Come back, Marion.”

“If this damn dog only had a head,” she furiously shouted back, “I’d sic him on you. Don’t dare to follow me or I’ll make the scene of your life.”

Through a side door of the hotel Topper sneaked up to his room only to find it depressingly empty. Squeezed oranges and empty gin bottles bore silent witness to the success of the Colonel’s endeavors. Topper walked wearily to the window and looked out over the lawn. Had Marion Kerby permanently left him? That question was uppermost in his mind. He had never before seen her so angry or unreasonable, yet with all his heart he wanted her back. For a long time he walked restlessly up and down his room. Several times he whispered her name, but received no answer. Finally he undressed, switched off the light and, getting into bed, lay there wondering what his vanished companions were doing.

“A lovely celebration,” he muttered bitterly to himself, rolling over on his side and seeking forgetfulness in sleep.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Oscar in Toto

Fervently hoping that he would be less easily recognizable in a bathing suit, Mr. Topper on the following morning took a solitary breakfast in his room, then hurried down to the beach. Here for an hour or so he reclined torpidly on the warm sand, too dispirited even to attempt the water lapping invitingly at his feet. Under happier circumstances he would have been secretly thrilled by this broad expanse of ocean, but today the old spell was broken. Topper was a lonely man, longing for Marion Kerby.

With gloomy eyes he watched the early bathers and reviled them in his heart. Their carefree outbursts of enterprise depressed him. One young chap he particularly disliked. He was tall and blond and beautifully tanned, clean-cut, varsity manhood every inch of him. A slim girl and shapely was watching this cute giant with her soul in her eyes as he carried a canoe, as if it were a straw, down to the water’s edge. And when Mr. Topper saw this happy couple go paddling off over the deep blue sea he earnestly hoped that a large wet wave would rise therefrom and mightily smite their budding romance.

“He smokes a pipe,” thought Mr. Topper, jeeringly, “and that’s just what he would smoke, a pipe, man-fashion.”

Nor did the children playing round him appeal to his better nature. He thought they all looked bold and unpleasant and wished they would go somewhere else. The beach was no place for them. Why couldn’t they keep to their rooms? As a matter of fact, why couldn’t all these people clear out and leave him alone? Take that man for instance, romping with his little son. Could anything be more revolting?

Mr. Topper turned away from this disturbing scene and gazed idly down at two small bare feet, one of which was impatiently tapping the sand. Automatically his eyes traveled up an attractive length of slim limbs until they found themselves squinting into Marion Kerby’s face – a set, unfriendly face.

“If I catch you in the company of that woman,” said the face with suppressed conviction, “I’m going out and drown her.”

“You won’t catch me,” he answered meekly. “Sit down.”

Mrs. Hart and the Colonel joined them at this moment and allied themselves with Mr. Topper in urging Marion to be seated. Ungraciously she flopped to the sand and favored Topper with a sneer.

“If it hadn’t been for these two,” she told him, “you’d never have seen me again. As it is, I doubt if I stay.”

“But I hope you will,” said Topper.

“Don’t speak to me now,” she snapped. “I can’t stand your silly voice. It’s ‘yam, yam’ this and ‘yam, yam’ that until I’m nearly mad. Keep quiet.”

“All right,” replied Mr. Topper with even greater meekness. “I won’t say a word.”

The Colonel’s voice broke in on their happy reunion.

“You should have been with us last night, Topper,” he said. “We had a splendid time.”

“What did you do?” asked Topper, not greatly caring now that he had Marion back.

“Made friends with the proprietor,” the Colonel replied, “and got him squiffed on his own grog. It was wonderful stuff.”

“Wonderful stuff,” Mrs. Hart echoed with deep feeling. “Wonderful!”

“He wants me to stay all summer,” Marion remarked casually. “Room and board free. He says I look all run down as if somebody had been terribly, terribly unkind to me. I just laughed in his face, but I haven’t told him whether I would or wouldn’t. Not yet.”

“You could do much worse, dearie,” Mrs. Hart said, furtively eyeing Mr. Topper’s face. “At least he doesn’t seem to be the flighty kind.”

Topper cast her a look of loathing, but discreetly held his peace.

“Well, Topper, shall we take a dip?” suggested the Colonel, rising from the sand.

Not knowing what else to do, Topper followed the Colonel’s example.

“Sit down!” flared Marion Kerby. “What are you trying to do, make a show of me on this beach? Sit down before I knock you down.”

In his eagerness to obey, Topper almost fell to the sand.

“All right,” he said. “All right.”

“Now get up,” she commanded, “and we’ll all take a dip.”

“Don’t let her get away with it,” whispered the Colonel. “I wouldn’t. They’re always meanest when they know they’re wrong. They want to break you down.”

“What chance have I?” said Topper. “She has every advantage in her favor and no scruples at all. She’s got me where she wants me.”

But before the swim was over friendly relations were once more established between Mr. Topper and Marion Kerby. From the way she treated him it seemed as if the unpleasant incident had never occurred. Topper, exalted to the skies, frolicked like a dolphin and lost all memory of the harsh words she had hurled at him. Exhausted at last by their flounderings, the party returned to the beach where they wallowed in the sand and went over the events of the past night, Mr. Topper listening with such an envious expression that Marion Kerby took his hand in hers and promised him a bigger and better celebration.

It was then that from down the beach came the terrified yelping of a dog. They looked in that direction and saw a large collie in the act of going mad. As he approached them his terror increased. He snapped at the air, spun round on his feet, arched himself in a desperate circle and rolled over in the sand. Nurses snatched up their charges, women screamed and the bathers fled to safety. During all this commotion the Colonel sat watching the actions of the collie with purely professional interest.

“Doesn’t look mad to me,” he observed. “Looks more as if he were fighting something.”

“Oscar,” breathed Mrs. Hart.

“Possibly,” replied the Colonel. “I forgot to mention that when I brought him his chow this morning, Oscar was not in the trunk.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Topper slowly. “Oh, dear me.”

At this moment the collie decided that enough was enough. He rolled over on his back, thrust his legs in the air, and let his tongue hang out. He was unmistakably through. Then above the vanquished dog appeared Oscar’s bushy tail, which was quickly followed by his hind quarters. Gradually the dog progressed until he had reached his ears. Here there was a hesitation, a noticeable wavering, then like the final shove at the goal line, Oscar’s head swam into view.

“By God! He’s done it,” exclaimed the Colonel.

The collie took one horrified look at Oscar, then turned his head away and closed his eyes. This was indeed too much. Oscar, as if forgetting his victim, trotted over to the Colonel and looked him square in the eye with an expression which eloquently conveyed the meaning that from now on he would take no more nonsense from anyone. He was a whole dog now in his own rights, and his rights were to be respected. With a nasty look at Mr. Topper he sprawled out in the sand and began to police his newly acquired hide. Meanwhile the collie had dragged himself away.

For some moments the Colonel studied his dog with puzzled and considering eyes, then presently his face cleared.

“I know what it is,” he said. “He must have forgotten his spot. He had a little spot in real life right on the side of his nose, the left side, but in the excitement and all I fancy he must have overlooked it.”

“That’s merely a detail, Colonel,” put in Mr. Topper. “Don’t send him back for his spot now. He can pick it up later.”

The Colonel agreed to this and the party reëntered their bath houses, Oscar’s performance having attracted to them rather unpleasant publicity. Some time later, when they foregathered on the lawn of the hotel, the Colonel was the last to appear, and when he did appear he was exploding with excitement.

“Don’t ask me where I got the news,” he began, “and anyway it doesn’t matter. George Kerby is back and is looking for you, Marion. He’s heading this way and he seems to have heard something.”

Topper looked for a chair, but finding none, braced himself on his legs.

“You’re not joking?” Marion calmly asked the Colonel.

“Credit me with more tact,” he replied in an injured voice. “This isn’t a trifling matter.”

“Did they say,” Topper painfully inquired, “did they say that he seemed to be angry?”

The Colonel laughed sardonically and Topper winced.

“Not at all,” replied the Colonel. “He’s just crazy to see you, Topper.”

“I wish I could say as much,” said Mr. Topper. “What, oh, what shall we do now?”

“Clear out,” answered the Colonel. “Vamoose plenty pronto.”

“I know just the place,” exclaimed Mrs. Hart, with a wild light in her eyes. “What a lark!”

“Try to take things seriously,” said Mr. Topper. “If you mean the lake I won’t go back there. I’m a marked man in that vicinity.”

“No,” Mrs. Hart explained. “It’s a deserted beach in Connecticut. No one ever goes there. It’s been left vacant through a family quarrel ever since my father died. What a family. I’m glad I’m out of it.”

“This is no time to be abusing your family,” Mr. Topper retorted. “Let’s start for this beach at once.”

“Not so fast,” said Mrs. Hart. “We’ll have to stop somewhere to buy some tents and provisions and things – —”

“And I’ll have to loot without delay the proprietor’s private locker,” interrupted the Colonel. “Oscar can sit with us and I’ll fill the trunk.”

Marion turned to the impatient Topper and placed a soothing hand on his arm.

“Don’t worry, old dear,” she told him. “We’ll take care of you. Hurry now and pack your things. We’ll be waiting in the car.”

“Won’t you come with me,” Topper pleaded. “For some reason I hate to be alone.”

Thus was the flight planned and right speedily was it executed. Twelve hours of high pressure driving, relieved only by an interlude of hectic buying, jostled them to their night-shrouded destination.

“What a devil of a place this is,” said the Colonel, sloshing about in the weeds and darkness. “The entire world is deserted.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Mrs. Hart replied. “Wait till the morning comes.”

“I won’t even wait for that,” said Mr. Topper, who had been diligently applying himself to the bottle throughout the entire course of the trip. “Here and now I sleep.”

“In spite of my remarks I’m still desperately engaged with these damn prehensile weeds,” the Colonel called. “This isn’t a beach, it’s a jungle.”

“The beach is farther on,” explained Mrs. Hart. “This field leads down to it.”

“Then be kind enough to put a cushion under me and place a bottle in my hand,” said the Colonel. “Then kiss me a chaste good-night. Like Topper, I sleep here and now.”

Some hours later, when the nice, clean, freshly starched sun rose and favored the field with its light it looked down on four untidy figures plus one rumpled dog stretched in various unpicturesque attitudes of slumber. Presently the figures stirred and sat up. They yawned, stretched and rubbed their eyes with frank disregard of each other’s presence. The dog unwound himself and snapped wearily at a fly. Mr. Topper was the first to speak.

“Are we safe?” he asked.

“So far, it seems,” replied Marion, fluffing out her hair, “but you never can tell about George.”

“The bottle, Colonel,” said Topper promptly. “Already I scent disaster.”

The bottle went the rounds, then the figures shook themselves and rose to their feet. Mrs. Hart led the way to the beach, the others straggling through the weeds beneath the weight of the tents and provisions. And the sun, as if to register its disapproval of their morning salutation, caused them to perspire freely.

The beach was a narrow yellow band, about one hundred yards in length, pocketed away in a wooded cove filled with cool, green water. Far out against a wall of billowy clouds a single sail stole gracefully along. Gulls were in the air. The smell of clam shells, salt and shrubbery gave a distinctive fragrance to the place.

“This is more than a deserted beach,” said Marion Kerby, appreciatively. “It’s a little pocket in nowhere. No wonder your family fought for it. I could live here the rest of my life, if I had a life to live.”

The smile she gave to Topper had lost a little of its old-time impertinence. Something about it troubled him. For a moment he tasted the savor of the end of things and caught a glimpse of an empty landscape. The very stillness of the place, its hushed, watchful solitude, the fanning out of the green, flat water and the clouds out there beyond conspired to make him feel that so much beauty could only end in pain. More than ever before he realized Marion Kerby’s keenness of feature and the world of untouched wonder that lay behind her eyes. Some subtle influence emanating from her at that moment made him begin already to miss her. He wanted to go over and stand close to her side, but, in his self-consciousness, the few feet separating them were as difficult to achieve as the Sahara Desert on stilts. All that he could say was:

“You’ve lived enough for two already.”

Apparently not hearing this remark, she walked away and sat down on a rock close to the water’s edge. The Colonel and Mrs. Hart were wrestling with the tents, the Colonel booming directions and assuring Oscar that if he did not go somewhere else he would speedily kick him back into the fourth dimension. Topper followed Marion and sat down at her feet. They were happy as they were, with silence and space around them, the deep blue sky above and the green water murmuring along the beach. There was a remote expression in Marion’s eyes as she gazed away from the shore. She seemed somehow to have withdrawn a little from Topper and her surroundings.

“Listen to me, Topper,” she said at last. “Are you any happier now that you’ve lost your stomach and your smug commuting ways?”

“I’ve lost more than that,” he replied, his eyes riveted on her face.

“What a coy devil you are,” she answered. “Do you mean to imply delicately that you’ve lost your heart to me?”

“You know it,” said Mr. Topper. “You know it with hateful complacency, but it’s true and so here we are.”

“Yes,” she answered with a little shrug of her shoulders. “And so here we are, but we won’t be here long, at least, I won’t.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Something is happening to me,” she replied. “I seem to be losing interest in things – all except you. Perhaps I’m getting high-planed.”

“Don’t do that,” he pleaded. “You never could be so lovely as you are right now.”

“Do you think so?” she said with a thoughtful smile. “For that you deserve a kiss. Come closer.”

Topper took her in his arms and pressed her to him.

“Make it snappy,” she exclaimed. “I didn’t ask you to strangle me. Hurry and help the Colonel. He’s swearing abominably at that poor woman.”

Topper was unable to analyze his emotions. Sensations were confused within him, happiness and sorrow, triumph and defeat. To work off his feelings he joined the Colonel’s staff and became desperately involved with a tent to the amusement of Mrs. Hart, who, upon Topper’s appearance, immediately sat down and gave up the struggle. The Colonel regarded her with a brutal eye.

“Get up,” he commanded, “and collect some wood and I’ll show you how to cook breakfast in case you don’t know.”

“I don’t know,” admitted Mrs. Hart, “and I don’t know that I care to know, but I will get some wood. The stomach of me is raging at the very thought of food. Teach Topper to cook. He looks enterprising.”

Under the Colonel’s skillful direction the camp was eventually arranged. During this interlude he showed himself to his best advantage, his military training coming to the fore. Topper became his chief assistant and Mrs. Hart the camp drone, her disinclination for work manifesting itself by her absence whenever there was any work to be done.

And now began one of the quietest and most peaceful phases of Mr. Topper’s vacation. The nearest village was five miles off and this they very seldom visited. Topper drove over once and came back with a canoe and some fresh provisions. The canoe was received with delight, the Colonel immediately going fishing in it, taking a bottle along. Some hours later he came back with nothing more useful than a tendency to stagger and to curse at the fish he had almost caught.

The days slipped by tranquilly, almost unnoticed, and gradually the fear of George Kerby’s arrival faded from Mr. Topper’s mind. Someone was always in swimming and there was always ample Scotch or some other equally heady beverage, the Colonel being a splendid provider. At night they gambled for Topper’s money and cheated him when they could, Mrs. Hart being the most successful and persistent, making it a point never to play an honest hand unless driven to it. Topper took Marion paddling whenever she would let him and he fell more deeply under her spell, although no further demonstration occurred. And the Colonel succeeded at last in making Oscar retrieve his spot. Sometimes it would be in the wrong place, but the Colonel was not particular. Topper became thoroughly attached to Oscar and told him about his cat, Scollops, the dog listening with his head on one side and an ear politely cocked.

It was Mrs. Hart’s surprising suggestion one Sunday that they should all go to church. They did this and Marion Kerby established a local miracle by slipping away in the middle of the sermon and materializing angelically directly above the preacher’s head. Mrs. Hart laughed so hysterically that she had to be helped from the church, but from that time on the preacher began to believe a little in the truth of his own sermons. The news of this event spread throughout the county and brought much fame and many visitors to this little country church which hitherto had been content to remain in bucolic obscurity.

The following night, just before dawn, Topper awoke with a feeling of profound depression which was not relieved by what he saw as soon as his eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness. A figure was standing at the flap of the tent. That was all. It was motionless. It just stood there and seemed to be examining Topper with calculating interest. When Mr. Topper moved the figure laughed unpleasantly. Most unpleasantly, Mr. Topper thought.

“Topper,” said the figure, “Topper, I’ve got you now, and, God, how I’m going to make you sweat.”

Mr. Topper was sweating already. His tongue clove to the roof of his mouth and his hands trembled on the coverings.

“Who’s speaking?” came a sleepy voice from the other bed. “Are you awake, Cosmo?”

The figure at the flap of the tent raised its hands to its head and clutched its hair.

“By all that’s holy!” it cried. “Living together in open shame.”

“It’s all a mistake,” said Mr. Topper in a despairing voice. “I didn’t even know she was here. She must have sneaked in after I went to bed. For heaven’s sake, George, wait until I explain.”

“And if I believed that,” replied George Kerby more calmly, “you’d probably tell me another one, wouldn’t you?”

“Why, if it isn’t George himself!” exclaimed Marion, rising from the bed. “And he’s in one of his most playful moods. Welcome home, honey.”

“Shameless woman,” he cried. “Put something over your shoulders. God, won’t I make him sweat for this! Leave this room, Marion.”

“It isn’t a room, it’s a tent,” she replied. “Do try to be accurate, and while we’re on the subject of accuracy, I might mention the fact that Topper was right. I did sneak in here after he fell asleep. My tent is some yards away, but the Colonel was snoring so violently I came in here.”

“The Colonel?” said George and Topper at the same time.

“Yes,” she explained patiently. “His tent is close to mine.”

“It won’t go with me,” George Kerby replied. “Lies, lies, lies, a tissue of lies from beginning to end. Oh, but won’t he sweat for this.”

“Don’t keep telling me how much I’m going to sweat,” put in Mr. Topper. “I’ve lost five pounds in the last five minutes. Let Marion explain.”

“Yes, George,” said Marion. “Don’t be tragic. I can explain everything. Topper’s as innocent as a lamb. He doesn’t know any better. Don’t jump at conclusions.”

Once more George Kerby laughed unpleasantly.

“I’m hardly jumping,” he retorted. “Conclusions are forced down my throat.”

Topper shivered and pulled the bed clothing round him.

“You talk to him, Marion,” he suggested. “Take him away somewhere and tell him everything. Maybe he wants a drink. It’s such lovely Scotch. Will you have a drink, George?”

Topper’s voice trailed away to a wistful nothingness.

“I’ll go,” said George, “but don’t think you’re going to escape. I’ll keep my eye on this tent and in the morning you’ll answer to me. Understand? In the morning you’ll answer to me. You’ll sweat then.”

“Why must you repeat everything?” complained Mr. Topper. “Take a good drink and lie down. You’re all upset.”

“Not so upset as you are going to be,” George Kerby replied. “Not nearly so upset. Now I’m going, but I’ll be back at any moment.”

“Good-night,” said Mr. Topper in a cloyingly friendly voice. “Good-night, George. I hope you’ll feel better in the morning after you’ve had a nice talk with your wife.”

“Never felt better in my life,” George answered. “I’m fit all over and that’s more than you’re going to be.”

Marion threw on a bathrobe and led her belligerent husband away, but sleep was murdered for Topper. In the pale dawn he sat hunched in his bed and wondered what George was going to do to make him sweat so much. Not until it was well on to breakfast time did he have the courage to leave his tent. The whole camp was astir and George Kerby was sitting on a log in dignified aloofness.

“Here’s where the sweating begins,” thought Topper as he looked fearfully at George’s grim face.

When the Colonel saw Topper he greeted him with unusual impressiveness and led him aside.

“Topper,” he said, “I’m sorry, but Mr. Kerby demands satisfaction. There’s no way out of it. If you don’t fight him he’ll kill you.”

“He’ll kill me if I do,” replied Mr. Topper.

“Perhaps, but there’s always a chance,” said the Colonel. “Now this is what I propose and Kerby seems to agree.”

The Colonel’s proposition was unique. It was nothing less than a duel with clam shells at twenty paces, each principal to have three throws apiece.

“Why I never threw a clam shell in my life,” said Topper, “but I understand they’re very dangerous. Isn’t there some other way? Some more reasonable way?”

“I can’t answer for the other way,” replied the Colonel. “He is waiting for your answer. If you refuse, may God be with you.”

“May God be with me anyway,” breathed Topper. “Make him agree to one throw apiece, won’t you, Colonel?”

“I’ll do whatever I can,” said the Colonel, walking with great dignity to George Kerby.

Marion brought Topper a cup of coffee and looked at him sympathetically.

“He’s a bum shot,” she whispered. “Don’t worry. It could be much worse.”

“Can you do anything with him?” Topper asked. “Get him drunk or something?”

“Not until after the duel,” she answered. “He insists on satisfaction. I’ve pleaded with him for hours.”

“I’m so thrilled!” exclaimed Mrs. Hart, joining them. “When is it going to be? Think of it, a duel, and we’ll be here to see it. It’s just too wonderful.”

The Colonel left Kerby and approached the group.

“Be ready then at five o’clock,” he said. “Kerby agrees to two shots apiece and intimates that he will need only one.”

Kerby had left the log and was arranging a target on the beach. Then he collected some clam shells and began to hurl them at his imaginary foeman with all his might. At first the shells went wide of their mark, but gradually he began to get the range of the target. Patiently, deliberately and earnestly he practiced all morning until he had developed murderous control. Everywhere Topper went he heard the clam shells striking the target with increasing frequency and force. The sound got on his nerves. With fascinated eyes he watched George Kerby at his grim occupation. After a brief rest for luncheon Kerby returned at once to the target and put on the finishing touches. Topper, unable to bear the sight, retired to his tent. Once he emerged and endeavored to do a little practicing on his own part, but when he saw George Kerby sardonically watching his futile attempts to hit a tree, he dropped the clam shells and stole back to his tent.

Slowly the hours dragged by until five o’clock, when the Colonel promptly appeared and solemnly conducted Topper to the beach.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “take your places at the proper distance and when I drop this handkerchief start firing.”

At this little announcement, Mrs. Hart, who had been drinking a trifle in anticipation of the event, clapped her hands enthusiastically.

“Atta boy!” she cried.

Topper looked at her with disgust, then turned his eyes to Marion. She smiled back at him encouragingly, but remained silent. George Kerby beckoned to the Colonel and made a few hurried remarks, after which the Colonel approached Topper with a troubled expression on his face.

“Topper,” he said, “Mr. Kerby insists on his privileges as a spirit. He demands to be allowed to dematerialize as that is, he claims, his natural state.”

“Tell him not to be childish,” said Mr. Topper. “How can I see to throw at him?”

“I mentioned that fact and he replied that that was your worry, not his,” answered the Colonel.

“Ask him if he would prefer to murder me in cold blood,” Topper remarked bitterly. “There’s a razor in my tent.”

“Do you agree to Mr. Kerby’s proposition?” continued the Colonel.

“What else can I do?” cried Topper. “If I don’t agree he’ll chase me all over this place with clam shells anyway. Let’s get it over.”

“Very well,” replied the Colonel. “Here are your shells, and good luck.”

Topper looked miserably at the clam shells the Colonel placed in his hand.

“Give him little ones,” he whispered to the Colonel. “Don’t forget, Colonel, pick out two small ones, small and light.”

“When I drop the handkerchief,” the Colonel once more announced, “you gentlemen can begin to fire.”

“At what?” called Mr. Topper as George Kerby faded from the scene.

“I can’t see as that makes much difference,” replied the Colonel. “But if you want a mark fire where you last saw him.”

The Colonel raised his arm and the handkerchief fluttered in the air.

“One minute,” called Mr. Topper. “Suppose he sneaks up behind me? Tell him he shouldn’t do that.”

“Don’t interrupt me again,” said the Colonel impatiently. “Of course he wouldn’t do that.”

“Oh, wouldn’t he!” answered Topper. “That’s just what he would do.”

He looked at the spot where he had last seen George Kerby and saw a clam shell poised in the air. To Topper it looked neither little nor light. It was a brutal clam shell, the great-grandfather of all clams.

“Are you ready, gentlemen?” called the Colonel.

“I am,” answered Mrs. Hart. “What a lark. Topper, you’ll soon be with us, old boy.”

The handkerchief dropped to the ground and Topper, aiming at the poised shell, missed it. Then the poised shell aimed at Topper and did not miss. It met Mr. Topper just above the eye and sent him speedily to earth. As if the shell had struck her, Marion gave a little cry and ran over to him, lifting his head to her lap. George Kerby reappeared and stood looking down at Topper rather guiltily. The Colonel was bathing the wound.

“If you’ve killed him,” said Marion Kerby, “he’ll be over on our side and then the triangle will be complete.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” replied Kerby, bending anxiously over Topper. “I didn’t mean to throw so hard. Pull him through, Colonel.”

Mrs. Hart was crying softly to herself and sipping a glass of Scotch.

“He was such a nice man,” she sobbed. “Such a generous host.”

The Colonel and Marion worked swiftly and silently as they skillfully bandaged Topper’s head. Then the Colonel took him in his arms and carried him to his tent, Mrs. Hart following after them with tipsy lamentations.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Return to the Tree

With an expression of congealed solicitude George Kerby was holding a glass of Scotch to Mr. Topper’s lips when next the stricken man opened his eyes on a world he had elaborately resigned himself to leave forever. The Colonel was making bandages with professional detachment and Marion Kerby was sitting on one side of the cot. Mrs. Hart, in an attitude of florid grief, was untidily draped over the foot of it. As he took in the serious group Topper was reminded of wax figures.

“Are you trying to poison me,” he asked, “now that you’ve got me down?”

“Oh, dear me, no,” Mrs. Hart pleaded moistly. “Please take a little drink. It will do you a world of good. It’s already helped me tremendously.”

Mr. Topper looked with surprise at her tear-moist face.

“What’s this?” he asked. “Tears? Don’t cry, my child, he’ll get me the next time.”

“Yes,” she answered dramatically, “they’re tears if you want to know. Ask them all. Tell him, Marion. Ever since that clam shell knocked you out I’ve been crying as if my heart would break. And I do believe it will unless some considerate person gives me a little something to tuck up my nerves.”

Kerby bent over Topper and looked contritely into his eyes.

“Listen, old man,” he said. “Tell me that I’m forgiven. I’m terribly ashamed of myself for getting you all messed up. The honors are even now.”

“But not the injuries,” Mr. Topper replied with a tired smile. “You put the gory in glory, George, but I don’t mind. Give me that drink and let’s call it a duel. There’s one thing, though, I’ll never forgive, not to the end of my days.”

“What’s that?” asked George Kerby.

“You’ve eternally ruined clams for me,” said Topper. “You don’t know what that means. Clams were my only vice once upon a time – a secret craving I kept to myself. Even my wife didn’t know I loved them. That’s all over now. Hereafter whenever I see a clam I’m going to duck and run like hell.”

“How droll he is,” murmured Mrs. Hart. “Let’s all have a drink.”

They all did, all save Marion Kerby, who held a moist cloth to Mr. Topper’s head.

“Do you want me to send these ruffians away?” she asked him. “Perhaps you had better rest.”

“Let the ruffians stay,” he answered. “The situation pleases my vanity. Never before have I been such a center of attraction.”

The Colonel turned to Kerby with one of his most disarming smiles.

“Now that the storm is over,” he said, “I want to tell everyone that it’s been a real pleasure to have met George Kerby. We have thought so much about him.”

“Thanks,” acknowledged Kerby, “but if it hadn’t been for Marion’s playfulness in that church you might never have had the pleasure. You can’t imagine what a great to-do her misplaced sense of humor has created. By this time, I’ll bet, the papers are full of it and the sparks are fairly flying from scientific and religious circles.”

“She was too funny for words,” said Mrs. Hart.

“Perhaps,” replied Kerby, “but as soon as I heard of it I knew what had happened. I recognized that particular brand of madness, having suffered from it for years. After that it was easy to find you.”

“How fortunate,” said the Colonel, with highly polished hypocrisy. “If we had known you were back we would have scoured the countryside. Your return was our constant topic of conversation. Topper and your wife were forever talking about it.”

“Were they?” cried Kerby, pitifully pleased. “What a beast I’ve been.”

“They were,” continued the Colonel, “but don’t worry. It’s been a good summer all around. You’ve outraged Europe and we’ve despoiled the New England States. At last we meet. A little misunderstanding, a most natural misunderstanding, is happily if painfully settled. Therefore I propose a final celebration. I feel that my ectoplasm is running low and I fancy we’re all about in the same boat We can’t fade away without one last fling, but this time the party will be on us. Mrs. Hart and your servant will give it.”

“Where?” asked Mrs. Hart, sleepily opening her eyes. “May I come?”

The Colonel cast her a glance of commiseration.

“The events of the day have been too much for the poor woman,” he remarked. “She is sodden with excitement.”

“It’s not that at all,” she protested. “Tell him, Marion. It’s just because I’m so frantically sympathetic. No one suffers as I do. No one has such nerves. You wouldn’t believe how much …”

“The Colonel,” George Kerby interrupted impatiently, “has extended to us a very handsome invitation which I, for one, accept on the spot. But where can we stage this celebration? From what I’ve been able to gather, you people have about exhausted all the hospitality on this side of the Rockies.”

“How about right here?” suggested the Colonel. “This is a good, safe place.”

“No,” put in Topper, “let’s go back to the old inn – you know, George, where we pulled our first party. Mrs. Hart and the Colonel would love it there.”

Marion Kerby was gazing at Topper with a reminiscent light in her eyes.

“I second the motion,” she said. “The old inn would be a lovely place for a farewell party.”

At this Mrs. Hart’s shoulders began to shake convulsively.

“Don’t say farewell,” she sobbed. “I can’t bear to think of the parting. Quick, Colonel, my glass.”

Marion motioned to the Colonel, who immediately lifted the grief-stricken woman to her feet, and, whispering words of comfort in her ear, assisted her from the tent.

Two days later the Colonel and Mrs. Hart left for the inn, there to complete arrangements for the celebration. The others, including Oscar, who had stubbornly refused to dematerialize, were to follow by motor within a few days.

On the morning of departure Topper, still bearing the honorable scar of battle, wandered dejectedly about the place. He was looking forward with but small eagerness to the farewell celebration and would have preferred to linger on forever in this quiet spot where he had spent so many happy and carefree days. Everything spoke to him of Marion, the water, the beach and the trees. Everything breathed farewell, the parting of the ways. If he could only have remained near her even with her husband present, it would have been better than a final separation. For the first time in many days he thought of Mrs. Topper, thought of her miserably, protestingly and with a little pang of shame. He had treated the poor creature terribly, he realized that, and the realization made it no easier for him to face their inevitable reunion.

To escape his thoughts he put on his bathing suit and went for a parting swim. He swam far out to the mouth of the cove and looked across the water to the distant horizon where tumbled clouds, touched with sunlight, were banked against the sky. He wished that he could swim out there with Marion Kerby and hide with her behind that fleecy curtain, to be protected by it forever from the urgency of life, to prolong there in a curtained land the romance and freedom he had enjoyed for only a few short months. His dream of escape was shattered by a voice floating to him across the water. Looking behind he saw Marion, clad in her bathing suit, gliding towards him in the canoe.

“What are you doing so far from shore?” she demanded. “It’s time we were getting started.”

“Are you so eager to leave?” he asked her.

“My heart is no lighter than yours,” she answered, “but I’m not wasting time weighing it. Look out, I’m coming in.”

She poised herself and dived lightly overboard, emerging close to Topper. Together they swam back to the canoe, and Topper, with all his strength, pushed it out of the cove.

“Let it drift away,” he said, “as a symbol of my departing happiness.”

“I’m in on that, old thing,” she replied, “but just the same, cheer up. We’d better be getting back to shore or George will be collecting another nice little pile of clam shells.”

“But, Marion,” Topper protested, “is it really to be the end of things? Can’t we go on for a while?”

“I’m afraid not,” she replied. “You and George are not proper playmates, and anyway my ectoplasm is growing a trifle frayed. You’ll be seeing through me soon.”

“You’ve deprived me of all my old ideas,” Mr. Topper answered, “and all I have in their place is an empty, aching feeling, a feeling of loss and discontent, the makings of a rebellion.”

“Memories!” she cried. “Memories, Topper. Do they mean nothing to you? Cling to them. The past is made of memories, the future is made of dreams. Hot stuff!”

“Not mine,” answered Topper. “Desk tops and legs of lamb.”

“Well, then, here’s a memory for you,” she said, swimming close to him and giving him a little salt-edged kiss. “Now, quit your mooning and get back to shore.”

Topper buried his face in the water and swam to the beach, Marion following easily in his wake. George Kerby was waiting for them with a glass in either hand, and as Topper swiftly studied his face, he fancied he detected in Kerby’s eyes a hint of pain, something lonely and hidden, yet reassuringly sympathetic.

“I thought you might like these after your long swim,” said Kerby, a shade apologetically.

Something about the situation made it difficult for Topper to speak for a moment. He accepted the extended glass and pretended to be getting his breath.

“You’re thoughtful, George,” he said at last. “Here are my best regards to you.”

“Good luck,” replied Kerby with a faint smile. “This place is almost too lovely to leave.”

But they left it just the same, left it as it was, the canoe drifting out with the tide and the tents rippling in the light breeze beneath a high, glad sun. Topper, with Oscar on his lap, slouched in the automobile and refused to look back at the little beach as Kerby drove across the field and on to the narrow road. No one spoke, no one seemed inclined to look at the other. They were occupied with their thoughts, which apparently were not happy. Presently Marion found a bottle and handed it to Topper.

“What’s wrong with this outfit?” she demanded. “You’d think we were going to a funeral instead of a celebration. The pair of you depress me.”

Topper and Kerby drank, solemnly at first, but gradually their solemnity faded until at last the three of them felt moved to lift their voices in writhing harmony, so painful to the ears that Oscar howled in protest.

Dusk was drifting over the fields by the time they reached their destination, and already the old inn was partly obscured by trees and shadows. They parked the car behind a clump of bushes and entered the inn by a rear door, old memories rising up to greet them as they stood in the dim light of the silent room. No one was there to receive them, but signs of preparation were everywhere in evidence. A long table had been arranged at one end of the room and the great sideboard was burdened with provisions, glasses and bottles. In one corner Marion discovered a battered but businesslike phonograph. Cigars and cigarettes had been placed by thoughtful hands at all convenient points. Oscar was behaving strangely. The hair stood up on his back as he sniffed the air excitedly and gave utterance to eager whines. Observing the behavior of the dog, Topper began to feel uncomfortable.

Suddenly three loud raps shattered the silence of the room and a voice called out, “Attention!” Topper, on his dash to the door, stopped long enough to see the Colonel, in full uniform, emerge from the gloom. The sight reassured him, as did the appearance of Mrs. Hart a moment later. Oscar was barking madly and scrambling at the Colonel’s feet. Mrs. Hart was approaching Topper with a tray full of glasses. This decided him to stay. He took a glass and drained its contents.

“Take another,” said Mrs. Hart.

“Thanks,” replied Topper. “How are your nerves? Mine are terrible.”

“Couldn’t be worse,” she assured him. “The arrangements have been such a strain. I think I’d better join you before I continue with the tray.”

“Do,” urged Topper. “It would be awful if you fainted.”

They drank together quickly and Mrs. Hart hurried away. Topper looked about the room and was appalled by the sight he beheld. Bodies in various stages of formation were appearing in every corner. Heads were floating in the air and bodyless legs were walking across the floor. Strangely detached-looking arms were already snatching food and glasses from the sideboard. And as Topper stood there gazing, the room gradually became peopled with men and women in evening clothes. They stood about in groups and conversed with animation. In the most natural way in the world they consumed sandwiches and cocktails, and lifted their voices in laughter. Marion Kerby came over to Topper and took him by the hand.

“Stop gaping like that,” she whispered. “It’s only a few of the Colonel’s friends he’s invited in honor of the celebration, and if you’ll take it from me, it’s a pretty hard-looking crowd. Don’t get giddy with any of the women or I’ll have to start something. I want you for myself tonight.”

“Never in my life have I witnessed such a wholesale display of horrifying sights,” said Mr. Topper. “You are welcome to have me all to yourself tonight. I’m cowed.”

“But first we must appear in public,” she replied. “Come with me and I’ll steer you safely through.”

She led him to a table at which George and the Colonel were already seated. Topper was greeted with shouts of joy, and the Colonel, thrusting his hand into a bucket, produced a bottle of champagne.

“Topper,” he said, “nothing is too good for you. I’ve been waiting for this moment.”

At the sound of the popping cork Mrs. Hart innocently sidled up to the table and sank to a chair with a weary sigh.

“I’m exhausted,” she breathed. “Simply exhausted. What’s that? Champagne?”

“Yes,” said the Colonel. “Do you drink it?”

“I will try tonight,” she answered in a resigned voice. “They say it’s good for exhaustion.”

When the Colonel had filled the glasses he rose and bowed to Topper.

“Topper,” he said, “I toast you as a man in a million. On this, our last public appearance, so to speak, I am frank to say that of all the happy things we leave behind you will be the most missed.”

Amid enthusiastic shouts of approval the Colonel resumed his chair and Topper in turn got up.

“I toast you all,” he said, “as a revelation to me of a larger life and a lighter death. And I thank you all for the changes you have wrought in me. Once I was a law-abiding, home-loving and highly respected member of my community. Within a few short months you have changed all that. Now I am a jailbird, a hard drinker, a wife deserter and an undesirable, dissolute outcast. And I am glad of it. Only a few short miles now separate me from my home, but let me assure you that they will be the hardest miles I have ever traveled in my life.”

Topper sat down to be thumped on the back by Kerby and the Colonel. Marion’s eyes were like stars and Mrs. Hart’s like pale moons, big but dim. More champagne appeared and guests kept visiting the table, gossiping for a moment, then drifting away. Topper was elaborately introduced and frequently reintroduced. This continued for some time. Many flushed faces confronted Topper, many bright eyes challenged his. Thrilling laughter floated through the air, the quick responses to well-turned lines. Arousing perfumes, subtle yet intimate, quickened the expectant blood. A soft light, shed by the lanterns hanging from the rafters, flooded the room, and through this light the dancers revolved to the impersonal music of the phonograph. The Colonel was at his most beaming best, gracious, immaculate and highly charged with champagne. Like a prince he sat at the table and greeted his subjects with jovial words. It was an expansive, heady and fluid evening, a dizzy moment stolen from the lap of time. Mr. Topper, at the urgency of Marion, danced with many fair women, listening to their leading remarks and capping them with his short but pertinent rejoinders. At last he returned to the table and claimed Marion for a dance. They circled the floor once, then ducked through the rear door and wandered off into the woods. Other couples were there before them. Laughter and whispers drifted among the trees.

“Well, Topper,” said Marion, “how are you holding your grog?”

“With all my might and main,” he answered. “You seem to be quite untouched.”

“It’s not my fault,” she replied, sitting down with her back against a tree. “It just won’t work tonight, although I’ve consumed enough for ten. My heart is not in my glass. Only my reflection, which will soon fade away.”

Topper was painfully inarticulate and Marion slipped her hand in his, letting her head rest on his shoulder while she gazed up at the sky through the branches of the trees.

“Did you ever look at the stars so long,” she continued, “that you almost became a part of them, so that when a lightning bug flew past your vision it got all mixed up with the Milky Way? Did you ever sit alone for hours chewing the cud of your own futility, hating yourself for being yourself and blaming life for making you so? Well, that’s the way I feel tonight. It’s time for me to be moving on. I’ve enjoyed this sort of stuff too long. There are other things to do. I don’t mean better things, merely more interesting ones. Our capacity to enjoy life should be measured by our ability to create life, or beauty or some form of happiness. So far I’ve created nothing, only a constant confusion, a restless, discontented stirring in the ether.”

“You’ve created happiness in me,” said Mr. Topper. “You’ve awakened dreams and left memories. You’ve made me humble and you’ve made me human. You’ve taught me to understand how a man with a hangover feels. You’ve lifted me forever out of the rut of my smug existence. I’ll go back to it I know, but I won’t be the same man.”

“You never were,” she answered logically. “You were never intended to be. Nobody is, but life gets you, life and the economic urge – success, esteem, safety. How many of our triumphs in life spring from negative impulses, the fear of losing rather than the wish to win. It’s a lot of talk, Topper, the whole damn show. And no one alive today is to blame. We must thank the ages past and bow to their false gods. We dress them up in new garments, but in their essence they’re just the same – power, property and pride. You can’t get away from them, the subsidized steps to salvation. I talk like this, but I’ve contributed nothing. We must just keep on and on until the mountains themselves crumble from nausea or we learn to scale them and cool our hands in the sky. Wild talk, Topper. Let’s go back and cage a drink.”

She would have risen, but he held her back.

“Rest here with me a moment,” he said, “and let the world go to hell.”

“If you feel like that,” she answered, “we’ll have to cage a flock of drinks.”

They rose and walked back to the inn from which issued the tumult of many voices raised in song and uncontrolled abuse. The room presented a scene of great disorder. Couples not amorously inclined were either gambling or accusing each other of murder, arson and rape. George Kerby was among the gamblers, but the Colonel still sat at his table with a far-away look in his eyes. With the methodical precision of a wax figure he raised his glass to his lips at regular intervals. Mrs. Hart was sitting in a corner devouring a leg of chicken, while Oscar with moist eyes was trying to hypnotize it out of her hand. The hour was late, but no one seemed to care about that. There were still some uncorked bottles. Broken glass lay on the floor and cigarette ends smoldered beneath the dancers’ feet.

Topper and Marion made their way to the Colonel’s table and sat down. He regarded them with polite inquiry, then automatically passed them a bottle.

“Good evening,” he said. “Are you well?”

“We are very well,” replied Marion, quite seriously. “And you?”

“I am well,” said the Colonel. “I am well.”

He then lapsed into silence as if the last shred of conversation had been exhausted. Topper and Marion sat quietly drinking and listening to the din which was constantly increasing in volume. It had arrived at that stage of the evening when the women were doing their specialty dances and the men were imitating animals or encouraging the dancers to more abandoned efforts. Suddenly in the midst of this debauch a new and sinister note was introduced. The doors of the inn flew open and in each door stood a man with a revolver in his hand.

“This place is pinched,” announced the leader. “Men and women line up in two separate rows. No funny stuff now. Get a move on.”

As if they had long rehearsed the figure the guests arranged themselves in two rows and stood swaying and giggling at one another, all except Mr. Topper. He neither swayed nor giggled, but trembled in every limb. The Colonel stood on one side of him and George Kerby on the other. Marion was directly opposite. The raiding party moved from the doors and walked between the rows, and as they progressed the rows gradually faded from view until only Topper remained unhappily present. Each man in turn inspected Topper, then turned back to the guests, but there were no guests to be seen, nothing but Topper and an empty room filled with chuckling voices and glasses moving through the air. The raiders huddled together and raised their revolvers, and as they did so the weapons were quietly removed from their hands.

“Out with the lights!” cried the Colonel’s voice, and the room was plunged in darkness.

Cries of mortal fear now broke from the raiding party and a scuffling noise was heard. Topper was seized by either arm and carried from the room. He felt himself thrust into the automobile and heard the grating of the gears. There was a furious barking and Oscar sprang into the car just as it wheeled down the path.

“Another pursuit,” said Topper. “What a remarkable country this is. Someone is always chasing someone else, and I’m forever it.”

“Killjoys,” replied Kerby from the wheel. “I was fifty bucks ahead.”

“I still have my chicken,” Mrs. Hart gloated from the back seat.

“And I have a couple of bottles,” announced the Colonel. “Oscar seems to have the seat of someone’s trousers.”

“And we all still have Topper,” said Marion Kerby. “Let’s escort him home.”

When the party had materialized Topper found himself seated between Marion and George Kerby. George was driving with one hand and reaching for the bottle with the other. Thus they sped along increasingly familiar roads at an increasingly reckless speed. Marion admonished her husband, but he merely took another drink and broke into a ribald song. Marion was clinging to Topper’s hand and pressing it from time to time. The Colonel and Mrs. Hart had apparently gone to sleep.

“Here we are,” said Marion at last. “We’re approaching the old tree. It’s our parting point, Topper. Can you take the car from here?”

“It was a fine party,” muttered Topper, then the words refused to come. He felt that his world was dropping away from him, and as if to hold it back, he clung with all his might to Marion’s hand. The automobile gave a sharp, uneasy bounce, then side-jumped from the road. As the great tree rushed out of the night to meet them, Marion Kerby threw herself on Mr. Topper and held him in her arms. Then Topper’s world in reality did drop away. He had a sensation of clinging arms and a warm breath on his cheek. There was a terrifying crash and he caught a strange picture of Oscar describing an arc in the air and vanishing as he turned. The earth sprang up and struck Topper a smashing blow all over. Aching darkness settled down on him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Through the Easter Egg

Mr. Topper was entering the peephole of his sugar Easter egg. Once inside he felt that he was in a different world, different yet strangely familiar. A soft, still radiance, more vital and sympathetic than that of the real world, lay over a vast hollow plain which ran in a great green dip to a distant fringe of trees.

What was he looking for? he wondered. Was it for the shepherdess of his youth? He knew that it had something to do with romance. Was he looking for Marion Kerby? That must be it But where was she? The hollow plain was empty. No living thing moved across it. And Mr. Topper was tired. Never before had he been so tired. He could hardly lift his legs, they dragged so heavily. But he had to find Marion Kerby. She was necessary to him. Already she had been too long away.

With slow, weary steps he set out across the sunken plain to the far-away trees on the other side. Their tops were dipped in a glowing light as the roof of the Easter egg turned on its downward curve, but all was dark at the base of the trees, dark, hushed and mysterious. He wanted to sit down and rest, but his eagerness to find Marion urged him onward. Several times he called her name, but was unable to hear his own voice. There seemed to be no sound in this Easter egg world of his. Why was there no sound? Topper became confused. He had a faint suspicion that he was suffering from an acute hangover.

He leaned against a small tree, and most amazingly the tree became Marion Kerby. This convinced Topper that he was suffering from a hangover of an exceedingly virulent nature. He took a step back and eyed her reproachfully.

“Where have you been?” he complained. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Looking and calling and wandering about. I’m going to cut it out, Marion. Too much grog. What a head I have.”

“You do look a bit like the Spirit of ’76 after a hard night,” she said. “Sit down before you swoon.”

Topper promptly sat down and nursed his head in his hands.

“Where am I?” he demanded. “How did I find this place? You’re always getting me into scrapes.”

“Don’t blame me,” she replied. “Blame my charming husband. He has a decided flair for trees.”

“Oh, yes,” said Topper. “There was a tree. I remember now.”

“That’s why you’re here,” she explained. “You became altogether too familiar with that tree, but the effect will soon wear off and then you’ll have to go back.”

“But why do I have to go back?” he asked. “There is no other place. And I’m tired, Marion, dog tired.”

“You don’t belong to our club yet,” she told him, “although you came close to joining. There’s still a spark of life left in you. Furthermore, it would make things extremely uncomfortable for me with you hanging around. George, as you know, has some rather archaic ideas.”

“Marion,” Topper pleaded, “don’t send me away. You know how I feel. I can’t go back to the world now. There’s nothing left for me there.”

“How about Scollops?” she suggested. “How about Mrs. Topper?”

“I’m done for,” he admitted, after a heavy pause. “I see I’ve got to go on. But won’t I ever see you again? Won’t you ever come back to me?”

Marion shook her head.

“I’m moving on,” she told him. “Someday we’ll meet again, perhaps, but things will be different then.”

“Worse, if possible,” grumbled Topper, painfully getting to his feet and gazing ruefully at Marion.

She grinned at his woeful expression and lifted her face to his.

“I do believe you want to kiss me,” she remarked.

“Damned if I will,” he replied.

“Ah, come on,” she urged. “It’s the last.”

Topper groaned and kissed her.

“You always were a jade,” he said.

“How gracious,” she retorted. “You’re almost like your old self.”

“I’ll never be that again.”

“Don’t,” she replied. “Don’t. Remember this, old thing: Too much virtue will sour the sweetest character. I’ve taken a sort of pride in you, seeing you change and grow ornery. Don’t spoil it all and disappoint me. Life will squeeze you if you let it, squeeze you back into a nice little mold with whipped cream and fixings.”

“I know,” said Topper drearily. “Squeeze me back into the 7:32.”

“But never into white duck trousers,” she replied. “Promise me that, Topper.”

“I swear it,” he answered.

“Good man!” she exclaimed, patting his arm. “It’s almost like leaving a son – my own creation.”

For a moment she regarded him thoughtfully, then moved away.

“So long,” she called over her shoulder. “Goodbye, old dear.”

Topper’s eyes grew round with desperation.

“But, Marion!” he cried. “Marion! When shall we meet again? Won’t you tell me when?”

“When fate sends you up against a larger and tougher tree,” she replied. “You’re a hard man to kill.”

Without looking back again she drifted away among the trees and Topper stood alone on the sunken plain.

“A pretty trick,” he muttered. “Leaving me flat like this. Well rid of her, say I. Always getting me into scrapes.”

But as he continued across the fields his heart grew heavy for Marion Kerby. Several times he stopped and gazed back, looking for all the world like a small boy reluctant to set out for school.

“The jade,” he continued to himself, “the heartless little jade. I don’t care a damn. Scollops has better sense. What’s happening to the light? I’ll never get out of this place. Marion, where are you? You got me into this fix.”

Gradually the plain grew dark and faded away as Mr. Topper, panting heavily, struggled through the peephole of his Easter egg world. It was a tight squeeze. He seemed to be hanging in space.

“Still too fat,” he growled. “My stomach sticks, damn it!”

•   •   •   •   •

When Mr. Topper returned to consciousness he found himself in a small white bed in a small white room. The hospital was close to his home, but Mr. Topper knew nothing of this. During the course of his vacation he had awakened in so many unfamiliar places that he instinctively began to figure out what had happened at last night’s party. Where had he been? What had he done? In what place was he lying now?

Then his eyes fell on Mrs. Topper and everything became clear. There were no adventures ahead. He looked at her through half-closed eyes and wondered about the woman. She was crumpled in her chair and her eyes were fixed on some green boughs tapping against the window. Somehow she looked quite pitiful. Strange that was, she had never looked pitiful before. And her face was not so unpleasant, thought Topper, in fact it was almost attractive now that the petulant, self-centered lines had been replaced by those of genuine anxiety. Her hand was resting lightly on the bed and Topper fumbled it into his.

“Hello,” he said, “how’s the girl?”

With a little gasp she turned in her chair and looked at his sunken face. It was odd to see the tears in her eyes and the uncertain smile on her lips.

“You can kiss me,” said Topper magnificently. “I’m too tired to move.”

Mrs. Topper was very much afraid. She kissed him, but did not linger over it.

“I might hurt you,” she faltered.

“Am I as broken up as all that?”

“You’re pretty well cracked,” she admitted. “It’s lucky you’re still alive. The automobile burned up.”

Topper heard this with relief. Much damaging evidence had been destroyed.

“It was the same tree,” he remarked.

“They’re talking of cutting it down,” she replied.

A nurse looked in at the door and, seeing the two conversing, hurried for the doctor. Topper was examined and Mrs. Topper dismissed. When she returned to say goodbye she found him white from pain.

“Go home,” he said, “and take a rest. I’ve given you a tough time of it. How’s the dyspepsia?”

“You know,” she replied, “I’ve been so worried I think I’ve lost it.”

“You’ll get it back,” he answered consolingly.

“I don’t want it,” she snapped. “I’ve got you back and you’re trouble enough. No sarcasm, please.”

“How’s my cat?”

“As useless as ever.”

Under her calm exterior Mrs. Topper was radiant. She gathered up her possessions and kissed her husband again.

“Those step-ins,” she whispered. “I’m sorry about them. They were lovely. I bought a lot more.”

A smile flickered momentarily across Mr. Topper’s lips. His eyes moved to the window. The fields and the woodlands stretched out to the dropping sun. Somewhere out there in space was Marion Kerby. But was she there? Had he ever seen her? A remarkable dream? Hardly. Across the fields the old song came back on the wings of memory:

“My husband he did it. The devil would drive,

The high-flying, low-lying soak.

And that is the reason I’m no more alive,

For he drove me smack into an oak.”

He raised his hand to his forehead. Yes, that was George Kerby’s scar. It was still there. And where were the Colonel and the jocund Mrs. Hart and that prince of dogs, Oscar? Gone, all gone. Would he ever see them again? The sun had touched the treetops now, filling their limbs with fire. Topper sat watching the glowing sky until the colors faded. A nurse entered quietly and handed him a glass. Topper obediently drank it.

“Very poor,” he remarked. “Very poor. Who bootlegs for this hospital?”

She laughed automatically and departed with the tray. Topper cautiously eased his position in the bed. In a little while he would be leaving the hospital, going home, going back to the distractions and obligations of life, going back to desks, schedules, commutation tickets, legs of lamb and familiar eyes. But things would never be the same. Topper was sure about that. Life would never get him. He would use it differently now. He himself was a different man. Perhaps he would sell his house and go away somewhere. He could get her to agree to that. In a little while he would be going back. Yes, going back home, starting the game all over. It would be good to see Scollops again. And the old girl was not so bad, not so bad, not at all so bad. But somewhere out there between the wind and stars, Marion Kerby was drifting, drifting farther and farther away. Thus meditating, Topper fell into a quiet sleep and dreamed that he was introducing Scollops to Oscar and that Oscar, now thoroughly in control of his members, amused the cat for hours by making his head and tail alternately disappear. Oscar was snappy about it.

— THE END —

TOPPER TAKES A TRIP

DESCRIPTION

The beloved characters—mortal and immortal — of Topper return in this uproarious romp through the south of France. One of Thorne Smith’s best-loved comedies, it proves once again that he is the undisputed master of urbane wit and sophisticated repartee.

Dedication

FOR   ROLAND  YOUNG

CHAPTER ONE

Morning Thoughts
on a German Model

There was Topper. And there was the Mediterranean. A magnificent spectacle, that – Topper and the Mediterranean. Kindred spirits well met, contemplating each other across an alluring girdle of sand.

Not a large man, Topper – Cosmo Topper. Nor yet a small man. Certainly not a small. A comfortable man, rather. Slightly plump, if anything, and clad in a pair of blue-silk pajamas. And there was the Mediterranean just as it had been there for a considerable length of time – much longer than Mr. Topper, for one thing. A vast expanse of cool ocean as blue and virginal seeming as the garments adorning the figure then inspecting it from the balcon of a discouragingly pale stucco villa set in a garden fairly bristling with grass of a repellent toughness – grass so hostilely tough that only a rhinoceros could sit on it with any showing of dignity and aplomb. Unfortunately, as rhinoceroses are rarely if ever encountered in these drab days sitting on Riviera grass in Riviera gardens, this observation must of necessity remain merely one of those vast mental pictures upon which to dwell during the interminable reaches of a family reunion.

On this early morning, one which appeared about as willing to give as to receive of the good things of life, Mr. Topper had the Mediterranean very much to himself. In fact, he was quite alone with all that great quantity of water.

There was the man. And there was the ocean. Unique and distinct. One might even choose between them, if suddenly faced with such a disagreeable necessity. However, so splendidly did they go together, so well matched or mated were the two, that most persons of discrimination would have hesitated to separate them. They would have preferred to sidestep the issue and to retain both Topper and the Mediterranean intact. But, of course, there are some who might have wanted the ocean more than the man, or vice versa. Who can say?

We are fortunate in being able to have them both at their best, Topper on his balcon, and the Mediterranean in its bed.

Across the Mediterranean Mr. Topper cast an early morning look, and the Mediterranean graciously offered its full-bosomed amplitude to his inspection. And although it has been previously observed that both were of a virginal blueness, it should not be forgotten that either one of them was capable of pulling some powerfully rough stuff when the opportunity offered.

Topper, it is to be learned with some relief, was virginal more through circumstance than choice. This does not imply that his was a low and lecherous nature. Nor does it necessarily follow that he was epicurean in such matters. But he did like things nice that way. Most men do, when and if possible.

Topper had been a banker by profession. He still was a husband – an original error of judgment unrectified by time. Habit is a dreadful thing. Once he had commuted without realizing the error of his ways. Most men commute through necessity. Topper had done so ritualistically. In Glendale, U. S. A., the Toppers had been socially solid. All that had changed, but not through Mrs. Topper.

The fact is that rather late in the day Cosmo Topper had been subjected to the ultra violent rays of a series of amorous and disreputable adventures as incredible as they had been entertaining. These adventures had left his pulse still beating in perfect harmony with the more enjoyable if less laudable preoccupations of life. They had not so much changed his character as ventilated it, given it a chance to breathe good, honest vulgar air vitalized by the fumes of grog. As a result, he had succeeded in washing his hands of work, but figuratively women still clung to them. There were times when those hands of Topper’s fairly itched after women, which is the natural state of all healthy and enterprising masculine hands.

Even now, in the innocent face of this clean Riviera morning, the man was actually speculating as to the exact degree of nudity the German model would achieve on the beach a few hours hence. Yesterday, to his almost visible agitation, this lady of wolfish lines had reached what he had every reason to believe to be the absolute limit of anatomical candour. In spite of this awe-inspiring display, something told Topper that this German model, in her relentless quest of a coat of tan, still held a few more cubic inches in reserve which she would willingly sacrifice to the sun. Until she did this there was no peace of mind for any inquiring spirit on the beach. And when this greatly to be desired end had been attained, Topper both hoped and proposed to be stationed critically in the front ranks of a vast, admiring, and cosmopolitan multitude. He owed himself that much. Not that he lusted after the woman, but too long and too patiently had he attended in clinical expectancy to be, at the end, deprived of this point of vantage.

Once she had definitely and conclusively arrived at the climax of her revelations, Topper felt that he would be quite willing to call it a game. He had no desire to pursue his investigations further. All suspense would be at an end. The German model could go her way, while he would go his as if the incident had never occurred. Her crisply burned body would remain in his memory merely as a remarkable phenomenon, something to wonder about, like a landslide, subway rush, or Democratic Convention.

However, until that time Mr. Topper’s interests were very much involved. True enough, so gradually had the German model progressed on her way to nudity that much of the shock had evaporated before fresh territory was opened up for inspection, but by the same token, the very deliberateness of the method employed lent to the business an atmosphere of terrific suspense. What the morrow would bring forth, or, rather, off, was the anxious speculation in scores of masculine minds. Women also wondered. Topper suspected several depraved frequenters of the Casino actually of betting on the results of the model’s daily progress. For example, the fifth rib against the diaphragm, heavy odds against a complete torso.

Being bored abroad is one of America’s favorite customs. And not without reason.

Mr. Topper held stoutly to the belief that within the short space of several weeks this German model had done more to establish friendly relations – to create a sort of entente intime, in fact – between her country and the Allied Powers than had been achieved by all the diplomatic gestures and disarmament conferences that had supplied the public with dull reading since the Armistice.

“And not a bad idea,” he mused, yawning. “In fact, a splendid idea. Instead of holding a series of silly disarmament conferences at which everyone gets all hot and bothered and cables home to hurry up with more guns – instead of this, why not institute a set of disrobing conferences? Why not make a clean breast of it internationally? Let us strip ourselves of our all and face each other man to woman instead of man to man. No more beating about the bush or dangerous secret diplomacy. No more old men telling lies to other old men. At innumerable private conferences the idea has worked out not only successfully but entertainingly. Why not try it out on a large international scale?”

He considered his Mediterranean now as if in a trance. Topper was seeing in his mind’s eye the American ambassador to England clad only in a pipe, looking at the German delegate trying to face the world in glasses. He saw a famous old French bargain hunter smilingly surveying the scene protected only by a blue béret – très gentil. And a gentleman from Italy clad only in a neat but shrunken black shirt – what a sight! Mahatma Ghandi taking everything quite naturally, together with a few grains of rice. Then there would be the ladies, supplied probably by an international theatrical committee: Miss America, Mlle. France, Señorita Madrid, et al. Altogether a jolly party. A conference that would accomplish some results, at least, no matter what those results might be. Agreeable events would be sure to occur.

The Mediterranean invites the idle mind to do some very curious thinking, and Mr. Topper, it seems, had accepted the invitation. And all the while these and other equally unbecoming thoughts were corroding the mind of this erstwhile banker, within the pale villa, his wife was sleeping most unpicturesquely yet most thoroughly. In spite of the many sterling qualities of this really admirable lady, one could forgive without too great a struggle her husband for preferring to think of the German model.

There was so much of her worth thinking about and so many choice bits of that so much. And strange to relate, Topper had not the faintest conception of what she looked like – no idea at all of her face. Men are like that. Careless. Just grown-up boys with a few extra tricks tacked on.

He well remembered the day when she had first made her appearance on the beach. Like many successful men and women before her, she had made rather modest and cautious beginnings. Only a scant couple of yards of her were exposed to the avid caress of the sun that day. From that first casual view of her one never would have suspected that there was so very much more of the German model still left unseen. Yet as time went on and vaster expanses became exposed, one came to believe that perhaps this German model would never cease, but like the brook continue on forever. Now, most fortunately for everyone concerned, there was little left of the lady that remained unexposed. With characteristic Teutonic system and thoroughness she had succeeded in revolutionizing the color of her skin and at the same time hanging up a record for plain and fancy nudity on a beach where such a record was exceedingly hard to make.

She was a good influence, Mr. Topper decided, as he stood on his balcon, getting himself together for the day. She was the living symbol of one of the few interests that nations held in common. She drew men together, took their mind off grimmer if higher things. Furthermore, she didn’t give a damn. Topper admired that. All his life he had given damns. Too many of them. For what she was, she deserved all the admiration and encouragement she received, although sweethearts and wives from Bronx Park to Brompton Road publicly denounced her while privately envying her proportions. So much for the German model, thought Topper as he turned to receive Scollops.

Scollops was Mr. Topper’s personal cat. She wove herself out onto the balcon and, as her master had done before her, looked the Mediterranean up and down. Then she yawned at it. There was a tongue inside. It was curled like a red-hot spring. Topper, considering his cat’s too knowing eyes, decided that she would go well with the German model. Both should lie in the sand together. They had much in common – everything male.

Mr. Topper gathered the cat in his arms and together they considered the day. He had brought this creature, this unregenerate cat, along with him at no little trouble and expense. At first Scollops had not been pleased. Travel had proved too confining, although there had been a moment or two on the ship – the captain’s Tom. Why bring up the past? Why not, thought Scollops? Life was better now – ampler, lazier, sunnier. She found it to her liking, although she had noticed with a sense of alarm that there appeared to be a great many more French dogs than cats, and that these dogs seemed curiously volatile and distrait. It hardly mattered, though. One enterprising gentleman cat for everyday company and another just in case were all that Scollops demanded. She had speedily acquired both. Not bad, either. Scollops frankly liked her gentlemen cats ungentlemanly. It would be amusing to present Mr. Topper with a litter of Franco-American kittens, amusing but quite a bother.

Had the man holding this godless animal so carefully in his arms even suspected vaguely the nature of her thoughts he would have dropped her like a hot shot, little realizing that his own thoughts were, if anything, less edifying.

Some distance out on the blue a French destroyer went scuttling along to Nice. Probably out of Toulon. She knifed the waters spitefully, as if to remind them that men could hate and kill as well as love and live amiable lives. A subtle, deadly little craft. Neat. From the near-by training station three airplanes zoomed in formation through an inoffensive sky, then broke into a stuttering of dizzy spins and loops. Playful little devils buoyantly practising murder.

Topper raised his eyes to these man-created wasps, then lowered them to the sleek sides of his cat. Far, far better to consider the German model. No foolish ideas there about national prestige, the rights of invasion, or defense of honor. Catch as catch can was her way of looking at life. Live and let live, but preferably with some nice rich man.

Extending a brown hand, Topper gently touched a small pink rose that had crept up on the vine from the veranda below to take a look round. It was jolly up here. Better than looking all day long at that damn tough grass. The air brought to mind pine forests and hidden flowers, also, occasionally, fish. From the little cork factory down the street a fine red powder dusted the light breeze. Scollops sniffed delicately. An inspiriting figure of a French girl, mostly legs of the better sort, as was only right and proper, sped smoothly along a white road. With effortless grace she sent the bicycle ahead. She was singing “Ramona.” All French girls were singing “Ramona.” And almost all French men. Not singing it any too well, but singing it often and emotionally. Topper had hoped he had left that song far behind in America. Now, right here in France, the populace was breaking its collective heart over it all day long and late into the night. Idly he wondered if the French senate sang it. He grinned indulgently. Probably, if he were French, he too would be vocally breaking his heart over this Ramona trollop and her confounded Mission bells. Thoughtfully his eyes followed the provocative figure of the girl as she sped over the inlet bridge and lost herself in a little crooked street mostly made up at the moment of a donkey and his eternal cart. Whether the girl made it or not Topper never knew. He rather suspected she didn’t, although the donkey remained unmoved.

“Ma chatte,” he remarked, thinking to himself what a silly word it was, “my little cabbage, let us promenade ourselves.” For a moment he looked back at the blue ocean. “Small wonder,” he continued to his little cabbage, “that that strapping wench Venus, all set for seduction, sprang full blown from the foam of such a sea.”

Leaving the Mediterranean to consider this at its leisure, Topper, bearing Scollops, quietly withdrew into his villa.

The fact was, the man was lonely, excessively lonely, but he refused to admit it even to himself.

CHAPTER TWO

Mr. Topper Shakes Hands

Topper, still doing his best in spite of his blue-silk pajamas, emerged gloriously into his garden. Scollops also emerged under her own power. There did not appear to be much of it because she moved slowly on reluctant feet.

On his way downstairs Topper paused to look at his wife, then hastily followed this uninspiring inspection with a stiff bracer of cognac. As Mr. Topper understood it, this clever French distillation was to be considered more in the nature of a tonic than a tipple – when taken properly. Owing to the blessed fact that his wife was a late sleeper, Mr. Topper found himself at liberty to take it properly several times in, the course of a morning. By rising early himself he could thus extend the length of his morning and accordingly increase the number of cognacs, all of which were taken properly. Husbands have their ways, God help them.

Topper, after looking at his wife, felt that the world owed him at least one drink of cognac properly taken. And he took it. Even in her sleep there had been about Mary Topper a certain grim rectitude which is especially depressing to those whose moral stature is only microscopically visible. Topper needed his cognac. He took his cognac. And although, as a result, his moral stature suffered a severe setback, he felt within himself much closer to God and man. His two favorites, Scollops and the Mediterranean, became even greater favorites.

Mention has been made of a series of adventures in connection with Mr. Topper. More should be said. Back in his suburban home Topper had met some exceedingly peculiar characters and enjoyed some equally peculiar adventures. From these adventures he emerged improved in every department. He was, perhaps, the only man of his day and generation who had actually and knowingly had familiar dealings with a spirit, or rather, with a person who, judged by all conventional standards, was entirely nonexistent. Topper knew better. However, because of this technical loophole perhaps no black marks can be recorded against him, in spite of the fact that he left behind him, in the course of his adventures, a clearly defined trail of chips from the Commandments he had shattered.

This morning, as Topper strolled along by his garden wall, he was thinking of his brief but lurid past. His thoughts made him restless, filled him with a poignant desire to live a little more amply and to associate again with those extraordinary companions of a vanished summer, especially with one of them, Marion Kerby. If he had her back again he felt that he could indefinitely dispense with the others. As a matter of fact, he would much prefer it. Colonel Scott and Mrs. Hart, those suave though disreputable affinities, would be far too expansive and uncontrollable along a coast offering as many opportunities for their failings as the Riviera. Even in the so-called dry States, they had seldom drawn a totally unalcoholic breath. And George Kerby – Topper felt that he could do very nicely without a great deal of George, Marion’s quick-tempered, high-living husband, who was forever insisting that death did not them part, not by any manner of means. An engaging chap, George, and a delightful companion, if he would only give up claiming such dictatorial sway over the time and actions of Marion.

In his heart Topper knew that Marion was lost to him forever. She had told him herself that she was passing on to a higher plane, freeing herself at last from the carnal drag of the earth. The jovial Colonel, the languishing yet ever hungry Mrs. Hart, and George Kerby would never pass out of the more pleasant influences of the earth. They had no ambitions to refine themselves. Topper felt sure of that. Those three liked themselves as they were, and Topper, thinking back, could hardly blame them. He, himself, had he been given the choice, would have preferred to remain a low-plane spirit, that is, assuming he was officially removed from this world. Then Topper’s thoughts dallied with memories of Oscar, the Colonel’s somewhat eccentric dog, that had only after the greatest patience on the part of his master learned to materialize in whole or in part, according to his mood and fancy. Oscar would have been an unusual companion for Scollops. He would have diverted the cat’s thoughts from certain channels.

A bald head, fringed with a nicely starched ruff of gray, popping up alarmingly from the other side of the wall, brought Mr. Topper’s own thoughts back into the present with a snap.

“Bonjour, mon vieux!” cried Monsieur Louis. “The times make fair, is it not?”

Mr. Topper’s hand was suddenly snatched from him and twirled about in the most bewildering manner. In this operation the element of surprise meant all. Topper had no choice. He merely stood by watchfully to see that nothing that could not be mended happened to his hand.

“You carry yourself well today?” continued Monsieur Louis, suddenly forgetting all about Mr. Topper’s hand and dropping it. “You promenade yourself a little? Comment?”

Mr. Topper hastened to assure Monsieur Louis that he, Topper, was exceedingly well pleased with everything in France, but especially with Monsieur Louis himself; that he, Topper, carried himself tremendously, and that he hoped Monsieur Louis was doing splendidly in the line of self-carrying; that the times had never made any fairer so far as he knew, and that owing to his blue-silk pajamas he was desolated that he could not please Monsieur Louis by projecting himself farther than a very little. And all the while Mr. Topper was saying these things he was wondering if Monsieur Louis had actually called him common to his face. It sounded very much like it, that last word. These French could get away with murder if one failed to know their language.

“Me, also, I am well pleased,” Monsieur Louis continued like God. “Now, behold, I work much. Tonight I play. Tout à l’heure, mon ami, tout à l’heure.”

And with this piece of gratuitous information of a rather personal nature Monsieur Louis ducked down behind the wall, leaving Mr. Topper on the other side vainly trying to get the meaning of his parting words.

“Tout à l’heure,” considered Mr. Topper. “What the deuce did he mean by that? Sounds silly to me – all at the hour. What hour? Can’t help feeling a little embarrassed for these Frenchmen when they begin to talk. Seem to lose all control of themselves. He works much now, but tonight he plays, does he? Getting along in years for that sort of thing. And he brags about it, the immoral old devil. Wonder what his wife thinks of that?”

Topper decided that most likely Madame Louis did not mind at all. French husbands and wives were always so busy rushing in and out of the house on the way to and from assignations that they never had any spare time to check up on each other’s movements.

This train of thought naturally brought him back to Marion Kerby. He recalled the day when he had purchased the Kerbys’ car as a result of his exasperation at his wife’s habitual attempts to thrust a leg of lamb down his jaded throat. George and Marion had been killed in that self-same car. A tree had objected to it. He remembered the day, the moment of awe and incredulity when they had first spoken to him out of vast spaces. How upset he had been. And he remembered, too, not without a slight shudder, how shockingly George Kerby had first materialized. What a dreadful sight that had been – a pair of golf knickers gradually taking form, and an inverted head dangling between their legs. At that moment Topper had wondered if George materialized were always going to be like that. Then Marion had made her presence seen as well as felt. He had first caught sight of her draped over a rafter in an old, abandoned inn. She had been about as abandoned as the inn itself. That night she had looked like an angel. There the resemblance had come to an abrupt end.

Once more Monsieur Louis’s popping head shattered Mr. Topper’s memories.

“In full truth,” he warned Mr. Topper, seizing his hand as if to prevent it from striking. “Tonight I have of pleasure, but now, my friend, I cut. It is that I trim the garden. He is in disarray. Me, I shall introduce order and make all things fair. Regard! I clip, is it not?”

Inasmuch as Monsieur Louis extended in the air a pair of shears fairly dripping with vegetation, Mr. Topper saw no reason to start an argument.

“With them I work,” continued the little Frenchman, philosophically regarding the shears, “but tonight it is a thing entirely different. Au’voir, m’sieur. I part.”

With this Monsieur Louis flung back Mr. Topper’s hand and collapsed behind the wall, from over which came the voice of a pair of agitated clippers.

“I wish he would stop doing that,” Mr. Topper complained to himself. “It’s more than disturbing. It’s downright alarming, especially when done with clippers. Furthermore, I don’t give a damn how much he plays, but if he doesn’t stop popping up and down like that he won’t be able to drag himself out of the house. Wonder where he goes to do all this playing?”

The whole thing had started from that night at the abandoned inn. What an excellent night that had been, dancing in the firelight with Marion and drinking Scotch with George.

Topper was not aware of the fact that an embryonic sigh escaped his lips.

And all the things that had happened after George had gone abroad. That interlude by the lake alone with Marion, that is, alone with her until Colonel Scott and Mrs. Hart, a pair of low-plane spirits with an equally low-plane dog, had appeared, casually drifting along in search of whatever pleasure the moment had to offer. They had made a party of it, the four of them, and he, Topper, had been the only one unable to disappear at will. It had been extremely inconvenient at times, and never more so than when George Kerby had unexpectedly returned to find Marion and himself together under highly compromising circumstances. They could hardly have been higher, those circumstances, nor more compromising. Then the weird duel which followed in which George insisted on his rights to remain invisible while Topper, unable to reduce his stature by one cubic inch, was forced to remain an exceedingly mortal target. Finally, the return to the inn, the farewell party, and the tree again. It had been a terrific smash-up. Topper had come back to consciousness in the hospital. Marion was gone, and so were the others. Even Oscar had withdrawn himself into a dimension unattainable to Mr. Topper. It was all over. Adventures end. Only Mrs. Topper remained, Mrs. Topper and his cat, Scollops.

Once out of the hospital, Topper had tried to make a go of it with his wife. An abortive attempt. As soon as she had got her husband back she speedily set about retrieving her dyspepsia and superior manner. In spite of her efforts to be human, she had gradually relapsed into her familiar rôle of conventional, self-satisfied, censorious matron with a social position to nurse. She had been grimly determined to make Topper comply. Now this is an impossible thing to do with a man who has once consorted on grounds of perfect equality with a set of low-plane spirits. To her intense chagrin, Mrs. Topper had found it so. She soon discovered that the once orthodox Topper had been utterly ruined for everyday suburban life. He missed trains, offended the neighbors, and cursed at things with a new and overpowering vigor. He refused to go to bed at the customary time, and was frequently seen in the company of low characters. Then, too, he suffered from occasional fits of abstraction in which the community of Glendale ceased to exist for him, and he would go wandering away by himself as if in search of something, the exact nature of which he had forgotten himself.

Once the man had attempted to tell his wife a little something about the less unedifying side of his adventures. He had felt the need to share, to recapture in the telling a little of the past. He did not get far. His wife, he could tell, was under the impression that his mind had been affected by his accident. It was all very discouraging.

In the end, Topper had made an attempt to furbish up his relations with his wife by taking her to Europe. No luck. In France Mrs. Topper was even more Glendale than before. Defensively and aloofly critical. Superior. Nonparticipating.

It was not Mary Topper’s fault. No woman could be the way she was of her own free will. God had given her the type of mind she had, and her family had taught her to use it the way she did. She thought herself quite right. And that was just the trouble. She was quite right – a damn sight too quite for Topper. In this world people should probably live according to her standards, that is, those who wished to get along with the minimum amount of friction and the maximum of dull, numbing comfort. Her rightness had become such an obsession with her that she was never happy unless she was showing Mr. Topper how terribly, terribly wrong he was. Topper sometimes wondered how a man who was so consistently wrong as his wife made him out to be had ever escaped being hanged and had become, instead, a responsible officer in one of the world’s largest banking institutions. As wrong as he was, however, he never made the mistake of asking his wife this question. It would have done terrible things to her dyspepsia, and God alone knew she needed little encouragement in that direction. Yet, somewhere deep down in his rather secretive heart, Topper nourished a genuine affection for this woman who had made such a sameness of his life. It was his fault, after all. Had he not permitted her to do it? And he had been much like her until a quartet of carousing characters who had left this world safer for domesticity by leaving it themselves, had taken him through some remarkably broadening paces.

Yes, Topper was fond of his wife, but being fond of one’s wife and getting along with her were two and entirely different matters, as many a husband had found out before him. Perhaps it was not to be expected. Topper did not know. The problem had been too long with him. It was barnacle encrusted.

Monsieur Louis, or rather the head of that brave, saved him from attempting to solve it. Once more it popped up, and once more Topper’s hand was captured and subjected to a friendly flinging.

“My friend,” the little man announced, his wicked eyes sparkling with some hidden irony as only a Frenchman’s eyes can sparkle, “this garden here is greatly encouraged. But why? There is nothing in it to grow. Alas, I reproach myself. In spite of which tonight I find my pleasure. Alors!”

Monsieur Louis was gone. Topper stood gazing vacantly at the spot where Monsieur Louis had been. So far as Topper knew Monsieur Louis had neither legs nor body. He had never seen these parts, though he imagined they were somewhere about. But on the witness stand he could not have taken an oath that there was any more to Monsieur Louis than one popping head, a quick little twisting neck, and a pair of agile arms. And the funny thing is that Topper never did know. That was all he ever saw of Monsieur Louis. Of course, had he taken the trouble he could have found out. Topper never took the trouble. What he knew of Monsieur Louis was quite enough. More of Monsieur Louis would have been too much.

“That little Frenchman certainly must be going to have a good time,” he mused almost enviously. “He’s so damned excited about it. Doesn’t seem to be able to think of anything else. The French are funny that way. He and his pleasure. Wish he’d stop popping about it.”

To protect his nerves from further incursions by Monsieur Louis and Monsieur Louis’s head and arms, Topper moved away from the wall and walked down to the little gate that gave onto the white road separating the white villa from the beach. Here he was almost immediately joined by Monsieur Sylvestre, patron of the excellent Café Plage.

Monsieur Sylvestre, as if suddenly spying an especially desirable fish, pounced upon Mr. Topper’s hand and did friendly things to it. Then he demanded of Mr. Topper how he ported himself this morning. Mr. Topper was once more gentil and admitted that he ported himself fairly bien and added that the times made fair. Monsieur Sylvestre, overwhelmed with both statements, again shook Mr. Topper’s hand and asked him if it was that he would have to boir un petit. Mr. Topper thereupon shook Monsieur Sylvestre’s hand and allowed that he would have of cognac to boir. Accordingly both shook hands for the fourth time and crossed the road, blue pajamas and all, to the little café squatting unpicturesquely on the sand. Here on the veranda they looked politely at several fishing boats and one tramp steamer from Denmark. They had to boir at the hands of Madame Sylvestre, who had first shaken one of Topper’s. This sort of thing went on for about a quarter of an hour, until Mr. Topper felt his supply of amiability running low, upon which he withdrew, after cordially shaking hands with his hosts, who were desolated by his departure.

On his way across the road Mr. Topper was nearly knocked down by his blanchisseuse, who, compactly mounted on her bicyclette, had been on the point of delivering at the villa the beautiful results of her blanchisseus-ing. This slight contretemps brought down on Mr. Topper’s head a deluge of polite lamentations. Things would have gone smoothly enough had they gone no further. The stricken lady insisted on tenderly shaking Mr. Topper’s hand. There was still more. His blue-silk pajamas were brushed and examined with a thoroughness that would have given Mrs. Topper grounds for a separation back in Glendale. Mr. Topper himself became somewhat light-headed during these impassioned operations and clung to his pajamas like a little gentleman in order to keep from giving the diligent blanchisseuse fresh cause for apologies or congratulations. He then helped her to collect the scattered laundry, and clinging to his pajamas with one hand, falteringly carried the laundry back to the villa with the other.

Here he encountered the maid, Félice, whom he had certain reasons for suspecting of being much more than she pretended not to be. He deposited the laundry in a chair, took a hitch in his pajamas, and made a grab for the French girl’s hand, thus making the morning a clean sweep of handshaking.

Félice evinced no surprise, although privately she was cast down that he stopped at her hand. She made no attempt to withdraw it and gazed back at the pajamaed gentleman with infinite understanding.

Sensing the reprehensible nature of the thoughts passing behind those melting eyes, he promptly dropped the hand and hurried upward to his bathroom. Here he stood looking thoughtfully at the tub. Had it suddenly remarked upon the weather and attempted to shake his hand he in turn would not have been in the least surprised.

“Funny people, these French,” he soliloquized as he let his pajama trousers follow their natural inclination. “Polite to the point of danger. Can’t make up my mind whether I like them or not. Some days, yes, and some days, no. That girl Félice, for example. A body isn’t safe with her around.”

Then he turned and regarded Vesuvius with profound skepticism. He could not quite make up his mind about this strange device, either.

CHAPTER THREE

Monsieur Grandon’s Vesuvius

Vesuvius had given Topper some mighty bad moments in the course of their relations. Even now he was not sure just where he stood as regards to Vesuvius, and what was even worse, just where Vesuvius stood as regards to him.

Vesuvius existed in a metal box that did things about making cold water different. But Vesuvius had, Mr. Topper feared, potentialities of achieving other and more ambitious flights than that. It could, for instance, take its name seriously and emulate the volcano, exploding most horrifically. This might result in depositing Topper, still soapy but otherwise unadorned, in the bosom of a vociferous French family picnicking on the beach. This would not be gentil, neither would it be diverting, that is, not for Topper. He had no desire to compete with the German model.

Topper’s first introduction to Vesuvius had been made through the medium of an extremely emotional Monsieur Grandon, one who claimed the distinction of being Mr. Topper’s propriétaire.

“Voilà!” Monsieur Grandon had exploded dramatically through his beard. “One has it!”

“What, Monsieur Grandon?” demanded Topper, slightly confused. “One has what, exactly?”

“In truth,” explained Monsieur le propriétaire, running frantic hands over numerous pipes, taps, and levers darting dangerously from all sides of the box. “It is there – l’appareil de chauffage.”

Topper, none the wiser, read the name of the box and became restive.

“One pulls this one here and that one there,” continued Monsieur Grandon, recklessly laying hands on various protruding bits of Vesuvius. “Alors! One pushes here, makes to turn there, then ignites this one here – but first,” and here the Frenchman paused and darkly considered the blank face of Topper, “but first,” he repeated with seeming reluctance, “one makes the water to run in the basin.”

“What!” ejaculated Topper incredulously. “Is that quite necessary?”

“The one who would bathe,” Monsieur Grandon explained with patience. “You, m’sieu, for example.”

Mr. Topper was more astounded than shocked.

“I was merely thinking of my wife,” he said coldly.

“Madame is your wife?” exclaimed Monsieur in a mixture of surprise and disappointment.

“But yes,” replied Mr. Topper. “Is it that you believed her my mistress?”

Monsieur Grandon shrugged temporizingly.

“It is of an occurrence unique,” he observed. “One expects more of an American when he visits our Riviera.”

Topper turned on the tap as a gesture of possession.

“Hein!” cried Monsieur Grandon. “Now shall I cause him to march.”

“Cause,” replied Mr. Topper after a moment’s hesitation. “But cause him to march with the utmost tranquillity. Cause him almost to amble.”

“There is not of danger, m’sieu.”

“But yes, my old,” replied Topper. “Something tells me in a loud, clear voice that there is of danger – that there is even of stark peril. Upon the body of Vesuvius there are certain telltale marks that give me to believe he once went ‘poof’!”

“Of a verity,” admitted Monsieur Grandon. “It is a long time since that one there went ‘poof’!”

“That, Monsieur Grandon, is most unfortunate,” commented Mr. Topper, “because after his so great and profound tranquillity he may imagine it about the right time to go ‘poof!’ encore.”

“It is a thing not to think of,” assured Monsieur Grandon.

“It is a thing I hate to think of,” agreed Topper, “yet it is a thing from which I cannot tear my thoughts.”

“Have of courage, m’sieu,” urged the intrepid Frenchman. “His first ‘poof!’ was his last.”

From what Monsieur Grandon allowed to remain unsaid he let it be delicately inferred that what had passed between himself and Vesuvius on the occasion of the first “poof!” had definitely settled matters for all time.

“But,” observed Monsieur Grandon with an alarming reversal of form, “should it eventuate that he does go ‘poof!’ then it is that one makes water to run on a scale very grand.”

“Have little fear on that point, m’sieu,” Topper hastened to assure him. “If he ever takes it into his head to go ‘poof!’ in earnest, water will be made on a scale of the utmost grandeur and with startling promptitude.”

“Is it not so?” murmured Monsieur Grandon abstractedly, as he did things to Vesuvius that made Mr. Topper shudder.

Thus it came about that Mr. Topper and Vesuvius, l’appareil de chauffage, met each other on terms of mutual suspicion which never quite wore off in spite of their daily contact. Those scars of a previous “poof!” were a constant reminder of an unreliable past. Familiarity had never bred contempt, although Topper was now able to pass through the ritual of ignition with his mind on other matters.

CHAPTER FOUR

Animated Discourse with a Foot

His mind was on other matters now as he made Vesuvius to march. He was still thinking of his other-world friends. As he watched the water flow into the tub, these vanished companions were all mixed up in his mind. He wondered if they had ever been or if he had dreamed them all in the hospital after the accident. There were times when he had almost convinced himself that they had been merely the puppets of his repressions. Most certainly George and Marion Kerby had been real enough once. Before they had come a cropper against that tree they had been a part of the social life of Glendale. Not an admirable part, to be sure, but, nevertheless, a tangible one. They had not been able then to appear and disappear at random, but had conducted themselves like ordinary human beings, only much worse, according to Glendale standards. Was it possible, he asked himself as he stepped into the tub – never a charming gesture – for a dog to be part dog one minute and no dog at all the next – merely a bark from another world? Yet these things had been, and Topper knew they had been. The old abandoned inn actually existed, and so did all of the other places he had visited with his companions in the course of those mad adventures which now seemed so distant and unreal.

“Seems an unreasonable waste of time and labor, this tub business,” Topper reflected as he carefully lowered himself into the water. “With the whole wide Mediterranean knocking at one’s front door, it is nothing less than a supine knuckling under to convention to drag a small part of it into the house and then to wallow in it.” He groaned feebly and began to lather his body. The spirit of rebellion was in him, for customarily, Topper and his tub were boon companions. “A horrid thing, all this bathing. Mostly brought on by wives. They talk about you if you don’t, and when you do they complain you’re monopolizing the bathroom. No pleasing wives. People seldom keep up this morning tubbing or else one would hear of more old folks meeting their Maker in a bathtub. To bathe,” he continued as he searched for the soap, “is to admit that one is not all that one should be. And that is not at all a fragrant admission. Yet in public a man will suddenly spring up and announce with an air of infinite virtue that it is his intention to bathe his body. The shame of the thing. A man should so live that a tub would be a novelty rather than a necessity. How much more dynamic it would be for a man to get up in public and announce that he had no intention of taking a bath for a long, long time; that he had taken a bath recently, and that he refused to make further concessions to public opinion, which was notoriously bovine and vacillating.” Topper had found the soap and was warming to his theme. “Let him add,” he continued, “that he really didn’t need that bath, and that he was prevailed upon to take it only by the knowledge that his wife would go about saying to other wives, ‘My dear, it’s simply terrible. I can’t do a thing with my husband. He absolutely refuses to bathe.’ Some wives might try to hush it up, but the servants would be sure to talk. Somehow the thing would get out.” Once more he fumbled for the soap, then thoughtfully considered his partially lathered foot. “Take that foot, for example,” he went on critically. “It is neither better nor worse for its tub – worse, if anything. Unpleasantly shrunken by the water. Its full bloom is no longer with it.”

Topper regarded the foot with sudden alarm. It seemed strangely changed. Somehow, it did not at all remind him of the foot he had associated with for so many years, shoe in and shoe out.

Then, even as he looked, out of the void shockingly came a voice, a disembodied voice, pitched in a note of warning. Topper jumped as if suddenly brought into contact with a furious electric eel.

“Listen,” said the voice quite casually. “I’m perfectly willing to have you scrub my foot if you get any kick out of it – ha! ha! – but don’t let it go any farther than that. I think that is fairly stated.”

Topper quickly averted his dilated eyes from the foot he had been so critically considering. With a dreadful feeling he realized that in truth the horrid thing did not belong to him. Somehow or other an odd foot had managed to get itself into the tub, and he, Topper, had been industriously scrubbing this self-same foot. He had been performing the most demeaning of all labors – scrubbing someone else’s foot. But whose? There was the foot as plain as the nose on his face. It was sticking up out of the water at a jaunty, uncompromising angle. Topper glanced again, then once more looked elsewhere. He could not stand the expression of that foot. It shattered him.

“Well,” continued the voice rather impatiently, “since you’ve got it so nicely soaped you might as well go on with it. Scrub that foot, Topper.”

“I have been scrubbing it,” gasped Topper, addressing his words to the foot, “scrubbing it to my intense disgust. Damned if I’ll scrub the crab-like object any longer.”

“Oh, I say, Topper,” said the voice, assuming an admonitory tone. “You greatly wrong that foot, I assure you. That is a typical Castilian foot, my dear fellow, worthy of the purest Castile soap. I jest, Topper. Smile.”

“I am far from smiling, foot,” replied Mr. Topper.

“Don’t call me foot,” snapped the voice. “Address me as sir or monsieur.”

“To me you are merely a foot,” remarked Topper, “and not a very good foot, at that. But what I want to know is: what is an odd foot doing in my tub, and where the deuce is your brother?”

“Don’t be deliberately disagreeable, Topper,” said the foot. “Your humor is in ill taste.”

“Perhaps,” admitted Topper, “but a foot, detached and talkative, is somewhat trying to the most rugged of bathers.”

“Come, come, now, Topper,” came the reproachful voice of the foot, “that’s not at all neighborly.”

“Can’t see how I could be any more neighborly,” rejoined Topper, “bathing as I am with your foot and God only knows what else.”

“It is rather chummy, isn’t it?” admitted the voice. “But if you must know, I really wasn’t counting on your company. All I required of you was to draw my bath. You see, I don’t understand that sinister-looking box up there. Vesuvius – a name hardly designed to inspire confidence.”

“You should have made your wishes known,” said Topper. “Had I known of your foot all the gendarmes in France couldn’t have crammed me in this tub.”

“This foot, Topper, seems to have got the better of you. What’s wrong with the foot?”

“Practically everything,” explained Topper. “But that’s not the point. How would you like to take a bath with an odd foot?”

“I would take it without the slightest qualms,” declared the voice. “In fact, I might use the odd foot to some advantage – scratch my back with it, for example. How’s that for an idea?”

“Rotten,” answered Topper. “Revolting. Almost unbearable. Would it upset you greatly if I called this bath off?”

“You wouldn’t upset me,” said the voice, “but I might jolly well upset you.”

Topper sensed a hidden threat in the words. He remained silent and submerged. Pondering. The situation had passed far beyond him. He felt unable to deal with it. Experience had shown him that it was impossible to free oneself from the attentions of a low-plane spirit once it had set its mind on cultivating one’s company. And although that same experience more or less familiarized him with the situation, he was far from being reconciled to it. One can very quickly get out of the habit of associating with partially materialized spirits. To be sitting in a bathtub conversing with five toes still struck him as being somewhat unusual. He wondered who could be the owner of those five toes. Topper more than a little suspected the hidden presence of George Kerby. There was something vaguely reminiscent in the quality of the voice – a certain ironical inflection, a grim, almost ghastly playfulness. Now had it only been the foot of George’s wife – Mr. Topper’s meditations were rudely interrupted.

“Of what are you thinking, Topper of the unsavory mind?” inquired the voice. “Something nice and dirty?”

Mr. Topper started guiltily. He wondered if his disembodied companion had the power to peer into mortal minds. Topper fervently hoped not. If he had, his, Topper’s, position would become most untenable. It would become appallingly dangerous. He attempted a disarming smile.

“My dear foot,” he replied easily, “if such you insist on remaining, I was merely thinking how nice it would be if you would pop off and allow me to continue alone with my bath. No gentleman – no well mannered gentleman, that is – relishes scrubbing his body while sitting on the lap of an unseen bath mate. It is neither gentil nor chic, no matter how you look at it.”

“I don’t mind it in the least,” remarked the voice indifferently.

“Only too well do I realize that,” said Topper. “But consider the difference of our positions, if you will. To me you are nothing more nor less than a foot, five weird-looking toes protruding from the water. To you I am one complete body with all parts present and accounted for. In other words, all my cards are on the table.”

“And there isn’t an ace among them,” commented the voice. “Furthermore, there are some parts of you I can’t account for at all. Under any scheme of things. No matter how far I stretch my imagination.”

“We won’t go into that now,” put in Topper hastily. “Anyway, I’d rather account for my own parts, if you don’t mind. There is not one I would sacrifice with any degree of fortitude or comfort.”

“How about that vast paunch?”

Mr. Topper leaned far over in an effort to conceal that object. This brought him face to face with the foot. From the water five long toes were wriggling up at him. Only a short time ago he had been soaping them with solicitude. The thought was decidedly disagreeable. Topper snapped back to his former position with alacrity. Why should he be ashamed of his stomach in the presence of such a foot?

“Merely a gentle declivity, my dear fellow,” he replied with dignity. “A man must have some container in which to put his food.”

“I don’t,” declared the voice proudly. “If I felt inclined I could eat my head off the while I snapped my fingers at my stomach.”

“God grant you do not feel inclined,” Topper retorted earnestly. “It’s not a picture of charm. I think I should lose my reason if I had to watch you engaged in the doubly unpleasant operation of eating your head off while snapping your fingers at your stomach.”

“Then you see what you’re up against?”

“I suspect rather than see it,” said Topper. “For all I know I might be up against Marcus Aurelius in the lighter vein.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“Much less than that. Merely the beginning. Just a foot.”

“If I made myself complete, one of us would have to leave this tub.”

“That one would be me,” said Mr. Topper. “I would go both gladly and promptly. Are you planning to be here long?”

“I’m ready to finish whenever you are,” the voice answered agreeably. “We can let the rest of me go until some other time.”

“We!” exclaimed Mr. Topper. “I hope to let the rest of you go forever.”

“You can hardly do that, Topper, my fine fellow.”

“This has been puzzling me,” observed Topper. “If I let all the water out of this tub, what would become of the foot?”

“I could do one of two things,” replied the voice in a considering tone. “I could shift it into a finger and let it slip down the drain or I could face you man to man.”

“Try not to do either,” urged Topper. “Can’t you figure out something else?”

“Why, of course,” continued the voice. “I could call the foot back into the fourth dimension, where the rest of me is at present.”

“Good!” exclaimed Topper. “Why don’t you do that? I can hardly leave an odd foot knocking about my bathroom, you know. It would upset the entire household. My cat might stray in and try to play with it – nibble its toes or something, although I’d hate to believe that Scollops would stoop so low.”

“You put things rather gruesomely yourself,” suggested the voice, “but I don’t mind cats. Like ’em, in fact. Your cat can play with my toes and welcome to them. But no nibbling. Not that. I’m thinking about Mrs. Topper. What of her?”

“Yes,” replied Topper blankly. “What of her. She would not appreciate an odd foot or any other odd part.”

“Thank God she’s yours,” the voice declared. “You’re welcome to her. But may I ask you, Topper, are you always so careful yourself of other men’s wives?”

“Certainly,” replied Mr. Topper, with a marked sense of uneasiness. “I always honor women.”

“I like that,” laughed the voice nastily, and Topper was sure now that he was in the presence of George Kerby’s foot. “And I dare say crawling into bed with them is your idea of honoring them – the order of the Double Cross.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” hedged Mr. Topper.

“No?” continued the voice with increasing agitation. “You don’t, eh? Innocent Topper. Chaste Topper. Bah! You bed presser.” At this point the foot waved itself vindictively scarcely three inches from Mr. Topper’s delicately quivering nostrils. “Well, mark me well, Topper,” the voice continued. “If you don’t keep your salacious old meat hooks away from my wife I’ll drag you down into your grave before your time.”

Mr. Topper was most unpleasantly impressed. He tried to bluff it out.

“Why, I didn’t even know you had a wife,” he managed to get out. “Mustn’t be much company for her if you go around like that.”

“I’ve a wife, all right,” continued the voice, “or I did have a wife. Don’t know where she is at the moment, but wherever she is it’s ten to one she’s raising particular hell. If I ever catch you two together – look!”

Topper looked and found himself confronted by two rows of bared teeth. He had never seen teeth so shockingly displayed in all his life. Beside them the snarl of a tiger was amiability itself. It was by all odds Topper’s most disconcerting moment. Those bared teeth grinning wickedly – a sight the most upsetting. Then suddenly they snapped with a click of horrid finality. Topper sprang from the tub. He could bear the situation no longer. Behind him the teeth clicked dangerously somewhere in the neighborhood of the nape of his neck.

“Remember!” gritted the pursuing teeth. “This is merely a friendly warning.”

“Friendly,” thought Topper frantically. “Oh, my good gracious God! What would it be like if he were furious? And all this on an empty stomach. It’s too bad.”

Throwing modesty to the winds, Topper dashed dripping from the bathroom, the blue-silk pajamas forgotten in his anxiety to seek the protection of his wife.

“Why, my dear!” exclaimed that lady, sitting up in bed. “I haven’t seen you in such a state for years.”

“You haven’t seen me in such a state ever,” replied Mr. Topper, snatching up his wife’s bathrobe and tying its arms round his waist, giving to the garment a curious apron-like appearance, effective only when approached from the front.

At this moment a blood-curdling yell of defiance rang through the house. Mr. Topper spun around. His wife was unable to decide whether she was more shocked by what she saw than by what she heard. Both Topper and the yell were terrible. A moment later Félice, who had attempted to straighten up the bathroom, came tottering upon the scene.

“The towel,” she announced tragically. “It agitates itself. It advances upon me and pushes out cries. Me, I am totally overthrown.”

“So am I,” agreed Mr. Topper, in his agitation turning his back upon the maid. “I tombe in ruins, myself.”

For the first time Félice seemed to be aware of the presence of Mr. Topper. When she had thoroughly assimilated the rear view of the master of the villa she became even more vividly aware. For a moment it was difficult to tell whether she was going to fall in ruins or explode in mirth. Gradually an expression of pleased enlightenment overspread her face.

“A masque, perhaps?” she asked of Mrs. Topper.

“Does it look like a mask?” snarled Topper.

“But yes, m’sieu,” said Félice.

Topper looked back and surveyed himself. Then he laughed bitterly.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he observed thoughtfully. “A tragic mask.”

What Félice had seen of Topper, as fantastic as it was, served to keep her from losing her reason, for after one last inquiring, puzzled look, she demurely lowered her eyes and left the room with a coy flit of her own trim torso.

“What is it all about?” asked Mrs. Topper, trying not to look. “What are you doing that for, and who is being murdered in the hall?”

“I don’t know,” her husband replied distractedly. “It must have been an escaped parrot or some other wild Riviera bird.”

CHAPTER FIVE

One Thing Leads to Another

The temps had started beau but had broken down on the way. An odd foot had thrown a monkey wrench into the workings of Mr. Topper’s day. He was disgusted with the temps. Also he was disgusted with baths and bathtubs. He faithfully promised himself never to bathe again. He would never be sure any more of what he might find in that tub. Anything, any human part, was possible. Gloomily he sought the privacy of his own room. In his present attire this privacy was greatly to be desired by all concerned.

More through accident than design his sleeping quarters adjoined those of his wife. “The French would have it that way,” he reflected as he passed through the door. “And a good idea, too, when given the right material.”

He recalled the eloquent insinuations of Monsieur Grandon upon the occasion of his introducing them to the villa. The Frenchman had stood in the doorway between the two rooms, a hand extended invitingly toward each bed.

“Regardez!” he had exclaimed, a playful smile cracking the austerity of his blue-black beard. “Monsieur est là et Madame est là. What happiness!”

Mr. Topper, regarding the Frenchman, could almost see himself and his wife lying exhaustedly in their respective beds, yawning into the face of an uneventful night.

“It is of a simplicity desirable, is it not?” Monsieur Grandon had demanded. “One comes. One goes. At any given moment. It is accomplished.”

Mr. Topper had refrained from pointing out to Monsieur Grandon that this constant dashing back and forth from bed to bed at any given moment might seriously overtax their failing strength.

“And the beds, m’sieu,” here the propriétaire had raised his eyes to heaven in unholy ecstasy. “Of an elasticité suprême – la, la!”

This had been just a little too much for Mr. Topper. For some reason the world of meaning Monsieur Grandon managed to pack into that “la, la!” was unendurable.

“Let us not go further into the beds now,” Topper had suggested a little primly.

“But no,” the propriétaire had replied, somewhat shocked himself. “Later you shall both introduce yourselves into the beds, et puis, who knows?”

Topper had looked at Monsieur Grandon aghast, astounded.

“My God,” he had thought, “is this little Frenchman bereft of all sense of delicacy, or is he merely trying to taunt me?”

Mrs. Topper had left the room.

While Topper was now radically rearranging his appearance, he was thoughtfully considering recent events, or as much of them as could be considered from the sketchy material at hand. This consisted of one detached and gesticulating foot, one pair of gnashing teeth, and one insufferably loquacious voice. Also one soul-splitting yell. All of these manifestations pointed to George Kerby. However, Mr. Topper was thinking more of what had not been seen, and which might at any moment be seen, than he was of what he had seen already – awful as that had been. Around him the air fairly tingled with currents of panic and calamity. He found himself wondering if Marion had drifted back to a low-plane and had followed her husband to the Riviera. The possibility excited Topper. Life began to quicken. It retarded itself immediately at the thought of George and the Colonel and Mrs. Hart. What an open break that would be. Topper smiled in spite of himself. Almost any change would be agreeable to his present mode of existence.

His dressing completed, Topper, looking vastly more dignified, stepped into the presence of his wife.

“I hardly recognize you,” she observed caustically. “You should go in for disguises and things.”

“What do you mean by things?” he asked.

“Conduct that cannot be described,” she answered quite comfortably. “All this has not been good for my dyspepsia.”

She looked down and consulted the pages of a menu book. She became absorbed. This was one of Mary Topper’s happier occupations. In its solemnity it was ritualistic. Each day before she arose it was her custom to take her dyspepsia out on a gastronomic hike along a path bristling with dangers. The very idea of what she might do to her dyspepsia if for a moment she relaxed her vigilance and yielded to some of the more alluring bypaths along the way or followed some of the seemingly innocent suggestions in her guide book, gave her much the same feeling as experienced by one cavorting dizzily through space on a hastily constructed but recklessly conceived scenic railway. She trembled pleasantly at the number of terrible things she could do to herself if she really let go her grip on the dietary rail; the effect of various spices, her reactions to a certain rich sauce, the hours of discomfort lurking in the depth of well seasoned gravy and the long, unrestful afternoons resulting from an overexposure to pâté de foie, pâtisserie, or fromage. And inevitably, after mentally passing through these hairbreadth escapes, Mrs. Topper, with unimaginative consistency and much to the disgust of her husband and Félice, would arise with some nice, wholesome, but perfectly spiritless menu firmly fixed in her mind. She had one so fixed this morning, and as Mr. Topper stood there looking at his wife, she glanced up and had the bad judgment to mention one of its principal items.

“How about a little gigot tonight?” she asked brightly.

Mr. Topper started and looked closely at his wife. The man had received a severe jolt. He was all at sea.

“How about a little what?” he asked uneasily.

“A little gigot,” she answered almost coyly for her. “Un petit gigot, you know.”

“I’m very much afraid I do know,” replied Mr. Topper. “And just because you say it in French doesn’t make it any nicer. I must confess, I’m surprised. As a matter of fact, I’m shocked.”

“Oh, you never like anything,” his wife complained petulantly.

“It’s not a question of my likes or dislikes,” he replied with dignity. “It’s a matter of fitness. One does not propose such a thing at this hour of the morning. Suppose the servants should overhear?”

“Nonsense. They know all about it already. I tell them about it myself.”

“You do!” exclaimed Mr. Topper, now thoroughly upset. “French servants don’t need to be told. I had no idea you were so loose.”

“What harm is there in a little gigot?” asked Mary Topper, looking penetratingly at her husband.

“Mary,” he said, “I hate to appear in the light of a prude, especially before you. I’m not saying there’s any harm in a little gigot. Many persons find it amusing. But it’s not a thing to dwell on – to plan in cold blood.”

“One can’t very well make a secret of it,” Mrs. Topper protested.

“Need one shout it from the housetops?”

“Nonsense!” snapped Mrs. Topper again. “Everybody knows about gigot.”

“Undoubtedly,” agreed Mr. Topper. “It is seldom out of people’s minds, but nice people, especially ladies, don’t make a practice of talking about it at the crack o’ dawn, so to speak.”

“Why not?” demanded his wife.

“If you can’t see that for yourself, it would do no good for me to tell you.” He paused a moment and scratched the back of his neck with a perplexed finger. Suddenly his expression cleared. “Will you kindly tell me just what in the world you mean by gigot?” he asked.

“You seemed to know all about it,” said his wife.

“I thought I did,” answered Topper. “I was afraid I did, but perhaps I was thinking of something else. Must have confused the word with gigolo. What does that queer sound you’ve been making mean, anyway?”

“Why, it simply means a leg of mutton,” replied his wife. “One can’t very well expect lamb in these peculiar French markets.”

Topper’s face was a study. The thing was much worse than he had expected.

“Did I travel at no little trouble and expense,” he asked quietly, “did I uproot my life and manage some four thousand miles to leave Glendale and all its horrid works behind only to have a leg of mutton flaunted in my face? This is most discouraging. I thought we’d settled the lamb question a long time ago.”

“I hoped all this travel might have made some difference,” was the plaintive reply.

“So had I,” said Topper. “I hoped it would make a vast difference in our daily diet. I hoped that over here you wouldn’t be able to discover the old familiar things with which you have gradually beaten down my appetite for years. You can’t change the nature of a chunk of meat merely by changing its name.”

“But I only thought – —” began Mrs. Topper.

“I know,” he broke in on her. “You only thought. That’s just the trouble. You thought out loud. If you’d said nothing about your damned gigot, I’d very likely eaten the beastly thing and been none the wiser. Suzanne and Félice, seasoning in relays, might have succeeded in disguising it. After all, Mary, as long as we have to eat, we might as well bow to the inevitable and endeavor to make meals pleasant occasions – refreshing little interludes – rather than repetitious ordeals. We want to eat flesh, not to mortify it. Don’t tell me about my food. Don’t warn me about it – threaten me with it. I’d like to be surprised for a change. I have other things to think about than gigots.”

“What?” asked Mary flatly. “What on earth is there left for you to think about now that you’ve abandoned your banking? Surely not your past. I hope you’re trying to forget that.”

“What I think about, past, present, or future, is nobody’s business,” retorted Mr. Topper. “Because a man has stopped working it does not necessarily follow that he has stopped thinking. As a matter of fact, that’s when he begins to think, when he begins to get a chance to think and look about him.”

“I know what you look about at,” said Mrs. Topper surprisingly, “that is, when you’re on the beach.”

“You do?” replied Mr. Topper, somewhat set down. “And what do I look at there, if I may ask?”

“More meat,” replied Mrs. Topper with unexpected coarseness, “and it isn’t a leg of lamb. I’ve seen that creature, too – almost all of her. You’re getting senile. That’s the trouble with you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m sure,” lied the good Topper.

“You know it so well you could draw it from memory,” Mrs. Topper assured him.

“Draw what from memory?”

“It,” said Mrs. Topper. “That disgraceful woman. Your naked friend.”

“Mary,” her husband replied accusingly, “I’m just beginning to learn that at heart you are an utterly coarse woman. I refuse to be drawn into any more of your vulgar discussions. Twice already this morning you have greatly shocked me.”

“That’s nothing to what you did to Félice when you so jauntily turned your back on her this morning.”

“Fiddlesticks! Félice is used to it.”

“What? You astound me.”

“This is profitless,” Topper broke out in an attempt to gain back a shred of his lost prestige. “If you ever mention a leg of lamb or mutton to me in any language I’ll provide myself with a broadsword and hew the legs off of every sheep in France, and that goes for the pups, too. Failing that, I buy up all the rams and incarcerate them in a monastery so that the race will become extinct.”

As her husband strode from the room Mary Topper did not appear at all impressed by the various things he was going to do. In fact, she was smiling slightly.

“And I believe I know what you thought gigot meant,” she called after him.

“I don’t give a hang if you do,” he flung back. “You and your confounded gigots. Why don’t you speak a language that has some sense to it?”

“That would have to be the sign language for you,” his wife assured him.

“I don’t hear you,” he said. “What?”

“Oh, nothing. You wouldn’t understand.”

Topper, halfway down the stairs, paused and tried to think of some crushing and final retort. Failing abysmally in this, he continued downward in a state of high bad humor. That woman up there had the greatest knack of putting him in the wrong. It was uncanny. The morning was getting worse and worse. There was no telling where it would end. He hurried over to the buffet and poured himself a tot of cognac. While doing so he became aware of the presence of the maid Félice. He could feel her gaze resting on him. Worse than that. He could feel her gaze resting on a particular part of him. This was just too bad. He turned to meet her large, wondering eyes.

“M’sieu carries himself better now?” she inquired solicitously.

He very much feared he detected a smile lurking round the corners of her full red lips.

“I always carry myself well, Félice,” he told her loftily. “It is not difficult.”

“Quel homme!” breathed Félice admiringly as if to herself. “Quel sangfroid! Merveilleux.”

“What’s so merveilleux?” he demanded as he turned reluctantly to replace his empty glass. “What are you gaping at now?”

“Rien de tout,” she replied with a shrug of her pretty shoulders. “Une bagatelle, m’sieu.”

“Is that so!” said Topper, departing to the veranda. Then to himself, “These French trollops have more damned brass. It’s their eyes. They’re as eloquent as a couple of tongues.”

He turned his own eyes to the little village stepping up the Esterels from the sea. Small white houses, occasionally a splash of color, red roofs and green, squatting cheerfully round the skirts of a great domed cathedral. On the shore the new Casino, its walls and its windows gleaming against the sun. Farther along the arc of the shore curved the more exclusive hotels – an expensive crescent studded with Americans and other rich. And far along the coastline lay the villas of the mighty dominated by the turrets of a château of much pleasure. Almost from Mr. Topper’s feet the squalid, picturesque, gossiping little streets of the town casually meandered upward, paused for a breath in some white, quiet square where advertising posters and green shutters lent the only touch of color, then took up their way once more only to vanish entirely into farmlands and pine forests. Suddenly a burst of life. A high-powered motorboat looped out from the shore, then sped arrogantly along parallel with the beach, leaving noise and foam behind it. A few miles out, a scatter of sailing yachts, like white tents tugging in the wind, streamed through sun-washed waves. It was a quiet day. From far off came voices drifting. Planes droned in the sky. Topper’s thoughts grew hazy. He had a pleasant feeling of nothingness, of remoteness and severed contacts. Yet also present was a vague sense of unease, an awareness of something waiting.

“Déjeuner, m’sieu,” came a soft voice behind him.

Topper turned slowly and followed the voice. He was wondering if he had taken his cognac altogether properly this morning. A few minutes later he had occasion to feel convinced that he had taken it most improperly as well as too lavishly. He did not regret this, for he felt the need of considerable extra courage and fortitude both of which were distilled deep in the heart of cognac – good cognac.

CHAPTER SIX

Unseen and Uninvited Guests

Déjeuner, as cherished by the French, was a frightful misnomer for the orgy into which Cosmo Topper had plunged that customarily fragile and insipid repast. When he had first arrived in France he had for a while permitted this travesty of a breakfast to be placed before him. With growing but silent sedition he had observed inferior coffee being mixed on terms of equality with warm and dubious milk. With praiseworthy fortitude he had applied innumerable species of oversweetened confiture to toast that had died aborning. He had masticated with increasing gloom in the face of a smiling France, swallowed with obvious effort, then remained perfectly motionless as he wondered long and deeply. Then the little that had been before him being even less, if possible, he had arisen with a profound sensation of loss and bereavement. As he watched other people going through the same matutinal anticlimax with every visible evidence of enjoyment and animation he had the sensation of a man who alone out of a great multitude had missed the point of a joke, and who in an attempt to disguise this humiliating fact joins in the genuine laughter with false heartiness. To add verisimilitude to this craven deception, Topper would endeavor to leave his table with the air of a man replete with good things, of one saying to himself, “Déjeuner is a splendid institution. So quaintly French. For the life of me I can’t figure out how I ever got along without it for all these years.” But in his heart Mr. Topper knew quite well how he had been able to get along without it for all those years, and at last there came a day when he resolved to prolong that sacrifice indefinitely. To hell with what others thought and others ate. He was going to consume his breakfast instead of looking for it. After all, the French, as superficially amiable as they were, might be entirely wrong about this déjeuner business. Anyway, it was their breakfast and not his.

Accordingly, while still loving France either because of or in spite of its failings, Topper introduced into it an essentially American breakfast. To achieve this he completely revolutionized his manner and method of living. He took unto himself a villa, rented one – an operation, by the way, which has done more to promote premature grayness in France among friendly visitors and to change them to cynical and embittered critics than any other form of extortion, insult, and humiliation the supremely logical Latin mind has as yet conceived.

Emerging from this transaction spiritually disgruntled and financially bilked, Mr. Topper set about obtaining a supply of God-fearing coffee. This was eventually found after the exchange of innumerable francs. Eggs and bacon then entered into the scheme of things, new methods were introduced painfully to Suzanne, and eventually there came a day when, in solitary grandeur, Mr. Topper sat down to his own kind of breakfast beneath a roof that was temporarily his own. Both Félice, who served this sacrilege, and Suzanne, who had been forced to commit it, furtively watched Mr. Topper until assured that God was not going to slay him on their hands.

Mr. Topper had once labored under the mistaken impression that he disliked change, that he was a creature of fixed and inflexible habits and solidly set opinions. Then one day he discovered that all his life he had been terribly wrong and that his conduct up to date had been unnatural inasmuch as it had been based on a false assumption. Quite unexpectedly he discovered that he enjoyed change and reveled in disorder, that hitherto his opinions had not been opinions at all but the figments of a manacled imagination. Marion Kerby had been instrumental in showing him the error of his ways. Topper changed, but in one thing he steadfastly refused to budge. Neither God nor man should for any considerable length of time interfere with either the composition or consumption of his breakfast. It had been ordained at the laying of the first egg conceived by hen and the first slice of bacon extracted from pig that the two should dwell in harmony together. And it was further ordained that their dwelling place should be a plate placed on a breakfast table for the nourishment and delight of man. Obviously this man could not have been of French extraction nor given a snap of his primeval phalanges for petit déjeuner or café au lait.

It was to such a breakfast that Mr. Topper anticipated sitting down. Things went no further than that for a time. The sitting section of the man was rudely arrested in its anticipatory and dignified descent and held grotesquely fixed in a position of suspended animation. Félice regarded the master of the villa with baffled eyes, then hurried from the room to tell Suzanne all about this, his latest prank. He was an original, that one, a veritable type.

“My dear chap,” protested a voice through the small of Mr. Topper’s back, “isn’t this rather high-handed? Don’t remain poised like that. Think of how it must be for me.”

“Think of how it must be for me,” gasped Topper, “to be rebuked by my own chair.”

Nevertheless, he immediately reversed the operation of his internal jack and elevated himself with more celerity than grace. Hoping that there was, perhaps, something a little curious about that individual chair and that the others were normal, Topper selected another one and was about to occupy it when this time his descent was interrupted even more peremptorily.

“Hold hard, Topper,” said a decided voice. “Take it away from me. Here I sit and here I stay. Scram.”

As greatly as Mr. Topper objected to the use of the expression “scram,” he felt that under the circumstances it eloquently conveyed an idea he very earnestly desired to put into practice. Accordingly he selected still a third chair into which he virtually plunged his body. A soft giggle greeted his arrival, his stomach was tenderly squeezed by two unseen arms – endearments which did more to speed his departure from that chair than had the other two harsher admonitions.

“Don’t go,” pleaded a woman’s voice which he recognized as belonging to Mrs. Hart. “I liked you so much as you were.”

“You wouldn’t have liked me long,” Topper assured her.

“Come! Come!” came the unmistakable voice of Colonel Scott. “None of that, Mrs. Hart, if you please. It’s only breakfast yet, or, at least, it’s supposed to be breakfast. I wonder if that is as far as we’ll get. I’ve been sitting here all morning watching him swill down cognac.”

“It’s my cognac, isn’t it?” Topper demanded.

“Rather let us say, it is our cognac,” replied the Colonel. “One for all and all for one, Topper. How’s that?”

“Not so good, Colonel,” Topper answered. “You mean, all on one and one for all. That’s the way it always was, wasn’t it?”

“I will say, Topper, you were always a good provider. We expect no less now.”

While this little exchange was in progress Mr. Topper was endeavoring to occupy the fourth and last chair at his own breakfast table. For his enterprise his ear was delicately nibbled and he received a slight pinch in an especially selected spot.

“Remove that, my old,” said the well remembered voice of Marion Kerby.

A pair of coarse, cynical laughs which Topper would have preferred not to hear, came from across the table as Topper once more wearily raised his body. He was now in the position of a man unable to sit down at his own breakfast table. Marion’s voice had thrilled him, but the situation was working him up to a pitch. He was in no mood for tender thoughts. His breakfast was involved, seriously endangered. For a moment he stood looking undecidedly at the table; then, his rugged New England ancestry overcoming his natural inclination to abandon the unequal struggle, he dragged a chair from the wall, placed it at the table well away from the others, and deposited himself in it with a defiant plop.

“Well, that’s very much better, I should say,” commented the Colonel. “Should have thought of it in the first place.”

“Kindly step to hell,” said Mr. Topper, wearily mopping his forehead. “That’s all, just step to hell.”

“Your language,” admonished the voice of the foot in the tub, which could be none other than George Kerby’s. “And your actions. What has come over you, man? First you invade my tub, then you sit on my lap. Great God, it’s enough to drive a man crazy!”

“I wouldn’t have minded either in the least,” said the voice of the languid Mrs. Hart. “Especially the tub. Mr. Topper, I’ll let you know the next time I’m making a tub of it.”

“Let me advise you to do no such thing,” came Marion Kerby’s voice, cold, deliberate, and low with fury. “Keep your ectoplasm out of his tub, or I’ll tear it to shreds.”

“Here! Here!” put in George Kerby. “What’s that man to you? What do you care about his tub and who goes in it? He’s none of your business whatsoever. Understand that? And as for yourself, if I ever catch you even near his tub, I’ll drag him down through the pipes.”

Involuntarily Topper shuddered at the picture of himself being elongated through the pipes.

“I suppose it has not even occurred to you,” he observed evenly, “that I might prefer to bathe entirely alone.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Marion Kerby. “Not one little bit. If we feel like it, all of us will bathe all over you whether you like it or not. And that goes for Oscar, too.”

At this moment Félice entered bearing a tray laden with eggs, bacon, toast, and a large pot of coffee. Topper looked pleadingly from one to the other of the four apparently unoccupied chairs, but all to no avail. No sooner had the maid placed the tray on the table than its contents were literally whisked away from under Topper’s slightly elevated nose. The coffee pot was snatched in one direction, while the bacon and eggs took another, but the latter changed direction several times, as if greedy hands were contending for possession, tugging the plate back and forth. Finally the eggs parted company together with the bacon and disappeared amazingly into the air, small portions of both dropping untidily to the tablecloth. The toast was acting oddly for plain ordinary toast – for any kind of toast, in fact. Four crisp pieces facing the four empty chairs were being snapped into nothingness. Mr. Topper, reaching for the fifth and last piece, experienced the unpleasant sensation of having it snatched from his fingers by an unseen hand.

All this was somewhat trying to observe, especially when the coffee pot became violently agitated in the air as if a determined dispute for its possession were silently in progress. Both Topper and Félice watched the antics of the coffee pot with fascinated eyes.

“There’ll be quite enough coffee for all,” said Topper under his breath. “Put the damn thing down. I’ll get some cups.”

He hastened to the buffet and returned with four extra cups, which he placed before the vacant chairs.

“Let me pour,” he said beseechingly. “Just for the sake of appearances. You’ll drive my maid mad.”

“M’sieu,” babbled Félice, “regardez là. The breakfast, it eats himself.”

Suzanne stood in the doorway with sheer horror deep in her eyes.

“Go away,” said Mr. Topper wearily, “and eat yourselves. I’m too busy to explain, but everything is quite tranquille. Have no peur. And bring back all the bacon and eggs in the house – and toast.”

“Plain bread will do,” cried a ravenous voice.

“Rashers of bacon,” shouted George Kerby, his voice choked with food.

“And make it snappy, my full-bodied wench,” called the Colonel in his army voice. “Bien vite, or I’ll haunt your sheets.”

This last remark retarded rather than hastened the French girl’s flight. She knew her essential English thoroughly. She had decorated more than one American villa. Pausing at the kitchen door she looked archly back at Topper, whom she held directly responsible for all these odd affairs. Had he not been acting strangely all morning?

“Comment on est gentil, m’sieu,” she murmured demurely. “Est-elle une promesse?”

“And while we’re on the subject of keeping away from tubs and things,” Mrs. Hart remarked lazily, “you, my good Colonel, had better keep away from that French trollop’s sheets. We don’t want any trouble at all, if trouble can be avoided.”

Mr. Topper, in attempting to discover just how much remained of his breakfast, found to his disgust that there were no remains. Apart from a slight untidiness – a few crumbs – it was as if his breakfast had never been. Topper cast the chairs a look of supreme distaste. He was a hungry man, and he strongly objected to having his breakfast devoured before his very eyes.

“Well, at any rate,” came the complacent voice of George Kerby, “I didn’t do so badly on that grab.” Here a few crumbs dropped to the table as if finger tips were being delicately brushed. “Are there no finger bowls in this establishment, Topper? After all, we are your guests, you know.”

Topper laughed shortly.

“Even Einstein couldn’t make that theory click,” he said. “First you crowd yourself into my bathtub, then, not satisfied with that, you go shrieking through the house making nervous wrecks of everybody, including myself. After that gracious little display, you hurry downstairs and call in your gang. You take my breakfast table, and then you snatch my breakfast in the most revolting manner, and now, by God, you demand finger bowls. Listen, the sooner I see the last of you – —”

“Pull in, my stout,” interrupted the voice of Marion Kerby. “You haven’t seen the first of us yet, nor the best. For instance, regardez là.”

The table was suddenly adorned by a pair of stunning legs which Topper also felt sure he recognized. These legs, drifting up to nothingness, executed a few clever tap movements, then slowly faded from view.

“And that’s just for instance,” continued the voice. “Have you seen enough, my gross?”

“Quite,” her gross replied hypocritically because of George Kerby. “Let us have no more obscenities.”

“Then you’re easily satisfied,” observed the voice of the Colonel cynically. “That’s just where I begin.”

“Why, Colonel!” exclaimed Mrs. Hart. “You petrify me.”

“Marion,” said George Kerby, and his voice was far from pleasant, “I would suggest that you lower your visibility considerably. You’re not the mascot of the troupe, and your legs are not public property.”

“No, they’re strictly my private business,” replied the voice of the legs.

“I’d like to twist them off,” said George Kerby.

Mr. Topper closed his eyes on this picture. These spirits had evidently descended to even a lower plane. They were coarser than he had ever known them, and less restrained. Even the Colonel’s invariable suavity had become somewhat roughened. Marion’s next remark confirmed him in his opinion.

“Then why don’t you materialize,” she suggested unemotionally, “and cut your silly throat from ear to ear in the presence of us all. You deserve to die at least a couple of times, and we deserve to see you.”

“I’m just waiting for you to materialize,” her husband answered angrily, “and then I’m going to beat the hide off you.”

“You’ll get no hide off me,” was the prompt retort.

“Please. Please,” Mr. Topper protested feebly. “I hate to interfere, but, after all, this is my breakfast table. Don’t make a brawl of it.”

“Then wouldn’t it be expedient to have something placed on the table?” suggested the Colonel.

“I could toy with a clutch of eggs myself,” Mrs. Hart remarked in her casual voice. “My stomach, if you’ll pardon me, is in a perfect frenzy.”

“Why don’t you all go away?” demanded George Kerby petulantly. “I found him first.”

“You can have what’s left of him when we’re through,” Marion remarked in a chilly voice. “Had quite enough of my legs, had he? Very well, we’ll see all about that. I’ll teach him how a gentleman should treat a lady.”

Topper, with a feeling of keen apprehension, realized that Marion was in one of her mean, unreasonable moods than which there could be no meaner nor more unreasonable.

“Marion,” he said politely, “I had no intention of suggesting that I had seen enough of your legs. I was merely trying to convey to you that the time was hardly propitious for their further contemplation.”

It was a dangerous speech, and it had unpleasant results.

“What’s that?” demanded George Kerby, hoarse with rage. “What do you mean by that? Are you trying to date my wife up on me right here before us all?”

“What did I tell you?” asked Topper hopelessly. “One has but to talk to you, and off he goes merrily on his way to murder. He almost accomplished it once.”

“Now, listen here, Topper,” cried the man’s voice passionately. “Right here and now let’s settle this situation. You want to keep well and healthy, don’t you?”

“I hope you understand, George,” his wife’s voice cut in, “that if you do anything to Topper, anything serious, that is, anything definite and final, we will have him with us permanently. Would it not be wiser to let him live to an overripe and doddering old age beyond all possibility of competition? It seems to me that you should take very good care of Topper.”

Mr. Topper listened to this conversation with a feeling of growing discomfort.

“I can make him suffer like hell in the meantime,” said George’s voice musingly. “I could cripple him.”

“Yes,” agreed Marion, “you might do that. You could tear off parts of him from time to time as a sort of warning.”

Topper was profoundly moved.

“I could do worse than that,” the man’s voice replied with an unpleasant laugh. “Much.”

“You mean worse for Topper?”

“Oh, very much worse for Topper,” the voice continued gloatingly. “About the worst thing that could happen to a body to my way of thinking.”

“No doubt it would also be to Topper’s,” said the woman’s voice. “Both of you have rotten ways of thinking.”

“You don’t even know what I’m thinking about.”

“I hope not. But look at Topper. He knows. See how pale he is.”

She spoke the truth. Topper was pale indeed. More than that, he was sweating pale drops of perspiration. Like wan, lackluster jewels they crowned his forehead.

“Dear me,” he protested weakly. “I wish you wouldn’t discuss what you might do to me and mine as if I were not present. I find it most distressing.”

“That’s a good idea,” spoke up the Colonel. “Let’s think of all the things we could do to Topper without quite killing him, and the one who hits on the worst wins a bottle of his best wine.”

“And I lose, whoever wins,” Topper commented bitterly.

“I win the wine,” declared George Kerby, “because I’ve already thought up the worst thing that could happen to Topper.”

“Why don’t you play another game?” Mr. Topper suggested. “Why don’t you see who can keep quiet the longest or go away the farthest? I hope you all win.”

“Now, Cosmo,” came the mockingly pained voice of Marion Kerby. “You don’t seem at all pleased to have us with you again, and I had thought it was going to be so different. Why, we’ve hardly done a thing to you yet in comparison with what we might do, or probably will do. I, for one, feel a bit depressed by this reception – saddened, I might almost say. Not having a handkerchief, I’ll have to use part of this tablecloth. Pardon me, everybody, but I’m not made of stone exactly. I’m not a great slab of granite. I can’t chip sledge hammers. I’m extremely thin skinned. Nobody – —”

“Oh, for God’s own sake,” broke in Mr. Topper unfeelingly, as he watched one end of the tablecloth making delicate little dabs in the air. “Don’t go on so. You’re so thin skinned you’re actually transparent. I can see clean through you.”

“Go on, George!” cried Marion’s voice. “Do what you said you were going to do. I don’t care one little damn now. Tear the beggar asunder.”

Topper caught a momentary flash of himself flying in all directions, of his various members decorating the Riviera. He closed his eyes on this, too. He found it difficult to decide whether Marion was more to be feared in one of her shockingly playful moods or when she was blindly ferocious. She played both to perfection.

“Let’s all quiet down now,” came the surprisingly amicable voice of George Kerby. “Let’s pull ourselves compactly together and pray for food. We don’t want to have any trouble here in Topper’s own home.”

“Speak for yourself,” snapped Marion. “I want some trouble here. I want a lot of trouble.”

“Here comes something much better,” Mrs. Hart’s voice cried out excitedly. “Clap eyes on that, Colonel. What a delicious looking tray! My mouth fairly slavers.”

This time, upon the appearance of Félice bearing a fresh and more abundant supply of food, Mr. Topper made a better showing. He had made up his mind not to be caught napping again. If he had to fight like an animal for his food, he was fully prepared to do his best. He would claw and snatch to the last crumb. And that was almost literally what he had to do to salvage the modest scrap of breakfast he did. His guests were prepared to go even farther than himself in their eagerness to provide their apparently famished but unseen bodies with nourishment.

Félice, who loved a good frolic of almost any nature as well if not better than the next, was startled in spite of herself. She could not understand how Mr. Topper could be in so many places at once. The affrighted girl was rocked as if in the grip of a gale. Once or twice an indignant protest escaped her lips as if undue liberties were being taken with things other than Mr. Topper’s breakfast.

Even when he returned to his chair with the spoils of conquest, Mr. Topper was not at all sure of his success. He distinctly heard someone breathing interestedly over his shoulder. It gave him an eerie sensation – the awareness of hidden eyes peering consideringly into the contents of his plate.

“That’s a nice little bit,” said the absorbed voice of Marion Kerby. “I think I’ll take that one just to prove I’ve forgiven you.”

Whereupon one of Topper’s choicest pieces of bacon slid from his plate and halved itself in the air. Its ultimate disappearance was followed by a distinct click, as of teeth.

“How unnecessary,” thought Mr. Topper.

It is surprising he did not think more about this weird breakfast and the strange things that had come to pass at it. The truth of the matter was that Mr. Topper had not been given much opportunity to do any thinking at all. He had been far too deeply involved himself. Astounding events occur with such a disarming air of naturalness that it makes one feel as if one had especially ordered them. One scarcely realizes their true nature until after they are over.

His friends had been changed but not improved. It was merely that the scope and effectiveness of their antisocial activities had been increased. One of these activities, although scarcely antisocial, was now in progress. An uninitiated observer would have gained the impression that Félice had been suddenly endowed with miraculous powers which she was using rather flightily. To the consternation of Mr. Topper she had elevated her fine French body about three feet above and parallel with the floor. There she remained for a moment alluringly poised on the wings of the fair Riviera morning.

“Leave her alone, Colonel,” Mrs. Hart admonished. “If you don’t put her down I’ll walk out on you.”

But the Colonel, having gorged himself, was now playful. Slowly but gracefully Félice was lowered to the matting, and her skirt, her inviolate jupe, was snatched from her waist. Félice, beside herself, was now only in step-ins and stockings. She looked greatly improved that way. The jupe, unoccupied, fluttered mysteriously in the air, then flopped down by the figure of its erstwhile tenant. Bereft of her skirt Félice was also bereft of her reason. That fine fortitude that had stood her in such good stead on other similar occasions forsook her now. To be unable to put up even a formal resistance seriously upset her ethics. Then again, when capitulating to a visible assailant one had something to go on, whereas with this one God alone knew what he looked like or what he was trying to prove. Whoever he was he seemed to have no definitely conceived purpose other than general low behavior. Félice tossed her fortitude into the discard along with her jupe. She began to scream in the most shockingly convincing manner. In the midst of this frightful noise she turned quite white and, so far as Mr. Topper could tell, died. The distracted man sprang from his chair and knelt down beside the stricken maid.

He was in this compromising position when Mrs. Topper appeared. The man glanced up at his wife and, finding no comfort there, glanced back at what seemed to him interminable leagues of step-ins and silk stockings. He was stunned by the amount of sheer leg that this woman had. The silence in the room was fraught with accusations. He was unable to let it continue.

“I just got here,” he observed rather inanely.

“So did I,” said Mrs. Topper. “It seems in the nick of time.”

“What do you mean?” Topper demanded indignantly.

“Need we go into that?” asked Mrs. Topper, delicately arching her eyebrows.

“It’s not that,” explained Topper in a hopeless voice.

“Then if it isn’t that,” observed his wife, “you must have taken up murder, which is, if anything, a trifle worse. What is her skirt doing where it is instead of where it should be?”

“It flopped there,” said Mr. Topper.

“A pretty picture,” commented Mrs. Topper, considering the skirt. “It just happened to flop there. For all you cared, I fancy, it might just as well have been hanging from the chandelier. And, by the way, if you are interested in whether or not she is regaining consciousness I would suggest that you shift your eyes to her face instead.”

This was a little too much for Topper, but there was still more to come. When he attempted to rise Félice, opening her eyes suddenly, flung her strong arms round his neck, and with a Gallic twist to the half-Nelson, tossed him easily onto his back. For a few moments Mr. Topper, stunned, lay down by his maid and stared up at the ceiling, upon which were many Riviera flies and a fine showing of mosquitoes recuperating from their night’s revelry.

As if fearing another and more brutal attack, Mr. Topper sacrificed his dignity and rolled rapidly across the room. Then slowly he rose to his feet. Somewhere in the room a woman’s voice was giggling, and it was not Mrs. Topper’s. That good lady was watching the performance of her husband with detachment.

“Well, I must say,” she admitted, “you move with surprising rapidity for a man of your age and bulk.”

“What do you mean, my age and bulk?” he flung at her. “I’m as good a man as any along the Riviera, and I’ll prove it quickly enough if you pull any more of those wisecracks.”

“You almost did,” was all Mrs. Topper said, but it was quite enough.

Topper, whose wits were still numb from the various shocks of the morning, could think of no reply to this. However, he could think of something to do. He gave the jupe of Félice an unreasonable kick and marched from the room.

“I shall expect an explanation,” his wife called after him.

He laughed sardonically and collected his hat and stick.

“It would drive you mad,” he said.

With a set face he departed in the direction of the village.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Self-tipping Hat

“And as for the rest of you,” Topper shouted furiously but inadequately across the length of his garden, “I hope you choke.”

“On what?” a voice at his shoulder promptly asked. “Man cannot choke on air alone.”

“I wish to God you could, Kerby,” Topper told the voice with the defiant inelegance of a baited man. He turned away.

Mrs. Topper, not understanding the reason for her husband’s fervent hope, and thinking he was flinging insults at the servants, decided that the man had lost what little was left of his wits. Not so Monsieur Louis, who was still hot at it, encouraging his garden. Once more the redoubtable head popped up. With the deadly accuracy of an eagle’s claw, a nervous hand seized Topper.

“Arrest you!” cried the Frenchman.

“For what?” demanded Topper, who by this time was surprised by no turn of fate.

“I near the end, mon ami,” breathed Monsieur Louis.

At the moment Topper was not in the least sorry. The sooner Monsieur Louis came to a complete and definite end the better. However, he remained gentil.

“Not, I trust, before you have had your play,” he remarked.

At the mention of play Monsieur Louis brightened shamelessly.

“But yes, Monsieur Toppaire,” he replied. “First I arrive at a finish, is it not? Then I begin to play.”

“You’re just like some friends of mine,” commented Topper. “They arrived at a finish and then they began to play. They’ve been doing it ever since, at the expense of others. Monsieur Louis, I do not like these friends. No.”

Monsieur Louis was at a loss concerning the true inwardness of Mr. Topper’s remarks. He never had an opportunity to find out, for at that moment Mr. Topper appeared to spin round on his heels. From somewhere close at hand a woman’s voice addressed him heatedly.

“You know that free-for-all Félice, don’t you?” demanded the voice.

“I didn’t know she was that,” Topper got out.

“Never mind,” the voice went on. “If you even so much as look cross-eyed at that jade I’ll chase you clean out into the middle of that damn Mediterranean and then sink you. So help me God!”

“You, M’sieu, and Félice?” inquired the little Frenchman in a low voice, quivering with emotion. “She is good, that one – voluptueuse.”

“What do you know about it?” Topper demanded ill-temperedly, but did not stay to be told.

As he hastened down the road Monsieur Louis’s bright eyes were darting from bush to bush in quest of one who could be none other than Madame Toppaire herself. So Félice was up to her old tricks, was she? It was of a convenience for the wealthy American visitor. He might prolong his stay to spend many good American dollars in their little French village. It was of a rightness. All the world would be well pleased save Madame Toppaire. She alone would not be elated. It was that Félice lacked discretion. That would come with the years. The little Frenchman thoughtfully shrugged his shoulders, then hurled himself at his garden, a complete picture of Félice at her best dwelling in his eyes.

In the meantime Topper was stepping diligently over yards and yards of drying fishing nets extending across his path. Innumerable dogs, attracted by memories of what the nets had once contained, did not speed his progress. To avoid a net and a dog at the same time required both quick decision and prompt action. Once he almost fell upon his fish-assailed nose. He had been pushed by an unseen companion whom he cursed passionately under his breath.

The fact was, Mr. Topper was a very much haunted man. If anything, he was overhaunted. His steps were dogged by low-plane spirits. He realized this more and more as he took his way towards the center of the village, skirting sidewalk cafés already performing their convivial functions, and crossing streets wherein motor cars hooted French maledictions at every moving object, and the deeper tones of a passing machine gave notice of the American invasion.

When he turned into the main thoroughfare of the town in which were situated the bureau de poste and some of the more important shops and cafés that would never have been in existence had Columbus remained at home, the fact that he was not unaccompanied was most unpleasantly borne in on him. He was being given aid in a rather singular manner. His hat was tipping itself of its own accord, but with marked courtesy, at various passers-by. Perfect strangers, desirous of taking no chances, were returning his involuntary salutations with puzzled, back-thinking expressions in their eyes.

Mr. Topper began to feel exceedingly foolish, especially when he realized that people were turning and staring wonderingly after his dignified, well tailored back. This inclusive greeting meant little to the Frenchmen he met, for a Frenchman is by nature an enthusiast at the game and will flip a snappy béret upon the slightest provocation. A friendly smile will turn him temporarily into a hand-wringing symbol of welcome. Not so with others. Many persons not unreasonably object to being saluted by an individual unknown to them. This is especially true of certain gentlemen when accompanied by certain ladies. And because they realize that their escorts will become angry enough for two, women have trained themselves rigidly not to be offended when pleasantly accosted by strangers of the opposite sex. So well have they succeeded that it is yet to be recorded that a woman has been anything other than secretly pleased upon the reception of such friendly overtures.

Accordingly, Mr. Topper, in the course of his walk, was the recipient of numerous hostile as well as covertly appreciative glances.

One Southern gentleman had the bad taste to ask him who the hell he was taking his hat off to, and when Mr. Topper in his irritation answered, “I hope you don’t suspect me of taking it off to what you have in tow,” this same Southern gentleman made a chivalrous Southern pass at Mr. Topper’s eye. But the blow never landed. Mr. Topper’s companions might have been ill-advisedly helpful, but they had no intention of permitting others to take any liberties with his person. That was sacred to them. Mr. Topper had the satisfaction of seeing the Southern gentleman double up with a gasp of sharp anguish while his hands solicitously clutched at his Southern stomach. Synchronously with this involuntary but nevertheless grotesque action the assaulted gentleman’s hat – a panama, especially purchased for the trip – was whisked from his head and tossed negligently to the street which had been traversed by horses as well as automobiles. This second misfortune, following so swiftly on the heels of the first, brought the Southern gentleman erect as if touched by a magic wand. That hat, that panama, meant much to him.

Now, it is an obvious conclusion that a man trying to decide whether to hit another man in the eye and then to rescue a new but slightly soiled panama from the street or to rescue the panama first and then come back and hit the other man, in the eye is thwarted in both ambitions. While Mr. Topper slipped through his fingers, the Southern gentleman, standing in deep abstraction, watched with morbid eyes the completion of his hat’s ruin as an automobile – an antiquated car at that – jounced blithely over it.

“Don’t worry, Toppy, old scout,” said George Kerby’s voice in his ear. “We’re not going to let anything happen to you.”

“Thanks a lot,” muttered Topper. “Your hearts, wherever they are, I’m sure are in the right place, but don’t call me Toppy, and for the love of God keep your hands from my hat. The situation is most embarrassing.”

Topper spoke through stiff lips. He feared that people would think he had taken up talking to himself in addition to his other eccentricities.

“Don’t mind about your hat,” whispered Marion. “We’ll take care of that. We’ll make it seem automatic. Only, of course, we don’t know your friends from Adam. We’ll just tip the damn thing at everyone, and that will make you popular.”

“It will make me notorious,” stiff-lipped Topper. “Why do you always insist on being so all-fired helpful?”

“We like you, Topper,” came the Colonel’s voice. “You’re a real pal. And we feel for you because you’re alone in a foreign land. From now on we’re going to see that you get the best of the breaks.”

“Even if we have to break your neck,” added George.

Topper groaned. There was no escape. He continued down the street. This time he altered his tactics. Whenever he felt his hat preparing to leave his head he would reach up quickly in an endeavor either to hold it on or, at least, to give the appearance of tipping it himself. But his companions were too quick for him. When Topper’s right hand shot up the hat would dart to the left. When he attempted to clutch it with his left hand the agitated object would cleverly dodge to the right. As a result of this, Topper gave the appearance of a man who for no apparent reason was diligently juggling his hat. Realizing the futility of his efforts he abandoned them and allowed the hat to have its way. There was nothing else to do about it.

“Be ready,” he heard Marion whisper excitedly. “Here comes an important-looking person. Make this tip a good one.”

As the important person passed by, Mr. Topper’s hat flew off with a particularly graceful swoop, and the important person, in his anxiety to be equally courteous, nearly stabbed himself in the groin with his stiffly starched French beard. Greatly unnerved by this encounter, Mr. Topper paused in the cooling shade cast by the Byzantine mass of Notre Dame de la Victoire to catch a quiet breath and to consider ways and means. This sort of thing could not go on. He had lost his reputation already. He feared now that he might lose his liberty as well. But even here, in the shade of the great cathedral, his hat continued to bob up and down with industrious rapidity.

While this bobbing was in progress Mr. Topper noticed a tall, gloomy-looking individual watching him intently. The man had actually stopped and was standing with his gaze riveted on Mr. Topper’s head. Every time the hat sprang to life the gentleman started visibly, then drew a little nearer, as if under a spell. Topper felt strongly inclined to take to his heels, but it was already too late. The gloomy man approached and addressed himself to Mr. Topper.

“I trust you will pardon me,” he said, “but for the life of me I can’t figure out how you do it.”

“It’s quite simple,” replied Topper for lack of anything better to say.

“I dare say,” responded the man. “The best things usually are. Would you mind doing it again?”

“Greatly,” gasped the distracted Topper, but he had no choice in the matter.

Pleased by the attention their real pal was receiving. Mr. Topper’s unseen companions treated the appreciative gentleman to a special display. This time the hat twirled rapidly round on its brim on the crown of Mr. Topper’s head. Although the gloomy gentleman had been prepared for something he had not been prepared for as much of it as this. He stepped back a pace or two and regarded Mr. Topper with alarmed eyes.

“It’s astounding,” he said at last in a low voice. “Will you do it just once more?”

“Certainly not,” replied Mr. Topper.

But the hat did do it once more, only this time it rose high in the air, then descended jauntily on Mr. Topper’s head. This small-sized miracle was sufficient to cause several other persons to stop to observe. Soon Topper and the gloomy gentleman formed the center of an interested little group. Mr. Topper will never forget the embarrassment of standing there watching several dozen pairs of bewildered eyes moving slowly up and down as his hat rose and fell.

“Merveilleux!” a voice broke from the crowd.

“Un drôle de corps, ce type-là,” observed another.

Mr. Topper flinched. Someone had referred to him as an odd fish. He objected to this, especially when he had no control over the circumstances that made him appear so in the eyes of this Frenchman.

“Is it your ears?” asked the gloomy gentleman.

Mr. Topper could not trust himself to speak. He merely shook his head.

“I could have sworn it was your ears,” the man continued, his disappointment written large on his face. “Then you must have muscles in your scalp.”

Mr. Topper was upset by this revolting suspicion.

“I am in no sense abnormal,” he muttered.

“But, my dear sir, you must be,” protested the gloomy gentleman. “You must be almost supernatural, or else you would not be able to accomplish such marvelous results.”

“I’m glad they strike you as such,” said Mr. Topper bitterly. “I think they are damned childish.”

“Not at all,” the man assured him. “You are far too modest. Is it possible you can flip your spine, perhaps?”

“How do you mean flip?” Mr. Topper got out as the hat crashed down on his head, completely covering his eyes. “Adjust the damn thing,” he muttered aside. “I’m in total darkness.”

“I don’t know,” continued the man, looking even gloomier. “It was merely a guess.”

“Neither do I,” said Mr. Topper. “Why do you ask so many ridiculous questions? Can’t you see I’m busy? You should be satisfied just to watch.”

“It’s fine,” admitted the man wistfully, “but I’d like to know. Used to be pretty good at that sort of thing myself.”

“I wish you were doing it now instead of me,” said Topper earnestly.

“I’d enjoy it,” breathed the man.

“You would,” remarked Topper disgustedly as his hat took to flight. “But I don’t. It bores me.”

“But aren’t you doing it of your own free will?”

Topper laughed crazily.

“Do you think I would make an ass of myself for fun?” he demanded. “I’m not playful. This is being done very much against my will. If you’d like to know, I’m not doing it at all.”

“Then what’s doing it?”

“That hat is.”

“What! The hat? How?”

“I don’t know,” answered Topper, feeling his grip slipping. “Can’t you see I’m in trouble? Don’t ask me any more questions. I can’t answer and I won’t answer. Let us say it’s a disease – curvature of the hat, convulsions of the scalp, frenzy of the brain – anything!”

“I wish I could catch the hang of it,” murmured the man, once more wistful. “It would make a great hit back home with the boys. Just think of walking down the street on Sundays with the kiddies and the little lady and surprising all the boys.”

“You think of it,” retorted Topper. “I don’t like to. I’m busy surprising perfect strangers – persons I never saw before and who I hope never to see again.”

For a moment Topper looked almost pityingly upon the gloomy gentleman. An overrich person from South America stepped from the crowd and slipped a fifty-franc note into the haunted man’s hand. This was a shade too thick for Topper. In an excess of rage he reached up and, snatching the hat just before it left his head, dashed it to the ground.

“Malheureux!” muttered a voice in the crowd.

“Quel dommage!” exclaimed a second.

“Ciel!” shouted another. “Regardez, bien vite! Il est vivant, ce chapeau.”

The hat indeed was living, living to the utmost while it had the chance. No sooner had it struck the pavement than it bounded back and pounced upon Mr. Topper’s head.

“Don’t do that,” said a rebuking voice in his ear. “Don’t be childish.”

Topper no longer gave a rap whether people thought he was talking to himself or not. He turned sharply and addressed space.

“Childish!” he exclaimed. “My God, I like that! You’ve made an old man of me. Could anything conceivably be more puerile, more inane, more off balance than what you’ve been doing to me?”

“Topper,” said Marion Kerby, “you are God’s gift to France. Through us you are amusing her children.”

“I don’t give a damn about that,” he retorted. “I know you’re making a blithering idiot of me. As it is I feel like falling down in the gutter and groveling like a – a – —”

“Like a fish,” suggested Marion.

“Fish don’t grovel,” objected George. “Worms do that.”

“And cowards,” added the Colonel.

“Listen,” said Mr. Topper, “I don’t care to discuss the matter. I’ll grovel like an eel if I want to.”

“How quaint,” put in Mrs. Hart.

“Go right ahead,” said George Kerby unfeelingly. “Do your groveling. I’d like to see you.”

“No,” declared the Colonel, “we must take steps. And promptly. Topper needs diversion. We all need diversion. All work and no play. Grab his other arm, George. Now, all together.”

Before Topper had time to realize what was being done to him, he felt himself seized by either hand and dragged through the admiringly respectful crowd.

“He parts,” said an awed voice, and Topper feared the man was literally correct.

“All is ended,” quoth another, and Topper felt that he, too, had spoken the truth.

With the upper half of his body greatly in advance of the rest of him, a position which gave his legs a peculiar dangling appearance, Mr. Topper was dragged down the street. And if some people thought it an unusual way for a man to walk. Topper could not help it. It was not a matter of choice with him, although he did his best to lessen the oddness of his position by waving his legs frantically in an effort to get them as nearly as possible under his body. But he never succeeded in catching up with himself. The impression he gave was that of a racing bicycle rider, an impassioned bicycle rider, yet one who was deriving scant pleasure from his violent exertion.

“Listen,” he said beseechingly. “Won’t you please just throw me away anywhere – it doesn’t matter where – and call it a day?”

“Topper,” replied George Kerby, a trifle winded himself, “we’re with you to the end.”

“And that,” panted Topper, “won’t be long now.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Casual Conversation
at the English Bar

“Phew!” exclaimed the Colonel after several blocks had been covered in the manner described. “This Topper party is no piece of fluff. What we need is a drink.”

“For once, Colonel, you’re right,” agreed Mr. Kerby. “And I know the exact spot. Topper goes there often.”

“But of my own accord,” gasped Topper. “That makes all the difference. Don’t drag me in there like this.”

“Oh, we’ve got to hurry,” said Marion. “Drag him along, George. Faster, if possible.”

As a result of this callous adjuration Mr. Topper’s body made an angle of forty-five degrees with the earth’s surface. This, it must be admitted, is an arresting way for a body to perform. And it was in this manner and at this angle that a few minutes later Mr. Topper scooted through the door of the English Bar and curved up with what one might call a swanlike swoop in front of the bar itself.

“Good-morning, Peter,” wheezed Mr. Topper, hoping to divert the bartender’s mind from the singular manner of his entrance. “What’s all this I hear about the Prince of Wales?”

Peter seemed neither to know nor to care what Mr. Topper had heard all about the Prince of Wales. He leaned far over the bar and looked for a long time intently at Mr. Topper’s feet, then slowly his gaze moved upward until at last all of Mr. Topper had been carefully surveyed.

“People have staggered up to this bar in many queer and inexplicable contortions,” he observed heavily. “Some have made it while others have fallen short. I had begun to believe that I knew every way a man could approach this bar under his own steam. I was mistaken, Mr. Topper.” Here Peter shook his head sadly. “Never in all the years of my service has a customer, or anyone else, for that manner, arrived before me as you did just now. Might I be so bold as to ask you to do it again? Just once more, if you will, Mr. Topper?”

“Nonsense, Peter,” replied Mr. Topper deprecatingly. “Don’t go on so about it. That was merely an old, old trick of mine. I rarely if ever do it any more.”

“Bravo, Topper!” cried several approving voices which Mr. Topper recognized as belonging to habitués of the place. “Do it again, old chap,” and “Give us all a chance.”

“Yes, please go on,” implored another voice. “Do what you did again, or else I’ll believe to my dying day that drink has touched my mind.”

With a forced smile Mr. Topper shook his head. Suddenly, however, his forced smile became fixed, glazed over, and unnatural. He felt himself being unceremoniously yanked back to the door.

“All ready, Colonel?” muttered the voice of Kerby.

“Right,” grunted the Colonel.

This time Topper was even better than before. He scooped through the room at an angle of thirty degrees. Like a fancy diver coming to the surface after describing a graceful arc beneath the water, he righted himself at the bar, his back slightly arched and his head well up. And like the diver he had so faithfully emulated, Mr. Topper, too, was breathless.

There was a general scraping of chairs as the occupants of the English Bar sat back and bent perplexed gazes upon the body and person of Mr. Topper.

“Damned if I see how he managed it,” one gentleman at last admitted.

“No more do I,” vouchsafed another. “Looked as if he were attached to wires or something, like an almost human puppet.”

A tall, thin man who up to the sensational entrance of Mr. Topper had been sitting quite alone, his head held carefully between his hands, rose unsteadily to his feet and, clinging for support to the backs of chairs, made his way weakly to the door. Here he paused and gazed back long and reproachfully at Mr. Topper out of a pair of somber, miserable eyes. Then he made his way to his hotel, packed hastily, and returned without delay to London. The Riviera had been too much for him. Never again did he fully believe in its reality. He preferred not to be reminded of the place. He never mentioned it himself and when his friends returned from the South of France he requested them not to tell him where they had been. After the peculiar, inexplicable episode of the English Bar he realized that the only way for him to retain his reason was to drive it from his thoughts entirely. He refused to admit even to himself that the incident had ever occurred, that a man created loosely in the image of God had so casually, so ridiculously set aside His laws as well as a few of Mr. Newton’s. In later years this man drank himself nearly to death and finally did die as a result of trying to repeat Mr. Topper’s performance in a low-class pub. Thus, even at a distance and after the lapse of years, did the insidious Côte d’Azur claim another victim.

After the first ejaculations of astonishment occasioned by the repetition and intensification of Mr. Topper’s odd entrance, the occupants of the English Bar once more sat back and considered the man as they would a god, their silent admiration not unmixed with a hint of alarm. Many were of the opinion that a man who had just done what he had done was capable of doing still more, was capable of doing practically anything, in fact – unheard of things. And he might not always be playful about it.

“Well,” said an elderly gentleman wishing to propitiate the luckless Topper, “I am sure we have all been most handsomely entertained.”

Mr. Blynn Nelson sold expensive motorboats entertainingly to the wives of the rich. It was suspected that his activities did not stop there. He now turned to Millie Coit, his neighbor, at a large, well filled table.

“In spite of which,” he said in a low voice, “I thank my God people don’t come in that way very often. The man must be double jointed.”

At the bar Mr. Topper was not having a jolly time. No. He was not having anything nearly approaching a jolly time. Pressure had been brought to bear on him to the end that five champagne cocktails now stood on a row in front of him. The lifting of one of the cool, long-stemmed glasses to his lips was the signal for the others to follow. Topper gulped down his own cocktail, but the remaining four, after tilting themselves delicately, emptied their contents into the void. Topper, desperately moving from glass to glass in an effort to give the impression he was drinking them all, looked much like a circus seal snatching unearned rewards. Four distinct sighs of satisfaction followed the emptying of the glasses. A small but heartfelt groan escaped Mr. Topper’s lips.

Peter had been privileged to witness all this. He now decided with his unerring sense of discrimination that it was high time to do a little line drawing.

“Mr. Topper,” he suggested in a low voice, “you’ve done very nicely this morning. Amazingly well, I should say, but if you keep it up you will probably deprive a few of my borderline customers of their remaining shreds of sanity.”

“I’ll try to control myself, Peter,” said Mr. Topper humbly.

“Would you mind telling me, sir, how you managed that last bit – those four separate and distinct sighs? To me that was most uncanny. I almost dropped my shaker. Had a feeling I was surrounded.”

“I know how it is,” replied Topper, laughing falsely as he drifted away from the bar. “Oh, I just did it somehow, Peter. Tossed them off, you know.”

Peter did not know, and he looked it thoroughly.

Mr. Topper’s friends made a place for him at their table and insisted on his sitting down. Everyone wanted to buy him a drink. A man who could do such things as Topper had already done should be received with a lavish hand.

As Topper was wearily seating himself, not at all sure whether or not the chair would be snatched from under him, Millie Coit turned to Hunt Davis.

“You were saying you lost your wrist watch?”

Hunt Davis was a writer of parts. Topper liked the man, but not so many others with the possible exception of Millie Coit. He now looked quite cast down about his wrist watch. Harold Gay inspected him with gloomy eyes.

“I know how you must feel, old boy,” he remarked sympathetically.

“Did you ever lose a wrist watch?” asked Davis a little jealously.

“No,” Harold Gay admitted. “I never wore a wrist watch.”

“Then how can you possibly know how I feel?”

“Simply by putting myself in your place. It’s not so difficult to put one’s self in the place of a man who has had his wrist watch stolen.”

“It may not be so hard to put yourself in the place of a man who has had his wrist watch stolen only once,” admitted Davis, “but, by God, it’s impossible to put yourself in the place of a man who has had his wrist watch stolen three times.”

“It’s harder,” agreed Mr. Gay, “but it’s not impossible. Not for me it isn’t. I merely put myself in the place of that man three times. I triple my emotions, as it were.”

“And how do you feel after you’ve put yourself in that man’s place for the third time, may I ask?”

“Certainly,” replied Gay. “I feel – I feel very much discouraged. I feel blue about it. Gloomy. I feel like giving up wearing wrist watches and asking other persons for the time.”

“But that wasn’t at all the way I felt,” Hunt Davis objected.

“Would you mind telling me how in hell you did feel?”

“I don’t recall feeling anything at all, except no wrist watch. It was a most peculiar sensation.”

“You mean feeling nothing was a peculiar sensation?”

“Not for some,” said Hunt Davis. “Some people never feel anything and don’t care a rap, but with me it’s awful. I mean the way I felt when I was feeling nothing.”

“But, my dear chap – —”

“Oh, for God’s own personal sake,” protested Clyde Jones. “We don’t care how you felt the first time you had a wrist watch stolen, much less the last. Frankly, I feel thirsty. One minute, Manley.”

“Just the same it would be nice to know,” pursued Harold Gay.

“I can’t tell you,” said Davis. “It was all too strange and awful.”

“Will somebody change the subject?” asked Millie Coit. “All my words are too dirty.”

“Like your subjects,” observed Mrs. Willard.

“And the company they keep,” said Millie brightly.

“Then tell us how it feels to lose one’s virtue for the third time,” suggested Mr. Nelson.

“Oh, I say,” protested Commander Becket.

“It can’t be done,” was Millie’s calm reply. “Virtue is a much overrated commodity that can be lost only once. In most cases it’s tossed away.”

“And that’s my dish,” said Mr. Topper surprisingly.

For this he received a sharp dig in the ribs.

“Hold your tongue,” Marion Kerby whispered furiously in his ear. “Don’t try to be smart and Rivieraish. Here, I want that drink.”

Obediently Topper held his glass over his left shoulder. Its contents were speedily drained.

“I hear the sound of lapping as of a cat,” said Hunt Davis.

Topper quickly lowered his glass and relapsed into brooding silence.

Mr. Harold Gay, in spite of his comfortable size, was not a comfortable companion. He had a penchant for bringing up subjects which neither he himself nor anyone else knew anything about. And yet these subjects were of such a disturbing nature that they demanded some sort of definite settlement – even an erroneous one – before anyone could return to that comfortable state of mental torpor which is germane to man.

For some minutes now he had been fixedly watching a certain spot on the floor, and while he watched he had been doing his best to persuade his intelligence that his eyes were all wrong. And yet what he saw was not in itself remarkable. In fact, it was nothing more nor less than a dog’s tail, only in this instance – and this might be a trifle odd – this dog’s tail was sometimes more and sometimes less. It was this that disturbed Mr. Harold Gay. And not without reason. A tail that can advance or retard itself according to the mood or necessity of the moment is enough to disturb the most hardened of characters. It is a tail to be reckoned with and not brushed aside. For Harold Gay it was a tail without precedent, a manifestation entirely outside the range of his experience.

This tail, this tail of a dog, was a hairy one – hairy to the point of artistic neglect. Bushy, it was. It was not an alluring tail. No. Not prepossessing. It was just a dog’s sort of tail. It belonged to a dog of careless habits and indolent mind, to a dog either so high or so low in the social scale of dogs that further effort would avail nothing. It had either achieved all or had nothing left to lose. But here was the rub – the part that gave Mr. Gay to pause. The dog proper, which according to the laws of God should have rightfully belonged to this tail, had either misplaced its body or callously abandoned its tail. Strange as this may seem, the tail, in the absence of the directing head, appeared to be quite competent to carry on for itself. It had been draped across the matting, thrust out from under a table for a distance of from six to eighteen inches, roughly estimated. Mr. Gay later gave those measurements as being, in his considered opinion, the most nearly accurate. Manley was inclined to agree. On various occasions that morning in the course of his plying between tables, Manley had seen that tail. Quite naturally he had jumped to the conclusion that a dog was attached to it and that the dog was under the table, which, to Manley’s way of thinking, was just like a dog. Harold Gay knew better. From where he was sitting he could see all. Not only could he see that there was no dog even loosely associated with this tail, but also that the tail itself possessed the remarkable virtuosity of being able to diminish and even to disappear entirely upon the approach of a threatening foot. Mr. Gay did not feel sufficiently confident of his own mental faculties to keep this tremendous knowledge to himself. He decided that he had to establish contact with other human minds. Accordingly, he made tentative advances.

“Will someone please bear me out in this?” he asked with due deliberation. “Is that thing, that hairy-looking object protruding from under that table, the tail of a dog?”

Everyone at the table concentrated his attention on the spot indicated. Mr. Topper, with mixed emotions, recognized Oscar’s terminus, and as if the recognition were mutual the terminus wagged feebly across a modest arc of matting.

“It gives every indication of being the tail of a dog,” Commander Becket declared after a thoughtful silence, “the tail of a dog animated by only the friendliest of feelings.”

“So far so good,” continued Harold Gay. “Now, am I right in presuming that that tail rates a body, or do tails no longer require bodies along the Riviera?”

“In my measured opinion,” observed Sam Brooks, “there should be a body knocking about somewhere belonging to that tail – a doglike body of sorts.”

“Perhaps,” suggested Blynn Nelson without much hope, “some woman was wearing a summer fur and dropped that tail.”

“So would I have done,” observed Mrs. Willard critically. “If my summer fur had a tail like that I couldn’t drop it too soon.”

“Righto,” agreed Nelson. “If that tail belongs to a summer fur, what must the fur look like? Shouldn’t fancy the thing would be particularly nice to see.”

Upon the reception of these unfavorable comments the tail sadly diminished in length. Topper felt sorry for its owner. He realized how humiliating it was to have one’s tail so dispassionately discussed.

“Don’t mind what they say, old boy,” he called softly.

At the sound of Topper’s voice the tail shot back to life. It wagged against the matting with frantic impetuosity. All at the table were startled, including Topper. The tail was regarded with respect if not with affection.

“Do you happen to be on speaking terms with that tail, Mr. Topper?” Commander Becket inquired.

“It strikes a responsive chord,” said Mr. Topper evasively.

“Then will you ask it for me to go somewhere else and collect a body?” asked Millie Coit. “This sort of thing is getting on my nerves.”

“It’s not improving my condition,” added an Englishman named Waddles.

“And what I am looking at,” contributed Hunt Davis, “is actually doing me harm.”

“What are you seeing?” inquired Mr. Gay.

“I am seeing – I’m afraid I’m seeing – a game of checkers playing itself very quietly, very orderly, but, nevertheless, playing itself without the assistance of human hands,” replied Hunt Davis in a strained voice.

“I do hope I don’t become hysterical,” Mr. Topper muttered. “Let’s all have another drink.”

“Do you think it’s possible that those we have already taken had a little something extra in them?” Millie asked in a low voice. “Something so subtle yet so powerful that our minds have all been affected alike?”

“Don’t ask questions,” replied Mr. Gay. “My thoughts are elsewhere.”

“I’d swear there isn’t a living soul sitting at that table,” Clyde Jones mused aloud, “and yet it drinks champagne and plays checkers in the most accomplished manner. It passes human understanding.”

“And under that table,” said Millie Coit, “is a dogless tail. How queer does a thing have to be before it becomes a miracle? If the populace knew what was going on here they’d turn this barroom into a shrine.”

“That relic is far from sacred,” Commander Becket vouchsafed, pointing to the shaggy tail. “I’d call it an obscene manifestation of black magic.”

During the course of this colloquy the disembodied game of checkers progressed with every indication of purpose and enjoyment. The red and black disks moved with dignity and deliberation. One of them would occasionally poise itself in the air as if in hesitation, then smoothly continue on its way. From time to time a glass filled with the finest champagne would elevate itself about lip high from the table, then return of its own accord daintily to its original point of departure.

“I’ve heard tell of fireless cookers,” Harold Gay said at last, “but never of playerless checkers that drink wine in the presence of a tail bereft of dog.”

“When you put it all together like that,” remarked Millie Coit, “it does sound almost too much to bear. And I was just getting interested in the game. There seems to be a little sly cheating going forward, but so far the dishonors are equal.”

“Look!” exclaimed Commander Becket. “As I live and breathe. That’s not at all sporting. The reds are being snatched off the board every time that glass goes up.”

The Commander, a stickler for fair play, rose and, walking determinedly over to the table, placed a restraining hand on one of the absconding reds. At the same moment he felt his wrist being sharply slapped. A growl issued from the tail, and the intrepid Commander received a stinging nip on the calf of his leg. This was more than confusing. It was both painful and dangerous. No game of checkers was worth it. Clinging to his dignity the Commander quickly returned to his chair and sat with his back to the checkerboard.

“I’ve been both invisibly slapped and bitten,” he announced in a trembling voice. “Will someone, in God’s name, tell me just what is going on?”

“I couldn’t tell you in my own name, much less in God’s,” said Harold Gay.

“Were the teeth the teeth of dog?” asked Millie Coit.

“What the devil difference does that make?” demanded the retired officer. “I didn’t stop to examine the teeth that bit me.”

“Neither would I,” replied Millie mollifyingly. “But if the choice were left entirely with me, I’d rather be bitten by the teeth of dog without any visible means of support than by the teeth of lion, for example, with nothing else but.”

“I don’t give a damn whose teeth they were,” the Commander rapped out. “I jolly well object to being bitten by any set of teeth, whether fish, flesh, or fowl.”

“Few fowls have teeth,” said Harold Gay moodily.

“Name me one with a set of teeth,” challenged Millie Coit. “One honest-to-God fowl.”

“For heaven’s sake, don’t let’s take that up now,” Mrs. Willard protested. “Isn’t there enough to talk about without dragging in birds?”

“I’m speechless,” remarked Hunt Davis.

“Let us drink,” suggested Topper.

“Well,” admitted the Commander, thoughtfully prodding his calf, “the teeth might have been those of dog, as Millie insists on phrasing it, but the spirit behind those teeth was that of a snake in the grass. I’m not going to look at anything any more ever.”

“Neither am I,” said Mr. Topper. “That way madness lies. Let’s none of us look at anything.”

For several minutes everyone at the table concentrated his gaze on his glass. Then Manley approached and presented Mr. Topper with a bill.

“What’s this?” asked Mr. Topper.

“The gentlemen playing checkers, sir, said it would be all right to give it to you,” replied the impeccable Manley.

A strangled gasp escaped the Colonel.

“Did you see two men at that table?” he asked, his eyes growing wild.

“Only a moment ago,” replied Manley. “There they are now, sir, just leaving.”

The table gazed, fascinated. The backs of two nattily clad gentlemen, swaying slightly, were disappearing through the wicker doors. At their heels in a leisurely manner moved a tail. There was nothing more to it. Just that.

As the swinging doors closed upon those two swaying backs, fear appeared for the first time in the eyes of the watchers at the table. Their eyes were searching each other’s faces, mutely pleading for enlightenment or denial – for any explanation that would rationalize even a little the things that had come to pass since the swanlike arrival of Mr. Topper at the bar.

“They must have been drinking a lot,” said Mr. Topper at last, his eyes studying the slip of paper, the outward, visible sign of a couple of spiritual disgraces.

“Indeed they were, sir,” agreed Manley. “Those two gentlemen knew how to drink.”

“And what to drink,” added Topper.

“And their dog knew how to bite,” put in the Commander. “Do you mean to tell me that those two checker players were at that table all the time, Manley? Consider your words carefully, man.”

“No, sir,” answered Manley. “Sometimes they were and sometimes they weren’t.”

“Can you tell us where they were when they weren’t?” asked Millie Coit. “That is, Manley, if mentioning such places does not overtax your admirable English reserve.”

“Oh, they weren’t there, madam, if that’s where you mean,” Manley replied.

“That’s exactly where I did mean, Manley,” continued Millie. “And if they weren’t there, can you tell us where they were, those checker-playing wine bibbers?”

“I merely meant, madam,” replied Manley with frigid dignity, “that I did not follow them there.”

“Of course not, Manley,” said Miss Coit. “Far be it from me to imply that you would ever do such a thing. However, the fact remains that you don’t know whether they were there or not.”

“Madam, I would not like to say,” said Manley, looking almost noble.

“Of course. Of course,” murmured Millie. “We don’t want you to say anything that would hurt you. Well, I give up. We seem to be about where we started.”

“I will admit,” offered Manley, “they acted rather odd. Being there and not, so to speak. But you see, Miss Coit, I was quite busy myself, and I didn’t rightly notice how they did.”

“Clearly and convincingly stated,” said Mr. Gay. “It strikes me that Mr. Topper, himself, is acting somewhat odd.”

This was indeed the truth. He looked for all the world like a man who was being briskly bounced up and down on his chair.

“Is your seat uncomfortable?” asked the inquiring Millie Coit. “Hornets, perhaps?”

“It is nothing,” chattered Mr. Topper, an expression of increasing embarrassment taking possession of his face as he desperately clung to the sides of his chair. “It will pass.”

“My God, sir!” exclaimed the naval officer. “What do you mean it will pass? Are you having a fit in our midst?”

“I’m going to have,” announced Mrs. Willard.

“Looks more like a bite to me,” observed Millie Coit, thoughtfully studying the bouncing man.

“Perhaps he’s squiffed and is playing horse,” helpfully suggested Waddles.

“I should think it would be fatiguing keeping it up so long,” remarked Harold Gay.

“Don’t mind me,” Mr. Topper shook out. “Go right ahead with your drinking.”

He essayed a neighborly smile, but was forced to close his lips on his chattering teeth.

“You don’t seem to get the idea, Mr. Topper,” Commander Becket told him with some asperity. “We’ve got to mind you if you insist on conducting yourself in what I can only say is an extremely childish manner.”

“I’m not doing it for fun,” muttered Topper, his hair vibrating strangely on his head.

“Then what are you doing it for?” asked Mr. Gay. “Surely you can’t be doing it for exercise.”

“I’m not doing it at all,” snapped Topper.

“Then we’re all mad,” said Commander Becket with dreadful conviction.

“Or perhaps Topper is possessed,” offered Blynn Nelson.

“Do you hear grunting going on?” asked the Commander. “I distinctly heard two separate grunts detach themselves in the air.”

“Could it be Topper, possibly?” asked Waddles. “I couldn’t keep from grunting if I was doing all that bouncing.”

This was too much for Topper. With a despairing look about him he released his hold on the chair and yielded himself to the forces that had been so industriously endeavoring to drag him from his seat. Like a cork released from a bottle he rose to the ceiling, gracefully skirted that obstruction and sailed out of the barroom through the open space above the doors. But even as he thus strangely departed Mr. Topper still retained the instincts of a gentleman. Twisting a strained face over his shoulder, he called back hurriedly, “Sorry I must tear myself away, everybody. Don’t worry about that check, Manley. I’ll be back.”

“He doesn’t have to hurry so far as I am concerned,” said Commander Becket in a hoarse voice.

“This bar has seen me for the last time,” put in a gentleman from Hollywood. “That man has more gags than a lotful of Harold Lloyds.”

Slowly and without looking at one another the men and women at that table arose and took their separate ways. Before they left, however, it was tacitly agreed that nothing should be said of all that had occurred. As Mrs. Blake Willard expressed it, “Others would never understand, and they might think things. One is so easily suspected of mental disorders along the Riviera. You know how people are – unpleasant that way.”

Mrs. Willard knew, for she, herself, was one of such persons.

CHAPTER NINE

“All God’s Chillun Got Shoes”

It is difficult to say what the pedestrians on Rue Gounod thought of Mr. Topper’s leaflike descent to the pavement after he had sailed from the English Bar. Fortunately there were few to observe, and they did not remain long. After one startled look at Topper they hastened to other and less disconcerting rues. Probably those who were privileged to witness his landing decided that he was either an acrobat casually practising a back flip or a slightly stout and unsober god arriving in haste from some well tailored Olympus.

What the pedestrians thought or did not think no longer concerned Mr. Topper. He was too deeply occupied thinking about himself, considering the state of his being and trying to adjust his body to his aërial mode of progress. At any moment he expected to be whisked from his feet and carried like a snapping flag down the main thoroughfare of the town. He might even find himself deposited on the dome of the cathedral of Notre Dame de la Victoire. Now that his companions had learned a new game he felt sure they would not abandon it until they had experimented with all its ramifications. For the moment he was vouchsafed a breathing space. He even entertained the extravagant hope that these same companions had departed in quest of other diversions and left him in peace. Methodically he felt his pockets for his possessions. His watch, passport, wallet, and cigar case had not been lost in his flight. Sheer centrifugal force had held them securely intact.

Then Topper saw something. It was not much, but it was sufficient to convince him he was not alone. Nor was he alone in what he saw. An elderly man holding a broom and sporting a green baize apron was standing in a doorway, also looking. There was a small pool of water lying in a hollow in the pavement. This pool at the most contained no more than a couple of cupfuls of water, but it was quite enough to be seen. As Topper and the man with the broom stood with their gaze fastened on the pool it gradually disappeared before their eyes. Those of the Frenchman’s were filled with consternation. Mr. Topper’s were merely disgusted. The diminishing of the water was accompanied by a peculiar lapping sound such as is made by the tongue of an extremely thirsty and not over-nice dog.

The man with the broom looked at Topper, who attempted to avoid his eyes.

“M’sieu,” announced the man in an awed voice, “the little pool, he pants.”

“I neither speak nor understand French,” Topper almost truthfully informed the man.

“But, m’sieu, you can at least regard,” insisted the man with the broom. “That little pool there is a pool no more. He is as dry as the palm of my hand.”

Mr. Topper did not know how dry the palm of the man’s hand was. The palms of his own hands were quite moist. He had to admit, however, that the man with the broom had spoken nothing less than the truth. The little pool was indeed quite dry. Oscar had polished it off, and following the polishing process came a satisfied grunt, the bestial emanation of a dog lying down heavily after a good drink. Topper could almost hear Oscar’s unseen bones clumping against the pavement.

“M’sieu,” said the Frenchman timidly, “it is unbelievable. The little pool, now he pushes grunts.”

“Can I help it if your damn French pools insist on pushing grunts?” Topper demanded irritably.

The man did not understand, but he gathered from Topper’s manner that he was being held responsible for the eccentric conduct of the little pool, or what had once been a little pool before Oscar had mopped it up. He leaned far out of the doorway and intently considered the spot where the pool had been.

“It is of a truth,” he said, as if to himself. “The place of the little pool is now breathing in gusts. It is necessary that I part all at once.”

Which he did, much to Mr. Topper’s relief.

Subdued but animated voices attracted his attention. He listened with growing unease.

“It’s ridiculous,” he heard Marion protesting. “He is not at all suitably clad for the Riviera. In the first place, he needs sun glasses. He’ll ruin his silly eyes. Then take a look at those feet. Altogether too formal. He must put beach shoes on them – espadrilles, they’re called.”

“Why don’t you let the man alone?” George demanded. “You’re not his wife.”

“And you’re not my husband.”

“Don’t let’s go into that any more.”

“Why do you think you’re my husband? Tell me that.”

“Because we both got smeared at the same time. Death did not us part.”

“It didn’t need to. Life had done that beforehand – life and your disgusting ways.”

“Come, come,” objected the voice of the Colonel. “This is a profitless wrangle.”

“I’ll make it a discordant brawl,” declared Marion heatedly.

“But listen, Colonel,” said George Kerby. “Just because a tree got in the way of our earthly activities it doesn’t follow that the holy bonds of matrimony were severed, does it?”

“That is a highly technical question,” replied the Colonel. “You see, in our present state there is no provision made for divorce nor any suggestion of marriage. Our relations, thank God, are informal.”

“One can go visiting over week-ends,” came the voice of Mrs. Hart, “without a Woolworth ring.”

“Let’s ask Topper,” George Kerby suggested. “He might be one of us at any minute.”

“Don’t ask me,” said Mr. Topper, speaking earnestly into space. “Don’t draw me in. I’ve been drawn in and dragged out enough as it is already.”

“Amusingly put,” commented George Kerby. “Let’s take the old boy shopping.”

“That’s what I said all the time,” declared Marion. “Sun glasses first. His vision should be dulled.”

“But I don’t want sun glasses,” Mr. Topper protested. “The lot of you make me look appalling enough as it is without decorating me with headlights.”

“Oh, you must have glasses,” Marion assured him. “We can’t let you ruin your eyes for the sake of appearances. Grab his arms, my braves.”

The braves grabbed Topper’s arms with a will, and once more he was hustled off down the street.

“If I promise to get these damn glasses without making any trouble, will you let me walk like a human being instead of some anthropoid ape?” Mr. Topper asked breathlessly.

“How about it, Colonel?” said George.

“It’s all right with me,” replied the Colonel, “if he doesn’t try any other sort of monkey business.”

Whereupon Topper was released and allowed to walk in the manner to which he had been accustomed. Furthermore, his hat remained undisturbed upon his head. His friends had either forgotten about it or grown tired of the sport. Topper carefully refrained from reminding them.

“Turn in here,” whispered Marion Kerby as they were passing a souvenir and jewelry shop. “It claims that one speaks English. Let’s see if one does.”

“One will be prattling baby talk by the time we’re through,” George muttered darkly.

“Can’t we buy these glasses nicely?” asked Mr. Topper. “Why spread terror and confusion throughout France? This storekeeper may be a good sort, for all we know.”

“Certainly, Mr. Topper,” came the deep voice of the Colonel. “We’re nice people. We know how to act.”

Topper made no comment on this misconception of the Colonel. Fearing the worst, he obediently entered the shop.

The owner of the place was in no wise remarkable. He smelled pleasantly, smiled pleasantly, and spoke pleasantly. If anything, he was a little too pleasant. Topper felt that if the man even faintly suspected the true state of affairs, much of his pleasantness would evaporate. He said it was a good morning to Mr. Topper in English, then stood regarding him with an expectant eye.

“Have you any sun glasses?” asked Mr. Topper.

The man intimated promptly that he had one of the most exhaustive collections of sun glasses in all of France, if not the world. He proceeded to prove his point by heaping a counter with a varied assortment of these articles.

Mr. Topper selected a pair at random and diffidently placed them upon his nose. Immediately they were snatched off, but not by Topper. The Frenchman endeavored to conceal his surprise.

“Did they pinch, m’sieu, perhaps?” he asked.

“They almost bit me,” muttered Mr. Topper, selecting another pair as unlike the first as he could find.

These, too, he placed on his nose and endeavored to hold them there. In the irritable struggle that followed the glasses snapped in two.

“No, no, no!” a woman’s voice protested. “Most unbecoming.”

“I’ll pay for those,” stammered Topper. “Must have slipped.”

The owner of the store felt better, but still far from well. Mr. Topper looked at the man helplessly. He was afraid to select another pair of glasses. This, however, was unnecessary. The glasses were selected for him. A yellow-tinted pair deftly detached themselves from the group on the counter and moved upon Mr. Topper. In a desperate endeavor to make the best of a bad situation he thrust out his hands, met the glasses halfway, and helped to affix them to his nose. In spite of the fact that the owner keenly desired to make a sale, he had no desire at all to make it in this staccato manner. He turned from Mr. Topper and looked steadfastly through the window, his fingers drumming nervously on the counter. When his gaze returned to his customer it was immediately changed to a fixed stare. A pair of wearerless glasses were looking at him eye to eye. Mr. Topper was in another part of the shop apparently having a fight with a necklace which was jumping frantically in the air.

“You can’t do such things,” Topper was explaining to the necklace. “That’s plain ordinary stealing.”

The owner thought this was funny, but he had no time to think much about it. What was facing him was funnier still. He looked at the glasses that were intently peering at him, then moved cautiously behind his counter. Had a tidal wave deposited itself upon the lap of the town the store owner would have been dismayed, but not greatly surprised. Had wild beasts and reptiles suddenly invaded his shop he would have experienced a pang of regret, but by some stretch of logic would have been able to reconcile that occurrence with the less conventional hazards of life. These glasses came under a different category. It is difficult to maintain one’s urbanity when being scrutinized quietly but fixedly by an uninhabited pair of glasses. One is prone to imagine things. One imagines unseen eyes looking consideringly through tinted glass – God knows what sort of eyes. The Frenchman tore his gaze away only to be met by another pair of glasses thoughtfully inspecting his neck. This inspection served to add embarrassment to alarm. For a moment the man did not know just where to look. He could hardly look at Mr. Topper, for what he was doing with that animated necklace, scolding it as he was, brought no comfort to the shopkeeper. Under the circumstances he did the only thing he could do. He closed his eyes and clung to the counter. The glasses were blotted out. When he felt himself rapped smartly upon the shoulder he started to crouch like a dog, but his legs were too paralyzed to obey this impulse. Mr. Topper was standing before him.

“M’sieu,” asked the man in a voice that shook, “did you see the glasses unattended?”

“Are you mad?” replied Mr. Topper.

“Perhaps,” admitted the man. “But they looked at me, m’sieu, those glasses. One pair even went so far as to inspect my neck. It was most suggestive.”

“And most unnecessary, I hope,” added Topper.

“But yes,” replied the Frenchman proudly. “Were you not yourself undergoing a little difficulty with a necklace?”

“It got tangled up in my fingers,” lied Mr. Topper, “and I became so unreasonably enraged that I began to talk to myself.”

This seemed scarcely probable, although the Frenchman tried hard to believe it. A woman’s laughter was heard without the woman.

“Things of a true incredibleness have taken place here,” the shopkeeper observed with stubborn suspicion. “And they continue. There are now, for example, unseen voices.”

“That is not of an incredibleness,” retorted Mr. Topper.

“But yes, m’sieu,” protested the Frenchman. “Where there are voices there should be bodies, or at the very least, some throats.”

“I made those voices myself,” again lied Mr. Topper.

“Then please make no more voices,” said the owner. “Such admirable ability belongs to the stage. It is too much for personal relations. Conditions are sufficiently difficult. Do you really desire glasses, or are you merely amusing yourself?”

“I’ll buy these glasses,” Mr. Topper declared, seizing a pair that was even as he spoke wriggling impatiently on the counter. “And I’ll pay for the broken pair as well as these two necklaces.”

Feeling a little comforted, the jeweler expedited the transaction and accompanied Mr. Topper to the door. As he did so he experienced the final shock of seeing the necklaces emerge from the pocket of his disturbing customer.

“Here, take these,” said a woman’s voice, and two empty necklace boxes were thrust into the storekeeper’s hand.

The necklaces themselves, one on either side of Mr. Topper, accompanied him down the street. Every time he tried to recapture them they jumped out of reach.

“I haven’t had such a lovely present in a long time,” murmured Marion Kerby. “Let’s see yours, Clara.”

“Mr. Topper knows how a lady likes to be treated,” said Mrs. Hart as the necklaces changed places.

“I know how you should be treated,” Mr. Topper replied in a low voice. “Those necklaces were bought to keep them from being stolen. That’s all there is to it. And now you are making me conspicuous with them.”

“Don’t keep trying to snatch mine back,” said Marion Kerby childishly. “I like to feel it in my hand. Did it cost much?”

“In mental anguish more than can be estimated,” was Mr. Topper’s answer.

That day the jewelry shop was closed. Souvenirs and sun glasses were probably bought, but not in that store. The moment Mr. Topper’s back was flush with the jamb the door was closed upon it. Then the door was securely locked, and the owner, as if in fear of arousing his souvenirs to further outbreaks of ferocity, quietly tiptoed from the shop. He was at an end.

Some minutes later Mr. Topper, strongly if invisibly guarded on both sides, was making his wishes known to a suave gentleman who gave the appearance of one who devoted his life to bringing peace and happiness to the feet of others.

“I want a pair of beach shoes,” said Mr. Topper brusquely.

“Les espadrilles!” exclaimed the gentleman, much gratified. “But yes, m’sieu. They are here.”

He turned, and there they were – several boxes of them. Other boxes of shoes were being literally torn from their places by unseen hands. The clerk looked at the agitated boxes uncomprehendingly, then turned to regard Mr. Topper. That gentleman was frantically engaged in trying to help some panting unseen to drag a pair of beach shoes on his feet.

“Wasn’t in the army for nothing,” proclaimed a deep voice when the shoes were on. “I can tell the size of a foot at a glance.”

“M’sieu,” declared the vender of shoes, “it is a thing disturbing, is it not? Those shoes, they have taken affairs into their hands.”

“Yes, yes,” agreed Topper distractedly. “I’ll take these on my feet.”

Without stopping to look at its denomination he crumpled a note into the man’s hand, then walked from the store. And as he walked there followed in his tracks at regular intervals four pairs of white canvas beach shoes proceeding according to size, the largest pair being first. As if stimulated by this singular demonstration Oscar succeeded in revivifying his tail and proudly brought up the rear. Down the crowded street of the town this quaint little procession made its way. Topper himself was happily unaware of his loyal following, until the amazed glances of pedestrians forced him to look back. When he did so he received the shock of his life. He felt like a man being followed by a large white cat and her three kittens with the isolated tail of a dog stalking the lot of them. When Topper stopped, the shoes stopped. Also the tail. In fact, Oscar seemed actually to lie down, for his tail drooped neglectedly to the pavement. Topper thought of his own white shoes. With them the line of march was composed of five units, not counting Oscar’s ragged contribution. And to add to the situation the shoes seemed to bear themselves with a certain air of pride. Occasionally one would be raised from the pavement as if for a closer inspection. Now, even in a town as accustomed to beach shoes as this one was, a display of five new pairs, four of which gave every appearance of being unoccupied, walking Indian file down the street was easily enough to create a small sensation. These shoes did.

“Maybe he has them on a string,” suggested an observer, “and is dragging them after him.”

“But why should a full grown man behave in such a silly manner?” demanded the observer’s wife. “Why couldn’t he carry them home like a normal human being?”

“Perhaps it amuses him more this way,” replied the husband. “A man who has to buy five pairs of shoes at once deserves some amusement. Keeping you in shoes is more than I can bear. Why not ask the man himself?”

“I wouldn’t go near that man.”

The fact that two rather flamboyant costume necklaces were accompanying two pairs of shoes did not greatly impress the populace. The human mind can only absorb a certain number of shocks in a given time. However, it was difficult for many witnesses to explain away the presence of that languid tail.

Mr. Topper was in a quandary. He did not know whether it was worse to stand still and regard those shoes together with the entire population of France, or to turn his back on them and to proceed on his way with the mortifying knowledge that they were methodically stalking his tracks. It was a delicate situation. He could not afford to stand there and collect another curious French crowd. His nerves would never bear up under the strain. He thanked God for the sun glasses. Perhaps he was not recognized. If he were, his reputation would begin to spread. He would be a marked man.

The largest pair of beach shoes began to shuffle impatiently. This decided Topper. He turned and hurried away. A soft, rhythmical pattering behind him made him horribly alive to the fact that the feet were following after. Topper knew of a square not so far off where taxicabs lived in happy discord. He hastened towards this square. Here he found an empty cab and sprang in only to be followed by three pairs of shoes. The fourth pair occupied the driver’s seat, the driver at the moment being a picturesque part of a war memorial as he diligently perused his journal. The man did not even notice the abrupt departure of his property. What the citizens of the town were privileged to see was an apparently driverless cab – an open cab with a single occupant, Mr. Topper, in solitary splendor, with a dog’s tail dangling untidily from his lap. They could not see the shoes in the car, nor could they hear the excited panting of the dog.

“Had no idea we were going for a ride,” the Colonel commented complacently. “Topper is full of tricks.”

“I dearly love these open cabs,” said Mrs. Hart.

Topper felt an arm snuggle its way through his. He sensed the intimate nearness of Marion Kerby. He was filled with a desire to see her impudent face again. In spite of the situation, he found himself pleasantly alive.

“Topper, my brave,” Marion whispered in his ear, “I could ride like this forever.”

“I fear,” her brave replied, “that this drive is going to be sadly curtailed. Do you realize we have stolen a cab?”

“Now, if Oscar would only stir his lazy ectoplasm and materialize,” the Colonel interrupted, “Topper would look quite smart. Oscar is a dressy sort of dog.”

“He’s small comfort to me as he is,” remarked Mr. Topper.

A few minutes later the cab turned into the lovely palm-lined boulevard that ran beside the sea. Here the sidewalk cafés were doing capacity business. Also, here stood a gendarme. Not a nice gendarme, but one of those gendarmes one can live quite happily all one’s days without ever meeting. He had an acute eye, this one. As the taxicab curved gracefully round him he was electrified to discover that it had no driver. Never in his experience had such an offense been brought to his notice. The very magnitude of the thing momentarily stunned him. That moment was all George Kerby needed. By the time the gendarme had decided to take steps, the taxicab was well down the boulevard. A gentleman at one of the café tables paused with his glass at his lips.

“Am I a little bit that way,” he inquired of the lady at his side, “or do I actually see a driverless taxicab?”

“You do,” replied the lady, arresting her own glass, “and what is more you hear it. That taxicab is singing.”

The cab was indeed singing. “I got shoes. You got shoes. All God’s chillun got shoes,” came shatteringly from it. At the same time three pairs of white shoes were proudly waved in the air. George Kerby even succeeded in placing one of his on the wheel.

“He must look awful,” Topper thought with a shudder. “Thank God one can’t see the rest of him.”

The singing taxicab made a grand loop and returned down the boulevard. People were now standing up at their tables to get a better view of the driverless cab. They could distinctly hear the voices of men and women singing lustily about shoes, yet all they saw was a dignified gentleman of middle age sitting in the taxicab with his mouth grimly shut. Several observers, not knowing what else to do, cheered the speeding car.

“I got shoes. You got shoes. All God’s chillun got shoes,” chanted the Colonel in a deep bass voice.

Whistles were blowing along the boulevard. Gendarmes were appearing. Lots of them. There was an excited honking of horns. Yet above it all boomed the voice of the indomitable Colonel loudly informing France that all God’s children were shod.

“We’ll sing for you, Topper,” cried George Kerby, “until you go down to defeat. You know how we are that way.”

“Too well,” replied Mr. Topper.

“I’m afraid Mr. Topper will have to be pulled in for the lot of us,” the Colonel interrupted his singing to observe.

“It’s a rotten shame,” said Marion Kerby. “I’ll go along with you, my old.”

“Oh, don’t do that,” Topper hastily pleaded.

When a human wall composed of gendarmes and spectators made further progress inexpedient, Topper’s companions, including Oscar, quietly melted away. God’s chillun took their shoes elsewhere. Mr. Topper was asked to descend. Witnesses readily declared that they had carefully observed Mr. Topper and he had neither driven nor sung. How, then, had it all come to pass? the gendarmes insisted on knowing. Mr. Topper was cast down at not being able to be of help. He had stepped into the automobile in all good faith and innocence, then the machine had immediately started to march. Why the car insisted on singing he had no idea. He was not familiar with the habits of French taxicabs. Perhaps the car was happy. Did automobiles sing in France? The gendarme was baffled in several directions. Suddenly his face cleared. Obviously the automobile was the offender. Mr. Topper had been more sinned against than sinning. In the name of France the gendarme apologized. The automobile would be well arrested. Also its owner. That one would indubitably remain in jail all the years of his life. As for the automobile, that would be taken apart piece by piece and inspected with the utmost rigor. Mr. Topper was allowed to depart. The crowd regarded his back with admiring eyes.

For the first time it seemed in years Topper had the sensation of being alone. He hardly knew whether he liked it or not. He decided that for the time being he rather liked it. The other world had been too much with him.

Slowly he began to smile. By the time he reached his own house he was laughing unwillingly but well. It was a thing he seldom did. He was thinking of the sightless sun glasses scrutinizing the neck of the affronted jeweler.

Mrs. Topper, watching him approach and overhearing his laughter, decided he had been drinking. Topper was only too willing to let it go at that. His unexpected appearance in sun glasses and beach shoes confirmed her in this opinion. She had been given to understand that men who drank usually made some strange and ill-advised purchases.

The glasses, she decided, lent to her husband’s customarily placid features a sinister appearance. They were violet in shade. There was about Mr. Topper the suggestion of a wild horse – one that laughed dangerously at its own evil thoughts.

Mrs. Topper was not at all satisfied in her own mind about the sanity of her husband. She suspected him of secret depths of depravity far too abysmal to be penetrated by ordinary mortals.

CHAPTER TEN

La Plage Tranquille

Topper owned a little book that went intimately into the climate, topography, diversions, and accommodations of the Côte d’Azur. He had paid four and a half francs for this little book, and had always found it to be at least fifty per cent accurate. It had instincts of veracity. The less agreeable features of the Riviera not mentioned were probably omitted with the knowledge that visitors would soon find them out for themselves. And because Topper found that this little book tended in the general direction of the truth he prized it highly and thumbed it assiduously. He knew innumerable bits about the Riviera that those who had been born and bred there never suspected – bits that would bring him neither pleasure nor profit. This little book had referred glowingly to the beach that he frequented as la plage tranquille. And indeed he had always found it tranquil enough until the arrival of the German model. Even then it had not become noisy. Merely alert.

The French are not loud people in the sense that Americans are. They are much more nosey than noisy. This does not hold for disputes, when animals of all species are prone to forget their manners. But the French can pack themselves by battalions into relatively small spaces and maintain a truly amazing degree of decorum – a sort of vivacious family monotone. However, they will regard. Their interest is quick to arouse and difficult to lull when once aroused. They will peer, scrutinize, and listen. What is even more disturbing to those unacquainted with the fine nuances of their language, they will comment with innocent frankness and abandon.

Mr. Topper was now on the beach. So was the German model. They were separated from each other by a scant six feet of sand. This afternoon the beach was crowded. There were large families present with baskets of lunch and bottles of wine. Some of these bottles had been thrust deep in the sand to cool. There were droves of children and a constant procession of couples that entertained nothing but the most agreeable ideas about one another. All was well. The plage was tranquille. Mr. Topper drew a deep breath and basked in the sun. After the excitement of the morning he felt at peace with France.

As he watched a well formed French girl shift dexterously from her dress to her bathing suit he idly wondered how she did it without revealing ever so much more of herself. Long practice, he decided. It was truly remarkable the way these French girls could dress and undress on the beach without in the least disturbing either its or their own tranquillity. Then he shifted his gaze to the trunks adorning some of the men. These always intrigued Mr. Topper. He wondered, in the first place, why they ever put them on, and in the second place, how they ever kept them on once they had been put. It was obvious that the average Frenchman gave little thought to his trunks. In his mind’s eye he could see them emptying old chests of clothes in search of the drawers of their ancestors which thrifty hands could make suitable for the beach. A slash here and a tuck there, a casually affixed button and, lo, their loins were girded sportively for the sand.

Mr. Topper was not aware of the fact that all was not well on the beach until two of his fellow countrymen, who had evidently abused the indulgence of the beach café, drew his attention to what was to them a strange and absorbing phenomenon.

“Tell me, T. D.,” said the longer of the two Americans, “has that dog dug its damn fool self down into the sand and allowed only its tail to remain exposed?”

“If it has, Joe,” replied T. D., “it’s the first dog I ever heard of acting in such a manner. Peculiar, I’d call it.”

“I’d call it impossible,” said Joe, “if it wasn’t waving there before my very eyes. There’s life in that tail.”

Mr. Topper’s eyes followed the direction of the Americans’ gaze and saw no more nor less than he had expected. There was Oscar’s tail waving negligently in the light breeze from the sea. However, Topper knew there was more to it than that – much more than met the eye. If Oscar’s tail was present, then it followed that Oscar’s companions were not far off. He cast a quick glance about him for unoccupied beach shoes. With a feeling of relief he was unable to discover any.

“Perhaps that dog’s a sand hound,” Joe suggested.

“Never even heard of any such dog,” declared T. D.

“Might have any kind of dog in France, though,” said the other. “Maybe he’s looking for sand fleas.”

“A dog with a tail like that doesn’t have to look for fleas,” wisely declared T. D. “He might be trying to get rid of some sand fleas.”

“Well, I wish he would stop whatever he’s doing,” complained Joe. “I don’t want to see his face, but I hate to think of him down there smothering himself to death. First thing you know that tail will collapse from lack of breath.”

“For God’s sake,” breathed T. D., suddenly sitting up, “will you look at what he’s doing now!”

The tail was slowly creeping across the sand in the direction of a large open lunch basket. Topper could picture to himself the stealthy movements of the rest of the dog.

“It’s burrowing,” said Joe, “like an – an – like a mole.”

“But what speed,” observed T. D. admiringly. “Do you think we drank too much and are seeing things?”

His question was never answered. Joe was too busy looking. The tail had achieved its objective. It was well under the lee of the basket now, and close to the sand. In another moment a sandwich emerged from the basket, quivered nervously in the air, then went out like a light. There was no more sandwich.

“Gord!” breathed Joe. “Can you match that?”

“Look,” was all T. D. said.

This time the leg of a chicken made its mysterious appearance. Evidently the tail considered this piece of loot worthy of more serious consideration. Slowly the leg followed by the tail moved across the sand to the protection of a rotting row-boat. In the security of this object the leg was consumed at the leisure of the tail.

“La jambe!” exclaimed the mother of the brood attached to the basket. “Elle n’est pas ici. Quel dommage!”

Apprehending the nearest child, she administered a routine chastisement upon the scrap of cloth it was wearing. Joe looked at T. D., and T. D. looked at Joe. No word was spoken. Both rose from the sand and made their way to the café. As they passed Mr. Topper, Joe paused and asked him a question.

“Pardon me,” said Joe, “but have you noticed anything peculiar going on – anything having to do with a tail?”

“No,” replied Topper coldly. “I have seen nothing peculiar in that line, although I have seen some rather amusing as well as provocative examples.”

“Let’s hurry,” said Joe to his companion. “He’s harder to understand than the French themselves.”

On this beach there was a huge push ball, the property of Monsieur Sylvestre. Mr. Topper was watching this push ball. So were a number of other bathers. It appeared to be pushing itself. Exclamations of alarm and surprise issued from the crowd. These were speedily augmented and intensified when the ball, suddenly tossing appearances to the wind, pushed itself over a family group inoffensively eating lunch on the sand. For a moment the family was blotted out; then it reappeared in a crumpled condition, its luncheon sadly attenuated. The father of the family picked himself up and in an impassioned speech demanded to be immediately informed who had made the balle to march not only over his lunch but also over his blood relations. As if it were an afterthought, the balle returned and smote the voluble Frenchman heavily upon his unguarded back. This forcibly returned the man to his former place on the sand in the heart of his family. The ball passed on and made for the crowd. It seemed to have become infuriated about something. The crowd parted, and the ball sped down the beach, where it crashed against a tent, the two occupants of which would have preferred not to be seen. As if satisfied by this display of ferocity the ball came to rest.

By this time Monsieur Sylvestre was receiving a lot of complaints about his ball. He strode down the beach and confronted it with a severe eye. Immediately the ball set itself in motion. It began to march on Monsieur Sylvestre. This act of defiance enraged the good patron. He, in turn, defied the ball. He rushed to meet its advance. In this the Frenchman displayed more valor than discretion. There was no stopping that ball. It met Monsieur Sylvestre face to face, and it was the patron’s face that yielded. When he dazedly arose he experienced the final humiliation of being chased back to the crowd by his own ball. The ball stopped short of the crowd and rested on its laurels. It was master of the field. None disputed its authority to go where it pleased. Monsieur Sylvestre had suffered a crushing defeat. He was stunned.

Throughout all this the German model alone had remained unmoved. She was gradually edging her bathing suit lower down on her body. A small towel served as supplementary protection. For once Topper was not interested. His eyes were on the springboard jutting out from the end of the bathing pier. Many eyes were centered on this spot.

Here he saw George Kerby, ludicrously clad in a flapping bathing suit which must once have been the property of a felon. George was poised on the extreme edge of the springboard. He was contorting his body in the most excruciating postures preparatory to diving. Suddenly he flung his striped form high in the air, scrambled himself there for a moment, then faded out. The bathing suit dropped to the water with a wistful splash. Before the astounded watchers had had time to recover from this shocking event, the tall form of the Colonel, clad like a patriarch in a flowing robe, appeared upon the lip of the springboard. The crowd was breathing heavily. One woman was actually praying, while several others were furtively crossing themselves. Even Mr. Topper was moved by the sight of the Colonel. Dressed as he was, it seemed likely that the priestly Colonel would, at least, ascend to heaven, instead of which he treated his audience to several dizzy flips, then landed in the water with a terrific flop. As far as the crowd could tell, the Colonel never came up, for his robe, too, drifted on the tide in company with the garment George Kerby had abandoned.

The bathers out on the float now began to experience difficulty in maintaining their footing. Topper watched them as one by one they appeared to hurl themselves into the sea. Only the ladies remained, and they looked as if remaining was the last thing in the world they wanted to do.

Mr. Topper decided that George Kerby and the Colonel must be very busy about having a good time. They seemed to be everywhere at once, causing disturbance.

When the men climbed back on the float they naturally wanted to know who was the dirty dog that had been so mentally warped as to push them overboard. This question was asked in several different languages, but in none pleasantly. This led to complications, for the answers were in all tongues an approximation of “go to hell.” So enraged did one small man become that he struck a large man in the stomach. The large man in his fury literally threw the small man away. Not quite mollified by this rather drastic step, he turned and punched an inquiring stranger heavily upon the nose. The stricken man, realizing the futility of meeting the large man on his own ground, satisfied his exasperation by tearing the bathing suit off an elderly gentleman in spectacles. Not knowing what else to do, yet feeling called upon to do something, the elderly gentleman held the nearest head he could find under water. One show of ill temper speedily led to another. It was not long before the crowd on the beach was stricken mute with amazement by the condition of the float. Its occupants seemed to have gone in for murder. Half clad and totally nude they attacked one another like so many Neolithic warriors.

Blind unreason ruled the day. Blows rained, and imprecations rose. Murderous ambitions were frustrated by a splash. Whether all the occupants of the float ever returned to the beach or some drowned on the way was never satisfactorily settled. Topper remembered seeing one man, evidently unhinged by terror, swimming industriously out to sea. He assumed the man eventually returned. He could not have sworn to it. Topper did not care a great deal if none of them got back.

Exhaustion and salt water eventually put an end to the activities on the float. The crowd drew a deep breath and wondered what the admirable Monsieur Sylvestre was going to do about it all. That gentleman was moodily considering taking either one of two steps – putting his café, bath houses, and diversions up for sale, or sending for the gendarmes. His plage tranquille had suddenly changed to la plage de la pandémonium. He sank heavily down on the sand by Mr. Topper and asked him about it. Mr. Topper admitted that it was a little too much for him to explain. That push ball, for instance, could it have been in the clutch of a strong but self-contained wind? Monsieur Sylvestre stoutly declared that the conduct of the push ball would have been inexcusable in a hurricane. And as for those diving bodies that disappeared even as they dived, that was a thing inexplicable. No, of a truth le bon Dieu had turned His face against his, Monsieur Sylvestre’s, beach. At this moment the distracted man caught sight of Oscar’s self-propelling tail snaking its way across the sand in the general direction of another lunch basket. Monsieur Sylvestre’s eyes started from his head. Several times he opened his mouth as if to speak, but no articulate sounds issued therefrom. Finally they came in awed accents.

“M’sieu,” he said in a choked voice. “Regardez! Even now dogs have begun to forsake their tails. Soon the entire beach may be doing likewise. Who can tell where these things will end?”

Not waiting to see what disposition this forsaken tail was going to make of itself, Monsieur Sylvestre rose unsteadily to his feet and lurched off in the direction of his café and level-headed wife. Mr. Topper sighed deeply and turned to regard the bare reaches of the German model. Today she was barer than ever, there was no doubt about it. Too bad so much was going on elsewhere. She was not receiving the attention she deserved.

As Topper sat there contemplating the deeply tanned figure of the German model he received the uncanny impression that eyes were contemplating him. For a moment he fought against the desire to look about him; then his resistance broke down. Had he known beforehand that he was going to encounter the reproving gaze of a python, still he could not have refrained from looking. The gaze that he did encounter was almost as dangerous. If anything, it was more so for his peace of mind.

What he actually did see was Marion Kerby fully and perfectly materialized. It was the first time he had seen her since she had returned, and his startled glance told him that hers was by all odds the loveliest figure on the beach. Everything else was forgotten – the trying events of the morning and the excitement that had so recently been occupying his attention. The beach faded away, and he saw her sitting there with the blue of the ocean at her back. Her slim body had been poured into a small, black, and well worn bathing suit. Her skin was glowingly tanned. Curls clustered unreasonably round her back-tilted head. He remembered the delicate, almost childlike, features of her face, the small impertinent chin, and the arched lips with their roving smile. He recalled the mad, eloquent beauty of her eyes, and again he looked into them, then hastily looked away. They were regarding him with scornful malevolence. Those lips he knew so well were curved in a dangerous smile. Topper hated to think of it as a grin, but it was almost that – a nasty grin. Topper waited in dread. For a brief moment she let her baleful gaze rest on the unsuspecting German model, then she looked significantly at Mr. Topper, who, although avoiding her eyes, knew exactly what was going on.

“Nice Topper,” she said in a low voice. “Animal man, Topper. I’ll cook your goose and hers, too, you leaky old bucket.”

Topper looked up at this odd appellation, but Marion Kerby was gone. A wild scream from the German model lifted him to his feet. She, also, was on hers, and now at last there was nothing left to prevent the sun from completing its task. The model was bereft of slightest pretense.

There were several things the lady could have done under the circumstances – several sensible, strategical moves she could have made. She could, for instance, have thrown herself to the beach and covered at least parts of her body with sand. Again, it would not have been unmannerly under the stress of the moment to snatch a towel from someone else and appropriate it for her own protection. She might even have used her hands and have run like hell for the bath houses, which were not far off. She could have done any one of these things or combined the best features of them all, but it just so happened that she chose to do none of them. Instead, she strode up to Mr. Topper, whom she mistakenly assumed to be the author of her predicament, and felled him with a single Teutonic blow. As the confounded man measured his length on the sand, the German model turned to find her bathing suit and towel dangling tauntingly before her eyes. The sight was to the lady as a red flag is to a bull. As the garments sped down the beach in the grip of an invisible force the German model sped after them. There was grim, implacable determination in the pumping of her legs. Her brown body with its narrow band of white was entirely forgotten in her pursuit of her stolen drapery. One arm was extended strainingly to reach what was rightfully hers, but her fingers, ever hopeful, never quite established contact. The towel and the bathing suit fluttered just beyond her grasp.

Thus passed the German model in impressive review. Spellbound, the beach regarded the spectacle, the climax of many mystifying events. At the end of the beach the flying articles turned sharply, and the German model followed after. When her ravished raiment came abreast of Mr. Topper, who had just risen, he received them full in the face. Once more he took the count.

“There!” came a voice in triumph. “I hope you got an eyeful as well as a faceful.”

As the German model made for Topper he sprang to his feet and held out the bathing suit and towel. His eyes were modestly averted. This was not a wise move. The model snatched her property, then promptly knocked Topper down again. For the third time he measured his length on the sand of the tranquil beach. This time he remained measured. Until things quieted down he had no intention of getting up. It was a sheer waste of effort.

At this point Oscar intervened in behalf of his old friend, Topper. The tail suddenly got into action and pursued the model to her bath house. More than the tail must have been in action if the frightened cries of the fleeing woman meant even a little bit. Once in her bath house she screamed for Monsieur Sylvestre, who from one thing and another was almost at the end of his rope.

“There’s a growl in my bath house,” she called in perfect English.

“A towel?” inquired the patron. “Madame, but yes, I caused it to be placed there myself.”

“Not this one, you didn’t,” cried the model, leaping unimproved from her bath house and frantically scratching at the door of another one.

The door flew open, and she stood confronting an elderly gentleman clad in spectacles only. This elderly gentleman had already received enough shocks on the float to scoot him through death’s door. The formidable appearance of the model slammed the door behind him. He collapsed in a heap. The lady almost did the same. Also, Monsieur Sylvestre. The next bath house was empty. Into it the model plunged. Entering bath houses at random was, of course, child’s play for Oscar. He was on the point of following the German model when he heard his master’s voice.

“Oscar, you devil,” called the Colonel. “Come here immediately and leave that lady alone.”

The tail swung round and trotted off in the direction of its invisible master. There was a jaunty flip in its carriage. It was a tail of considerable achievement.

Monsieur Sylvestre had abandoned the model to her noise and her nudity and was addressing Mr. Topper.

“M’sieu,” he was saying reproachfully, “at the proper time and in the proper place I am not saying that your conduct would have been other than quite correct, inevitable, in fact, but why did you undress the lady here on my once so tranquil beach?”

Mr. Topper raised his head wearily.

“I tell you, Monsieur Sylvestre,” he said weakly, “I was not within six feet of the woman when the event occurred. I am not in the habit of undressing ladies either in public or private.”

The patron elevated his eyebrows and gazed out to sea. He was thinking of how ungallant Mr. Topper was. So unlike a Frenchman, who was always willing to lend a helping hand.

There was only one thing left to do about it. Monsieur Sylvestre did that thing.

He shrugged.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Interlude on the Rocks

Unseen wavelets slipping furtively over low-lying rocks. Night time now. Far out across the ocean the bald head of the moon is pushing up the darkness. Topper is on the rocks. Alone. He smells the night around him. Topper is almost doglike about it. He has a yen for the fragrance of night. Mimosa blended with wet sea grass, and over all the heavy, sweet, compelling scent of tropical flowers swimming on the breeze from near-by estates. There are trees behind Topper. The sea lies in front. Under him and about are the rocks – dark, crouching, motionless. Somewhere close at hand lies a little sandy beach – a shallow scoop of sand about as large as a bathtub. This quiet secluded place Topper discovered for himself. He comes here when the mood is on him. He comes here and sits and looks and smells. Sometimes he thinks things. But what things he thinks would be difficult to say. Men like Topper, men whom life has given to believe that they are unoriginal, ordinary, humdrum creatures, have a habit of keeping their thoughts to themselves. Yet what thicker skinned poets glowingly put down on paper some of these stout and seemingly commonplace gentlemen have been nourishing in secret all their lives.

Topper is fascinated by this spot. Close to the surface of the water the rocks step far out from the shore. Occasionally a reef breaks through. When the sea is running strong and the wind blows flat across it he experiences a comforting sensation of isolation as the waves drive in around him. Even the sea gulls in this place seem to be of a different tribe – solitary, lost, and a little eerie.

“Not much pickings for them here,” Topper had once thought. “Look sort of foolish, though, bringing a package along. Sea gulls don’t eat crumbs. Great chunks at a gobble.”

A little more than a week has passed since the episode of the beach, or, rather, the episodes on the beach. During all this time Topper has not been favored by the company of his unseen friends. He has been left with a sense of injury. Some explanation was due him, some slight form of apology. He himself had been forced to explain although he had failed lamentably. The story of the unveiling of the model had been told with extras to Mrs. Topper by her snooty English friends.

“What perverted impulse prompted you to snatch the bathing suit off that lewd woman?” Mrs. Topper had asked when the snooty friends had at last departed, their good works left behind them.

“I had nothing to do with her bathing suit,” Topper wearily denied.

“You must have,” went on his wife. “The woman actually knocked you down. Fancy that, being knocked down on a public beach by a naked woman.”

“I don’t like to fancy it,” said Mr. Topper, closing his eyes on the horrid memory.

“I don’t know what has come over you,” Mrs. Topper hurried on. “Are you going to make your life just one attempted assault after another? First Félice, then this German model.”

“No,” replied Topper darkly. “I’m going to succeed the next time.”

“Well, I hope you do,” snapped his wife, “and get such ideas out of your mind for good and all.”

“That German model was nearly naked, anyway,” Mr. Topper observed.

“I know,” Mary Topper replied, “but that nearly, as small as it was, meant everything.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Topper. “I readily admit that.”

“It didn’t seem to faze her, though,” Mrs. Topper observed, “the way she went rushing about in that shocking condition.”

“I was a lot more injured than shocked,” said Mr. Topper.

“I can well imagine that,” replied his wife, “letting yourself be knocked down by a naked woman.”

“But, my dear, if I had knocked the naked woman down,” Topper protested, “people might have mistaken my intentions entirely.”

“And they wouldn’t have been far wrong,” declared Mrs. Topper quite unreasonably. “What’s going to become of you, I’d like to know? You can’t go dashing about France pulling skirts off servant girls and bathing suits off German models.”

Mr. Topper did not know what was going to become of him. He told Mrs. Topper that he did not care a damn. To proclaim his innocence any further would be, he knew, worse than useless. He collected his hat and stick and made for the door. His wife’s voice followed after. It was her parting shot.

“And if you are seized with an impulse to claw the clothes off some woman you meet in the street,” she told him, “I advise you to count up to twenty, no matter how much you feel like it.”

Topper laughed mirthlessly.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’m going to leave a trail of stripped bodies behind me.”

“Well, don’t drag them into the house,” was all his wife replied.

Topper had been afraid to attempt the beach since the day he had been thrice knocked down upon it. He did not know what had become of the German model, but reports had it that she was back at her old stand. He wondered how she could do it. She was made of ruggeder stuff than he was, that was certain. What would she do to him if he appeared in her presence? Would she arise and knock him down – cause another scandal? Topper rather suspected she would. That German model seemed to thrive on public scandals. She was a public scandal herself.

Instead of frequenting the beach Topper took to the Esterel Mountains. Here in deep quiet valleys he considered many things at leisure, hardly realizing he was thinking at all. There was always some hustling little stream to keep him company, and the fantastic coloring of the great rocks rising high above him pleasantly occupied his eyes. It was quiet back here in the mountains. All the world seemed to have moved to the beach. It was a rare occasion when he met another human being. Even the bird life was of a desultory nature. Solitude was deep but not oppressive. When he caught the dark shadow of a fish moving in the clear waters of a stream he felt a sense of mystery and surprise. He was not entirely alone.

As a result of these long walks Topper was losing weight and toughening his muscles. He felt better physically as well as mentally. He no longer cared a rap what other people thought. And strange to say it was here in these solitudes that he discovered he loved France. His casual conversations with the back-country people he met from time to time in the course of his walks did much to dispel the impression made upon him by the franc-frantic denizens of the resort towns. Topper had a desire to return to these quiet places someday before he died. He scarcely realized how deep that desire was rooted in him.

He felt the same way about these rocks and the little beach he had discovered. This spot would dwell in his memory. He would harken back to it. The moon was up now. A silvery path ran from it to the rocks. Topper saw in fancy a figure drifting towards him down the moon path. Then, very quietly, a small hand nuzzled its way into his. He knew without turning his head that Marion Kerby was back. She would do a thing like that, taking his welcome for granted like a stray pup.

“Yes?” he said, still gazing out to sea.

“I feel like the incidental music for Amos and Andy,” she murmured.

“It must be a terrible feeling,” replied Topper.

“No, it isn’t. It’s nice for a change. I feel all holy and sunsetlike inside. Still, sort of, and very, very tender – like a good woman about to be bad.”

“Your hair is blowing in my mouth,” was Topper’s reply to this. “Do something about it.”

“Then bite it off,” continued the low voice. “I’ll grow some new hair.”

Topper thought this remark far from holy and tender, but he made no reply.

“Oscar can do his hind legs now,” offered the voice a little timidly. “And much of his upper rump.”

“I don’t care if he can do himself into a pack of bloodhounds,” replied Mr. Topper. “Where have you been all this time? Answer me that.”

“All right,” said Marion in an injured voice. “Don’t bite my head off. I don’t mind about the hair. You can chew on that till the cows come home.”

“I don’t care to chew on that until the cows start out even,” said Mr. Topper. “I’m not a hair chewer.”

“I know you’re not,” Marion put in placatingly. “But I do think you might show some interest in Oscar’s rump, especially his upper rump.”

“Do you expect me to sit here on these rocks and go into ecstasies over the shaggy rump of a lunch-snatching dog?”

“Well, the Colonel is greatly encouraged, and we all feel sort of good about it. A fish did it.”

“What! How could a fish possibly influence Oscar’s upper rump?”

“Can’t quite say,” she replied. “But he saw a fish in a tank the other day, and from that moment he began to materialize his hind legs and upper rump.” The voice trailed off for a moment, then resumed musingly, “I guess Oscar had never seen a fish before – not a real live fish, that is. Strange, isn’t it, never having seen a fish!”

“And he probably thought,” remarked Mr. Topper sarcastically, “that if a fish could get away with a funny tail like that, he himself had little of which to feel ashamed.”

“Perhaps,” Marion replied. “You may be right, but deep emotion has always affected Oscar’s rump proper and upper rump.”

“There’s not a proper part in all of that dog’s body,” declared Mr. Topper.

“How about mine?” Marion asked demurely.

“Nor yours either,” said Topper. “Are we to sit here all night discussing Oscar’s rump? I’ve asked you where you have been for so long? And while we’re on the subject of rumps, I’d like to take yours across my knee and give it a good sound drubbing.”

“I’d quickly do away with mine,” replied Marion. “On second thought, though, go right ahead. I don’t mind brutality. I lived with a brute all my life.”

“George treats you a damn sight too well. By the way, just where is he now?”

“I’ve given him the slip. He’s drinking up all the francs he won by cheating at Monte Carlo. That’s where we were – at Monte Carlo. We always go there when we feel the need of money. The Colonel thought it up.”

“And the delicious Mrs. Hart put the idea in the Colonel’s mind,” said Mr. Topper.

“Wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” Marion agreed. “She’s a rare trollop, that one, but a lovable old tear-sheet withal.”

“And you’re no lily, yourself,” replied Mr. Topper.

“I am so,” said Marion. “I’m a tiger lily. Feel my teeth.”

Topper’s neck was sharply bitten in a spot where the marks of teeth would be sure to attract unfavorable attention.

“You’re branded now,” continued Marion, laughing softly. “From now on you are my mustang. Go on and act wild.”

“Marion,” said Topper reprovingly. He hesitated a moment, then turned, and for the first time met the irresistible invitation of her eyes. “Oh, hell,” he muttered, taking her in his arms. “You’re the very soul of depravity, and yet, you’re better than a sermon.”

“Let’s deprave,” murmured Marion, snuggling her pliant body close to the man. “I’m not exactly off you, either, my old and rare.”

Then Topper did act wild, wilder than he had ever acted in his life. Being thrice flattened against the sand was a small price to pay, he decided, for those moments of complete forgetfulness he spent with Marion by the little, hidden beach. The moon kept rising higher, and if it was at all disconcerted by what it saw, it did not bat an eye. The moon had been witnessing such meetings since the world was first made to shine on. At this late date it was shockproof.

“Saints preserve us,” breathed Marion Kerby, her voice drifting back from the far end of time. “In the words of a lady you know, for a man of your age and girth – —”

“None of that!” Topper broke in, blotting out her face with a large brown hand.

“Oh, all right,” the girl spluttered. “But how will I ever get rearranged?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Topper. “Do you like this place?”

“It’s excellent for the purpose,” she answered. “Every prospect pleases. Don’t let the others know a thing about it. By the way, what were your relations with that German model from Yonkers?”

“Not even close enough to be platonic,” said Mr. Topper.

“Is that a lie?” asked Marion.

“That is not a lie,” returned Topper. “My interest in her was purely academic.”

“Academic, perhaps, but not purely.”

“I won’t stickle,” said Topper.

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” she answered. “It sounds sort of bad. From now on I want you to keep your eyes off that wolf of a woman. If you value what little is left of your reputation, look somewhere else. Next time it will be your suit that gets snatched off.”

“One can hardly keep from looking at so much bare flesh.”

“I’ll give you enough to look at,” Marion replied grimly.

“Marion,” said Topper rather primly, “you have sunk to the lowest of planes.”

“I know it,” the girl at his side admitted. “I’ve backslid terribly.”

“How did it happen, Marion? I’m glad you did.”

“You would be,” she answered, smiling oddly in the darkness. “But it doesn’t speak so well for me. I couldn’t stand the upper strata. The atmosphere – too rarefied for me. Wasn’t ready for it. I thought I was. I felt sure about it. Convinced. But this old earth exerts a powerful pull, my old. Especially with you on it – you all alone and puzzled about things.”

“You don’t mean that, Marion?” Topper’s voice was low.

“I don’t know,” she answered slowly. “I guess I must mean it, or why do I let myself go like this? God knows it’s not for your looks. I could improve on those with my hands tucked into boxing gloves.”

“You like to make yourself clear, don’t you?” Topper put in.

“I do,” continued Marion. “And you’re not admirable. In fact, there’s nothing good about you – no redeeming feature, and yet, you’re my sort of man.”

“You’re hardly a mother superior yourself,” declared Topper.

“Oh, I just raise a lot of harmless hell. Take advantage of situations and all that. But I don’t fall for any other guys. George has only you to worry about.”

“Yes,” allowed Mr. Topper. “He worries so much about me that I can’t help worrying about him – a little.”

“And that young buck tries to make every good-looking dame he lays eyes on,” continued Marion. “I don’t mind in the least. He was always that way. His parents had to give him a woman for his sixteenth birthday. They were extremely indulgent, his parents. And he exacted the same indulgence from me. Had I cared any I’d have made him a corpse quick as a wink, same as I’ll make you if you pull any fast ones.”

“I’m all right, lady,” said Mr. Topper hastily. “You don’t have to trouble your head about me.”

“I won’t,” Marion assured him. “Your head will get all the trouble. I’ll twist the dull thing off like this.”

She illustrated this threat by a suggestive grinding of her two small fists. Mr. Topper could see his neck serving as the core for this painful operation. He looked away.

“Don’t,” he asked her. “Don’t do that any more. I understand perfectly. Let’s talk of something else.”

“Sure,” agreed Marion, “but that’s about the way I’d do it.”

“How did you get track of me over here?” asked Mr. Topper.

Marion rested her head on his shoulder and took up one of his hands much as she would a book.

“Well,” she said, “when I backslid, the first person I called on was you. You weren’t there. You weren’t anywhere that I could find. So I just hung about the place until the letter carrier came and collected your readdressed mail from a servant. I snatched one of the letters out of his hand, read the address, then flung it back in his face.”

“That was unnecessary,” remarked Mr. Topper.

“Quite,” agreed Marion. “He was greatly upset about it. Almost afraid to pick the letter up. I have fun that way. Not much, but a little. I was feeling good about finding out where you were. After that it was all quite simple. I collected the rest of them and induced them to take the trip. George is always game for any kind of diversion.”

“Including torture and murder,” added Mr. Topper. “He found me first, did George, in a most embarrassing situation.”

“Oh, no, he didn’t. I was there all the time.”

“Good God!” exclaimed Mr. Topper. “While I was taking a bath?”

“While both of you were taking a bath,” said Marion, nodding contentedly. “Behind that wicker laundry basket of yours. I tried to get in it, but the damn thing was full.”

Mr. Topper was profoundly shocked. He rose to his feet and helped Marion to hers.

“That was not at all nice of you,” he said.

“No,” replied Marion complacently, “but it was highly amusing. If George hadn’t been there I’d have bathed with you myself, perhaps. Who knows?”

“Come,” said Mr. Topper. “We had better take a walk.”

“Will you buy me a drink?” Marion asked him.

“I’ll buy you a swarm of drinks,” Topper assured her.

“Not too many tonight,” said Marion. “I must look up George to see if the coast is clear.”

“Just what are you planning on doing?”

“Oh, nothing much,” she replied evasively. “Just scouting about. After we’ve had our drink I’ll take you home.”

And that is what Marion did. Rather wistfully she left Topper at his gate.

“Where are you going to sleep tonight?” he asked her.

“We have unoccupied rooms at the best hotels,” Marion told him. “The maids can’t understand why the beds are mussed up every morning. I might sleep in one of those bath houses, though, just to be nearer you.”

“Don’t do that,” said Topper. “Go to your hotel and get a good night’s sleep. And think of me. I have to go in there now and listen to a lot of drip from my wife’s unendurable friends – England’s worst exhibits on the Riviera.”

“Tell ’em to go to hell,” murmured Marion, kissing him as she faded out. “I’ll see you soon, my old and rare.”

Topper stood at his gate. He was alone now. The night spoke of his solitude – intensified it.

“Marion,” he called softly. “Marion, where are you?”

Silence. Waves against the beach.

Topper turned and walked thoughtfully towards his villa, pallid in the moonlight. In the next villa – not Monsieur Louis’s – a woman’s figure was outlined against a window. She was standing there watching – always watching. She seldom left her window, that old, mean-minded French hag.

“Like to shy a rock through the pane,” Topper mused darkly as he stepped onto his veranda. “It would damn well serve her right. Hiding her own wickedness behind a curtain while looking for the worst in others.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Eccentric Behavior
of Scollops

When Mr. Topper stepped into his villa he was on the verge. Exactly what he was on the verge of he could not have said with any degree of certainty. But he knew he was on the verge of something. He felt like it all over. It might have been the mumps, or, again, it might have been murder. So far he had never committed either. And when he entered his sitting room to be confronted by a stack of four Sutton-Trevors and one Mary Topper he knew that the verge of whatever it was had been left far behind. He was over it and plunging headlong into all kinds of trouble – folly, indiscretions, and even better, Marion Kerby.

Accordingly, when Mrs. Sutton-Trevor looked up at Mr. Topper with more interest than approval and said, “Bonsoir, Monsieur Topper. J’espère que vous vous portez bien. Comment?” Mr. Topper looked back at her disgustedly and replied, “Must you make those alien noises?”

It was one of those insulting remarks that people pretend either not to have heard or not to have understood. Mrs. Sutton-Trevor laughed unnaturally. Mr. Topper thought of a lake of seamed, rubberlike ice suddenly splitting open, then closing up again. Topper looked closely at the lady in an attempt to discover if he had heard aright. Her face gave no indication of ever having departed from its set grimness. Nothing lingered there. Mr. Topper blinked rapidly several times.

Mr. Keith Sutton-Trevor then took up tennis with Topper. Keith Sutton-Trevor was still considered an only child, although he was easily Mr. Topper’s age. He was a man with teeth and the face of a hard-bitten ridge. Mr. Topper leered at the ridge and declared he hated the game, which was a lie. Mr. Topper loved tennis and played it atrociously. Keith’s mother protested violently in English. She endeavored to give the impression of having become so accustomed to speaking French that she found her native tongue tough sledding. She groped spasmodically for the right word and made herself look altogether horrid. Mr. Topper informed her brutally that he still detested tennis, that he had come to France merely to drink and indulge a couple of other low whims of his, and that he approved of Soviet Russia.

“Liars, thieves, and murderers,” muttered the elder Mr. Sutton-Trevor who up to this moment had been quite satisfied in listening to the sound he made by breathing heavily through his nose.

“But, my dear Mr. Topper,” interposed the wife of Keith Sutton-Trevor, who in a past incarnation had been an ill-favored horse and who had not been improved by the change, “there’s not a gentleman in the government.”

“How about your own?” asked Mr. Topper.

“You mean our Labor element? Ah, Mr. Topper, its members are rapidly becoming gentlemen. England always does that to its radical politicians; then they become statesmen and can’t afford to be radical any longer.”

“Political eunuchs,” snapped Mr. Topper.

“Why, Cosmo!” exclaimed his wife.

“Pretty strong – pretty strong,” objected the elder Mr. Sutton-Trevor. “I say, Topper, there are ladies present. Yes, by gad, there are.”

“You surprise me,” said Mr. Topper. “How does it feel?”

Mrs. Topper’s dyspepsia was increasing by leaps and bounds.

“My husband jests,” she gulped unhappily.

“While you indijest,” retorted Topper. “How’s that, Trevor-Suttons?” he demanded, deliberately reversing their names. “Think it’s worth a cognac? I do. It’s very funny.”

“Sutton-Trevor, Mr. Topper, if you please,” objected the wife of the breather with steadily mounting emphasis.

“Suttinly,” replied Mr. Topper from the buffet, at which he was taking a double portion of cognac most improperly. “That’s very funny, too. And I’m not even half trying.”

“You don’t need to try at all,” commented Mrs. Topper, “so far as we’re concerned, Mr. and Mrs. Sutton-Trevor have asked me to motor to Paris with them, and I’m thinking of accepting.”

“It would be the last thing in the world I’d think of doing,” said Mr. Topper quite inoffensively. “It’s your dish at a gulp, though. I can see that. Let nothing stop you. Keith and myself will stay at home and play tennis morning, noon, and night. How about it, Keith?”

“My husband is an exceptionally fine player,” put in Mrs. Keith.

“You mean, for a man of his age,” Mr. Topper replied with ready sympathy. “I fancy he can pull some sneaky ones. Well, I’m a pretty stealthy player myself. It will be sneak meeting sneak. Don’t trouble to acknowledge that one. It came too easy.”

Topper loudly smacked his lips, polished them on the sleeve of his coat, and sat down, reiterating that he dearly loved to drink. He was deliberately trying to start a row.

There was really very little left that Mrs. Topper and the Sutton-Trevors could talk about in the uncouth presence of the drink-loving Topper. A brooding constraint fell upon them, and into this walked Scollops in a manner with which nobody present was even remotely familiar, including Scollops, herself.

Casually and without haste Mr. Topper’s personal cat sauntered across the sitting room with her back legs dangling thoughtlessly in the air. It was an effortless performance in which Scollops seemed to be taking no part. Topper realized full well that Scollops was not responsible for the ridiculous figure she cut. He suspected the Colonel and Oscar of experimenting with his pet. What did surprise him was the complete lack of interest Scollops displayed in what was being done to her. Few cats permitted such liberties to be taken with their persons. Dogs, yes. Dogs were natural born clowns. Not so cats. Those creatures of habit were conservative to a fault. Topper reflected that the Colonel had a way with animals. Inexhaustible patience. He took one look at his cat, then rose and returned to the cognac. The inverted Scollops followed him. Topper felt somewhat like a ring master in a circus.

“Is this one of your stupid tricks?” his wife demanded.

“It appears to be Scollops’ idea entirely,” remarked Mr. Topper. “I claim no credit at all. Give the little lady a big hand.”

“I mean, have you strung her up on a wire or something?” Mary Topper persisted.

“I’m not so anxious to amuse you as all that,” her husband retorted.

“You’re not amusing me in the least,” interposed Mrs. Sutton-Trevor. “I refuse even to look at such an unnatural and undignified animal.”

“That cat is far from amusing,” wheezed old Mr. Sutton-Trevor. “The Lord God of hosts never created a cat to walk in that fashion.”

“I think I could bear it a little better if she would only reverse her position,” said the old gentleman’s daughter-in-law, “and walk on her back legs instead.”

At this remark the back legs referred to began to pump busily in the air as if the cat were riding a bicycle upside down. Mr. Topper himself was a little upset by this uncalled for demonstration. Even Scollops contrived to look back and up at her speeding legs as if surprised by their sudden activity.

“Perhaps the cat has something in her foot and is trying to shake it out,” suggested Mr. Keith Sutton-Trevor.

“Nonsense,” said his mother impatiently. “That would be a silly way to go about getting it out.”

“No,” agreed Mrs. Topper. “If I had something in my foot I’m sure I wouldn’t stand on my hands and shake my legs in the air.”

“Don’t!” said Mr. Topper hastily. “Even the thought unmans me.”

“Well, she’s your cat,” continued Mrs. Topper, ignoring her husband’s remark. “I wish you’d make her stop whatever she thinks she’s doing.”

At this moment Félice entered to collect the coffee cups and liqueur glasses. After one look at Scollops she forgot the object of her quest.

“The cat,” she murmured, “she is foolish. She claws at the air in reverse.”

Snatching up several cups she hurried from the room. Topper had a bright idea. He hoped the Colonel, or whoever was manipulating Scollops, would play up to it.

“ ’Bout face!” he ordered.

Immediately the cat described a neat flip, landed lightly on her hind legs and stood at attention with her forepaws elevated. Topper laughed inordinately.

“That’s one of the funniest things I ever saw,” he said. “Damn my eyes!”

“I wish you’d go somewhere else and look at that cat alone,” Mrs. Topper told him feelingly. “She’s upsetting my guests.”

“Also herself,” added Topper. “Carry on, Scollops.”

At this command Scollops did a strange and unladylike thing. She resumed the position of a normal cat, walked deliberately over to Mrs. Sutton-Trevor and spat at that good lady. Mrs. Sutton-Trevor started violently in her chair.

“My word!” exclaimed her son. “Do you think the beast is mad? Will it attack us, perhaps?”

Scollops, as if understanding these questions, turned and looked long at the Englishman. Then, crouching close to the floor, she emitted a fearful scream and sprang, claws distended, into the horror-riven face of Mr. Keith Sutton-Trevor. There must have been more weight behind Scollops than mere cat, because the assaulted man, with a scream rivaling hers in fearfulness, rolled out across the matting as the back of his chair hit the floor.

“I’m dreadfully sorry,” said Mrs. Topper, bending solicitously over the sprawling gentleman. “It will never occur again.”

“Once was too often,” the Englishman’s mother replied for him. “An incident like that should never occur at all. Your husband’s cat will have no opportunity to insult me and assault mine a second time.”

“Nonsense,” said Mr. Topper, seizing the fallen man by the arm and dragging him ruthlessly over the matting in an abortive effort to help him to his feet. “What should a tennis shark like your son care about a little cat? He plays with their guts.”

“What!” ejaculated Mr. Sutton-Trevor, growing purple in the face. “This is too much – too low to be tolerated.”

“Your husband is less endurable than his cat,” the younger Mrs. Sutton-Trevor told Mrs. Topper. “What a disgusting thing to say about poor Keith.”

“Not at all,” grunted Mr. Topper, pulling the arm with all his might. “If you had any sense at all you’d know that tennis rackets are strung with catgut.”

“I wish they were strung with yours,” grated the elder Mr. Sutton-Trevor with a complete reversal of manners.

“Oh, what a horrid wish!” said Mr. Topper, pausing for a moment in his pulling. “Did you hear what he said, everybody? I merely stated a general fact. He’s getting personal about my interior.”

“If you would kindly stop trying to pull my arm off,” interposed Mr. Keith Sutton-Trevor bitterly, “I might be able to get up off the floor for a while.”

“Sorry, old chap,” replied Mr. Topper. “Wasn’t thinking of what I was doing. Hope it isn’t spoiled for your tennis.”

“I couldn’t even play ping-pong with it, the way it is now,” the man replied ruefully as he painfully endeavored to wriggle the injured member back into position. “May I ask what you wanted to do with my arm?”

“I don’t want to do a thing with any part of your malformed body,” Mr. Topper assured him. “Between the bunch of you you’ve broken my cat’s heart. Look at the poor creature.”

Scollops, when last seen, had been crawling under the chair of the elder Mr. Sutton-Trevor. That gentleman, looking down, was distressed to see a long shaggy tail lying between his feet.

“That is a strange cat,” he observed, “but she can’t be so strange as to grow a tail like that all at once.”

Gingerly he moved his feet apart and leaned down closet to the tail in question.

“Is there a dog in the house?” he asked.

“No,” said Mr. Topper. “Do you want one?”

“There are enough low animals present as it is,” replied the old man significantly. “Whatever that queer object belongs to, it can’t stay where it is. I don’t like the looks of the thing.”

With this old Mr. Sutton-Trevor reached down and laid violent hands on the tail, giving it a rude tug as he did so. The tail snapped out from under the chair and was immediately followed by a deep growl.

“My God,” said the old gentleman, turning white, “I’ve pulled the beast’s tail off, and it merely growls. What manner of an animal is it?”

At this moment the tail began to wiggle excitedly in his hand. With a yell of fear Mr. Sutton-Trevor dropped it and drew his feet up off the floor. Like a thing of life the tail sped round the room. Scollops suddenly appeared from under the table and lengthened out in hot pursuit of the tail. The tail left the floor and landed on Mrs. Sutton-Trevor’s lap. Scollops did likewise, and it was there that the battle was joined. While this admirable English gentlewoman made noises like an American Indian on the warpath, Oscar, unseen but vocal, and Scollops, a flash of screeching fur, fought to a draw without budging an inch from their original point of contact, i. e., Mrs. Sutton-Trevor’s agitated lap. As a result of this trying experience, the good lady, as soon as the cat and the tail had removed themselves from the field of battle, had to be assisted from the room.

“There’s something decidedly peculiar about this villa,” she announced upon returning to the sitting room. “And I’m not referring altogether to Mr. Topper either.”

“That’s good of you,” put in Mr. Topper with a malicious grin.

“It was unintentional, I assure you,” the lady resumed, “but when undogged tails begin to bark and bite and dash about the house, and when cats start to walk like acrobats and fight like distracted demons in my lap, it’s time to draw the line. I draw it now. Mrs. Topper, I’m exceedingly sorry, but I can’t let my family remain beneath your husband’s roof. It’s altogether too dangerous. At any moment my husband might have a stroke or my son might lose his mind.”

“Well, I draw the line at that,” Mr. Topper retorted, “although, for the life of me, I can’t make out how either one of them would be greatly changed. The old chap’s been the grave digger’s darling for years, and as for your slightly faded son, he can hardly lose what he hasn’t.”

“Oh!” gasped Mrs. Sutton-Trevor. “Strike him, Keith. We have never been so insulted.”

“England expects every man to duck his duty,” said Mr. Topper nastily.

This was too much for Keith Sutton-Trevor. He stepped up to Mr. Topper and raised his hand. It was immediately filled with cat. How Scollops managed it no one will ever know. Mr. Topper suspected the Colonel of having dropped her there. At the same time not only the tail but also the complete rump of a dog came charging across the room at the trembling legs of the outraged Englishman. It was more than human flesh could bear. Even gods would have been disconcerted. Mr. Keith Sutton-Trevor had in his composition no strain remotely godlike. He dropped the cat, sidestepped the rushing rump, and fled from the house.

“Where’s he gone?” demanded his father.

“To look for the rest of that dog,” Mr. Topper suggested cheerfully.

“And where is she going to?” continued the old man as Keith’s wife dashed after him.

“To look for what’s left of him,” replied Mr. Topper. “He’s hardly worth the trouble.”

“If I were a day younger, sir, I’d thrash you within an inch of your life.”

“And if you were a day older there wouldn’t be an inch of your life left to thrash.”

“Oh!” cried the old gentleman. “This bounder is insufferable. Take me away.”

Topper was drinking cognac.

“Yes, Mrs. Sutton-Trevor,” he said, “hurry up and draw that line. Drag him out with it.”

This lady chose to ignore Mr. Topper.

“My dear,” she said to his wife, “I advise you to come with us tomorrow on that trip. This is no place for a woman of refinement.”

“I’d like to start right now,” was Mrs. Topper’s reply as she followed her guests to the veranda. “I will let you know in the morning. Ever since his accident there has been something queer about him. Especially of late.”

When she returned to the sitting room she glanced at her husband and decided she had stated the case with admirable fairness and restraint. There was most assuredly something queer about him. He was slouched down in a chair and he was holding a glass of cognac in his right hand. On one knee Scollops was sitting contentedly while on the other lay either the start or finish of a dog consisting principally of a shaggy tail. In the presence of that irreconcilable manifestation Mary Topper did not linger long. There was little to be gained and much might be lost. Averting her eyes from her peculiar husband and his even more peculiar pets she hurried upstairs, an uneasy sensation creeping the length of her spine.

Topper sipped his cognac and looked meditatively down at the tail. Those hyphenated snobs had got what was coming to them. Too long had they desecrated his Riviera for him, smearing entire chunks of starlit evenings. Had he come to Europe to meet Glendale with an English accent? No, he had not come to Europe to do that. Glendale was too much with him as it was. He was comforted to know that the Sutton-Trevors had been roundly insulted and injured.

“Now where the devil has the Colonel gone?” he wondered. “This dog here is left on my hands. Can’t turn a dog in his condition away from my door.”

It did not matter. If his debauched master had wandered off in search of other diversions, what little there was of Oscar could bunch itself up in a chair and sleep right here. He could entertain Scollops – keep her at home at night, for a change.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A Lady’s Leg Betrays

Topper drained his glass and deposited his burdens in the chair. After life’s fitful fever they slept well, their former antagonism forgotten in their mutual defense of the man. Scollops opened her eyes drowsily and contemplated the neatly arranged but nevertheless dogless rump. Then she closed them, and a slight shiver ran through her graceful body. This was an entirely new make of dog to Scollops. She would probably grow hardened to it. A cat had to get used to many disagreeable facts in life. Previously she had always been able to consider the faces of her sleeping companions. No matter. A friendly rump in the chill hours of the night was better than no rump at all. What there was of Oscar was warm and shaggy. Scollops appreciated this. She would make the most of the little the gods had granted. The sound of a dog yawning immoderately completely filled her left ear. Once more the cat opened her eyes. This time she looked with fastidious disapproval at the spot whence the yawn had issued. If this rump intended to yawn like that occasionally throughout the night the situation would indeed be most trying. Scollops could get used to the rump, but not to its yawns. The sharp, gasping yelps with which they terminated were especially difficult on the ears. The cat glanced up at Mr. Topper inquiringly, as if to ascertain what he thought about it, then returned her gaze to the rump. With a philosophical shrug of her sleek shoulders she closed her eyes once more and attempted to make the best of an unparalleled juxtaposition.

Topper moved restlessly about the room, glancing from time to time at the bottle of cognac standing on the buffet. Let it stand. No sense in waking up in the morning with a dull head. The cognac could wait. He walked out on the veranda and scanned the face of the moon. Automatically the woman in the villa at his right planted herself at her window.

“The evil-minded old hag,” he muttered, looking belligerently up at the shadowy form. “Someday you’ll get that rock if you don’t mind your own damn business.”

The watching woman had put a curse on the night for Mr. Topper. He turned his back on her and sought the privacy of his villa. Closing the long shutters on the sea he stood by them, listening to the foaming of waves on the beach, then slowly mounted the stairs with a backward look at the peculiar group in the chair. Mary should be in bed by now. He heartily hoped she was. To indulge in any further conversation with that lady tonight would be far from expedient.

In the course of a single evening Topper had touched romance and roundly defeated his enemies. Also, he had indulged in more cognac than was his wont. He was willing to call it a day, and not such a bad day at that.

Quietly he passed through his wife’s room and on into his own, leaving the door ajar in accordance with well established tradition, the reason for which he could not understand unless it was to encourage a fair and friendly exchange of Riviera insects. Mrs. Topper and her dyspepsia were sleeping confidingly together. They were self-sufficient. Not so Mr. Topper. Moonlight lying on water was not good for his peace of mind. It disquieted him. Had he been a dog he would have bayed soulfully at the moon. Deprived of this emotional outlet he undressed slowly without troubling to turn on the light, donned a regal pair of pajamas, and maneuvered himself into his bed of an elasticité suprême.

“How nice!” breathed a soft voice in his ear. “I love silk things.”

Topper gasped as his pajama trousers were tugged violently and inquisitively felt by some unseen companion who loved silk things.

“Don’t!” he whispered in the moon-filtered darkness. “You’ll yank the damn things off me.”

This impassioned plea was met by an unholy giggle.

“Nothing ventured nothing gained,” said the voice at his side.

He turned his head and found himself looking into Marion Kerby’s moon-touched eyes. In the half-light of the room her face looked small and pale and impish. Her defiant nose was hardly six inches from his. Her lips were dangerously near.

“Go on back to your bath house,” said Mr. Topper, “and keep your hands off my pajamas.”

“I won’t,” she snapped back at him. “I’m quite comfortable where I am, and I do like your pajamas. I’ll tear ’em to shreds if I feel like it.”

“Don’t feel like it,” said Mr. Topper. “Stop feeling altogether.”

“You should never deck your body out in silk when I’m about,” whispered Marion. “I can’t keep my hands off it.”

Topper considered her closely.

“What have you decked yours in?” he asked suspiciously.

“Merely the top of a pair of yours. I can hardly find myself in them. Want to try?”

“Don’t talk like that. It’s not right.”

“What should we both do – say our prayers and then go to sleep?”

“It would be far, far wiser. You’ve backslid terribly.”

“And I’m going to drag you with me.”

“Do you realize that you’ve got yourself uninvited into bed with a married man, and that you have a husband of your own somewhere close at hand – too close at hand?”

“Yes,” quietly. “I realize that.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that it is a wrong thing to climb into bed with men?”

“With how many men?”

“With any number of men.”

“I don’t know about it’s being wrong,” came the voice, “I know it would be unwise.”

Mr. Topper was stumped.

“Have you no moral values at all?” he asked at length.

“I haven’t a thing for sale, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s what I don’t mean.”

“Then you’d better stick to simple sentences. A slight misunderstanding might make a whale of a difference.”

Topper found himself unable to continue looking into Marion’s glowing eyes. He turned his own way.

“Why don’t you go back to your hotel?” he asked.

“Nobody there. The gang’s out. George has gone away in a motorboat with a dame calling herself Mrs. Blake Willard.”

“I know her,” replied Topper. “A charming woman.”

“Did you ever go away with her?”

“No,” said Mr. Topper. “Myself and Mr. Blake Willard are the only two men on the Riviera who have not availed themselves of that pleasure.”

“Then she’s that sort of woman?”

“Very much so.”

“What a joke on George!”

“He is merely following the conventional precedent, that’s all.”

“Of course, he was greatly boiled,” Marion observed with a scrap of loyalty. “Usually he’s a choosy sort of person.”

“Mrs. Blake Willard is not a matter of choice. She’s a matter of routine.”

Silence, then a small voice, softly:

“Do you like me, Topper?”

“What has that got to do with your crawling in bed with me?”

“I didn’t crawl, to begin with, and isn’t it right for people who like one another to see as much of each other as possible?”

“Certainly not,” Mr. Topper objected. “Such inquisitiveness would lead to all sorts of complications.”

“I don’t understand,” said Marion.

“Listen,” Mr. Topper explained patiently, “if every couple that like each other crawled – —”

“I wish you wouldn’t say crawl,” the low voice interrupted.

“All right,” said Mr. Topper. “If every couple that took a fancy to each other got themselves into a bed there wouldn’t be enough to go round.”

“Enough what – beds or couples?”

“Beds, of course.”

“Then why beds? Let ’em think up places. I could.”

Once more Topper was stumped. It was like talking to a savage.

“Do you realize this,” he asked presently, “that my wife is asleep on one side of me and that on the other your space-devouring husband, fed up with Mrs. Blake Willard, may most horribly appear at any moment?”

Marion chuckled.

“It would be amusing if they appeared at the same time.”

“It would be just too bad,” said Mr. Topper. “He would literally tear me up and toss me away, and she would tell the pieces exactly what she thought of them.”

“I wish you’d think more about me and a great deal less about George and your wife. If you’re not more entertaining, I’ll crawl into bed with her, as you so graphically put it.”

“That would be friendly, especially in the top part of my pajamas.”

“Then choose between us.”

“I’d rather take a walk,” hedged Mr. Topper. “Let’s.”

“If you try to leave this bed I’ll have her in here in no time.”

“If I don’t leave this bed I’m afraid she’ll be in here anyway. Can’t I even close the door?”

“It would be advisable,” replied Marion. “Things are looking up.”

“Don’t be bold.”

“One has to be a damn sight more than bold with you. A body has to be downright overbearing.”

When he returned to the bed Marion was snuggled down in his place. One slim bare leg was tucked outside the coverings. Grumbling about the nerve of some women, Topper lay down where she had been.

“I can’t sleep on this side,” he complained.

Marion laughed unpleasantly.

“What makes you think you’re going to sleep?” she asked. “Where are your manners?”

Topper looked at her with startled eyes.

“Aren’t we going to sleep?” he demanded.

“No, we’re not going to sleep,” she mimicked, sticking out the tip of her tongue at him. “You great big cow.”

“For God’s sake,” said Topper. “I’ve had a tough day. What are you planning on doing at this time of night?”

“Well,” replied Marion consideringly, “we can’t play polo, and we can’t run races, and it would bring in a flock of mosquitoes if we lit the light and broke out a deck of cards. We might play twenty questions, though.”

“I need only one,” said Mr. Topper. “Are you going to get out of this bed and go home?”

“All right,” answered Marion, “but you’ll be sorry.”

She slipped from the bed and walked over to the window, where she stood in the drifting moonlight, an odd-looking little figure.

“I say!” whispered Mr. Topper. “You can’t go like that.”

“I can go like that,” she whispered back furiously. “I can go in less than that. Here! Take your damn circus tent.”

With this remark she tore off his pajama jacket and flung it to the floor. Then, quite unexpectedly, she hid her face in her hands and began to cry softly but effectively. Topper could not stand this. He looked at the gleaming figure, then blinked stupidly at the world in general.

“Marion,” he whispered uneasily, “don’t go on like that.”

“Naked I came into this world,” she said brokenly, “and mother naked I’ll leave the damn thing. You don’t care.”

Topper heaved himself out of bed and went over to the window.

“Don’t touch me,” said Marion, leaning heavily against him. “Don’t come a step nearer.”

“It wouldn’t be physically possible,” observed Topper.

Was she laughing now or crying? Topper was unable to tell. He felt two smooth arms creeping up to his neck and a small wet face pressed against his. He knew when he was licked, and he liked it.

“My old and rare,” she murmured, holding onto his ears and dragging his head down to her lips.

There was nothing for Topper to do but to carry her back to the bed.

“I knew you understood all the time how a gentleman should treat a lady,” she murmured. “Now, if you’ll be so kind – —”

Topper dropped her suddenly, and her sentence ended in a gasp.

“Now, for God’s sake, be ready to dematerialize at a moment’s notice,” said Mr. Topper a few hours later. “Don’t fall asleep and forget yourself.”

“I won’t,” murmured Marion drowsily. “There’s been enough of that already. I’ll fade at the crack o’ danger, Mr. Topper.”

The room became quiet save for the sound of deep and regular breathing and the dream-spun cadence of the surf.

Mary Topper awoke early the next morning. This was due to the fact that she had arrived at a definite decision. She would leave that morning for Paris with the Sutton-Trevors in their motor. The conduct of her husband on the previous evening had been inexcusable. Furthermore, unnatural and sinister things were going on in the house – dogs’ tails and all that. She did not care to think about them. Her husband could take care of himself. She experienced a passing qualm when she thought of the fair Félice. Then she shrugged her shoulders. If a man intended to be a man there was no way of stopping him.

She got out of bed and slipped on her dressing gown. She must inform her husband at once of her decision. It was odd that he still remained in his room. Then, for the first time, she noticed that the door between the two rooms was closed. This was even odder. Worse than that. It was actually insulting. She faced the door grimly, then flung it open.

The first object that greeted Mrs. Topper’s gaze was altogether delightful, although, it must be confessed, the good lady did not look on it with any apparent appreciation. What she saw was a slim bare and brown leg – an exquisite example of feminine decoration – lying innocently exposed on the covering of the bed. Where the continuation of the leg was Mrs. Topper was not sure, but she naturally imagined it to be farther up, huddled in the bedclothing. Of one thing she was sure, that leg did not belong to her husband. It was far too slim and shapely. She hated to admit this galling fact. Himself, the perfidious male, was lying comfortably in bed with the possessor of that leg – had been so lying all night long. And he was not in his accustomed place. He had even broken a habit of years – a thing he had never done for her – and slept on the left side.

Mrs. Topper’s blood boiled. For the first time in her life she became an elemental, militant woman. Yes, she would leave the house, but she would leave it in ruins first – the house and everyone in it, especially these two.

With a stealth gathered from her primitive ancestors still lurking in spirit in the shadow of the cave, she crept up to the bed and seized the leg by the foot. Mr. Topper was rudely awakened by a smothered ejaculation almost in his ear.

“Damn!” said Marion Kerby. “My right leg’s asleep, and I can’t do a thing with it.”

“Why do anything with it at all?” Mr. Topper asked lazily, endeavoring to open his eyes.

“Simply because your wife’s got a-hold of it,” said Marion with convincing earnestness.

“What!” exclaimed Mr. Topper, his eyes wide and staring.

He took one look at his wife’s set face, then covered his own with the bedclothes. Mary and the leg could fight their own battles. This was one of those situations in which a man should keep himself to himself. There was no occasion for him to barge in and make matters worse.

“Coward!” panted Marion Kerby. “Do something about all this. Rub my leg and make it wake up.”

To rub his companion’s leg at that moment was the farthest thought from Mr. Topper’s mind. Far be it from him to add fuel to the fire.

“Some other time,” he muttered. “I’m busy.”

“There won’t be any other time, if you don’t pry this woman loose.”

Exactly what Mrs. Topper intended to do with the leg once she had succeeded in getting it is difficult to conjecture. It is doubtful if Mrs. Topper knew herself. Probably she had some vague idea of dragging it, together with the body, through the streets of the village, after which she would return for Topper. It is certain she had no intention of dragging the leg from its body. Not that such a feat would not have given her a great deal of well merited satisfaction. She merely doubted her ability to perform the act.

With one despairing grunt the leg yielded to Mrs. Topper’s tugging and parted company with the bed. So sudden had been the capitulation that Mary Topper sat down heavily with the leg resting lightly across her lap, its small pink toes wiggling protestingly.

“My God, what a wife you have,” came Marion’s voice feebly. “I’m mere putty in her hands.”

Topper could not restrain his curiosity. One of his eyes morbidly took in the novel scene.

“Isn’t that thing awake yet?” he asked in a depressed voice.

“It seems to be in the grip of a terrible awakening,” replied Marion. “I don’t know what’s wrong with it. Either it has ideas of its own, or she’s paralyzed the poor thing. Scared it stiff, so to speak.”

While this strange conversation between her husband and the leg was in progress Mary Topper had been gathering her forces. At first she had looked down slightly dazed at the prize she had so ruthlessly drawn, being particularly repelled by its gesticulating toes. Then the loquacity of the leg was not exactly calculated to soothe her nerves. With increasing irritation she listened to the leg address her husband as if it had some claim on him. It had even asked to be rubbed. The thought of this highly improper request stung Mrs. Topper to action. She sprang to her feet and began to wave the leg wildly about the room. Topper, peering over the edge of the sheet, took one look and shivered. Then he hid the scene from view.

“For the love of Pete,” called Marion, “will you tell your wife to quit flinging my leg about like an old piece of rope? What the hell does she think she is anyway – a cowboy? Say there, Mrs. Will Rogers, will you lay off that leg? I’m getting dizzy, honest-to-God, lady.”

“I don’t know who you are nor where you are, and I don’t care what you are,” cried Mary Topper, in a wild, unladylike tone of voice. “I’ve got this leg and I’m going to keep it. I’m going to bite it with my own bare teeth.”

“It would be hard to bite that leg with somebody else’s teeth,” said the rapidly revolving object, “but I must admit you can think up some pretty mean little tricks. That settles it, Topper, old boy. You simply must get up and take my leg away from your wife. I don’t want the sweet young thing to be bitten by a woman.”

“Oh!” cried Mrs. Topper, increasing the speed of her twirling. “Your words are driving me mad.”

Topper sprang from the bed and was immediately floored by coming into violent contact with the leg. Mrs. Topper laughed harrowingly.

“Take that, you dog!” she cried.

“Ouch!” exclaimed the leg. “That hurt like hell.”

“It didn’t improve me any,” said Topper from the floor.

“Shouldn’t mind a lady’s leg,” replied Marion. “Why doesn’t she throw me away and pick on you instead? Look out! Here I come.”

Topper ducked in the nick of time, and the leg swished harmlessly over his head.

“I’ll batter his brains out,” panted Mrs. Topper.

“He doesn’t seem to have any,” observed the leg.

“What business of yours is that?” Mrs. Topper demanded.

“None at all,” hastily disclaimed the leg. “I was merely twirling and thinking – that’s all, I assure you.”

“I feel like chucking you through the window,” said Mrs. Topper.

“Good! Why don’t you?” replied the leg. “Any change would be better than this. Better still, why not set me down in a corner until you’ve got your breath?”

At this moment Mr. Topper made a desperate lunge at the leg, only to fall ingloriously upon his stomach. The leg had disappeared.

“Sorry, old boy,” came the voice of Marion Kerby, “but I am not at all responsible for the caprices of this leg of mine. It snapped out of its dope of its own free will. Just in time, too. I’m all twirled out.”

Mary Topper, deprived of the leg, looked thoughtfully down at her prostrate husband. There was only one thing left worth doing to him, and she could not bring herself to do that. She refused to soil her hands with the murder of a creature so low and depraved. Impotent with anger unappeased, she looked about the room. Then she conceived one of those distractedly ridiculous ideas that occur to persons only at moments of consummate rage. On Mr. Topper’s bureau was a bottle containing a particularly obnoxious fluid used for the whitening of shoes. Seizing this, she emptied its contents on the back of Mr. Topper’s head and neck.

“There!” she muttered. “Take that.”

“I’ve taken it,” said Mr. Topper from the floor. “All.”

Without indulging in another hostile demonstration she turned from the strange-looking object at her feet and left the room, slamming the door behind her. From her own room came the sounds of furious packing.

Mr. Topper, still dazed by the terrific activity of the last few moments, rose and did futile things to his head and neck with a towel. With his voluminous and colorful silk pajamas and his face oddly smeared with whitening where the liquid had spread, Mr. Topper made a tragically festive appearance. In make-up, at least, he was fitted for the rôle of Pagliacci. He made no attempt to sing, however, satisfying his vocal inclinations with deep-seated oaths.

“I say, old dear,” came the cautiously pitched voice of Marion, “do you think after all we’ve been through you could arrange for a little cognac?”

From the veranda below came the sounds of industrious sweeping. Mr. Topper stepped out on his balcon and made queer motions at Félice. The motions were entirely unnecessary. His face alone was sufficient to attract her closest attention. Félice gave it one astounded look, then dropped her broom. She was afraid to run into the house because Monsieur might run down to meet her. To rush out into the public highways would not be seemly. She temporized by staying where she was. She would humor this mad Monsieur.

“Félice,” he called in a low voice. “It is that I have need of a bottle of cognac. Voilà!”

Topper tossed down to the maid a rope which Monsieur Grandon, in his anxiety to provide his tenants with some means of escape from Vesuvius, had seen fit to attach to the railing of his balcon.

“The bottle, Félice,” continued Mr. Topper, “attach it thus.”

Here the man wrung his hands so gruesomely in an attempt to make his meaning clear that much of the color departed from the cheeks of Félice.

“But yes, m’sieu,” she faltered, nodding her head rapidly. “Tout de suite.”

Perhaps if she complied with Monsieur’s strange request he would remain drunk all day in his room, which was an occurrence highly to be desired by all concerned.

When Topper returned to the room Marion Kerby, clad in a silk pajama jacket, was sitting on the edge of the bed. She looked oddly frail and subdued.

“Do we get it?” she asked in a small voice.

“The affair is in motion,” he told her.

Both of them were suddenly electrified by the sound of an infuriated voice fiercely denouncing Félice, whose own voice was raised in protest.

“She’s up there!” cried the voice. “I know she’s up there. First I’ll slit his throat, and then I’ll beat her.”

“I get more than you do,” observed Mr. Topper with the resignation of a man ruined beyond all hope of recovery.

“It’s George!” exclaimed Marion.

“In the flesh,” replied Topper.

He looked through another window and beheld an unnerving scene. George Kerby was confronting Félice on the veranda. In one hand he held a carving knife which had been snatched up from the buffet. As Topper watched he saw the enraged husband place the knife between his teeth and seize the rope with both hands. Then he paused, removed the knife from his mouth, and, taking the bottle of cognac from Félice, placed it to his lips.

“Thanks,” Mr. Topper heard him say as he passed the bottle back to the maid, returned the knife to his mouth, and sprang at the rope. “I’ll go up this damn thing like greased lightning.”

Topper turned to Marion.

“Your husband is climbing up that rope like greased lightning,” he informed her, “and he is holding most horribly between his teeth a carving knife with a blade sufficiently long to slit the throats of the entire community.”

“I go,” replied Marion, “with speed the most terrific.”

There was a twinkling of bare brown legs as Marion flappingly dashed into Mrs. Topper’s room. That lady, her packing completed, was standing before her mirror clad only in a dressing gown. This garment Marion neatly slipped from the other woman’s shoulders.

“I’ll take this,” said Marion, and disappeared on a dead run through the door on her way downstairs.

Mrs. Topper looked nakedly after her, vaguely wondering how many women her husband had managed to secrete in his room overnight. In the meantime, Topper, from the depths of a clothes closet, had the single pleasure of seeing George Kerby’s head appear piratically over the railing of the balcon. To Topper the man seemed to be composed entirely of knife. Springing into the room, he looked wildly about him.

“Where are they?” he shouted. “Topper, your time is up – I mean, come.”

In the clothes closet Mr. Topper’s face became even whiter than its whitening. He saw himself in ribbons. For a moment George Kerby prowled about the room like a tiger on the hunt, then, suddenly spying the door to Mrs. Topper’s room, he dashed through it, brandishing the knife and awesomely shouting, “Show me a throat and I’ll slit it.”

It just so happened that Mrs. Topper, because of the absence of her dressing robe, was in a position to show George Kerby much more than her throat. It was an encounter not easily to be forgotten. The infuriated man’s anger was dissipated through sheer shock. Mrs. Topper, in seeking protection behind a wardrobe trunk, forgot everything herself in the exigencies of the moment.

“Madam, I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Kerby. “Had I only known – —”

“Well, now that you not only know but also see,” Mary Topper interrupted coldly, “will you take both yourself and your knife out of my room?”

“But, madam – —” began George Kerby, feeling that he had not half sufficiently apologized for the enormity of his offense.

“Write me a letter about it,” cut in Mrs. Topper. “That door leads to the lower floor. Go out of it and keep going.”

Kerby hastened to obey the lady’s instructions.

While this brief encounter was taking place, Topper had just enough time to gratify the watching woman in the villa next door by sliding down the rope George had so swiftly mounted. Topper, too, was like greased lightning. If anything, he was even greasier, because, unlike George, he was descending to earth. Arrived there he rushed into the dining room and collapsed in a chair.

“My God,” he thought wearily, “no motion-picture camera could have followed the activities of this morning!”

“M’sieu,” whispered Félice, gazing at Mr. Topper with admiringly sympathetic eyes, “the little Mademoiselle, she is on the beach. Ah, m’sieu, très chic.”

Because of the stultifying fact that the lady’s husband was looking at him from the door, Mr. Topper did not trouble to tell Félice that the little Mademoiselle was in full truth a Madam of no little experience. On George’s face were the marks of his recent encounter – lines of shock and bafflement.

“God Almighty,” he muttered, “is everything abnormal in this house? What’s the matter with your face?”

“Hello, George,” said Topper briefly. “Sunburn. Have you had breakfast?”

“Have you seen my wife?” asked George.

“Why, no,” replied Topper innocently, “but Oscar’s knocking about somewhere. That is, part of him is knocking about.”

“Well, I’ve seen yours,” said Kerby in a low voice.

“Oh, did you, now?” answered Topper in an interested voice. “What did you think of the lady?”

“She was a sight for sore eyes,” replied Kerby with unnecessary frankness. “I’m sorry, Topper, but your wife was unclad.”

Topper was prompted to reply that George had nothing on him, but he tactfully restrained the impulse.

“That was too bad of you, George,” he said mildly, “but it’s a good thing I’m not an unreasonably jealous man. I trust you – er – let matters rest at that.”

“Oh, quite,” put in George hastily. “I assure you you need have no fear for the honor of Mrs. Topper.”

“You seem to be well satisfied on that score,” said Mr. Topper, with a slight smile. “However, I feel that way about her honor myself. Will you cognac yourself with me?”

Topper rose and walked over to the buffet. George followed him suspiciously.

“Are you sure you haven’t seen my wife?” he demanded.

“I think you’re hardly in a position to ask me such a question,” Topper replied, looking steadily at George. “And I do wish, old chap, you’d put that decidedly ugly-looking knife down. It gives me the creeps.”

“Well, what was that rope doing hanging down from your balcony?” George continued, abandoning the knife, much to Mr. Topper’s relief.

“Ah, that,” said Mr. Topper with a depreciative laugh. “We are not all blessed with sympathetic and convivial wives, George. That rope is the means to cognac when other sources of supply are cut off.”

George Kerby’s face cleared. The idea amused him. Old Topper and his rope. How could he ever have suspected the man? He drank deeply with his host, and drank again. Then he sat down and ate a hearty breakfast. Neither gentleman was aware of the happy fact that Mrs. Topper, bag and baggage, had made her exit from the scene by way of the back door.

“Will you help me find Marion?” George asked when he had consumed the last morsel of food. “I want to beat her.”

“Certainly,” replied Topper quite unmoved. “I’ll even help you beat her. By the way, what’s the name of your hotel? I’ll meet you there after I’ve washed up a bit and dressed.”

“The Splendide,” replied George Kerby.

“Aren’t they all?” said Mr. Topper.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

At the Hôtel Splendide

Mr. Topper was as good as his word. He met George Kerby at his hotel, the Splendide. He did even better than that. He actually took up his temporary abode at that luxurious establishment. This radical alteration in his manner of living was made for rather than by Mr. Topper. He had no choice in the matter. Marion Kerby, in the course of a stolen conversation, had made it clear that she would not consider his occupying the villa alone with that good-looking French trollop whose amorous nature was as easy to arouse as it was difficult to curb. Consequently, soon after Mrs. Topper’s abrupt departure through the back door, the master of the villa requested Félice to carry on like a good and beautiful young thing for a while and in patience to await his return. Félice, in turn, had assured him that he could find her alone in the villa at any hour of the day or night. This, Topper frankly doubted. Nature had never created Félice for the impalpable arms of solitude.

“And if you attempt to sneak back to that place alone,” Marion had assured him with every indication of sincerity, “I’ll burn it down to the ground and quench your spluttering cinders in the sewer.”

Topper was not at all particular about what Marion did with his spluttering cinders once he had arrived at that unfortunate stage, but he did most definitely object to the cinder-producing process itself. Moreover, he presumed that the excellent Monsieur Grandon, the owner of the villa, would prefer to retain it intact for the comfort and entertainment of future generations of American visitors. Mr. Topper had discovered to his sorrow that French property owners had strongly fixed ideas about such matters, the cracking of an already chipped teacup being sufficient to cause them to send their eyes rolling in consternation to heaven in search of their thrifty God.

For the past fortnight now Mr. Topper had been a modest, self-effacing part of the social life of the Hôtel Splendide. During all of that time he had unrelentingly sought the company of George Kerby. So assiduously had Topper dogged the footsteps of George that George had become quite fed up with Topper. Marion’s jealous young husband had become convinced that if he never saw Cosmo Topper again on any plane whatever, still he would have seen too much of him. He even began to feel sorry for his wife when he saw her listening, with an expression of hopeless dejection, to one of old Topper’s interminable disquisitions on the theory and practice of banking or the dangers of an overabundant gold reserve. No danger there for Marion, Kerby further decided. He had greatly overestimated Topper. The man was merely a rich, good-natured bore, getting well along in years. George little realized that in the person of Cosmo Topper the stage had lost an actor of considerable tenacity, if not ability.

To Topper alone was due the honor and the glory of eventually relieving the situation by ridding the party of the disturbing presence of Mr. Kerby. George literally flung himself into the arms of a rich South American widow and begged her to take him away from Topper for an indefinite stay on her palatial yacht, a request the South American widow was not at all backward in granting. Topper had the deep satisfaction of seeing them off on their cruise. He even tossed in a casual reference to the beauties of the west coast of Africa, of which he knew nothing, and the thrills of big-game hunting, of which he knew even less. The idea of knocking a lion for a loop strongly appealed to the volatile nature of George Kerby if not to his companion, who, nevertheless, insisted that lions were an old South American dish.

Immediately upon the departure of George, the Colonel and Mrs. Hart began to do some pretty tight moral eye-closing, a feat which they found not at all difficult to perform. In fact, they became morally blind, always having had a tendency in that direction. This gentle failing made possible certain desirable rearrangements of sleeping quarters, which made things more convenient for all hands. Soon Topper and Marion Kerby were living together under circumstances of the most cheerful licentiousness, while the Colonel and Mrs. Hart, according to a long-established custom, occupied adjoining rooms. In other words, the four of them merely adapted themselves to conform with the charming convention of the Riviera. And as for the dog, Oscar, he slept wherever he found a safe anchorage for his rump.

The little party was now seated comfortably on the lawn of the Hôtel Splendide. In four brown hands sparkled four tall glasses of equally brown ale shot with the golden glow of the dropping sun. Topper had been playing tennis at the club with no less a person than Mr. Keith Sutton-Trevor, whom he had roundly defeated. In the past two weeks Topper had roundly defeated the best players the club could send to the front. Topper’s success at the sport had become a sensation that threatened to develop into a scandal. The members of the club had never before seen such peculiar tennis played. This semi-stout American, unheralded and unsung, had virtually revolutionized the game. His racket appeared to be all over the court – frequently not even in his hand at all. His opponents to a man complained that something interfered with their rackets whenever they needed a point, and that not infrequently in decisive rallies they were pushed, tripped, slapped, and subjected to even more humiliating indignities. However, as none of these so-called indignities were visible to the eyes of the judges, these gentlemen were reluctantly forced to ascribe the objections of the defeated players to bad sportsmanship.

Marion greatly delighted in gently flipping a player’s racket whenever he attempted to serve. This inevitably led to the player’s serving doubles and thus presenting Topper with a point. On the other hand, Mrs. Hart found it more amusing violently to push a player whenever he was off balance, a piece of ruthlessness which resulted in numerous painful falls. The Colonel had a habit of seizing the ball in the player’s court as it rebounded from Topper’s service and putting it through the most baffling twists and dodges. To the spectators it frequently looked as if Mr. Topper had nothing at all to do with many of his best passing shots and returns. He could even turn his back on his opponent and still win. There were times when the onlookers received the distinct impression that the tennis ball was being personally conducted from Mr. Topper’s court and deposited in some unattainable spot in that of his adversary’s. On several occasions a ball from Topper’s racket had been seen to poise itself alluringly – some said, tauntingly – before a player, and to remain suspended there until the infuriated man was driven to smash at it, only to discover that the ball had cleverly dodged round him and was continuing merrily on down the sideline for a well earned point in Mr. Topper’s favor. It was the consensus of opinion that this mild-mannered American player could do things with a tennis racket and ball that had never before been accomplished or even attempted by man. His habit of maintaining a low-pitched, scolding conversation with himself was considered slightly odd, but then his whole game was slightly odd. Had the spectators known it, Mr. Topper was merely protesting against being slapped encouragingly on the back and in other ways fondled by Marion Kerby and her friends. After one of these one-sided matches Topper’s three companions were invariably as weary and thirsty as he himself.

As the Colonel sat delicately sampling his ale he was thinking of how best to turn Mr. Topper’s remarkable ability to his own financial advantage. Thoughts like this were frequently in this enterprising gentleman’s mind. There had never been enough francs printed to satisfy the Colonel’s requirements. The overhead, or, rather, down the throat, upkeep of Mrs. Hart was terrific. That dear lady was so extravagant that, although stockings were noticeably absent along the Riviera, she wore holes in hers, nevertheless, in the privacy of her room. It outraged her ideas of a woman’s rights to keep the same stockings in her bureau drawer for more than a week. What were a pair of legs coming to if men get to taking them for granted? Mrs. Hart had no intention of letting the Colonel forget hers. Therefore, it was quite pardonable for the Colonel to gaze unseeingly at the cool blue reaches of the Mediterranean and to evolve plans for making money from Mr. Topper’s tennis, which, in full truth, belonged to them all. His game was a joint effort, Topper being merely the play instead of the lay figure.

“Topper,” he began with tentative indifference, as was his wont when approaching delicate matters, “the three of us could make you the champion tennis player of the Riviera – of the world, for the matter of that – if you’d let us.”

“God, no!” exclaimed Topper. “You’ve done too well already. May I ask what was the idea in dragging the trousers of Sutton-Trevor down round his ankles this afternoon? That isn’t a tennis stroke.”

“A mistake,” said Marion briefly, pulling off her béret and shaking out her curls until she looked nice and wild and untidy. “My hand slipped. I was trying to yank him over backwards.”

“To begin with,” admonished Topper in a gentle, reasonable voice, “you shouldn’t yank gentlemen over backwards, and in the second place, it isn’t quite nice to pull their trousers down.”

“Shut up, or I’ll pull yours clean off,” Marion told him, then added thoughtfully, “drawers and all.”

Realizing that Marion could be even better than her word when the mood was on her, Topper remained silent. He had no desire to appear with the wrong half of him unclad before the guests of the Hôtel Splendide now assembled on the lawn.

“Of course,” continued the Colonel, not to be deflected from his subject, “if we took up the idea seriously, the ladies would have to restrain their natural inclinations.”

“Whattayoumean?” demanded Mrs. Hart in a lazily hard-boiled voice.

“I mean, my dear,” replied the Colonel, completely immune to her tone, “that you and Marion would have to abandon your practice of endeavoring to undress the players. If we can make our opponents give the appearance of being slightly – er – fuddled, it would be to our advantage, of course.”

“Fuddled,” said Marion sarcastically. “I’ll make the beggars look frantic.”

“And we should always remember our audiences,” resumed the Colonel, bending a dignified eyebrow in Marion’s direction. “We must endeavor to keep them diverted.”

“At my expense, Colonel?” Mr. Topper suggested easily.

“Certainly not,” replied the Colonel. “By no means, my dear sir. At the expense of your competitors.”

“Am I going to play more than one at a time?” asked Mr. Topper, not quite so easily.

“You might,” said the Colonel thoughtfully. “It’s an idea. With our help you could play ten men at the same time and win in straight sets.”

“Sure,” agreed Mrs. Hart, “but we’d be busier than a rabbit at a dog show.”

“Not so busy at that,” observed Marion. “We could trample half of them under foot and get the others fighting among themselves.”

“I realize that,” said Mr. Topper. “The trouble is, you all make me do things that are humanly impossible. That little idea of having the ball sail out of bounds, then suddenly duck back when my opponent isn’t looking is simply more than the public can bear. It’s silly. I even feel silly myself. Besides, it’s a dirty trick.”

“Oh, dear me, Mr. Topper,” drawled Mrs. Hart, “we don’t mind that in the least. A super-player like yourself cannot afford to be too finicky.”

“Well, I’m not going to play one man,” retorted Mr. Topper, “let alone ten.”

“Then,” said the Colonel, as if it did not really matter, “there’s the financial aspect of the thing. On side bets alone we could clean up enough money to endow an orphan asylum.”

“Occupied exclusively by the products of your own folly,” dryly observed Mrs. Hart. “In all sizes, shapes, and shades.”

“Mrs. Hart!” objected the Colonel, bending two dignified eyebrows upon that lady. “If you please.”

Mrs. Hart whispered something to Marion, after which both of them glanced at the Colonel and giggled.

“Most annoying,” complained the Colonel to Mr. Topper. “And most unjustified.”

“Oh, quite,” replied Mr. Topper. “I cannot imagine you in connection with any slight irregularity of conduct, Colonel.”

“That feeling is entirely reciprocated, I assure you,” returned the Colonel heavily.

“They think they’re a couple of other guys,” Marion informed Mrs. Hart.

“I don’t know about Topper,” declared Mrs. Hart, “but that alcoholic ward of mine can convince himself at times the bloom is still on the rose.”

“Oh, I say!” expostulated the Colonel. “You are actually overstepping the bounds of decency.”

“Overstepping ’em,” said Mrs. Hart jeeringly. “We looped-the-loop over those bounds years and years ago.”

“That’s neither here nor there,” resumed the Colonel impatiently. “I wish you would refrain from introducing purely irrelevant subjects at this particular moment. Where were we, Mr. Topper? Oh, yes – the financial aspect.” The Colonel paused and drew thoughtfully on his cigar. “Topper,” he continued abruptly, “man to man, I want to tell you it irks me to be short of funds. I am much too great hearted to be without money.”

“You mean, Clara Harted,” put in Marion.

“How clever you are,” that lady murmured.

“Ignore them, Topper,” continued the Colonel. “They are as savages or children. To resume. Although I have the greatest reliance on your generosity, still it is not meet and fitting for me to depend entirely on it.”

“Oh, no,” agreed Mrs. Hart. “Mr. Topper might die or lose his mind or fancy another pretty face.”

“If he takes a fancy to another pretty face,” Marion Kerby said with painful distinctness, “he’ll both lose his mind and die.”

“I’m trying to listen, Colonel,” put in Topper. “Go on. Let’s waive those last two remarks of the gentle ladies.”

“Well,” said the Colonel, importantly clearing his throat. “Because of the various little services we have been able to render to you in the past – small but invaluable attentions – —”

“Such as?” suggested Topper.

“We won’t go into that now,” said the Colonel hastily, “but because of one thing and another, I feel – and I believe my companions will back me up in this – that it would sit ill on you not to become the tennis champion of the Riviera.”

“Is that your case?” asked Mr. Topper.

“In a nutshell,” replied the Colonel.

“Then,” said Mr. Topper, “you can take your case, place it in your little nutshell, and do whatever you think most definitely negative with it.”

“I could offer a suggestion here,” interrupted Marion.

“Don’t,” replied Mr. Topper. “My fortune is at your disposal, Colonel, but I’ll be damned if I came to the Riviera to live on a tennis court, as you suggest. If you have a yen for making money, why not try Monte Carlo, Nice, or Cannes? I’ll stake you to a stack.”

“I have a grand idea,” spluttered Marion, exhuming an ale-flecked nose from her glass. “The races are on tomorrow. We could do well with horses, Colonel.”

Colonel Scott gazed thoughtfully at Marion for a full minute. Then he nodded his massive head three times.

“My dear child,” he observed benignly, “we could do more with horses than even the people who ride them. Shall we discuss this little matter later? There is no need to bother Mr. Topper with our plans.”

“Don’t,” said Mr. Topper. “I prefer to retain my peace of mind. And if the races become a riot, you can’t blame me. I am not a party to any funny business.”

“But you will join us?” inquired the Colonel.

“I’ll do better than that,” replied Topper, who in spite of himself was fascinated by the idea. “I’ll charter a car and drive you there myself.”

“Magnificent man,” murmured Mrs. Hart.

“Pure cane sugar,” commented Marion. “A trifle too refined.”

“Looks more like beet than cane,” the other lady observed.

“That’s the ale,” said Marion.

“We’ll need plenty of ready money,” the Colonel dropped suggestively. “It’s a commodity that seems to be growing increasingly more unfamiliar to my touch.”

“For this unholy enterprise,” said Mr. Topper, “you can depend on me for financial backing.”

“Good man!” exclaimed the Colonel.

“Positively lordly, say I,” from Mrs. Hart.

“What a lover!” put in Marion. “Mine, all mine.”

“I am doing this,” continued Mr. Topper, choosing to ignore these unnecessary remarks, “for two reasons. I know very well you would steal all my money if I didn’t give it to you willingly; then again, I have every confidence in the ability of Colonel Scott to make the crookedest track turn in his direction. Anyway, I feel that it would be an act of divine justice to get a few francs back from the French for a change – honestly, of course.”

“That last bit goes without saying,” piously observed the Colonel.

“Also without believing,” Mr. Topper added. “For the moment I’m going to tear myself away from your depressingly strait-laced company. Perfect all necessary arrangements, then look for me in the bar.”

As Topper walked away, the three of them followed him with expressions of respect and admiration.

“He would go far as a low-plane,” Colonel Scott observed.

“That’s an idea, too,” said Marion in an odd voice. “He has no human contacts to keep him officially alive. His cat – she’s almost human – is about the strongest tie he has. One can always do things to Scollops.”

“Who can always do things to Scollops, and how?” asked Mrs. Hart.

“Well,” replied Marion reflectively, “we could settle for all time that controversy about the nine lives.”

“Giving us three whacks at the beast apiece,” observed the Colonel.

“Let’s wait till the weather gets a little cooler,” suggested Mrs. Hart.

“Of course,” agreed Marion. “I didn’t mean for us to dash off at the minute and fall upon the poor cat. It was merely a passing fancy.”

The Colonel and Mrs. Hart looked thoughtfully at their companion. Marion, her small chin resting lightly on the rim of her empty glass, was gazing enigmatically out to sea. As the Colonel considered the determined line of the girl’s firm jaw he privately decided that if he were a life insurance agent he would stay clear of Cosmo Topper and his cat. Both were bad risks.

At dinner that night nothing untoward occurred, that is, nothing especially so. The Colonel’s mind was still engaged with matters of high finance.

“Do you know what the trouble is with Americans on the Riviera?” he inquired.

“You tell us, Colonel,” answered Marion. “I’m weary of the subject. The only trouble I can find with them is merely that they are on the Riviera. And that holds for nationals of all countries.”

“Yes,” agreed Mr. Topper, relieved that everything was going so nicely. “The greatest trouble with Americans on the Riviera is to be found in books about Americans on the Riviera. I once knew a dog who sucked one egg – just one egg – and to his dying day that dog was known far and wide as an egg-sucking dog. As a matter of fact, he was nothing of the kind. He merely tried one egg and found he didn’t like them that way. Scrambled, yes.”

Marion was regarding the speaker pityingly.

“Your Hoosier philosophy appalls me,” she said. “Why don’t you take up whittling sticks and sitting on fence rails? We’ll build a fence for you, if you have any special preference; then we can knock you off when you get too awful.”

“Don’t mind her, Mr. Topper,” put in Mrs. Hart, placing an affectionate hand on his. “I understand perfectly what you meant about that poor dear dog and the one egg he unfortunately sucked. You are trying to tell us nicely that all Americans on the Riviera are suckers, and you nearly succeeded.”

“I wasn’t trying to do anything of the sort,” Mr. Topper retorted uncomfortably as he noticed Marion’s glittering eyes fastened on the hand that was holding his. “I was simply stating a fact – drawing a parallel.”

“I used to draw the sweetest flowers when I was a girl,” said Mrs. Hart moistly. “All wild. Ah, youth, youth, and the patter of bare feet.”

“Whose bare feet?” asked Marion. “I’ll bet they weren’t your husband’s.”

“I was speaking symbolically,” murmured Mrs. Hart. “My first husband always wore slippers – the cutest things – plush. We could never hear him coming.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” demanded the Colonel.

“None of your business,” replied Mrs. Hart. “Those slippers cost me a comfortable home. Ask the waiter to pour.”

“Isn’t this terrible?” the Colonel inquired of Mr. Topper.

“No, Colonel,” Topper replied, smiling sympathetically. “I find it rather sad. Mrs. Hart had a hard life.”

“You mean, she led a hard life,” declared Marion. “She was a trull before she could toddle.”

“Oh, Marion,” Mrs. Hart protested. “What will poor Mr. Topper ever think of me? I was never really a trull, dear. Merely a practical amateur.”

“Ladies,” broke in the Colonel, “let us return to my original question.”

“I didn’t find it original,” commented Marion.

“But my answer is,” replied the Colonel. “The trouble with Americans on the Riviera is that there are no speakeasies. They can’t accustom themselves to getting drunk lawfully.”

“But they can with the ‘l’ left off,” remarked Marion.

“Very clever, my dear,” said the Colonel, looking as if each word hurt him. “Now my idea is – —”

“Isn’t he gay!” broke in Mrs. Hart. “He wants us all to get awfully drunk.”

“That is not my idea at all,” objected the Colonel. “You’re that way already. Now, my idea is – —”

“Oh, I know!” cried Marion, “He wants to get a law passed. Isn’t that it, Colonel?”

The Colonel looked at Marion for fully half a minute, during which time his heavy eyebrows struggled furiously to establish contact with his even heavier mustache.

“Oh, Colonel,” the girl murmured admiringly. “They almost meet.”

“Bah!” exploded that gentleman. “This is too much, Mr. Topper, my idea in a nutshell is – —”

“Remember what happened to that last nutshell,” said Mrs. Hart warningly. “Why not put this idea in something else?”

“A safe, for instance,” suggested Marion. “Or put it out of your mind.”

“Or in moth balls,” added Mrs. Hart.

“I was thinking,” began the Colonel, “of opening – —”

“Pardon me, Colonel,” said Mr. Topper politely. “I must have a word with the waiter.”

While Mr. Topper held a protracted debate with the waiter regarding the low state of coffee in France, a debate, by the way, in which he came out second best, the Colonel looked wearily round the dining room, his fingers drumming patiently on the table. He could not bring himself to look on the faces of the two ladies. To do so would have released the terrific pressure he was placing on his emotions.

“Now, Colonel,” continued Mr. Topper affably, “why are you so hesitant about giving us your idea? Let’s have it, man. No need to beat about the bush, you know.”

Colonel Scott gasped.

“Beat about the bush,” he got out. “These women have erected a soundproof wall between themselves and intelligent conversation. Anyway, my idea doesn’t seem so good to me now. Much of its freshness has worn off. In fact, I’m sick of the damn thing.”

“I’ll bet he wants to open up a chain of speakeasies along the Riviera – basement rooms and grilled doors and the inevitable Tony,” broke in Marion. “Wasn’t that it, Colonel?”

The Colonel turned away, his face filled with pain. Speechlessly he nodded.

“In a nutshell,” he said at last in a faint voice.

“Why this frantic scramble for money?” Mrs. Hart inquired. “Do you want to buy France? I understand that lots of these Continental countries are going for a song – the Bankers’ Blues, they call it.”

“Would you like to be barkeep, Topper,” asked Marion, “or would you rather play Tony and peer through the grille?”

“I’d rather play the part of an unlawful drinker,” Mr. Topper replied.

“If you would be courteous enough to allow me to explain,” the Colonel essayed.

He was never allowed.

The manager approached the table. In the background lurked a gendarme.

“There is a formality in progress,” the manager apologized suavely. “It is necessary to borrow the passports of all guests but recently arrived. There are certain cards – you understand?”

“Certainly,” replied the Colonel courteously. “Is that distinguished-looking gentleman back of you the Mayor of New York, or is he a prominent gambler?”

Even as the manager turned, the Colonel began to fade. Soon he was entirely gone.

“That gentleman – —” began the manager, turning back, then hesitated, a look of blank amazement overspreading his face. “But the Monsieur is gone,” he explained to Mr. Topper. “Yet how could he have gone?”

Mr. Topper laughed unnaturally.

“Ha! Ha!” were the sounds that Topper made. “How could he have gone? He mustn’t have been here at all. That’s all there is to it. Frankly, I was wondering to whom you were talking.”

“But the plate!” exclaimed the manager. “There has been a fourth present.”

“Oh, that,” replied Mr. Topper, fighting for time. “That plate. Who can that person be?”

Once more the old dodge worked. As the manager turned to look behind him, Marion, at a signal from Topper, whisked the plate from the table and hid it in her lap. Mrs. Hart deftly tidied up the place where but a few moments ago the cowardly Colonel had sat. When the manager turned back, Mr. Topper pointed to the empty space.

“Are you jesting with us?” he asked the manager. “There has been no fourth – merely these two ladies and myself. We are three.”

At this moment the plate slipped from Marion’s lap and crashed to the floor. There was the clatter of knives and forks. The manager was more than surprised. He was startled. He hesitated; then, sacrificing dignity to wonder, he stooped down and peered under the table. When he arose, the table was empty save for a considerably disturbed Mr. Topper. The manager had time to catch a glimpse of two plates bearing eating tackle hurrying down an aisle in the direction of a tray. Several waiters also witnessed the progress of the plates. The entire dining room heard the shattering sound they made as they dashed into the tray.

“Now why did they go to all that trouble,” Mr. Topper wondered, despite his preoccupation with other things, “only to break the damn plates at the end? Perhaps they became nervous or tried to make a race of it. I’m nervous as hell myself, and I’d certainly like to make a race of it.”

When the manager had mastered the emotions caused by the self-removing plates he turned back once more to Mr. Topper.

“You have seen?” inquired the manager.

“Nothing,” replied Mr. Topper coldly, “except your rather unusual conduct, m’sieu. You come to my table and demand a fourth. You start. You peer. You – you – er – fidget. In short, you spoil my dinner. You call me a recent arrival when I have been your guest for days – —”

“But your friends?” the manager craftily interrupted.

“I have no friends,” replied Mr. Topper, not to be out-crafted. “Furthermore, you have already seen my passport. I shall expect some explanation.”

He rose from the table.

“It shall be forthcoming, m’sieu,” replied the manager, “if any explanation can be found, a development which to me seems exceedingly unlikely.”

In the lounge of the Splendide, Mr. Topper was joined by the ladies. Taking him by either arm they led him rapidly up to a large screen through which they apparently passed, leaving him standing with his nose practically pressed against it.

“God bless my soul and body!” exclaimed a gentleman with white hair and a red face. “I’ve just seen the most peculiar thing. But, tell me first, is that man actually smelling the screen? And where are the two ladies who were with him only a moment ago?”

“I don’t know about the two ladies,” a large woman at his side replied, “but if I ever saw a man smelling a screen – which I don’t think I ever have – that person is certainly smelling that screen. Actually sniffing it.”

Several persons were regarding both the screen and Mr. Topper attentively. One man went so far as to walk across the room and look behind the screen. Then he reappeared and stood looking at Mr. Topper. Mr. Topper felt the man’s eyes curiously studying his face. He resorted to a weak subterfuge.

“Near-sighted,” he muttered as if to himself yet loud enough for the man to hear. “So damn near-sighted. Lost my glasses. I’d love to examine this screen. Looks interesting.”

To make good the deception Mr. Topper fumbled between the chairs as he hoped a near-sighted man might fumble, and slowly made his way from the room.

“Poor chap,” thought the man. “He must be nearly blind, or else I’m seeing too well.”

On the lawn Topper was once more joined by the ladies.

“I want to talk to both of you,” he began.

“So do we,” said Marion, hanging affectionately on his left arm. “We want to know if you’ll buy us a couple of little drinks.”

“Count me in on that,” said a deep voice from nowhere.

“But – —” protested Mr. Topper.

The ladies hustled him through the pleasant evening while the Colonel did helpful things in the rear.

“All right,” said Topper. “Don’t push, and quit tugging. I’ll buy the drinks if you’ll only not tear me to pieces.”

“Do you hear?” said Marion happily. “He likes to be with us.”

“Now about that chain of speakeasies,” began the Colonel, returning in person to life.

Several strollers stopped to listen to Mr. Topper. He was hurling horrid words at someone who must have been standing far away on the unseen African shore.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Six Well Fixed Races

At the races the next day Mr. Topper found himself very much alone. From the alacrity with which his companions left him to his own devices Topper suspected the worst. He parked the car in front of the Casino with the quiet observation that in case of any slight misunderstanding giving rise to hot words and violence all hands were to rally round this spot with no loss of time. After locking the car he carefully secreted the keys in an inside pocket as a provision against possible doublecrossing. Topper had no desire to be left alone with an infuriated race track. With promises that before the day was done the entire party would be self-supporting, the Colonel, with Oscar and the ladies, departed to make arrangements, the exact nature of which Topper decided he would be more comfortable to remain in ignorance. However, he could not keep from wondering why they went to such elaborate trouble to acquire wealth when they could so easily loot a bank, pick well lined pockets, or pillage the villas of the rich. Too tame, he decided. The Colonel enjoyed casting a thin veil of honesty over his nefarious transactions. The man was so tortuously crooked that he took pleasure in burlesquing honesty.

Some time later Mr. Topper came face to face with the group of acquaintances that had witnessed his peculiar conduct at the English Bar. It was not an easy meeting on either side. Vividly recalling his meteoric departure from the place on the last occasion, these charming people were far from indifferent to the complications inherent in this present encounter. For all they could tell, this retired American banker might take it into his head to go swooping round the race track in hot pursuit of the horses. Or he might be seized by a violent attack of bouncing brought on by the excitement of the races. However, their fear of the strange potentialities of the man prompted them to mask their true emotions. He was cordially absorbed into the party and presently borne away to the clubhouse, from the veranda of which he later saw not all, but nearly all, of what there was to be seen.

Owing to the undefinable nature of their activities it would be a far better thing to deal as briefly as possible with the Colonel and his companions rather than to enter into the details of how they set about eliminating the element of risk from six races. Suffice it to say that their plans had been carefully laid and most eventualities anticipated.

The ladies, gowned exquisitely and provided with all necessary credentials by a thorough and thoughtful Topper, by making promises of a most lurid character, succeeded in enticing a well established bookmaker into a private room of the clubhouse. Here the disillusioned man met with a reception far different from the one he had been given every reason to expect. In other words, he was the one to be disrobed, but first he was knocked both down and out. The Colonel thereupon appeared, and with his deft assistance the unfortunate gambler was stripped of his sportive outer garments, disclosing under ones of an even more sportive hue. After this he was bound, gagged, and dragged out of harm’s way. The ladies then abandoned their own garments while making a concession to modesty by disappearing themselves. On the other hand, the Colonel, now suitably attired in the ravished outfit of the unconscious gambler, returned to the location frequented by that person, and thereupon began to lure, provoke, and browbeat large chunks of francs from members of the general public. All of the Colonel’s betting arrangements, with a few exceptions, were strictly cash transactions, but as he quoted unusually favorable odds, that is, apparently favorable odds, and because of his impressive voice and eloquent gestures, he was soon virtually pauperizing a steady string of clients no less avaricious than himself but far more trustful. The fact that his trousers were a trifle short and his coat a shade over-styled slightly disturbed the fastidious sensibilities of this ex-army exquisite. Otherwise he was in his element. He even wondered regretfully why the idea had not occurred to him before.

Mr. Topper, in the course of a short stroll, inadvertently came across the Colonel in full cry. Topper was considerably impressed and no little alarmed by the tremendous business the Colonel was doing.

“God help all the favorites,” he murmured as he turned away from the brilliant scene, speculating idly on the possible activities of Marion, Mrs. Hart, and Oscar.

Had he been aware of the true nature of their activities his prayer would have been even more fervent. His heart would have gone out not only to the favorite for the first race, but also to entry number seven, contemptuously referred to by the French populace as an “ootsaidaire,” a term which Mr. Topper later discovered simply meant an outsider – a horse far removed from the money.

Amalek, the favorite for the first race, and the horse upon which the hopes of many of the Colonel’s victims were centered, was speedily found in his stall by the unobtrusively investigating ladies. According to the Colonel’s instructions they began to work on this horse after first having concealed Oscar’s rump beneath a pile of straw, a situation from which the curious creature seemed to derive some faint amusement, especially when he was able to make his colleagues scramble frantically with the straw when he thrust his tail through. A queer dog, Oscar, taking him all in all, which was difficult to do because he was seldom that way.

Marion and Mrs. Hart then proceeded to disturb, dumbfound and infuriate Amalek – upon whose evenness of temper much money depended – into a condition bordering on homicidal irresponsibility. This was not difficult to accomplish. Such a trick as suddenly pulling out the horse’s tongue and blowing on it immediately changed the animal’s mental outlook. The unexpected repetition of this indignity just when the horse was beginning to believe that that was over, at any rate, served only to heighten his bitter resentment. It is bad enough to have one’s tongue pulled out and blown on under the most favorable circumstances, but to have it pulled out by unseen hands and blown on by unseen lips is very much more disagreeable. At least, Amalek seemed to figure it out that way. The horse hated it. He was not only embarrassed but also alarmed. No one can say positively exactly what thoughts passed through his mind while his tongue was being pulled out, but it is probable he feared he was being attacked by some rare equine disease such as seizure of the tongue, or the latter half of that foot and mouth trouble he had heard so much about. Other arts and dodges were practised on Amalek, things that made him forget entirely about racing and think only of revenge. When Marion suddenly chattered in his ear like a demented squirrel Amalek was fit to be tied. For the safety of France he should have been tied. Amalek should have been securely tied to the post instead of started from it. A thumb tack gently tucked under his saddle completed the business of unseating the creature’s reason. He broke into a cold sweat while still endeavoring to conceal his murderous purpose behind his wicked eyes. That thousands of francs had been wagered on his winning this race meant little or nothing to Amalek. If anything, the knowledge gave him a certain ironical satisfaction. The more fools his backers. Amalek intended to show the world that a race horse in good standing could not be subjected to the indignities he had suffered without swift and terrible retaliation. His hand was turned against man and beast alike. He would do things and go places.

With growing amazement Mr. Topper’s friends followed from the clubhouse veranda the impassioned reprisals of the horse. Topper was unamazed. Had he seen Amalek dragged bodily from the track and hurled into the bushes he would not have been amazed. He knew from past experiences how ruthless his absent companions could be once their interests had become involved.

But when Amalek left the track he did so of his own free will. Before his departure, however, he threw consternation into the ranks of the competing horses. Every living thing within reach he attacked with his teeth and heels. The only horse to escape his wrath was already so far behind in the race as to escape the attention of the general public. This was the Colonel’s horse – his hand-picked favorite, number seven, lucky number seven, ironically known as Le Plongeur, or in a reasonable language, the Diver.

Topper had been mysteriously advised to bet his francs on this tattered shred of horseflesh. He had done so. And because of the weird proclivities his friends attributed to him they also had wagered heavily on the seemingly impossible success of this ruined “ootsaidaire.”

Upon the shoulders of Marion and Mrs. Hart and the rump of Oscar devolved the responsibility of seeing to it that Amalek and the Diver reversed the logical order of march. It was a heavy responsibility and one that involved no little activity. In fact, all hands were exceedingly busy.

While Amalek employed himself in the line of unseating jockeys with his teeth, deflecting honest horses from their courses with his feet and making a menace of himself in general, Marion, with the rear end of Oscar, hurried to the same end of the shambling Diver and incited the dog to attack. At the first sharp nip at his fetlocks Le Plongeur, or lucky number seven, stopped effortlessly in his tracks and looked back to see what new affliction his God had seen fit to punish him with for not having run faster in the days of his youth. Marion, standing well out of the way of the horse’s hoofs, eyed his reactions with professional interest. She figured out that even the slowest horse, if bitten by the rump of a dog, would feel inclined to move a trifle faster. She was right. Le Plongeur blinked several times very rapidly as if to clear his eyes of the familiar dust of other horses, then he bent his gaze more intently upon the semi-detached rump of Oscar. Once more the Diver blinked, this time to clear them of a vision far more disturbing than dust. As realization slowly dawned upon the dim mind behind the eyes, an expression of horror overspread the poor animal’s face and continued on until his entire body was held in the clutch of fear. Here was an object to be avoided at all costs. Here at last was a cause that justified real honest-to-God leg work. It was then that the Diver started into a run such as neither he nor any other horse had ever run before. The inspired speed of his mount was even more of a surprise to the jockey than it was to the horse itself. Gamely he stuck to various sections of the flying beast and hoped that his luck would last. Even had Amalek not involved his fellow horses together with their riders in a hand-to-hand combat for survival itself, the Colonel’s choice would have won by several convulsive lengths.

“Will someone more familiar than I with the finer nuances of racing kindly explain to me what the hell Amalek thinks he’s doing with himself and all these other horses?” Millie Coit inquired in a hushed voice.

“That seems fairly obvious,” Blynn Nelson replied. “After having either murdered or mutilated all other competitors in the race save one he is now trying to climb the fence in order to attack the judges’ stand in the rear.”

“I can count at least four jockeys struggling in agony on the track,” vouchsafed Harold Gay. “And just a moment ago I fancied I caught a glimpse of a dog that was not all there. Of course, I must be wrong.” Mr. Gay removed his field glasses from his eyes and looked suggestively at Mr. Topper. “What little I saw of the dog,” the speaker added slowly, “looked startlingly familiar. Would you care to look, Mr. Topper?”

“Heaven forbid,” replied Mr. Topper hastily. “I’m seeing too much as it is with my naked eyes.”

Oscar, having seen the Diver off to a good start, concealed his invaluable rump in a flower bed and awaited further demands upon his peculiar talents. By this time the stands were quite naturally in an uproar. The judges were trying to throw their hands away while discharging streams of inquiries and objections in the general direction of God. The once proud owner of Amalek was sneaking down a side street and seriously entertaining ideas of assuming a disguise. His horse, his magnificent Amalek, he now considered an unclean reptile. Little did that matter to the reptile himself. Having tossed his jockey to the winds, he had succeeded in putting the fence between himself and the track. Here, in the center of the field, he was now defying man, beast, and God to get together and try to do something about all the horrid things he had done.

While the other demoralized horses were casting about for their jockeys, the Diver, with stark terror in his eyes, tore along the track in an earnest effort to remove himself as far as possible from the thing he refused even to think about. It was a neat display of concentrated space-eating speed. In spite of the fact that the Diver’s success would be their loss, the spectators began to cheer.

Hunt Davis, who had been born and bred in blue-grass regions, rubbed his eyes in bewilderment.

“Damn me,” he observed in an admiring voice, “if I ever saw a horse run any faster than that in all my born days. Looks like he’s downright scared about something. Maybe he’ll kill his fool self.”

“Not before he wins, I hope,” said Millie Coit. “That’s our own little private favorite, that rocket out there. After he’s made it a race he can die a thousand deaths, and may God rest his soul each time.”

“Then Topper was right about betting on him,” advanced Waddles. “I wonder how he knew?”

“One wonders no end of things about dear Mr. Topper,” observed Mrs. Blake Willard insinuatingly. “For example, how does the man contrive to play such an astonishing game of tennis?”

“Isn’t there enough to wonder about?” Mr. Topper mildly interposed. “Both Amalek and our Diver there are more astonishing than I am.”

“So long as he makes me a rich woman,” Millie Coit declared, “I don’t give a rap how he goes about it.”

While this casual discussion was going on, so was the Diver. Lucky number seven was going on and on and on. Even now it is not definitely known whether he ever stopped. When he found himself face to face with the finishing line he was seen to hesitate for the first time in the course of his mad progress. Now the Diver knew nothing at all about finishing lines. He may have heard of such things, but the crowd had never waited long enough to let him complete a race. Before the tragic eyes of the judges and in the presence of the hooting multitude the horse felt out of place and alone. Should he go on with this new venture? He looked back fearfully, then the memory of that terrible nipping rump bounding so jauntily about the track overcame the horse’s embarrassment. Emulating his name he plunged past the post. If he did not win the race he might lose his life. This was no time to stand on ceremony. As fresh as if the race had just begun, the Diver kept on going.

“We’ll have to send a wireless to that horse’s jockey to let the beggar know he won,” Commander Becket remarked in a disgusted voice. “I’ve seen horses run in all parts of the world, but this is about the raggedest race in my recollection.”

However, the retired naval officer was destined to witness even raggeder races than this one before the day was done. From the first race to the last, things went from bad to worse. Horses grew more restive and jockeys less sure of their seats – less sure of anything, for that matter. The concerted efforts of Marion, Mrs. Hart, and Oscar succeeded so well in unnerving the horses for the second and third races that only a few of them were able to appear in public, the heavy-money horses invariably losing to the most unexpected entries. Apparently the goddess of chance was at last taking pity on physical wrecks in the line of horseflesh.

The fourth race was perhaps the most ridiculously futile of all. It was won by a deaf horse. And the deaf horse won this race solely because she was a deaf horse and consequently unable to hear the disconcerting and objectionable sounds Marion Kerby and Mrs. Hart cleverly created the impression the other horses were making. No brain other than that of a woman could have conceived a device so embarrassing both to the horses and to their jockeys. Even the starter was involved in the misunderstanding arising from what the poor chap had every reason to believe to be a group of talking, cursing, and vulgarly offensive horses. The only horse that appeared to retain both her poise and her self-respect was named La Sorcière. And La Sorcière was deaf. Stone deaf.

As the already nervous animals were busily engaged in lining up at the starting barrier, Marion Kerby, placing herself close to the mouth of one of them, suddenly smote the air with a wild, unnatural scream. The horse, greatly upset, strove to give the impression that such a desperate, unhorse-like sound could not have issued from him. He turned his head and looked accusingly at his neighbor, who in turn looked severely at the horse next to him. And this kept up until finally all the horses were looking frowningly at each other. To see a number of horses suspiciously inspecting each other’s faces is an unusual thing. Very. At any rate, the starter seemed to think so. He, too, looked suspiciously at all the horses, his scrutiny including their jockeys. When Mrs. Hart contrived to place a truly dreadful sound in the mouth of still another horse the starter started himself. He was moved to words.

“Gentlemen,” he said, addressing the jockeys of the two offending horses, “is it that your mounts are in pain? Such noises sound far from well. They are, truly, altogether new to me, those sounds.”

The two accused jockeys stoutly denied the imputation that their horses were anything other than the healthiest and most well bred of beasts. Monsieur the starter must be thinking of a couple of other horses.

A burst of ironical and defiant jeers interrupted these protestations. La Sorcière alone, of all the horses, retained her poise.

“A thousand thunders!” exclaimed the starter. “You must do something about all this. Your horses, they are unbecomingly boisterous. Quiet them, if you please.”

“One thousand and one thunders!” shouted a horse in a reckless voice. “No more nor no less.”

The starter looked pained at being out-thundered by a mere horse. He looked even more so when an especially offensive noise issued from a horse standing in the center of the group. Even the horse’s jockey looked a trifle dismayed. It was such a sound as crude persons employ when giving another person the raspberry in almost any language. The starter had his own ideas about being given the raspberry in French. He looked angrily at the jockey.

“Your horse,” he demanded, “did you make him to push that distressing noise?”

“M’sieu,” protested the jockey, “is it that you fancy I would encourage my little cabbage to give issue to a sound so unrefined as that?”

The starter had his doubts about this. The jockey’s reputation was none too savory. His mount had a mean eye – far from one of refinement. The starter intimated as much. Marion tugged the horse over to the starter and by a series of irritating pinches made the frightened and bewildered creature endeavor to deposit his front feet heavily upon the starter’s chest. The starter climbed up on the fence and disqualified both horse and rider. High-pitched neighs of derision now became general among the horses. Marion and Mrs. Hart were in full tongue. Surprisingly effeminate shrieks and catcalls fell from the lips of the perturbed jockeys. In the midst of this hubbub one jockey was distinctly heard to allude suspiciously to the sex of another jockey. The upshot of this was an exchange of blows and several new disqualifications. By this time it was a toss-up between the horses and the starter as to which would be disqualified first. It was obvious that the horses were as unfit to start as the official was to start them. He was brought to a full realization of his ridiculous position when he heard La Sorcière announce in a bored but ladylike voice:

“Monsieur the starter, one grows fatigued on one’s feet. Me, I am prepared to march.”

This public rebuke by the least favored of animals on four legs was just a little too much for Monsieur the starter. He released the few remaining qualified horses and departed in search of a substitute to take his place. Under the circumstances the horses ran as well as could be expected, but it was plain to see that their thoughts were on other matters. They could not be disturbed by mere racing. La Sorcière, anxious to retire from the public eye to the comfort and seclusion of her stall, hurried right along. As a result of the indifference of her competitors the Colonel had the satisfaction of seeing still another of his favorites jounce home a winner. It is doubtful if La Sorcière even realized she had actually won a race, and as no one could tell her about it she probably never found out.

For the fifth race the Colonel radically altered his method of procedure. Instead of picking a favorite, his instructions were merely that at all costs John Bull and Coquette should be prevented from placing.

“How will we do that?” Mrs. Hart inquired. “Do you expect us to wrestle with a couple of infuriated horses?”

The Colonel shrugged indifferently.

“That’s your end of the game,” he replied. “Don’t bother me. Why not hang onto the beggars’ tails?”

“That’s our end of the game,” said Mrs. Hart.

“Not a bad end either,” replied Marion. “We need a little diversion.”

Accordingly, when the fifth race started, Marion and Mrs. Hart, clinging gamely to the tails of John Bull and Coquette respectively, found themselves being hurtled through space amid a great clattering of hoofs.

“Gord!” gasped Mrs. Hart. “I might be invisible to the eye, but I still retain some feelings.”

“These fool horses aren’t giving us a tumble,” complained Marion. “Might just as well not be here at all.”

“Do you find the motion soothing?” asked Mrs. Hart.

“A little hard to breathe,” admitted Marion.

“Hang on for the first turn!” cried Mrs. Hart.

“Oh, why did we ever take up racing?” asked Marion. “This is no place for a lady.”

“Not even for a kite,” said Mrs. Hart. “Port your helm.”

After they had weathered the perils of the first turn the conversation was resumed.

“I’m a grand old flag and I’m tied to a nag,” Marion sang out.

“I’d like to give Coquette a piece of my mind,” said Mrs. Hart. “The old girl has a wicked wobble.”

It was only to be expected that this steady flow of conversation between the two ladies should arouse some interest on the part of the jockeys. The need to know just who was doing all this talking right behind their backs became so urgent that both of them turned round in their saddles in an attempt to discover its source. This maneuver caused them to sacrifice much valuable ground.

“At whom are you looking, my old?” Marion asked nastily in French.

“What a repulsive face mine has,” observed Mrs. Hart.

“From where I am I’m not getting a noble view of horseflesh,” Marion announced.

“Far from it,” replied Mrs. Hart. “In fact, I’m getting a very low opinion of horses in general.”

“If John looks as bad in front as he does behind,” commented Marion, “I’d hate to meet him face to face.”

“It couldn’t be worse than the face of my jockey,” declared Mrs. Hart in plain but painful French.

The jockeys were getting mad. They were burning up. The intensely personal remarks of the ladies had deeply wounded their impressionable French natures. No man likes to have such insinuations made about his face. The insulted jockeys found themselves unable to concentrate on the important business at hand. Their mounts began to lag farther and farther behind. They were growing weary of the pace. Meanwhile the two ladies were considering what next to try to discourage John Bull and Coquette and to humiliate their jockeys. The last turn lay close ahead. The animals might be holding back for the home stretch.

“I’m going to twist this devil’s tail,” announced Marion.

“I’ll try it on mine, too,” said Mrs. Hart. “Clean off.”

Upon the putting of this crude suggestion to the test it was the horses that looked back this time. With large, inquiring eyes they inspected their twisted tails. What was going on back there, they wondered. Why should anyone want to do that to them? There was something sinister about all this. The interest of the horses in their tails was fatal to their heads. Speeding blindly as they were in a semicircular position, they suddenly became entangled and fell in a large, untidy heap from which their jockeys, more indignant than injured, presently emerged with a couple of stories to tell that no one ever believed. Once more the Colonel’s will had been done.

“That makes us all the richer,” said Mrs. Hart as the two ladies returned to the starter’s barrier in search of Oscar, whose services would be needed in the last race.

“In experience as well as francs,” remarked Marion. “No more horsefly tactics for me.”

“I felt like a sneeze in an earthquake,” Mrs. Hart declared.

“Neatly turned,” said Marion.

For the sixth race the Colonel had perversely set his heart on a veteran of many decades, Voiturette, a name which at the time of the animal’s christening had meant little carriage because in those remote days motors were still unknown in the provinces. In all of France there was not a follower of the track who expected this horse to do anything other than to occupy her customary position to the rear. In this the Colonel, Mr. Topper, and his friends were the lucky exceptions, Topper having been previously advised to place all his winnings on her success. Voiturette had been playing anchor horse for so many years that she had become a well loved national institution.

In the bushes near the starting barrier Marion and Mrs. Hart were having a desperate time with Oscar. For the sake of originality they had set their hearts on making the dog utilize his head in order to gain their ends. Oscar could not understand.

“Oscar,” Marion was pleading, “this is a serious matter. Won’t you forget your rump for a moment and be just a head – a terrible head with lots of teeth and a leer, perhaps?”

“Yes,” chimed in Mrs. Hart sweetly. “Show all the bad horses your pretty teeth, old kid. Snap from a tail to a head.”

“Come on, Oscar,” urged Marion. “It’s heads we win, tails we lose. How about it?”

Oscar’s rump was quivering nervously. He seemed to realize that something good – something extra special – was expected of him. And although he did not know exactly what this was he was trying his best to please. Crouched down in the bushes he concentrated on the business until the sweat dripped from his almost invisible body. Part after part of himself he materialized in the hope that one of his offerings would give satisfaction. Because he was using his head so furiously he completely forgot to display it.

“He doesn’t seem to know he has a head,” Mrs. Hart complained in a low voice. “All those parts he’s been showing us might do – God knows they’re awful enough – but for the last race of the day they don’t seem sufficiently spectacular.”

“We haven’t much time left,” muttered Marion. “If Oscar doesn’t do a head soon we’ll lose our pants. Don’t be a duffer, Oscar, old dear. Make a nice head for the ladies – a nice, awful head.”

This odd entreaty gave inspiration to Mrs. Hart.

“Be a mad dog, Oscar,” she suddenly commanded.

In Oscar’s confused mind these words struck sparks of intelligence. Certainly he would be a mad dog for the ladies. He knew all about playing mad dog. It was one of his favorite games. Why hadn’t they asked him the first time? Suddenly and grippingly Oscar’s rump gave place to a head. Both ladies instinctively edged away. Even when one expected the worst of Oscar it was no laughing matter to get used to him. His mouth was flecked with foam, his eyes rolled insanely, he did revolting things with his tongue, and his dripping fangs could not be long endured by human eyes, much less by those of a high-strung horse.

“For the love of God,” breathed Marion, “he’s about the maddest damned mad dog I ever did see.”

“He’s cute,” said Mrs. Hart a little nervously. “But the Colonel should do things like this. After all, Oscar’s his dog. I hope the beast doesn’t take this business too seriously. One sight of him will kill most of those poor horses.”

“Yes,” reflected Marion. “It would take years and years of the closest intimacy for any horse to get used to that head. Nevertheless, better a few dead horses than a financially crippled Colonel. Guess we ought to congratulate the poor idiot.”

“Isn’t he cunning?” exclaimed Mrs. Hart in a false voice, gazing with difficulty upon the horrible head. “Don’t bite me, mad dog – ugh, you’re just too awful for words!”

Pleased by this tribute, Oscar made a few playful practice snaps in the general direction of the ladies, who huddled together in space.

“I don’t think he’s ever been quite so mad as all that,” murmured Mrs. Hart. “Do you think he’s really just playing?”

“Well,” replied Marion with conviction, “I’m not going to show a scrap of my body to find out.”

“If he isn’t in earnest,” said Mrs. Hart, “he certainly has a slapstick sense of humor.”

“He’s all right,” answered Marion. “After all, slapstick humor is merely the laughter its critics wish they could have created themselves. It’s close to the hearts of the gods. The pie has not yet been thrown that I can’t laugh at.”

“It’s mighty hard to get a laugh out of Oscar,” Mrs. Hart observed. “He’s the most frightful display of ectoplasm I’ve ever had the unhappiness to meet.”

“We’ve got to snap to it,” said Marion as the horses began to arrive at the barrier. “Take that around to the first turn where there aren’t any close observers. When the main body of horses come along, turn it loose about fifteen yards in front of them and tell him to go plumb crazy. I’ll hold Little Carriage well in the rear until that dog has had his day.”

With her enthusiastically mad dog, Mrs. Hart departed through the bushes that luckily hid him from view. Marion drifted over to the head of Little Carriage and unobtrusively placed her hand on the grand old mud hen’s bridle. All was now in readiness for the final race of the day.

“Good!” exclaimed Commander Becket as the horses broke evenly from the barrier. “Looks as if we were going to have a real race this time.”

“They’re off to a good start, at least,” agreed Millie Coit. “All except our horse. There’s only one way I can’t stand being ruined, and that is financially.”

“Be calm, my dear,” said Mr. Topper knowingly. “Voiturette can’t lose this race. They’ve been saving her for years.”

“Looks mighty like she’s still being saved,” remarked Harold Gay.

“Indeed it does,” put in Blynn Nelson. “If they don’t begin to draw a little interest soon I’ll have to sell a fleet of motorboats to break even with my obscure little wine dealer.”

Running low and well in a flying wedge the horses were nearing the first turn. Proceeding leisurely from the barrier came Little Carriage, nervously trying to free her bridle from the disturbing grasp of an unseen hand. Little Carriage did not mind trotting slowly through a race, but she did not exactly fancy walking through one. In a few years, perhaps, but – —

Then Oscar, suddenly pushed by Mrs. Hart, made his cataclysmic appearance. His immediate vicinity seemed to be composed entirely of jaws and teeth, both working with a will. The day was done for the horses so far as racing was concerned. If a horse breathed that was so anxious to win a race as to pass that head, he or she could have all three places for the asking. The flying wedge put on the emergency and skidded. For a moment it looked at Oscar’s working face, then wheeled about and sped back in the direction whence it had come.

“What’s this?” demanded the Commander indignantly. “It’s a rout, by God, not a race. A shameful retreat. I’d rather lose all my money than all my wits.”

The majority of the spectators seemed to be of the same opinion. A great clamor arose. This last race was just a little too steep for the best natured of crowds.

As the horses passed Voiturette plodding along in the opposite direction no greetings were exchanged. The poor creature looked wistfully after her friends as they rushed by on either side. Reluctantly she yielded to the unseen but not unheard tugging at her bridle. Marion was cursing steadily. An unpremeditated glimpse of Oscar’s head peering drippingly through the bushes caused Little Carriage to sit down with a gasp of dismay. This is perhaps the first time on record that a body of racing enthusiasts has ever been treated to the spectacle of a solitary horse sitting in the middle of a race track while the main body of competitors were doing their best to get themselves off it as speedily as possible. Philosophically the jockey belonging to Voiturette clung to the grotesquely squatting horse and contented himself with hoping that the animal would not lie down entirely and die so far from home and friends.

It was at this point that Marion lost her temper. She not only took the bit but also the teeth of the sitting horse, and endeavored to pull them out of her head. Failing this, she rushed to the rear of the horse and kicked her vigorously. And all the while she maintained a steady stream of indecent language. The jockey who could only understand English when it was cursed understood a lot of it now. Finally her efforts were rewarded. Voiturette, growing weary of being kicked, rose and plodded off down the track, Marion tugging her furiously by the bridle.

“That animal gives me the impression that someone is pulling it along,” said Clyde Jones. “See how its neck stretches out and jerks back sort of protestingly.”

“Looks as if our horse is going to win in a walk,” observed Commander Becket. “First time I ever saw a race won in a walk.”

“You’ll see this one won in a creep,” replied Millie.

As Little Carriage came into the home stretch the demonstration swelled to a terrific outburst. Voiturette’s squatting act had restored the crowd to good-humor. What with kicking, swearing, and pulling, Marion Kerby was nearly winded. Entering into the spirit of the occasion the jockey bowed ironically in the direction of the stands. Slowly and painfully the old horse approached both her own and the race’s finish. Step by step her stiff joints cut down the few remaining yards. From the crowd in the paddock boomed the deep voice of the Colonel.

“Speed, Little Motor!” he shouted.

“Mind your own damn business,” came back the bitter voice of an unseen woman. “Keep your stolen shirt on. I’m practically carrying her as it is.”

Far off on the brow of a gently rising hill the brave steeds that had so gallantly started the race were ingloriously tearing up turf in their anxiety to obliterate for all time the memory of the horror their eyes had looked on that day. Unseated and disgruntled jockeys were limpingly returning from all points of the compass. When Voiturette dragged her exhausted body across the finishing line the amazed and delighted French multitude – for once forgetting its love of francs – tore loose and gave the old girl a new thrill. Within the space of her own length from the line she let go her legs and hit the track with a grunt. From that spot she refused either to budge or to be budged. Little Carriage was through. She had won her first and last race.

Marion brushed the palms of her hands together and drew a deep breath. It had been a tough race for her, and she felt tough.

“If I ever see another horse again during the remainder of my supernatural days,” she muttered, “I’ll choke its blooming tongue out.”

Snatching a hip flask from the pocket of the nearest bystander, she hurried across the field, guzzling as she went. When she picked up Oscar and Mrs. Hart she was feeling decidedly better.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Ascension
of Colonel Scott

No bookmaker – honest or otherwise – who accepted money as freely as had the Colonel, could expect to retain it all. It was hardly possible for some of his many clients not to win occasionally. However, the Colonel was a gentleman whose expectations surpassed all laws of logic. They were seldom if ever disappointed, and never discouraged. He could expect the most prodigious things and realize them with surprising ease if not the strictest honesty.

Even had he paid his fortunate clients the winnings that were rightfully theirs, he would not have been much out of pocket. His own vast, ill-gotten gains would have hardly noticed the difference. But on this occasion greed had overcome whatever feeble resistance his none too robust scruples had attempted to offer. He did more than expect to retain all of the money in his possession. As he expressed it somewhat grimly to himself, he damn well intended to retain all of the money down to the last centime. He even considered for a moment his chances of success in walking out on his two henchwomen but reluctantly abandoned the idea. He knew Mrs. Hart’s character well enough to realize that she would gracefully follow him through the most tortuous corridors of hell for the sake of five francs. And as for Marion Kerby, he had not the slightest doubt that that young lady would turn the earth and the air itself into a living inferno for him if he attempted to play her false in an enterprise involving money. Even while regretting the sordid characters of these two women he could not altogether detach from his regret a sort of unholy feeling of admiration. Moreover, Mrs. Hart and Marion might prove useful in future ventures. He would have to satisfy himself by holding out on them as much as possible – by taking advantage of their inability to deal rapidly and accurately with the intricacies of foreign money. He earnestly hoped that Mr. Topper, in the capacity of an ex-banker, would not step in as an unofficial observer at the division of the spoils.

As soon as the last race had dragged itself to its final collapse the Colonel became exceedingly busy in collecting his side bets, an enterprise in which he succeeded by the exercise of the most brutal methods. The professional gamblers with whom he had dealt, believing him thoroughly mad, had put him down as easy picking. They now discovered to their sorrow how terribly mistaken they had been. In spite of the arguments they properly advanced regarding the honesty of the races the outraged Colonel insisted on extracting his pound of flesh.

It was while dealing with the most stubborn of these dishonest gentlemen that several disconcerting incidents occurred – incidents which led to a scene that will long be remembered by the frequenters of that race track.

Profoundly moved by the pusillanimous and obviously unfair attitude of this reluctant gambler, the Colonel was calling loudly on God to take prompt and effective action when the avaricious shouts of his own clients were borne unpleasantly in on his ears. Among these shouts he distinguished one of outstanding ferocity. Turning with elaborate indignation, the excellent Colonel encountered the envenomed gaze of a gentleman clad unbecomingly in a blue undershirt and a pair of gaudily striped drawers which struck a faint spark in the Colonel’s memory. Where had he seen those drawers before? Ah, yes. They were none other than the incredibly ill-chosen garments of the betrayed and assaulted bookmaker. This was serious. It grew even more serious when the Colonel remarked the presence of two evil-faced gendarmes standing on either side of the repellent looking bookmaker. The Colonel was not amused. He found nothing funny in the quaint appearance of the passionately vociferating bookmaker as so many disinterested spectators appeared to be doing. He realized with alarm that if caught in his present condition of solidity by this emotional French mob he would be torn franc from franc. Scenes from the French Revolution swept through his mind. The Colonel could take care of his body, but that was not enough. He wanted also to take care of the francs. Without the purchasing power of those francs the activities of his body would be seriously curtailed. Furthermore, there was the matter of the last uncollected bet. As critical as the situation was he had no intention of abandoning all that money in favor of a welshing Frenchman. To do so would be to establish a bad precedent for the noble institution of racing. He, the Colonel, would be actually encouraging dishonesty.

Accordingly, he felt that he was conferring a favor on France when he turned suddenly and, smiting the gambler to the ground, conscientiously rifled his pockets. A cry broke from the mob, and the gendarmes made hostile advances. Having impoverished his fallen enemy the Colonel quickly extracted several huge wads of francs from his own pockets and proceeded leisurely to dematerialize before the eyes of the incredulous spectators.

The borrowed garments of the accusing bookmaker fell from the Colonel’s body, disclosing some rather flamboyant shorts in which the wearer could be only faintly discerned. An aggressive military mustache, two huge bundles of francs, and the drawers themselves, the whole being loosely held together by a filmy structure in the semblance of a man, were all that remained of the Colonel. Slowly and impressively he rose from the ground and remained poised in benign contemplation above the heads of the multitude as a light breeze gently swayed him to and fro.

“Regard that!” cried one of the Colonel’s erstwhile clients, forgetting in his admiration that he was witnessing the irrevocable disappearance of his own winnings. “Monsieur the bookmaker has dissipated himself. It is that he has become as a god. A thing marvelous, this. Is it not?”

“But yes,” replied another bilked client, not so easily carried away by the excitement of the moment. “It is of a marvelousness in full truth, but – hein! It is also an affair of the most lamentable nature, for is it not that there go an illimitable number of francs that should be rightfully ours?”

“Of a verity,” responded the first Frenchman, his expression of admiration promptly changing to one of poignant despair. “It is but now being borne in on me that I am applauding a theft instead of a miracle. That one on high, semi-seen only and aloof, is far from what he seems.”

“M’sieu, he is even less,” said the other politely. “Bear witness, nevertheless, that the small little that remains still possesses sufficient astuteness to cling with a greed of the utmost tenacity to our francs.”

“Indubitably, m’sieu, and one regrets that much,” the first victim agreed. “It would be no less than a step of justice and wisdom if our brave gendarmes encumbered the drawers of the wicked one with lead.”

“But, no!” cried the other thriftily. “It is that they might miss and so destroy a number of francs enormous.”

“So far as we ourselves are concerned,” observed the first Frenchman, whose intellect was not sufficient to follow the economic abstractions of his friend, “those francs of innumerable number are, if not destroyed, at least departed, and forever, alas.”

It was of a truth. The francs were departing. Higher and higher ascended the Colonel above the heads of the gesticulating crowd. The military mustache became confused with the branches of trees on a distant hill. The drawers blended harmoniously with the sky now, shot with pastel shades from the lowering sun. Only the two huge bundles of francs remained visible to the tormented eyes of the mob, then they, too, slowly faded from mere specks to an aching void.

The Colonel had made good his escape. His highly questionable conduct had been most impressively dramatized. To his way of thinking he had given his baffled clients more than enough for their money. He was well pleased with the results of the day. Now for the automobile and Mr. Topper – perhaps a bit of an orgy.

•   •   •   •   •

If brevity is the soul of wit, Marion’s briefs were brilliant. They were short to the point of brusqueness – neat, concise little garments. The young lady, now back in the private room in the clubhouse with Mrs. Hart and Oscar, was holding these briefs in her hands preparatory to materializing in them when Mrs. Hart first noticed the absence of the bookmaker.

“He is gone, my dear,” she announced.

“That’s good,” Marion replied abstractedly. “I’m glad he took those drawers away, or I’d never be able to get into my own.”

“Weren’t they fearful?” said Mrs. Hart, now busy about her own materialization. “Wonder who thought them up?”

In answer to this came a low growl from Oscar.

“My dear,” called Marion, “I have the most uncanny sensation that someone is looking at my scanties askance. So, seemingly, has Oscar.”

“So have I,” replied Mrs. Hart. “Something tells me we’re not alone.”

“Evidently,” said Marion calmly, turning towards the door. “Looks as if the whole damn Riviera has wedged itself into the room.”

“What’s the big idea?” demanded Mrs. Hart, following Marion’s example and turning to confront a breathlessly interested group of club members, servants, and gendarmes.

“In place of the absent drawers,” commented Marion, “we seem to have much of France.”

“More of it than I need or want,” gasped Mrs. Hart. “This is a terribly embarrassing situation. Do something about those briefs, my dear. You’re in an awful state.”

“I’ll do what I can,” said Marion. “You’re not swathed in garments yourself, you know.”

“Yes,” chattered Mrs. Hart. “I know only too well, but I can’t seem to manage my ectoplasm.”

Marion, too, was experiencing difficulty in that direction. Their ectoplasm – at all times of a sensitive disposition – had received such a severe shock that its action had become atrophied. Consequently the ladies were left in a state of suspended materialization in which they appeared to be made of delicately tinted gelatine. They could neither return to nothing nor advance to more. Oscar had completely disappeared. There was not even a rump to be seen. As tired as she had become of seeing that part of the dog bunching itself about the landscape, Marion now decided it would at least be a comfort to have had even that unprepossessing object with them in this moment of crisis.

“The ladies,” one of the gendarmes observed superfluously, “they are without costumes.” He hesitated, then added as the ladies in question shrank into their briefs, “Or nearly so.”

“They should be arrested and put into jail,” remarked an American guest of the club. “If my husband were here I wouldn’t know what to do.”

“Is that so?” said Marion in a hard voice. “Well, lady, neither would he, or else he wouldn’t have married you.”

“They are the same as the ones who misled monsieur the bookmaker,” put in another gendarme.

“He was certainly wearing a misleading pair of drawers,” retorted Marion.

“But, my old,” objected still another representative of French law and order, “that one assured us they undressed him and not themselves. He had hoped otherwise, he told us.”

“He was a gentleman at least,” replied Mrs. Hart. “He didn’t want to brag.”

“I’m getting sick of this back talk,” said Marion. “Let’s make a break.”

“How?” asked Mrs. Hart.

“We’ll scream our way out,” Marion replied. “Grab up your clothes and follow me and yell like hell. Maybe Oscar will show some signs of life and limb.”

Suddenly the room was filled with a volley of ear-splitting screams, shrieks, and imprecations. Two translucent ladies, clad only in the curtest of panties and clinging onto their outer raiment, danced weirdly about the room. From beneath a table arose the howling of a dog that increased in ferocity with the tempo of the dance. Presently the head of a mad dog appeared at the seat of the howls. Guests, servants, and club members vied with each other to give the gendarmes ample room in which to make their arrests.

“My God in heaven!” muttered an old débauché, mopping his forehead with a scented handkerchief. “I thought I had slept, in my time, with every manner of woman extant, but I must have completely overlooked that type. What are they?”

“Why, they’re hardly anything at all, old chap,” an English visitor explained. “Merely a pair of scandalously animated ladies’ garments, so far as I could tell.”

“Well, I recognized more than that,” said the old gentleman. “And listen to them. Do you mean to tell me that a couple of pairs of jigging drawers can let out whoops like that?”

The Englishman, a trifle offended at the other’s coarse way of putting things, stalked off. Anyway, this was France. He was not responsible for its morals. Joining a French show girl out of work whom he was maintaining at a favorable rate of exchange while on the Continent, he drove impeccably away from the clubhouse and later telegraphed his wife to be careful of Junior’s cold.

The game old débauché, as if still fascinated by the riddle of the sexes, struggled back to the door of the private room and peered in between two gendarmes. He was just in time to witness the charge of the embattled panties foamingly led by the snapping fangs of Oscar.

“Strange women,” mused the old gentleman as he got himself out of the way. “And an even stranger dog.”

As Marion dashed through the door one of the gendarmes made a shrinking grab at her. There was the sound of ripping silk.

“There go the briefs!” cried Marion. “Hold onto yours, Clara. The godarme gendam – I mean, the goddam gendarme got ’em.”

“Hope he keeps his beastly hands off mine,” yelled Clara Hart as she dashed through the door, then triumphantly added, “Made it! Only an impertinent pinch.”

“Mine weren’t much, but they meant a lot to me,” Marion called back over her shoulder.

“Easy come, easy go,” Mrs. Hart panted as philosophically as one can pant.

“You mean, easy on, easy off,” replied Marion. “That’s why I liked ’em.”

“Drape your dress around you and run like hell,” Mrs. Hart urged. “The godarmes are following.”

“I can’t run like hell with this dress draped around me,” Marion complained.

“Then just run like hell,” said Mrs. Hart.

Down the main thoroughfare of the French resort the fascinating figures sped, a path being cleared before them by the anything but fascinating head of the baying Oscar. Shopkeepers, chauffeurs, and tourists saw them and blinked their eyes. Even the Colonel saw them, and joined the merry chase as it debouched into a palm-lined avenue that led to the Casino.

“Sic ’em, Oscar,” called the Colonel, and the dog, at the sound of his master’s voice, turned back and threw consternation into the ranks of the pursuing gendarmes.

“Oh, look at all the francs,” cried Mrs. Hart in a delighted voice.

“You’d run naked through the streets of Paris for half that amount,” Marion Kerby told her.

“Wouldn’t I!” shouted Mrs. Hart. “I’d even loiter sans costume through the streets of New York itself for less than a third.”

“Come! Come!” cried the Colonel. “This is no time for vulgar niceties. Run, girls, run.”

“Well, we’re not exactly crawling,” said Clara Hart in an injured voice.

“I was under the impression we were literally killing the kilometers,” put in Marion bitterly.

“What’s wrong with your ectoplasm?” the flying Colonel inquired. “Why are you that way?”

“What’s wrong with your own ectoplasm?” exploded Mrs. Hart. “You seem to be all francs and drawers. Ours is stuck, that’s all.”

Mr. Topper, seated at the wheel of his chartered machine, heard the tumult of their approach. To his startled eyes it seemed that the entire populace of the town proposed to take a ride in his machine. Preparing for the worst, he started up the engine. The Colonel, or rather, two wads of francs were the first to arrive.

“I must look queer to you,” he laughed apologetically, “but everything is all right. Mrs. Hart has most of my clothes.”

“Pardon my informal appearance,” gasped that lady as she fell in beside the Colonel. “My ectoplasm will soon be in circulation.”

Marion, in the front seat, was practically choking Topper with a pair of tapering diaphanous arms. Even the French witnesses to this intimate little scene were shocked into forgetting its romantic flavor. Some of them even remembered to take the number of the car. The French can be very much like that on occasions. Especially when it’s at the expense of an apparently wealthy American.

“Journeys end in lovers meeting,” Marion sang out.

“I think I can stand almost everything except the way Oscar is,” remarked Mr. Topper judiciously. “I refuse to be responsible for the quality of my driving with that head in my lap.”

Oscar, with a gendarme’s cap gripped firmly in his teeth, was busily worming himself into the front seat beside Topper. Oscar liked this man. He was so solid. A good lap for a weary head. The poor beast had forgotten how unpalatable he looked.

“We’ll deal with Oscar later,” said the Colonel. “Now, if you love your liberty, for God’s sake, look alive, even if we can’t.”

“Where away?” demanded Topper.

“Anywhere,” replied the Colonel. “Anywhere but home. They’d trace you there as quick as a wink. Got to give ’em the slip. Head for Monte Carlo.”

“Splendid!” cried Mrs. Hart.

“Shove off,” commanded Marion. “If we must wash our soiled linen, let’s do it in someone else’s public.”

“You don’t seem to be wearing any linen at all,” Mr. Topper observed.

“I didn’t think you’d notice,” Marion replied, making another dive for him.

“If you’ll restrain this woman,” said Mr. Topper with fastidious calm, “and drop a handkerchief over this dog’s face, I’ll try to budge along.”

As the gendarmes arrived, the car sped on its way.

“Here’s your cap, dearie,” Marion called back. “Wish it had been your pants.”

“Trousers,” corrected Topper. “Are all women alike?”

“I don’t know,” replied Marion innocently, “but now’s a good time to find out.”

“Low. Always low,” Mr. Topper murmured regretfully, as if to himself.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

From Tree to Tree

“The surveyor who laid out this bit of road must have been as cockeyed as hell,” the Colonel complained some minutes later.

“You’re so crooked, Colonel,” Marion observed dispassionately, “that all roads look cockeyed to you.”

Nor was the Colonel cast down by this remark. His mood was benign and expansive. A hard wench, but a clever one, he mused, smiling at Marion.

The road to which he had been referring was the Corniche d’Or, one of the most picturesquely petrifying highways in the world – France’s gift to back-seat drivers, nervous wrecks, and individuals desirous of ending it all. As the car hurtled round a corner Mrs. Hart, looking over its side, gazed down into the grinning jaws of a mouthful of fanglike rocks some hundred feet below. In spite of her indifference to natural laws, including that of gravity, the good lady shuddered.

“This isn’t a road,” she gasped. “It’s a maze – that’s what it is, and it has either driven Mr. Topper mad or he is driving us mad. I don’t care which, because it comes to the same thing.”

“The only way to travel comfortably on this web,” said Marion, “is to get so blind drunk you either can’t see it or else you see so crooked you begin to think it’s straight.”

“In that remark, though involved, there is a world of wisdom,” quoth the Colonel. “It’s been a hard day and a dry one. In spite of the pressure of the moment, I feel as if all of us would work better with a drink or so inside.”

“You’ll have to get dressed first,” said Mr. Topper.

“We’ll have to do more than that,” Marion replied. “We’ll have to finish up with our bodies. I feel like an unmade bed.”

“Well, I can’t make a scrap more body than I have already,” Mrs. Hart declared, “unless we stop in some quiet spot and I’m allowed to concentrate on my various parts. This drive has shattered my nerves.”

“And the Colonel isn’t anybody at all,” observed Marion. “Merely drawers and francs.”

“I like him better that way,” said Mrs. Hart.

“I worked like the deuce for all this money,” replied the Colonel.

“You mean, we did, dearie,” put in Mrs. Hart.

“We won’t begin that discussion now,” said Mr. Topper, foreseeing trouble of the worst sort. “I want to be miles away when those francs are divided.”

“Suits me,” remarked the Colonel laconically.

“But not me,” announced Marion. “We’ll need an honest referee instead of a quick-change artist like his nibs there.”

Marion glanced knowingly at the Colonel, who tried to look terribly hurt.

“How well you know the man,” said Mrs. Hart. “But how can we be sure of Topper? Every man has his price, and he looks like a bargain to me.”

“Damaged goods,” agreed Marion sadly.

“Ruined,” went on Mrs. Hart. “The two of them are like this.” She held up two fingers. “In cahoots.”

“I hate that word,” exclaimed Marion. “It would break my heart if Topper were in cahoots. Of all the despicable characters a cahooter is the worst. They’re so darned loud mouthed.”

“You seem to be under the impression that a cahooter is much like a hog caller,” remarked Mr. Topper.

“Not at all,” retorted Marion. “He’s more like an Alpine horn blower, only worse. If I ever catch you cahooting, may heaven help your soul, because that will be all that’s left. Let’s get out here.”

Topper drove the car off the road near the edge of a pine forest. Its occupants, including Oscar, alighted, and the three most interested parties, bearing their attire, distributed themselves behind trees, there to dress and materialize at leisure. Oscar, like a perfect gentleman, sought the privacy of some bushes. Topper sat down on a matting of pine needles and wondered idly if it would not have been more comfortable had he continued on at home being a banker and chasing trains.

When presently he looked up from his musing, Mr. Topper was panic stricken to discover that there was now not only a fourth, but also a fifth interested party, the two added parties being so exceedingly interested that they were quivering with suppressed excitement. But for the moment, Topper was relieved to discover, they were not so much interested in him as in what was going on in the forest in general, and in particular, what was occurring behind those three pine trees.

Following the direction of the gendarme’s absorbed gaze, Mr. Topper saw an assortment of heads, arms, legs and various other anatomical necessities busily popping back and forth from behind the pines. Viewing these unarboraceous actions through the eyes of the gendarmes, Topper realized that to them it must seem all very odd and irregular. Was it that something of a nature the most reprehensible was occurring behind those trees? And in a proximity so close to a public highway? The gendarmes could not conceive of any other explanation. But what daring! What ardor! What lack of restraint! With all the forest before them, why conduct themselves thus so close to the road? No. This must be brought to a finish. The gendarmes could condone much, but not this. It was a reflection on the fair name of France. These naked and impatient miscreants must be haled into the presence of Monsieur le commissaire himself.

Fascinated, Mr. Topper watched the two officers of the law concentrate on one of the trees. Stealthily they advanced over the soft pine needles, poised themselves, then sprang round the trunk.

“Whoops!” came the startled voice of Mrs. Hart. “The gendarmes! They are with us.”

Promptly she faded out, dragging her clothing with her.

“There is nothing of all that was there,” said one of the gendarmes.

“A voice, perhaps?” suggested the other.

“One cannot clip the bracelets on a voice,” came the logical reply. “Rush the second tree with speed terrific.”

And with speed that they hoped was terrific the gendarmes dashed for the pine behind which the Colonel had established his headquarters.

“Literally caught with my drawers down,” that imperturbable gentleman shouted as two wads of francs and a bundle of clothes went leaping through the trees.

“Didn’t see a thing,” cried Marion as the thwarted gendarmes furiously attacked her tree. “Is my life going to be just one goddam after another? I loathe the very sight of them.”

The gendarmes, thrice disappointed, now turned their attention to Topper. He, at least, seemed solid enough to arrest. But why was he, too, not naked? Perhaps he had been. Of a verity. They rushed upon the astounded Topper, and Topper lost his presence of mind. Instead of retreating to the automobile, as he should have, he scaled the side of a tree with an agility made possible only by fear of immediate seizure and long incarceration. Cries of encouragement rang through the woods. Topper had never before realized what a spirited tree climber he was. Neither had the gendarmes, apparently. They regarded his apelike progress with frankly astonished eyes. Perhaps he was not a man after all, but an overdressed monkey. One encountered almost everything along the Riviera.

“Arrest you there!” cried one of them. “Comprehend you, m’sieu? One demands that you descend.”

Topper, having exhausted the resources of the tree, had little choice. He was forced to arrest himself. There was no place left to go. Descend, however, he refused to do. He doubted if he could descend even had he so desired. He would probably have to live in that tree all the days of his life. He remembered that Scollops had once got herself into a similar situation, and everyone had had an uncomfortable time of it, but none quite so uncomfortable as Scollops. He could readily understand that. The services of the Fire Company had been required to extricate the cat. Would he, too, be carried down ingloriously on the shoulder of a perfect stranger, some fire-fighting Frenchman, while the inevitable French mob ironically cheered and offered humiliating scraps of advice? How the hell had this all come about, anyway? The Colonel and Marion and Mrs. Hart, they were responsible for this seemingly endless series of contretemps – this uninterrupted rushing about. High aloft in his tree Topper decided that a man could pay too dear a price for the friendship of such persons. He felt more convinced of this than ever when the gendarme next addressed him.

“If you do not descend all at once,” called the man, “it is that I will fire.”

Even from his great height Topper decided that the revolver in the gendarme’s hand looked vulgarly large and ostentatious.

“But, m’sieu, I cannot descend,” Mr. Topper replied in a firm but reasonable voice.

The gendarme shrugged his shoulders with magnificent indifference.

“Perhaps, m’sieu, this will be of help,” he answered.

A bullet ripped and snorted through the branches of the pine. To Mr. Topper it sounded like the scream of a wild stallion.

“Monsieur le gendarme,” he sang out promptly, “I descend with a speed never before attempted.”

“Don’t you do it,” warned a voice in his ear. “Are you ready, ladies? Then pull.”

Topper, feeling strangely like a tattered rag doll, was snatched unceremoniously from his insecure perch, whisked through space, and deposited in another tree.

“God, Colonel,” he protested, “give me a moment’s warning the next time you do that. What do you think I am, a sort of flying squirrel? I feel so damn helpless I could gnash this tree to splinters. This is worse than dashing from pillar to post.”

“We’re saving your life for future taking,” said Marion, invisible on a neighboring limb; then, cupping her lips in her hand, she shouted, “Hey, you little dressed up runt! I’ll come down there and tweak your prying nose.”

“M’sieu,” called the gendarme, and even his distance from the treed Mr. Topper could not blunt the strained incredulity of his voice, “how did you achieve that impossible?”

“None of your business,” shouted Marion Kerby. “Your mother was the keeper of a house of ill fame, and that other little pig’s was an inmate. Shrug that off, you frog.”

Assured that they were not only being mocked by the effeminate voice of the man in the tree, but also grossly insulted, both gendarmes now discharged their revolvers in his direction. Topper was promptly and breathlessly transferred to another tree. Like a huge, overstuffed bat, the man floated helplessly through the forest.

“Listen,” gasped Mr. Topper, clinging desperately to a swaying limb, “you all toss me about from tree to tree altogether too carelessly. You seem to forget that I weigh in the neighborhood of one hundred and seventy-five pounds – that is, I did before I climbed up that damned pine. Since I’ve taken up tree-jumping I’ve lost considerable weight.”

“Nonsense,” replied Marion. “It’s good for you. Best thing in the world.”

“But not for my nerves,” retorted Topper. “If you’ll only put me down on solid earth I’ll take a chance with those two gendarmes.”

“Let’s all go down and beat them up,” suggested Marion. “I’m getting sick of them and their damn guns.”

“I’m terribly tired of it all myself,” said Topper, with marked sincerity. “I don’t like all this monkey business. If anyone had told me this morning that before night I was going to be flying madly from tree to tree, I’d have laughed scoffingly in his face.”

The implacable gendarmes had now taken up their stand beneath Topper’s third tree.

“M’sieu,” began the spokesman, “it is not seemly for a man to conduct himself in public as you are now doing.”

“Well, if you’d only go away,” called Topper, “I could continue to jump about these trees all by myself. Is there a law against tree-jumping in France?”

The gendarmes discussed this question for several minutes between themselves.

“M’sieu,” said one of them at last, “is it that you would be willing to descend and allow us to examine your person?”

“For what?” asked the startled Topper.

“For wings, perhaps,” suggested Marion.

“We wish only to observe you, m’sieu,” said the second gendarme. “One is of a desire to see how you do it.”

“In the customary manner,” shouted Marion.

“What do you think?” asked Mr. Topper of his unseen friends. “Should I trust those damn godarmes?”

“We’ll take you down,” replied the Colonel, “then stand by for trouble.”

Accordingly, Mr. Topper was taken down. That is, he was taken part of the way down. About fifteen feet from the ground the others seemed either to lose interest in what they were doing or to forget all about Mr. Topper – whatever it was, the results came to the same thing. Topper felt himself suddenly released. With a wild cry he descended heavily upon the upturned faces of the two gendarmes. When the three of them arose from the pine needles, Mr. Topper’s arms were firmly held by each of the officers he had unwittingly assaulted.

“Monsieur,” announced one gendarme, “it is that we must escort you to Monsieur le commissaire.”

“But no,” wheezed the half-stunned Topper. “It is that you will play no such dirty trick on me. The words of your mouth herself were that it was you who would effect the inspection.”

“That same thing has been effected,” replied the gendarme, “and we believe you to be mad without hope.”

“On what do you base such an opinion ridiculous?” asked Topper. “I’m without hope, I admit, but I’m not mad – not yet.”

“No man, m’sieu, in his sanity complete would flit from tree to tree only to hurl himself through space regardless of the consequences either to himself or to the gendarmerie of France. M’sieu, if you are not mad, you are possessed of a thousand devils.”

As the gendarme delivered himself of this belief the voice of an infuriated dog made itself heard in the forest. Topper took heart.

“Here comes one of those devils now,” he said, as the foaming head of Oscar burst through the undergrowth and flung itself into action. Positions were speedily reversed. From the tree Mr. Topper had so recently quitted, the two gendarmes looked down moodily on an animal that could be none other than the most pervertedly conceived of all the demons in hell.

“To the car!” commanded the Colonel in his best parade-ground voice. “Those birds will remember their guns in a moment and start in plugging at Topper.”

“Easy on that name, Colonel,” cried Topper as he dashed through the woods in the direction of the car.

Bullets followed his retreat, but they had been fired without much hope. The gendarmes were disconcerted because Topper had escaped like an ordinary human being instead of flapping batlike through the trees. The name had been, Toppaire. They would remember.

When the active little party was once more under way Mr. Topper asked a question.

“Are things,” he asked, “to be like this forever? What I mean is, are our nights to be devoted to orgies and our days given over to flight?”

“Give me my nightly orgy,” said Marion Kerby calmly, “and you can do what you want with your days.”

“I’d like to know how you spent your time when you were on a higher plane,” remarked Mr. Topper.

“Oh, I just went about trying to drum up sex among a lot of people who didn’t even know the meaning of the word,” Marion replied.

“Any luck?” asked Mrs. Hart.

“Not a chance,” said Marion. “I met one old duck who seemed to have some ideas. ‘Sex,’ he mused with a puzzled expression when I took up the matter with him. ‘Now, I wonder what’s familiar about that word.’ He paused for a moment, then broke into horrid, derisive laughter. ‘Oh, yes,’ he chuckled, ‘I remember now. Weren’t we the silliest things? Tell me, does that puerile practice still maintain?’ Well, you know, I felt quite silly myself for a while, then I got peeved. I told him that sex was making rapid progress, that it was even being glorified, and that without it there would be hardly any books and no moving pictures. ‘Wouldn’t that be nice,’ said he quite happily, the old dog. ‘Well,’ said I, just to show my independence, ‘a few chunks of sex round here would wake things up a bit. I’m going back where it comes from.’ The old guy was quite disturbed. ‘Don’t try to go bootlegging any of it on this plane,’ he said, ‘because you won’t find any customers unless you catch them when they first arrive. Don’t know how you ever came up in the first place. You’re a spiritual moron.’ ”

“Disgusting old thing,” said Clara Hart sympathetically. “In life, I’ll bet, he was a nasty man.”

“Hell,” remarked the Colonel. “Without sex there wouldn’t be any planes at all.”

“And I would be just as well pleased,” commented Topper. “If I’m ever arrested now I’ll spend the rest of my life in a dungeon.”

“We’ll come and visit you,” said Marion.

“If you want that drink,” he told her, “you’d better pull yourself and your friends together. I’m going to stop at the next place we come to, and I don’t care a damn if I am arrested. There won’t be any trees in jail.”

When Topper drove up before a roadside café his friends, stimulated by the prospect of a drink, had made decided improvements in their appearances. Here, restfully on a broad, pleasant veranda perilously poised above a chasm of rocks against which the waves tore themselves to tatters, they sat and sipped champagne, then settled down to drink in earnest. Gradually the nervous tension slipped from Mr. Topper. He felt at peace with the world. Why not? He had everything he wanted – Marion, the Mediterranean, lots of champagne, and no Mrs. Topper.

“Drink up,” urged the Colonel expansively. “This wine is on me.”

“Don’t worry,” Mrs. Hart tossed in, as women will inevitably at the wrong time. “The wine is on the three of us. Mr. Topper is our guest, of course, but the Colonel, there, he’ll take it out of our winnings. He’s the original pro-rater – the guy who invented that discouraging custom known as Dutch treating.”

Once more the Colonel attempted to look grieved, which was almost impossible for him in the presence of champagne.

“Would you ladies like a salad?” Mr. Topper inquired. “I don’t feel quite natural unless I’m paying for a little something.”

“I could nibble a bush of romaine,” replied Marion.

“Prefer that to endive?” he asked, thoughtfully studying the card.

“Too strong for me,” said Mrs. Hart. “I never could bear ducks’ eggs.”

“Who asked you to bear ducks’ eggs?” demanded the Colonel. “Leave that to the ducks. It’s their business.”

“How did we get on the subject of eggs and ducks?” asked Mr. Topper, a trifle confused. “Why not stick to salad? I wasn’t inviting you all to breakfast or dinner, although I’m perfectly willing. I’ll invite you to both if you feel like it.”

“I merely brought up ducks in connection with romaine salad,” Mrs. Hart explained.

“Romaine salad to a duck’s egg is like a red flag to a bull,” observed the Colonel profoundly.

“Bulls?” asked Mr. Topper. “Now, how on earth did bulls creep in?”

“Bulls don’t creep in,” said Marion. “Bulls bash in. Didn’t you ever hear of the well known bulls of Bashan?”

“I’ve heard a little about those bulls,” replied Mr. Topper, “but not much. Did they happen to like salad? Because if they didn’t I see no reason to take them up either.”

“Oh, hell,” said Mrs. Hart. “Let’s order ices. That will solve the whole problem. Things are getting too involved.”

“All right,” agreed the Colonel affably. “We’ll make it champagne.”

“Just the same,” pursued Topper, “I’d like to know more about those bulls of Bashan. Who did they ever pinch?”

“They didn’t,” replied Marion. “They just horned in.”

“That’s different,” said Mr. Topper in a pleased voice. “It makes everything even farther from satisfactory.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Disappearing Suicide

When Mr. Topper awoke the next morning he found himself in bed with a headless woman. Feeling already as if death would be a welcome release, the sight of his decapitated companion made him feel even worse. The fact that there was a definite declivity in the center of the neighboring pillow served only to heighten a situation that was already sufficiently unpleasant. Regular breathing and an occasional low moan issuing from the rim of this declivity added mental to the physical anguish the miserable man was already experiencing. Even the bare arms and shoulders so close to him lost something of their fascination as he reached out and roughly shook the unfinished body.

“Marion!” he said. “Wake up! And please do something about your head. Either add it to your body or add your body to it. My stomach is all upset.”

“I’ll claw your stomach to ribbons if you don’t quit that shaking,” were Marion’s waking words.

“Wish you would,” muttered Topper. “I could do without a lot of my stomach this morning. Don’t know where we are or how we got here. Last thing I remember was sitting on the veranda of some damn café discussing ducks and bulls.”

“You were very dull about those bulls,” remarked the pillow. “Guess you don’t even know where Bashan is.”

“Don’t even know where we are, I tell you,” said Mr. Topper irritably, “let alone where those bulls came from. Must be some queer place in New York like Goshen.”

“Both Bashan and Goshen are in Palestine,” Marion told him, “and that’s where the bulls came from.”

“Which, Bashan or Goshen?” asked Topper.

“Bashan,” replied Marion. “The bulls came from Bashan, but it’s quite possible that some of them settled in Goshen. They were wild, you know, those bulls that came from Bashan.”

“All bulls are wild to me,” said Mr. Topper. “Why did they ever come from Bashan in the first place? Didn’t they make out well there?”

“No mention is made of cows,” observed Marion.

“But where there’s a lot of bulls there should be a little cows,” concluded Topper.

“Perhaps that’s what made ’em wild,” observed Marion.

“What?” inquired Topper.

“No cows,” replied Marion.

“Then there must have been some cows, or at least a cow, in Goshen if – —”

“Will you shut up?” Marion interrupted. “You’re as drunk as a lord right now, or else you wouldn’t be giving one damn whether there were bulls in Bashan and cows in Goshen or whether the twain shall meet. Let’s go back to sleep.”

“Will you make a head, then?” asked Topper.

“No, I won’t,” snapped Marion. “I’ve got one hell of a headache from all that champagne.”

“Is that what you do when you have a hangover?” Topper inquired enviously.

“Yes,” answered Marion. “I get rid of my head and that leaves the ache high and dry.”

“You mean there’s nothing there to ache in?” asked Topper.

“God, how dull you are this morning! If you ask me another question I’ll do something desperate.”

“It’s desperate enough as it is, lying here looking at you,” replied Topper moodily.

“I’ve got everything else but a head,” retorted Marion with growing irritation. “Look at some other part.”

“That’s all right,” complained Topper, “but how would you like to have me lying here without any head?”

“I wouldn’t mind,” she answered. “Do you imagine I’m deriving any pleasure in looking into that besotted face of yours? If your fortune had depended on that mask you’d have been a little match girl years ago.”

“So you won’t make a head?” persisted Topper.

“No, I won’t make a head, you nincompoop.”

“Then will you pull the covers up over that pillow, and I’ll try to pretend it’s there?”

“That settles it!” exclaimed Marion furiously. “I told you to leave me alone. Now you’ll wish you had.”

Springing from the bed, she materialized her head, and clad as she was in a towering rage, she rushed to a French window through which, to Topper’s horror, she hurled herself, loudly shouting his name. Instead of hearing the thud of a falling body the man in bed heard the crash of an overturned chair just outside the window.

“Holy mackerel,” came the voice of Marion Kerby. “We’re on the ground floor.”

“Madam, you’re on my chest,” a gentleman replied indignantly. “I’m on the ground floor, or, rather, veranda.”

“A meticulous devil,” Mr. Topper observed to himself, in spite of his consternation.

“Sorry, mister,” he heard Marion saying. “Thought I was higher up. Wanted to commit suicide. My mistake.”

“Hope you succeed next time,” gasped the man.

Topper sneaked to the window and applied one timid eye to a slit in the curtain. What he saw was not reassuring. To all intents and purposes an overlarge, middle-aged gentleman was attacking an underclad, small young lady. It could have been the other way round, but the man in such affairs usually gets the blame. Numerous guests of the hotel were watching developments in an interested semicircle. Hotel factotums and officials were protesting in voluble French. Newcomers were arriving from all directions.

“Leave that brazen creature alone this instant!” cried a stout lady bursting through the crowd. “So this is why you were so anxious to come to France, is it? You’ll pay dear for your folly, believe me.”

Apparently the unfortunate gentleman did. Untangling himself from his fair obstruction, he left her flat on the veranda and got to his feet.

“My dear,” he began in a mollifying voice.

“Don’t stand there looking at her,” his wife cut in. “Why doesn’t someone throw something over the shameless thing?”

This suggestion was reluctantly acted upon. A man stepped leisurely forward and tossed a light overcoat over Marion, who had curled herself up into a small white ball.

“Madame,” said the manager of the establishment in perfect English, “will you be so kind as to withdraw now to your own room?”

No answer from the overcoat. The manager cleared his throat.

“Do you wish us to carry you there?” he assayed, at which question the overcoat appeared to shrink a trifle and shake a negative head.

Receiving no answer, the manager signaled to several servants, who stepped forward and laid eager hands on the garment. Their expectations were doomed to disappointment. The overcoat was empty. When they lifted it only the spot where the body had been was revealed. Gasps and ejaculations of amazement from the throng. The manager had turned quite pale. Nevertheless, he retained his presence of mind and command of English.

“Return the overcoat to the considerate gentleman,” he said. “This affair demands further investigation. It shall be made.”

Topper quietly closed the window and crawled unhappily into bed. Within a very few minutes a firm knock sounded on the door.

“Entrez!” called Mr. Topper.

The manager stepped into the room, quietly closing the door behind him.

“Good-morning, m’sieu,” said the manager. “Were you, by any chance, forced to eject a naked woman through that window a few moments ago?”

“Certainly not,” replied Mr. Topper indignantly. “I wouldn’t throw a naked woman out of my window. Waste not, want not, say I.”

The manager coughed delicately behind his hand.

“I can understand that,” he agreed, Mr. Topper thought a shade too readily. “Nevertheless, an unclad woman emerged but a moment ago with great speed through that window.”

The manager with a nod indicated the window through which Marion had hoped to commit suicide.

“For all I know, Earl Carroll’s Vanities could have been bounding in and out of that window all morning,” Mr. Topper calmly assured the manager. “I’ve been sleeping. You’re the first person I’ve seen today, and I’m not particularly glad to see you. Go away.”

“Yes,” came a woman’s quiet voice. “Why don’t you get the deuce out of here and give my husband a chance to get some sleep?”

Marion Kerby, in the stunning costume she had worn at the races, appeared gloriously in the bathroom door and stood looking coldly upon the manager.

“Madame,” he replied apologetically, admiration sharpening his eyes, “I ask a thousand pardons – —”

“Well, I don’t hand you one,” she cut in curtly. “What’s all this about windows and naked women?”

“One of them went through that window, madame,” the manager explained.

“Do you want a naked woman?” Marion demanded.

“But no, madame. That was not my intention,” protested the man.

“Then why do you come barging in here, putting ideas in my husband’s mind? You could have seen at a glance it isn’t any too strong. Anyway, you shouldn’t be looking for naked women at this time of day.”

“A mere matter of routine,” declared the manager. “You were not perhaps that woman, madame?”

“Do I look as if I’d just been thrown through a window?” Marion asked haughtily.

“On the contrary, madame,” the manager answered gallantly. “I only asked because she had such a glorious figure.”

Marion was looking seriously at Topper.

“Do you think we could have got ourselves into a bad house by mistake?” she asked him. “The things this man says.”

“I assure you, madame, this is a most respectable hotel.”

“And yet you make a practice of asking your guests for naked women – practically begging them for naked women. Call that respectable? Aren’t you able to get your own naked women? Must my husband turn procurer for your sake, may I ask? If there is going to be a naked woman in this room I’ll be that woman. Understand? And if I catch any of yours in here I’ll chuck them through that window, all right, but they’ll go out in pieces. Get me?”

Marion had backed the manager against the door, which he was vainly trying to open. At that moment a door opening into an adjoining room flew back and nobody stood on its threshold. A voice husky with wine and sleep was the very utmost the Colonel could achieve for the present.

“Ask him where we are and the name of his hotel,” said the Colonel. “Also what day it is and the time of day if any.”

It was then that the manager began to have grave doubts of his own sanity. Had constant association with so many tourists affected his mind? Several of his colleagues had gone that way. Was it now his turn? It seemed so. Had he not already seen this morning a naked woman who disappeared? And was he not now hearing voices?

“M’sieu,” he got out falteringly, “where is the one who speaks? I hear but I do not see him.”

Topper laughed falsely from his bed.

“That’s my friend,” he replied. “His voice has the most remarkable carrying quality. He should be a radio announcer. He’s in the next room, but one would swear he was right here, wouldn’t one?”

Swearing that one would, the manager, not forgetting to bow to Marion, hastily withdrew. Topper seized the telephone as soon as the man was gone.

“I want two pitchers full of whisky sours,” he told the bored clerk, “and a waiter who knows not only what place this is, but also the name of the hotel, the day and the time of day. All those things. Yes. And – —”

Marion snatched the telephone from his hand.

“And ask Monsieur le propriétaire, when you see him,” she said, “if he has found himself a naked woman yet. You understand? You would.”

She set the instrument down, then turned and considered Topper.

“My aged and fat,” she breathed. “I almost killed myself for you.”

“It very much looks,” replied Topper hopelessly, “as if one of those days have started again.”

“Isn’t it just too glorious!” said Marion. “And tonight the orgy, as usual.”

“Yes,” agreed Topper. “It’s just too damn rotten glorious for words. Can’t we do something about it? I yearn for a nice dull normal day. Why not go to the Muséum d’Océanographie and take a look at some fish for a change – that is, if we really are at Monaco?”

“Good idea, Topper,” the Colonel invisibly joined in. “Nothing like looking at fish to get one back to normal. They’re so indefatigably prolific. Think I’ll go now and do myself into a man.”

“And while you’re doing it,” suggested Topper, “I wish you’d do yourself into a less active man for a change. Can’t you make yourself into a little man, Colonel – a little old tired man with a tremendous respect for the law?”

“My self-esteem would not permit me,” said the Colonel.

“What’s Clara doing?” asked Marion.

“Last time I saw her,” replied the Colonel, “the lady was endeavoring to materialize from both ends at once. A quaint fancy. In one direction she had advanced as far as her knees, and in the other she had covered some pretty delicate territory.”

“Hope she makes an accurate joining,” observed Marion.

“That is most devoutly to be desired,” agreed the Colonel. “I shall hasten to apprise her of the unfortunate consequences resulting from any careless craftsmanship. We will join you upon the arrival of those pitchers of – er – sours.”

“You didn’t have to shout out my name when you flung yourself through that window,” said Mr. Topper to Marion as she lit a cigarette and curled herself up beside him on the bed.

“I know,” she answered, “but you see, I was not myself at the moment.”

“Then why make me myself?” asked Topper.

“That was the point of the whole suicide. I wanted everyone to know I had died because of you. Then you’d have been a marked man along the Riviera. Wherever you went people would have said, ‘Why women kill themselves over that American pig I can’t understand.’ ”

Topper winced.

“I’m a marked man already,” he replied. “In fact, I’m damn well striped. Don’t you think you all are behaving just a little bit like the Rollo Boys gone bad? This constant rollicking about is a trifle too varsity for me. If we must be depraved, why can’t we be so like sophisticated adults?”

“There’s too much sophistication in the world already,” Marion said quite seriously. “Too much cheap sophistication. It burns me up. Every damn thing is sophisticated and patronizing. Even the shop windows are arrogantly sophisticated – magazines, books, plays, conversation, and even bathrooms, all trying to be sophisticated and falling short of the mark. First thing you know girl babies will be born pregnant and the males will be carrying lilies in their hands.”

“You’re quite convincing,” admitted Topper, “but don’t you think your prejudices occasionally carry you a little too far in the opposite direction? For example, bouncing my hat up and down on my head, then bouncing me up and down on a chair, dragging me up to a bar, and whisking me from one tree to another – doesn’t it ever occur to you that such conduct is a trifle childish?”

“We do what amuses us at the moment,” replied Marion, “and not what we think may amuse others.”

“Especially me,” said Topper.

“Don’t pretend,” she told him, piling herself on his chest. “Secretly you’re amused all the time.”

“I’m not now,” he answered as a waiter knocked and entered with the tray and information.

“But the waiter is,” said Marion. “Those sours look swell.”

Promptly the Colonel appeared with Oscar, Mrs. Hart, and a French newspaper which he had ordered from the desk.

“Oscar,” he announced, “has already breakfasted from the trays of others momentarily and most carelessly left unguarded along the hall. He seems to have done quite nicely for himself.” Selecting a drink, the Colonel tossed it off with military precision. “I have been spelling out this French paper,” he resumed, “and as far as I can discover, everything seems to have been wrong with those races yesterday except the track itself. We could have torn up that, had we thought of it. Unfortunately, the paper gives quite an accurate description of your humble servant. ‘A man very distinguished and agreeable,’ it says, or words to that effect. It seems that I am wanted.”

“Is there a price on your head?” asked Marion eagerly.

“Not yet,” replied the Colonel, “but if there were I would not take either of you ladies into my confidence. The point is, it will now be necessary for me to assume a disguise whenever I appear in public. I have always wondered how I would go in a beard.”

“I hope you’d go away,” said Mrs. Hart. “That dust mop on your lip is bad enough to have swishing about the house.”

The Colonel chose to disregard this remark as being unworthy of notice.

He put down the glass, reached for the telephone, and summoned the head barber to his presence. Presently this one fragrantly arrived.

“I wish to be arranged becomingly in a beard,” the Colonel stated.

“Arranged?” repeated the barber, momentarily puzzled by the word, then his face cleared. “Do you mean, m’sieu, as if in death?”

“God, no, my man!” exploded the Colonel. “As if in life. Gallantly arranged like an officer and a gentleman.”

“You’re not looking for a disguise, Colonel,” observed Marion. “What you need is a reincarnation – an entirely new layout. That man’s merely a barber and not a magician.”

“Please be quiet,” said the Colonel.

After thoughtfully studying the Colonel’s face from all sides, the barber nodded several times to some secret reflection of his own.

“It doesn’t matter from what direction you look at it,” put in Mrs. Hart, “that face remains just as bad.”

“Clara, do be still,” protested the Colonel. “You’ll discourage the man.”

“He’s more than that already,” replied Clara. “That face has actually frightened him.”

Assuring the Colonel of the speedy fulfillment of his wishes, the barber hurried away and returned almost immediately.

“Didn’t take him long to grow it,” remarked Marion.

“M’sieu,” cried the barber, extracting a blue-black object from somewhere beneath his white apron, “it is here!”

“An odd place to wear it,” was Mrs. Hart’s comment.

“Ladies!” objected the Colonel. “Must you?”

“Most emphatically yes,” said Mrs. Hart. “If you appear in public with that thing on the end of your face, I’m going to blacken mine and wear a curtain ring on the tip of my nose.”

When finally the Colonel was arranged in the beard it looked neither gallant nor becoming on him. However, it did make him look different.

“Well, I must say,” pronounced Mrs. Hart, hastily reaching for another drink, “you’re an extraordinary-looking officer and a weird-looking gentleman. Why, you’re not even human!”

“Look at Oscar,” put in Marion.

Topper had thought he had seen the dog at his maddest, but never had he seen him wear such a completely gone expression as the one now torturing his face. As accustomed as he had become to the Colonel’s vagaries, Oscar was not prepared to meet his master’s eyes peering questioningly at him over the rim of that blue-black beard. With a low gurgle intended to convey profound mental agitation, the dog faded from view, for which he was roundly cursed by the incensed Colonel. The barber had long since departed. One look at the dog had been quite enough to speed him on his way. Like Oscar and the manager of the hotel, he, too, was prey to the gravest suspicions concerning his own mental stability.

When it came to a division of the previous day’s spoils, the Colonel insisted on wearing his newly acquired facial decoration, while both of the ladies, with equal vigor and many more words, insisted on the removal of this disconcerting object, Marion Kerby pointing out quite properly that the Colonel would be able to tuck God only knew how many francs behind such a bush. Pretending to be revolted by such a reflection not only on his integrity but also on his good taste, the Colonel was finally prevailed upon to permit Topper to distribute the money. When this had been done amid a breathless hush and in the presence of three pairs of burning eyes, Marion Kerby handed Topper her roll of bills.

“Keep ’em for me,” she said. “I don’t want any more bulges about my body than nature has already provided.”

“And you, my dear?” the Colonel inquired politely of Mrs. Hart.

“I’ll pad my legs twice their size,” she replied, “before I let you get your hands on these francs.”

“That would hardly be the way to go about it,” said the Colonel as he watched with peculiar intentness Mr. Topper’s hand slipping Marion’s share of francs into his right side trouser pocket.

Had Topper been able to intercept this glittering scrutiny of the Colonel’s he would have been able to spare himself and another gentleman several moments of acute embarrassment.

The unpleasant affair arose over a misunderstanding which was intensified by the unladylike conduct of Marion Kerby. It happened after luncheon. Topper and Marion were seated comfortably on the veranda when the latter’s after-eating placidity was disturbed by a slight twitching of his right side trouser pocket. In spite of the lulling influence of food and wine, Topper’s faculties were still sufficiently acute to reason out that under normal conditions his pockets did not twitch for the mere pleasure of twitching. No. His pocket was being twitched by some outside influence. He turned quickly and regarded his neighbor on the right, then turned away. He hated to believe the truth. Such a nice old gentleman with such an honest face. And to think that this old gentleman was no better than a thief. In fact, he was a thief, or would be soon if he had his way about it. Had Topper not seen a furtive movement of the old man’s clawlike left hand? Topper had, but what Topper did not know was that the old gentleman, in spite of the privileges accorded to age, still preferred to scratch himself as privately as conditions permitted. Had Topper known this, being a little precious about such things himself, his opinion of the old gentleman would have undergone a favorable change. No man who preferred to scratch himself in private would deliberately pick a pocket in public. As it was Mr. Topper took no definite action until several repetitions of the twitching warned him that Marion Kerby’s money was actually in peril. He then reached out and snatched at the old gentleman’s frantically moving hand.

“Why did you want to do that?” Topper demanded reproachfully, in a low voice.

“I couldn’t help it,” replied the old gentleman. “Stood it as long as I could.”

“You mean you’re a kleptomaniac?” asked Mr. Topper.

“I had to scratch,” whispered the other.

“You had to scratch my pocket?” inquired Topper, pointing to the money that was nearly falling out.

“Sir!” cried the old gentleman. “Are you trying to accuse me of stealing your money?”

“What!” shouted Marion. “My money?”

Then she hurled herself into action. With hands no less frantic than those of the old gentleman, she now proceeded to scratch him far more thoroughly than he had been able to scratch himself.

“Give me my money,” she kept repeating, “or I’ll claw the gold from your teeth.”

“Your money is safe,” Topper tried to assure her. “You’ll kill the old fellow.”

“Of course I’ll kill the old fellow,” replied Marion. “I’d kill a thousand old fellows and half that amount of young ones for the sake of those francs.”

At this moment the francs, slipping from Mr. Topper’s pocket, caused him to look down; then everything became clear. About three inches from the floor of the veranda dangled a blue-black beard. So absorbed had the Colonel become in his nefarious operations that he had forgotten the fact that he could not dematerialize his disguise. He must have been lying flat on his nebulous stomach endeavoring with all the craft and patience of his perverse nature to tease with the end of a knitting needle Marion’s francs from Topper’s pocket. Even as Topper looked, the end of this needle was coaxing the roll of money closer and closer to the sinister black beard.

Marion, releasing her hold on the old gentleman, followed the direction of Mr. Topper’s gaze. Then with a wild cry she dived head foremost over the body of her late victim and landed on the veranda with the beard clutched firmly in her hand.

A gasp of dismay fell from the Colonel’s unseen lips, after which the air became so shot with oaths, imprecations, and obscenities, it was impossible to decide whether Marion or the Colonel held the advantage. Fortunately Marion decided, but solely for tactical reasons, to dematerialize. Where a woman had once been, the numerous spectators now saw merely a beard and a heap of clothes busily engaged in calling each other the vilest of names. Presently the clothes arose, clutching a roll of francs, and followed the beard down the veranda.

“Get along there,” the clothes were heard to remark to the apparently cowed beard. “I’ll tell Clara Hart exactly what you tried to do, and if she lets you into her bed again I’ll never speak another word to her.”

It was difficult for the spectators to conceive of anybody letting that beard into bed even once, let alone again.

“But, Marion,” they heard the beard protesting, “hang it all, I was merely having a bit of a joke with Topper.”

“Ha! Ha!” laughed the clothes, so viciously that several persons present turned quite faint, especially when they saw the roll of francs being shaken in the air. “You’ll know better next time than to play jokes with my money and my man.”

Her man turned, and after mumbling an apology to the old gentleman, hurried away. The old gentleman followed his example, vowing to himself that in future, if he ever needed to scratch, he would make no effort to conceal his intentions. He would go even further than that. He would publicly announce them, so that there would be no possibility of mistake.

When Mr. Topper entered his room a few minutes later he was surprised and not especially delighted to be greeted by a burst of laughter. Marion, Mrs. Hart, and the Colonel, in the best of spirits, were seated round a bucket from which protruded the neck of a huge bottle. No longer content with quarts, they were now ordering magnums.

“What the hell,” began Topper, “was the meaning of that shameful brawl? Haven’t you any better sense – —”

But Topper never finished his sentence. Guiltily his three friends faded out. Only the occasional movement of a glass gave witness to the fact that they were there at all.

“Oh, all right,” he declared at last, getting no kick from scolding at space. “We’ll say no more about it. If you all are so downright low that you can forgive and condone deliberate theft and doublecrossing, I see no reason why I should complain. It would be useless.”

Topper had spoken the truth. Marion Kerby’s anger against the enterprising Colonel had quickly evaporated. He had offered her a bottle of wine, and when Mrs. Hart’s back was turned, slipped her a thousand francs. As the wine was charged to Topper and the francs had been detached in the scuffle from Marion’s own roll the Colonel felt he could well afford this amicable gesture. Furthermore, Marion was so lost to honesty herself that she appreciated rather than deplored the Colonel’s efforts to provide as handsomely for himself as possible. That he had failed so lamentably only added piquancy to the situation.

At Topper’s hopeless words the three of them agreeably appeared once more, the Colonel, with his unfailing courtesy, providing Mr. Topper with a glass of wine. Topper polished it off with an absent-minded flip, then sank wearily to the side of the bed.

“I feel as if I’d lived all of my life in Monaco,” he remarked, “so many things have happened.”

“Well, nothing more is going to happen now,” Marion Kerby assured him comfortingly. “We’re going to have a nice normal time. First you’re going to buy us a bottle of wine, and then we’re all going out and peer at a lot of silly-looking fish.”

“Can’t I go alone?” asked Topper wistfully. “I really would like to get a good look at all those fish and things.”

Cries of horror and incredulity escaped the lips of his companions.

“What!” exclaimed Marion. “We could never hear of such a thing. Who can tell what terrible things might happen to you alone?”

“I’d like to know what hasn’t happened to me already?” asked Mr. Topper hopelessly.

“There’s lots left unhappened,” was Marion Kerby’s reply.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Looking at a Lot of Fish

Mr. Topper never did get a good look at all those fish and things. However, he did manage to look at some fish, and that was more than enough.

On the way to look at these fish, the Colonel insisted on a momentary interlude at a pleasantly situated sidewalk café overlooking the harbor of Monaco. It was a stage setting valued at many millions of dollars, represented chiefly by yachts and the money expended on their upkeep. It was a heady sort of paradise in which the most expensive things seemed attainable in the smiling presence of the Goddess of Chance. Mr. Topper had a feeling that beneath it all something was being held in check – concealed from the eyes of the spectators. At first he had suspected something straining, desperate, and tragic, but as he sat there and looked about him he decided that the principal quality lying beneath the surface gaiety of Monaco was one of utter and abject boredom. He even went so far as to attribute the many suicides induced by the place simply and solely to that – insufferable ennui. People did not kill themselves because they had lost all their money, but merely because they were so tired of Monaco they did not have the strength to leave it any other way.

“I don’t know why I ever yielded to your entreaties,” declared Marion, squinting thoughtfully at him through the ice in her glass. “You’re such an old frump, Aunt Cosmo. And I don’t know why we ever came to this dump, either. If you took away those lovely mountains behind us and sank all those yachts out there, this town would be just a glorified Atlantic City, and the dear God knows, nothing could be worse than that.”

“Merely the difference between an old hooker in cotton tights and one in silk,” replied Mr. Topper. “And please, Marion, don’t do those things to your face. The passers-by will think you’re a half-wit or something. Furthermore, the only entreating I did was to entreat you to get out of my bed.”

“I must have missed my direction,” was Marion’s calm retort, “or got the signals mixed. It doesn’t matter one way or the other. Here we are.”

“And Monaco always gives me a feeling of unrest,” said Colonel Scott. “I was trying to explain it to Mrs. Hart, but the poor thing can’t understand. She likes it here because there are so many things to buy – so many useless, expensive things. As for myself, I’d feel more at home either in an old-time brothel or the cloister of a monastery, if you can get what I’m driving at.”

“I’m sure, Colonel, you’d do equally well in either setting,” Mr. Topper replied politely.

“He’d be more at home not in the cloister,” Mrs. Hart contributed in a bored voice.

“Monaco’s glamour fails to glam,” continued Marion. “It’s like a reformed prostitute looking at a peepshow through smoked glasses. When the exploitation of vice becomes perfected – all smooth and polished and refined – I begin to lose interest in vice itself. Of course, that doesn’t go where you are concerned, Topper, my stout fellow.”

“Well, you might as well lose interest in that, too,” said Mr. Topper. “I’m going to look at a lot of fish.”

More drinks followed, and more time was wasted, if such a thing is possible as wasting time at a sidewalk café. One by one Mr. Topper’s companions drifted away from the table. After that he either forgot all about them or they forgot all about him. It came to the same thing. Topper found himself alone. It was the psychological moment to look at a lot of fish. He did not give one snap of his fingers for his friends. To prove this he tried to snap his fingers. No sound came. That did not matter either. Probably very important persons were unable to snap their fingers. He called the waiter and endeavored to show him how he, Topper, could not snap his fingers. As luck would have it, this time they snapped smartly. Nodding his head moodily, he left the place and hailed a cruising Victoria.

“Fish,” he muttered tersely but inclusively to the driver. “Chez poisson.”

“M’sieu,” inquired the driver, “is it that you would buy of fish, or do you refer to some particular fish, perhaps?”

Mr. Topper thought this over.

“I do not know any particular fish,” he replied, somewhat sadly, “nor do I want to buy any fish. Just fish is all I ask. Let me see some of them.”

The driver shrugged, as French drivers will. He gazed patiently over the harbor, and prepared himself to wait until this inebriated American had settled in his own mind just what he wanted to do about fish. Mr. Topper was seized with the fear that between them he and the driver might make a mess of this business and that in the end he would see no fish at all. In spite of his mental agitation all he could say when he stepped into the Victoria and next addressed the driver was merely, “Fish.”

The driver shrugged again and drove Mr. Topper off to the fish market. Here he turned in his seat and looked inquiringly at Topper’s face to see his reactions to these fish. Utter hopelessness was registered on Mr. Topper’s face. He shook his head and wiggled his hands in a fashion which to him was eloquently fishlike.

“Not dead fish,” he told the driver reproachfully. “I do not desire to look upon the remains of a lot of dead fish. Behold, man, I want fish that go vite.”

Mr. Topper’s hands darted out at the driver, who ducked just in time. It looked very much as if the man in the Victoria were attempting to hypnotize the man on the box. The driver alighted and held an animated conversation with a group of prospective fish eaters. Much argument and even more scrutinizing. Tolerantly amused glances were directed at Mr. Topper. He hated all this exceedingly. Presently a gendarme approached and looked inside Topper’s passport as if hoping to find some fish concealed between its pages. Then, after a few hurried words to the driver, he strolled away, leaving Topper wistfully gazing after him. Thereupon the driver returned to his place of duty and smiled reassuringly at Mr. Topper.

“M’sieu,” he cried, “we march! It is that I know now. You want to see some fish. We go.”

Topper smiled back feebly.

“I don’t know whether I do or not,” he replied. “I grow more than a little fatigued with fish.”

He sighed and leaned back in the carriage. This was like everything else in a foreign land. One had to work so hard to get any place that one was too tired and upset to enjoy it when one got there. Sightseeing was a demeaning occupation. He would abandon fish.

On his way back to the hotel he stopped at a sidewalk café to refresh himself and brace his nerves. Here he sat looking at the harbor and wondering what all those tourists debarking from an ocean liner were going to do with their time, money, and expectations. He hoped they would never see a fish wearing a blue-black beard. For a while they were going to have a pretty confused and anxious time of it, he decided. Preoccupations with details would make them forget they were in Europe at all. Luggage would vanish, husbands get drunk, children lost, hotels be misunderstood, food suspected, and the customs of the country severely criticized, before they would settle down to the fact that they were not having a particularly good time, but that, after all, they really were abroad, which was more than their neighbors at home could say. There was a kick in that, at any rate. Then there would always be the solace of picture postcards. Nothing like those things to get one back to good solid ground. After one had sent a flock of these garish missives home one felt as if one were really beginning to get to know the country a bit. They were the lowest common denominator of foreign travel. So thought Mr. Topper over his several drinks. He began to feel sorry for fish and tourists alike. His sympathy even embraced his missing companions, including the rump of Oscar, or his head. They were so bad, the lot of them – such terrible companions. Marion probably needed a dress. He himself needed evening clothes. He would arise now and purchase things with a large hand. If he bought enough garments, some of them might fit somebody.

When Topper eventually returned to his hotel, several attendants followed his progress bearing packages in their arms. He had bought enough clothing to costume a small musical comedy. He bathed, shaved, drank a bottle of cool wine, then sent for a valet. When the man arrived Topper considered him in silence.

“Do you speak English?” he asked at last.

“But, yes, m’sieu,” answered the man. “Of a perfection.”

“That would be too good for me,” replied Topper. “I wouldn’t understand you. Just get some of these clothes on my body, and we’ll call it square. Hand me that glass first. I’m mentally and physically exhausted. Are you ever that way?”

“After arranging some of my gentlemen for their evenings,” replied the valet, “I am frequently unable to enjoy those of my own.”

“I can well understand that,” said Mr. Topper, “after looking at some of the nervous wrecks littering up this coastline.”

“I do not understand why they come here,” went on the valet, deftly flicking Topper’s legs into a pair of trousers. “Each year I see them older and wearier and their women younger and fresher. Money can make much of life, m’sieu, but there comes a time when even the youngest of mistresses cannot renew youth itself.”

“I dare say you’re right,” said Topper somewhat sadly, catching sight of his own face in the mirror. “There comes a time, doesn’t there, my friend?”

“Like a thief in the night,” replied the valet.

“Well, thank God, we have a few more nights left,” was Mr. Topper’s answer to this.

In a none too festive frame of mind, Mr. Topper dined alone that night. In spite of the simple dignity of the meal he had to confess he missed his friends. In their rooms were the various presents he had bought them. He wished they had been there to receive them. It would have been nice to see them open the packages. Topper’s mind was essentially simple. Unexpectedly his thoughts were interrupted.

“Listen to me, you,” came a voice, pitched in a low, furious key. “I’m not dining with you tonight. I doubt if I ever eat again. You’ve actually sickened me, you have. How much money did you spend for all those things upstairs? Don’t lie, mind.”

“Not much, Marion. Only several thousand francs. Why?”

“Not much,” gasped the voice. “Several thousand francs. Oh, God, do You hear this man? All of that money wasted when we could have stolen these things without the loss of a franc. It’s a crime before Heaven.”

“But, my dear,” protested Topper, “would not that have been stealing and isn’t stealing a crime?”

“No, you ninny, that would not have been stealing and stealing isn’t a crime when you steal from thieves.”

“There’s something in that,” propitiated Topper.

“Bet your boots there is,” said Marion. “And even if there wasn’t, do you want to know what we’re going to do?”

“I’d rather not,” replied Mr. Topper. “Your voice doesn’t sound any too agreeable.”

“I’ve made a list of all those shops that robbed you,” Marion went on. “The three of us are going right back and get ours, good and plenty.”

“Don’t do that,” protested Topper. “I don’t want the money.”

“Then we’ll keep it ourselves just as we had intended to do all the time.”

“I thought you might like the things,” he mumbled. “Some of them, at any rate. Aren’t any of them any good?”

Suddenly he felt two lips brush lightly across his wrist. Topper was so startled, his fork clattered against his plate.

“Thanks for that flame-colored gown,” a voice murmured in his ear. “I’ll try to pour myself into it, but with you around I can’t tell from one minute to the next how long I’ll stay poured. See you later.”

Much to Mr. Topper’s embarrassment, his head was jerked back at an awkward angle and his mouth was resoundingly kissed.

“Oh! I could tear you to pieces,” a woman’s voice exclaimed.

“You almost have,” he muttered.

When Marion had left, the man she could have torn to pieces kept his eyes fixed on his plate. He strongly suspected that the waiter, who was, in truth, looking at him with a puzzled expression, was thinking him slightly daft. Topper wondered how he could explain to the man in French that occasionally he talked to himself in English just to keep from forgetting his native tongue. Topper abandoned the idea. It was altogether too involved. As he made his way through his solitary repast he thought about Marion Kerby. He might just as well be married to her the way she went on about things. And he was seldom comfortable with her, yet never quite himself without her. Both ways, she was a lot of trouble. Affection was the thief of freedom. Love lowered a man’s morale.

His dinner finished, Topper took a cab to the Casino, where he strolled from room to room, wondering how so many people could lose so much money and still retain their reason. Perhaps they were mad already. That was why they were there.

Finding a vacant place at a table, he sat down. For the next fifteen minutes he made mildly inquiring bets, until his modest stack of chips had been unemotionally collected by an apparently self-refrigerating croupier.

It was at this moment that Mr. Topper noticed for the first time that a gentleman on his right seemed to be consumed with a timid desire to make him a little present. A stack of chips from the man’s pile was unobtrusively edging its way along the table. With increasing annoyance Mr. Topper watched the chips furtively slide in his direction and take up a position in front of him.

“Thank you,” said Mr. Topper, a trifle haughtily, “but I’m not as desperate as you seem to imagine. I can still afford to pay for my own chips.”

With this he returned the chips to the gentleman and bought a new stack for himself. The gentleman considered the returned chips, a puzzled expression on his face, then looked long at Mr. Topper.

“My dear sir,” he began, “ill-fortune must have addled your brain. I have not attempted to give you any of my chips. Furthermore, I have no intention of giving you any of my chips.”

“Then why did you push them at me?” asked Mr. Topper.

“Me push my chips at you?” laughed the gentleman unpleasantly. “What sort of man do you think I am?”

“One moment,” replied Mr. Topper.

He was too busy to continue the conversation, all his efforts being directed toward fighting off the chips of the lady at his left. Her whole pile was moving with determination in his direction. Extending his left hand, he tried to push the chips back. For this his hand was sharply rapped by the lady.

“Madame,” he muttered, “don’t do that. Your chips – do something about them.”

“No fear,” replied the woman. “I’ve sat by your kind before.”

Between the hostile eyes of his two neighbors Mr. Topper sat uncomfortably and blindly resumed his betting. A few minutes later a man’s hand came within the vision of his eye. It seemed to be struggling with a stack of chips.

“I warn you,” came the gentleman’s voice. “Stop trying to sneak my chips. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“Me sneak your chips?” gasped Topper, giving the man’s chips a violent shove. “Don’t be ridiculous. I – —”

A flank attack from the chips on his left forced him to turn sharply. The lady’s chips were once more on the march. Topper gave them an impatient shove, but the chips stubbornly resisted his efforts.

“What’s this?” demanded the woman in a tired, metallic voice. “After my chips again. Is this some new racket? Trying to grab my chips, then pretending I gave them to you?”

Topper could not reply. A scraping of chips from the right attracted his attention. Both of his hands were now occupied in resisting the generous impulses of his neighbors. The onlookers gained the impression that Mr. Topper was endeavoring violently to extract chips from two players at once.

“This is most embarrassing,” he managed to get out. “Are you both deliberately trying to frame me? Please keep your chips to yourselves.”

“I don’t know how you are doing this thing,” gritted the man, “but doing it you are. Take your hand off my chips.”

“I’m afraid to,” replied Topper, breaking out in a gentle sweat. “Suppose you hold onto them for a change.”

At this moment a stack of chips came swooping gracefully across the table from a sallow-faced individual seated directly opposite Topper. It looked as if the man had either lost all patience or else was endeavoring to outdo the others in generosity. Topper, releasing his hold on the stacks of chips to the left and right of him, endeavored to repel this frontal attack. Too late. The three piles of chips ducked under his guard and clashed noisily together in front of the mortified man.

“I’m sure I thank you all,” began Mr. Topper with a sick smile.

“How did you do that?” interrupted the individual from across the table. “I’ll give you those chips if you tell me how.”

“I didn’t,” cried Mr. Topper. “You must have hurled them at me.”

“If he can gather money as easily as all that,” observed a gentleman sitting next to Sallow Face, “why does he trouble to come here?”

“He should be picked up,” said a woman maliciously.

“And chucked in,” added a man.

“I assure you,” began Mr. Topper, then his voice trailed away.

Piles of chips were now advancing upon him from several different directions. Topper felt not unlike Alice being attacked by the pack of cards. He was afraid that at any moment the chips would begin to fight their way into his pockets. With cool, penetrating eyes the croupier sat and regarded the scene. He earnestly desired to discover how all this was being done. Around the table various players were struggling with their chips, which were leaping at Mr. Topper like frantic fish.

“For God’s sake, cut it out,” muttered Topper passionately to the air about him. “Don’t you realize they’ll pull me in?”

He rose from the table and looked about him at the bewildered faces of the players.

“Sorry,” he said in a strained voice. “If you insist on giving your chips away, you’ll have to give them to someone else.”

As if in answer to this, the wheel suddenly started in to spin rapidly of its own accord. And with this the frigidity of the croupier melted as if seared by the flames of hell.

“Mille tonnerre!” the man exclaimed, striving to restrain his eyes. “The play is at an end.”

He endeavored to arrest the speeding wheel. It hesitated, momentarily, then hurried with renewed vigor on its way.

Topper turned from the table, leaving the chips of the players as well as their nerves in a sadly confused condition. The croupier removed his fascinated eyes from the wheel long enough to signal to an attendant. From that time on Mr. Topper’s movements were followed by the unobtrusive eyes of several professional observers. Fearing the chips might begin to follow him about the place, Topper collected his hat and stick and left the Casino. On the steps there was a brief and intense struggle. Unseen hands were trying to hold him back. Topper resisted furiously. Witnesses of the scene were both amused and alarmed to see a middle-aged gentleman, faultlessly dressed, dodging this way and that, as if endeavoring to elude his own shadow.

“I won’t go back!” they heard him mutter. “Damned if I will. You’ll have to carry me in. I’ll lie down right here in the street.”

But what surprised the witnesses even more than this seemingly fruitless quarrel with himself was the inexplicable presence of a beard – just that, a beard, an agitated blue-black beard that looked for all the world as if it were trying to whisper in the ear of the gentleman in evening clothes. With frantic hands Topper kept trying to push the beard away.

“Don’t!” they heard him mutter several times. “I can’t stand that beard. If you’ve anything to say, speak out.”

“All right,” came the Colonel’s voice from space. “If he won’t go back he won’t go back. That’s all there is to it. We can’t carry him in and dump him on one of the tables.”

“Then drag him along,” said a woman’s voice.

The witnesses then saw the middle-aged gentleman depart through the night in a peculiar slanting fashion. His feet were swinging behind him and were barely touching the ground.

“Mad as a hatter,” remarked a man to his momentary mistress. “No doubt his losses have unhinged his reason.”

“Well, that’s no reason why he should try to unhinge mine,” the woman complained fretfully as momentary or age-old mistresses will. “Let’s give this place a miss and confine ourselves to drinking. My feet hurt.”

“Put me down,” Mr. Topper was crying aloud to darkness. “Let me walk. It’s these exasperating little things that get the best of me.”

He was allowed to walk back to his hotel, from which the manager for various reasons too painful to mention asked him to remove his party in the morning.

“We’ll wreck the damn place before then,” a woman’s voice was heard to remark as the manager turned away.

However, this never occurred. Half an hour later four beautifully uniformed gendarmes escorted Topper and his jeering companions over the border into France.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Sanctuary

“As for me,” weightily pronounced Monsieur Dalmas, the small French avocat as he daintily replaced his empty glass among the domesticated flies on the evil-looking table top, “as for me, Monsieur Toppaire, I admire America greatly. In fact, I might even say that I am my country’s most passionate friend of your country.”

“M’sieu,” replied Mr. Topper, regarding the little man with mild alarm, “I did not know matters had gone as far as that.”

“They have,” said Monsieur Dalmas moodily. “Matters have advanced to that stage – even beyond.”

“You are amiable, m’sieu,” Mr. Topper assured him. “Also your heart is huge. As for me, I am no less inarticulately enamored of your fair country.”

The two gracious gentlemen were seated in a little combination café and épicerie situated on the fringe of a pine forest which overhung the sea. Here in this quiet country settlement Topper had at last found sanctuary. Already the owner of the grocery-store-café loved him well. Likewise did the owner’s wife, her two sons, her one daughter, and their tiny but voluble grandmother. It was Sunday – a day reverenced by the French because enjoyed with a light heart – and the bare, unpicturesque room of the café contained a small cross section of France. There were country folk gathered from the neighboring farms and vineyards, fishermen and fishermen’s wives absent a moment from their nets, friends and relations drawn from the resort towns along the coast to visit for the day. And there was a sprinkling of soldiers and sailors, in constant demand by the French maidens, who danced, drank, laughed, and sweated, fought and made love, with impartial enthusiasm. There were children and dogs and a number of incredibly aged yet animated men and women. Some sinister-looking characters were present, many attractive ones, and an equal number of dull ones. Much excitement but little actual inebriety. There was too much concentrated thrift as well as poverty present in the room to permit of that indulgence.

Marion Kerby was dancing meaningless twirls with a confusingly nimble sailor. Her expression was surprised, amused, and a trifle strained. Mr. Topper preferred not to look at them. He preferred, rather, to drink with Monsieur l’avocat, a delightful little gentleman who spent most of his sober hours in knitting intricate little nets for the retention of even littler fishes. Needless to say Monsieur l’avocat was not knitting now, nor had he been for some time past. For the moment the little fish were free from the peril of his nets.

“But, Monsieur Toppaire,” the old man resumed, “I am much fonder of America than you can achieve for France. Is it not so?”

“No, it is not so,” said Topper promptly. “And don’t be silly, Monsieur Dalmas. You, sir, loathe America in comparison with the intensity of my emotion for France.”

“What then should we do about it?” demanded the lawyer a little hopelessly. “Or should we do anything at all except order fresh drinks?”

“How about exchanging countries?” suggested Mr. Topper, for lack of anything better to say.

“An excellent idea,” replied the little lawyer solemnly. “But what would our respective countries have to say to such a high-handed procedure?”

“Our respective countries would remain agreeably silent,” Mr. Topper continued. “We will exchange them secretly, without their knowledge and only between ourselves.”

“You mean,” said the small Frenchman, “we will do nothing to the countries – make no attempt to move them like—?” He ended his sentence by vaguely waving his hands across each other.

Mr. Topper thought deeply.

“No,” he said at last, “that would be too difficult. One can hardly move countries in secret.”

“Then is it that I can now consider myself entirely American?” asked Monsieur Dalmas eagerly.

“It is,” replied Mr. Topper, wondering how he had ever got himself so deeply involved in this profitless subject. “And as for me, I am French to my finger tips.”

“And is it that you feel changed, m’sieu – different, perhaps?” asked the lawyer.

“Thirstier,” reflected Topper briefly, as indeed he was.

“Then you are of a full truth French,” declared Monsieur Dalmas. “And for the reason that I feel even thirstier than that, I must be typically American.”

Fresh glasses were ordered and speedily dispatched. It was a hot day, and the room was growing increasingly more crowded. The automatic piano jangled viciously through its four-piece repertoire.

“I shall sail for America within the week,” the little lawyer continued contentedly. “It will be nice to return home, although I love your France.”

Mr. Topper was truly alarmed by this turn of affairs. If Monsieur Dalmas started in to proclaim how much he loved Mr. Topper’s France, and Mr. Topper were in turn forced to declare how deeply he admired Monsieur Dalmas’s America, the conversation might continue on forever. In spite of this possibility, Mr. Topper answered almost sadly.

“I don’t think I’ll venture abroad this year,” he said. “My place is right here in France.”

The lawyer nodded comprehendingly.

“Yes,” he replied. “Your country needs you now.”

“But you will write?” Mr. Topper inquired.

“Assuredly, m’sieu,” said the other. “We shall both write constantly.”

“What about?” asked Mr. Topper.

“About the ineffable beauties of our respective countries,” replied Monsieur Dalmas.

“And the one who succeeds in making the other homesick wins,” said Mr. Topper.

“And I dare say you consider yourselves no end humorous,” broke in the voice of Marion Kerby. “I’ve been listening to a lot of this – too much of it, in fact.”

“Does she go with the exchange?” inquired the little lawyer hopefully.

Marion looked at him pityingly.

“You, Monsieur Dalmas,” she observed, “had better go back to your little fish and your tatting.”

Topper laughed at Marion’s disgusted expression.

“You’re a fine pair of olds,” she said. “I am going to take this one out for a walk.”

“I would very much like to accompany you,” put in Monsieur Dalmas earnestly. “Monsieur Toppaire can point out to me the unique charms of his country. It is so helpful to a foreigner.”

“You’ve both driven each other cuckoo, if you ask me,” replied Marion. “But come along, and just to make you feel at home I’ll play I’m a Siamese twin.”

After a few more rounds of drinks Marion led her two men from the café after having first shaken hands with the patron, who stood looking after them admiringly.

Taking a path through the pines, they wound downward towards the sea. They came upon it in a quiet place where rocks were, and the murmurous washing of waves – waves rising and receding and rustling among the rocks. A breeze dipped in spray moved about this place – this little pine-framed cove – and made it cool. It was pleasant here, and quiet. A good place to rest in and to recapture one’s self after a little too much grog. The pocket edition of French jurisprudence lay down and promptly fell asleep. Topper, after a slight struggle, followed his example. Marion aired her slim legs and considered the Mediterranean. Then she looked at the two men and thought them little better than dogs – an old dog and a middle-aged dog, both pleased with their own conceits. Idly she wondered what other women thought of when they had both the chance and the inclination to think at all. Perhaps they were, like her, appalled by the scanty realization of the abundant promise of life. Even the fullest of lives was two thirds of the time empty, alone, and discontented. The technique of living itself had been neglected.

In a world so rich that every human being in it could lie on his back half the day and watch the clouds roll by, why was it that only a handful enjoyed the leisure to travel and to sample a little of the diversity of life? Here were two sleeping sots who had spent nine tenths of their lives at work, and yet only small chunks of happiness had been vouchsafed them. Not desperate characters, either of them, yet the necessity to work according to their lights had probably forced them to do more harm than good to their fellow men along the way. Not a pleasant thought, that – the evil unconsciously created through the operations of the economic system. Yet you could not laugh it off. The very facts of a man’s success were some other man’s skids to failure, discouragement, and warped thoughts. Marion decided that every man should have the right to fail in his own peculiar way. If failure were not penalized by economic and social oblivion, more men would attempt the impossible and attain it. Neither success, nor strength, nor power should be the standards by which life was measured, for in themselves they were meaningless units devoid of any inherent or lasting value. And all this business about vice and virtue took up altogether too much time. God kept silent, perhaps, merely because He was ashamed of the various things His side had said both for and about him. A person who tried hard to be good and one who worked hard to be bad were wasting a lot of effort to arrive at the same end – disillusionment. There was not enough silence in the world, and not enough honest laughter, laughter straight from the belly. Sex should be taken out and aired and given a clean bill of health. It should be put on a self-supporting basis. There should be public sex parks as well as athletic parks. “Fields for friendly frolics,” she said half aloud.

“What?” exclaimed Mr. Topper, suddenly sitting up.

She looked near-sightedly at him and smiled.

“Nothing,” she said. “You’re too gross to understand. I was thinking of a lot of lonely, ingrown men and women made so through the absence of a little band of gold.”

“I can think of a lot who are made so through its presence,” replied Mr. Topper.

“Are you speaking to me as a Frenchman or as an American?” demanded Marion.

“As one who has suffered,” answered Topper.

“Wonder what the Colonel and Mrs. Hart are doing?” she mused, suddenly changing the subject.

“Something cheerfully sinful, no doubt,” he told her.

“They’re nice people,” said Marion. “The world at least gets a kick out of their wickedness as some call it.”

“I get a great deal more than a kick,” replied Mr. Topper.

The Colonel and Mrs. Hart had departed on one of their customary side tours. For a week they had remained with Marion and Mr. Topper in this isolated place, then life had begun to pall, and they had gone with warm assurance of their speedy return. Topper had seen no reason to doubt their word. They always had returned – most calamitously. Two weeks had now elapsed, and the pair were still away. During their absence Topper had spent one of the happiest periods of his life.

From Monaco, their paradise, well lost, they had reached this place late the following night, after a day of riotous feasting along the way. Finally, taking a winding road that twisted among the hills, they had come upon a small hotel that seemed to have gone to sleep after waiting in vain for guests. The party of four heaven-sent customers, and the dog whose original point of departure was a little less well considered, were received with gracious good-nature even at that late hour, and provided with the best of rooms, wine, and service. From the first Topper felt that he had come home. There was an atmosphere of rest, comfort, and cleanliness about the place. Monsieur Poccard, his son, and the little maid of all work seemed sincere in their desire to please. Even the cook went out of his way to divert and edify the guests. He displayed before them rare but inexpensive dishes and occasionally wet them with a hose he seemed to enjoy squirting when not clattering about in his kitchen. The four of them had the place entirely to themselves, with the exception of Monsieur Dalmas, the little lawyer who spoke English, and an elderly French widow who appeared perfectly satisfied with a phonograph for her sole companion. Occasionally Monsieur Poccard would play to them on the piano, and on these occasions the son, to show his own goodwill, would sing. There were times when the two Poccards would sing all at once, and these times were quite awful. Stout operatic pieces sang the Poccards, with occasional surprising bursts into capricious Italian street songs. When it was over one felt thoroughly beaten yet strangely lighter of heart. One could not help feeling affectionately disposed towards two persons who must have done so much injury to their interior organs for the sake of giving pleasure to others.

The first night Mr. Topper slept deeply in a room that breathed with pines. Far below was the sea, and he could feel its presence, while above, quite close to his head, were the stars and a kindly God who kept the human touch by walking at night through vineyards and forests of silent pines. There was a path that made a short cut to the sea and the rocks, and Topper came to know this path intimately every foot of the way. Not so Mrs. Hart or the Colonel. They tried it once, then found excuses for staying at home. Once they had discovered the possibilities of the little grocery-café, they found staying at home not difficult to bear. Topper and Marion could stand a lot of silence and both of them could gaze on leagues of sea. For those two reasons, if for none other, they could stand a lot of each other’s company. They felt no need to be entertaining – no strain for words. They merely lived and allowed time to take a ride for itself. They existed like a couple of pleasantly domesticated beasts amid congenial surroundings. Topper sent for his mail to be forwarded and learned about Mrs. Topper from herself, than whom there could be no better authority. Also, he learned about himself from the same source but failed to consider it reliable. He was a happy man, and to prove it he gave Colette, the trifle of a maid, sufficient money to purchase the liberty of her sweetheart, who was in unproductive durance for having mangled a sailor person who just previously had attempted to mangle Colette, but with a much more friendly intent.

Yes, Topper was happy, and Topper was free from care. Deprived of the example of her two associates, Marion settled down to a normal humdrum existence not entirely devoid of its romantic flavor. They walked long miles and looked thoughtfully at the gloomy remains of the Roman occupation. Here, in the shadow cast by an abandoned stone quarry filled with a smooth, mysterious body of motionless water, they ate bread and cheese and drank wine from bottles cooled in the water of the quarry.

Occasionally they visited the open-air movies at night, at which Marion saw pictures that had been passé even before she and George had hit the fatal tree. The French translations of the American idiom were a source of endless wonder and delight, being the best part of the evening’s entertainment.

They swam much, drank a little, and ate whatever they could, supplementing the meals served by the hotel with purchases of cheese and crackers from the little épicerie. Most of the time they were hungry, yet all of the time contented. Moments of unease would come to Topper, moments in which he looked into an empty future in which there was no Marion – no companionship in life. And there were times when he caught her looking at him with a peculiar glitter in her eyes that made him extremely uncomfortable. On one occasion he found her in bed with a long-bladed knife she had stolen from the kitchen, and on another he turned round just in time to prevent her from crashing a large rock down on his unprotected head. She laughed it off by saying that she had simply intended to startle him. Topper joined in her laughter, but his sounded a trifle strained. Frequently she tried to induce him to dive from high places into shallow, rock-speckled water, and several times she had playfully endeavored to push him through his window or to lure him girlishly across the path of a speeding motor truck. Once, while lunching amid the Roman ruins, he had actually been forced to cling to a tree with one hand while furtively snapping at sandwiches held in the other, to prevent himself being hurled into the black waters of the quarry many feet below. When he inquired the exact nature of her intentions she told him bitterly that if he was only partially a gentleman he would jump into the damn place himself.

“Not while eating luncheon,” said Mr. Topper. “I’m not a gentleman when I’m hungry.”

Marion pelted him with her sandwiches and drank up all the wine out of sheer spite. These little incidents occurred so casually and were so deftly explained away that Topper had not the temerity to question Marion seriously about them. Nevertheless, like Agag, he walked lightly by her side, watched his step carefully, and never allowed her to get behind him in dangerous places. One would think that this sort of watchful existence might have ruined Mr. Topper’s nerves, not to mention marring his tranquillity. Such was not the case. Topper’s nerves had already been ruined, and he derived a certain grim satisfaction in quietly observing Marion’s vexation whenever he prevented her from murdering him. However, it must be admitted that the situation was somewhat unusual, although, when understood, rather piquant.

Women have killed men to keep other women from having them, but here was a woman attempting to murder her lover in order to keep him with her. It would have been hard to explain.

On the day following their arrival Mrs. Hart discovered a traveling merry-go-round and brought her companions to see it. The hour was still early, yet the owner of the contraption, with an eye to business and effective publicity, induced the four of them to mount solemnly upon the most insecure-looking horses. No sooner were they astride than the mendacious owner set his machine to march at a furious pace; then, collecting a crowd of amazed men, women, and children, he pointed to his customers painfully revolving through space and proceeded to make a speech. He assured the gaping multitude that these so rich Americans had been so struck by the nobility of his horses, the luxury of his machine, and the fairness of his prices, that they had virtually fought their way into the saddle and threatened him with bodily hurt did he not promptly set his supreme equipage in motion. Topper’s panting implorations to stop the damn thing from marching were lost in the applause of the crowd.

“They think we’re American cowboys,” cried the Colonel above the din. “This thing is a misery-go-round.”

“I’m an American tragedy,” called Mr. Topper, clinging to his hateful mount and wondering about the damage that was being done him.

He caught a glimpse of Marion’s wild eyes and flashing teeth peering back at him over her shoulder. The sight of her taut body jouncing busily on an apparently insane horse was nearly enough to make him lose his grip. He wondered if he too looked as utterly foolish as she did. Finally, Topper in desperation hurled the owner a handful of francs. This one pounced on the money and turned a radiant face to the crowd.

“Regard!” he cried. “They enjoy it. They even demand more. Will they never stop? What people!”

And with this he sprang at a handle and gave it a vicious tug. So fast did the horses speed with this encouragement that Topper virtually lost consciousness. All knowledge of time and space grew vague. He felt sure he was foaming at the mouth. To make matters worse, he had the bitterness to see his companions fading one after the other from the backs of their cavorting mounts. He was alone with his sorrow, his so great misery. Had Topper been able to lay hand on the owner of the fiendish machine he would have pulled the man’s tongue out by the roots, or whatever it is tongues have at the end of them.

“They have gone!” he heard the owner cry, some hours, it seemed, after the departure of his friends. “This is strange. I must arrest its progress and search. Perhaps they are in the wheels. If so – —” The man shrugged his sentence to its horribly unuttered conclusion.

The merry-go-round came to an end, but Topper, for some moments, was unable to part from his horse. When he did so it was weakly and with the step of an aged and crippled man. At the moment he was not strong enough to do anything to the owner. The tongue part would have to come later.

“Your friends,” demanded the man, “what have you done with them? You alone have paid. Am I a dog?”

“Yes,” said Topper in a thick voice. “You’re a dog, a dirty dog, and your mother was one before you. Find my friends, or I’ll call the gendarmes. Tear that infernal machine apart and look for their mangled bodies among the wheels.”

The rest of the morning had not been pleasant for the owner. Nor was his trade in that vicinity ever good.

Topper, as he sat there on the rocks, was thinking of this experience and enjoying it from a distance. Slowly he rose and helped Marion to rise. The little lawyer they left sleeping, not knowing what other disposition to make of his body. Slowly they mounted the grade that led back through the pines.

“Take a last look at it,” said Marion. “We leave this place tomorrow.”

She laid an arm on his shoulder, and instinctively Topper braced himself.

“Why must we leave, Marion?” he asked in a low voice. “I never want to go. Can’t we just give the rest of the world a miss? We’re well off here, you know.”

Marion silently shook her head and gazed into his eyes with a peculiar intentness. Then she made as if to slip her arms round his neck. Topper, troubled by her look, ducked slightly and stepped back. In spite of the seriousness of the moment, Marion laughed softly.

“Don’t do that, you American pig,” she murmured. “I’m not going to murder you – not now, at any rate.”

Mistrustfully Topper allowed her to put her arms up to his shoulders. He looked about for a tree to grab in case of any little trouble, any little slip or push. It was no trifle trying to be fondled by a woman who might just as likely as not choke you black in the face.

“Didn’t it ever occur to you that Scollops might become enceinte,” she asked in a low voice, “or worse still, that George might return from the wars? It takes more than a South American widow to hold that gay desperate in thrall.”

“Hell,” muttered Topper, holding Marion’s eternally youthful body to him. “Both of your suggested possibilities are most unpleasant. It would be just like Scollops to deflower my home while I am away. And as for George – he’s just too awful to think about.”

“He always is,” said Marion.

“Had a good time?” asked Topper.

“Slick,” answered Marion.

“It’s been all right,” went on the man. “More than that for me.”

Marion nodded dumbly, and her eyes sought the sea.

“Like me?” asked Topper.

Once more Marion nodded.

“Say it,” said Topper.

“Look,” replied Marion, pointing to the small figure of the Frenchman sleeping on the rocks. “It hasn’t moved.”

Together they considered the body.

“That damn little French lawyer,” was all Topper said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Broken Window

The little inn was left behind – Monsieur Poccard, Monsieur Poccard’s son, petite Colette, Monsieur Dalmas, the brave cook – all were left behind. Sun filled the arms of the little cove, and waves washed therein, but Marion Kerby’s slim form and Topper’s rather stout one sported there no more. The last drink at the café had gone the way of all drinks, good and bad alike. The patron’s hand had been shaken. All hands had been reshaken. A final, final drink was suggested. And the whole thing began over again with even more elaborate flourishes and expressions of even deeper mutual admiration. The American couple were gone. A fine couple, free with francs. No airs. No harsh orders and superior criticism. An exemplary couple. But mad. Mad as only Americans can be mad. Mad in an inexplicable, altogether mad manner. They arrive. They settle down. They are here, they are there. One never knows. Then suddenly they depart. One begins to doubt if they had ever been there at all. And why they had ever arrived or why they had ever departed remain twin mysteries of equal magnitude. Some things are known about God. Even more can be devised. About Americans – no. Never. Nothing can be known about them – nothing even suspected. One thing, perhaps, yes. They drank like the veritable poissons, and they drank all wrong. Hein! How could it be otherwise when their own President himself had locked up all their cellars? What a man! What a perfect demon of a President! However, the Mayor of New York – or was he the Duke of New York – he was a gallant, a true brave, a type, that one. He alone would save the States United and bring fresh prosperity to French vineyards. Alors! One must return from the dusty white road down which the American couple had but since departed. Time to sell cheese and other provender and perhaps a few books. The American invasion was at an end. Francs now would be even more difficult to find.

Meanwhile Mr. Topper and Marion, in a hired car, were being driven back to their original point of departure, the little fishing village where, in Topper’s villa, perhaps lurked a pregnant Scollops, a cat who had betrayed her trust. Topper had decided to drive there first to discover if Marion’s fearful suggestion had proved a shameful reality. Perhaps both Scollops and the maid Félice herself were a little bit that way. He would not have been surprised. No. If both had escaped scot-free the coincidence would be even more surprising. Topper could but wait and hope that only one of them was pregnant. Idly he speculated as to which one he preferred to be that way. It was hard to decide. Both were of a type. With the playful Monsieur Louis hanging about his garden, his wicked old eyes following every woman within sight and divining the presence of those outside his range of vision, it was a wonder the whole neighborhood was not with child. No good there. A thoroughly bad old fellow, that Louis person. Was Louis his first or his last name? And if it was his last name, why was it his last name? Topper never found out.

It was a hot day. A dry day. The road was dusty. Topper was in one of his farewell moods – triste, the French called it. Not a bad word, that. Less silly than most French words. He was absent-minded, spiritless, drifting. Marion was a little difficult. There was much she disliked about everything. There were many things she threatened to do. One of these things she actually did. For a long time the dust had been bothering her. She coughed with unnecessary bitterness, thought Topper. Dust was drenching her hair, lungs, and eyes, she complained. In fact, she was simply dust. A large, uncomfortable particle. She would retire her head from contact with the dust. That, at least, she would save. In spite of her bitter, complaining mood she was as close to Topper as she could well wedge her small body. She was leaning as heavily against him as she could – leaning aggressively, hoping to make him uncomfortable. Topper paid little attention to the lady. His eyes were on the road and the sea. Occasionally they studied the unpleasant back of the chauffeur’s neck. Occasionally they caught a glimpse of the chauffeur’s casually lascivious eyes in the driving mirror. Gradually, one might say cautiously, Marion’s small comely head withdrew into the void. The rest of her body remained leaning against Topper. The effect was that of a gentleman nonchalantly cuddling the body of a headless woman. Had Topper been aware of this effect he would not have been quite so nonchalant. However, he was not aware, and time continued to march. Also, the machine. The road, now so familiar to Topper, twisted its mad way along beside the sea, but for the most part high above it. Villas one would love to own and to live in appeared in the distance, approached, momentarily held one’s attention, then dropped behind – a moment of quiet beauty lived and left. Other motors passed in both directions making sure not to sound their high French horns until their sound was quite uncalled for – in fact, insulting. Time kept on marching, the road winding, and the dust rising.

Suddenly Topper caught a fresh glimpse of the chauffeur’s eyes in the mirror, and as much as he shrank from these furtive yet strangely intimate contacts with the man, his, Topper’s attention was thoroughly engaged this time. There was an expression in the driver’s eyes that aroused something more than interest. Just what was that expression, Topper wondered. Was it horror? Was it repulsion? Was it dread? Certainly the soul that dwelt behind those eyes was not at peace with his God. No, far from it. Had the man run over a child or a stray cat? No. The owner of such a face would not be moved by an incident so trivial. He had doubtless run laughingly over scores of both. There was another reason. Topper’s eyes searched the road ahead in hope of finding the cause of the man’s disquietude. Perhaps a flood was doing, or an earthquake. More likely a landslide. The road appeared to be no more terror-evoking than usual. No extra special danger seemed afoot. Yet the man was undoubtedly in the clutch of fear. Topper peered back into the mirror. This time Topper was sure the man was looking at him as one would look at a murderer immediately after an especially revolting piece of work. As if fascinated, the driver’s eyes first rested on Mr. Topper’s face, moved downward to his shoulder, momentarily fluttered there, then moved away and fixed themselves on the road. Perhaps it was only a vagrant indisposition, hoped Mr. Topper, a passing mood, some congenital eccentricity wished upon the unfortunate chap by his indubitably criminal parents. Topper decided to put the unpleasant incident from his mind. He tried but did not succeed.

“I feel quite ill,” said Marion in a decidedly accusing voice. “Anyone would feel the same in my position.”

The erratic driving of the man at the wheel prevented Mr. Topper from replying to Marion’s lament. He fixed his eyes on the man, only to find the man’s eyes fixed on him, but this time the gaze was direct instead of reflected from the mirror.

“Turn round and look where you’re going,” Mr. Topper commanded. “Do you want to kill the three of us?”

“There are only two left to kill,” replied the man. “You, m’sieu, have seen to that.”

Topper’s nerves were not good, neither was his temper.

“If you don’t turn your head to the road,” he gritted, “I’ll knock the damn thing off.”

“As you did the other one,” muttered the man. “Morbleu! I must get out of this.”

And he did. Stopping the car by the roadside he got out of it and ran rapidly down the road. Mr. Topper, slightly dazed, looked stupidly after the man.

“Now why did he want to do that?” he asked.

“Perhaps he needed to,” Marion replied lazily.

At this moment an automobile that had appeared from the direction in which the chauffeur had vanished drew up beside them. The serious faces of two respectable-looking American gentlemen peered out of the car in the rear of which were a couple of less respectable-looking American ladies.

“Any trouble here?” inquired one of the gentlemen of Mr. Topper. “We saw a chauffeur running – —”

He stopped suddenly and looked incredulously at Mr. Topper. Then he blinked rapidly and nudged his companion.

“Do you see what I am seeing?” he asked in a low voice.

His companion leaned far out of the car and looked with increasing horror at Mr. Topper, who under the combined scrutiny of the two gentlemen was beginning to feel decidedly uncomfortable.

“No,” he told the gentlemen with a certain show of dignity. “There’s no trouble here. Why should there be?”

There was a short pause during which the two gentlemen endeavored to get a grip on the situation.

“Well,” said one of them at last, “a man in your position should consider himself in a lot of trouble unless he is used to the thing.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Topper. “And why, may I ask, are you acting so funny? Have you both lost your heads over something?”

At this last question the two gentlemen shrank back a little and looked away from Mr. Topper.

“No,” answered the spokesman slowly. “We haven’t lost our heads, but we know who has. Did the chauffeur do it?”

“What a question to ask,” exploded Mr. Topper. “How do I know whether the chauffeur has done it or not? I’m not interested.”

“He’s a cool customer,” observed the second American. “Wonder how he did it? With his bare hands, perhaps. Yet I see no signs of bl – —”

At this moment one of the women shrieked, then became deathly still. The other woman started in to babble while pointing at Mr. Topper.

“What’s wrong with her?” demanded Topper. “Is this a car full of lunatics? Or are you all drunk?”

“Murderer!” cried the woman, suddenly finding words. “Jack-the-Ripper – Strangler Lewis.”

“Not Strangler Lewis,” corrected one of the gentlemen. “He at least allowed his opponents to live.”

“Are these people all nutty?” asked Mr. Topper, glancing down for the first time at his headless companion and grasping that fact with a start of horror himself. “What the hell – —” he began, but the woman cut him short.

“You may well ask,” she cried in a nasty, hysterical voice. “First you ruin the poor creature, then you twist her head clean off her neck, then you take a drive with her body. Of all the nerve! What did you do with the head? Tell us that.”

“You’re perfectly right, madam,” came Marion’s voice from nowhere. “He did all those things and worse, and then he loses my head. Make the brute find my head for me, or I’ll never rest in peace. Fancy he chucked it somewhere. Murderers usually do that with heads.”

The four occupants of the other car were speechless. So was Mr. Topper. Indignation robbed him of words.

“The voice from the grave,” the woman murmured at last. “The poor headless soul.”

“Hardly from the grave,” one of the gentlemen again corrected.

“Make him find my head,” urged the voice. “I’m in a hell of a fix without a head. Just fancy my position. To lose one’s hon – —”

“Shut up, you!” cried Mr. Topper, also getting hold of some words of his own. “If I could only get my hands on your head I’d damn well twist it off.”

“My God!” breathed one of the men. “Did you hear that? What callousness! He actually wants to do it again.”

“I know,” replied the correcting gentleman. “They’re like that. They enjoy it.”

“Certainly I enjoy it,” retorted Topper in a grim voice. “I’d like to twist all of your heads off – every damn head.”

“Better look out,” warned Marion. “He’ll do it. He threatened me more than once, but I never believed a man could be so mean. Then suddenly he ups and does it.” Here she made a horrid noise, then added, “Just like that – no head. Zingo!”

The people in the car did not know whether to be more appalled by Marion’s description of her death than by the horror of the act itself. They swallowed hard and took counsel among themselves. Here they had an obvious murderer and a loquacious murderee on their hands, and they had no ideas as to what to do about it all. The entire situation seemed palpably impossible, yet the plain facts of the case spoke otherwise. Here was a headless woman describing with revolting noises her terrible loss, and here was her murderer not only glorying in his ghastly deed but also fervently wishing he could repeat it. The fellow was actually threatening them with like treatment. An end was put to their indecision by a sudden act on the part of Mr. Topper. He pushed Marion violently from him.

“What? At it again?” her voice came querulously as her body slumped over on the seat. “I should think you’d be tired. I know I am.”

“This is all wrong,” said one of the gentlemen. “It just can’t be so. I say, let’s shove off.”

“Keep an eye out for my head,” called Marion. “An eye for a head instead of tooth for a tooth. Ta, ta, my braves.”

A shriek of chilling laughter followed the departing motorists down the road.

“God!” breathed one of the gentlemen. “I’m glad Mary there didn’t hear any of that. It might have brought her out of that faint, and I need some time for thought.”

“But aren’t you going to do anything about it?” demanded the one who had not fainted. “Tell a policeman or something?”

“Something,” replied the other. “I’m going to tell it to a couple of stiff drinks at the nearest bar. That would be a pretty little bedtime story to slip across in French to a gendarme. We’d be the ones to get locked up.”

Meanwhile Mr. Topper, with more agility than grace, had climbed over into the front seat and blasphemously sent the automobile on its way.

“That was a pretty thing to do,” he shouted furiously over his shoulder. “A hell of a thing to do – a typical Marion Kerby trick.”

No answer.

“I suppose you think you’re funny,” he flung back hopefully. “Make a murderer of me, will you – a Strangler Lewis, a Peep the Tommer?”

“Please, mister,” said a small voice beside him. “There’s nobody back there now, not even a head. And Strangler Lewis is, or was, a wrestling gentleman, and the other one’s name is Tom the Peeper.”

“What do I care?” snapped Topper. “I wish I were Strangler Lewis and I had you on the mat.”

“Oh, Mr. Topper, what a thing to say. And in front of all those people. Madison Square Garden, no less.”

“For God’s sake, be still,” muttered the defeated man. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“But not all Toms are Peeping Toms,” continued Marion, returning in person to herself. “Never make that mistake. Some are mere Thumbs while others are no more than Cooks. Then there was a Tom who was the son of a piper and another – —”

“Childish drivel,” snorted Mr. Topper. “Wonder where that damn chauffeur has got himself to? Can’t blame him much for running, considering what he saw.”

“Yes,” replied Marion. “You sadly misjudged the poor man’s intentions.”

Topper smiled slowly, reluctantly, then shrugged away his gloom entirely. The atmosphere seemed to have been cleared. There was even less dust, as both were riding in the front seat now, and protected by the windshield.

“You didn’t disabuse my mind any,” he said. “Oh, well, it’s just another one of those things. Another little joke at my expense.”

“You were far less upset than the others,” Marion reminded him. “In fact, you came off quite well. Too bad you didn’t meet the Widow.”

“What widow?” demanded Topper.

“The one that chops your head off and drops it in a basket,” Marion replied serenely.

“I’ve had enough of heads for one day,” Topper told her.

“You mean you’ve not had enough,” said Marion brightly. “By one.”

“I hate smart people,” was Topper’s reply to this. “You know – the ready retort.”

A few miles farther on they came upon the chauffeur sitting dejectedly by the roadside. At the approach of the car he rose wearily and started to run, but the man must have been sadly out of training, for he soon abandoned the attempt. Probably he decided that if he had to lose his breath one way or another he might just as well get it over with here and now, thus sparing himself the exertion of running himself to death.

The spent man and the automobile stopped side by side, and the spent man turned to be murdered. Much to his surprise and gratification he was confronted by the alluringly smiling face of Marion. Carefully scrutinizing her tender neck to see that her head was conventionally joined to her shoulders, he was able to produce an exhausted sigh of relief.

“See,” offered Marion reassuringly, pointing to her head. “I have it, my friend, la tête complète.”

“Madame,” stammered the man, “from where did it come, that head there?”

“Had it all the time,” said Marion. “I was merely hiding it. Monsieur had said something – oh, such a wicked thing. Didn’t you ever hide your head, my brave?”

“Madame,” replied the man earnestly, “I have wanted to with all my heart. But a moment since I would have hidden it in the jaws of a lion enraged.”

“I can well understand that,” said Marion. “But have no fear, my friend. Monsieur is a bad, bad man, but a woman’s head is always safe in his hands. He can see that. You comprehend?”

“Perfectly, madame,” replied the chauffeur, smiling for the first time as he gazed with admiration upon the annoyed face of Mr. Topper. “I myself am not unlike Monsieur. L’amour is my one – —”

“But I am not at all like that,” broke in Mr. Topper. “Let me assure you – —”

“You are like that,” declared Marion. “And I love it. We are wasting time for no good end. Mount into the back, my old, and Monsieur himself will show you things – maneuvers you never thought possible except in an aëroplane.”

The chauffeur mounted accordingly, and the car resumed marching. He decided that Mr. Topper, in spite of his agreeable qualities, would be safer by far with both hands engaged at the wheel. So Mr. Topper drove over bridges spanning the tracks of the P. L. M. until his sense of the fitness of things could bear it no longer.

“Why does this road cross these tracks so damn many times?” he inquired. “It seems such a waste of effort and material, not to mention time.”

“M’sieu,” said the chauffeur rather timidly, “it is not the road that crosses the tracks, but it is the tracks themselves that undermine the road.”

Mr. Topper was still trying mentally to digest this one when they drove into Cannes and met life in one of its pleasantest aspects.

“Food,” observed Marion.

“And drink,” agreed Topper.

The chauffeur beamed. This Monsieur was supremely human after all.

They drove along the Croisette, shops and hotels on one side, the beach and sea on the other. Mr. Topper looked at the women on the beach, and Marion sat quietly observing Topper.

“You know,” she said, “I can read you like a book, and every page is vile.”

Topper was mildly offended. He dearly loved to look at women either beautifully clad or unclad. It was one of his amusements, a quiet, harmless pleasure on which he could depend. Inasmuch as thought transference was not among his accomplishments no lady’s sense of propriety was outraged. Although, if the truth must be known, if only a small percentage of the ladies Topper admired had been able to read his thoughts he would have been an extremely busy man.

“I don’t see you blushing,” he observed.

“I seldom blush in the customary manner. Mentally, I am suffused.”

They dined at the Palm Beach Casino, and also danced. Marion insisted on this slight recognition of her sex. Topper was at all hours of the day or night perfectly willing to recognize sex with the utmost cordiality, but dancing was hardly his idea of the proper way of expressing his recognition. However, he enjoyed dancing with Marion. Also, he enjoyed the knowledge that he, Topper, was actually dancing without being stoned by observers or booed off the floor. Generous applications of wine that also danced increased his dexterity and daring. Often, during the dull, comfortable monotony of his married life, Topper had wanted to dance. Often he had danced, but always in the seclusion of his own room and alone or, at best, with a chair for his partner. If little can be said in favor of Marion Kerby it must be acknowledged at least that she was woman enough to understand the man in Cosmo Topper, although she took unpardonable liberties with her knowledge. She was taking them now, as she circled round the floor. Marion was actually floating. Her feet never touched the floor. Topper, holding her in his arms, was unable to see that he was carrying about with him only the upper half of a woman. Marion to obviate interference and to allow free play for her partner’s feet had thoughtfully withdrawn the lower half of her body from circulation. So strongly had the idea appealed to her that she had entirely overlooked its possible effect upon observers unacquainted with his intentions.

Topper, to some of the diners, gave the impression of a man dancing alone but with a surprising display of enjoyment. As a matter of fact, so realistic was this impression that one man remarked to the lady sitting opposite him: “That man must be either the greatest egoist in the world or its greatest mimic. Never did see a chap derive so much enjoyment from his own company.”

From another point of vantage Topper looked for all the world as if he were carrying round in his arms the upper section of a smartly clad display figure abstracted from the window of some fashionable shop along the Croisette. Numerous spectators were of this belief until they discovered that the thing not only talked and smiled, but actually turned its head.

“My God,” said an American visitor, breaking into a gentle sweat, “that must be Madame Tussaud herself!”

The girl with him was clinging to his arm.

“Oh, look,” she kept saying. “Look at her now. No bottom part at all.”

“Like a mermaid without a tail,” another girl remarked.

“Or a woman similarly disqualified,” said her escort.

This remark started an argument as to whether a woman with only the upper half of her body present were disqualified or not.

Meanwhile, a drunken gentleman rose from his chair and began to follow Mr. Topper about the floor. The drunken gentleman had no intention of being offensive, but he did want to find out about all this. He even went so far as to pass his hand thoughtfully through sections of air which rightfully should have been displaced by Marion’s body. Then he maneuvered himself into a position in which he was able to peer closely into Marion’s face. Mr. Topper took exception to this.

“Go away,” he said quietly. “Far away.”

Marion merely winked her left eye slowly.

The man stepped back and placed a steadying hand on Mr. Topper’s shoulder. Mr. Topper was not offended. He did not belong to the type that when sober finds cause for either amusement or scorn in the actions of others drunk.

“What’s the matter, old man?” he asked.

“Look,” was all the man could say, making a floor-sweeping gesture. “Down there. Look. There’s nothing at all down there, nothing at all. No feet, no ankles, no legs, no – no – just nothing,” he concluded lamely.

Mr. Topper looked and turned red.

“Do something quickly,” he whispered furiously. “This morning it was your head, and now – —”

“Heads I win. Tails you lose,” Marion replied smilingly.

“Well, for God’s sake, produce the latter and the other parts that go with it,” Mr. Topper pleaded.

“I’d hate like the deuce to argue like that with only half a lady,” the drunken gentleman announced to the crowd of dancers and diners that had gathered round.

Mr. Topper had an inspiration. He would pretend he was a professional magician.

“Meet me in the car,” he whispered in Marion’s ear. “Now, get the devil out of here.”

He made a few Svengalian passes in the air, and Marion, having enjoyed her moment, had the grace to vanish entirely. There was a burst of applause. Topper bowed several tunes, then with great dignity returned to his table, paid his bill, and left the Casino. Marion was waiting for him in the automobile. Luckily for her the chauffeur had returned from his regal repast. Topper was unable to give expression to his emotions. Favoring them both with a sick smile, he climbed into the back of the car and motioned to the chauffeur to drive. He was through for the day. Once he viciously pinched Marion, causing her to emit a plaintive little shriek which was pleasant to hear, but when he caught in the mirror the expression of leering tolerance on the face of the driver, and when Marion called him a naughty man, he desisted from further hostilities and contented himself with dark looks and even darker oaths. It was dark, too, when they drove through the quiet streets of the little fishing village and stopped on its outskirts in front of Mr. Topper’s pallid villa. They sat in the car and looked up at the windows of the place. Topper experienced a feeling of the ending of things. The interlude was nearly over. At his left the night surf came driving in upon the sands of Monsieur Sylvestre’s so-called tranquil beach. Clouds were scudding across a moon that had nearly reached the full. On one side of his villa the home of the reprehensible Monsieur Louis lay in darkness, its owner probably at play – up to his old tricks. On the other side the villa occupied by that beastly old woman who watched at her window was in a similar condition of quietude. But was it? Certainly not. A faint light shone in one of the rooms, outlining against the window curtain the figure of a woman – the woman, the woman who in Mr. Topper’s eyes symbolized all the malignant prudery, the narrowness and prurient curiosity that next to actual warfare did more than anything else in life to destroy the happiness, self-respect, and freedom of action of humanity. She stood for the type that stolidly claimed the woman was always wrong. And like the type she represented, she callously closed her eyes on the evil conditions in her own home only to peer into the windows of her neighbors. She represented bigotry, oppression, and ignorance, that old woman behind the window. Topper had seen it at work in offices, homes, and communities.

“The horrid old bitch,” he muttered under his breath. “God deliver all the bad women from the tender mercies of the alleged good ones. And that includes you,” he added, taking Marion’s small, firm hand in his.

“Listen,” said Marion. “Of course, it’s none of my business, but doesn’t it strike you as a bit odd that your villa should be so well lighted during the absence of its lord and master?”

Topper looked at his villa and noticed with a start of alarm that both upstairs and down the lights were gayly gleaming. It had seemed so natural at first that its true significance had not penetrated his brooding mind.

“Good God, don’t tell me my wife has returned?” he burst out.

“Not from the nature of the sounds I hear,” said Marion. “That is, not unless she has changed very much for the better.”

It was true indeed. The sounds of disorganized revelry were issuing from the villa. Snatches of indecent song, small shrieks and deep vulgar laughter mingled to make a symphony of life in full foam.

Topper turned a pair of puzzled eyes on his companion. She was smiling up at him maliciously.

“Dear, dear,” he observed. “I was expecting to find a pregnant cat, but it seems that the house itself is pregnant.”

Suddenly the French windows on the ground floor burst open, and a flock of men and women poured out into the night led by the Colonel, clad only in his drawers.

“He seems to affect that costume,” Marion observed quietly.

“What goes on here?” Mr. Topper asked in a daze.

From the merry rout Mrs. Hart emerged, dragging a semi-clad Félice with her. In the moonlight she confronted the Colonel.

“An unfortunate misunderstanding, my dear,” the watchers in the car heard him say in his suavest accents.

“That’s one of the few actions in life,” replied Mrs. Hart, “that denies a double interpretation. Colonel, I hate to say it, but you’re nothing better than an exceedingly lousy liar.”

“My dear,” began the Colonel, then spying the tense figure of the woman at the window he seized upon her as a God-sent diversion. “Look!” he cried, waving one bare arm dramatically towards the window. “Behold, old evil eye! A filthy hypocrite hiding behind her inability either to give pleasure or to attract it. See! I do this!”

And the Colonel did just that. He tossed a champagne bottle through the window with the accuracy of a man trained in warfare. The crash of glass was followed by another one. Soon the whole disorderly party was hurling bottles, stones, gravel, and even the personal attire of its members through the windows of the villa. Marion was greatly pleased. She looked questioningly at Topper. There was a strange expression on his face, a sort of pleasurable excitement inevitably produced by the sound of crashing glass.

“Shall we join the party?” she asked in a low voice.

“It looks like an open break with law and order,” he replied thoughtfully, “and as much as I deplore this sort of thing, I would like for once in my life to register my violent objection to worm-eaten but organized and well entrenched joy killing.”

He paid the frightened chauffeur far more than enough for his mental anguish and professional services; then, with Marion’s hand in his, he left the car.

“My old and rare,” she whispered with unaffected admiration “In moments of crisis you rise to true greatness.”

They mingled with the seemingly maddened throng and began throwing whatever object came nearest to hand in the general direction of the besieged villa. Soon Mr. Topper and Marion were as disheveled, dirty, and demented as the rest of the strange people milling about them. It was a scene of epic action, of large ruthlessness and vast enjoyment. It was one of those things that in idle moments one dreams of doing, but which one never does except at seats of learning where such things come under the head of education. Topper was suddenly entangled and tripped. He found himself on his own back on his own ground. There was no comfort in this. A large, naked gentleman was tugging at his shoe.

“Pardon me,” came the courtly voice of the Colonel, “but I have no shoes of my own, and there is nothing left to throw.”

“Hi, there, Colonel!” cried Mr. Topper. “Lay off my foot.”

“My friend!” exclaimed the Colonel joyfully. “My crime mate. Here, take your shoe. I wish I had more to offer you. Congratulate us, Topper. We have been keeping your home intact for you during your protracted dalliance. But first let me help you to rise.”

The Colonel pulled Topper to his feet just in time to meet the assault of the united gendarmes of the district. Oaths, blows, and imprecations now became general, yet above them all, loud and clear boomed the voice of the Colonel.

“Cinquante-cinq!” he shouted. “Quatre-vingt-dix!”

“You’re not cursing, Colonel,” cried Topper. “You’re counting.”

“What the hell do I care?” bellowed the Colonel. “It sounds good and fulsome. Cinquante-cinq! Tear the beggars up!”

Topper was now assaulted from all sides. He wondered where Marion was. Then he caught a momentary glimpse of her. What he saw did not augur well for the future happiness of a certain gendarme.

“Marion!” shouted Topper.

“With you, boy!” called Marion. “As soon as I ruin this lad.”

“We have no fight with the gendarmes, Colonel,” said Topper, seizing the man’s arm just as it was about to polish off a member of the force.

“Looks mighty damn like a fight to me,” replied that man of brawn. “Not that I haven’t been in worse.”

“Then call off your crowd,” said Topper, pushing a gendarme in the stomach.

“Shall we take you with us?” asked the Colonel.

“God, no!” cried Topper. “All the trees in France wouldn’t hold me after insurrection.”

The Colonel issued a command, and a great silence fell upon the scene. Topper stood alone – alone, that is, save for the presence of a great multitude of gendarmes. The gendarmes looked at Topper, and Topper looked back at the gendarmes. Then all of them looked around.

“M’sieu,” said an officer, stepping forward and clipping a pair of handcuffs on Mr. Topper’s wrists, “your friends, where are they?”

A voice from the air answered for Topper, and even as the voice boomed out Topper felt a small hand slipped into his imprisoned ones.

“We are gone,” intoned the deep voice. “We are those good Americans who come to Paris when they die. See you later, Topper.”

Evidently the Colonel and Mrs. Hart had collected a flock of low-plane spirits during Mr. Topper’s absence and had been entertaining them at his expense. The magnitude of the Colonel’s cool effrontery appealed to Mr. Topper.

“Better one bird,” said the officer philosophically, “than no bird at all. This affair is strange passing all belief. Perhaps you, m’sieu, will elucidate it for us before Monsieur le commissaire himself, is it not so?”

“But yes,” replied Mr. Topper. “It is not so.”

And all the way to the place whereat Monsieur le commissaire held court, Mr. Topper felt an unseen presence marching by his side. The heart of the man was gay and devoid of alarm, although filled with a multitude of rapidly crystallizing lies for the special edification of Monsieur le commissaire himself.

“A break like this just had to happen,” said Mr. Topper to himself. “A person can’t live peacefully on one plane and associate with the denizens of another.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Law Takes
Its Casual Course

Monsieur le commissaire Devaux sat with weary elegance behind his desk in the small room at the police station. With an expression of polite disgust he regarded those within his sight, including his own officers of the law.

“Who are all these annoying-looking persons?” he asked of an officer standing near by. “These offensive smelling citizens, even if bent on crime, should first wash. Are they all criminals, Henri?”

“That, Monsieur le commissaire, is for you to judge.”

“Why cannot the law take its course?” continued the commissaire. “I grow weary of inferior sinning. Where is our American monsieur? He interests me.”

“He will arrive in but a moment,” assured Henri. “Meantime these two women have a grievance against each other. Also, they have disturbed the peace by fighting and the excessive use of vile language.”

“I know those two women,” said Monsieur Devaux sadly, “and it pains me to hear that they use vile language, that is, to excess. A little vile language is good for all – it clears one’s spiritual alimentary tract.” Monsieur Devaux paused to appreciate this. He was alone in his appreciation. “I am afraid they are very bad women,” he resumed, “but why are they here at this hour of the night?”

“You were present, Monsieur le commissaire,” said Henri simply, “so we brought them.”

“I see,” observed Devaux. “Every time I am here you feel that you must bring me something. That is thoughtful but unnecessary. I prefer to be alone. Bring them to me.”

A small thin Frenchwoman and a large fat Frenchwoman were pushed before Monsieur le commissaire. Both began to talk volubly at once. Both attempted to resume hostilities. Both were forcibly separated and quieted.

“Marie,” asked Devaux, utterly untouched by the display of feminine ferocity he had witnessed, “why do you call your smaller neighbor bad names and attack her?”

“M’sieu,” replied the larger woman, “that one steals my husband.”

“Do you mean she steals him repeatedly?” inquired the commissaire. “From day to day?”

“No, m’sieu,” replied Marie. “From night to night. From day to day he remains at home – supine.”

“Naturally, from night to night,” murmured Devaux. “My mistake. One should have known better. And you, Jeanne, what is your complaint? It seems you should be grateful instead of offensive.”

“That sow of ill repute will not allow her husband to remain stolen,” announced the small woman in an injured voice. “I am small, and I need a man.”

“I don’t quite see that,” said Devaux. “Marie is large. Does she need two men?”

“She has the fishing front complete to a man,” retorted the small one. “She is notorious, that one.”

“She deserves to be,” observed Commissaire Devaux. “This all seems to be more of a problem for God to decide than man.”

Marie could no longer restrain herself.

“And, Monsieur le commissaire,” she exploded, “when I confront her with her theft she does this to me for all the world to behold.”

By an inelegant gesture Marie showed the commissaire exactly what Jeanne did to her. The commissaire was visibly moved. He attempted to avert his eyes but was unable to do so. They were held fascinated by the titanic proportions of the primitive spectacle. Yet, even as he observed, he thought, in a detached manner, of the numerous objectionably human acts a public official was forced to look upon in the dispatch of his professional duties.

“And, m’sieu, if you do not know what that means – —” began Marie.

“I’m very much afraid I do,” Devaux interrupted hastily, “and it seems to be painting the lily a little.”

“It means – —” continued Marie, desirous of making sure the full significance of her demonstration was understood.

“Marie,” broke in the commissaire, “do not hold that unnerving posture any longer. I think I can read the writing on the wall, especially when so trenchantly expressed.”

“It means – —” began Marie.

“Please take them away,” said the commissaire. “She refuses to believe I know what it means, and I refuse to be told. You see, we are at an impasse.”

As the ladies were being led out, Mr. Topper was briskly led in by a considerable number of gendarmes. He was brought into the presence of the commissaire himself.

“Ah!” exclaimed that one with obvious relief. “So you have at last arrived.”

“You are confusing arrived with arrested, I fear, m’sieu,” Mr. Topper amended.

Now Commissaire Devaux spoke perfect English, made so by dealing for years with far less perfect Americans and Englishmen. He was slightly offended by Mr. Topper’s correction.

“M’sieu, you see fit to jest at a serious moment in your life,” he observed easily. “More serious than you realize. You are lionlike at present. Later you may more resemble his prey – one of his minor meals.” Monsieur le commissaire paused and regarded in sudden horror the vast quantities of gendarmes cluttering up his quarters. “Am I to be favored with a review?” he inquired of one of the officers; then, noticing the battered condition of many of the men, he added in French, “Lionlike is not the word. The man must be a menagerie in himself to have inflicted such punishment.”

“But there were at least forty others,” replied the officer. “Forty wild ones, Monsieur le commissaire.”

“Splendid!” cried Devaux. “Remove several hundred of these crippled-looking creatures that once were men and bring in the remaining forty prisoners.”

“M’sieu,” replied the officer haltingly, “we were successful in apprehending but one – that one before you – the others vanished into thin air.”

The commissaire received this piece of information with admirable sangfroid.

“The air could not have been so remarkably thin,” he observed, “to have consumed forty wild bodies.” He looked thoughtfully at the officer. “Have you, perhaps, been drinking,” he asked, “or were you struck heavily upon the head?”

“The latter, m’sieu,” replied the officer. “Repeatedly. And not on the head alone.”

He pulled back his tunic.

“Stop!” cried the commissaire. “Is it your intention to strip yourself before us to show us the extent of your injuries?”

“One thought you might like to see, m’sieu.”

“Were they of an assuredly fatal nature, perhaps I would,” replied Devaux. “With less than that I would not be satisfied.” He turned his eyes upon Mr. Topper. “Ah, well,” he continued at last, “we will have to do as thoroughly as possible with the one prisoner we have at our immediate disposal. Monsieur Topper, I can see a long stretch of the most boring years spanning your slow progress to the grave.”

“But why?” demanded Topper. “Must I be sentenced for forty prisoners whose very existence remains yet to be established?”

“For at least forty,” replied the commissaire. “The juge d’instruction whom you will later have the misfortune to meet may suggest more in his report. He is a strong believer in vicarious atonement. I shall content myself with a conservative forty. Is all clear, m’sieu?”

“Crystalline,” retorted Topper. “M’sieu, is there no justice in France?”

“Obviously not,” the commissaire informed him in the most astonished of tones. “Your question confounds me, but why confine it to France? Is there justice in any country in the world, Monsieur Topper? There are laws – there are laws everywhere. We do the best that we can with them. Do you not realize that man is not ready to receive justice, much less to administer it? If justice were done to humanity, there wouldn’t be any humanity left. It would be poisoned, and the last prisoner would in the end have to poison himself, a piece of Quixotic integrity which passes belief. So you see, m’sieu, justice is a mere word. There can be no such thing as justice so long as justice is needed. But pardon me. You touched on my favorite topic. One moment, if you please. Who is that woman there?” he called out sharply. “She is making most disturbing sounds.”

A middle-aged American woman was brought forward. She was crimson with wrathful indignation. In atrocious French she attacked the commissaire and the nation he represented. He listened politely to her for a moment, then waved her to silence.

“Madame,” he said in a mildly rebuking voice, “if you must say such horrid things, please say them in English. I don’t want my subordinates contaminated with seditious utterances. I can understand English, and, quite unofficially, I agree with much you say. Has this lady done anything, or has anyone done anything to her? The latter contingency seems hardly possible from where I am sitting.”

It was explained to Commissaire Devaux that the lady was the wife of one of a group of visiting American politicians. These politicians had come to make speeches in France because their constituents at home would no longer listen to them. Also they desired to break a few speech-cramping French precedents and to set up several new ones. The lady had hurled a brick through the window of a restaurant in which the wife of another American politician was drinking champagne with some friends. Not content with this act of violence, she had thereupon delivered a speech in which her husband’s name was frequently mentioned in connection with his noble determination to uphold prohibition not only in America but also the wide world over. The lady resisted arrest and mentioned freedom and liberty and something about stars and stripes.

Throughout this recital Monsieur le commissaire became more and more dismayed. Plainly the affair bore an international aspect. He must proceed with the utmost diplomacy, although it went against the grain. Sardonically he smiled upon Mr. Topper.

“How would you deal with such a case?” Devaux asked him with a touch of malice.

“If you will ask the lady to leave the room,” said Mr. Topper, “I’ll be delighted to advise you.”

“That’s the way I feel about it,” replied Commissaire Devaux.

At this moment an exceedingly young-looking policeman entered the room. He was carrying with a great lack of enjoyment a six-inch piece of pipe sealed at both ends.

“What’s that?” demanded the commissaire.

“Mon commissaire,” replied the youth, “it is believed to be a bomb found in the home of an estate agent.”

“I could think of no better place for a bomb to be,” replied Devaux without turning a hair. “But why bring it here? We desire to live, if you do not. That is, all save yourself, Monsieur Topper, who are facing a living death.”

“If that damn thing is a bomb,” said Topper with conviction, “all of us are facing immediate death.”

The commissaire’s face brightened up.

“I have it!” he exclaimed. “Give the bomb to the dry lady and tell her she is at liberty to take it wherever she pleases so long as it is a long way off. Perhaps her husband might like it to present to the city of Chicago with a speech. You see, Monsieur Topper, I am not without knowledge of conditions in your home of the free and land of the brave.”

Suddenly the bomb was snatched by some unseen hand from those of the young policeman who looked momentarily relieved.

“Release the prisoner Topper,” cried the voice of the Colonel as the bomb leaped aloft, “or I’ll blow this place to atoms.”

“And Topper with it, you fool,” came the voice of Marion Kerby. “Give me that bomb this minute.”

A struggle seemed to be in progress for possession of the bomb.

The commissaire looked at Topper with an expression of resigned horror.

“M’sieu,” he said in a low voice, “this is the tensest moment of my life beside which the horrors of war were as slumber. If we live through this remind me to take up the matter of voices and bodies and other manifestations.”

“If I still have control of my faculties,” replied Mr. Topper.

The Colonel was laughing madly, while Marion stuck steadily to swearing. Suddenly the bomb began to fizz.

“Monsieur Topper,” remarked Devaux, “it was a pleasure to have known you. Already I am trying to get used to the past tense. So that you won’t be forced to accompany me to God as a suspect I hereby acquit you of all charges.”

No sooner were the words spoken than the bomb went flying through the door to the center of a little square where stood the statue of a particularly stuffy-looking angel. There was a small explosion, and when the dust cleared away little of the angel remained.

“Good,” remarked the commissaire, peering through the door at the scene of small ruin. “For some reason I never did like that angel. Some of you, mes braves, go out and effect a few tactfully selected arrests. I cannot hold the American Monsieur for this. I’ve already acquitted him.” With a smile he turned back to Topper. “Well, m’sieu,” he observed, “we have succeeded in eliminating the bomb and the angel, too.”

“Also, we are still alive,” replied Mr. Topper.

“And for that reason you should be in jail,” the commissaire assured him, “but I see you are determined to take advantage of a hasty remark made under the stress of an abnormal situation.”

“Regardez là, mon commissaire!” cried a gendarme, pointing excitedly to the square. “A veritable miracle is in progress.”

On the splintered pedestal where the stuffy angel had once stood now appeared the figure of a flesh-and-blood woman, Marion Kerby, clad only in the briefest of scanties.

“A decided improvement,” murmured Monsieur Devaux, “although a far greater distraction.”

It was only a momentary manifestation, but that slim, debonair figure poised so impudently in the footsteps abandoned by the joyless symbol of piety enforced – sweet religious melancholy – stood out clear and distinct, like the provocative forerunner of a pleasanter day and age. It was like a high wind blowing away the stale perfume of ancient sin, ripping the gloomy masks from the images of long-libeled saints, and leaving in their places a row of cheerfully ironical grins. To Topper and the commissaire, standing in the door of the police station, that gleaming figure of a woman brought many irrelevant thoughts to mind, some comforting and some a little edged with regret. The air was filled with catcalls and shouts of unholy jubilation, tipsy laughter and scraps of song sung just a little off the key. And above all the disorderly noises boomed the brazen voice of the Colonel.

“We are those good Americans,” he chanted, “who go to Paris when they die.” This was followed by jeers and laughter, then: “Compliments of the season, Mr. Topper.”

And just before the figure melted from the pedestal it turned towards the men standing in the doorway and mockingly thumbed its nose, or rather, her nose, for no one gazing at that slim, vital figure could think of Marion Kerby in terms of the neuter gender.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

An Invitation
to Be Murdered

“My friend,” remarked the commissaire as the tumultuous sounds faded with the figure, “you seem to be known in some rather esoteric circles.”

Before Topper could reply, a harsh voice was heard behind the two men.

“Am I at liberty to leave this awful place?” demanded the wife of the American visiting politician.

Devaux’s face froze with pain at the sound of the woman’s voice. He closed his eyes as if to retain the memory of the vision they had so recently seen. It was apparent that the good commissaire was exercising the utmost self-control to keep from performing some criminal act himself. France’s reputation for politeness was in the balance.

“But certainly, madame,” he managed to produce at last, together with a smile that must have cost him dear. “And with the utmost expedition. Please be so gracious as to consider the damages entailed by your ladylike conduct in hurling a brick through a hard-working patron’s windows entirely on this municipality and the Republic of France itself.”

“My husband will hear of this,” was the gracious manner in which the lady accepted courtesy of the French Republic.

The commissaire beamed.

“I hope so, madame,” he exclaimed. “Perhaps he would honor us with a speech when the new window is installed.”

“I don’t know about that,” said the woman doubtfully, her grim features relaxing a little. “Perhaps he would. He’s become a bit choosy about his speeches lately. Nevertheless, it would be an opportunity. The folks back home would get printed copies of it – my name would be mentioned – Betty Sanders would turn green with jealousy and …”

Thus musing the lady departed out of the lives of Monsieur Devaux and Mr. Topper. When she had gone the commissaire turned to his former prisoner.

“This night, my friend, I have seen and heard more than is good for a mere police official,” he said. “Tell me – unofficially, of course – do you know the lady of the pedestal?”

“I know one who looks surprisingly like her,” replied Topper.

“And is it true,” continued the commissaire, “that sometimes she accompanies you merely as a head and sometimes with even more attractive portions displayed?”

“And frequently none at all,” replied Mr. Topper, avoiding a direct admission.

As Topper walked down the street the eyes of Commissaire Devaux followed him enviously.

“Some men have all the luck,” he reflected. “Could anything be more convenient on occasion than a disappearing mistress?”

Topper did not return to his villa that night. He felt hardly strong enough to look on the shambles the Colonel and his crew must have inevitably made of the place. He took his way to the Splendide, where his reception by the manager was marked by a demeanor of nervous suspicion almost amounting to awe.

As he passed down the hall leading to his quarters a lion’s skin got up from the floor and followed him. And as if this were not sufficiently surprising, the lion’s skin staggered a little in its gait. A peripatetic lion’s skin sans lion is even more demoralizing to one’s nervous system than one well filled with lion, although there is scant cause for self-congratulation in the presence of either. Topper’s attendant seemed to take that view. So did all the other guests who were privileged to witness the strange procession – Topper being followed by a slightly drunken lion’s skin trying to walk stealthily.

Topper looked back once to see what it was all about. Once was more than enough. He did not look again. He merely contented himself with wondering if there was anything under the face of the sun that could not happen to him. When he opened the door for himself – the attendant having been good enough to drop the key in his flight – the lion’s skin crowded into the room behind him. Topper closed the door and turned to face his unusual visitor. The lion’s skin had squared off and was making hostile passes at the air. Topper was more interested than alarmed. He realized that this was a thing he might never see again in his life – not that he was especially anxious.

“Put ’em up,” came the thick voice of George Kerby. “Put ’em up, you bed presser. I’m going to give you the beating of your life, Topper, but I’m not going to kill you – not quite.”

“How about a drink first, George?” suggested Topper. “I can give you more action with a little drink in me, although God knows what good you expect me to accomplish by cuffing that damn skin about.”

“Don’t swear at this skin,” retorted the gesticulating shell of a lion. “I killed this lion myself with my own bare hands – strangled him to death – then I skinned the bum, and I’m going to show you just how I did it.”

“Don’t pull a tall one on me like that,” said Topper. “You either bought or stole that skin, George. You know you did.”

“But you don’t know which,” replied George with the innocence of a drunkard.

“No, I don’t know that,” admitted Topper. “Stop prancing about so much and tell me.”

“All right,” George conceded. “You order the drinks, and I’ll tell you all about it. Then we’ll have a fight – a good long one.”

Topper was treated to the spectacle of seeing the lion’s skin throw itself into a chair and carelessly cross its legs.

“Why do you wear it at all?” he ventured. “Don’t you find it rather stuffy?”

“I stuff it,” said George complacently. “I’m the stuffing.”

“Well,” observed Topper skeptically, “if you find any pleasure in playing stuffing for a lion’s skin I see no reason why anyone should object.”

“That’s what I say,” said George. “Topper, you’re a man after my own heart. No. I forgot. I’m mad at you. I’m after your heart – your jet-black heart.”

When the unsuspecting waiter arrived with the drinks he was so upset to find Mr. Topper listening attentively to a gesticulating lion’s skin that he dropped the drinks and fled. The skin and Topper looked at the broken glass, then looked at each other.

“Too bad,” said the skin.

“A pity,” commented Topper. “I’m afraid the only way we’ll be able to get a drink is for you to abandon your skin.”

“Very well, then,” said George. “To hell with the skin. I stole it from a dealer. Beat him at his own skin game. Not bad, eh, Topper?”

“Cleverly put,” allowed Topper. “Very cleverly put. You’re there, George, although I can’t see you.”

The skin was flung through the air and landed at Toppers feet.

“You can have the skin,” declared George without heat. “You’ll need one when I’m finished with you.”

“You’re getting better,” said Topper. “Pulling them fast and funny.”

“Am I, Topper?” asked George, greatly pleased. “Do you think I’m really funny?”

“You know I do, George.”

“I’m glad you do, Cosmo. It’s not going to last long.”

“Nonsense! Keep it up.”

“I’d like to,” replied George. “I’d like to keep on being funnier and funnier, but I’m always afraid my tremendous temper will overmaster me.”

“A drink will help a lot,” Mr. Topper assured him.

They arrived, the drinks, but this time three waiters arrived with them. They edged into the room, shrinkingly skirted the abandoned lion’s skin, and placed the drinks on a table. And this was one of the rare occasions when Topper did not have an ample opportunity to offer a tip in France. He had no opportunity at all, for after depositing the tray on the table the nerves of the waiters snapped, to a man, and the three of them fought their way from the room, while George laughed heartily if invisibly.

“Did you bring back any more trophies, George?” Mr. Topper asked innocently after the drinks had been taken. “I’ll bet you did, you old dog.”

“Got some,” admitted George. “Left ’em in an empty room on the next floor up. Couldn’t stand another night with that South American woman – lots of spice but no bite. Want to see ’em? I’ve a bit of an elephant’s tusk with a dirty picture carved on it. You’ll like it.”

“I’d love it,” lied Topper, thinking of the depravity of the man. “Tell you what, George, you go get your stuff, and I’ll order a lot of drinks.”

“Might just as well make a night of it before we have that fight,” agreed George, preparing to leave the room. “Of course you know where Marion is, but you won’t let on.”

“All I know is that she and her gang got me arrested,” said Topper with feigned bitterness. “They play too fast for an old chap like myself. I dare say the lot of them are enjoying themselves somewhere.”

When George left the room by the door, Marion Kerby came in through the window, and when George returned in the same manner he did not find Mr. Topper, but he did find a lot of drinks. Sobered a little, he considered things, tossed off a few drinks, then set off with the determination to find Topper, come what may.

In the meantime Topper and Marion were sitting on the rocks by the hidden beach. They were drinking wine and looking at a revolver, both of which objects Marion had brought along untidily wrapped in a towel.

“What do you want with that thing?” Topper asked a little nervously.

“I have a small plan,” replied Marion, a peculiar expression in her eyes.

“I never like your small plans,” said Mr. Topper. “I never seem to win.”

“I’m afraid you won’t like this one,” replied Marion. “You see, I’d like to shoot you.”

“What!”

“Yes,” admitted Marion. “I want to murder you in cold blood.”

“Good God!” Topper edged away.

Then Marion began to talk. She talked earnestly and convincingly. The burden of her talk was that she wanted Topper always with her. She could never tell what might happen. And she wanted Topper. Not Topper at a disadvantage, but a Topper as free and flexible as herself. Together they might rise to the highest plane or sink to the lowest. Who could tell? Topper’s withdrawal from life would not make a great deal of difference. If he insisted on it she would murder Scollops, too. Mrs. Topper would be well provided for – happy with her sorrow and dyspepsia.

“After all,” she concluded, “you have only two things to look forward to – old age and the unspeakable things George is sure to do to you some time in the near future.”

As Topper sat there discussing his own murder he was not sure whether he was drunk or dreaming. He never knew. Neither of them knew that, acting on a tip from Clara Hart, George was already making his way towards the beach. It was a race of death against life.

“I know, Marion,” said Topper, “but, hang it all, isn’t that gun too large? It’s a painful-looking weapon.”

“No,” said Marion, looking consideringly at the gun. “I think it will do the trick.”

“Please,” protested Mr. Topper. “Don’t talk so snappily about my murder.”

“This is the way I figure it,” continued Marion in a businesslike voice. “If I can hit you in some vital spot with this thing your chances of life would be nil.”

“What vital spot?” asked Topper with morbid curiosity.

“We won’t go into that,” said Marion.

“No, but a great big ugly bullet will,” replied Topper, “and inasmuch as it’s my spot, I feel that I ought to know.”

“How about blowing your brains out?” suggested Marion easily.

Topper stifled a scream.

“Oh, no,” he got out. “Oh, no, no, no. Don’t, Marion. What a thing to say.”

“Well, they say,” went on Marion placidly, “that if you plug a guy in the stomach he’s sure to be wiped out. Gangsters think highly of the stomach.”

Topper let out a long breath that ended in “o-o-o-o.”

“I’m not going to be murdered,” he declared at last, “unless you can think of some better place and unless you speak a little more becomingly.”

“How would you like to be shot in the heart?” asked Marion.

“Simply love it,” replied Topper, “but suppose you missed?”

“I’d just keep on banging away at you until you were shot to pieces,” said Marion coolly.

Topper nearly curled up at this.

“Literally full of holes,” he muttered. “A sieve.”

“Oh, a couple of shots will do,” declared Marion. “You’re sure to be murdered.”

“But how is what burns me up,” was Mr. Topper’s reply.

He rose wearily to his feet.

“Would you be more comfortable lying down?” asked Marion in a professional voice.

He looked at her reproachfully.

“How can you speak of comfort at a time like this?” he asked her. “By gad, the way you talk, one would think I was getting my picture taken instead of my life.”

“Why, there won’t be enough left of you, my boy, to make a speck on a time exposure,” Marion assured him.

“Ah-a-a-a!” was all the reply Topper was able to make to this.

After that things happened quickly. Marion kissed him lightly upon the lips. She had no idea of weakening her man. Then she moved back several yards and raised the gun.

“Half a minute,” called Mr. Topper. “Have you been drinking, Marion?”

“Yes,” admitted Marion, and this time it was her voice that shook.

“But you’re all right, aren’t you? I mean your hand doesn’t wobble?”

“No, old dear,” said Marion in a small voice. “Are you all right yourself?”

“Yes, kid, don’t worry. I love – —”

A fraction of a second before the sound of the gun shattered Topper’s last words, George Kerby sprang forward and whirled him about. Then came the bang, and his body seemed filled with fire. He swayed, buckled to the ground, and, crumpling over on his back, lay still. Marion, opening her eyes, saw George kneeling down by the body.

“Where did I hit him?” she asked, running forward. “Is he dead yet?”

“Can’t answer either question,” said George briefly. “All I can say is that you must have been nuts, the pair of you.”

Both of them were now kneeling by the fallen man, both frantically examining him.

“It’s not here,” said George, searching Topper’s chest diligently for a wound.

“His stomach’s okay,” called Marion. “Take a look at his head.”

“No hole here,” said Kerby, “except the usual ones.”

“Well, I give it up,” remarked Marion. “He must be struck somewhere. I’ll take a look here.”

“Oh, no you won’t,” said Topper weakly, suddenly snapping out of his daze. “You damn fools, turn me over.”

“Never thought of that,” muttered George, rolling Topper over. “By jove! here it is. Now, how would the newspapers put it? ‘Wealthy American Found Strangely Wounded in the—’ Just how would one designate the spot?”

He began to laugh softly. Marion was almost crying. What an inglorious end to an enterprise so heroically conceived and executed!

“I don’t know what they’d call it,” she said, sinking to the ground. “I’d call it a damn bad break. Why did you have to butt in?”

And the potential murderess broke into a series of low and painfully human sobs. Topper, with his nose on a clam shell, reached back and patted her hand. George stood over her and helplessly patted her back. Everything else was forgotten for the moment save Marion and her tears.

“There – there,” said George soothingly. “The Colonel will fix him up as good as new.”

“That’s just the trouble,” sobbed the girl. “I don’t want him as good as new. I want him all dead.”

Although the idea of the Colonel laying ruthless hands on his person did not appeal to Topper, he said nothing about it.

“Sure,” he replied cheerfully. “Why go on like that over a mere shot in the pants – I mean, trousers?”

That night, after a somewhat drunken extraction performed braggingly by the enthusiastic Colonel to the accompaniment of a string of obscene and ill-timed jests, Topper became a little feverish. And all night long Marion, a little huddled, sat by his bed. When dawn broke she bent over and kissed him. Moving quietly about the room, she touched a few of his things here and there. But she never looked back at the bed as she went away.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Night Thoughts
on a Vanished Mistress

Topper is once more on his balcony, this time we have him seated somewhat tenderly on a pneumatic arrangement which he hopes to be able to give soon to some out of luck urchin on the beach. It is night now, and the path of the full moon goes glimmering on to Africa. Topper is alone save for Scollops. The cat sits by his chair. Topper is alone, and he fears very much he will always be alone. Marion is gone. George is gone – all of them all gone. Somewhere through the night Mrs. Topper is speeding towards her husband. And out there along that moonpath the small figure of Marion Kerby is speeding farther and farther away from him, Topper very much fears.

“Listen, Scollops,” Topper mutters. “Did it ever get you anything to cry over spilled milk?”

Scollops was not helpful. Cats are not helpful. Their attraction lies in their monumental egotism. This cat yawned and thought prettily about her own affairs – if she thought at all.

“Because if it did,” continued Topper aimlessly, “I’d flood the sea with tears.”

Félice, looking her prettiest, appeared upon the balcon.

“Bonsoir, m’sieu,” she said in her rich, rather husky voice. “How goes the little wound tonight?”

“Not so damn bien, Félice,” replied Topper.

“And yourself, m’sieu?” continued Félice.

“About as low as your morals, my girl,” said the man. “You can judge for yourself how badly I feel.”

At this sally Félice smiled contentedly. Look where she had advanced herself to without the exercise of morals.

“How fortunate,” she murmured, “m’sieu was inconvenienced from behind.”

Topper looked upon her with mildly disapproving eyes. Félice flexed her torso and withdrew into the room. Topper remained alone, his eyes fixed on the moonpath. Time passed, and the path shifted. Topper remained fixed. Presently he rose and moved over to the railing of the balcony, up to which a few small roses were still struggling. Softly he pounded his fist upon the railing. That nail needed hammering. He noticed that. Topper did not philosophize over the absence of Marion. He was hurt as an animal is hurt, and like an animal he remained dumb. He did not tell himself in so many words that with the vanishing of Marion also vanished much of himself – that she had carried away with her the glamour and buoyancy of life, its mirthfulness and its romance. Inside him this knowledge was making itself poignantly felt. Topper did not try to analyze it. Topper was not that way.

There he stood, not a large man, but certainly not a small – by no means a small. A little stout, if anything. Commonplace enough, but comfortable looking. He would never set the world afire. A man alone with his thoughts, and he hardly knew what they were. Would Marion ever come back? he wondered. She had not committed herself. That was something. She had backslid once. Why not again? Life was like that, always on the skids, always sliding back. Well, he had slid back, God knows, back into life with a bang. Back with a shot in his trousers.

A low moon now, dropping down and looking wan. Topper’s eyes are in shadows. No one will ever know what manner of man looked out of them, what loneliness they held. Slowly his fist beat upon the railing as his darkened eyes followed the path of the moon. Was a small, debonair figure outlined against it? Topper’s fist continued to beat, slowly, monotonously pounding. The clenched fingers tightened a little.

A song measured to the cadence of Taps came floating through the night. It was not much of a song, but it got inside Topper. A violin throbbed in the heart of its melody.

“Good-night, dear, good-night,” came the voice. “For the last time tonight hold me tight.”

“A cheap thing,” thought Topper. “Just like all of them.”

But, after all, weren’t a lot of real things seemingly cheap, seemingly commonplace, yet real enough? Making love was cheap if considered in a certain light. Everybody did it more or less. And everybody got over it more or less – or did they? Hell, that damn tune with Taps beating through it was getting him. That was it. Taps always did. There was something so final about it. An ending. Lights out. Pipe down. You’re through. Stand by for a new day. He smiled grimly as he thought of the new day. He would most assuredly have to keep his face to his wife, especially at unguarded moments. He could never explain away the scar of Marion’s bullet.

“A sweet sort of souvenir,” he mused. “A romantic keepsake. A little reminder of a moment of glorious folly.” Trouble was he almost had to break his neck to see it.

His hand was tired from pounding, and his eyes heavy from watching. Had he been hoping for something? He guessed so. He damn well knew so. Some little sign. A hint, perhaps.

Topper relaxed his fingers and closed his eyes. A little breeze ran through the ramblers. Lips brushed against his. He stood very still, trembling only inside. The throbbing of Taps seemed to mill and flood about him. Words were being sounded upon his consciousness:

“If I ever backslide, old thing, I’ll damn well slide back to you.”

A little dog-eared rose all hot and crushed had found its way into his hand. He looked at the ragged petals, and a glint from the dropping moon struck a warm spark in his eyes.

“If I ever backslide, old thing,” he repeated to himself, “I’ll damn well slide back to you.”

Topper smiled. It seemed fairly safe, knowing her as he did.

With this ray of hope in his heart and a small rose in his hand, not to mention a healing wound in the seat of his trousers, Topper turned to the French windows behind which Félice was waiting. She was not. Félice was sound asleep. However …

— THE END —

THE STRAY LAMB

DESCRIPTION

Mild-mannered investment banker, cuckold, and dipsomaniac T. Lawrence Lamb gains perspective on the human condition during a series of mysterious transformations into various animal forms. Lamb, his daughter Hebe, her boyfriend Melville Long, and Hebe’s friend Sandra Rush (a twentyish lingerie model who becomes Lamb’s love interest) pursue many adventures, most of which fall well outside the perimeter of law and order.

CHAPTER ONE

Spines in Transit

Mr. T. Lawrence Lamb weaved his long, shad-bellied body down the aisle, and as one sorely stricken in affliction, crumpled into a seat. He hoped prayerfully that the other half of it would remain unoccupied. He hoped even more prayerfully that if it should be occupied it would not be by anyone he knew even remotely. Every evening he hoped this and almost every evening his hope was disregarded.

Mr. Lamb automatically elevated his knees. Out came his paper and off went the train. All set. Another day smeared.

He sighed profoundly. So far so good. No one had yet encroached upon his Jovian aloofness. Perhaps for a change he would get the best of the break. Adjusting his features in what he fondly believed to be a repellent expression he prepared to concentrate his attention on the financial section of his newspaper. His heart was not in it. Neither was his mind. Lamb was in a vagrant mood – misanthropic, critical, at odds with himself.

“Here we sit,” he mused – his eyes darkly contemplating his fellow commuters – “Here we sit, the lot of us, a trainful of spines in transit … so many sets of vertebrae, each curved and twisted according to the inclination of its individual owner.”

His eyes rested unenthusiastically on a man he heartily disliked, Simonds, a purveyor of choice lots.

“Take Simonds there,” he continued to reflect. “That spawn of hell is just a lot of vertebrae all curled up. I myself am scarcely more than a column of vertebrae. And that old lady over there, she’s a repository of vertebrae, old tortured vertebrae, no doubt extremely brittle … museum pieces.”

He sighed morbidly over the great age and brittleness of the old lady’s vertebrae, and rearranged his own, flexing them deftly between the seat and its back. His knees crept up higher in front of him. His head sank lower. He was gradually jack-knifing into his favorite commuting position.

For some inexplicable reason vertebrae this evening seemed unusually important to Lamb. They were almost getting the best of him. The more he thought of vertebrae the lower his spirits ebbed. There were too many commuters, all trying to contort themselves into the most comfortable, the most restful positions – all striving to do well for their backs after the strain of the day.

Tentatively Lamb peered into his newspaper. He fully intended to wash his hands of vertebrae and to study the details of a new bond issue.

There were newspapers everywhere – evening newspapers. Alluring tabloids with impartially quartered front pages displayed one pair of robust legs, one good corpse, a sanguinary railway accident, and a dull-looking pugilist. What more could any reasonable person crave?

Lamb studied the absorbed readers with detached animosity. Papers were being held at every conceivable angle, some negligently, untidily, others grasped tenaciously as if their owners lived in momentary dread of being deprived of their comfort. Some readers scanned their papers from afar. Others approached them secretively, nose touching type.

“Newspapers and vertebrae,” elaborated Lamb, eyeing the suspended sheets bitterly. “That’s all we are. That’s all we’re good for.”

In the third seat in front of him sat a dignified old gentleman. He was having tough cerebration assimilating the fact that red ants greatly deplore the existence of essence of peppermint. For sixty-odd years he had managed to struggle through life without the benefit of this information. Now it had become urgent business with him. He must tell his wife about it the first thing. No more red ants for them. Then he tried to remember if they had ever suffered from red ants.

Farther down the aisle was a man whose expression grew bleaker and bleaker. He was following a comic strip. His concentration was almost pathetic. When he arrived at the grand climax he sat as one stunned, gazing hopelessly ahead of him. One would have been led to believe that he had suddenly received a piece of extremely depressing news.

In another seat, crouched like a dog over a bone, an ingrown-looking individual was enjoying a vicarious thrill from the sex irregularities of a music teacher and a casual man of God. Satisfyingly salacious stuff. Shocking. However, this particular commuter would not discuss the sordid affair with his wife. Such topics are better left outside the family circle.

Meanwhile the landscape.

Lamb turned to the window and considered a rapidly receding cow. Then his glance ran through the train. Nobody else was considering that cow. Nobody else was considering anything other than newspapers so far as he could discover. Yet the cow had not been without its points … a pleasant, contemplative, square-cut cow. And that brook out there. Lamb wondered idly where it wandered, through whose back-yard, through what meadows and woodlands. Lamb himself was wandering now far from the financial section.

No scenery in all God’s world, he decided, was quite so unobserved, left quite so utterly flat and to its own devices as those sections traversed by these hurtling slave galleys of progress. For the commuter familiarity with the landscape completely skipped mere contempt and passed into the realms of non-existence.

If that proud home-owner laboring out there on his lawn could only realize how unappreciated his efforts were he would not feel so infernally smug about things. Perhaps, thought Lamb, the man would give up gadgeting about with garden implements and devote his time to disguising the flavor of bootleg gin – a far more utilitarian and artistic pursuit.

Especially this evening, Lamb’s thoughts ran on, was the landscape neglected. Eyes looked upon it, but for the most part indifferently, unseeingly. Newspapers were to blame. Lamb worried his own paper. Commuting trains everywhere, he reflected, were more or less spiritually akin. That was the awfulness of it. His feeling of inferiority and sameness deepened. His mood grew more restless. It was gathering in revolt.

What was he himself but a poor doomed commuter, a catcher and quitter of trains? His destiny stood confronting him, smirking at him. Years from now he would be extending a withered and feeble hand clutching a commutation ticket to be punched. He wondered if conductors ever died or grew old. They never seemed to, always stayed about the same – loquacious mummies.

A good Grade A, case-hardened commuter, decided Lamb, would experience but scant difficulty in meeting his soul’s brother in any part of the world where commuting trains operated. With this creature he would be able to discuss his favorite topic in his own pet vernacular. Neither of them would give a tinker’s dam about the scenery. They would consider it in no terms other than those of building and real estate development – investment opportunity. With an inner ear, Lamb harkened to a hypothetical conversation:

“That’s a neat bit of wooded highland,” observes commuter A covetously.

“Yep,” says B. “It’s just itching to be opened up.”

“Wish I had the ready to go in for a proposition like that,” replies his friend.

“Man alive,” says the other, “if I had the backing, that property wouldn’t stay undeveloped long. Give me just six months, and I’d have a couple of paved streets run through and a row of model homes – .”

He pauses and frowns masterfully at the hillside.

“And garages,” adds commuter A, not to be outdone. “Bang-up sewerage and a garbage-disposal plant. That sort of stuff gets the right class of buyer.”

The wooded hillside is doomed. Its trees shiver. Trees have a way of knowing about such things. Soon wayward lovers will be seeking elsewhere for stimulating concealment. A neat little garage will have usurped their bower.

“My God!” muttered T. Lawrence Lamb, now thoroughly in revolt against the ordained measure of his days. “I’m a part of the system. I’m all tied up.”

Then quite suddenly his attention became riveted on an object.

It was an ear.

CHAPTER TWO

The Ear Obtrudes

An unqualified fact. The object at which Mr. Lamb was gazing with such rapt attention was nothing more nor less than an ear. A small pink ear. A perky shred of an ear. And this ear in turn was ornamenting a small sleek head. Exceedingly black hair, closely trimmed – a severe yet successful bob, becoming only to about one woman in a thousand.

“That’s a mean-looking ear,” mused Lamb. “Looks like a wicked horse’s. Snakish sort of a head too, probably filled with all sorts of schemes and misery.”

Yet, even as he gazed, Lamb attempted to reject the existence of the ear. He was not, he assured himself, actually looking at it. He was merely resting his eyes. In a moment or so he would return once more to his newspaper. As a matter of fact, his paper was so held as to be ready for immediate action. For instance, if the head to which the ear was attached should chance to reverse its position, Lamb could instantly take to cover. Meanwhile, if the ear happened to cross his field of vision that regrettable circumstance could hardly be obviated. It was not of his seeking. As he had previously done with vertebrae, he now proceeded to do with the ear. He washed his hands of it. He firmly set it aside. That silly-looking ear was really no concern of his.

Unconsciously Lamb found himself wondering just how it would feel to bite that ear ever so delicately – tentatively, so to speak. What would its owner say? What would she do? Bite back most likely. White teeth, small active teeth, somehow went with that ear. A brazen character too, daring and unrestrained. A thoroughly objectionable female type. Even from the little Lamb had seen, he considered the owner of the ear a demoralizing influence.

Anyone observing Lamb would not have suspected him capable of such an odd line of thought. Lamb himself was far from being aware of the fact that he was a thoroughly unmoral man, a sort of warmed-over pagan as judged by all standards of conventional morality. Otherwise that ear would not have disturbed him so profoundly, would not have lured him away from consideration of finance and industry.

When the gods were fabricating Mr. T. Lawrence Lamb they were far from being single-minded about it. There had been a certain divergence of opinion, a lamentable lack of harmony. Some had contended, not without reason, that there were already too many commuters cluttering up the earth, too many hard-headed, conscientious home-owners, too many undeviating husbands and proud fathers. Humanity was becoming too stable, too standardized. It needed more highly spiced and less orthodox representatives. Other gods were firmly convinced that in order to allow themselves a few gracious liberties and privileges and at the same to create a favorable public opinion it would be a far wiser thing to keep humanity more or less at a dead level, to make appetites and desires as orderly as possible, and to reduce imagination to a safe and sane minimum. It is to be remembered that these dissenting gods were the greatest hell-raisers on high and that they brought forward their contentions merely to further their own selfish ends and to assure themselves of unexamined enjoyment of their rather indelicate pursuits.

Unfortunately, though outnumbered, these gods represented a small but active minority, and the result with Lamb was an acrimonious compromise, an incongruous blending of strongly opposed elements. Outwardly Lamb looked and acted like a sober, responsible and respected member of the community – one of its more solid members. Lamb firmly believed himself to be every bit of that. But the inner Lamb, the true Lamb, was not quite so good. There was little conformity in him, scant reverence for the established order of things. Consequently Lamb was the seat of much mental and spiritual conflict, of many stray, orphaned thoughts. Within himself he contained an unplumbed reservoir of good, healthy depravity that was constantly threatening to overflow and to spill all sorts of trouble about his feet.

Lamb’s face, like his body, was long. His skin was dark and expression somewhat saturnine. His eyes looked out on life always a trifle sardonically. His associates believed him to be a capable, serious-minded man, whereas in reality he was filled with a sort of desperately good-natured irony. For purposes of self-protection he was often brusk and caustic. It was just as well for everybody concerned that many of the remarks that sprang uninvited to his lips were quickly stifled. He had a wife who considered herself both artistic and intellectual. Lamb heartily detested these qualities, little realizing he possessed them himself to a high degree.

He enjoyed sitting with his knees elevated and his arms waving vaguely above his head. In this position he gave the impression of a semi-recumbent cheer leader. It was his most effective pose. He could explain things better that way. When customers came to him for financial advice they usually found him in this position, his desk being used solely for the purpose of supporting his knees. As he talked to them, his hands churning about in the air seemed to be juggling the industries and public utilities of a nation. Fascinated, his callers saw golden opportunity dancing before their eyes. Lamb’s success as a financier lay in the fact that he was often eloquently inarticulate – staccato. When necessary he could be masterfully blasphemous. His selling talks left much to the imagination. An overhead scrambling of the hands, a tortured oath or so, and a lowering scowl were sufficient to crumble the opposition of the most opinionated investor.

In his dress he somehow always managed to be smartly disheveled, always slightly sprinkled with cigarette ashes. His manners were not good. They were natural. At forty he no longer cared a rap whether or not he ever sold another bond. Like his fathers before him, he was the Lamb of Lamb & Co. Exactly who or what the “Co.” represented people had given up speculating. Customers knew that Lamb alone was sufficient. They deferred to his judgment and absorbed his bonds. Lamb had never ceased to be both pleased and surprised by his success. He was conscientious about other people’s money. The well-established reputation of Lamb & Co. had not suffered under his management. He was proud of it, but just a little fed up. This he scarcely realized. Fortunately for the business no one ever sensed the lurking instability of the man, least of all Lamb himself.

His wife found it convenient to regard him as an unimaginative plodder – a money-grubber. Lamb no longer bothered his head about her opinion. In his eyes she had long been a matrimonial washout. Occasionally he found enjoyment in annoying her. For years she had been trying to subjugate him, to mold him to her ways of life. Today he was as inexplicable and as recalcitrant as when he had just married her. He was not a satisfactory husband. He knew this and was pleased. He failed utterly to harmonize with Mrs. Lamb’s background, yet there he was and there probably he would be always with his long legs and mocking face. Mrs. Lamb often wished she had married an unqualified fool instead of this dark, ambling creature on whom she could make no impression.

It was essential to Mrs. Lamb’s happiness that she should always make an impression. She feared Lamb’s unuttered observations and never felt quite securely poised in the presence of his enigmatic grin. Lamb was no household comfort. He cramped his wife’s style dreadfully. His daughter a little more than liked him. Together they considered life critically, cynically, and just a bit coarsely. With the aid of Hebe, Lamb at times became a jovial vulgarian. It was a relief to him, an outlet. With everyone else he automatically acted the part of the conventional, unemotional, complacent business man he fondly believed himself to be.

And for that reason the ear offended him. Lamb disliked philandering, yet for some reason or other, he felt that with very little persuading he could bring himself to philander with that ear. For several weeks he had been observing it in a casual, detached way. It was such a ridiculously small ear – the merest pretence of an ear. Why should a full-grown man like himself trouble about such a trifle? He was well past the age of foolishness. His own daughter was nearly as old as the ear. Anyway, the whole idea was out of the question. Yet the ear was undeniably a challenge. And that small sleek head so independently perched on a nice-looking neck, that too, was not without its appeal.

Strange to say, Mr. Lamb had never looked on the countenance of the owner of the ear. He had not even tried to push his investigations that far. He had felt it safer to let bad enough alone. He had ideas about the face, vague speculations, but he did not dwell on them. Why should he? Of what interest was it to him? Rubbish!

The train was slowing down for his station. Experienced commuters were already collecting their inevitable packages from the racks. Mr. Lamb methodically folded his newspapers and dismissed the ear from his thoughts – that is, he half rose preparatory to making his way down the aisle when quite unexpectedly the ear turned, and Mr. Lamb sat down hurriedly like one suddenly atrophied. The man was shocked to the core. He felt himself being intimately caressed by a pair of incredibly melting eyes set in a face whose pallor is usually associated with innate vice. There was a mouth too, vivid and terribly defenseless, and at the same time quite capable.

It was one of the most alarming experiences in Mr. Lamb’s life. Those eyes. The languor in them. What a way for a women to look at a man in public! The only word Lamb could think of in connection with those eyes was “voluptuous.” They were actually voluptuous eyes, yet strange to say, they were unconsciously so. The girl did not know what she was doing. She could not possibly know.

“A creature with eyes like that,” thought Lamb, “should be forced to wear smoked glasses.”

She was more dangerous than a floating mine in the path of shipping. Her very innocence increased her potency. For some inexplicable reason Lamb smelled the fragrance of branches heavily ladened with blossoms and caught a glimpse of a Chinese print he had once intended to buy.

The girl had turned her face away. Simonds, the bounder, was pausing to talk with her. The girl was smiling a slow, provocative smile, and Simonds, fool that he was, seemed to be ghoulishly pleased.

“She’s cooking up something,” thought Lamb. “The Jezebel – a regular Messalina, that girl – a she devil.”

The train was gradually emptying. Lamb half rose again to make his way out. Then her eyes met his for a second time, and once more Mr. Lamb felt himself transfixed.

This was all nonsense. He rallied and calmly returned the girl’s gaze. Then he finished folding his paper, rose snappily and left the train.

“What the hell!” he kept saying to himself. “What the hell!”

CHAPTER THREE

The Ear Has Legs

Still numbed by the high voltage of those passionate eyes – Mr. Lamb had slightly refined his first expletive – he made his way down the aisle and mingled with his kin on the station platform. In his deep abstraction he failed to respond with his customary briskness to the salutations of his friends.

“ ’Lo there, Lamb, how’s the boy?” passed unchallenged as did, “Evening Larry, how’s tricks?” and other such innocuous inquiries.

Following the trail of commuters up the circular stairs, Lamb paused in the waiting-room by the newspaper counter and looked through a window at the glittering array of waiting motors. Some of them were already pulling out bearing their complacently successful owners homeward through the neat well-ordered streets of that opulent suburban town.

Ordinarily this massing of wealth, this tangible evidence of purchasing power would have given Mr. Lamb a comfortable sense of security. It would have made him feel that all was well with the state of the nation and that under the beneficent guidance of a cautious administration prosperity was assured. This evening, however, Lamb looked upon the automobiles without elation. They were mostly being driven by wives and daughters – smartly togged women for whom this moment constituted one of the high spots of the day. Any woman so unfortunate as to be forced to meet her bread-winner in an outmoded car was the object of some pity and no little secret self-congratulation. Her costume was examined a little more critically, and questions were asked about her husband. Did he count or was he unimportant? Why did people like that try to hold their own in such a well-to-do community? There were other commuting towns. Nice little places where they would feel more at home.

The bemused Lamb picked out his own well-groomed automobile and dwelt on its handsome lines unappreciatively. There was his daughter at the wheel. A good girl Hebe, but after all was she really good? Was any woman fundamentally good? Lamb was none too sure.

He saw another person standing by his car. A young man in white flannels, light sweater, and sport shoes. A well-set-up youngster. Obviously very much absorbed in Hebe. This youth was leaning over the side of the automobile, and Mr. Lamb was struck by the lithe, unconscious grace of the vigorous young body. A fine-looking pair those two made. A romantic splash of color and animation. Romance – that was for them. They still had time ahead. Heaps of it. His was rapidly running low.

Without realizing how far he was going, Lamb leaned over the newspaper counter and attempted to strike an attitude similar to that held by the youth. The effect was somewhat surprising. The counter was low, and Lamb was long. As a result of this combination Lamb appeared to be sprawlingly, jauntily, suggestively confidential. The newspaper man looked at him with startled eyes for a moment, then mistaking Mr. Lamb’s motives, approached slowly and leaned tensely forward across the counter. Unconscious of the man’s presence, Mr. Lamb maintained the immobility of his peculiar position. Believing that he might be still too far away to receive the delicate communication Mr. Lamb desired to make, the newspaper man drew even nearer, placed his ear to the other’s lips and waited expectantly.

For a long moment this odd tableau remained fixed as if in wax, then the man’s curiosity got the better of him.

“Shoot, Mr. Lamb,” he murmured. “Something good?”

Slowly Mr. Lamb turned. It took a little time for him to realize the full import of the situation. All he could see at first was an avid ear. Then he drew back as if stung and gazed blankly at the vendor of papers. Why was the creature so breathlessly expectant? With a shiver of apprehension he suddenly realized the full significance of the situation. He looked down at his unnaturally cascading body and immediately assumed a more normal position.

“What?” he asked, fighting for time. “What’s that you said about something being good?”

“Oh, nothing,” replied the man defensively. “From the way you were leaning over, I thought you wanted to whisper something. You know, something sort of – er – racy.”

The newspaper man had barely avoided the use of the word “dirty.” In his substitution of “racy” for it, he felt he had achieved a conversational triumph. Nevertheless, he considered himself cheated – let-down. Mr. Lamb regarded him with growing disapproval. He studied the eager eyes and half-parted lips. Sedulously he avoided the ear. That face, he feared, that repellent face would henceforth haunt his dreams.

“No,” he replied at last. “There seems to have been some misunderstanding. Those stairs got me. I was merely resting. It must be the weather. Somehow I feel quite worn-out this evening.”

He turned wearily, his shoulders suddenly sagged, and arranging his body in lines of utter exhaustion he dragged his feet away from the presence of the hateful person behind the counter. Lamb was not cut out to be an actor. His idea of feigning fatigue was far too elaborate. It was arresting but lacked conviction. Mr. Lamb had never progressed in such a remarkable way in the whole course of his life. He looked as if he had been mortally wounded and was blindly making his way toward human aid.

How many others had witnessed his momentary madness, he wondered. How many eyes had dilated at the sight of his humiliating posture? Had the ear chanced to see his breakdown? Lamb was filled with panic.

“Sort of a funny place to pick out for a rest,” pondered the mystified newspaper man, looking after the half-crouching figure of Mr. Lamb. “Hope he makes his car before he drops in his tracks.”

The object of his solicitude was by this time painfully approaching his automobile. He was relieved to see that the youth he had so disastrously attempted to imitate had departed, but was not at all reassured by the puzzled look of inquiry in his daughter’s eyes.

“What happens to have broken down in you, major?” the young lady demanded in a cool, censorious voice. “From that peculiar walk you appear to be practicing, I’d say you needed a hot water bottle and a dose of castor—”

“Don’t!” interrupted Mr. Lamb sharply. “You may be right. Perhaps I do, but why advertise my shame to the entire community? Would you like to have people pointing out your father as a man who has or is about to take a dose of castor-oil? Do you desire to drag your own flesh and blood through the dust of these streets? And why do you persist in calling me major?”

“As for the dust of these streets,” the girl replied, “you seem to be doing the dragging of your own free will. How came you to get your middle section all bunged up like that? And why are you crouching before me like a jackal about to spring? One would think you’d checked your stomach somewhere. And that agonized shuffle of yours. Why did you embark on that?”

Mr. Lamb looked at his daughter with hopeless eyes. With a deep sigh he opened the door to the front seat and crawled in beside her.

“My stomach got itself that way,” he explained briefly. “Don’t know exactly how it did it. Had a frightful day in the city. Dog-tired.”

Why had he ever attempted to deceive that hellish newspaper vendor with such an obviously artificial walk? It had only succeeded in making matters worse. Now he must somehow save his face. His daughter was regarding him with an undermining look of sympathy. Lamb essayed a groan. Perhaps that might help a little.

“If you go on like that,” observed Hebe, “you’ll not only be dragging yourself through the dust, but you will actually have to get a prop for your stomach to keep your head from bouncing along on your feet.”

“A horrid picture,” thought Lamb. Then to keep his daughter’s mind from dwelling any longer on the subject, he asked abruptly:

“Just who was that emaciated-looking loafer who was practically swooning all over my car just now?”

“That emaciated-looking loafer,” replied Hebe unemotionally, “might be occupying the position of your son-in-law at any minute now. You’d better be careful how low you classify him. I have an idea he was admiring my legs. So many people do.”

The physical collapse aroused himself sufficiently to consider his daughter’s legs. He had always been interested in legs.

“Is that so?” he remarked. “Well, if he wasn’t near-sighted to the point of blindness, he must have got an eyeful.”

“Father dear,” admonished the girl, “I am still but a child.”

“Not with those legs,” replied Lamb. “From the way that fellow was peering into the car you would have thought he was trying to learn your legs by heart, or to subject them to the third degree.”

“And why not?” demanded Hebe ominously. “What’s wrong with the legs?”

“Don’t like them,” said Lamb. “They’re too vigorous. Interminable legs. Do they never come to an end?”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Hebe. “They’re better than Sapho’s legs. Not so frank and confiding.”

Hebe was alluding to her mother, who had unfortunately been christened Mary, and who because of her penchant for amateur dramatics, had been renamed Sapho by her daughter. The name had been gratefully accepted by Mrs. Lamb. She was strongly of the opinion that she deserved it. Mary Lamb would not have been a livable name.

“You might be right,” agreed Mr. Lamb. “Your mother’s legs seem to be pretty well all over the place these days. Yours are a little less visible at least.”

He paused to consider the subject in all its ramifications. Hebe at times was quite a relief. Only she understood how to treat unimportant matters with academic thoroughness.

“You know,” he went on reminiscently. “In spite of Sapho’s extreme leggishness, I personally don’t seem to see them any more – not as legs, if you get what I mean. But she must have had legs at one time, I suppose.”

“Certainly,” replied Hebe, “or else I wouldn’t be here.”

“Logically arrived at,” agreed Mr. Lamb, “although your way of putting it has rather indelicate implications. Your parental respect also needs a little brushing up.”

They were alone now, the other automobiles having departed, and a new flock was arriving for the next contingent of commuters. Neither father nor daughter seemed to care whether they ever reached home or not. The casual ways of the pair were quite a trial to Mrs. Lamb. They were not popular around the house.

“Speaking of legs,” observed Hebe casually, “yon’ is an upstanding pair of shafts.”

She pointed directly across the street, and Mr. Lamb’s eyes followed the direction of his inelegant daughter’s finger. The shafts referred to belonged to a pair of arms busily intent on carrying several large bundles from the delicatessen store. Lamb looked on the legs with instinctive covetousness, then, like a frightened rabbit, froze defensively to his seat. They were the legs of the ear.

“Uh-hoo!” bawled Hebe’s uncultured voice. “Uh-hoo, Sandy! Over here!”

“Don’t!” pleaded her father. “Don’t make that awful noise. You sound like some sort of animal.”

“Over here!” shouted Hebe with unabated enthusiasm. “We’ll take you home.”

The legs paused in their progress, altered their course, and came forward attractively in spite of the bundles.

•   •   •   •   •

“That ear would have such legs,” thought Lamb.

There was something startlingly personal about them. They were vicious legs – suggestive. Lamb decided he had never seen such demoralizingly feminine legs. And Lamb was not elated. He had a premonition of change, of some complication arising to disturb the comfortable regularity of his life. He seriously resented this. He was Lamb of Lamb & Co., a contented, successful man. He was all set – had his own interests. Why should those legs come walking into his life? With characteristic thoroughness he washed his hands of the legs. Nevertheless, washed or unwashed, the legs continued to approach.

“Swarm in,” said Hebe urgently to the girl. “Slither over the major and drop your bundles in the back.”

“Why do we all have to huddle up here in the front seat like so many immigrants?” asked Lamb inhospitably. “Let me get out. I’ll sit behind. Willingly. Gratefully.”

In spite of his protest, the legs brushed past Mr. Lamb’s knees and arranged themselves alarmingly beside him.

“This is your father – yes?” asked the girl. “Is he a nice father? He doesn’t sound very. Is he?”

“He’s too long,” answered Hebe briefly.

“And drawn-out, perhaps?” suggested the other.

“Exactly,” agreed Hebe. “That’s just it. He’s too long and drawn-out. Take his neck for instance.”

“Me take his neck!” cried her friend. “You suggest I should take your father’s neck. How amiable!”

Mr. Lamb noticed that her voice was surprisingly deep and rich and that she spoke with an insinuatingly rising inflection. An unwholesomely foreign type, he decided.

“You’re mistaken,” he hastened to assure the girl. “My daughter didn’t mean for you literally to take my neck. She meant for you merely to look at it. She seems to think it’s too long.”

The girl scrutinized Mr. Lamb’s neck avidly. Mr. Lamb thanked God that he was a cleanly man.

“Why, I love that neck!” she suddenly exclaimed, and Lamb was both relieved and outraged. “I think I could neck with that neck.”

“What sort of friend is this, Hebe?” asked Lamb. “Something imported?”

His mood was waxing retaliatory.

“Her name’s Sandra,” replied his daughter, “and in a manner of speaking she is imported. Russian on her mother’s side. A nice girl but prone to folly.”

“Name doesn’t sound quite real,” observed Lamb. “Does she work in an office?”

“Not Sandra,” he was informed. “She’s a swell model. Underwear and things.”

“You should see me,” put in Sandra enthusiastically. “Then I am at my best. Then you would make me much. But to return to the neck, tell me, Hebe, your father doesn’t neck, perhaps?”

“Not sure,” said that young lady impersonally. “I doubt it. His sex life is practically nil.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!” ejaculated Lamb, rapidly changing color.

“Such a big man too,” replied the other girl sympathetically. “The poor thing must be starved for some loving.”

“Hear that, major?” said Hebe. “What you got to say?”

“I wash my hands of the both of you,” came the emphatic response. “Never did I hear such stuff. Do all young women go on nowadays like you two?”

“This is mild,” his daughter calmly informed him. “So far, we have respected your feelings.”

“But I won’t any longer,” cried Sandra tragically. “He is trying to go back on himself. He is taking a flat leave of me. I must tell all. For weeks this man has been devouring with hungry eyes the back of my head. Do not deny it, major. I have watched you in my mirror. Today I regarded him with these eyes.”

Here she cast these eyes wildly about the automobile, and Mr. Lamb became slightly dizzy. He was glad he was not driving.

“Today I observed him eye to eye, so to speak, and he wilted – wilted before my gaze. Now he would wash his hands of me. Do not let him do that, Hebe. Do not let him wash. I shall not be washed by this long Lamb, do you hear? I shall remain unwashed forever.”

On this high note of resolve the emotional young woman paused for breath and gazed magnificently about her. Mr. Lamb was filled with amazement and consternation. The complication had arrived. He was embroiled.

“You may remain unwashed forever, so far as I am concerned,” he remarked soothingly. “I shall make no attempt to wash you.”

“Good!” she exclaimed with a pleased expression. “I knew you would make me much. And now I depart.”

The car drew up before a small, neat-looking home of the modest order, and the girl quickly slipped out.

“Bring him yourself the first time, Hebe,” she said. “After that he will come alone.”

“By stealth and at night,” added Hebe.

“I shall do nothing of the sort,” Mr. Lamb retorted emphatically. “Neither alone nor accompanied do I come. The two of you have gone far in depravity. I wash—”

“For goodness’ sake, no more washing,” protested Hebe. “We’re all washed out as it is.”

The other girl stood gazing soulfully at Lamb for a moment, then she observed complacently, as if addressing the world at large, “The Long Lamb will come, never fear. I shall have him.”

“Stop talking like an adultress in a French farce and go away,” urged Lamb. “I want to get home and snatch a drink.”

“I shall make you suffer for that,” she retorted.

With an emotional swirl of her scanty skirt, Sandra turned and hurried up the walk to the small house. Mr. Lamb in spite of his resolution, followed with his eyes the retreating figure, missing no details of its trim lines.

“Well, major, what do you think of Sandy?” his daughter asked. “Fairly hot stuff, what?”

“Torrid,” Lamb agreed. “Does she always go on like that or is this some sort of maidenly pastime you two indulge in?”

Hebe grinned.

“That’s for you to find out,” she said. “As for me I’ve discovered the cause of your weird conduct when you left the train just now. Sandy had regarded you with these eyes. Brace up, major. You’re a favored man.”

“Drive on,” growled Mr. Lamb, “and for God’s sake don’t be an ass.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The Little Russet Man Appears

Strangely enough Hebe heeded her parent’s plainspoken admonition, which both of them knew without saying amounted to nothing less than an abject supplication. One glance at her father’s face was sufficient to convince her that his long-repressed emotional arrangements were in a state of fermenting chaos which threatened at any moment to produce revolutionary results of an impredicable nature.

Thereafter she devoted her youth and energy to the business of driving, taking full advantage the while of that great liberality the law extends to the young and not unfavored daughters of prominent citizens of all well-regulated communities. Lamb was too busily engaged in washing his hands of practically everything to notice his close and constant companionship with painful injury and sudden death.

Hebe drove. She drove in the direction of that place in which Mr. T. Lawrence Lamb sought refuge and repose after the contemplative quietude of a short yet most unprofitable day.

As if preordained by a class-conscious God with an eye to real estate values, this fair mansion was situated on the financially correct side of the tracks.

In most commuting towns of any recognized worth there are always two sides of which the tracks serve as a line of demarcation. There is the right side and the wrong side. Translated into terms of modern American idealism, this means, the rich side and the side that hopes to be rich.

On either side of the tracks there sometimes extends a quarter – a blot – that is not rich, will never be rich, and makes no visible effort to be rich. The blot thrives squalidly amid its fights, sufferings, and enjoyments. It is fundamentally superior to either side of the tracks, because it envies neither, regarding all members of the community as legitimate prey.

Properly speaking, however, those who dwell on one side of the tracks form a separate and distinct race from those who have their being on the other side. The rich side is naturally of finer clay, superior morally, physically and intellectually. And it is the bounden duty of those who dwell on the rich side to defend its borders against the untimely incursions of the financially striving side. Between the two a silently genteel yet none the less bitter guerrilla warfare is in constant progress. No pickets are visible, no orders to halt are audibly voiced, no hostilities are openly exchanged. Nevertheless, there is a certain sense of vigilance. They shall not pass, is the order of the day.

By nature Mr. Lamb was too indolent and skeptical to care a rap about either side. By the accident of birth and inherited wealth he was well above the battle. One side of the tracks was as good to him as the other. He lived where he did, not from his own choice, but because the house had been left to him by those who had gone before after having lived in it themselves and had their fill of it. The modern plumbing and other embellishments were of Mrs. Lamb’s contrivance. Like other members of her ilk, she believed, for some obscure reason, that the rich side of the tracks was also the aristocratic side. She was one of those aspiring wives who would have ruined her husband’s health, hopes, and happiness in her efforts to drive him across the tracks to the right side, had Fate seen fit to have placed her on the wrong.

If Mr. Lamb was most entirely perfect in the eyes of his friends and associates, it was due solely to his profound disregard of the finer shades of class distinction, his complete indifference as to what was taking place about him in his sacrosanct community. He should have been a civil leader, the chairman of committees, the protector of the established order of things, whereas he devoted most of his time to making a fine art of comfortable if grotesque sitting. This state of affairs, to put it mildly, was most distasteful to Mrs. Lamb. Consequently Lamb enjoyed it the more. Silently, some might say meanly, he observed her irritation. He studied it analytically. He also enjoyed her dizzy attempts to make up in herself for the semi-recumbency of her husband.

Once when Lamb had elevated himself in an endeavor to rid the community of Home Defense lecturers, reformers, and other practitioners of a warped and questionable patriotism, his wife had been so outraged that she had withdrawn to Europe for the duration of three months, much to the peace and gaiety of the entire household. Lamb and Hebe often alluded half despondently to the unguarded naturalness of existence during that pleasant period.

Hebe drove. She drove a winding way along a picturesque, semi-rustic road leading to that desirable eminence from which the abode of Lamb looked down on both sides of the tracks through casements that had framed several generations of watchers, for the ancestral Lambs had always been estate-minded and land-possessed.

Mrs. Lamb objected to the antiquity of the house, but she had to admit the distinction of its location and the advantages of its ample grounds. She had endeavored to make Lamb build. Lamb had studied her darkly for the full space of a minute, and there the endeavor had languished, never to be renewed. He had merely grinned, elevated his knees a trifle higher, and sighted at her over them. That had been quite enough. The subject was definitely closed.

As the car rounded a well-planned curve such as is to be found on the right side of the tracks, Hebe’s eyes marked and dwelt on a figure she considered rather unusual. It was a little russet man, as she always afterwards remembered him. A small creature, this person was, appareled in an ancient habit of russet hue. Even the umbrella which he carried with some show of elaboration was of the same color. From the rear, his short plump figure gave one the impression of good living and well being. It was a jolly sort of figure, the embodiment of jocund autumn. Hebe thought of chestnuts and burning leaves, of trees turning and hearths aglow. He was a surprising little man, well poised and suggesting a certain dignity in spite of his odd appearance.

The little man was more surprising still as the car drew near him, for he suddenly stopped, turned deliberately in his tracks and brandished his russet umbrella in a most determined and imperative manner. There was no mistaking the meaning. He desired the car to stop. And Hebe obediently stopped. She noticed the little man’s face was also of a russet hue. It was a jolly face, in which sparkled a pair of merry, unfathomable eyes.

“May I try it?” he asked abruptly.

His voice was as clear as a bell. It carried a quality of humorous briskness. Hebe was nonplused.

“You mean—” she began.

“Exactly, my dear,” supplied the little russet man as he fidgeted ineffectually with the handle of the rear door. “I mean just what I said: may I try it?”

“Let me help you,” offered Mr. Lamb, slightly dazed, as he turned to open the door from the inside. In doing so his eyes encountered those of the little man, and an extraordinary sensation shot through him. He felt as if suddenly he had been discovered, and yet there was a haunting sense of having just failed to remember something he had forgotten so long ago that he doubted ever having known it. The spell was broken at the sound of the little man’s clear voice.

“Your servant, sir,” he said, and there seemed to be some hidden significance to his words. “Now I suppose one mounts?”

“Just so,” replied Mr. Lamb. “One mounts.”

After busily podging himself into the automobile, the little man sat down quite unhurriedly and arranged his umbrella in just a certain way. It was his way of arranging an umbrella.

“Now,” he said, looking about him cheerfully, “what happens next? Make it do things, my dear.”

Feeling much younger and less assured, Hebe put the car in motion as the little man observed her, his eyes alight with great expectations.

“You must understand,” he explained in a confidential voice, leaning over to Mr. Lamb, “in my other – er – I mean, in my younger days I had no experience at all with this method of locomotion. How could I?” he demanded severely. “How could I?”

The question required an answer.

“You just couldn’t,” agreed Mr. Lamb. “Impossible.”

“Exactly!” cried the little russet man on a note of triumph. “The method didn’t exist. Is it – er – er – quite as you would have it, my dear sir?”

“Not so good,” offered Lamb, not knowing himself exactly how he would have it.

“No,” reflected his small passenger judicially. “It is, as you so laconically put it, not so good.”

“Some nerve,” remarked Hebe in a smothered voice.

“The expression, my dear, is modern,” said the little man good-humoredly, “yet its meaning is quite clear. I was merely agreeing with your father, for I presume he is your father, but perhaps I am in error on that slight point. It’s possible you are his wife, or even better, his mistress. It is of no importance. As I was just now saying, I prefer to walk. I seem to taste things through the soles of my feet.”

“You must run across some rare dishes,” Hebe threw back jauntily.

The little man eyed the girl with approval.

“Your daughter, sir,” he said, “for now I am sure she is your daughter, appears to possess an unusually healthy strain of vulgarity. I like it. I myself am vulgar beyond compare. In my other – er – I mean to say, in my younger days even strong men were forced to leave the room. I once remember Rabelais’s fainting – the master vulgarian of them all. That was an achievement. My highest. Now I am somewhat refined. Not that I fail to appreciate things.”

Mr. Lamb did some vague casting back in his memory, then became slightly shocked. This strange passenger must indeed be extremely old, almost too old to exist at all.

“Did I understand you to say, Rabelais?” he asked in his most polished manner.

“A thousand pardons,” the little russet man hastened to explain. “Rabelais! Certainly not. It must have been a more recent vulgarian. Old fellows like myself are prone to confuse both people and periods. Many years ago, though, I once met you, Mr. Lamb.”

“Me,” ejaculated Lamb, now thoroughly aroused. “At what time? In what place may I ask?”

“Before you were, in a loose manner of speaking, born,” came the quiet reply. “The place does not matter. You would not recall it.”

Lamb and his daughter swiftly sought each other’s eyes and found therein no helpful revelation. They seemed to be driving on in a dim, wandering silence, almost somnolent.

“From the outset you were destined to conflict,” drifted a small, clear, yet distant voice from the rear seat. “It can be rectified. It should be. If I can be of any service—”

Silence. Hebe was driving as those who drive in a dream – automatically, instinctively. Her father seemed to have fallen into some deep quagmire of meditation from which he would probably never be able to extricate himself. Silence still. Higher mounted the road. Had they been driving thus through eternity? Where was the station? Where was the house? And what, exactly, did they matter? Absently Hebe began to sing softly a melody from Tosca. Her low voice was surprisingly sweet, yet for some inexplicable reason an echo voice seemed to be following her today, a stronger voice filled with passion and bitterness, a knowledge and love of life. Lamb kept passing from one brown study to another, each growing browner until the last one threatened to become black. Yet even in his aloofness he listened to the singing and wondered. Something within him responded to it. As Hebe quite naturally slowed down and stopped at the gates to the house before taking the car to another entrance, a clear note rang out and lingered for a moment in the car around them – only them. They started and gazed at each other with bewildered eyes.

“Give over whooping,” said Lamb. “What will our passenger think, not to mention the entire neighborhood?”

Hebe glanced back at the rear seat.

“He doesn’t seem to be there,” she announced unsurely.

“Where the devil did we put the beggar off?” demanded her father.

“Don’t know. He’s off. That’s just all there is to it,” replied Hebe. “Perhaps the lunatic slipped out when we slowed down somewhere. I think he is an escaped one – honestly.”

“Without the slightest possibility of a doubt,” agreed Mr. Lamb. “But do you remember, the devil knew my name?”

“Yes – yes – so he did,” said Hebe. “I remember now. Rum, ain’t it?”

“No end,” replied Lamb with a grin. “This is our show, Hebe, understand?”

“It is. It is,” said the girl.

And just as he was leaving the car he asked her as diffidently as he could, “Listen, Hebe, does your friend – what’s her name – Sand—”

“Sandra Rush,” supplied Hebe helpfully.

“Name doesn’t matter anyway,” went on her father hurriedly. “Does she always act like that?”

“That’s for you to find out,” said Hebe.

“Certainly not. No interest,” declared Mr. Lamb. “And is it true that she parades in underwear?”

“That’s a fact,” the girl replied. “An absolute fact. I’ll take you to see her sometime.”

“God forbid,” muttered Lamb, turning up the extensive driveway. “I wash my hands of it all.”

CHAPTER FIVE

A Horse in Bed

Mr. Lamb returned home to find his wife in another man’s arms. The scene would have annoyed if not irritated the majority of God-fearing husbands. Not so Mr. Lamb. It left him cold. To heighten the color of the situation, Mrs. Lamb was clad in what is generally considered an intimate costume – arrangements usually associated with the bed, yet not necessarily with sleep. The costume in which the man rejoiced seemed a bit vague to Lamb. All he could think of was Mardi-Gras, class reunion, and revelry in general. He was not particularly interested.

The couple lay à la Cupid and Psyche upon the floor. At Lamb’s entrance Cupid released Psyche with such alacrity that there was the unromantic sound of a thud, Psyche being in the neighborhood of ten stone.

“Ah!” cried Mr. Leonard Gray with a wild wave of his hand and a smile of an uncertain nature. “Croesus home from his mints. How stands the market today?”

Mr. Lamb saw no occasion to reply to this piece of flamboyancy.

“Well, old money-grubber,” said Mrs. Lamb, heaving into a more graceful position, “I suppose your hands reek with greenbacks. You’re late tonight.”

Nor to this remark did Mr. Lamb consider it essential to reply. He merely contemplated the pair at leisure.

“There are lounges,” he said at last. “It’s merely a suggestion, of course.”

“Oh, no, the floor’s the place,” protested Mr. Gray.

“Not the way I was taught,” said Mr. Lamb. “Tilly, where’d you get those funny breeches?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Lawrence,” Mrs. Lamb replied with an attempt at dignity. “They’re not breeches. They’re—”

“Go on, tell me they’re kilts,” interrupted her husband. “I’m ignorant. I revel in it.”

“You know perfectly well they’re your own best silk pajamas,” retorted his wife. “I put them on to get a certain effect.”

“You’ll get a tremendous effect unless you’ve put them on backwards,” Mr. Lamb observed. “I’ve always had to be careful with those pajamas myself.”

“Sapho,” put in Mr. Gray hastily, “I don’t think I can go on with it now. I can’t recapture the mood.”

“Try that strangle hold again, young man,” suggested Mr. Lamb. “It might do you a world of good.”

“Every man must play his part, Mr. Lamb,” replied Leonard Gray protestingly.

“But you appear to be playing my part,” said Lamb. “Playing it better than I could – far better.”

Mr. Gray was the local amateur hero, the focal point of the Woodbine Players. He had once tried to sell bonds in Mr. Lamb’s office. It had been a poor try. Even his manly good looks had failed to disturb the stenographers. So, accordingly, he had withdrawn, having failed in all departments. The flappers and married women who had nothing better to do welcomed him back to the fold of the idle, and found him quite a help. Of late he was much to be seen at the Lamb ménage where Sapho and he developed their art.

“Why persist in misunderstanding?” complained Mrs. Lamb. “Leonard and I are rehearsing for Sunday night.”

“Then I suppose I should stay away or visit friends?” her husband suggested.

“Don’t be vulgar,” Mrs. Lamb replied. “You know very well about the Vacation Fund affair.”

“When I was a boy,” said Mr. Lamb, “such scenes used to be barred in public, especially on Sunday. Why do they close the movies?”

At this point Hebe blew into the room and eyed the weirdly clad couple.

“At it again, I see,” she announced. “When will you two ever get tired?”

Mrs. Lamb sighed wearily and considered rising, then thought better of it.

“I’m sure I’ll be glad when it’s all over,” she said. “I’m tired out, and the part bores me to tears.”

“I wish I could take it for you,” Hebe’s voice was deep with unfelt sympathy.

“Child,” said her mother, “you’d never understand. It takes – oh, I don’t know what it takes.”

“It takes a hell of a lot of nerve, I’d say,” Mr. Lamb remarked. “Come on, Hebe, I want to desiphon a couple of drinks.”

When they had left the room Mrs. Lamb looked questioningly at her partner.

“You shouldn’t have dropped me like that,” she complained. “I felt so off poise.”

“Only thing to do under the circumstances,” replied Mr. Gray.

“Perhaps it was,” she answered as he helped her to her feet. Then in a lower voice, “I’m afraid we were rehearsing too well, Len. You’ll have to be a better boy.”

“More careful,” he said, equally low.

She nodded.

In the dining-room Lamb was actively caging drinks, being carefully provided for by Thomas and Hebe. Thomas knew Lamb better than Lamb knew himself. He had been in the family longer and was so old that he had grown used to it and was now apparently indifferent to the passage of time. Thomas seemed to feel that he had got so old he could hardly get any older. He had no more room for years. So he cheerfully kept on living and regarding Lamb and Hebe as his last responsibilities. He was far too old for Mrs. Lamb. She was eager to pension him off. Thomas knew this and failed to show the proper amount of gratitude.

Presently Brother Dug came in – Douglas Blumby, Lamb’s brother-in-law and pet aversion. Dug always sang the “dead-drunk” part in “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” and had never failed to find it amusing. He was about Lamb’s own age, forty, and should have been chloroformed some months before his first candle. During the war he had been a camp song-leader and general rouser-up, and ever since that time his one idea in life had been to make people sing. On gala occasions he donned his non-combatant song-leader’s uniform and recalled camp life in a loud voice. He did things about Boy Scouts, and they failed to see his point.

Now he entered the room with a, “Whoopee, good people! Guzzle’s the word. How’s tricks, Larry?”

Larry choked so severely over his drink that both Thomas and Hebe sped to his assistance, the one taking the glass from his shaking hand, the other thumping him violently upon the back. When the afflicted man had somewhat recovered he turned a pair of watery malevolent eyes on his brother-in-law.

“I’m not proud of Lawrence,” he said in a hoarse voice, “but by God if I’ll stand for Larry! Furthermore I don’t know any tricks.”

Hebe turned to brother Dug reproachfully.

“You’ve been cautioned enough not to call him Larry,” she told him.

Brother Dug was not at all cast down.

“All right, Larry,” he replied with a humorous smirk as he patted Mr. Lamb’s already flayed back. “I’ll not call you Larry.”

Thomas and Hebe seized Mr. Lamb’s arms and clung to them. For a moment he stood there rigid and straining like a statue of Prometheus chained, then he allowed himself to be placed in a chair and supplied with a fresh highball.

Meanwhile Douglas Blumby had drifted away on some merry quest. His booming voice could be heard in the hallway discussing with Gray and Sapho the part that he would play in the Vacation Fund affair.

“Why do you let him live here, father?” asked Hebe.

“God knows, young one,” he replied. “Perhaps it’s fear of your mother or my final loyalty to her. Another thing, I have a certain duty to society. Bad as I am I could never inflict that ninny on the world. We must keep our troubles in the family.”

It was hardly a propitious moment for the entrance of Mr. Melville Long, yet in that young gentleman came without a care in the world, assured of a warm, if not enthusiastic, reception. Mr. Lamb, gazing at him with lowering brows, recognized the youth he had so disastrously attempted to imitate.

“This is Mel Long,” said Hebe. “He wolfs with us tonight, major.”

“I know your father,” said Lamb, extending a limp hand. “He works.”

“A father’s privilege,” replied Mr. Long blithely. “I often thank God he does. If he didn’t I don’t know how we’d ever get along.”

“You rejoice in your non-productiveness, young man,” observed Lamb.

“I’m not so unproductive,” the youth replied. “This morning I helped a famous dipsomaniac to regain a part of his health by playing him eighteen holes of golf. This afternoon I made a sketch of mother that made the old dear feel fifteen years younger. I’ll get a new car for that. And tonight – well, here I am.”

“And I suppose you’re going to stay,” said Mr. Lamb rather cheerlessly.

“Until the crack o’ dawn,” Long replied with a happy smile. “Golfing makes one hungry.”

Mr. Lamb rose wearily from his chair, placed his half-empty glass on the buffet and walked to the door.

“Well,” he said, “if you’ve settled that, I suppose nothing I can say would induce you to alter your plans. At your age I didn’t drink – much.” He turned to his daughter and continued: “Hebe you do the strangest things. Don’t drop the decanter when pouring. And don’t wear it out.”

With that he left the room. After dinner he retired to his study, where he sat doing nothing, absolutely nothing. Once he walked out on his little private veranda and considered the world at large, after which he returned to his chair where he continued to do nothing.

The next day he broke an inflexible rule and journeyed to the city. It was Saturday. There was no sense to it, yet he went just the same.

As he made for a seat in the train, a slim figure almost tripped him up in its eagerness to crowd past him.

“We shall sit together,” breathed the figure. “You and I on a single seat – alone!”

“With the exception of five or six hundred human souls,” observed Mr. Lamb, “we are quite alone.”

“This is merely the beginning,” replied Sandra.

“It is a short trip and I usually read right up to the end of it. That has been my rule for years,” said Lamb.

“But now that you’ve come to know me so well,” the young lady continued, “you will have to make a new set of rules.”

Mr. Lamb regarded her with a pained expression.

“You get the queerest ideas in your head,” he replied. “I hardly know you at all. Why don’t you go up there and sit with Simonds? He has no one to talk with, and I doubt if he knows how to read.”

“Mr. Simonds!” exclaimed Sandra. “He is a lovely man. He lends me his horse. I ride him tomorrow.”

“Why don’t you go and tell him about it?” said Lamb curtly. “If I couldn’t be a better horse than that clown of his I’d give up trying. At that he’s preferable to his master.”

“You like him, I see,” said Sandra.

“We all do,” replied Lamb shortly; then with a quick change of tone, “Tell me, do you really parade in underwear?”

“You mean, march down Fifth Avenue behind a band and Mr. Whalen?” she asked. “Never! I’m too exclusive.”

“I didn’t mean quite so openly as that,” Mr. Lamb explained. “You know what I mean. Don’t quibble.”

“I have never quibbled,” she said with conviction, “and I don’t think it nice of you to suggest such a thing. But I do parade in underwear, to say the least.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way,” advised Mr. Lamb, in a fatherly voice. “It doesn’t sound nice.”

“Oh, I am still unseduced,” she replied. “I’m tired of trying to be.”

Mr. Lamb looked about him quickly, consternation in his eyes.

“Lay off that,” he said in a low, intense voice. “Don’t shout the word above the roar and clatter of the train. Confine your unsolicited confessions to this end of the car.”

“You misunderstand,” she continued earnestly. “I don’t mean that I desire to be seduced. What I tried to convey to you is, I’m tired of having people try to seduce me. You’re an exception.”

“Let’s drop seduction for the moment,” pleaded Mr. Lamb. “Do you like going to plays?”

“Only for the moment will I drop it,” said Sandra. “I like going to plays. Take me.”

“I will not,” said Lamb.

“Dog,” said Sandra, and turned to the window.

The conversation languished here. Mr. Lamb opened his paper and endeavored to read. His eyes kept straying furtively to the girl’s averted face. Had she caught his glance he would have felt like a thief. The reason was hard to define. Gradually it dawned on him that the girl was looking at the scenery. Actually looking at it. Seeing it. To such an extent, in fact, that he was entirely forgotten. She had dismissed him from her thoughts, if he ever had been in her thoughts. She was out there somewhere, out there in the woods and fields. She was no longer connected with underwear, that is, Lamb hastily amended, she was no longer parading in underwear with commercial intent. Lamb also amended that thought. He did not know quite how to put it, so he gave it up. Anyway she was out there somewhere, and he was left quite behind. He felt injured yet interested.

Suddenly she squeezed his arm.

“Look!” she said. “See the two ponds – the upper one and the lower?”

The ponds flashed past, two brief little bits of metal. She looked at him with cloudy eyes.

“Well, the lower pond is all alone now,” she continued. “There used to be swans on it. Such lovely, button-hook-looking swans. Now they’re all gone. They’re on the upper pond, those swans, and the children play there now. Do you think that the lower pond feels lonely?”

Mr. Lamb considered it a very difficult question. His common sense assured him that the lower pond did not mind in the least, yet somehow, within himself, he felt as did his companion, that the lower pond might feel a little lonely.

“Yes,” he said at last, regarding her quite seriously. “I think the chances are that the lower pond feels just a bit out of things. Perhaps it is lying there wondering when the swans will return again … and the children.”

“I think you’re awfully damn nice,” she said irrelevantly, and Lamb promptly returned to his paper.

Just before the train pulled in at the station, Lamb turned to her and asked, “Why do you sometimes speak in such a strange way … sort of inverted English?”

“You don’t like it?” she asked with a delightfully rising inflection.

“Leave me out of it,” he replied. “Why do you do it?”

Then she laughed. She laughed softly, almost inwardly, without regard for either Lamb or his feelings.

“You’re so dumb,” she said finally when she had pulled herself together. “But just because you’ve given me such a good time, I’ll let you into a secret. Where I work, where I wander around in underwear, the directing gods urge us to talk like that. They think it sounds distinguished, gives the scanty things we wear the stamp of authenticity. Some of the models are much worse than I am. Sometimes I fall into it from sheer habit, at others for the sake of practice. I love to practice on you, you’re so – so – gullible, if you get what I mean. Now will you make me much?”

Lamb gave general directions as to just where she could go, and thus they parted, the one to the opulent salons of Fifth Avenue, the other to the thronging defiles of the financial district.

That night Lamb momentarily left his study and stood for a while on his private veranda. In a perverse fashion he was a little nosey about what was going to happen on the following evening and the preparations now under way. Merely because he was so completely out of it. Lamb was that way.

Mrs. Lamb – Sapho – with several turbans around her head, and what he decided must be a romper suit embellished with a scarf round the waist, was temperamentally directing several members of the Woodbine Players in the erecting of floodlights and the construction of a stage. At times she would pause as if in a trance, one hand pressed to her cheek. And Lamb hated that. He had to look somewhere else whenever she did it. Sapho was also driving Thomas into a long awaiting grave by sending him for something, then not wanting it when the old man had pantingly arrived. Lamb called Thomas to him, and ordered him to bed.

“On your way through the dining-room don’t forget to tilt the decanter,” he told him.

“I wasn’t going to, sir,” Thomas assured him, and shambled off with a parting, “I hope we all sleep, sir, in spite of it.”

Lamb hoped so. He intended to.

He returned to his study and the charming fabrications of Kai Lung and was getting along quite nicely when he became aware that someone was speaking to him. What he heard was:

“As I was saying, it should be rectified.”

Mr. Lamb looked up and saw sitting opposite him, as if he had always been accustomed to occupying that particular chair, the little russet man.

“Can you do anything about it?” asked Mr. Lamb.

“I did not say that I could, sir,” the little man replied.

“Then why let’s talk about it?” continued Lamb. “From the first, you say, I was destined to conflict. By that, I assume you meant, spiritual conflict. Well, recently I’ve just realized it. Before that I always imagined I was a singularly contented and fortunate man. I’m not. I don’t like things.”

“What would you prefer to be?” asked the plump caller, carefully placing his umbrella on the floor beside his chair. “What would you like to do?”

Lamb rose in exasperation. He moved restlessly about the study, poured out a brace of drinks, produced a box of cigars, and finally reseated himself.

“I don’t know,” he said rather helplessly. “Haven’t the vaguest idea when you put it to me straight. One thing I do know, I’m tired of being a human being. I think I’d like to be things if I could – animals, birds, beasts, fish, any old sort of a thing, just to get another point of view, to keep from thinking and acting always as a man, always as a civilized being, an economic unit with a barrel full of obligations constantly threatening to run up against something and smash.”

The little russet man considered Lamb pensively for a short time over the ash rim of his cigar. Lamb steadily meeting his gaze read a world of understanding in the little fellow’s eyes. To Lamb at that moment he did not seem little. He seemed large enough almost to be terrible. Yet the man was not quite terrible. It was his penetration that gave one a feeling of awe – of nakedness.

“That is all I wanted to know,” said the little russet man emphatically, and put down his glass.

Lamb turned to reach for an extra ash tray. When he turned back with the tray, offering it to his guest, all that remained of him was a lazily floating cloud of cigar smoke. The cigar itself was neatly balanced on the arm of the chair. Only the glass, cigar, and weaving smoke gave evidence that he had ever been there at all.

For several seconds Lamb remained in a condition of suspended animation, the ash tray still extended. Then he deliberately returned the tray to its place, finished his drink, put his book on the desk, its pages spread at the place where he had been reading, got up from his chair and thoughtfully left the room.

It was Hebe’s custom to call her father in the morning. Even in the summer-time when most young ladies lay late abed, especially on Sundays, Hebe was always hellishly up and prowling.

Mr. and Mrs. Lamb occupied adjoining rooms though the advantage therein had for some time ceased to exist. It was through her mother’s room that Hebe gained access to her father’s.

This morning as usual, she appeared in a flaming dressing-gown and softly opened her father’s door. Sapho was still asleep, her temperament entirely abandoned. The girl looked into her father’s room gloatingly. She was going to disturb someone. Then gradually her expression changed. She cocked her head on one side like a puzzled dog and continued to look, her eyes growing rounder and rounder. At last she turned quietly to her mother’s bed.

“Sapho!” she whispered. “Sapho! Wake up. There appears to be a horse in father’s bed.”

CHAPTER SIX

Equine Excursions

There was an element of urgency sharpening the edges of Hebe’s whisper that penetrated Sapho’s vast unresponsiveness to mundane considerations. This woman of many parts and poses sat up in bed and looked upon her daughter as a glacier would regard a rose.

“Your humor, Hebe, is extremely mal à propos,” she brought forth.

“Sapho,” replied Hebe, “I’m not trying to be funny. Things are funny enough. There’s a horse or something very much like a horse in the major’s bed.”

Sapho still light-headed from a heavy sleep strove to adjust her brain to the reception of this extraordinary announcement. No good. The brain refused to accept it. “What do you mean, there’s a horse in your father’s bed?” she achieved after an effort.

“Exactly that,” answered her daughter calmly. “Either father has turned into a horse or a horse has turned into father. It comes to the same thing. There’s one other possibility. Some horse might have run father out of bed and taken his place or else gone to sleep on top of him.”

“As if we didn’t have enough on our hands with the Vacation Fund affair tonight,” Mrs. Lamb complained as she sought for her robe and slippers. “If it isn’t a horse, Hebe, I’ll be very much vexed.”

“And if it is?” Hebe inquired.

“God knows,” sighed Mrs. Lamb, tiptoeing across the room.

Together they looked upon Mr. Lamb’s bed and beheld a horse. As much of the covers as possible were over this horse, its head was upon the pillows, yet much remained exposed and dangling. Hoofs and legs were eloquently visible. It was obvious that only the most determined of horses would have been willing to sleep in such a cramped position merely for the sake of a bed.

“My God,” breathed Mrs. Lamb. “What will the servants say?”

Under the scrutiny of the two women the horse stirred uneasily and opened one eye. It was enough. Mrs. Lamb indulged in a gasp. Hebe was merely interested. Not satisfied with this demonstration, the horse raised his head from the pillows and looked inquiringly at Hebe and Mrs. Lamb. Then his lips curled back in a sardonic grin displaying a powerful set of vicious-looking teeth. He rolled his eyes until only the whites remained and thrust one curved foreleg at Mrs. Lamb, a gesture eloquently suggestive of his intention to inflict some painful injury upon her body and person. Mrs. Lamb hastily withdrew to her bed where she took refuge beneath the covers.

“You do something about it, Hebe,” came her muffled voice. “Get the creature out of the house without the servants knowing. It would never do to have them think your mother had a horse in the next room. You know what servants are.”

The horse was listening intently, ears pitched forward, and at this last remark he winked slowly and deliberately at Hebe. The girl was amazed. It was her father all over. At that moment she accepted the fact that something strange had occurred.

Then after a few minutes of thoughtful consideration, looking this way and that as if to determine the best way of procedure, Mr. Lamb cautiously got himself out of bed, but not without considerable clattering and convolutions. Hebe watched him with amused interest. She knew it was her father.

“Hurry, Hebe,” came her mother’s voice. “We can’t afford to miss church today – not with that affair on tonight.”

Mr. Lamb thought of his best pajamas, and throwing back his head gave vent to a wild neigh. He was feeling rather wild and at the same time a trifle timid. He had often played horses as a child, but never actually been one. Now he tried to recall just how he had gone about it in those early days. He wondered how he looked, what sort of horse he was, and, remembering his full-length mirror, he stepped delicately across the room and, sitting down in a strangely unhorselike attitude, lowered his neck and gazed at his reflection. The effect was not pleasing. He saw a most despondent-looking creature regarding him from the glass. Hebe could not restrain a laugh, and Mr. Lamb turned his head and looked at her reproachfully, then continued his scrutiny.

“I’m not much of a horse in this position,” he decided. “There must be some other way of being a horse. Perhaps—”

He rose from his strange position and backed away from the mirror, but was still unable to get the desired view. Bending an eloquent glance upon his daughter, he pointed with his hoof to the mirror. Obediently the girl went over to the mirror and after much shaking and nodding of her father’s head, she adjusted it to his satisfaction.

“That’s something like,” thought Lamb, surveying his reflection with no little satisfaction.

He was a fine body of a horse – a sleek, strapping stallion. Black as night with a star on his forehead. He turned slowly, taking himself in from all angles.

“Rather indecent, though,” he thought. “Wish I had a blanket, a long one. Oh, hell! I’m a horse, now. Horses don’t mind. Still it doesn’t seem quite – well, I just never did it before, that’s all.” He paused to reconsider his reflection, then continued his soliloquy, “Anyway, if that girl can go about in step-ins and such, I can go about in nothing at all.”

He looked at his daughter proudly, and affectionately nuzzled her warm neck. She put up her arms and kissed him, then drew back and looked at him with a half-smile. Lamb solemnly nodded his head, and Hebe understood. Then a pleasant idea occurred to him. He squeezed through the door into his wife’s room and quietly approached the bed. Mrs. Lamb was still completely smothered by the covers. Slipping his nose through an aperture, he suddenly emitted a piercing scream sounding like a lost soul in hell. It was as if he had blown the good lady out of the bed. With amazing swiftness covers and all disappeared. Mrs. Lamb found herself on the floor on the other side of the bed, and she felt herself lucky to be there.

“Hebe, dear, for God’s sake, what was that?” she wailed.

“The horse,” answered Hebe shortly.

“Oh, what a horse!” quavered Mrs. Lamb. She was almost crying. “Can’t you get him to go away? There’s some Quaker Oats in the kitchen. Perhaps you can lure him out.”

Thoroughly satisfied with the results of his first endeavor, Lamb’s thoughts automatically turned to his brother-in-law. His spirit of enterprise was fired. He would stir farther afield. Still walking with high-bred softness, he made his way to the quarters of Douglas Blumby. Hebe expectantly opened the door for him, and Lamb, with a courteous inclination of the head, passed through.

Brother Dug was at his shower. He was attacking it as only Brother Dug could. He was literally singing it into silence. Lamb stopped and considered, then gently parted the curtains and thrust in his head. Brother Dug, feeling a draft, reached blindly behind him to reclose the parted curtains. His hands encountered the wet nose of a horse. For a moment he fingered the nose thoughtfully. It was not a part of himself, he was sure of that. Then Lamb breathed heavily on his back, and Brother Dug gave up feeling and singing at the same moment. He turned uncertainly only to find a horse confronting him with every evil intent in its eyes.

Mr. Blumby’s power lay in his throat, and this organ he now hastened to use with unprecedented vigor. It was a triumph of vocalization. He put his whole heart and soul into it, yet the horse remained. Realizing he could not shout the horse out of existence, Blumby crouched against the wall and held up two shaking hands as if to blot out the horrifying sight. For a moment he thought himself back in bed in the grip of some vividly terrifying nightmare. The horse still remained, water running grotesquely down either side of his nose. Mr. Lamb was killing two birds with one stone – refreshing himself and taking vengeance on his brother-in-law with whom he had never thought he would share a shower. He recalled the weeks, months, years of nausea this creature had caused him by his mere existence, and his anger rose. With one alarming foreleg he reached out and pressed down on the hot water lever. Cries of increased anguish from the occupant of the shower. Steam arose. Douglas attempted to escape, but Mr. Lamb implacably pushed him back. By this time Hebe had retired, having no desire to take part in a murder, no matter how justifiable.

Tiring at last of this sport, Mr. Lamb turned from the shower and devoted his talents to the room. This he proceeded to wreck, and, remarking Hebe’s absence, gave other effective demonstrations of his scorn.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have done that,” he said to himself as he left the room, “but after all I’m a horse; I’m not supposed to know any better.”

Hebe met him at the door and suggested a breath of fresh air. Lamb gravely agreed. He was rather nervous and faltering in navigating the stairs, but with Hebe’s moral encouragement he finally found himself in the lower hall. The girl opened the front doors and gave him an affectionate pat on the rump.

“That’s rather a familiar thing to do even to one’s father,” Lamb decided.

He turned and subjected his daughter to a reproaching look, then with great dignity passed through the doors and descended the front steps. The Sunday papers had already been delivered. A headline caught his attention. He paused and endeavored to read, but found difficulty in focusing his eyes. Finally he hit upon the plan of using only one eye. This caused him to cock his head in rather an odd fashion for a horse. However, it served Lamb’s purpose, and he became thoroughly interested. Having essentially a legal turn of mind, he had been following this murder trial in detail, and this report struck him as being unusually full and intelligent. With a deft hoof he flipped the paper over and continued reading, becoming more absorbed as he progressed.

Suddenly the maid, Helen, came out on the front veranda, hurried down the steps and snatched the paper from under his attentive nose. Lamb started after her up the steps, and the maid with a frightened cry darted into the house. Later she assured her mistress that she had been pursued across the lawn by a wild horse with blazing eyes. Mrs. Lamb was not hard to convince. That horse was capable of anything she thought.

Deprived of his newspaper, Lamb took stock of the world and his altered relations to it. It was a fair world and a brave day. Lamb felt better than he had in years. Nevertheless, he would very much like to finish that newspaper story. Perhaps the Walkers had not risen yet. Maybe their paper would still be out. With this hope at heart, he cantered down the drive and along High Hill Road until he had reached the Walkers’ place. Here he turned in and bore down on the front porch as unobtrusively as he could, taking into consideration the fact that he was a stallion of striking appearance obviously on the loose.

Good. The paper was there. Lamb quickly found the exact place in the evidence he had been reading when interrupted and went on with the story. When it came to its continuation on page eighteen Lamb was nearly stumped, but by the happy expedient of applying a long red tongue to the paper, he was able to turn it to the desired page. Just as he had achieved this triumph some inner sense caused him to look up. Walker, clad in a bathrobe, was following his movements with every sign of amazement.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Walker softly. Then he called out: “Come here May, if you want to see something funny – a horse reading the Sunday paper.”

“Nonsense,” said his wife, coming on to the porch and scanning the moist paper. “The poor fool’s been trying to eat the paper, that’s all. Such a beautiful horse, too. Wonder whose he is?”

“She called me a poor fool,” said Lamb to himself, “and she’s the biggest dunce in town. However, she has sense enough to see that I am beautiful. I am. Very.”

He looked at her with arched brows, and Mrs. Walker was visibly impressed.

“He’s an odd horse,” she admitted. “Perhaps he was, in some strange way, interested in that paper.”

Lamb made an approving noise.

Walker, having observed the horse’s efforts, studied the page thoughtfully. There was only one continuation on it.

“I’ll try him,” he said, and he began reading the evidence aloud.

Lamb, forgetting he was a horse, promptly sat down and listened. From time to time, as a telling point was made, he nodded his head, and every time he did this Mr. Walker became so moved that he could hardly continue reading. Mrs. Walker drew up a wicker chair and sat down. She too, became interested both in the horse and the evidence.

It was a strange Sunday morning scene: Mr. Walker comfortably seated on the top step reading diligently and a horse sitting in a weird position listening intently with ears cocked forward. Later when the Walkers attempted to tell the story at the Golf Club, they were jeered into rebellious silence.

Upon the completion of the story, Lamb arose and bowed courteously, so courteously in fact, that Walker in spite of himself, returned the bow with equal elaboration. Thereupon Mr. Lamb walked decently down the driveway and turned into High Hill Road.

“A good sort, Walker,” thought Lamb. “I’ll remember him if ever I get back to my former self. He believes in taking a chance.”

Back on the Walker porch the man turned to his wife.

“Well, that’s about the darndest horse I’ve ever seen,” he said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Battle of the Church

“An exceptionally interesting trial,” mused Mr. Lamb as he ambled along High Hill Road. “If they can only get someone to corroborate that ragpicker’s story the prosecution is going to have tough sledding.”

Other considerations occupied his attention. He remembered with a pang that the morning had been lamentably free from any suggestion of bacon and eggs. Few things worse could happen to Mr. Lamb.

“Horses,” he continued musing, “seem to get through the day pretty well on grass, but I won’t eat grass. It would seem so desperate. What would Hebe think if I ever told her I had eaten grass?”

He looked contemplatively at a near-by tuft. They were about finishing breakfast at home now, well satisfied, gorged no doubt. Smelling agreeably of butter, they were preparing for church. Well, he would miss that in any event.

“That bit there doesn’t look so bad,” he thought, eyeing the tuft of grass with closer attention. “Suppose I try it just for fun?”

He glanced in either direction and approached the tuft.

“Well, here goes,” he said to himself. “Might as well be a regular horse while I’m at it.”

He nibbled the grass tentatively, throwing his head back the better to judge its taste.

“Not at all bad,” he decided. “Not bad at all. Sort of like a rugged salad.”

For the better part of an hour Mr. Lamb continued along the road fastidiously selecting choice patches of grass and experimenting with various combinations of weeds, clover, and wild flowers. Some he found palatable, others were hard to down. His appetite temporarily arranged for, Lamb bent his mind on other lines of activity. He was not like other horses, content to graze all day. Furthermore, he had come across a cow cropping grass, and this had rather damped his ardor. He had no intention at present of sharing breakfast with a cow. One had to draw the line somewhere. His thoughts involuntarily strayed to Sandra, and suddenly he remembered she had told him she was going riding today on Simonds’s horse. She had also said some rather silly things about Simonds being a lovely man.

“I’ll fix that horse,” he muttered or attempted to mutter. “I’ll make him rue this day.”

With this edifying intention firmly fixed in his mind he cantered off in the direction of Simonds’s home. He knew exactly where the horse passed most of its time – in a vacant lot directly back of Simonds’s place. A high fence surrounded the lot, and behind this fence Simonds’s horse was going about its own business. Mr. Lamb studied the innocent animal with growing animosity. He was the kind of horse Mr. Lamb most detested, a smug, plump horse, exactly like his master.

“He would have a fence to protect him,” thought Lamb. “The coward. But I’ll settle his hash. Wonder if I can make it?”

He backed off for some distance, gathered his powerful muscles together and made a lunge at the fence, clearing it neatly. Once on the other side he suddenly changed his tactics. Instead of rushing at the horse and demolishing it as he had intended, he decided first to indulge in a little sport. He would be more subtle in his form of attack. He would confound this horse, terrify it within an inch of its life, put it out of commission for Sundays yet unborn.

Accordingly Mr. Lamb did things, things that no horse had ever done before or had ever thought of doing. He lowered his body close to the ground and curved his legs in a most unusual manner. Throwing his head to one side, he allowed his tongue to loll out of his mouth at one corner. With that careful attention to detail that marks the true artist, he flattened his ears and rolled his eyes more unpleasantly.

“Guess I look funny enough,” thought Lamb. “Wish I could foam a bit. That would be the final touch.”

He tried to work up a convincing-looking foam and succeeded partially. In this manner he approached his unwary enemy.

“Love to have a snapshot of myself,” he reflected. “No one would ever believe it.”

But several persons did believe it, among them being Simonds himself. He was standing at his bathroom window, and his eyes were starting out of their sockets. A few pedestrians also had stopped and now stood transfixed by the fence. This was more unusual than an appearance of Halley’s comet, and years after they remembered the event far more vividly. Simonds, in a thin quivering voice, called to his wife, his son, and his daughter, and together in various stages of disarray, they witnessed the rout and almost total extinction of their horse.

When the horse first spied the strange-looking object creeping up on him he stopped what he was doing and gave his full attention to it. At first he felt no fear. The phenomenon was entirely outside his experience. But as Lamb drew nearer a certain anxiety took the place of curiosity and surprise. And when the horse caught a glimpse of Mr. Lamb’s lolling tongue and bloodshot eyes, he realized that here was something that would not improve upon closer acquaintance.

Slowly and deliberately Lamb circled round his enemy until he had reduced him to a state of abject terror. The horse’s nerves were shot to pieces. He was trembling in every limb. Then Mr. Lamb, rolling his head drunkenly from side to side, his tongue sliding and slithering revoltingly between his bared teeth, began to close in on the aghast object of his enmity.

“A pretty picture I must make,” thought Lamb, as he prepared for the final coup.

Within a few yards of the wretched horse, he paused and horrified the air with a series of heart-searing shrieks. The Simondses drew back from the window, the pedestrians hastily abandoned their points of vantage on the fence. The enemy almost swooned, but some half-numbed instinct warned him that to remain longer in the presence of that animal from hell was certain and painful death. Comparative safety lay only in flight, and flee the horse did. Thrice round the lot he sped, fear increasing his ambition to break all established speed records. Lamb, now at full height, followed just closely enough to keep the edge on the horse’s terror.

On the third lap the horse decided that the enclosure was altogether too small to accommodate both of them. He made a dash at the fence. This time Lamb was not forced to jump, the enemy having gone clear through the fence and cleared the way. Out into the streets of the town the chase debouched. Fairfield Avenue swam past Mr. Lamb’s vision like a dream. They came to a beautifully kept lawn and tore across it. The enemy rounded the corner of the house and came suddenly upon a breakfast party on the rear lawn. It was either his life, or the party’s comfort, decided the horse. The party had to be sacrificed. Too late for turning now. Through the breakfast party the panting animal plowed, scattering table and dishes to the four winds. Lamb noticed as he passed through that one of the ladies had lost her kimono and was rushing about with the table-cloth over her head. He knew the people but had no time to apologize. His interest in the scene had caused him to lose slightly, and he now redoubled his efforts. The ground fairly thundered beneath his hoofs as he dashed down the broad, quiet street at the end of which was situated the stately church he attended. This place of worship had broad doors on either side and a huge main entrance. They were all open to the breezes on this balmy July morning.

The fleeing horse, either mistaking the church for a stable or else deciding as a last resort to seek sanctuary, disappeared into the main entrance, paused in bewilderment, then as if realizing that this was no place for him, made a swift exit through one of the side doors.

Lamb in the heat of the pursuit followed without considering. He found the congregation in a state of wild confusion that was in no wise lessened by the sudden and tremendous appearance of a second and even more terrible horse. Protected by his pulpit the preacher looked boldly down upon his seething flock and for some odd reason began to sing “Nearer My God To Thee.” Several women, believing he was summing up the situation altogether too mildly, fainted and lay in the aisles. All of the sleepers were wide awake and convinced that they would never sleep again.

It was at this moment that Lamb’s better nature asserted itself. As he surveyed the scene of carnage he had been so instrumental in creating, his conscience smote him and he promptly sat down, hoping thereby to restore peace and harmony to the congregation.

Observing how quiet he was, one of the ushers timidly approached him and attempted to lead him out. Lamb resisted with dignity, and when the fellow persisted, he placed a hoof gently against his chest and gave him a slight push. The usher slid down the aisle as if it had been greased and brought up with a thump against a pew. No more attempts were made to expel Mr. Lamb. He remained quietly seated in the rear of the church, paying strict attention to his own affairs. True, he was breathing hard, but so were many other members of the congregation including the preacher himself.

“This horse,” announced the good man, peering at Mr. Lamb with puzzled eyes, “seems to be rather a different type of horse. I don’t think he will disturb us and evidently he intends to stay. Who knows? Perhaps he is the first of equine converts.”

Lamb’s shoulders shook in encouraging mirth, and a polite noise issued from his throat. Several people turned and regarded him with timid reproval, and Lamb waved a placating hoof in their direction. Mistaking his meaning they immediately turned back and looked at him no more.

“Yes,” continued the preacher as if in a dream, “a strangely odd horse. Never in my long experience – well, let’s get on with the service.”

Lamb followed the service closely, rising when the congregation rose and sitting when it sat. His kneeling was an artistic achievement and created such a stir that few people listened to the prayer in their efforts to observe his contortions. Even the preacher became distrait and found himself repeating toward the end of the prayer, “God, what a horse! God all mighty what a horse!”

When the plate was passed for the offering, Mr. Lamb involuntarily reached for his change. The gesture was eloquent but futile. He averted his gaze, hoping no one had noticed his slip.

At the close of the service he was the first one to leave the church and, as was his custom, he waited outside for his family. He had gone this far, he thought to himself, he might as well see the thing through. He little reckoned however, on his reception by Mrs. Lamb. The docility of the horse throughout the service, his obvious reverence and piety, had somewhat reassured this lady. She thought she knew how to deal with any person or creature who actually believed in God and took Him seriously. Consequently, as Lamb followed her and her daughter along the sidewalk, taking his proper place on the outside, she continually tried to “shoo” him, until Lamb in his exasperation gave vent to a piercing shriek.

That settled Mrs. Lamb. From then on Mr. Lamb was perforce accepted as one of the party, much to Mrs. Lamb’s humiliation. Time after time she passed acquaintances who in spite of their manners would not refrain from asking her what she was doing with a horse. Mrs. Lamb disclaimed any ownership of or responsibility for the animal. Lamb on his part invariably stepped courteously aside and gave the impression of following the conversation with polite attention. From time to time he nodded his head as if in agreement.

His wife particularly disliked this. It seemed to place her on a social level with a horse, and that was not to be tolerated. However, Lamb asserted his rights, and Mrs. Lamb no longer had the heart to challenge them. Hebe stuck to her father like a soldier, enjoying the situation with a maliciousness not at all compatible with her recent departure from a house of God. Toward the end of their progress the walk developed into a race, Mrs. Lamb endeavoring to leave the horse and Hebe behind, and the pair of them obstinately refusing to be left.

It was at this stage of the game that they encountered Sandra Rush. Mr. Lamb stopped in his tracks and fixed the girl with a triumphant eye. She met his gaze wonderingly for a moment, then turned to Hebe.

“Why, what a peculiar horse you have,” she said. “For some reason he reminds me of your father. Something about the eyes. By the way, where is your father, the attenuated Lamb?”

Hebe was startled by her friend’s instinctive recognition of the horse. Mrs. Lamb was returning reluctantly to join the conversation.

“I don’t know exactly,” she hastened to reply. “He’s probably trailing about somewhere, or else just sitting. The major’s an odd duck.”

“A nice duck,” said Sandra.

“What’s this about ducks?” inquired Mrs. Lamb, as she joined the group in spite of the presence of the horse.

“I don’t know,” replied Sandra innocently. “I was just telling Hebe that I intended to go horseback riding this afternoon.”

“On whose horse?” asked Hebe, and Mr. Lamb became immediately alert.

“That man Simonds’s,” said Sandra. “I ride on his horse each Sunday. Such a lovely horse.”

“Well, he’s far from a lovely horse now,” replied Hebe sorrowfully. “From the glimpse I caught of him, that horse is a mental case. It will be many a long Sunday before he regains his reason, not to mention his health.”

Sandra desired enlightenment, and Hebe told her all she had seen and heard of the chase. At the end of the stirring recital, Sandra turned and let her reproachful eyes dwell on Mr. Lamb. She found him looking noble and unrepentant, but under the pressure of her gaze, the great animal gradually wilted until finally his head hung low to the ground. Mrs. Lamb was outraged to see this demon stallion thus subjugated by this rather questionable friend of her daughter. As a matter of fact Mrs. Lamb resented Sandra’s existence entirely. There were so many reasons – all of them good. Sandra was all that Mrs. Lamb would like to be and more than she had ever been.

“Why don’t you ride this chap?” suggested Hebe. “It’s all his fault.”

“I shall,” replied Sandra firmly. “I’ll ride the devil to death. Simonds will lend me a saddle.”

So, much to Mrs. Lamb’s relief, the horse followed Sandra and was subsequently saddled and tethered in front of her house. When she came out from luncheon she found him leaning philosophically against a tree, his forelegs jauntily crossed.

“You’ll have to cut this foolishness out,” the girl said severely. “Only fake horses act like that. Don’t make a spectacle of me.”

Mr. Lamb turned an idle head and surveyed her long and approvingly. If she was as nice as that in riding togs, he considered, what wouldn’t she be in underwear?

When Sandra had released the halter, he crouched close to the ground and peered round his shoulders at her. This proved a little too much for Sandra. The girl began to laugh, and Mr. Lamb shook himself impatiently. It was not the easiest position in the world to hold.

“I’ll fix her,” he said to himself.

When she finally decided to accept his grotesque invitation, Mr. Lamb crawled hastily forward, and the girl found herself sitting on his rump. She sat there only a moment before she slid slowly but inevitably to the street. Lamb rose to his full height and looked down at the young lady.

“That,” she said from the gutter, “was a peculiarly snide trick. I don’t know what sort of a horse you are, but if you were a human being I fancy you’d pull chairs from beneath people.”

Mr. Lamb executed a neat little dance step and waited. This time Sandra mounted him in the accepted manner, and Mr. Lamb, immediately set off backward, looking round from time to time to take his bearings.

“If you have any gentlemanly instincts at all,” said Sandra at last, “you’ll give up all this shilly-shallying and do your stuff like an honest-to-God horse.”

Her mind was in a state of confusion. She had ridden all her life and met all types and conditions of horses, but she had never encountered one that had behaved so incredibly as this one. In its very resourcefulness there was something almost human.

At the girl’s plea Mr. Lamb reversed his position and went forward majestically through the town. Sandra felt as if she were leading a circus parade. When they reached a dirt road he abandoned his little conceits and settled down to real business. He carried her swiftly, smoothly, and effortlessly over the ground. He was experiencing a sense of freedom and power – a total lack of responsibility save for the safety of the girl on his back. Sandra had never felt so exhilarated. Her mount was self-conducted. She had hardly to touch the reins. Presently they came to a fence that bordered a long rolling meadow. Lamb slowed down and looked back inquiringly at his passenger.

“It’s all right with me, old boy,” said Sandra. “Can you make it?”

Lamb showed her he could. He landed on the other side of the fence as if he were equipped with shock-absorbers, then stretching his body he streamed away across the meadow. Sandra had a sensation of flying, and Lamb himself felt that his hoofs were touching the ground only on rare occasions. After half an hour of swift running, Lamb came to a halt and sat down abruptly. The girl slid to the grass. When she attempted to rise, Lamb pushed her back with his nose and stood over her. For a moment she looked at the horse with startled eyes, then grinned.

“At it again,” she said, pressing a cheek against his silky skin and giving him a small soft kiss.

Mr. Lamb stepped back a few paces and regarded the girl with heavy dignity. He was at a loss to know what to do about it. She had kissed him in broad daylight and made other affectionate advances. A stop should be put to this. Then something, some long restrained impulse seemed to snap in Mr. Lamb, and he began to prance joyously. He performed a dance of great vigor and elaboration after which he went racing round the meadow to give the girl some indication of what he could do when he set his mind to it. When he returned she was calmly reading a book she had fished from her pocket, “Green Mansions,” and as Lamb, now adept at reading horsewise, followed several pages over her shoulder, he became absorbed in the narrative and placed a restraining hoof against the margin of the page to prevent her from turning over before he had caught up with her.

In this manner some time slipped by, the horse reading over the girl’s shoulder, until at last growing tired of the heavy breathing in her ear, she pushed his nose away and laid aside the book. Thereupon Lamb dropped to the grass beside her and placed his head in her lap, opening one large eye and looking up at her owlishly. Sandra picked up the book and continued to read. Lamb nudged her, and she gave him a sharp slap. He nudged her again and she commenced to read aloud. Lamb settled down to listen. The situation was much to his liking.

An hour later when it was time to return home, the girl had to pummel him to get him to wake up. Still half asleep, he struggled to his feet and automatically reached for a cigarette, then remembering he was a horse, frowned thoughtfully upon his companion. It was all too bewildering Lamb decided, but it had been an altogether satisfactory afternoon. Even while he had slept he had been deliciously aware of the closeness of the girl’s body. Lamb was not insensitive to such things.

The stallion’s appearance at the Vacation Fund affair that night was not an unqualified success. He first presented himself at the dining-room window where his wife and daughter and the leading actor, Mr. Leonard Gray, were indulging in a late, cold supper. Already the tables on the lawn were occupied. Other points of vantage were rapidly filling up. Cocktails were circulating freely. All those who dwelt on the right side of the tracks knew exactly the class of people for whom the Prohibition Act was intended. They themselves were certainly not meant to be included. That went without saying.

Mr. Lamb announced his presence by thrusting his head through the window and unloosing a piercing scream. The dining-room was filled with horror.… It took several minutes to find Mr. Gray, and several more to induce him to crawl from under the grand piano where he had apparently taken up permanent residence. Mrs. Lamb herself was none too well. When she and her leading man attempted to resume their dinner, their knives and forks clattered so violently against their plates, it sounded as if they were playing at beating the drum. The situation was saved by Hebe. That young lady of infinite composure, gathering up practically all the salad, made a quick exit through the window and led her father round behind some box bushes that encircled the field of activity. There was a convenient opening in the bushes at this spot through which, unobserved, Lamb could get an idea of what was going on.

Lamb thought the salad delicious. He had never tasted anything quite so whole-heartedly satisfying in his life. And when Hebe returned with a cocktail he felt that life was opening up indeed. A slight difficulty arose here, however. Lamb was unable to drink from so small a glass. He spilled most of its contents. His daughter with admirable resourcefulness thereupon fetched a bucket, a bottle of gin, some ice and oranges. While Mr. Lamb looked on approvingly, she mixed this mighty cocktail and placed it before him. Lamb speedily inserted his nose, swallowed several cupfuls and sank back with a sigh.

“All set now?” asked Hebe.

Lamb nodded enthusiastically.

“When it’s empty, I’ll fill it up,” she assured him. “Sprawl here and get an eyeful. I’ll send Mel around with a tray of sandwiches. This affair is going to be a riot.”

At the time she little realized the remarkable accuracy of her prognostication.

When Melville Long appeared with the sandwiches he found Mr. Lamb nose-down in the bucket, which from the sucking sounds that issued from it he judged to be empty. Mr. Lamb withdrew his head and received his visitor graciously. He literally beamed upon him, extending a hoof which Long seized and shook vigorously.

“A nice chap,” thought Lamb. “One of the best. Wonder if he could mix me another cocktail? Everyone else is having a good time.”

With the aid of an eloquent nose he drew the young man’s attention to the dispiriting state of the bucket. The youth was not long in catching Mr. Lamb’s meaning. With a curt “We’ll fix that,” he hastened away. When he returned he was carrying two bottles of gin and an armful of oranges.

“Hebe’s bringing the ice,” he explained as he poured the gin in the bucket and rapidly squeezed the oranges. “Didn’t have room myself.”

Together the young people arranged Mr. Lamb satisfactorily, then left him to his own devices, their presence being required elsewhere. Mr. Lamb was feeling remarkably well-disposed. He thrust his head through the aperture and eyed the lawn. At the unexpected appearance of the head an elderly lady jumped with the agility of a girl.

“God bless me!” she cried, spilling her cocktail down her dress. “Did you see that, Helen?”

Helen, her daughter, fortunately had not seen. She regarded the hole in the bushes nervously. It was empty. Turning back to her trembling mother, she endeavored to sooth her, but the old lady had been profoundly shocked. Mr. Lamb did not like this old lady nor was he exceedingly fond of her daughter. Arranging his face in its most demoniacal expression, he bided his time. When the two women were once more gazing nervously at the hole he suddenly popped his head through with instantaneous effect. Clinging to each other for support, mother and daughter cut a swath through the lawn party, uttering frightened little cries in their flight. Not until they were safely ensconced in their limousine and being driven rapidly home did they release their hold on each other. Then they sat up very erect and kept tapping their hands distractedly.

“I never saw such a face in my life. What was it?” asked the mother.

“Those eyes,” intoned the daughter, and tightly closed her own.

Mr. Lamb’s next opportunity to annoy someone came when a gentleman moved his chair close to the aperture and carelessly tossed his cigarette through it. The still lighted cigarette fell on Lamb’s nose and burned it just a little. It was quite enough for Lamb. He promptly shot his head through the hole again and took a good look at the offender. Lamb did not like this man either. In his present state of liquor, Lamb hated the very sight of him. Therefore he withdrew his head and, thrusting a long leg through the hole, placed it against the chair and gave a tremendous shove. Man and chair parted company, but continued in the same general direction. The chair knocked the legs from under an innocent bystander, and its erstwhile occupant, passing completely through a group of ladies, came to rest on a rosebush. Extricating himself from this he hurried back to the hole and looked about for an enemy. None was to be found save an old gentleman quietly observing the colorful scene.

“Did you do that?” demanded the man in a hostile voice.

“Do what?” asked the old man amicably.

“Give me a clout just now,” replied the other.

“Go away,” said the old man deliberately. “You’re drunk – drunker than you realize.”

The assaulted man had reason to believe him, and quickly withdrew from the party. He did not feel quite drunk, but he imagined he must be. Those cocktails. They were strange concoctions. Just the same someone had given him a clout. There was no denying that. Drunk or sober, he knew when he had received a clouting.

This supine activity, in spite of its pleasing results, began to pall on Mr. Lamb. He yearned for larger fields. Taking another swig at his monolithic cocktail, he rose and, finding a gate in the box bushes, mingled with the party on the lawn. Although a trifle unsteady, he managed to maintain his dignity. He conducted himself as he conceived a gentle and unobtrusive horse should. The guests were rather surprised, some even alarmed, but after a short time they accepted him as a part of the evening’s entertainment. Mrs. Lamb was so advanced.

From afar Mr. Lamb observed two particularly pretty girls in intimate conversation. Approaching the girls quietly he nipped one of them in an extremely ungentlemanly manner. The girl gave a startled exclamation and, heedless of the onlooker, tenderly rubbed the injured spot. Then she turned and saw the horse looking at her roguishly.

“My dear,” she said to her companion, “you should know what that horse just did. Why, the creature’s almost human.”

When Lamb next tried this unmannerly trick the afflicted lady gave the gentleman she was conversing with a resounding slap in the face and followed it up with a piece of her mind. The poor man looked thoroughly mystified and wretched. The husband of the lady hurried to the spot, and upon learning what had occurred, drew back mightily and knocked the man down. He was literally dragged out. Today he is still wondering why.

Sapho had more than a suspicion that all was not going well with her party. The Vacation Fund affair was threatening to become a shambles. It was all the fault of that hell-born horse. Nothing could induce it to go away. She decided to put on the final act – the pièce de résistance of the night. Her act. In the meantime, having become bored with his surroundings, Mr. Lamb sat down and, leaning against a tree, fell into a light doze.

When he next opened his eyes the curtains had been parted on the flimsily constructed stage. His wife in his best pajamas was wallowing about in the arms of Leonard Gray, who was saying something about being “far from my own glade,” in a high complaining voice. This bored Lamb beyond endurance. With a shriek of utter abandon he galloped toward the stage. Mr. Gray cast one horrified look at the speeding horse, then with amazing expedition got even farther from his own glade. Sapho also left at once, virtuously clutching the pants of Lamb’s pajamas.

Springing to the stage, Lamb gave a drunken exhibition of a horse’s idea of clog dancing. The audience was in confusion. In the midst of his hurricane efforts the stage collapsed, and Lamb disappeared beneath a small avalanche of scenery, planks, and trappings. Those who lingered to look back saw only a horse’s head projecting from the ruins. The horse was either dead or asleep.

Later that night Lamb feebly dug himself out and sought his bucket. Someone had thoughtfully replenished it. He drank avidly and made his way to the front of the house. He had some vague idea about sleeping in the hammock, but failed to retain it. Resting his head on the first step, he draped himself across the lawn and drifted off.

Mrs. Lamb was awakened the next morning by the maid announcing that a passer-by had stopped to inform her that there was a dead horse on the lawn.

“I hope to God he is,” said Mrs. Lamb, as she pulled the covers more securely over her head. Her only regret was that the animal was not buried and well out of sight.

CHAPTER EIGHT

What Happened
to the Horse

After several other early commuters had informed the maid that a horse had passed out on the lawn Mrs. Lamb decided to look upon the gratifying sight herself. But when she reached the veranda the horse was no longer there, and the good lady was just as glad.

Lamb had awakened dizzily and made a tour of the ruins he had created. Vaguely only did he remember the events of the night. The little he did recall was sufficient to make him wish to forget.

“I’d better get the hell out of here,” he said to himself. “There’ll be no living within a mile of Tilly for some time to come.”

He cantered off to the station and hung about there for a while, getting in the way of hurrying commuters and keeping an eye out for Sandra. When that young lady undulated into view he trotted up to her and stopped. So did Sandy. She put her arms round his neck and gave him a good-morning kiss. Lamb became a horse of stone. Dimly he heard an insistent honking of horns, but paid little attention to them. He had lost all traces of his headache. Sandy had kissed them away. He glanced about him and discovered he was blocking the way of two motors, the drivers of which were far from resigned. Stepping aside politely, he looked after the retreating figure of the girl.

“She shouldn’t have done that,” thought Lamb, “but I’m not altogether sorry she did.”

At this point a state trooper tried to do things about the horse. Lamb reared back on his hind legs and pawed at the air. The trooper hurried elsewhere and returned with a long noose rope.

“Thinks he’s Will Rogers,” said Lamb to himself, as he watched the trooper out of the tail of his eye.

Craftily anticipating the man’s fell purpose, he took immediate steps to outwit him. Carelessly Mr. Lamb maneuvered himself alongside one of the town’s most revered citizens, Mr. Robert Bates, fat, fifty, and influential – a factor in local politics. As the noose came swishing through the air Lamb crouched close to the ground and observed the rope neatly pinion Mr. Robert Bates’s arms to his sides. Feeling the rope grow taut, the trooper tugged with a mighty effort and succeeded in pulling Mr. Bates completely over the back of the crouching horse. After that there were no impediments to bar the rapid progress of Mr. Robert Bates across the road.

The trooper wound the rope round a telegraph pole, secured it firmly, and turned to survey his prize. His prize lay struggling at his feet, emitting a long succession of unpleasant sounds terminating with “I’ll break you for this, my man.”

Naturally this little episode had neither gone unnoticed nor unappreciated. It was a pleasure to many to see Mr. Bates thus handled. It was no pleasure to the state trooper. The humor of the situation escaped him; but Mr. Bates did not escape. He would be with him always, the trooper feared. Mr. Lamb with a triumphant neigh left the poor fellow explaining to the sizzling first citizen that the unfortunate occurrence was entirely due to the horse, and thunderingly cleared the town. Thereafter all that remained of the horse was a not unblemished reputation.

Mr. Lamb was next discovered straining his neck to reach a particularly delectable blackberry on the edge of the woods. Several children, shepherded by an elder sister, were regarding the enterprising horse. They had never seen a horse pick blackberries. The children decided that he was a “funny horse” and made a jubilant noise about it. Mr. Lamb, with a start of surprise, beheld his admiring audience and immediately fell to cropping grass in the conventionally accepted manner. The children then drew near the horse and patted him with small adventurous hands. The horse did tricks to amuse them, and they brought him a wild flower to smell. Amazingly the horse smelled it, rolling his eyes to show his appreciation. He was enjoying himself more than he had for years. Presently the horse took leave of the children and once more sought the road. The children returned home to hamper their mother’s activities by telling about the funny horse.

After this pastoral interlude, Mr. Lamb continued cheerfully on his way. Many miles now separated him from Sapho. He regretted the absence of Hebe. A pity she too, could not have turned into a horse. The little russet man was responsible for it all. Had Lamb only realized it at the time of their last conversation he would have arranged things differently – introduced an element of order. However, the little russet man had given him no chance. Now Lamb did not know how things stood, whether he was to be a horse permanently, or when he would stop being a horse. All such details should have been considered.

Mr. Lamb had taken to the more unfrequented roads and was now in a territory unknown to him. He was decidedly on the loose. He came to a meadow in which several sleek-looking mares were grazing. To Mr. Lamb they seemed quite girlish. Without further ado he leaped the fence and swaggered up to the mares. His unexpected arrival created quite a sensation. The mares were all a-twitter. One began to tremble nervously from an excess of sex consciousness. The stouter of her girl friends merely gazed at Mr. Lamb with an expressively submissive look. The third, however, was a mare of another color. She looked at Mr. Lamb for a long moment with a bold, appraising eye and seemingly found him to her liking. Then she trotted off to a secluded part of the meadow, occasionally glancing back at Mr. Lamb and tossing her head prettily.

This mare interested Mr. Lamb strangely. At the same time something urged him to proceed with caution. There was no good in that mare. Mr. Lamb followed her. There was something on his mind. He was trying to remember the image the mare evoked. Something about the eyes. Whose eyes were they?

When he reached the mare’s side he peered into her eyes thoughtfully. The mare returned his gaze languorously and rubbed her nose against his. Mr. Lamb started back offended. Then he remembered. This passionate creature had the eyes of Sapho when she was developing her art in the arms of Leonard Gray. Undeterred by the rebuff of her first effort, the mare circled round Mr. Lamb, gradually closing until she again stood at his side. Suddenly she turned and bit his neck, then sped away.

“Well, if she thinks I’m going to follow her,” thought Mr. Lamb, “she has another think coming. They’re all alike the world over. This mare is determined to get me into some compromising situation.”

He spent the remainder of the afternoon alternately grazing and repulsing the mare’s advances. Her two friends looked at him hopefully from time to time, but were ladylike enough to leave him to his own devices. Finally the mare, disgusted with this aloof, dignified, and apparently unemotional stallion, abandoned her attempts to seduce him and contented herself with gazing at him scornfully. She joined her companions, and the three of them put their heads close together. Occasionally they would lift them for a moment and look steadily at Mr. Lamb, then resume once more their intimate conversation. Lamb, growing uncomfortable under the continual scrutiny of the horses sought another section of the meadow, but the mares, as if fascinated, followed him at a respectful distance and discussed his every move.

The situation was becoming intolerable, and Mr. Lamb was heartily thankful when at sunset the three mares trotted off to one end of the meadow and waited there expectantly. Lamb followed them at a casual amble, and when a sleepy-looking farm-hand presently plodded up to the fence and opened a gate, Mr. Lamb slipped by unnoticed with the other horses and continued with them across the field to the stable.

“This is what might be termed crashing the gate,” he said to himself, as he entered the stable and sought refuge in an empty stall.

He would have been perfectly satisfied with the oats the farm-hand had provided had not the shameless mare kept thrusting her head over the partition in order the better to observe him crunch. Eating oats was a new experience to Lamb. He would have preferred to have practiced it alone, but every time he glanced up, the mare’s large eyes were fixed upon him with such unabashed curiosity that Lamb immediately suspended action and pretended he had finished.

Apparently the acquisition of a strapping new stallion meant nothing in the life of the sleepy farm-hand. He closed the stable doors and went his way, and Lamb to escape the prying eyes of the abandoned animal in the next stall, lay down, placed his head on a bucket and prepared to sleep. After the indulgence of the previous night, he was too tired to ponder over the radically altered circumstances of his existence. But before he took leave of consciousness Mr. Lamb once for all washed his hands of the inquisitive mare, who was moving restlessly about in the next stall.

Mr. Burnham was not quite so unobservant as his handyman, the name being in this instance strictly a courtesy title. When he discovered the sleeping stallion the next morning his heart was filled with wonder and admiration.

“Why didn’t you tell me of this, Sam?” he demanded of the farm-hand.

“Didn’t rightly notice it myself,” replied that individual. “He acted so natural-like, seemed he must belong.”

“And if a cavalry regiment had quartered here last night,” observed Burnham, “I dare say it would have meant the same thing to you.”

He looked at the three mares suspiciously and hummed under his breath.

“I wonder—” he continued as if to himself, then catching the look of disgust in the brazen mare’s eyes, he shook his head and returned once more to the sleeping stallion.

“Funny way for a horse to sleep.” Mr. Burnham drew his right arm’s attention to the horse’s head resting on the bucket. The right arm also had failed to notice this. He agreed, however. It was a funny way for a horse to sleep.

Mr. Burnham then applied a foot with insistent pressure to the stallion’s rump, and Mr. Lamb looked up with sleepy indignation. Gazing for a moment at the two strange faces, he replaced his head on the bucket and closed his eyes.

“Get up, sir!” commanded Mr. Burnham, and this time the application of the foot was slightly more vigorous.

“If this sort of thing is going to continue,” thought Lamb gloomily, “I might as well abandon all thoughts of sleep.”

He rose, stretched his great body and stepped out of his stall. The two men followed his movements in silence. Lamb walked out into the stable-yard and, seeing a large trough full of water under the pump, plunged his head deep into it. Very busily he put in his front legs and twirled his hoofs around. Picking up an empty flour sack, he tossed it about his head until he was partially dry. After this Mr. Lamb felt considerably refreshed. He lifted his head proudly and looked down at the silently watching men. Even the farm-hand had been able to detect something out of the ordinary in the actions of the horse.

“Well, Sam, what do you think of that?” asked Mr. Burnham, inhaling a deep breath.

Thinking was one of Sam’s most vulnerable points. He was unable to put into words his confused mental reactions.

“It ain’t right,” was all he said.

“If nobody claims that stallion,” declared Mr. Burnham, “I’m going to enter him in the show this Saturday. He’s the finest body of a horse I’ve seen in years.”

At this Mr. Lamb set himself and paced gallantly round the yard. He fully intended to earn his meal ticket. Sam eyed the horse with growing suspicion. His imagination was at last aroused.

“Feed him,” said Mr. Burnham, “and keep him well-groomed. I’m going to make inquiries. This seems like a gift from heaven. Those mares need entertainment.”

Burnham made inquiries throughout the course of the week, but could find no claimant to the stallion. Those who had seen the horse, or who had even heard remotely about it, declared they would have nothing to do with it. They did not want that horse. As a result of his investigations, Mr. Burnham had no scruples in attaching the horse to himself. And Mr. Lamb was well pleased to be attached. He was living on the fat of the land, and Sam, in spite of his mental deficiencies, was proving himself to be an entirely satisfactory valet.

On Saturday Lamb was taken to the show. It was a semi-bucolic affair, a thing of barter and trade, but more than a thousand horse-lovers were present and assembled about the field. Mr. Lamb was placed in a shack and carefully guarded by Sam. The stallion seemed greatly elated. Mr. Lamb was really anxious to win a prize – to establish a name for himself and Mr. Burnham.

It was a gala day for Sam. Lamb noticed that his valet was not too dumb to indulge copiously in corn whisky, a great bottle of which was reposing on a table in the shack. As time passed, Lamb began to grow nervous. He hated waiting. When Sam stepped outside to view the world, Mr. Lamb quickly elevated the bottle and drained its contents. His nervousness immediately left him. He knew he would win a prize. Nothing now could stop him. Sam returned and looked at the bottle with an injured expression.

“Someone’s been in here,” he muttered. “Like to catch ’em at it.”

He departed again and presently returned with another bottle, which he uncorked and sampled appreciatively.

“Watch that bottle,” he told the stallion when he next left to mingle with the throng. “And if anyone tries to get at it kick ’em through the shed.”

Mr. Lamb made sure that no one would take liberties with the bottle. He introduced the fiery fluid into his system and felt even more convinced that he was certain to win practically all the prizes.

A few minutes later, when he was taken out to be judged, the whisky was taking full effect on him. Mr. Burnham was so keyed up himself, he failed to remark the staggering gait of the stallion. However, the judges and spectators noticed it as Mr. Lamb was led thrice past the stand. When he endeavored to prance bravely he got all tangled up in his legs.

“How many legs have I?” he wondered. “Seem to have grown an extra pair.”

“That horse seems to think he’s imitating a drunkard,” observed a judge. “What on earth does he think he’s doing?”

When he was brought up to be looked over at closer range Mr. Lamb almost fell over one of the judges. He succeeded in regaining his balance, only by stepping heavily on that shocked dignitary’s foot. To make matters worse Lamb was seized with a violent attack of hiccoughs which he was unable to control. There was a strong smell of alcohol in the air. The judge regarded Mr. Burnham suspiciously.

“Got to do something to make up for all this,” Mr. Lamb said to himself. “Wonder what I can do – some sort of a stunt – something a little different.”

An idea grew and flourished in his dizzy brain.

“I’ll be a hobby-horse,” he said to himself. “That’s the very thing. I dare say nobody ever saw a live hobby-horse before.”

He thought for a moment, then stiffening his legs and placing his hoofs close together, he began to rock forward and aft, gaining momentum with each swing. Every eye in the multitude was riveted on Mr. Lamb. The judge stepped back and regarded him indignantly. This animal was making a fool of them – taking their horse show altogether too lightly. Cheers of encouragement broke from the spectators. They went to Mr. Lamb’s head. With gratified expression he redoubled his efforts. Mr. Burnham looked on helplessly, disgust written in every line of his face. He felt as if he had been betrayed. Mr. Lamb turned his head and winked at his owner as if to say, “We’ll show these hicks something new in the line of a horse.”

He did. Each rock was bringing him nearer to the ground. Finally, in an excess of zeal, Lamb made one supreme effort. He pitched recklessly forward, held his position for one breathless moment, then nose first continued to the ground where he remained with eyes tightly closed.

“I won’t look,” he said to himself. “This is the end. I’m disgraced.”

“Will you please take that thing away?” asked one of the judges, turning to the humiliated Burnham. “We don’t want it at this show.”

Burnham tried to raise his crumpled horse – the heaven-sent – but Mr. Lamb refused to budge. One of the judges knelt down beside him and sniffed.

“How crude!” thought Lamb dreamily. “These judges!”

“Why, this horse has been drinking corn whisky,” the judge announced, rising. “The animal is actually dead-drunk. Disgraceful, Burnham, I say. Never heard of any such a thing in my life. Take him away.”

Burnham, regarding the stallion, wondered exactly how the judge expected him to take his entry away. He certainly could not carry the besotted horse from the field in his arms. Nothing less than a derrick would be required to lift that body. The judges apparently were of this opinion, too, for they removed themselves to another section of the field and continued with the show. Lamb remained recumbent, gently snoring, in the center of the field. A circle of admiring spectators had gathered round him.

Before the day was done Mr. Burnham had sold the heaven-sent to a fancy truck farmer. The price given had reflected no credit on the value of Mr. Lamb. The truck farmer had turned in his own horse as part payment.

Darkness had fallen by the time Mr. Lamb had recovered sufficiently to be driven away. When he came to his senses he found himself harnessed to a light farm wagon. He was being driven along a country road.

“Sold down the river,” he mused to himself. “Parted from family and friends.”

Monotonously the fields and trees moved past. Lamb began to recognize the road. He remembered certain landmarks. They were going in the direction of his home. Presently his new master drew rein and getting down from his seat, began to search in the back part of the wagon. Lamb fell into a light doze. When the farmer returned he found a man clad only in pajamas standing where just a moment ago his recently acquired horse had stood. The man seemed a bit dazed and was pulling at the shafts. At first the farmer was afraid to approach, then indignation got the better of his timidity. He strode up to the white-clad figure and looked at it wrathfully.

“What are you doing there?” he demanded.

Lamb started and looked down at himself.

“By God, I’m back,” he said under his breath; then turning to the farmer, he replied, “Just fooling with these shafts.”

“And what did you do with my horse?” continued the farmer.

Mr. Lamb dropped the shafts and seated himself by the roadside. The farmer followed his example.

“What could I have done with your horse?” asked Mr. Lamb. “Do you suppose that I tore him limb from limb and scattered his parts to the four winds?”

“No,” said the man after a thoughtful pause. “You couldn’t have done that.”

He paused and considered Mr. Lamb with thoughtful eyes.

“Then you were the horse,” he announced in positive tones. “You must have been the horse.”

“What, me?” exclaimed Mr. Lamb. “You’re crazy, sir. Do I faintly resemble a horse?”

“Not now, you don’t,” replied the man with conviction, “but a minute ago you did, and what’s more, you acted like a horse – not a very good horse, but enough of a horse to get along with. Now you’re no earthly good to me.”

“Well, I’m relieved you recognize that fact,” said Mr. Lamb. “What are we going to do about it?”

“Listen,” said the man, as if endeavoring to explain the strange occurrence to himself. “This business isn’t as simple as it seems to you. This evening at the show I bought you for a horse. You were dead-drunk on the field in front of hundreds of people. In spite of that I bought you and gave you another chance. I was going to give you a nice home and keep you away from drink. I’ve been over the ropes myself. Don’t object to a little fun within reason, but—”

“It’s all right about that,” put in Mr. Lamb. “Go on with this remarkable yarn.”

“It does sound crazy when I hear myself telling it,” admitted the man. “But it’s true just the same, every word of it. I got you sort of sobered up and started off home with you. Everything was getting along nicely. At this spot I got down from my seat and turned my back on you for a minute. When I turned back – no horse. You were standing between the shafts pulling like the devil. Now answer me this,” he continued in a reasonable voice, turning full on Mr. Lamb. “A minute ago there was a horse, or the dead image of a horse, standing between those shafts. If you weren’t that horse, who was the horse or what was the horse? Answer me that.”

Mr. Lamb did not want to answer him that. He realized that the man – any man – was mentally unequipped to be told the true state of affairs. He himself was reluctant to admit the terrible thing that had happened to him. It was too far removed from the kingdom of God as generally conceived. It was too mythological. Only a pagan would believe and understand. And back of it all, Lamb knew, was the little russet man.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Lamb slowly. “It was like this: when I was a very little boy I just loved to play horse. That’s a fact. I played horse so much and so long that I was never able to break myself of the habit. To this day – would you believe it? – I still play horse. It’s a weakness – a failing. It’s like strong drink to other men.”

Lamb halted to see what impression he was making on his erstwhile owner. The man seemed absorbed in the story. Lamb himself was beginning to believe it.

“Well tonight,” he continued, “I gave a bit of a party, and I guess we all had a little too much. I remember after going to bed that it struck me as being rather a good idea to get up and play horse. I slipped from my bed, you understand, quiet as anything so as not to wake up my wife, who suffers from insomnia just like her mother, and whose brother has lumbago, poor chap. Without making any noise I crept downstairs, turned the key in the front door lock and ran down the road. I ran and ran and ran. After a while I came to this wagon and crawled in between the shafts, and then you came along. That’s how the whole thing happened.”

The climax seemed rather smeared for a good story, but it was the best that Lamb could achieve at the moment. He looked at the man hopefully and regretted to see that the farmer’s face had fallen considerably. Apparently he had lost interest in the story.

“It’s all right,” he said, “but it doesn’t explain what became of my horse.”

“There really wasn’t ever any horse at all, was there?” asked Lamb, evasively.

“No,” replied the farmer with elaborate sarcasm. “I was dragging this wagon along by myself just for exercise.”

There followed an uncomfortable silence.

“Well, I’m sure,” said Mr. Lamb at last, as he rose and stretched himself wearily, “I can’t imagine what can have happened to your horse. You can see for yourself that I’m not anything like a horse.”

“But I’m not so sure,” the farmer replied, “that you weren’t a horse a little while back. There’s something queer about all this.”

“All right, have it your way,” said Lamb with a yawn. “I’m not your horse now. Have you any old bags in that wagon you don’t need?”

The farmer tossed him a couple of sacks which Lamb draped about his long body.

“What am I going to do about the wagon?” demanded the farmer in a gloomy voice.

“Wait here for that horse,” said Lamb. “He’s sure to come back if he ever existed at all. I begin to fear he was not alone in his cups.”

The farmer watched Mr. Lamb trudge off down the road, then seating himself once more on the moist leaves and grass, he thought over the strange events of the day until his head began to swim. Dawn found him still sitting there waiting for a horse that would never return.

“Why,” Lamb asked himself, as he climbed quietly through one of the lower windows of his own house, “why, if that little russet chap took my silly outburst seriously, does he insist on making a practical joke of it?”

Like a thief he stole upstairs and crawled into bed. Someone was sleeping beside him. Switching on the light he gazed on the face of his neighbor. It was Mr. Leonard Gray. Lamb grinned and quietly got back into bed after turning off the light.

“These rehearsals are getting better and better,” he thought as he composed his limbs for slumber.

CHAPTER NINE

The Height of Tolerance

Mr. Leonard Gray was not habitually an early riser, but some extra special instinct urged him to be up and doing this morning. Perhaps, after all, the instinct was not so extra special. It may have been due merely to his sense of touch and Mr. Lamb’s whiskers which were extremely hardy and assertive. Tough, stubbly whiskers were the last things in the world that Mr. Gray expected to encounter. They had not been included in his plans. Consequently when it was borne in on him that he was tenderly stroking a cheek abundantly provided with a week’s growth of knifelike hair he opened his eyes with no little interest to see wherein he had erred.

Nor had Mr. Lamb expected to have his whiskers stroked either tenderly or otherwise. In fact he had forgotten all about whiskers and imagined he was still a horse. He, too, opened his eyes and looked uncomprehendingly into those of Mr. Leonard Gray. Lamb drew back his lips and exposed his teeth in a most disagreeable expression, then suddenly realizing he was no longer a stallion, he controlled his natural impulse and grinned pleasantly at his companion. It is difficult to say whether the snarl or the grin did the most to upset Mr. Gray’s delicately organized nerves. It came to the same thing in the end. With a stifled gasp the splendid fellow gave Mr. Lamb the entire bed and dartingly began to dress.

“Where’s the fire?” asked Mr. Lamb easily. “No need to pop off like that. There’s plenty of room in this bed. Lie down and get your beauty sleep.”

“Only wish I could,” the young man faltered, briskly slipping his arms through the legs of his trousers. “Must run along. Worked to all hours last night on the books of the Woodbine Players … got so fagged I couldn’t go home. Crawled right into your bed and slept like a top.”

“One of the most active gadgets I know,” observed Mr. Lamb.

“That’s so too,” agreed Mr. Gray, grittily getting into his shoes. “Tops are active, aren’t they?”

“Very,” said Mr. Lamb, “when on pleasure bent.”

This point having been settled there seemed to be nothing left to talk about. Mr. Lamb lay quietly back in bed and watched Mr. Gray at his toilet, his eyes following every movement of the desperate youth. This was terribly trying to Mr. Gray. Dressing to him was a ritual which he preferred to perform in private.

“Don’t you ever wash in the morning?” Lamb asked at last, unable to restrain his curiosity.

“Oh yes,” said Mr. Gray quickly. “Always wash in the morning, always.”

“Well, you’re not washing this morning,” continued Mr. Lamb argumentatively.

“I will though, I will,” the young man explained hastily. “When I get home I’ll tub it.”

“That will do you no end of good,” said Mr. Lamb. “I say, your collar’s all rucked up in the back, and for God’s sake do something about those trousers. You can’t face the world in such a confiding condition.”

Mr. Gray with a convulsive movement tried to attend himself in two different places at once. Lamb continued to observe him with quietly brooding eyes. An old saber was hanging on the wall near the bed. Lamb lazily reached up and took it down. Mr. Gray redoubled his efforts as he watched his languid host delicately test the blade then thoughtfully transfer his gaze to him.

“Do you know something?” observed Mr. Lamb. “This old saber is very sharp. It would snip that head off your shoulders as easily as slicing cheese.”

Gray gave an hysterical little laugh and continued his dressing in a far corner. Suddenly, Lamb half rose in bed and darted the saber at him. With a strangled cry Gray looked helplessly about him.

“Your vest,” said Lamb. “Your vest. It’s buttoned all wrong.”

With dancing fingers the pride and joy of the Woodbine Players readjusted his vest, snatched up his coat and moved warily toward the door. If he could only make it life would be just a little bit more secure. The saber flashed out and barred his path. Gray shrank back.

“Before you leave,” said Lamb, “I’d like to ask you a question, just one question.”

Gray feared that question. Why had his torturer reserved it to the end? Suppose Sapho, unaware of her husband’s return, should enter the room at this minute with some shockingly revealing endearment? Gathering his histrionic abilities for one heroic effort, he half looked at Lamb and smiled. His face gave the impression of a wax figure that had partly melted in the sun. Lamb was studying his neck intently, and Mr. Gray was unhappily aware of his gaze. Also he was not forgetful of the presence of the saber. Was this to be the end of what he had fondly believed to be a picturesque career?

“Throw back your head,” said Lamb abruptly, poising the saber in his hand.

Gray as if hypnotized elevated his chin and awaited the stroke of doom.

“If you think there’s been anything—” he began, but Lamb cut in on his last-minute perjury.

“Tell me,” said Lamb, his eyes still fixed hungrily on Mr. Gray’s neck, “where do you buy your ties? I want you to get me some.”

Gray almost collapsed. So that was the reason for Lamb’s long scrutiny. He snatched at his neck and tore off the colorful decoration, tossing it to the man on the bed. “Here,” he said hurriedly. “Take this one. Piles of them at home. I’ll send some over.”

“Bring ’em,” suggested Lamb.

“I will,” breathed Gray. “I will. First thing.”

He left Lamb reclining on his bed happily inspecting the necktie. Sapho was sleeping the gloating sleep of a successfully unfaithful wife. Gray tiptoed past her door with face averted. No time to warn her now. Safety, assured bodily safety, was the first consideration. Never had life seemed so sweet. The fresh morning air fanned his face. He passed an unsteady hand across his forehead and found he had been perspiring profusely. Then the reaction came. He began to laugh softly – secretively. Lamb was such a fool, so ridiculously unaware of his horns. These husbands! They were all alike. And their wives. They were all alike, too, or almost all alike, if you pressed your campaign in a certain manner. By the time he had reached his home Mr. Leonard Gray had thoroughly convinced himself that the joke was on Mr. Lamb. In the meantime that gentleman to whose head he had so adroitly affixed horns was falling blissfully asleep with the saber held lightly in one hand and Mr. Gray’s necktie in the other.

Hebe took a long chance that morning and quietly sought her father’s room. She was surprised and delighted to find him there asleep, but a little puzzled by the playthings he had taken to bed with him. Mrs. Lamb had failed to announce to her daughter the presence of a visitor. If the truth must be known, she had entirely forgotten to tell anyone at all about it. The household had been unaware of the great honor Mr. Leonard Gray had conferred upon it. So far as Mrs. Lamb was concerned it would continue to remain unaware. Hebe thought there was something not distantly familiar about the necktie.

“The major must be getting childish,” she said to herself as she gently closed the door.

“Sapho!” she whispered, and Sapho woke up with a startled cry. “Father is sleeping in his own bed for a change.”

In utter consternation Mrs. Lamb looked at her daughter. Her frame of mind was not to be envied.

“Hebe,” she said after a long pause, “I told you distinctly never to come near this part of the house on Sundays. Since that Vacation Fund affair and the strange disappearance of your father my nerves have gone to pieces. I need rest. I must have repose. You know it.”

“But the major’s back,” replied Hebe. “Come and look.”

That was just what Mrs. Lamb most objected to doing at that inauspicious moment. As she gazed blankly at her daughter a keen realization of the situation ominously grew within the lady.

“Have you seen him?” she asked, after a moment’s hesitation.

“With these eyes,” responded Hebe.

“Did he look – er – as usual?” Mrs. Lamb was growing confused.

There was something mysterious about that room. First her husband turned into a horse, then her lover turned into her husband. Peace and security seemed to have departed from the world.

“The picture of himself,” answered Hebe, “only there was something sort of strange about him. He had a saber in one hand and a necktie in the other.”

Mrs. Lamb gave a start and smothered an exclamation.

“What sort of necktie was it?” she asked.

“That’s the funny part about it,” said Hebe in a puzzled voice. “It didn’t look like the major’s at all. I have it! It looked exactly like Leonard Gray’s.”

“O-o-o-oh!” The sound came fluttering from Mrs. Lamb’s lips. The color had left her face. So that was all that was left of Leonard Gray, only a necktie.

“Was the sword frightfully bloody?” she asked, fascinated by the horror of the situation.

“I didn’t notice,” said Hebe, looking strangely at her mother, “but I seem to think it was.”

Once more the low cry issued from her mother’s lips. She sank weakly back on her pillows and closed her eyes.

“Leave me,” she said to her daughter.

Already she was picturing herself playing a most important rôle in a fashionable murder trial. Too bad about Leonard, though. Mrs. Lamb then considered her husband. She was more than a little suspicious of Lamb. A well-nigh unbelievable conviction was forming in her mind. For the past few days she had dismissed it, fearing it might unbalance her reason. There was no getting away from the fact, however, that it had been a strangely acting horse … so like her husband in many ways. The whole thing was mad, wild, impossible, but – but – if she were really married to a man who even occasionally turned into a horse, surely the courts could do something about it. Everything was altogether too much for Mrs. Lamb. It was not a successful Sunday morning. Her life should have been so different – so much larger and more magnificent. What sacrifices she had made in marrying that man! She was overwhelmingly sorry for herself and only a little bit sorry for Mr. Leonard Gray, indubitably deceased.

Later in the day Hebe was having a business meeting with Melville Long. The meeting was held on the veranda and presided over by a decanter of Scotch.

“There is only one of two things to be done,” the young lady began briskly. “Either you’ll have to ruin me or else start bootlegging.”

“Why not do ’em both,” suggested Long, “and thus make assurance doubly sure?”

“Might be something in that too,” admitted his fair companion, “but the way I see things at present one or the other must be done.”

“Well, I draw the line at ruination,” declared Long in a more serious voice. “I’m off that ruination idea entirely.”

“There’s something in it,” Hebe went on. “We won’t dismiss it altogether. If you ruin me and I actually find myself with child—”

“Enceinte is the way nice people say it,” Mr. Long corrected.

“Don’t interrupt,” said Hebe impatiently. “It all comes to the same thing in time. As I was saying, if I were actually beyond doubt that way I know the major would do the handsome thing. He’d see us safely married and give us a chunk of cash. He’s got no end of money. Sapho would be annoyed at my carelessness, but the major would fix her. You see, then we’d be all married and everything.”

“Yes,” agreed Mr. Long. “Particularly everything. With the head start we’d have you could easily be a grandmother before you were thirty-five. Then again, there’s an element of amateurishness about ruination. People might get the idea I didn’t know my way around. Wouldn’t like that. Bootlegging is better. I’d feel more independent.”

“All right,” said Hebe impartially. “Why not try that? We could make enough money in a year to start out on our own. Ruination can easily wait.”

“I know a guy down in the slum district,” Long continued meditatively. “He’s a nice guy, and I know he’d start me off right – get me the stuff and all that.”

“And we could use one of our cars,” put in Hebe. “The big one. That would be slick for deliveries.”

“We’ve certainly got to do something if we want to get married,” the young man went on broodingly. “Honest work takes too long. Painting won’t net me a red, and the old man absolutely refuses to come across until, as he puts it, I’ve proved myself. He goes on about me as if I were a problem in geometry. Always asking me to prove myself.”

It was here that Sandra put in an appearance, and the edifying alternatives were explained for her consideration.

“I think,” said Hebe on concluding, “that ruination would be the best and safest, don’t you?”

“It would be by far the most agreeable,” Sandy decided. “Also the most effective. Bootlegging though is pretty exciting. I’d like to try it myself. And Mel has a lot of rich friends. He could poison them for a long time before they actually died or lost their sight.”

“By the way,” said Hebe, changing the subject for her friend’s benefit, “the major’s back.”

Sandra brightened visibly, and Long looked startled.

“That’s so nice,” said Sandra. “Is he tired of being a horse?”

“Don’t know,” replied Hebe. “Haven’t spoken with him yet. He was pounding when I last saw him.”

During Mr. Lamb’s absence the three young people had discussed him earnestly and had come to the conclusion that, as incredible as it seemed, he had been the horse. All had advanced their reasons, and they had seemed incontrovertible. Hebe had even related her father’s experience with the russet man and his strange behavior. This had clinched matters. Mr. Lamb had been and probably still was the horse. There was no getting around that amazing fact. Not being so far removed from fairy tales themselves they accepted Mr. Lamb’s metamorphosis without much difficulty.

At this moment the subject of their conversation blithely entered the room. He was resplendent in Mr. Gray’s tie.

“Good afternoon, ladies and gentleman,” he said amiably, then turning to his daughter. “Did you get my letter Hebe?”

“Yes, indeed,” replied Hebe with undisguised sarcasm. “And all your telegrams and that lovely box of candy.”

Mr. Lamb sat down and considered the three young people with an affable expression.

“I forgot to tell either you or your mother,” he continued, the lie coming with surprising readiness, “that I have an important deal on in Philadelphia. I might have to pop off at any moment. Probably open an office there.”

“Why not a livery stable?” suggested Hebe.

Mr. Lamb favored his daughter with a false laugh.

“Why a livery stable?” he asked daringly.

“Honest to God,” spoke up Sandra, “tell us something. Weren’t you that horse? You’re among friends.”

“Suppose I should say yes?” parleyed Mr. Lamb.

“Then I’d say that you were one of the worst and best horses I’ve ever ridden,” replied Sandra.

Lamb considered the situation for a short time. He realized that these three young people not only thought he was the horse, but also knew he was the horse.

“What do you think?” he asked turning to the tactfully mute Melville Long.

“Well,” said Long, “no natural-born horse could have consumed cocktails the way that horse did. Never saw anything like it. And the sandwiches – it must have had human blood in its veins.”

Lamb was regarding Sandra closely. What would she think if he came out and admitted that he had been the horse? She could never possibly afford to associate with a man who turned into things. At the moment he heartily regretted ever having had anything to do with the little russet man. He bowed his head and unhappily studied the extreme tips of his shoes.

“I guess I was that horse,” he said at last in a low voice. “I don’t know much more about it than you all do. It just happened. There I was – a horse. But I’m not a horse now,” he added hopefully.

Hebe went over to her father and gave him one of her rare kisses. Sandra sat as close to him as possible without sitting on his lap.

“Do you remember,” she said, “I kissed you?”

“I might be a horse again or something worse at any moment,” Mr. Lamb looked at her warningly.

“How does it feel to be a horse, Mr. Lamb?” Melville Long’s voice was replete with interest.

“Remarkable,” began Mr. Lamb and stopped.

A motor was fussing up the gravel in the driveway. Mrs. Lamb came in and sank down exhausted. Even the sight of her husband failed to revive her. Then she saw the tie. She sat up, an expression of horror marring her features. All day long she had been searching for traces of Leonard Gray, hoping against hope that he might have escaped with only a wound. Here was the person who had done her lover – perhaps her last – to death, callously conversing while his victim’s necktie, like a trophy of war, hung flauntingly from his neck.

Mr. Lamb went through all about Philadelphia again. Mrs. Lamb scarcely heard him. Her eyes were fixed on the colorful tie. Hebe, noticing the direction of her mother’s gaze, also looked on the necktie and became uncomfortably interested in it.

“That’s a terrible tie, major,” she remarked. “Where did you get it?”

“Ask your mother about that,” replied Mr. Lamb easily. “She knows more about my neckties than I do.”

“Murderer!” Mrs. Lamb had been unable to restrain the accusation.

Mr. Lamb sat up appalled.

“Have I killed someone?” he asked. “This is the first I’ve heard of it. Hebe made no mention of a murder.”

Mrs. Lamb, now beyond control, came close to him and extended a tragic finger.

“What did you do with the body?” she demanded in a low vibrating voice. “And all the blood. What became of that?”

Mr. Lamb was no more startled than were Hebe and her friends. Their round eyes regarded the murderer wonderingly. Mr. Lamb pulled himself together and returned the accusing gaze of his wife.

“What did you do with the body first?” he inquired. “That would be more to the point.”

Mrs. Lamb turned away and walked to the window. Her face was safe from scrutiny. At that moment Mr. Leonard Gray himself saw fit to arrive.

“Here they are!” he cried, placing a package on Mr. Lamb’s lap. “All new. Went into the city and picked them out myself. If you like the tie you’re wearing, you’ll go crazy about these.”

“Meet my chum, everybody,” said Mr. Lamb quietly. “We’re roommates now. Thanks for the ties, Len.”

Mrs. Lamb with a distracted look about her, fluttered her hands above her head and left the room. Leonard Gray followed. The murderer threw himself back in his chair and favored Sandra, Hebe, and Mr. Long with a benign smile.

“And they all lived happily ever after,” he said.

“Let’s have a look,” urged Hebe. “Mel could use a new tie.”

Mr. Lamb obligingly opened the package.

CHAPTER TEN

Lamb Takes the Air

“Suppose I should tell him I’ve just gotten over being a horse?” Lamb mused to himself, as he politely eyed his customer, an aged person of many motheaten millions. “I guess the old blighter would drop those bonds and close his account on the spot.”

He resisted the temptation to experiment with the old gentleman and thereby materially added to his own not inconsiderable wealth.

When his customer had departed, Lamb summoned his secretary to him and told her all about Philadelphia. He had already told her about Philadelphia, but this time he told her better. He shrouded his future movements in tantalizing mystery. Lamb was taking no chances. God only knew what the little russet man had in store for him, and Lamb very much doubted if he had taken even God into his confidence. He would have liked to have had a short conversation with the little russet man, but he knew of no way to get in touch with him.

All that week Mr. Lamb had been hearing about the horse. He had gleaned impressions from many unexpected sources. The stallion had created no end of excitement in the town and surrounding countryside. An enterprising reporter had strung together a story which the city people laughed at and dismissed, little realizing that it was the most conservatively handled piece of news in the paper. Simonds was the most voluble about the horse. Almost the most bitter. He had sent his own horse away for a change of scene. The poor animal was actually pining away in its lot, constantly fearing a return of that diabolical stallion. The state trooper had lost his easy post. He no longer postured about the station, a target for the come-on glances of women who with a sigh of relief had seen the last of their husbands for that day.

Lamb was highly edified by what he heard. He had been a horse among horses. His exploits would be remembered. Whenever Mrs. Lamb referred viperously to the Vacation Fund débâcle he would thoughtfully finger his necktie and look at her significantly. Mrs. Lamb quickly changed the subject. Leonard Gray’s neckties were constantly reminding her of a most disturbing interruption of what had started out to be an unusually diverting week-end.

“Wonder what we’re going to be next?” Hebe speculated one evening, entering into the situation with the enthusiasm of her years. “How’d you like to be a giraffe?”

“God forbid,” said Mr. Lamb quickly. “I hope the little chap feels that he has sufficiently convinced me of the unwisdom of unconsidered wishing.”

But the little russet man did not feel that way about it, and when Lamb woke up one morning he found himself perched precariously on one of the four posts of his bed. When he attempted to stretch, as was his wont, he heard an unfamiliar swish in the air.

“I’m something else,” he said to himself. “Wonder what it can be?”

Fluttering lightly to the floor, he observed himself in the mirror. His excitement was intense. What he saw was a smoky-looking seagull with black rings round its eyes. The effect was that of detached thoughtfulness. Mr. Lamb spread his wings and looked with approval on their snow-white lining. He was a good gull.

“As gulls go,” he admitted to himself, “I dare say I’m about as good as they come. Wonder how it feels to fly? Don’t know the first thing about it.”

He went to the table and looked at his watch. Sandra would be taking the usual train. He had plenty of time.

“No use disturbing the household,” he thought, hopping to the open window and balancing himself on the edge. “Well here goes for a Lindbergh. Hope I don’t foul a tree.”

Lamb extended his wings and took the air. He landed in some confusion among the box bushes, but managed to beat his way out with the loss of only a few unimportant feathers.

“Must do better than that,” he commented. “I’d best try a couple of take-offs.”

He gave himself a running start and left the ground. This time he flew with gathering confidence and landed on Hebe’s window, upon which he tapped gently. That young lady woke up without effort and immediately let him in. She had schooled herself to be surprised at nothing and to be prepared for anything. She looked at her father with admiring envy.

“Golly,” she said “I wish I was in your shoes.”

Lamb extended one claw and emitted a peculiar crackling noise intended to be a laugh.

“How does it feel to fly, major?” his daughter continued.

The gull gave an exuberant hop expressive of much enjoyment, and Hebe understood.

“How about grub?” asked Hebe. “I suppose you don’t fancy a couple of succulent worms?”

The gull shuddered and almost twisted its head off in the violence of its opposition to this revolting suggestion.

“Well, come along,” said Hebe, slipping into her dressing-gown and quietly opening the door.

Mr. Lamb, skipping lightly behind his swift-footed daughter, followed her to the pantry where she set before him a bowl of puffed rice and cream. When he had eaten his fill of this he delicately polished his beak on a convenient napkin and spread his wings gloriously for the benefit of his daughter. After this he left the house and made his way to the station.

From a great height he saw Sandra leaving her house to start off for the station. Swooping dizzily down the air lanes, he circled round her head, then came to rest at her feet. Without a moment’s hesitation, for Sandra had also been warned to be prepared for anything, she picked him up and held his head against her warm neck. Mr. Lamb was so elated that he freed himself and tried to loop-the-loop. This enterprising endeavor resulted in a small disaster. Mr. Lamb found himself flat on his back in the gutter. His claws were busily churning the air. It was a ludicrous sight, and Sandy laughed at the gull. Lamb adjusted himself with as much dignity as he could summon to his aid and after a certain amount of necessary preening, preceded the girl to the station in a more orderly if not so spectacular manner. As he planed along the platform he took occasion to knock off Simonds’s hat and had the satisfaction of seeing it roll to the tracks, where its usefulness was destroyed by the thundering arrival of the city-bound express.

When no one was looking Mr. Lamb slipped into the baggage-car and hid himself behind a trunk. Later when he had made sure that the conductor was several cars ahead, he made his way on foot through the train. He was searching for Sandra. As the gull swayed cautiously down the aisle of the first car heads popped out from behind newspapers and amused eyes followed his progress. Mr. Lamb was uncomfortably aware of the interest he was creating.

“Why can’t they mind their own business,” he thought, “instead of staring at me?”

At the end of the car he turned and favored its occupants with a hoarse cry, at the sound of which several heads darted back behind the newspapers.

The other half of Sandra’s seat was unoccupied. Mr. Lamb quietly hopped up to it and sidled as close to her as possible. She spread her paper accommodatingly and together they read the news of the day. From this Mr. Lamb looked up in time to discover the approach of the conductor. Mr. Lamb wanted no trouble. He was too large a gull to hide, too large to creep under the seat. Then a brilliant idea occurred to him. With one swift, insinuating look at Sandra he fell down on the seat and allowed his head to dangle over it. The head swayed distastefully with the rhythm of the train. To all intents and purposes the young lady was carrying a dead seagull to the city. Sandra after some quick thinking fathomed Mr. Lamb’s intention and ordered her actions accordingly.

The conductor, arriving at her seat, looked down at the seagull with an expression of disgust. Years of service had inured him to all types of commuters. He had seen them carrying all sorts of surprising packages from vacuum cleaners to French pastry. He had never, however, previously encountered a commuter carrying a dead seagull.

“That’s a strange thing to be lugging about with you,” he informed Sandra.

“He just died,” replied the girl sadly. “I’m taking him to be stuffed. The poor old thing has been in our family for years.”

She picked Mr. Lamb up by his legs and dangled him convincingly before the conductor’s eyes. Although Lamb felt a rush of blood to his head, he continued to act the part of a dead gull. The conductor seemed convinced, especially when the bird flopped limply against his face. The remainder of the trip was uneventful, and when the train reached the station Sandra once more seized Mr. Lamb by the legs and carried him out with her. He was very much squeezed and rumpled. Once when a stout lady backed into him he was forced to resort to rather brutal tactics in order to induce her to remove a large portion of herself from his face. With an indignant expression, the stout lady looked suspiciously about her, then hewed a path through the crowd.

By the time he had been carried to the street Lamb was literally almost a dead gull. He cocked his head up as well as he could and looked pleadingly at the girl. She took him in her arms and smoothed his feathers. Lamb felt better. Then to the astonishment of many onlookers he rose in the air and circled above Sandra’s head. The onlookers glanced at the girl questioningly. They had seen an apparently dead seagull come to life and fly away. Sandra was unconscious of their gaze. Higher and higher mounted the gull. All he could see now was the white face of the girl straining up to him. Impulsively, she raised one hand in farewell and something white fluttered in the air, then she faded from view.

For some reason, when Sandra turned away, her eyes were just a little bit moist. She wondered if he were lonely up there and if he would ever come back.

“He doesn’t know the first thing about being a seagull,” she said to herself. “Anything could happen to him up there. Might even run into an airplane.”

All that day Sandra was a greatly preoccupied young lady in underwear. She kept remembering the excited throbbing of the bird’s heart as she had held it in her arms. Mr. Lamb was rapidly becoming a problem seriously to be considered. His sardonic grin and long lean body drifted across her vision. She was very much afraid she loved this man who happened at the moment to be a bird floating somewhere about in the sky. One of the reasons that made her more than suspect she loved him was the fact that she so thoroughly detested his wife.

“Have you any knowledge of your father’s movements?” Mrs. Lamb asked her daughter that night.

“Not the slightest,” answered Hebe truthfully, “but if you’d taken the trouble to look you’d have seen there’s been a bird in his room.”

Mrs. Lamb was slightly revolted. If she were only sure. If she could only get absolute proof. She thought of life with Leonard Gray and chewed her steak with abandon.

That night Hebe put a bowl of puffed rice on the back steps. At three o’clock in the morning she was awakened by a series of wild cries, and going to the window, saw a large bird chasing a cat round the yard. When she came down to breakfast, all that remained of the combatants was some fur and a few feathers. Hebe picked one of the feathers up and examined it attentively. It was smoky-gray with a dash of white on the inside.

“The major’s been here all right,” said Hebe, half aloud, as she collected the rest of the feathers and carried them to her room.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

An Aerial Interlude

Mr. Lamb had been a seagull for several days and had become a thoroughly experienced flyer. Since his defeat of the cat he had stedfastly refused to return home. He was going to be a seagull up or down to the last detail, but in doing so he was becoming an extremely hungry bird, not being able to accommodate his appetite to raw fish and the cast-off bounty of ocean liners. Once he had brought himself to nibble at a fair-looking piece of grapefruit sliding along the waves, but had swallowed so much salt water in the attempt that he had been forced to abandon the object of his desire.

Today he had been feeling rather light-headed as he swooped and circled over lower Manhattan. His sharp eyes looked down into the dark cañons of stone pierced by many windows. He thought about the office buildings. He considered them from a new point of view. Hitherto he had looked on them as outstanding examples of American industry and progress. To have things to do with them had always given him a feeling of accomplishment – a comfortable sense of regimentation. Today he was not so sure.

“Millions of souls in those buildings,” he mused, sweeping close to his own. “There’s a good-sized town in that building of mine alone. And they’re all working. Thousands of them loafing … just getting by. Poor pent-up devils! Suppose the little russet man had turned them all into gulls instead of picking on me. What a remarkable sight it would be. Trails of gulls issuing from every window. The air filled with the beat of many wings … all released!”

Lamb pictured the scene to himself. He was weary and painfully hungry. Still he soared – alone.

“Scissors dropped,” he continued. “Pens rolling off abandoned desks. Stocks and bonds and crisp clean bank-notes suddenly left unguarded.”

Lamb, in his reverie, saw the sky growing black with gulls. Birds pushing their way to freedom, crowding on one another. He painted a mental picture of a little group of conscientious gulls, still held by habit, poising on window ledges and peering back into their offices to make sure that all was in order before they took to the air. What a sight! A river of gulls, following the precedent of years, homeward bound across the bay to Staten Island. Another river flowing uptown, and a turbulent one into Brooklyn. A bridge of gulls passing over the Hudson. It would split at various commuting tracks and grow thinner at each suburb. Gulls everywhere pecking at windows, vainly trying to get their wives to understand that something unusual had happened to them – actually to them, their time-tabled husbands.

Lamb’s thoughts were growing wilder as his hunger increased. He saw dense masses of gulls flocking to the subway stations, impelled there by habit. The dark tunnels would be filled with several counter-flying columns of frantically surging wings. Gulls trampled on in trying to get out, when they might just as well have been flying in the open air. And the buses, too. They would be packed to the top rails. Birds swaying in close ranks. All going home – home to their wives. Mostly men.

The girl gulls wouldn’t go home. Not they.… They would be far too enterprising. Down to the Island for them. Snatching free rides on the scenic railway, no doubt, and keeping their eyes peeled for boy friends they had never met. Some of them would infest chop-suey joints and flutter about to the tune of an automatic piano. Others would just hang round soda shops and giggle and wait for something to happen. But the fact remained, the girls would be pleasure-bent – sex-driven, alert, seeking – they wouldn’t go home. Lamb could hardly blame them. He wasn’t going home either. He was going to swoop around and pity the slaves in the office buildings below. He was—

“Oh, hell!” he broke in on his thoughts. “This isn’t getting me anywhere. Must have food. I’ll take a chance and try it.”

He coasted down from his high place and landed in a narrow street before the doors of a restaurant in which he had usually taken his luncheon. The restaurant at that hour was crowded, but the smell of food and the hospitable clatter of plates were irresistible to Mr. Lamb in his famished condition.

“Well, here goes,” he said to himself as he waited his opportunity and sidled unobtrusively into the restaurant.

Mr. Lamb’s unusually sharp eyes picked out a table at which one man was sitting. This gentleman’s head was completely hidden behind his newspaper and on the opposite side of the paper, between it and Mr. Lamb, reposed a plate of chicken and French-fried potatoes. The waiters were in a fever of activity. Everyone was in one way or another occupied with food. The presence of the seagull passed unnoticed. The sight of the French-fried potatoes was too much for Mr. Lamb. Being a bird himself he decided that it would be rather indelicate to partake of the chicken. However, the potatoes would suffice. With the utmost caution he mounted the chair opposite the reading gentleman and, protruding a stealthy neck, fastened upon one of the potatoes. This swiftly disappeared. Once more his competent beak shot forth and another potato was done in.

By timing his forays judiciously, Mr. Lamb was getting along quite nicely – making a meal for himself. The table was a secluded one and was partly concealed by a railing. But all good things must come to an ending, and Mr. Lamb’s luncheon was rudely interrupted. The man lowered his paper and looked with some surprise upon the seagull. The seagull froze in the chair, a portion of potato still protruding from its beak. The bird returned the man’s stare unwinkingly. This man, Lamb decided, was a mild man. There should not be much trouble. Of course there would be some. No matter what happened it would be impractical to try to deprive him of the potatoes he had already eaten. The gentleman neatly arrested the progress of a hurtling waiter.

“I say,” he said, looking thoughtfully at the waiter. “Don’t you cook your food any more? Am I expected to swallow that thing feathers and all?”

The waiter, regarding the motionless bird, almost dropped the tray.

“I don’t know how it happened, sir,” he said. “It never did before.”

“There’s always a first time for everything,” continued the gentleman patiently. “And by the way, you seem to be stuffing it from the wrong end.”

“That gull’s been stuffing hisself,” replied the waiter and, quickly putting down his tray, seized upon Mr. Lamb, who just managed to gulp down the remainder of the potato before he was carried from the restaurant.

“Be gentle with him,” admonished the gentleman. “That bird is rather an innovation in the line of gulls.”

Mr. Lamb sent him a parting look of gratitude.

“Well,” he said to himself philosophically, as he was cast into the street, “this is the first time I’ve been given the bum’s rush since the halcyon days of Jack’s.”

He arranged his feathers and watched some pigeons picking something on the street corner. His first instinct was to swoop down on them and appropriate their food. Then he thought better of it.

“I haven’t come to that,” he decided. “Damn if I’ll bully pigeons yet.”

A brilliant idea was shaping itself in his mind. He knew of a seafaring café on the river front that rejoiced in a number of stuffed birds. He had always considered them as rather dusty and repellent decorations, but somehow they seemed a part of the place. If he could only succeed in insinuating himself into this café he might be able to pass himself off as one of the stuffed birds and thus pick up some choice bits. The place as he remembered it still sported a free-lunch counter. Prohibition had left it undisturbed.

Mr. Lamb put his plan into action. It was not difficult, because most of the occupants were standing at the bar with their backs to the free-lunch counter. This consisted of a huge buffet with a long, low shelf upon which were displayed various ornaments which the proprietor seemed to feel were essential to the esthetic contentment of his guests. Lamb saw a boat in a bottle, a framed flag done in silk, some particularly ghastly part of a fish, and a neat little group of extremely unlifelike glass flowers.

Awaiting his chance, Lamb sprang lightly to the shelf among this weird collection and immediately poised his wings. Directly facing him over the bar was a stuffed owl and out of the corner of his eyes he could see a moth-eaten-looking hawk. He studied the technique of these two birds carefully. There were several others in the room, but he could not bring them into his range of vision without turning his head which was thrust slightly down and forward over a dish of dried herring. This in his present state appealed to him greatly.

“I hate bolting down food,” he thought, “but this is no time nor place to observe the niceties of table manners.”

With a lightning-like dart of his head he snatched up one of the herrings and, cramming it into his mouth, once more became a stuffed bird. Only a slight tremor around the throat gave evidence of the activity that was going on within him.

Mr. Lamb made three more successful snatches before an interruption occurred. The interruption took the form of a stout gentleman with thick horn-rimmed glasses. Detaching himself from the bar, this individual lurched sleepily over to the lunch counter and leaned against it. He sampled a herring, then half turned to the bar the better to observe his friends.

“This bloated man is likely to camp here all day,” thought Mr. Lamb dejectedly. “And if his friends come over and get into action they’ll clean the place out.”

Slowly moving his head as close as possible to the plate, he made a short, swift snatch. The herring was his, but the man had noticed something. He turned and looked hard at the gull, then transferred his eyes to the plate. Removing his glasses, he polished them deliberately and once more inspected the gull. As he walked over to the bar he stopped suddenly and looked back. Mr. Lamb was prepared for the move. He looked fixedly back at the man and just before he turned away Lamb slowly closed one eye. The man stopped in his tracks, swayed back to the gull and, getting his face very close to it, studied the bird for a full minute.

“Well, I give up,” he muttered at last. “It must be the grog, but I didn’t think I was as drunk as all that.”

He hurried back to the bar and called for a double brandy. With this comfortably inside him, he returned once more to the gull.

It was unfortunate for the complete success of Mr. Lamb’s luncheon that he was discovered in the act of consuming the largest herring of them all. He could not possibly hope to get the entire fish into his mouth. Realizing the fuddled condition of the man, Lamb had decided that he would retain no clear impression of what he saw. Therefore he leisurely finished off the fish before the man’s bulging eyes, and resumed his inanimate position. The drunkard clutched the edge of the buffet and held on.

“Tell me,” he demanded thickly. “Are you a stuffed bird or not? For God’s sake be one or the other or I’ll go potty.”

Mr. Lamb returned the man’s pleading gaze with a cold, dead eye. Only one herring remained on the plate, and Mr. Lamb had his heart set on that. He was determined that the inebriate should not have it. Watching the gull closely, the man moved his hand slowly toward the last herring. Lamb allowed him to pick it up, then shot out his hand and tore it from his fingers.

“That settles it,” said the man aloud, stepping hastily back from the buffet. “When stuffed birds begin to snatch food from customers’ hands I’m through.”

He lifted up his voice and demanded the immediate presence of the proprietor. That worthy party, bearing a mug of beer, joined him.

“What’s wrong here?” he asked good-naturedly. “Not enough food?”

Still clinging to the buffet the man pointed a none too steady finger at the gull.

“Is that a stuffed bird?” he demanded. “Because if it is it must have been stuffed alive.”

“Why, damn my eyes,” said the proprietor, looking intently at the gull. “It must be a stuffed bird, although I don’t rightly remember this one.”

He paused and thought for a moment, then his face cleared. His mind insisted on explaining the presence of that bird. Unconsciously his imagination helped him.

“I remember now,” he said. “We had a sort of a blowout last week, and one of the boys must have brung him in. That’s it. That’s just how it got here.”

The other man looked at the proprietor with a pitying smile.

“Did you ever hear of a stuffed bird polishing off a plate of fish and fighting for the last one?”

“Did that bird do that?” asked the proprietor.

“That and more,” declared the other. “The damn thing had the nerve to wink at me.”

This last statement settled the proprietor’s doubts. His customer was seeing things. That was all there was to it. He took the man by the arm and attempted to lead him away.

“Come on over,” he said coaxingly. “I’ll stand the drinks. After that you’d better go home.”

This irritated the other considerably. He reached up and, seizing the gull by the feet, carried him to the bar. Mr. Lamb stiffened his body and awaited developments. He caught an inverted view of a cuspidor and a floor covered with sawdust before he was roughly hauled aloft.

“Gentlemen, I ask you,” cried the stout man. “Is that a stuffed bird?”

Mr. Lamb was passed from hand to hand along the bar. He was minutely examined. His feathers were parted and skin inspected. In the course of his journey up and down the bar his head was dangled conveniently over several glasses of beer from which he drank with avidity, the herring having made him thirsty.

“Of course it’s a stuffed bird,” one of the men said at last. “What do you think it is? No live bird would let himself be handled like this without putting up a hell of a squawk.”

“Jim’s right,” put in another voice. “Sure it’s a stuffed bird.”

“What do you mean, stuffed?” asked a skeptical individual. “Look at that bird’s skin. It’s altogether too fresh to be stuffed.”

Lamb’s skin was again examined and prodding fingers were thrust into various parts of his body. The wear and tear was beginning to tell on him.

“This is no go,” he said to himself. “Those drunkards will make a wreck out of me.”

“Well, put him down and let’s have a drink on it,” a reasonable voice suggested. “What do we care whether he’s stuffed or unstuffed? It’s all the same to me.”

Lamb was placed at the end of the bar and allowed to get his breath. The gentlemen returned to their drinking.

“I earned that luncheon,” he said to himself, thirstily watching the glasses. “I’d better be shoving off now before they’re at me again.”

He kept his eye fixed on the original cause of the investigation and, when that tippler’s head was tilted back, leaped upon it and fastened his claws in the thick hair. Flapping his wings violently, Lamb strained his throat in a piercing cry and pulled with all his might. The man’s cry was as piercing as the bird’s. He staggered across the room and crashed to the sawdust, leaving in Mr. Lamb’s claws several tufts of hair. Thoroughly interested now, Mr. Lamb swept down the bar, overturning glasses in his flight. Most of the investigation committee had taken refuge behind chairs and tables. With a final scream of triumph Lamb circled the room and made his exit through a conveniently open window.

“What did I say?” demanded the prostrate man in an injured voice. “I told you it wasn’t a stuffed bird.”

“Well, what in hell was it?” someone asked. “It wasn’t a regular seagull. No normal bird has sense enough to act stuffed.”

“I’m glad we all saw it,” said a third, “or I’d be feeling awful now.”

The gentlemen emerged from their various places of shelter and returning to the bar looked up at the owl suspiciously.

Lamb, dropping the hair in some innocent bystander’s face, flew out over the harbor and settled himself on a wave. Here he was presently joined by a venerable-looking seagull who, without any form of salutation, plopped himself down beside him. Lamb regarded him respectfully as a gull much older than himself.

“How do you do,” offered Lamb.

“What?” almost snarled the ancient.

“What?” repeated Lamb blankly.

“Yes,” scolded the other. “How do I do what?”

“Oh, nothing!” replied Lamb. “I was just saying hello.”

“You weren’t saying hello,” the old gull snapped. “If you’d said hello, I’d have heard, hello. You asked me how I done. Don’t think I’m deaf.”

“Did,” corrected Mr. Lamb.

“See!” cried the gull. “You’re wrong again. I always use done.”

“Then you always say it wrong,” said Lamb, his irritation getting the better of him. “You’re an insufferable old fool and you don’t know you’re alive.”

“There you go,” retorted the other. “You’re always wrong. If I wasn’t alive I wouldn’t be here.”

“And I wouldn’t miss you,” replied Lamb.

“The sea is large,” the old gull suggested. “Why don’t you hop off?”

“I was here first,” said Lamb.

“I’m always first wherever I am,” his disagreeable companion announced. “And besides, you’ve drifted half a mile since you lit on the water, so you’re not the first because you’re not there any longer and I—”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” interrupted Lamb, “you win. Have it your own way.”

“Of course I win,” said the gull complacently. “I always win. I can argue you down on anything. Say something and I’ll bet you’re wrong.”

Mr. Lamb made no reply. He abandoned the conversation as hopeless. Besides he did not care for the old gull’s rasping voice. The sea was rough at this spot, and Lamb was beginning to feel far from well. The choppy motion of the waves was seriously disturbing the herring. He looked over to see how his companion was standing it. The old bird was stolidly bobbing up and down apparently lost in some exasperating line of thought.

“Do you ever get seasick?” Mr. Lamb ventured.

The gull looked up irascibly.

“Put it properly,” he rasped. “If you mean, do I ever get sick from or because of the sea, my answer is no, certainly not. On the other hand, if you are trying to ask, do I ever get sick of the sea, then that’s altogether different.”

He paused and looked broodingly at the sky.

“I’m fed up with the sea,” he continued. “I’d like to retire and settle down. Build a nice little nest somewhere – nothing elaborate, you understand – and take life easy. I’ve been following the sea all my life and now I’m about through with it. I’d like to pass my few remaining years on shore. It’s a dog’s life for a gull.”

“Why don’t you retire?” asked Mr. Lamb. He was almost sorry for the old bird.

“Got to get my living, gotten I?” snapped the other.

“Haven’t I,” Mr. Lamb suggested mildly.

The old gull made an unpleasantly sarcastic noise.

“You’re starting in again, I see,” he observed with a hint of a threat in his voice. “I said ‘gotten I,’ and I mean ‘gotten I.’ No good trying to trip me up, I know.”

Mr. Lamb once more relapsed into silence. There was nothing to be gained by arguing with this opinionated old bore. Time passed and the sun began to consider the Jersey hills. It had had a full day making the city sweat. Now it was time to close up shop. The old gull stirred and looked at Mr. Lamb.

“Want to go inshore and eat fertilizer?” he asked.

Mr. Lamb shuddered and clung to the herring.

“Thank you, no,” he replied when he had a little mastered his nausea. “I’ve already dined.”

“It’s swell chow,” said the old bird, “but suit yourself. More fertilizer for me. I love it.”

He clapped his beak together with repulsive anticipation.

“Well, we’ll probably run into each other sometime,” he continued. “A big liner goes out tomorrow. Lots of first-class garbage. Probably see you with the mob. So long.”

He rose from the water and streamed away inland. Lamb watched him out of sight.

“What an uncouth old devil,” he mused.

That night when Sandra was undressing for bed she looked up from her garters and saw a large gull sitting on her windowsill.

“You low-down old loafer,” she said, deliberately pulling down the shade. “And I was actually feeling sorry for you.”

A loud, ribald squawk clattered in the air, but when she went to the window the gull was gone. She sat for a long time that night looking into the darkness.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Mr. Billings
Removes His Clothes

The next day Mr. Lamb put to sea. It was entirely unexpected. One of those unplanned excursions that turn out so excellently.

He had been hanging about the three-mile limit all day, idly sniffing empty bottles and recalling his vision of Sandra; when along toward three o’clock a big liner came stepping swiftly on her way to Europe.

Mr. Lamb had never crossed. It was one of those things one promises oneself and keeps on promising until the tomb puts an end to the hoary illusion. He was fond of ships. He felt that he could do well on a ship. The only thing wrong with Europe was that his wife had been there. He was not so fond of Europe for this. It should have been out when she called.

He tagged along with a motley throng of gulls in the wake of the ship. His companions were greedy for garbage. He most disliked their squawks of disappointment and satisfaction. One little gull who, in spite of her frantic efforts, was getting almost nothing, he helped out. She appreciated the half-filled banana peel hugely, but immediately began making improper advances, and Lamb had the time of his life convincing her of his chastity. It was all new to her. She returned to the garbage a much puzzled bird. She was more hurt than annoyed.

Then Lamb boarded the ship. He was going to see for himself. With a stealth that was now well developed he slipped into the scuppers of the main deck and made his way forward to the smoking-room. From his point of vantage there were many legs – forests of legs. He averaged them up on his way and decided they were far from bad. Good, satisfactory legs, well-hosed and frankly displayed for all the world to admire. He thought of slave markets where women were sold nude, and he wondered why the pictures always showed them cringing. Why, just show these women a slave market, and they would be racing to see who could strip first. Lamb was not a nice man. He did not think in nice ways. Mrs. Lamb had found that out.

His reception in the smoking-room was a great deal better than he had either hoped for or expected. The minute he thrust his serious, bespectacled head into the door a man in the corner began to laugh quietly to himself. From then on Lamb was a made gull so far as the smoking-room was concerned. He was accepted as one of the boys.

It all started from the man in the corner feeding him with bread soaked in wine. From then on things went from bad to worse. He was borrowed by various tables and urged to indulge. That is hardly correct. Lamb needed no urging. When a pretty woman held him in her arms and temptingly offered him a sip from her own cocktail he saw no reason to make a display of himself. He sipped and continued sipping. After dinner he did things with liqueurs. Exactly what he did with them he never quite remembered. However, a certain highball lingered long in his mind … that highball and a slanting deck, then an open door and a bed. Life became a comfortable hiatus.

When he next visited consciousness he was pecking irritably at a soft but firm object that was seriously disturbing his slumber. Several times beneath his pecking the object moved convulsively. Then suddenly the object was removed and the lights flashed on. When the coverings were pulled back, Lamb found himself frowning up into the face of a seriously perturbed young lady auspiciously attired. Now it so happened that this young lady had mastered only one cry of alarm that she considered suitable for shipboard. This cry she made all haste to utter.

Rushing from the room, she shouted at the top of her extremely robust lungs a warning that is feared and heeded on all the seven seas.

“Man overboard!” she announced with an earnestness that lent conviction. “Man overboard!”

The cry was automatically caught up by the stewards and passed forward to the bridge.

“Where?” demanded an officer, seizing the distracted young lady by a well-bared arm.

“Don’t know,” she half sobbed, “but I think it’s in my bed. It bit me.”

Too late now. The ship lost headway, then went into reverse. Doors popped open, and half-clad figures rushed to the decks, all of them cheerfully shouting something about a man being overboard. The scene was as giddy as a college rush.

During this refreshing interlude Mr. Lamb found an opportunity to remove himself to another stateroom, and to make sure there would be no misunderstanding this time he deliberately perched himself on the back of a chair.

“Well, that’s doing pretty well for a mere seagull,” he thought dreamily as he took up his sleep at the point where it had been disturbed.

Upon the bridge the skipper, when he learned the true state of affairs, was credited by his officers for inventing an entirely new language – something more concretely awful than they had ever heard before.

When the occupant of the stateroom Mr. Lamb had selected for the remainder of the night returned he glanced at the chair and averted his eyes. Then he rang for the steward.

“Steward,” he asked when the man had arrived, “does there seem to be a bird on that chair in the corner?”

“There is, sir,” replied the steward. “It’s a seagull.”

“Is the bird alive or dead?” continued the man.

The steward approached Mr. Lamb and scrutinized him closely. “He seems to be more asleep, sir,” said the steward. “I’ll chuck him right out.”

“No,” said the man. “No, steward. Let the damn fool sleep. I merely wanted to find out if we saw the same thing. I know exactly how he feels.”

The steward withdrew, and the man, after a sympathetic survey of the gull, quietly prepared for sleep. He omitted dropping his shoes that night – a sleeping gull should not be aroused.

Mr. Lamb woke up a wreck. He had a confused memory of confusion. Impossible to put things together. He was sure, however, that the skipper did not want him on the ship. As a matter of fact, when the skipper had received a fuller report of various happenings aboard his ship he had said, “Find the ——— ——— gull and wring its ——— ——— neck.” Instinctively Mr. Lamb knew that the skipper would be just snooty enough to issue an order like that. Lamb had heard about skippers.

Therefore, with a parting look of interest at his cabin-mate, he hopped to an open porthole and abandoned ship. As he wheeled high in the heavens he saw smoke on the sky-line. Soon he was able to make out the lines of a ship heading in the opposite direction – New York bound.

“I guess I’ll have to hitch-hike it,” he decided, stumbling over an air pocket and almost losing his balance. “In my condition I could never make port on wing.”

Before he finally left, however, he flew back to his own ship and secretively introduced himself into the skipper’s quarters where he succeeded in arousing the weary man by patiently toying with his hair. Then at a safe distance, close to a porthole, the gull arranged himself and listened while the skipper made all the noise. Mr. Lamb wished he had a stenographer present to take down many of the wonderful words he heard. The skipper went into his parentage, dwelt on various irregularities of birth, and gave specific evidence showing that Lamb was a nameless, immoral scavenger of the sea, the scum of all feathered things. Then Mr. Lamb took up the burden of the conversation and cursed the skipper vilely but impartially, as only a seagull can.

The air was filled with a wild clattering sound. The skipper listened for a while to the cursing gull with truly professional interest, then relost his temper. There were a great number of bells in his room. The skipper rang them all. When practically the entire crew had been assembled the skipper gave it explicit instructions just what to do with the gull. To have done all the things the skipper commanded would have required a lot of gulls – one gull could never have lasted. Mr. Lamb waited politely until the man had exhausted his supply of unpleasant suggestions, then poising himself in the porthole, rebuked him roundly for his lack of self-control. The crew had never heard the skipper so severely addressed. It was panic-stricken. It advanced on the cursing bird with extended hands. Lamb watched the determined men with an ironical eye, then dropped out of sight forever. After putting his crew on half-rations, the skipper cleared his cabin and returned to his bed, where he did not sleep.

When Lamb dropped down on the inbound vessel he dropped in a place where he would be free from intrusion, and there remained recuperating until the ship had passed the Battery. Then he sought the quiet waters of the Upper Hudson and drowsed peacefully round a battered old hulk until the lights began to appear in the windows of the apartment houses looming up high on the banks above him.

About five o’clock in the morning Mr. Lamb made up his mind that he was thoroughly sick of being a seagull. He had seen enough and done enough. If the little russet man insisted on his being things, Lamb wanted to be something else. He flew down Wall Street and turned into Broad Street. The financial district was deserted. Remarking that one of the windows of his office had been left open, he skimmed through it and sought his own private room. Everything was clean and in order. A large pile of slit envelopes was neatly stacked in the unfinished business basket. Perching himself on the edge of his desk, he closed his eyes to think and continued right through to sleep.

Time did not stay for Lamb’s slumbers. It continued evenly about its business. The office staff made its appearance, and Billings, the treasurer, quietly entered Mr. Lamb’s room. The old gentleman halted in the doorway and considered the sleeping gull long and thoughtfully. It was not his nature to be surprised. The moment he saw the gull his mind automatically leaped the events leading to its presence and occupied itself with devising schemes best fitted to relieve the office of its uninvited guest. Gulls did not buy bonds. Therefore gulls had no place in the scheme of things. It was all plain sailing to Billings.

He closed the door gently and returned to his desk the better to perfect his plans. This was a situation he had better handle himself. The ejecting of a seagull from the chief’s private office would be too much of a treat for the lamentably frivolous members of the staff. He selected a long basket designed to hold ticker tape and once more entered Mr. Lamb’s office, closing the door behind him. He hoped the gull was still sleeping.

But the gull was not still sleeping. The gull was not there at all. In its place squatted Mr. Lamb on the extreme edge of his desk. Mr. Lamb was clad only in pajamas, and to Mr. Billings this fact was more to be regretted than the existence of Russia and the popularity of Al Smith. Those phenomena were inexplicable, but the conduct of his chief would have to be explained, and Billings greatly doubted if a satisfactory explanation could be found. He fervently thanked his God that there was no smell of liquor in the air. Mr. Lamb must have left the bottle outside. He had the sense at least to do that.

Billings was about to close the door and lock it, feeling it wiser to let his chief finish his sleep, when Mr. Lamb woke up and began to flap his arms against his sides in a singularly birdlike manner. Billings, remembering the gull, gasped as a shocking suspicion entered his mind. The flapping was the cause of more trouble. Mr. Lamb lost his balance and fell with a crash to the floor. The fall and the sight of the familiar face of his treasurer were sufficient to give Mr. Lamb a comprehensive realization of his predicament. He looked down at his pajamas, then smiled cordially up at Billings.

“Morning, Billings,” he said. “Would you mind taking off your clothes. I have an extremely important engagement.”

For only a moment did Billings hesitate, then he slowly began to strip. It was up to him to see that Mr. Lamb kept that engagement. A cool million might hang in the balance. Who could tell?

At this intimate juncture Miss Helen Wilson, bearing the morning letters, came swiftly into the office and, to the relief of both gentlemen, went swiftly out again. The expression on her face was enough to collect an interested group.

“The boss is in there in pajamas,” she quietly told the girls, “and Billings is undressing.”

“My Gord!” breathed a snappy-looking stenographer. “What do we all have to do, go to bed?”

A few minutes later Mr. Lamb, clad in a suit several sizes too small for him, came smilingly from his office and greeted his demoralized staff as if nothing unusual had occurred. And a few minutes after his departure Mr. Billings summoned his assistant to him and shortly appeared wearing a suit several sizes too large for him. With an air of deep preoccupation he flopped across the main office, then flopped from view behind the protection of his own door.

What steps the assistant took to cover his nakedness are not known. It is to be assumed that Mr. Billings did not permit him to go home in Mr. Lamb’s pajamas.

When Lamb presented himself at his home his arrival created a small stir. Even Thomas was quietly edified. Mrs. Lamb was not amused.

“That’s rather a dashing little ensemble you’re wearing, major,” Hebe observed, looking up from her plate. “Do you feel that we need to be diverted?”

“I sort of fancy it myself,” said Lamb, taking his place at the head of the table. “It’s Philadelphia’s latest. Do you like it, Sapho?”

“Where have you been?” asked Sapho. “And what am I to understand by these mysterious disappearances?”

“Flying,” said Mr. Lamb enigmatically; then as if it were an afterthought he asked: “Would it be quite convenient for me to retire to my room after luncheon? I want to save this suit for Sunday.”

Mrs. Lamb refrained from asking further inconvenient questions. Her husband ate more than usual.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A Lapful of Sandy

“Why must I be carried into the city?” Mr. Lamb complained, as his daughter spread disorder among the traffic in upper New York. “I just came from that wallow of vice and corruption.”

“I’m going to spend money, I told you,” his daughter patiently explained, “and I want you to watch how I do it. You see, major, at any moment now I might get married or something very closely related to getting married. From now on I’ve got to be always on the alert.”

“There’s an infinity of space between getting married and something very closely related to getting married,” Mr. Lamb mildly observed. “Then of course there remains the relatively unimportant question of the morality of the thing.”

“There you have me,” replied Hebe. “I’ve always been backward on morals, but I do know how to dress appropriately for any given occasion, and that’s more than half the battle.”

“You may be right,” her father agreed. “My own morals are undergoing a severe strain at present. They seem to be almost undermined, although thus far I am still intact. As a seagull I slept with a lady, but not very comfortably nor very long. I made an impression at that. It is a question in my mind if that lady ever sleeps again. She will certainly never sleep with a seagull.”

Hebe parked the car in a side street and, taking her father’s arm, directed his steps to a magnificent shop just off Fifth Avenue.

“This place is obviously not designed to improve one’s morals,” Mr. Lamb remarked as he looked about him. “I can hardly understand how a woman with such remarkable contraptions on underneath can refrain from discarding her outer garments and displaying herself demi-nude.”

“All women cherish or have cherished that pious desire,” Hebe replied wisely. “Your mind operates too crudely to understand the finer feelings of women. Anyway, here comes madam.”

Madam having been introduced to Hebe’s father and the young lady’s wishes having been made known in a low voice, the couple were ushered into a private room and offered ridiculously inadequate gilt chairs.

“If you weren’t my daughter,” said Mr. Lamb, “I’d be leaving at just this point. What goes on here? The presence of that sofa over there is not reassuring. Am I expected to ring for drinks?”

“I wouldn’t have a mind like yours for the world,” his daughter told him. “It’s so utterly evil – so bad.”

“Do you mean to sit there and tell me – ,” Mr. Lamb began, but he never finished the sentence.

The door opened and a girl clad in what Lamb considered next to nothing came slithering and swaying into the room. The girl was Sandra … impersonal, aloof, and unsmiling. Her eyes glittered dangerously, Mr. Lamb thought, when they occasionally met his.

“Get an eyeful you old roué,” she gritted as she swept close to his chair.

Mr. Lamb started back.

“Hebe,” he said, “I think I’d better be going. My morals as I have already told you are almost undermined.”

“Is it not chic?” Madam demanded. “Is it not ravissement?”

While Hebe was agreeing with madam that the garment was both chic and ravissement Sandra once more glided past Mr. Lamb.

“Nasty,” she muttered. “Nasty old man.”

Mr. Lamb leaned close to his daughter and actually brought himself to whisper, so great was his indignation.

“She just called me a nasty old man,” he told her. “You staged this party – not I.”

Hebe patted her father’s arm with a soothing little hand.

“Don’t mind her,” she replied in a low voice. “You are nasty, but you’re not so very old.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” breathed Mr. Lamb, and fastened his eyes on the exact center of the rug.

“What do you think Mr. Lamb?” asked madam, fearing that the source of revenue might be growing bored. “Would not your daughter wear well in that?”

“What?” said Mr. Lamb with a slight start. “Wear well? Oh yes, of course. She’d wear splendidly if she didn’t wear out altogether.”

“Your father is droll,” laughed madam. “Come, I have something to show – ,” and taking Hebe by the arm, she led the girl from the room.

“Un moment, monsieur,” drifted back to him through the closing door.

Then things began to happen. When the click of the latch assured Sandra that she was alone in the room with Mr. Lamb, she took instant advantage of their privacy. With one spring she was on his lap, her arms twined tightly round his head. To Mr. Lamb it seemed that Sandra’s unexpected demonstration was more in the nature of an assault than an expression of tender emotions. Suppose he should be discovered in this compromising position? Lamb grew frantic.

“Get up,” he mouthed, his vowels being muffled by a quantity of ineffectual lace. “Get up at once – this instant!”

Then madam and Hebe made their appearance. Madam uttered a shocked cry and covered her eyes, but Hebe studied the situation with her usual detached interest.

Sandra wriggled off the knees and took refuge behind madam.

“It was a veritable assault, madam,” she chattered with every appearance of terror. “The moment you left the room that nasty old man on the chair looked at me and said, ‘I’m going to get you,’ and with that I was seized – you saw.”

She embellished this lying statement with a volley of extremely convincing sobs and shudders. Madam put her arms around the girl and did her best to quiet her maidenly alarm.

“Let me explain,” Lamb began, but Hebe interrupted.

“Madam,” said she, “I think I’ll take several sets of that small thing she’s wearing.”

Madam was delighted. She even regarded Mr. Lamb with sympathetic eyes.

Mr. Lamb walked out of the shop and allowed Hebe to guide his faltering steps at random.

Hebe knew of a place and thither she led her father. For the remainder of the afternoon she dutifully fed him highballs until his belief in the ultimate wisdom of God was partially restored. He was even able to smile ruefully over the memory of Sandra’s assault.

At a late hour that night he was still drinking highballs and running up a commendable check at a night-club for the benefit of Sandra, his daughter, and Melville Long. Mr. Lamb had danced with more diligence than grace. Now, however, he was past dancing. In fact, if the truth must be known, Mr. Lamb was rapidly disappearing, the top of his head being level with the table-cloth, and in a few minutes even the little of him with which he saw fit to grace the table was withdrawn from public view.

Observing the reluctance of her father to remain in an erect position, Hebe called the waiter and asked for the check. Presently he returned with a beaming face in anticipation of a heavy tip, but as he was on the point of proffering the final reckoning he suddenly became transfixed in his tracks, his eyes riveted themselves on the floor, and the beam slowly melted from his face giving place to an expression decidedly unnerving to behold. The party looked down and saw what the waiter saw – a long, large, tawny tail protruding from under the table. The waiter felt sure that even to look at such a thing was not included in his salary. He tiptoed away carrying the check with him. Let more intrepid spirits collect it if they could. His duty lay with his family.

The two girls looked at the one remaining man, who himself was not so crisp.

“What’s on the other end of it?” asked Sandra.

Hebe bent over and thoughtfully contemplated the tail.

“Search me,” she said at last, “I don’t rightly remember ever having had any dealings with a tail like that before.”

“Perhaps it’s an altogether new and better animal,” Mr. Long suggested enterprisingly.

He pulled a flask from his hip pocket and passed it to the ladies. The situation called for a drink.

“That,” said Hebe, sweeping the back of her hand across her mouth, “endears you to me for life.”

At this moment Mr. Lamb decided to relieve the tension of the situation. A long, sleek head with a pointed snout appeared above the table, slid onto the rumpled cloth and looked moistly at the three young people. In the due course of time the head was followed by a body, which slumped back awkwardly in its chair.

“I don’t want to be hasty,” said Hebe, “but roughly speaking, I think my father and our host leans toward kangaroo. What will we use for money now that he has gone?”

Once more Mr. Long was enterprising.

“Mightn’t he have a pouch?” he asked. “I seem to remember something about kangaroos and pouches.”

The kangaroo laughed foolishly and beat on the table with his short but powerful forelegs. Hebe cast her lover a smile of infinite commiseration.

“For one I’d prefer not to look for it,” she remarked. “You see, darling, he’s not that sort of a kangaroo.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Long. “It was merely a suggestion.”

“Rather an indelicate one,” observed the girl.

For some minutes Sandra had been looking with growing disgust at the obviously inebriated kangaroo, who had been fatuously crying to hold her hand.

“Now, I ask you,” she demanded. “What are we going to do with that? You just can’t leave a kangaroo to shift for himself in a city like this.”

“He’d be safe so far as women are concerned,” observed Melville Long, surpassing himself in optimism.

The kangaroo received this remark with a giggle of appreciation.

“I don’t know,” said Hebe. “He’s not such a bad-looking kangaroo.”

“He’s a terrible-looking kangaroo,” declared Sandra. “Look at him there, all slouched over. Why can’t he sit up properly?”

Mr. Lamb favored her with a scowl.

It seems unfortunate that at this stage of the conversation a gentleman in executing an ambitious dance step should have descended heavily on Mr. Lamb’s tail. It seems doubly unfortunate that Mr. Lamb had not sufficient restraint to withhold the vicious upper cut he immediately delivered upon the point of the gentleman’s chin. From that time on everything seemed increasingly unfortunate.

The dancer retaliated with a left hook to Mr. Lamb’s jaw, and Sandra, as if guided by an infallible sense of balance, sprang upon the man’s partner and partially disrobed her.

“Touch a hair of his head,” she shouted, “and I’ll strip you clean.”

Several ladies rushed to the assistance of the assaulted woman, and this quite naturally brought Hebe into the fray. One thing led to another, and presently Melville Long found himself engaged in biting the ear of a perfect stranger while kicking another diligently in the stomach. On all sides it was an earnest, hard-breathing little engagement that did not lose one whit of interest because of the fact that only a few of its participants had the vaguest idea of what it was all about.

In the meantime the kangaroo, highly excited by all that was going on, was leaping from table to table and impartially smiting both friend and foe whenever the occasion offered.

The room was not quiet nor the scene restful. Several men, as if preferring not to trust the evidence of their eyes, were sitting motionless at their tables, their heads buried in their arms. When Mr. Lamb’s head managed to get itself through a snare drum, retaining the frame round his neck, it seemed high time to think about going home.

Hebe, Sandra, and a shockingly tattered Mr. Long cut a path through the whirling mass and joined the kangaroo at the door.

“Cut and run!” cried Sandra. “The car’s round the corner.”

The four of them burst so compactly from the place that two arriving policemen were heavily borne to the pavement. There they sat and blew their whistles, then lurched in the direction of the flying wedge. They were trailed by a waiter wildly waving a check.

“Off again,” thought Lamb to himself, as he leaped along beside Sandra. “My universe of late seems to be in a disconcertingly unsettled condition.”

As they swarmed into the automobile a motorcycle policeman came into view and calmly took the number of the car, which by this time was gathering speed, then with a satisfied grin, settled himself down on his machine to show these people exactly where they got off.

At Columbus Circle another officer tried to hold them up when they were forced to slow down in traffic, but a hairy arm shooting out unexpectedly from the rear seat of the car, landed him in the gutter.

“What sort of a mob is that?” he wondered, vividly recalling the strange-looking arm that had so bewilderingly altered his plans.

Melville Long was at the wheel, and Hebe was sitting beside him. On the back seat Sandra was clinging to the kangaroo and laughing softly at the festive appearance he made with the rim of the drum round his neck.

When they were well out of the city the motorcycle policeman, who had not forgotten them for a moment, telephoned ahead to the next fair-sized town and gave full particulars and an adequate description of the merry little party. They were all laughing now, save Mr. Lamb, who showed a strong inclination to doze off on Sandra’s shoulder. Melville Long’s merriment was the greater because of the skilful manner in which he believed he had eluded pursuit.

The flight came to an end at the railroad tracks of the next town. The bars were down, and it was here that the reception committee waited.

“Damn,” said Melville Long under his breath as several dark figures emerged from the shadows and manifested their presence in other unpleasant ways.

“You big stiffs,” said Hebe. “Why didn’t you call out the army?”

“That’s all they are,” agreed Sandra unhesitatingly. “They’re just great, big, liver-footed stiffs – morons!”

“That talk ain’t going to help you a bit,” one of the officers warned the ladies.

“Aw, shut up,” said Mr. Long. “We’re not asking you for a lesson in polite conversation.”

The officer was about to attend to the young man for this remark, when a terrible, grinning face was suddenly thrust into his. He started back with a cry and had to be supported by two of his brother officers. But this was Mr. Lamb’s last effort that night. He had no recollection of being driven to a station house and half carried to a cell in which he was locked up in company with his prospective son-in-law. The two girls, still busily insulting every uniform in sight, were given a barred apartment of their own where they sang and jeered themselves to sleep.

When Judge Gibson arose next morning he made up his mind to give all prisoners brought before him whom he could not sentence to painful death at least a life term at revolting labor. In this cheerful frame of mind he repaired to his court and proceeded to spread dread and dismay among the ranks of evil-doers. When Sandra, Hebe and Melville Long were lined up against the rail he kept them waiting a considerable time before he looked up from a paper he had been studying with growing interest. When he did look up his expression was almost happy. Here was something he could get thoroughly enraged about. Convulsing his face into a small bunch he slowly considered in turn each youthful face looking bravely up into his.

“Good morning,” he said in a suspiciously pleasant voice. “Can you think of anything you haven’t done?”

“Rape,” replied Sandra promptly.

“Arson and pillage,” added Hebe.

“Treason,” was the best that Long could achieve.

The Judge was a little taken back by the nature of the snappy replies. Evidently these young people were not so soft as they looked. He would have to deal with them astutely.

“Well, I have you down here for about everything else,” he continued, referring to the paper. “I’ll select a few charges at random just to give you an approximate idea of how very long you are going to be with us.”

He cleared his throat efficiently and carefully adjusted his glasses.

“A mention is made here of driving while under the influence of spirituous liquor, of demolishing a restaurant and refusing to pay the check, of assaulting, maiming, and wounding upwards of half a hundred innocent persons, of speeding and violating every known traffic regulation in the most flagrant and callous manner, of having in your company and possession a dangerous wild beast, of attacking several officers of the law, and of being in possession of a flask of whisky. Your evening seems to have been industriously spent in disturbing the world at large.”

“I’ll bet you love to read the weather reports that say ‘Rain and increasing cold,’ ” observed Sandra with her most disarming smile.

The judge was not annoyed. He looked at the girl a long time as if trying to fix her image forever in his memory.

“Where you are going,” he told her distinctly, “you won’t have to worry about the weather. It will be all overcast to you.”

In spite of herself Sandra shuddered at this unemotional announcement.

“Your honor,” put in one of the policemen. “They also used bad language and called us a bunch of big stiffs.”

The judge looked at the policeman with a shocked expression, then turned his eyes to the prisoners.

“How did you find that out?” he asked.

“You can see for yourself, your honor,” replied Hebe.

“I know,” agreed the judge, “but we’ve been trying to hush it up. Don’t go giving us away every time you get run in.”

The judge paused and once more considered the document.

“It refers here,” he continued with a new note of interest in his voice, “to a dangerous wild beast. Where is this wild beast at present, Donovan?”

“He’s locked up,” replied that worthy.

“Did you capture it last night?” asked the judge.

“The four of us, your honor,” said Donovan modestly. “Officers O’Boyle, Burk—”

“Quite right,” the judge interrupted. “Then I assume the beast was neither dangerous nor wild.”

“It gave us a terrible start, your honor,” Donovan got in. “An awful sight it was with the drum around its neck, and all.”

The judge looked up quickly. This was all news to him.

“It must have been dreadful,” he remarked with elaborate solicitude. “But what’s this about a drum? It says nothing here about a drum.”

“Yes, sir, it was wearing a drum,” said Donovan.

“And you say this drum was around the neck of this alleged wild beast?” continued Judge Gibson. “What sort of wild beast does it happen to be?”

“The doctor just came in on a case, sir, and claims it’s a kingaroo,” the officer replied.

“Kangaroo, Donovan,” corrected the judge.

“Yes, your honor,” Donovan continued, “but Sergeant Brophy says it ain’t a kingaroo, because kingaroos don’t act that way.”

“In what lies the eccentricity of this unknown wild beast’s behavior?” demanded the judge now thoroughly interested.

“Didn’t get your honor,” said Donovan.

“What’s wrong with the thing?” snapped the judge, then turning to his prisoners added politely, “You’ll pardon me I hope before I put you away. I must get Donovan to tell me all about this kingaroo.”

“Certainly, your honor, we’ll pardon you if you will pardon us,” replied Hebe.

“Very good,” said the judge with a ghastly grin. “You were going to say, Donovan?”

“I hadn’t intended saying anything,” replied Donovan.

“Well, go right ahead and say it,” urged the judge patiently. “I think you can confide in us. What’s wrong with this wild beast?”

“Well, your honor,” replied the officer with every sign of hesitancy. “The last I saw of the thing it was humming ‘Me and My Shadow’ and dancing around in its cell.”

“What!” the judge almost shouted, leaning far over his desk; then, sinking back, he added, “Don’t say any more for a moment, Donovan. I need to think.”

The prisoners before him were leaning on the rail, their faces hidden from view.

“I wish I could laugh,” said the judge gloomily. “Never have I been forced to listen to such an involved and successfully obscured narrative.”

He picked up a newspaper and read for several minutes, occasionally stopping to look penetratingly at Donovan until that intrepid limb of the law began to grow more than a little reflective.

“What did you say the name of that song was?” the judge asked at last.

“ ‘Me and My Shadow,’ ” Donovan replied.

“Is it a pretty song?” continued the judge. “Do you know it?”

“I couldn’t sing it myself, your honor,” said Donovan, fearing the judge’s next request, “but I know it when I hear it.”

“I’ll buy you a record, your honor,” offered Sandy. “It’s sweetly wistful like so many of your clients.”

“You won’t be near any store,” said the judge.

“Oh,” said Sandy, “that’s too bad!”

“Sounds like a criminal record,” observed the judge. “ ‘Me and My Shadow’ – shadow, you see. Good! Everyone gets 100 but Officer Donovan.”

The judge folded his papers with a snap and sat up abruptly.

“Enough of this,” he said briskly. “Donovan, bring in that singing kangaroo. Let’s all have a look at it. Perhaps we’ll be able to agree on a name.”

“He’s not such a poisonous judge,” murmured Hebe to Sandra.

“Not at all,” said Sandra. “Quite a human being.”

“Wait till you see what he does with us,” Melville Long whispered behind his hand, his optimism vanished.

The kangaroo was not entirely sober when Donovan, holding a rope, the other end of which was secured around his neck, brought him before the judge. The animal covered the ground with a peculiar gliding motion that gave him the appearance of skating. He was still humming under his breath in a preoccupied manner. Greeting his friends with a casual wave of a relatively short foreleg, he bowed to the judge.

At this point several sleepy reporters came back to life and began to ask each other questions. Here was a good story. They collared an attendant and obtained full details. The few remaining spectators also displayed signs of returning interest. The judge leaned forward and listened intently, one hand held up for silence. A strange noise was issuing from the kangaroo’s lips. Observing the judge’s strained attitude the kangaroo obligingly increased the volume of his humming, and the room was filled with what the kangaroo fondly believed to be a song.

“You’ve a better ear for music than I have, Donovan,” said the judge, settling back in his chair. “Is he still harping on his favorite song?”

“That’s what he thinks he’s doing,” answered the officer. “It ain’t so bad, your honor, considering he’s a poor, dumb, soulless beast.”

Mr. Lamb looked pensively at Donovan.

“Where’s his drum?” asked the judge suddenly.

“He refused to come out of his cell until I’d taken it off for him,” Donovan replied.

“Too bad,” observed the judge. “I’d like to have seen that.” Then turning to Hebe, he asked, “Miss Lamb, where did you get this singing kangaroo?”

“My uncle found him in the bush,” said Hebe.

“What bush?” asked the judge. “Try to be specific.”

“The Australian bush,” replied Hebe. “He’s been in our family ever since he was a pup.”

The judge continued to question the girl about the kangaroo until Mr. Lamb grew bored. He was also becoming extremely sleepy. The liquor was wearing off. Slowly he sank down and fell into a gentle slumber. The judge looked over the edge of his desk.

“Donovan,” he ordered, “wake that kangaroo up. Neither man nor beast sleeps in this court.”

A violent jerk on the noose brought the kangaroo erect like a released spring. He made a side swipe at Donovan, but, luckily for that officer, failed to land. Then, as if suddenly realizing his surroundings, he looked apologetically at the judge.

A strange feeling was taking possession of Mr. Lamb, a feeling not entirely due to his overindulgence. Some sort of chemical revolution was taking place within him. He was unable to shake off his drowsiness and confusion. As he drifted off to sleep again he had a vague idea that the judge was asking Donovan whether the poor soulless beast had been given a cup of coffee that morning.

A loud discussion in the back of the courtroom between two heavy-faced, unhatted ladies stoutly defending the smirched reputation of their respective husbands presently to be tried on a charge of jointly attempting to put an end to each other’s lurid careers, created a momentary diversion. All eyes were turned in their direction, and by the time the belligerent ladies had been voluminously ejected, another diversion had arisen to mar the tranquillity of the judge’s morning. When he next peered at the kangaroo he found himself looking into the dark eyes of a tall, fashionably clad gentleman of distinguished manner and sober bearing.

“Hello!” exclaimed the judge in some surprise. “Where the devil did you spring from?”

Mr. Lamb presented his card and explained his presence in the court. Having learned indirectly about the escapade of these young people and being the father of one of them and an old friend of the parents of the other two, he had hastened to help the judge to show them the error of their ways.

“You are just in time to see the last of them, Mr. Lamb,” Judge Gibson informed him. “And by the way, how did you manage to get that noose about your neck?”

Mr. Lamb’s hand flew to the rope. For a moment he appeared to be crushed. His companion of the night gazed at him with dismayed eyes. How could he lie himself out of this? Then a bland smile touched Mr. Lamb’s lips as he looked up at the judge.

“I just found it lying there on the floor,” said Mr. Lamb, “and I thought I’d try it on.”

“Are you in the habit of trying on nooses?” asked the judge.

Sandra was leaning against Mr. Lamb. Her face was crimson, and a handkerchief was crammed in her mouth.

“That’s the most deflated lie I’ve ever attended,” breathed Hebe.

“No,” replied Mr. Lamb in reply to the judge’s question. “It is not one of my hobbies.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” the judge remarked. “One of the nooses might stay put sometime.”

Mr. Lamb laughed politely.

“Donovan,” continued the judge, “where has that kangaroo gotten himself to? Is he still sleeping or what’s he think he’s doing?”

When the judge’s eye gathered in Donovan, he imagined the officer was giving every appearance of shell shock. Donovan was staring at Mr. Lamb with frightened bewildered eyes.

“Why, that gentleman’s the kangaroo!” he faltered. “The rope ain’t never been out of my hand, your honor.”

“No, Donovan,” replied the judge. “Mr. Lamb is not a kangaroo in spite of his eccentric conduct. You’ve tried to convince me of many strange, unbelievable stories in the course of our relations, but I refuse to be convinced that this gentleman is a kangaroo.”

A hard light came into the judge’s eyes, and he leaned far over his desk again.

“Now, Donovan,” he rasped. “You go out and find me that kangaroo. Take some of your fellow incompetents with you. Bring that animal back to me. I want him to teach me that song.”

“I beg your pardon, Judge Gibson,” Mr. Lamb put in, “but I think I can help the officer out. As I was coming in a kangaroo burst from between two excited women who were evidently being put out. The creature almost knocked me over in his eagerness to go somewhere. He turned to the left and jumped into a passing van heading away from the city. That’s the last I saw of him.”

“Search for that van, Donovan,” said the judge. “And don’t forget to beat every bush. He likes bushes. So far it seems you’ve made a mess of the case. There’s not a witness here in court to support a number of your charges. I don’t even see a plaintiff.”

Donovan left with one last fascinated look at Mr. Lamb, who immediately after retired with the judge to his private chamber. When he returned he smiled encouragingly at the delinquents. The judge brushing his lips with a handkerchief also smiled upon them.

“What your various parents are going to do to you will be plenty,” he said happily. “You will come to wish I had put you in prison forever. I’ve just had Mr. Long on the wire, young man, and he actually pleaded with me to sentence you for life. He said something about being able to prove yourself in jail. In view of the approaching unpleasantness I am letting you off with a suspended sentence. Get them out of my sight, Mr. Lamb. They’ve taken up my entire morning – they and that kangaroo.”

Back in the automobile Lamb collapsed. Sandra nestled against him.

“I hope this will teach us all a lesson,” he said piously. “It will all come out in the papers.”

“ ’Twill make erotic reading for Sapho,” replied Hebe. “I think we had better go away somewhere.”

“I know I had,” said Long moodily. “There’ll be no living at home. I’ve proved myself conclusively at last.”

“Ruination?” suggested Hebe.

“We’re ruinated enough as it is,” said Long.

Sandra’s hand crept in to Mr. Lamb’s.

“You’re such a nice, long, lovely liar,” she murmured.

Mr. Lamb was looking at her ear.

“That thing,” he said, pinching it slightly, “was the start of all my troubles.”

“Kiss it,” urged Sandra in a low voice.

Mr. Lamb looked coldly at the girl.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Sapho Tries to Murder a Fish

Mr. Lamb had spoken conservatively. The reporters got it. The papers printed it. Yards of it. In spite of the vast multiplicity of detail, in spite of the unscrupulous embellishments, the callous innuendoes, the gentlemen of the press were still heavily befogged as to the actual facts of the affair. Mr. Lamb appeared in print, but not in his true rôle of a converted kangaroo.

One story in particular disturbed the overtaxed equanimity of its central character. The author of the story in question had seen fit to treat his subject facetiously, which when one comes to consider its nature seems about the best way to treat it. One can hardly work up a spirit of profound indignation or grow morbidly melancholic over a humming kangaroo. A few morons exist who perhaps could, but these single-minded gentlemen were, as usual, too busy suppressing books, collecting unpleasantly reminiscent picture postcards or putting disturbing factors behind the bars to worry about Mr. Lamb and his companions.

Nevertheless, Mr. Lamb would have wrung this individual reporter’s neck quite cheerfully and thoroughly had the neck conveniently offered itself. However, the necks of reporters are not always the easiest things in the world to establish contact with, save through the medium of a bottle containing any fluid remotely alcoholic including varnish and rub-down preparations.

Sitting this evening in the quietude of his study with his old friend Kai Lung safely balanced on one long, thin knee, Mr. Lamb delayed for a moment the pleasure of having this engaging Oriental unroll his mat in order to peruse for the fifth time the far less engaging inventions of some obviously depraved occidental newspaper reporter.

These inventions were in part as follows:

THE STRANGE BEHAVIOR OF
MR. T. LAWRENCE LAMB

APPEARS IN COURT WITH A NOOSE
ROUND HIS NECK

JUDGE GIBSON REFUSES TO HANG HIM

Apparently anticipating the worst, Mr. T. Lawrence Lamb of Woodbine, N. Y., a well-known and, just previous to this writing, conservative investment banker, presented himself before Judge Gibson in general session today with a noose neatly arranged round his neck – this in addition to a tie of unusually lurid color.

In full justice to Mr. Lamb it must be stated that his appearance in court was due to no moral lapse of his own. One can only ascribe Mr. Lamb’s unconventional neck adornment to a desire to offer himself in vicarious atonement for the sins of his daughter, Miss Hebe Lamb, and her two accomplices, Miss Sandra Rush and Mr. Melville Long, all active members of Woodbine’s younger set.

That these young people were a little more than active on the evening of their arrest and subsequent incarceration is evidenced by the fact that no less than fourteen serious charges were lodged against them and that their trail of destruction extended from the dead center of New York’s night-club district to a spot some forty miles distant from the city.

Additional interest is added to the mad progress of these young people through the presence of a singing kangaroo, or, as Officer Patrick Donovan prefers to call it, kingaroo. Whether this convivial animal was a kangaroo or a kingaroo is difficult to establish at this moment, due to the unfortunate fact that whatever the creature was it successfully thwarted retention and is still at large. According to Judge Gibson it is probably in some bush. The judge never offers an opinion without some good reason.

An element of mystery is introduced here arising from the inexplicable coincidence that the noose so unsuccessfully used to restrain this night-club-loving animal was the identical one that so nattily adorned Mr. Lamb’s neck.

Mr. Lamb has stated that finding the noose on the floor he picked it up and slipped it on merely through lack of knowing anything better to do with it. To his way of thinking, a noose obviously required a neck, and not wishing to intrude upon the neck of some perfect stranger, he quite logically put it on his own.

In view of the gentleman’s social position and well-established conservative leanings, this is an explanation difficult to believe. It can only be assumed that Mr. Lamb’s mind suddenly broke down under the shock of his daughter’s conduct and that temporarily the man was not anyway near himself.

Evidently this was the charitable view that Judge Gibson took of the situation, having been somewhat shocked himself by the sudden appearance of an otherwise normal gentleman wearing a noose round his neck, and to all intents and purposes willing to pay the supreme penalty for his erring daughter and her no less erring friends.

Apparently the sight of Mr. Lamb, together with the sincerity of his bearing, touched some hitherto successfully concealed spring of tenderness in the judge, who released the youthful offenders on a suspended sentence after what is believed to have been a pleasant conversation in his chambers with the sacrificial Mr. Lamb.

Miss Sandra Rush, an underwear model of no mean proportions, is often seen in one of the many Lamb automobiles. This is, of course, due solely to her close friendship with Mr. Lamb’s daughter. The singing kangaroo, it is believed, is still caroling his ribald songs in some secluded bush.

It was on this high note that the story came to an end. It was also as this note sounded that Mrs. Lamb entered her husband’s study. Once entered, she stood still and tragically awaited his acknowledgment of her presence. Fearing that the acknowledgment might be indefinitely delayed, she altered her pose at last and slanted an accusing finger at the newspaper now drooping from Mr. Lamb’s hands.

“What are you going to do about it?” dropped gloomily from her lips. “I suggest you resign from everything and live somewhere else under an assumed name.”

Mr. Lamb elevated his knees, skilfully retaining control of Kai Lung, and looked at his wife as if he were trying to place her in an extremely feeble memory. Presently he unlimbered, rose and vaguely offered her a chair which she in turn spurned, overacting the part in doing so.

“Ah yes!” murmured Mr. Lamb. “It’s Sapho – my Tilly. You were saying? …”

“I was saying,” Sapho put in, “that you should drop out of sight and live under another name.”

“Couldn’t I grow a beard?” Mr. Lamb asked mildly. “I might even dye my hair and continue to lurk here as one of your inspired friends or a conveniently acquired uncle from Australia. They say here in the paper that the kangaroo or kingaroo – I prefer the latter version – came from the bush. And to think that we both shared the same noose. This paper also says that he sang. I missed that part. Can’t have everything, I suppose. Do you believe he actually sang, that kangaroo?”

“You should go to your underwear model or to your own daughter for such information,” was Mrs. Lamb’s crushing retort. “The light attitude you are now assuming seems in the worst of taste to me. Once more I ask you, what are you going to do about it? I cannot afford to be associated with a laughing-stock. My life – what modest talent I possess – was never intended to be shackled to a personality so – so coarse and unsympathetic as yours … so utterly self-centered and lacking in the finer shades and vibrations of emotion. My life should be led with a larger, a higher vision. Everyone recognizes that fact.”

“The word that I have in mind,” said Mr. Lamb slowly, “the only one I consider a fitting reply to your bathetic remarks, is frequently applied to wives by less delicate husbands than I. It’s too honest a word for your ears, so I’ll let you exercise your limited imagination. Consider the word as said.”

He looked thoughtfully at some cigarette ashes that had fallen on his left knee, started to brush them off, then deciding the effort was too exhausting, gave it up.

“Still there is something in what you say,” he remarked at last. “That Vacation Fund affair, from what I heard of it, provided enough laughter to last this community for years. If both of us become laughing-stocks the general merriment might provoke an epidemic of hysteria.”

“I absolutely deny I was a laughing-stock,” said Mrs. Lamb. “A horse was responsible for all that … a low, vicious, yet strangely human horse in some of its more objectionable actions. In many ways that brute of a horse reminded me of you. Even now I shudder when I think of him.”

“Another point I share in common with this horse of yours.” Mr. Lamb grinned good-naturedly.

“I did not come here to discuss my emotional reactions to you,” Mrs. Lamb answered coldly. “I hoped that we might be able to arrive at some understanding – some civilized arrangement. Since the appearance of all this scandal in the papers my nerves have been uprooted. It will take years to get them anyway near back to their former condition. They’ll never get back entirely. You don’t know what a thing like that does to me.”

Mr. Lamb, still grinning, seemed to be considering things. His wife did not care for the grin. She recognized it. Also the light in his eyes. Something particularly disagreeable always followed these facial manifestations. She was not disappointed. Something unpleasant did – something surpassingly disagreeable, a real accomplishment for Mr. Lamb.

“Here’s an idea,” he said quite seriously. “Suppose I should give you the use of my room over week-ends? What would you think of a clubby little scheme like that? Sort of ménage à trois, one member being absent.… I have a little pride.”

Mrs. Lamb did not express an opinion of her husband’s little scheme. She did not even deign to meet Mr. Lamb’s eyes. The mental process of this crude man was altogether too antiquated to deal with the complex sex impulses of a modern woman of genius. In bringing up that phase of the situation he was once again displaying execrable taste. She had come to his study to discuss his affairs, not hers. She was her own woman, but now since the newspapers had published such full reports of his actions in court, his affairs were public property.

“A long week-end,” she heard Mr. Lamb urging. “From Friday to Monday night. How about it, Tilly?”

She turned to the door, fully intending to go through it, when Mr. Lamb’s voice recalled her.

“I have one more suggestion to make,” he said. “Suppose I should retire from business and write a book entitled ‘Wild Animals I Have Been’?”

This suggestion was sufficiently arresting to move Mrs. Lamb to change her mind and to accept the once rejected chair. Arranging herself becomingly she regarded her husband with what she fondly believed to be a disarming smile.

“Then you have been animals,” she remarked conversationally. “How interesting! Tell me all about it. I knew you were that horse of course, and I suspected you of being the bird, although I never saw it, or rather you. Were you also the kangaroo?”

“Why this sudden interest in animals?” asked Mr. Lamb. “I never noticed it before save perhaps in the worn-out dishmop you occasionally defile our presence with – that snug harbor for jaded fleas. And suppose I should admit I turned into animals and things, I dare say you’d keep my guilty secret from the entire world with the possible exception of the law courts and a select multitude of your strolling players. You’d love to see me arrested as an escaped kangaroo. Your present mood of sweet confidence – wifely interest – amuses me.”

With a burst of determination Mr. Lamb brushed the ashes off his knee, spilled some more on his vest and continued.

“Well, strange as it may seem,” he said, “I’m going to tell you right here and now to your exceedingly false face that recently I have acquired the habit of turning into animals, both wild and domestic. At this very moment I might become some extremely deadly reptile and do you in with fangs filled with horrid poison. I wouldn’t squeeze you to death because even snakes have some self-respect. Frankly I’d like to fang you. I feel like doing it, but unfortunately the choice does not lie with me. I might become a panther instead of an anteater or a rat or a butterfly – God knows what I might become.”

Lamb paused and regarded his wife darkly. She was not a thing of beauty. Terror failed to improve the arrangement of her features. Standing in the doorway she returned his gaze with eyes of glass, so fixed and polished was the expression in them.

“I’m taking the trouble to tell you all this,” Mr. Lamb went on evenly, as he followed her into the dining-room, “because I don’t give one shrill hoot in hell how you spread the news. No one would believe you anyway. You’d only be making a bigger fool of yourself than you have already, if such an enormous achievement is possible – which I very much doubt.”

Mr. Lamb was thoroughly aroused now. For so many excellent reasons he found himself weary of this woman and all her false standards of life. He was standing by the goldfish aquarium looking down absently at its four occupants, three fish and one diminutive but aged turtle.

“Doesn’t that damned old turtle ever budge himself?” his subconscious mind was asking, while quite consciously he continued deliberately on with his wife.

“And here’s another thing to worry about,” he heard himself saying. “It’s highly possible for me to return home some morning in the early hours in the guise of a famished tiger, an undernourished wolf, a man-eating shark, a wild boar, a – a—” He paused to give himself time to think of some particularly disagreeable animal. “—a crocodile,” he resumed triumphantly. “And if that frail lily of yours should chance to be in my bed I’d gnash him up like that and gladly pay for the subsequent nausea his presence in my belly would cause me. How’d you like to come vamping into my room in that decrepit way of yours to find all that remained of Mr. Gray was only a couple of corns dangling between my jaws? A pretty picture? But a possible one, and you’d be responsible for the death of the Woodbine Players’ worst actor just as sure as I’m standing here.”

The picture of Leonard Gray’s corns dangling between the dripping jaws of a crocodile proved too much for Mrs. Lamb. She turned her back upon her terrifying husband and covered her face with her hands. A sudden liquid plop startled her into reversing her position. Mr. Lamb was no longer there. Amazingly, the potential crocodile had vanished. His last words, she remembered, had been, “just as sure as I’m standing here,” but the man was not standing there, and Mrs. Lamb seriously doubted if he ever had stood there.

The confused woman was about to hurry from the room when her eyes were drawn to the aquarium where a fourth and larger goldfish was chasing the other three round the tank in frantic circles.

Recalling the liquid plop she had heard, Mrs. Lamb slowly and thoughtfully left the room. A sweet, womanly little plan was buzzing in her mind. As she prepared herself for bed she wondered idly how Lady Macbeth undressed while engaged in perfecting one of her many dirty tricks.

While this dramatic disrobing was in progress Mr. Lamb, with an exasperated nose, was busily budging the turtle over the floor of the aquarium. When the little russet man had taken a sudden fancy to change him into a goldfish there still had been a number of things on Mr. Lamb’s mind he had wanted to say to his wife. Now he was taking his irritation out on the turtle.

“Never thought of a goldfish,” Lamb said to himself. “From a crocodile to one of these made-up sardines.… What a let-down!”

He gave the turtle an especially vicious budge.

“Get a move on,” he muttered. “Shake a leg, you old scow. Show us what you look like inside. Out with your head.”

After many disturbing budges, the ancient turtle protruded his neck and, looking resentfully at Mr. Lamb, gave utterance to the equivalent of:

“What in hell, may I ask, do you think you’re trying to do with me? This is a private home. Flip on.”

“I won’t flip on,” replied Lamb. “And I’m going to budge you to my heart’s content. Are you so confounded thick-shelled you don’t know when you’re being budged?”

“I know when I’m being budged, all right,” retorted the turtle, “and I know when I’m not being budged, but what I don’t know is what purpose all this budging is going to serve. I never have dealings with goldfish. We’re not on the same level.”

“No,” replied Lamb, “you’re on the lower level.”

“Not low enough for you,” said the turtle.

“You should be delighted I even budge you,” answered Mr. Lamb.

“I’m not delighted,” said the turtle. “And I hate ostentation.”

“I’m only a goldfish pro tem,” offered Mr. Lamb. “Tomorrow I may be a zebra.”

“There’s no such thing as a zebra,” the turtle retorted. “It’s all a lie – the whole sordid story.”

This fruitless conversation did not serve to restore Mr. Lamb’s good humor. The turtle, he decided was just about as opinionated and ignorant as the seagull who had so revoltingly invited him to eat fertilizer.

“Don’t make a display of your vast ignorance,” said Mr. Lamb. “I myself have seen any number of zebras.”

“Show me only one,” challenged the turtle.

“There aren’t any zebras here,” replied Mr. Lamb.

“That proves it,” said the turtle with a nasty laugh. “That makes a liar of you. The first thing I know you’ll be trying to tell me there’s such a thing as a lion.”

“Got you!” cried Lamb exultantly. “If there aren’t any lions, how did you know their name?”

“I didn’t say I did,” replied the turtle. “Good-night. I loathe a liar.”

With this he withdrew not only his head but also his four feet.

“Budge and be damned,” came through the slit in his shell. “I’m going to sleep.”

“You’ve never been awake,” Mr. Lamb threw back, as he flipped himself to the surface of the tank.

“All goldfish are living lies,” the turtle shouted after him, popping his head from his shell. “There’s not a gram of gold in the whole silly mess of ’em. Just try to spend one, and see how much change you get back … not even a slim sardine.”

Lamb dived swiftly back and made a vicious snap at the turtle’s head, which was neatly withdrawn.

“I hope your stomach turns up before dawn,” he bubbled through his shell.

“I’d like to meet you in a plate of soup,” was the best Mr. Lamb could offer on the spur of the moment.

Still in an evil mood Mr. Lamb swaggered up to the goldfish now huddled in a corner and, singling out one of them, addressed himself to it.

“What sort of fish are you?” he demanded truculently. “Male or female?”

“Female,” snapped the goldfish, “for all the good it will do you.”

“Hold on, baby,” said Mr. Lamb. “I’m a fast and ruthless worker. No morals at all. I take my fun where I find it, and I find lots.”

“Well, don’t feel funny round here,” the other retorted. “Go somewhere else and grab off your fun.”

Mr. Lamb regarded her broodingly for a minute.

“The lot of you get out of this corner,” he said at last. “I sleep here.”

He chased the goldfish to the other end of the tank and swayed moodily off to sleep, thinking disagreeably about his wife. He strongly suspected that the good lady was planning something, that if she could only muster sufficient evidence to prove that he turned into things she would try to obtain a divorce. It would make a pretty case, one of the most unusual in the history of that splendid institution. Mr. Lamb did not object to being divorced. To him it was an end highly to be desired. But he did object to being divorced on the grounds of being a kangaroo or a horse or a seagull. That would be just a trifle too sensational for him.

His life as a goldfish was not a constant round of revelry, and he was forced to resort to various little devices to keep himself from being too oppressively bored.

His first effort in this direction was extremely elaborate and gave him no little satisfaction. He had discovered that by rubbing his nose against the side of the tank he was able to trace a clear impression which would, under favorable conditions, remain visible for a few minutes. This opened up rare possibilities. Mr. Lamb wondered why other goldfish had not hit upon the idea before. He began by tracing letters much in the manner of a sky-writer, and at last succeeded in mastering the art of writing backwards. After much practice he became highly proficient, so much so, in fact that he felt himself qualified to give a public demonstration.

One evening when Leonard Gray was dining at the house for the further development of his art, Hebe called the attention of that gentleman and her mother to the strange behavior of the new goldfish, which Mrs. Lamb for purposes of her own, claimed to have purchased.

“Why, that new goldfish is actually tracing letters on the side of the tank,” announced the acute Hebe. “Look, everybody! It seems to be trying to write something.”

Everybody looked, including Thomas and one of the maids. All eyes grew wide with surprise, some even with consternation, when they spelled out the boldly written word:

ADULTERER

It is perhaps not edifying to record that the youngest person present was the one least shocked. With amused eyes Hebe looked from one blank face to another.

“Now I wonder,” she said musingly, “just who that fish is panning. Are you by chance an adulterer, Thomas?”

Thomas looked really pleased.

“While my wife was alive, Miss Hebe,” he explained, “she was a just but exacting woman. I had neither the time nor the energy, miss.”

“I understand and sympathize, Thomas,” the girl continued. “Well, how about you, Nora?”

“Why, Miss Hebe,” Nora faltered, quite red but undismayed, “you know very well I’m not married.”

“You win on a technicality,” said Hebe. “Neither am I married, so a little possible adulteration lies for us in the future. Leonard, you don’t need to be married, so that leaves only—”

“Hebe!” cried Mrs. Lamb, her voice well out of control. “Please bring this farce to an end. Immediately!”

Mr. Lamb, seeing that his efforts had not gone unrewarded, cut jubilant capers across the surface of the tank and before the dinner was over achieved the following cryptic warning:

KEEP OUT OF MY BED

Again Hebe made sure that this feat, though clearly unappreciated by her mother and Mr. Gray, did not pass unread by them.

From this point on, conversation became a matter of eloquent silence pierced by furtive glances. It is to be doubted if either Mrs. Lamb or her leading man was aware of what they were eating. Mechanically they masticated, sedulously averting their eyes from the tank containing the loquacious goldfish.

Later that night when Sandra Rush and Melville Long dropped in, Hebe introduced them to the remarkable goldfish, who with great speed and celerity traced on the side of the tank:

JAILBIRDS

He also attempted to flip some water in Sandra’s face with his tail, but only succeeded in spotting her dress.

“It’s the attenuated one all right,” replied Sandra, “but very much compressed. I recognize his feeble sense of humor. Let’s take him out and make him gasp a bit.”

She made a snatch at the goldfish, but some clever fin work sent him to the floor of the tank where he remained craftily alert. Hebe stood considering the goldfish with an unusually serious expression. Long, taking note of this novel manifestation, asked the reason for it.

“Sapho says she bought him herself,” replied Hebe. “Wonder why she claims that?”

Sandra looked at her quickly with large, comprehending eyes.

“Perhaps she intends to do in earnest what I suggested in fun,” she said. “You’ll have to stand guard over that goldfish, Hebe. Perhaps your little russet friend didn’t foresee such a possibility as this. The attenuated one is quite defenseless now.”

Sandra, too, was a little more serious than was her wont. For a long time she stood looking down at the goldfish lurking at the bottom of the tank.

“How long do you suppose this animal stuff is going to continue?” she asked of no one in particular. “It would be nice if he remained himself for a while, so that a person could get to know him.”

The following evening Mr. Lamb arranged still another little diversion for the edification of his wife. When she put in an appearance for dinner she found him floating gruesomely with his belly prominently displayed for all the world to see. The other goldfish, huddled in a corner, seemed to be regarding the corpse with frightened eyes.

An expression of gratitude to God escaped the lips of the fish’s wife. He had spared her the annoyance of being a murderess. The happy woman raised up her voice and called for aid.

“Hebe!” she cried. “Nora! My poor goldfish is dead.”

When these witnesses had been summoned to her side Mrs. Lamb proceeded to do a thing that revolted her every instinct.

“See,” she said in a voice of anguish as she dipped her hand in the water, “the beautiful thing must have died. What a pity, and what a darling he was!”

“You’ll look swell in mourning,” observed Hebe, closely scrutinizing the goldfish. “Are you going to give it a church funeral?”

“Don’t be silly, Hebe,” she replied casting her daughter an uneasy look. “This is no time for humor.”

To hold a fish either dead or in the full flower of youth is not one of life’s most reposeful moments – not for the vast majority of normally constituted persons. Mrs. Lamb, though not normally constituted, felt far from well when she fished the slithery body of her husband from the water.

“Nora!” she cried. “Get something to put him in … the garbage can.”

“Him?” inquired Hebe mildly. “Do you know that fish’s sex?”

It was at this moment that Mr. Lamb decided it was about time to stop playing dead. He had sacrificed for his art practically all the breath he could well afford to lose. If he ever got into the garbage can he felt sure he would sacrifice his entire quota. Therefore, with an artful wriggle, he flipped himself from the delicate grasp of his wife and plopped gratefully back into the water.

When Nora returned with a coffee-strainer held diffidently in her hand she had the joy of seeing the goldfish sporting briskly about in his temporarily natural element.

Mrs. Lamb was not able to dine. She was revolted as well as disappointed. When she attempted to express her profound pleasure at the restoration of the goldfish to its former good health and spirits her voice choked with the insincerity of her emotion.

Naturally this altogether uncalled-for conduct on the part of a goldfish did not pass unnoticed by his colleagues in the tank. Their first attitude of fear passed to one of pity, for they felt that the poor fish was indeed a child of God, more than a little cracked about the gills. This attitude, however, soon gave place to one of admiration when they realized that there was a method behind the apparent madness of this resourceful companion of theirs. The lady goldfish, taking Mr. Lamb at his word, gave evidence of the sincerity of her admiration by suggesting the production of goldfish on a modest scale. Mr. Lamb toyed with the idea, but realizing he might be a bull or a zebra by the time his progeny were goldfish, the incongruity of the situation robbed it of its attractiveness.

He succeeded in teaching them to swim in formation like airplanes, putting them through loops, nose dives and tail spins. The servants could hardly be driven away from the tank so great was their interest in these aquatic displays. The climax was reached one morning when the four goldfish were discovered solemnly swimming backwards round their tank. There was no ostentation about this performance, no suggestion of a desire to please or to attract attention. It was as if overnight the fish had come to the decision that it was about time to reverse the order of things. They merely swam backwards with a naturalness that would have led one to believe that fish had always swum backwards from the infancy of Noah.

It was difficult to serve breakfast that morning through Nora’s inability to keep her attention fixed on her ordered duties. Even the impeccable Thomas seemed a trifle vague and preoccupied. Mrs. Lamb endeavored to ignore the goldfish, but Hebe’s cheers of enthusiasm made it hard to pretend that all was not as usual.

The turtle was disgusted. When Mr. Lamb with pardonable pride asked him what he thought about it he replied that it was “Silly damn rot,” and that no good came from going against the laws of nature.

With the turtle Mr. Lamb could find no point of agreement. They began to argue and bicker whenever they tried to converse. The turtle insisted on criticizing the furniture and appointments of the dining-room. He was particularly sarcastic about the design of the rug. Mr. Lamb naturally took this to heart, the dining-room being more or less his, and although he was not responsible for its arrangements he found himself defending them with the fervor of a zealot. To hear him argue with the turtle one would have thought that Mr. Lamb had personally selected each article of furniture in the room. Relations between the two were finally broken off when the turtle referred in the most disparaging language to a “long drink of water,” who used to be seen hanging about the place and whose absence he noted with gratification. Mr. Lamb, fully appreciating the fact that he himself was the long drink of water in question, cursed the turtle roundly and was in turn as roundly cursed.

The fat was in the fire when Mr. Lamb wrote one evening for the benefit of his wife the following disquieting announcement:

TODAY A FISH:
TOMORROW A SNAKE

Upon reading this warning Mrs. Lamb realized that it was high time to act. Her husband as a snake would be a far different matter from her husband as a goldfish. She nerved herself for action, endeavoring to absorb into her spirit the murky mood of Lady Macbeth on one of her bad days.

When the household was quiet that night she corded her dressing-gown round her waist and crept downstairs. For a wonder Mr. Lamb was actually asleep and balanced on an even keel in his own private corner. This time Mrs. Lamb’s hand was swift and sure. With a sharp intake of breath, she seized her unsuspecting husband and carried him to the kitchen. Here she looked desperately about for something in which to put him – not the garbage can, for his remains might be discovered there and the crime traced to her. Mrs. Lamb wanted a modest but secure sarcophagus for the body of her husband. An empty sardine tin would have done splendidly. A soda box would have been a great help at the moment. She was even considering the possibilities of squeezing him into a small bottle when Mr. Lamb made an energetic flip for liberty and life. The flip was only partially successful. It transferred him from Mrs. Lamb’s hand to Mrs. Lamb’s stomach where he continued his flipping, the cord round his wife’s waist successfully preventing further descent.

Mrs. Lamb was no fit woman. She is not to be blamed. No woman is quite at her best with a wet and determined goldfish flipping clammily against her stomach. It is to be doubted if many men would have retained the stoicism and dignity of the more insensitive male under the same circumstances.

The picture Mrs. Lamb presented was that of an utterly abandoned muscle dancer, one thoroughly interested in her profession. It was an animated picture. Nor was it unaccompanied by sound. Little ecstatic cries, sharp exclamations, gasps of vital anguish fell from the convulsive lady’s lips. They made the picture complete. At least so thought Hebe as she stood in the doorway and witnessed her mother’s contortions.

Then before the girl’s startled eyes an amazing thing took place. She saw Mrs. Lamb suddenly bulge to almost twice her size. She heard the rip of her nightdress, and before she had time to realize exactly what she was witnessing, she saw her mother flat on her back on the kitchen floor and her father, dripping wet, standing beside her. The little russet man had not deserted him. Mr. Lamb had been saved in very much less than the nick of time.

Mr. Lamb was breathing hard and apparently his wife was not breathing at all. When she did breathe it was to give utterance to a wild cry.

“Murder!” she announced. “Murder! Your father’s trying to strangle me.”

“You damn near did strangle me,” said Mr. Lamb.

He turned and grinned at his daughter.

“Hebe,” he continued, “be a good girl and mix me a stiff drink. You may have one for yourself if you feel like it. These lightning changes are not so good for the nerves.”

He extended a hand and helped his wife from the floor.

“Sorry, Sapho,” he remarked apologetically, “but I could never fit in that bottle now.”

Sapho was beyond speech.

Having failed lamentably to emulate the example of Lady Macbeth, the wife of the ex-fish felt that at least she could follow her advice. She stayed not on the order of her going, but went at once. Mr. Lamb picked up the bottle and considered it with a peculiar feeling.

“This,” he said, extending the bottle to Hebe, “was intended to be your father’s last resting place. I might have been a bottle baby, but be damned if I’ll be a bottled corpse.”

“Maybe the next time she’ll have to use a cage,” suggested Hebe.

“Perhaps,” said her father dryly, “but you can use the bottle now.”

Hebe did.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Sandy Gets Her Man

Mr. Lamb was not in the pink. He had returned from his office far from well either mentally or physically. His life as a goldfish had not improved his health. He had absorbed too much stale water and overlooped a bit. Furthermore, the requirements of constantly readjusting himself were proving altogether too exacting.

Brother Douglas, fresh from a convention of the Directors of American Youth, handed him a letter. Without comment he received it and began to read. Hebe watched her father. When he had finished the letter he swore more from amazement than anger.

“Listen to this,” he said. “It’s good.”

Then he began to read:

“I can no longer live under the same roof with a murderer. Therefore I fly. I have stood every humiliation, every form of abuse, but I do not feel called upon to sacrifice my life for a man who turns into various things at a moment’s notice. My life is in danger, therefore I fly. Do not attempt to find me. Do not attempt to follow. I fly. Pursuit is in vain. This is the end.”

A dazzled silence followed the reading of this tragic epistle. It was broken by Mr. Lamb.

“Now, who in hell,” he asked almost pleadingly, “does she expect to follow her?”

“I’m glad she remembered to send love and kisses to her unnatural daughter,” said Hebe.

Douglas got up and began to whistle, “All Alone on the Telephone.”

Mr. Lamb looked at him and grinned.

“Douglas,” he asked, “how do you manage to be such a damn fool without ever an intermission?”

Brother Dug looked back at Mr. Lamb and also grinned.

“I was merely trying to keep you from breaking down,” he replied. “When face to face with tragedy, sing, whistle or do both. Hebe, play something on the piano, and we’ll all have a bit of a song.”

Without a word Hebe went to the piano and struck a resounding chord. Had Mrs. Lamb not been so busy flying she would have had the pleasure of hearing floating through the windows of her abandoned home the words and music of the old familiar hymn, “Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow.” The voices of the three singers blended rather well, and the rendition of the hymn was marked by a certain sincerity of feeling not always to be found in church.

“Well, Douglas,” asked Mr. Lamb, when the hymn had been brought to a crashing climax, “are you going to desert us now?”

“No,” said Douglas, displaying an unexpected streak of embarrassment. “That is, not unless you want me. I’m a little too fat for flying, and I’m sure no one really wants to murder me, although once I was pretty nearly scared to death.”

When he made this reply he carefully avoided looking at Mr. Lamb.

“Such loyalty, not to mention heroism, calls for one drink at the very least,” said Hebe. “Perhaps more.”

They had more.

When dinner was served Mr. Lamb looked beamingly upon Thomas.

“Thomas,” he said, “Mrs. Lamb may not be with us for some time to come. Her presence is indefinitely postponed.”

For once Thomas was taken off his guard. With eager hands he hastened to the table and started to remove the absent lady’s plate as if to make sure of his master’s statement. His face was alight with pleasure. Mr. Lamb’s voice interrupted his activities.

“Not so ruthless, Thomas,” he admonished. “You needn’t do it now. Just remember it in the future. And Thomas,” he added, “is there any of the old stock left, the wine you drank in the days of my youth?”

“I didn’t think you remembered, sir,” replied the old man.

“Unfortunately for you I did,” said Mr. Lamb.

“There are some bottles,” said Thomas. “A few, sir.”

“One,” his master ordered.

Thomas departed under full sail. As Nora hurried past him in the pantry she felt herself unexpectedly pinched and heard him humming a song he had unearthed from some dim recess of his memory.

“I’ll get the evening out for that,” this highly competent maid confidently promised herself.

As Mr. Lamb sat at dinner his eyes kept constantly straying to the aquarium where the three goldfish he had come to know so well were drifting drowsily about as if in languid expectation of a lost leader. It gave him a feeling of satisfaction to know that his old enemy, the turtle, was once again forced to peer out at the “long drink of water” he had spoken of so disparagingly. Impulsively Lamb rose from the table and with his knife budged the old fellow across the bottom of the tank.

“How indignant he must be,” thought Mr. Lamb. “I only wish he could appreciate the full flavor of the situation.”

Then he singled out the lady goldfish and considered her for a moment.

“I might have been the father of her children,” he mused as he returned to the table. “That would have been a pretty state of affairs.”

Throughout the remainder of the dinner he could not shake off the weird knowledge that only a short time ago he had been swimming about in that tank and looking out at his wife and daughter and the ubiquitous Mr. Gray. It would be difficult, he decided, for the little russet man to provide for him a more novel experience. Lamb heartily hoped it would be the last. He was more than willing now to remain a normal human being for the rest of his life. His desire to remain himself was greatly intensified now that his wife was absent, permanently absent, he hoped. This line of thought automatically brought him round to Sandra Rush, and a dark, brooding look came into his eyes. He recalled her faraway expression when she had watched the scenery that morning on the train, and the story she had told him about the two little ponds. She was not always depraved. Sometimes she could be quite decent. Very seldom though. Mostly mad and wild and reckless.

“Too old,” he said, unconsciously speaking aloud, “Too damn old.”

“Beg your pardon, sir,” said Thomas. “Is the chicken too tough for you?”

“Chicken’s fine,” replied Mr. Lamb. “Why?”

“I thought I heard you say it was too old, sir,” said Thomas. “I felt sure it was about the suitable age, sir.”

“But I’m not, Thomas,” Mr. Lamb replied. “I’m too damn old. Don’t you think so?”

“That depends,” answered Thomas consideringly. “Too old for what, if I may ask, sir?”

“Oh, go to the devil, you fossilized lump of sin,” said Mr. Lamb. “I didn’t mean six-day bicycle racing.”

“Well you might be a few years over for that,” was the imperturbable decision of Thomas, “but you’re still good for your share of – er – sport, if I make myself clear, sir.”

“Most delicately so, Thomas,” put in Hebe. “I quite agree with you. It pleases our major to believe that he is of ancient vintage. By cultivating that frame of mind he hopes to escape adventure.”

“I’ve had adventures enough, God knows,” said Mr. Lamb.

“But not of the nature I mean,” responded his daughter. “Those still lie ahead.”

“There’s not much good in either of you,” declared Mr. Lamb, putting down his coffee cup. “You’ll excuse me now if I retire to my study. Douglas, I hope you will remain uncorrupted now that your sister is no longer here to protect you.”

“I have nothing to fear in that line,” observed Douglas. “My adventures lie neither behind me nor before. That’s one of the tragedies of a fat man.”

“He throbs out his sex in song,” said Hebe, as Mr. Lamb left the room.

Retrieving the much interrupted Kai Lung, Mr. Lamb elaborately arranged himself in his chair and prayed to God that he should be allowed to proceed at least a few pages in the book before he was transformed into another animal, bird, reptile, or fish. He had read exactly two paragraphs when the door flew open and Sandra burst into the room.

“I thought you’d be glad to see me,” she cried, standing radiantly before him.

“What led you to form that totally erroneous impression?” asked Mr. Lamb, looking at the girl over the top of his book.

“Why, Sapho’s decamped,” she went on happily. “And now everything’s going to be all right.”

“All right for what?” Mr. Lamb demanded unbendingly.

“For us,” said Sandy breathlessly. “The coast is clear.”

“It isn’t at all clear to me,” Mr. Lamb replied. “What form of depravity are you now suggesting?”

“Any and all,” said Sandra. “You’re my man now.”

In spite of himself Mr. Lamb could not repress a grin.

“Get the hell out of here,” was all he said.

“Put me out,” she challenged.

“Go on,” warned Mr. Lamb. “Get the hell out.”

“Get the hell me out if you can,” she answered.

Mr. Lamb rose slowly and stood over the girl. Quite deliberately, quite effortlessly, he picked her up in his arms and held her suspended.

“I don’t know whether to spank or to kiss you,” he remarked, looking unsmilingly down into her deep and disturbingly provocative eyes.

“I’m all set for a little of both,” said Sandy.

Lamb did the latter. He did it extremely well, so well, in fact, that Thomas, entering with a decanter of whisky, remained unnoticed in the doorway. Quietly the old fellow closed the door and seated himself on one of the dining-room chairs, a liberty he had never taken. Then he raised the decanter to his lips and drank a silent toast. Things were indeed looking up in the house of Lamb.

Somewhat subdued, Sandra and Mr. Lamb were sitting a little later on the private veranda adjoining his study.

“I hope you don’t turn into a bear,” said Sandra.

“I hope I’ve done my last turn,” said Mr. Lamb.

“So do I,” she answered. “I’d hate to lose you now.”

Mr. Lamb turned in his chair and found her eyes in the darkness.

“You’re sure you’re not kidding me?” he asked. “You know you’re such an exaggerated person. I’m never sure whether you’re making fun of me or not. You see, I’m not used to young girls. I’ve always been sort of out of it and faithful – not to her so much as to myself. This thing sort of puzzles me. I don’t see where I get off with a fine-looking girl like you. Old enough to be your father.”

There was something so utterly helpless and fumbling in this speech of Mr. Lamb’s, something so amazingly innocent and sincere that Sandra for no reason that she could fathom felt very much like crying. Dimly she sensed the repressed youth and longing behind the unappetizing years through which this long, sardonic, quietly observant man by her side had lived. While his wife had been mouthing about beauty and living quite an unbeautiful life, he had just grinned his slow, irritating grin and silently kept on wanting. And being decent and rather commonplace. Yes, Sandra was more than sure that she was not kidding. But she did not reply to his question. She did not want to hear her own voice. She merely reached out and taking his long, lean hand, held it against her breast.

Way down below them in the darkness the lights of the town lay against the other side of the valley. Even the blot contributed its share to the general illumination.

Mr. Lamb was not unhappy. Neither was the girl. Both were silent. It seemed better so.

Some hours later when Thomas was pouring Mr. Lamb his invariable nightcap, the old servant paused with the decanter half raised and regarded this man whose toys he had once mended.

“You’re fit as a fiddle, Mr. Lawrence,” he offered. “Even for bicycle racing, or I am very much mistaken, sir.”

“What leads you to believe that, Thomas?” Mr. Lamb asked suspiciously.

“General observations, sir,” said Thomas. “General observation. Nothing more, sir. Good-night.”

Leaving Mr. Lamb slightly puzzled, Thomas with an annoyingly self-satisfied expression, quietly withdrew.

“Now, I’m in a devil of a mess,” thought Mr. Lamb, as he pondered cheerfully over his glass.

Even Kai Lung lay forgotten upon his knee.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Less Than the Dust

When Mr. Lamb woke up next morning he was as sick as a dog. And he was a dog. Weakly he flopped himself out of bed and crawled across the room to his mirror. He had not the vaguest idea of what he was. He knew he was something. He knew he was not himself. He was some sort of four-footed animal with fur, and from the looks of his feet Mr. Lamb felt convinced that he could not be much of an animal.

“That looking-glass,” he thought to himself, “has reflected many weird and startling images, but this time I think it’s going to get the shock of its life. So, perhaps, am I.”

Lamb was right. The most woebegone, flop-eared, putty-footed, miscellaneous assortment of canine maladjustments leered out at him from the mirror.

On previous occasions the little russet man had always done well by Mr. Lamb. He had been the best of everything, no matter what it was. He had been an imposing stallion, a bang-up seagull, a two-fisted kangaroo, and a goldfish of note. Now, however, he was the worst dog he had ever seen, obviously the son of a mother who had possessed an unlimited capacity for experimentation, relieved by a certain jocular capriciousness.

Of this dog confronting him, Lamb recognized little of himself save perhaps a broodingly speculative cast of the eye. His ears were long, spiritless, and yellow, seemingly sewed onto his head as an afterthought. His hair grew over his black and tan body in unbecoming fits and starts, first here and then there. He was a tufted dog. His feet were large and woolly. They splayed out in front, giving him the appearance of wearing old turned-up carpet-slippers. He was a long, low, ribby dog. One side of his face was black, the other side yellow. Along his body this color scheme had been reversed. He would have made a striking model for a woman’s bathing costume, his haunches being black and yellow and his chest yellow and black. Taking him all in all he was a dog to give one pause, a dog to walk around and speculate upon, one to examine in detail at close range and then to view from afar for a full effect.

Mr. Lamb did not regard himself in this light. Sick as he felt, his heart was filled with shame. He had a desire to crawl away to some quiet place and there to make an end of it all. Life which last night had tasted so sweet now lay sour in his mouth. His long, thin, spineless tail drooped despondently on the floor.

“I can’t possibly let myself be seen in this appalling condition,” he decided, as he placed a mop of a paw against his swimming head.

When he had retired the previous evening he had known he was going to be ill, but he had not taken into consideration the fact that he was also going to be a dog – and such a dog as he had turned out to be.

Because of the absence of his wife he had allowed the door between the two rooms to remain open. With a loose, uncoördinated motion he shuffled through and by a little clever, but exhausting manipulation got himself out into the hall. Downstairs he found an open window through which he made a furtive and inglorious exit, landing with a thud on the grass. For a moment he lay there painfully recovering his breath and strength, then he shambled weakly off across the lawn, his body aching and tongue lolling out.

Hebe from her window witnessed the departure of this unfortunate-looking animal, little realizing that it was her father she saw, fleeing to escape the eyes of those who knew him.

Mr. Lamb has only the haziest memory of what occurred to him after leaving his home. Certain episodes stand out in his mind like flashes caught from a fast-fading dream.

He recalled, for instance, slinking along the shadowy side of the road until he came to a rustic bridge where two men were holding a heated debate upon religion, the day being Sunday and their flasks potent with applejack. Here in an unneeded little patch of sunlight Mr. Lamb lay down to rest and to warm himself a bit.

“Believe in your miracles if you will,” one of the religious fanatics was saying, “but as for me I think they’re a lot of apple-sauce invented by a gang of grafting old prophets who couldn’t even predict the next day’s weather.”

“Sure they could,” said the other. “Didn’t they call the turn on many a blight and famine? You should read about all the things they figgered out – floods, pestilence, the destruction of towns, battles and alarms and – and – all sorts of calamities.”

“They must have been a cheerful little bunch of predicters,” observed the unbeliever ironically. “Didn’t they ever say something pleasant?”

The other paused to consider this difficult question. It was a bit of a poser for him, yet he felt duty-bound to stand up for the prophets. Suddenly his face cleared. Light had been given him.

“Sure they did,” he answered. “Judgment Day.”

“A very pleasant day that’ll be,” said the other. “Especially for you. And if they did, it was guesswork, pure guesswork.”

He took a swig at his flask and looked triumphantly at his friend, then let his gaze drift to the dog lying huddled up in the grass and leaves.

“Well, if all them things weren’t miracles,” the defender of the faith demanded, “just what would you call a miracle?”

“This is what I’d call a miracle,” was the other man’s ready reply. “If that there mut should get up right now and, putting his nose in the center of this bridge, make a complete circle with his awful-looking body that would be some miracle.”

Sick as he was, Mr. Lamb could not resist the temptation. He got up and walked to the center of the bridge. Then placing his nose down in the dust he held it firmly in position and described a completed circle with his body. With his nose still in place he rolled up his eyes to see if he had produced the desired effect or if he should continue on. The men were stunned. They returned the dog’s inquiring gaze with eyes full of applejack, wonder, and trepidation. The unbeliever was actually frightened. He took another pull at his flask and timidly fixed his eyes on the dog. Mr. Lamb once more deliberately described a circle and sat down in the middle of it, holding up one paw as if in benediction.

“God Almighty, it’s a miracle,” breathed the unbeliever. “Do you think we should kneel down and pray?”

“Let’s get rid of these flasks,” suggested his friend. “It doesn’t look quite right.”

The two men tossed their flasks in the bushes, then looked at Mr. Lamb for some sign of approval. Mr. Lamb nodded his head three times, rose and shambled weakly down the road. The men gazed after the retreating dog until a turn in the road hid him from view. For a moment they looked silently at each other, then like the vast majority of converts, they backslid completely and, diving into the bushes, returned with their flasks, which they drained with great speed and dexterity. By nightfall they were telling their friends about a dog that sang hymns and preached sermons.

Mr. Lamb’s next memory is not so pleasant. It was night and he was standing on the lawn of a low, rambling, brightly lighted house. Shouts and laughter came through the windows. Someone was singing, or trying to sing, “Frankie and Johnny.” Behind the house was a background of high black trees. They were silent as if listening.

Lamb dragged himself to the porch and peered through the open door. He saw three women and four men sprawled about the place in attitudes of drunken abandon. One of the men was propped up in a narrow, lounge bed. Although the night was warm, a bathrobe was thrown round his shoulders. He was coughing and smoking and drinking. From time to time he would call to one of the women, apparently his wife, and ask her to replenish his glass. Apart from this tender attention the woman gave scant care to the sick man. She was completely wrapped up in a tall, languid-looking person, and she was drunk enough to show it. Her form of love-making consisted in displaying her legs and contradicting everything said by the object of her affection. Gin and whisky bottles and overturned glasses were everywhere in evidence. From time to time violent quarrels would break out between one of the couples, and then the air was filled with abuse and recrimination.

“Lower away,” called the sick man at last to his wife, pointing to her bare thighs.

“Aw, don’t be an old woman,” she answered across the room, as she lolled back on a couch with her evening’s selection. “Everybody knows I got legs. What’s wrong in taking things easy?”

Then she proceeded to tell the entire room just how jealous her husband was, and quoted some remarks he had made about one of the men present.

Mr. Lamb crept across the floor and seated himself by the sick man’s couch. The sick man reached down and fondled one of the dog’s long, aimless ears. No one else seemed to pay any attention to Mr. Lamb. They were all too busy with their own affairs. When the sick man’s eyes looked down into his, Mr. Lamb read nothing in them but drunken despair.

“This is not going to be so good,” said Mr. Lamb to himself. “This man is not only sick and drunk but also nearly out of his mind with jealousy. Can’t say that I blame him. Something is going to happen.”

For a moment he saw the dark, brooding trees waiting and listening behind the house.

Presently the sick man called to another girl. He whispered something in her ear, and she brought him a bottle of gin which he kept by his side, drinking the stuff raw from time to time. He was very drunk now, hardly able to see. Opposite him on another couch his wife was openly kissing her companion. The room had grown quiet. Some of the lights had been turned out.

In the stillness could be heard the broken voice of the sick man trying to sing a nursery song:

“‘To bed. To bed,’ said Sleepy Head.

‘Let’s tarry a while,’ said Slow.”

The song seemed plaintively incongruous in that unhealthy setting. The girl who had brought him the bottle of gin was kissing her partner and crying at the same time.

Mr. Lamb was beginning to feel decidedly uncomfortable, but some instinct kept him by the side of his companion. Coughing violently, the man reached down for the bottle, groped about until he had found it, then raised it to his lips. When he took it away the bottle was empty and the man’s face was bathed in sweat. A broken sound came from his chest.

“ ‘To bed. To bed,’ said Sleepy Head.” The voice stopped and the man slumped forward. He stopped coughing.

His wife looked at him for some minutes, then turned to her friend and nodded. They rose and quickly passed through a door leading to a dark room. Half an hour passed, and still the drunken man did not stir. One hand hung limply over the side of his couch. Mr. Lamb sniffed it and suddenly crouched back. He knew that the man was dead.

When the wife returned with her partner, her eyes dark, heavy, and drunken, his sleepily triumphant, she went over and shook her husband by the shoulders.

“Wake up, old woman!” she cried. “You’re missing all the fun.”

Mr. Lamb crouched cold with the horror of the situation.

“Why, the old woman’s dead-drunk,” his wife announced, as the dead man slid over on the couch. “Come on everybody, let’s have some fun. The killjoy’s through for the night.”

With this she took a drink of gin, and pulling up her already short skirts, threw her arms round her lover’s neck and danced madly about the room. The others followed her example.

More drinks and more dancing. A girl went over to the still figure on the couch and took its hand. She gave a start, and bent over to examine its face, feeling the cold skin with trembling fingers. Then she hurriedly called one of the men to her and together they examined the crumpled form. The man placed a hand over the stopped heart. When he rose his face was white.

“You tell her,” was all he said.

“Come here,” called the girl to the wife.

“Like hell,” she replied. “I’m comfortable here on the couch. He’ll sleep all night. Let him alone.”

She took a drink from a bottle and swayed back on the couch. She was head down in gin. The other girl approached and stood looking down at the two locked figures.

“Your husband is quite dead,” she said quietly.

“Come again,” replied the other, sitting up and holding her head in her hands. “Dead, you say?”

Then she began to laugh.

“Dead, you say? God, that’s funny! He would do a thing like that. Always spoiling a party.”

Day was breaking, and as Mr. Lamb slipped through it he kept hearing the dead man singing, “ ‘To bed. To bed,’ said Sleepy Head.”

Mr. Lamb next remembers himself lying weak from exhaustion and nausea in the sunlight before a small cottage. Through the door he could see a man and his wife facing each other across the breakfast table. A good-looking couple, but hostile. Their eyes met with studied indifference. No words were exchanged between them. When the man rose to get his hat a new expression came into the woman’s eyes as she furtively followed his movements. There was in them something soft, a sort of silent cry. Without uttering a word of farewell, the man went to the door of the cottage, then stopped when he saw the sick dog. With a low murmur of friendship he bent over Mr. Lamb and lifted the weary head. Then the man brought the dog into the cottage.

With a bitter expression about her lips, the woman stood by the stove and watched her husband patting and fondling the dog. In one hand she held a pan of hot water. When the man asked her for some hot milk she shrugged her shoulders and turned away.

“Damn you,” said the man in a low voice. “Get me some hot milk for the poor, sick creature.”

Lamb hated hot milk, but appreciated the man’s good intentions.

“Will you get that milk?” the man demanded, his voice still low and impersonal.

Suddenly the woman flared up and turned on her husband. Her face was white with something deeper than anger.

“No!” she cried, dashing the hot water over Mr. Lamb. “No! No! No!”

Mr. Lamb gave a low moan of pain, but made no move. His eyes were on the woman. She was trembling with little shudders of revulsion. He saw the man spring forward and slap the woman sharply across the face. The woman swayed slightly, then stood quite still looking straight ahead of her, the same bitter smile fixed on her lips.

Then Mr. Lamb saw the man slowly turn his back upon the woman. His head dropped, and two tears trickled down his cheeks. His hands were clenched by his sides. Gradually the bitter smile melted from the woman’s lips and in its place came a certain tenderness.

“Come here,” she said at last, holding out her arms to the man. “Come here, come here to me.”

And the man went to his wife’s arms. She held him fiercely, and Lamb beheld her face with pleasure. A pretty woman she was, he thought, and well set up. Just a trifle too impulsive.

He stayed only long enough to show that there was no hard feeling, then quietly slipped away, leaving the man and his wife with their tongues at last unloosed. Once more he took to the road, feeling somewhat Boy Scoutish, having just performed his daily good deed.

Exactly when it was Lamb never rightly remembered. All he can recall is seeing a large, handsome hall with the open doors of a library at one end. He also recalls a wide stairway mounting up majestically to a balcony. A fine, lean, white-haired old gentleman was having a row with an equally fine and lean-looking son. Both were saying things they would regret the moment they were uttered.

“Your political ideas, like all your ideas, are fallacious right through,” the old man said. “Those radical friends you are now cultivating should be taken out and shot. Yes, sir! Shoot ’em down. They’re Reds … the scum. And furthermore they are not welcome here. I forbid them the house.”

“So I can’t bring my friends into my own home,” replied the young man, rising excitedly and facing his father. “Then it isn’t a home of mine. I forbid myself the house where my friends are not welcome.”

The old gentleman stiffened. There was a cold smile on his lips.

“Forbid and be damned,” he said distinctly. “Go live with the friends of your choice.”

Without another word the young man raced up the stairs. Mr. Lamb remembers watching from his place of concealment the old gentleman’s eyes as his son rushed away. They were filled with anxiety and loneliness now that the mask of pride had been momentarily dropped. He paced up and down the heavy carpet, opening and closing his hands helplessly. Now he looked old indeed to Mr. Lamb – old and somewhat smaller.

In a short time the boy returned with two suitcases, and once more the old gentleman stiffened, forcing the years and the loneliness back by an effort of his stubborn old will, his pride of race and breeding, his belief in lost traditions.

“You will not be inconvenienced any more,” said the young man. “Goodbye, sir.”

“Your consideration is appreciated,” replied his father. “Goodbye.”

The young man looked back once, hesitated, but seeing his father standing with his back to him, he turned away and disappeared through a door in the hall. The moment the door closed the old gentleman altered his rodlike attitude and stood as if listening. Presently he heard the hum of a motor, and something like a sigh escaped his lips. He fumbled in a cigar box and automatically selected a breva, then he sank to a chair and looked dully at the unlighted cigar.

It was at this point that Mr. Lamb slipped out of his corner and lurched to the gravel driveway. He did not know what he was going to do, but he fully intended to do something. This silly impasse between the old fool and the young fool must be broken. He saw the glare of the headlights sweeping round the curve from behind the house, and he began to bark and howl the best he knew how. Dragging himself to the middle of the driveway, he pranced on his hind legs and waved his foolish-looking paws commandingly.

Too late. The lights swerved sharply. Mr. Lamb felt himself smashed and hurtled through the night. Then he heard the crash of the automobile as it collided with one of the trees on the lawn. Still Mr. Lamb retained consciousness.

He saw the old gentleman, followed by several servants, hurrying down the driveway.

“My boy,” the old gentleman called through the darkness. “Are you hurt?”

“It’s all right, dad,” came the relieving response. “I’m looking for a poor mut I hit. Bear a hand and help me find him.”

“It’s a wonder your damn fool neck isn’t broken,” said the old gentleman, coming to the flood of the lights.

He put his arm round his son’s shoulder.

“Sure?” he asked.

“Sure, sir,” said his son. “But the mut is, I’m afraid. Odd acting dog. He seemed to be deliberately trying to stop the car.”

“A good sort,” said the old gentleman. “Hope we can patch him up.”

With the aid of a flashlight, Mr. Lamb was eventually plucked from a bush. The old gentleman himself carried him into the house. A man was dispatched in another car for a doctor. Just before Mr. Lamb lost control of the situation, he had the pleasure of seeing two suitcases being carried up the broad stairs. Then Lamb for the nonce let the world go hang. It was too full of trouble for him. He could not be expected to arrange and settle everything.

When he once more favored the world with his presence, Mr. Lamb found himself on the clean, warm earth. He was in a sort of wired runway at the end of which was something that appeared to be a dog-house de luxe. A soft pillow was beneath his head, and a broken bandage trailed from his left foot. But what was more disconcerting still was the large, red face of a man in proximity to his.

“What did you want to get in here for?” the face inquired reproachfully.

Mr. Lamb looked down at himself and realized with a start that he was no longer a dog. Once more he was Mr. T. Lawrence Lamb, a conservative investment banker in an extremely embarrassing position.

“I didn’t want to get in here,” was all he could think of replying. “Where in the deuce am I?”

“You’re in one of the finest dog hospitals in the country,” replied the face with pardonable pride. “One of the smartest and the swellest.”

“That,” said Mr. Lamb, “might make a profound impression on a dog, but it leaves me quite unelated. I don’t want to be in a dog hospital no matter how swagger it may be.”

“Then why did you get up out of bed and deliberately sneak over the wire in your pajamas?” asked the face.

It was true. Mr. Lamb was clad only in his sleeping togs. He had to admit that undeniable fact. But he very much disliked to be lying down on the flat of his back and talking up to that red face suspended above him like the sun.

“Listen,” said Mr. Lamb, after a moment of swift considering. “If you’ll only remove that face of yours I’ll try to get up and talk to you on my feet.”

The face was slowly and reluctantly withdrawn, and Mr. Lamb felt less like a bug under microscopic examination.

“Well?” said the wearer of the face, when Mr. Lamb stood confronting him.

“Ah yes,” replied Mr. Lamb easily. “I was thrown in here.”

The man looked more hurt than surprised.

“Come again,” he remarked brutally.

“Very well,” said Mr. Lamb. “I’m a somnambulist.”

“That kind of talk ain’t going to get you anywhere,” replied the man.

“I’m a sleep-walker,” explained Mr. Lamb.

“You’re a damn poor liar,” said the man.

“I’m doing the best I can,” said Mr. Lamb. “Help me out, won’t you?”

“What did you do with the dog?” the man demanded inflexibly.

“The dog must have gone out as I came in,” said Mr. Lamb. “I never saw a dog. I was sound asleep.”

“And snoring,” supplied the man with heavy sarcasm.

“Now you’re kidding me,” said Mr. Lamb. “I’m serious.”

“I know,” replied the man. “That’s what makes it so funny.”

He looked up and down the runway.

“Well, the mut’s gone,” he remarked, “and it’s good riddance of bad rubbish. Never had such a clown in our kennels before. It mortified me to have to look after him, he was that low-blooded. Some rich gentleman sent him to us.”

Mr. Lamb had heard quite enough about the dog. He looked at himself in perplexity, then turned once more to the man.

“Listen here,” he said, “we’re getting nowhere this way. Lend me an overcoat and get me a taxi, and I’ll write you a letter all about it … and the letter will have something in it much more interesting than news. Get me?”

The man got him. Also he got him an overcoat, something in the line of slippers, and a taxicab.

And, with the help of these, Mr. Lamb got home … gratefully, wearily and with the utmost discretion.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

In Sandra’s Bed

“Been out for a bit of a walk,” Mr. Lamb whispered, suddenly meeting Thomas face to face as he, Lamb, was tiptoeing through the hall. “A bright, fresh morning.”

“It is, sir,” replied Thomas blandly. “Just come back from a nice, long swim myself.”

Mr. Lamb appeared not to have caught this surprising announcement of the old servant. He was about to hurry to his room when he suddenly remembered something.

“By the way,” he called back. “There’s a taxi man outside. Slip him a good tip. I got tired, and he brought me home.”

Thomas, making some innocent observation about the convenience of finding taxicabs in the early morning on deserted country roads, departed on his mission, and Mr. Lamb sought the seclusion of his room. Here he bathed, shaved, and dressed, and once more faced the world as a respectable member of society. Then he sat down and thought.

His experiences as a dog had given him enough to think about. He had never realized before that so many melodramas were taking place about him – so many tragic, stupid, and sordid ones, so many touchingly human. During the time that had elapsed since he had been a terribly sick dog Lamb had unconsciously grown. Always tolerant, his tolerance now was vouchsafed a deeper understanding. He could not keep himself from wondering how that drunken girl had felt when she finally came to her senses and fully appreciated all that had happened. Would her open betrayal and the death of her husband trouble her mind greatly? Mr. Lamb doubted it. She would probably get drunk again and continue on with her furtively vicious life. He wondered, too, how such women acted when they grew old, what memories they dodged, what thoughts haunted the shallow reaches of their brains. Her husband could hardly have been an admirable person, yet for some reason Lamb had taken rather a fancy to the chap, drunk as he had been. Boredom and bad gin were responsible for so much.

Mr. Lamb looked at his calendar and found that he had been a dog for little more than a week. Where he had lain and strayed during that time, how long he had remained at the kennels under the care of the moon-faced man, he had not the remotest idea. He went to his desk and wrote a letter to this individual. This letter bore no signature, but contained a ten-dollar bill. When Thomas entered with a pot of coffee and some eggs and toast, Mr. Lamb gave him the letter and, indicating the overcoat and slippers, told him what to do with them. Thomas needed no instructions having had a brief but illuminating conversation with the taxi-driver.

Although the thought of the office was distasteful to him, Lamb went in by a late train. He would have liked to have seen his daughter, but learned that she had spent the night with Miss Rush, the house being rather lonesome on account of the absence of her father.

He found that his office was still doing business, although much remained to be done. This he proceeded to do as well as he could during the hours at his disposal, then, after reassuring Billings as to the state of his health and mind, Mr. Lamb hurried home. The sanity of the office had helped somewhat to restore his mental balance and to dispel the morbid speculations that were disturbing him. The nursery song of the dying man kept floating across his thoughts. Lamb could not fight down the growing impression that he was a man apart, that somehow the lines of communication between himself and the rest of the world had been severed, perhaps for all time. He was seriously worried now by the situation in which he found himself. If the little russet man set his mind on it, he could take him clean through the animal kingdom, not to mention birds, fish, and reptiles – insects even. Mr. Lamb was appalled by the thought. Any sort of arrangement with Sandra was entirely out of the question so long as he kept on changing. Even Hebe would eventually grow tired of a father who possessed within him the makings of a complete jungle.

It was in no cheerful frame of mind that Mr. Lamb sat down to dinner that night. Nor was his hilarity heightened by what Hebe had to report.

It seemed that during his absence Mrs. Lamb had returned to the house, packed most of her possessions and, with the aid of two taxicabs, departed mysteriously to parts unknown. She had been accompanied by her maid. This news was not in itself disagreeable to Mr. Lamb, but what went with it was not so reassuring. Hebe gave her father to understand that in the course of a little chat with her mother the good lady had shown she possessed some very accurate knowledge of the recent activities of her husband. It appeared that she was quietly collecting stray but alarming scraps of evidence as well as interviewing certain parties. Just how she intended to use this evidence and what her ultimate intentions were Hebe was unable to say. However, it was agreed between father and daughter that Sapho’s intentions so far as they were concerned could hardly be of a rosy hue.

“Would you object very much to being divorced?” asked Hebe.

“No,” answered Mr. Lamb readily enough, “but I would object very much to being displayed. I have no desire to furnish material for the Sunday supplements and medical journals. Nor do I want to be interviewed by reporters on how it feels to be a goldfish or a kangaroo’s opinion of New York’s night clubs. Your mother, my child, is not only after her freedom, but also her revenge. You see, Hebe, we’ve really kidded her unmercifully even though she did try to cram me into a bottle. Have you no sympathy at all for her? My indifference is of course natural, but you’re a sort of blood relation. I don’t quite understand—”

“Mother never had much time for me,” Hebe broke in upon her father. “That’s one of the reasons I’m such a hard-boiled egg. When I was a kid I thought I was fond of her, tried to make myself believe I had a regular mother, but that hopeful phase didn’t last long. Sapho didn’t really ever care except in front of company. Then another thing, major: I’m in the way of being a woman creature and I get some purely feminine slants on the workings of her mind. She’s her own woman, major, first, last and all time. If she can’t be the bell cow she’s not going to trail along. That’s all there is to it. When I think of that worm Leonard Gray, I can find no sympathy in my system for Sapho. She isn’t breaking her heart about us and hasn’t been for years. The thing that surprises me is that she ever let me be born. I know for a fact that since I’ve been a so-called young lady, she’s resented my existence. Sapho brooks no competition. She wants no reminder of the advancing years. Hope you don’t mind me speaking like this of my own mother, but I’ve known for some time past I should give tongue. One can’t be loyal to two warring factions without getting shot full of emotional holes. When you happen to be with us I prefer to be loyal to you.”

It was a tremendous speech for Hebe. Her father gazed at the girl in surprise. He had never before heard her speak so earnestly or at such length. She was indeed a young lady with a head as level as her tongue was light.

“Well,” he said, rising from the table and stretching his long arms, “I do wish things would settle down a bit – myself especially. Ever since we gave that little old chap a lift my life has been just one long atavistic orgy.”

That evening he was given ample opportunity to peruse his book without interruption. As a matter of fact he had a little more privacy than he needed. For an hour or so he waited impatiently in his study for Sandra to put in an appearance, then abandoning hope he turned to his book and soon became absorbed. About midnight Thomas came in to arrange a drink for his master and to see if he wanted anything. It was a ceremony with Thomas, one he loved to perform, and Mr. Lamb, realizing this, permitted his old friend to go through with it.

“You’re feeling quite yourself, sir?” inquired Thomas as he was about to withdraw.

“Yes,” answered Mr. Lamb dryly. “For a change.”

“Glad to hear it, sir,” said Thomas. “Good-night.”

“Good-night,” replied Mr. Lamb. “And, Thomas, don’t forget to leave a window open in the library. This house needs a little downstairs ventilation.”

Thomas understood. Ever since these strange disappearances of Mr. Lamb the old man had been taking this precaution. It had been Hebe who had first suggested the idea to him.

After Thomas had quietly closed the door Mr. Lamb returned to his book and his drink. Presently his head began to grow heavy, and at last he fell asleep.

Some hours later he awoke with the impression that all was not as it should be. His drowsy eyes focused themselves on a long tail conscientiously striped with gray and black bands.

“Either that tail belongs to me,” he thought dreamily, “or else a cat is sitting on my lap.”

After some minutes of gloomy speculation he worked up enough enterprise to settle the question. If the tail moved when he bade it move then the tail belonged to him, or rather he belonged to the tail; and if he belonged to the tail, then it followed that he was a cat. He thought the tail into action, and it moved with graceful majesty. “It’s mine,” he said to himself regretfully. “I’m it again.”

He remained as he was in the chair, all curled up and considering. If he were half as fearful a cat as he had been a dog, he decided he would remain in that chair without budging until the little russet man, in the fulness of time, saw fit to turn him into something else. He held out one paw and studied it critically. It was a sizable, efficient-looking paw and appeared to be well equipped with claws especially designed for back-yard combats. So far so good, he decided. Then he turned his attention to his tail. The tail, too, was not to be despised. It was a long, lashable tail, sleek and artistically groomed. Mr. Lamb took heart. Nevertheless he was loath to take a full view of himself in the mirror. The last shock had been too great. He dared not run the risk of another. Then his eyes fell on the decanter.

Now, it is a strange example of perverseness that, as a man, Mr. Lamb drank consistently but, except on rare occasions, always with moderation, whereas, whenever he became an animal, his first desire was to get himself well-potted and to go about in search of trouble. Only extreme nausea had prevented him from being a drunken, roistering dog, ill-favored by nature and disorderly through inclination. He now began to scheme and plan how he could best extract a drink from the decanter. It would require no little doing – that he fully realized – but the difficulty of the undertaking made him concentrate upon its accomplishment the more earnestly.

Finally he rose and, taking his empty glass from the table with his two paws, he managed to place it on the arm of his chair which was next to the table and a little below its level. Then he inserted a paw into the mouth of the decanter and dragged it to the desired position. Judging the distance to a nicety, Lamb slowly tilted the decanter until a satisfactory stream curved out and fell into the glass. It was a neat, clean-cut achievement, and Mr. Lamb could not refrain from admiring his own dexterity.

“Gad!” he exclaimed to himself. “Didn’t even spill a drop. Not one. I really deserve this drink.”

Whether he deserved the drink or not he proceeded to take it with avidity, lapping up the fiery liquor with a long, red, ladle-shaped tongue.

“I would have saved you the trouble, major,” came a level voice from the doorway.

Mr. Lamb interrupted his lapping just long enough to nod busily at his daughter, then continued to polish off his drink to the limit of his tongue’s effectiveness, after which he sat down in his chair and turned two glittering eyes on Hebe. The girl came into the room and closed the door.

“I discovered you weren’t in your bed,” she remarked, “so I naturally suspected the worst. Well, you’re not a bad-looking cat,” she went on. “As a matter of fact you’re about the swellest thing in the line of a cat I’ve ever seen – and one of the largest.”

This gave Mr. Lamb an idea. He had long entertained a grudge against the unmannerly back-yard despot that had attempted to make the bowl of puffed rice his own, when Lamb had been a seagull. He would settle this grudge without further procrastination. It should be done.

Leaping from his chair he raced to the open window in the library and literally hurled himself into the darkness. The huge drink of whisky he had consumed was hot in his veins. He was ready and willing to do battle to any gang of cats in the town. Within a very few minutes Hebe’s ears were pierced by the most blood-curdling assortment of feline imprecations and screams of anguish she had ever had the misfortune to hear. Shortly after this outbreak Mr. Lamb, redolent with whisky and with every hair in place, swaggered into the room and resumed his seat with a triumphant flourish of his long, sweeping tail. He looked significantly from his glass to the decanter, then fixed his eyes on Hebe.

“A cup of warm milk would do you a lot more good,” his daughter told him.

Mr. Lamb shrank back in his chair and shivered. At the moment he thought it was the worst suggestion he had ever heard. Hebe laughed in spite of herself, so eloquent was her father’s disgust. She went to the pantry and returned with a bowl into which she poured a drink appropriate to an occasion of victory.

“Not so loud, major, not so loud,” admonished Hebe, as Mr. Lamb once more began his fast and furious lapping. “See if you can’t run through the gears without grating.”

Mr. Lamb paused a moment to get his breath, looked at his daughter with owlish eyes, then again fell to and did not raise his head until the bowl was dry. Then he staggered into the dining-room and thrusting his face close against the side of the goldfish aquarium, glared in at the turtle. It was an edifying example of drunken futility. The turtle was fast asleep, consequently entirely indifferent to this display of frightfulness. Even had the old fellow been up and stirring he probably would have mistaken Mr. Lamb’s terrible face for some new kind of rug or dining-room decoration. Apparently maddened beyond endurance by his recent enemy’s unresponsiveness, Mr. Lamb thrust a paw into the tank and roughly mauled the turtle about. Consternation broke out among the goldfish. They darted through the water in wild confusion. This gave Mr. Lamb some slight satisfaction. He would have continued to torment the poor creatures until they were utterly exhausted had not Hebe lured him away with the promise of a drink.

“The mistake you’re making,” she told him as he was rapidly tucking his grog away, “is that you’re trying to drink like a horse when you’ve only the capacity of a cat.”

Mr. Lamb elevated one side of his dripping mouth and mewed scornfully. This, however, was his last demonstration of defiance. When he attempted to mount the stairs he fell asleep on the fifth step, but when Hebe tried to carry him to his room he kicked and wriggled so indignantly that she was forced to put him down. Laboriously, yet with a certain dignity, Mr. Lamb navigated the stairs under his own steam, his daughter helping him occasionally to regain his balance. At the door of his room he paused and leaning against the jamb, nodded gravely at Hebe in token of dismissal. The girl nodded back as gravely, and thus father and daughter parted for the night.

Mr. Lamb achieved the summit of his bed in four desperate leaps, the first three landing him all sprawled out on the floor, but once in bed he was there for good. When Hebe came in to turn out the light he was snoring gently on his pillow.

The next morning he appeared at breakfast with a slight hangover. Either forgetting he was a cat or not caring whether he was a cat or not, he took his place at the head of the table and looked with favor upon his daughter.

“You’re not a very respectable cat,” she observed, returning his look rebukingly, “even if you are my father.”

For answer he opened his mouth to its fullest extent and protruded his long red tongue, curling the tip ever so slightly, then making it quiver like a leaf. It was a remarkable, but not picturesque spectacle, and Thomas, coming into the dining-room, bent almost double the better to view it.

After breakfast Mr. Lamb was seen dragging the morning paper across the floor to his study where he remained all day alternately reading and sleeping. While he was engaged in the latter Hebe quietly entered and removed the decanter.

“I’ll not have a drunken cat raising hell all over the place,” she said to herself. “He might get himself all banged up.”

At nightfall Mr. Lamb, having wheedled a drink from a not unsympathetic Hebe, made his escape from the house and betook himself to town. The first person who attracted his attention was Simonds, walking peacefully down the street with his family. Once more the imp of malice ignited Mr. Lamb’s imagination. Suppose he should startle Simonds. The idea was no sooner conceived than it was put into execution. Getting a flying start he raced after the unsuspecting Simonds and, leaving the ground with a wild shriek, landed heavily between the man’s shoulders, clawing and nuzzling him harmlessly but frantically. The Simondses parted in disorder like pool balls on a table. The purveyor of choice lots pitched headlong to the pavement where he remained in a half-swoon. By the time the crowd had collected Mr. Lamb was well out of it all and gliding snakishly along in the direction of Sandra’s dwelling. On the way he encountered a large dog whose heart and soul were wrapped up in the business of regaining some much needed sleep. Mr. Lamb approached the dog and deliberately cuffed him on the side of the head.

Now this was where Mr. Lamb made an error of judgment if not of good taste, for this dog, this slumbering brute of a beast, made a business of cats. He specialized in their destruction. In his dreams he slew cats. In his waking hours he lived his dreams. But Mr. Lamb was ignorant of all this. He desired to put to the test the theory of the nine lives. His curiosity was well rewarded. No sooner was the cuff received than the dog automatically lunged at Mr. Lamb. His movements were swift and sure, his technique flawless. Lamb was smothered beneath the weight of the mighty dog. The world seemed to have turned into a pair of flashing teeth and snapping jaws.

“This,” thought Lamb to himself as he crawled between the dog’s hind legs, “is decidedly no go. What a mad dog this one turned out to be.”

To make matters worse the dog was not without his followers, and these followers now followed Lamb as he sped along the street.

“Nine lives would not be quite enough,” he decided, glancing back over his shoulder at the baying rabble at his tail’s end. “I’d be four lives short in the jaws of that mob.”

It was no laughing matter now. Mr. Lamb was winded and rapidly losing ground. One of the dogs caught up with him and bowled him over. The pack came thundering down, but Lamb with a desperate wriggle managed to shake off the dog and make a little headway.

From her lawn Sandra was watching with indignation the uneven pursuit of the cat, not knowing it was Mr. Lamb whose life was in peril. She only realized that some poor cat was being unfairly attacked, and her eyes grew bright with anger.

The dogs were upon him now and Lamb, fighting gamely, was borne down beneath their numbers. Then he heard a voice calling and he recognized the voice. Sandra had waded into the seething mass of dogs and was trying to extricate the cat. With his last ounce of energy Mr. Lamb eluded a large red mouth, jumped free from the pack and sprang into the girl’s outstretched arms, where he lay panting and completely through. For a few minutes the dogs swirled dangerously round the girl, then gradually and cursingly withdrew before the commanding light in her eyes.

Holding Mr. Lamb close against her breast, she took him to her room and placed him gently on her bed. Later she brought him a bowl of milk which he drank gratefully. After this she undressed and went to bed, the cat being already asleep.

When she awoke a man was lying in bed with her. The man was Mr. Lamb. This was better than a perfect stranger, but still it was not so good. She saw with relief that he was fully dressed, but quite rumpled. She also realized that as far as clothing was concerned, he had the decided advantage of her. Sandra’s sleeping arrangements were always of a sketchily attractive nature. She smiled to herself as a thought tickled her mind.

“Well, here I am at last in bed with the man I love,” she mused to herself.

Mr. Lamb opened his eyes and looked at her resentfully.

“Whom are you laughing at?” he demanded.

“Oh, nothing,” said Sandra. “But the situation, even you must realize, is highly compromising.”

Mr. Lamb was about to drift back to sleep without deigning to reply when she dug him in the ribs.

“Don’t do that,” she said. “You can’t sleep here.”

Mr. Lamb gave a startled grunt and again eyed her disapprovingly.

“Get out of this bed,” said Sandy.

“Why don’t you get out?” Mr. Lamb protested. “I don’t have to go to work.”

“I can’t get out,” replied Sandy.

“Don’t be silly,” said Lamb. “I’ve seen you in less than nothing before.”

“That was in my professional capacity,” she explained. “This is entirely different.”

“Much better,” said Mr. Lamb, “so far as I’m concerned.”

“And all this time,” the girl replied, “someone is probably listening at the door. Mrs. Cummings doesn’t object to Hebe sleeping with me, but I doubt if she’d carry her tolerance to the point of granting you the same privilege. She saw me going to bed last night with a cat in my arms. If she saw me going to bed this morning with a man occupying the same relative position, things would be hard to explain. Her mind is not oriental enough to understand.”

“Listen,” said Mr. Lamb, as his mind reverted to the events of the previous night. “You damn well saved my life.”

“And for thanks you crawl into bed with me and compromise practically all that remains of my rep,” she replied.

“You deliberately put me in your bed,” he retorted.

“But I little realized you were a lamb in cat’s clothing,” the girl replied.

“Neat but not altogether new,” said Lamb. “Slip me a little good-morning kiss and I’ll try to get the hell out of here.”

“You’re forever getting somebody the hell out of somewhere,” replied Sandy, throwing two lovely arms round his neck and kissing him in no undecided manner.

“Now get out,” she murmured, pushing him from her. “Go and get yourself to hell out of here.”

“We’ll call this a trial trip,” said Mr. Lamb as he eased himself out of bed.

“Pig,” said Sandy with glowing eyes.

“Don’t call me that,” replied Lamb pleadingly. “I might be one at any minute for all I know.”

“You’ll have to stop being things,” said Sandra, “before we can come to terms.”

“I know,” replied Mr. Lamb, “and I’m praying to God I do.”

He went to the window and peered cautiously through one side of the curtain. A long shed roof sloped down almost to the side of the adjoining yard. If he could cross this roof unobserved he might be able to jump into neutral territory. It seemed about the only thing to do.

“I’ll have to try it,” he said to Sandra. “Are there many people in the back of this house?”

“Only about six or seven possible pairs of eyes, but they should all be fixed on their plates at this hour,” she answered easily.

If the truth must be told Sandra did not in the least object to being compromised officially. She was out to get her attenuated Lamb and the sooner she got him divorced the happier she would be. She was abandoned enough to hope that he would be seen when he made his escape from the house.

Mr. Lamb raised the window to its limit and thrust out an inquiring head.

“Hasn’t something slipped your memory?” asked the girl in bed.

Lamb came swiftly across the room and gathering Sandra’s yielding body in his arms held her against him for a moment, then dropping her suddenly as if she had been an old sack, he slid his long form through the window. At the edge of the roof he gathered himself together and sprang into the air, landing neatly in the next yard right beside a lady engaged in cutting flowers. Luckily the lady’s back had been turned when he had made his desperate leap so that she did not have a chance to see his point of departure from the roof.

“Gur-r-r,” said the woman, unable to think of anything else to say as she turned round abruptly. “O-o-o-oh, where did you come from?”

“I was just admiring your roses,” replied Lamb with his most charming smile.

This remark did much to restore the lady to her usual state of assured rectitude.

“They’re not roses?” she said. “They’re sweet peas.”

“My mistake, madam,” apologized Mr. Lamb. “You see I’m rather near-sighted.”

The lady regarded Mr. Lamb’s eyes for a moment as if they were things of glass. Her expression was entirely unsympathetic.

“Well,” she remarked at length, “the next time you want to admire my sweet peas, which you don’t seem to be able to tell from roses, don’t come creeping up behind me like a thief in the night. You’d get just as much fun staying at home admiring an onion, or a cabbage – it’s larger.”

Thereupon she walked jaggily off down her garden path, and Mr. Lamb, feeling remarkably well in spite of his strenuous encounter with the dogs, returned to his home.

“I always suspected,” he observed to himself, “that an investment banker and a second-story man had a great deal in common.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The World’s Worst Bootlegger

Melville Long was ready to prove himself at last. He was now the proud possessor of much bad whisky and gin. A man in the blot was responsible for its quality. In spite of this damning fact the man continued to enjoy deep and unbroken slumber. Already Mr. Long rejoiced in three customers. His heart was hopeful, and Hebe’s was in very much the same condition. But Hebe did not know all of her Melville. She had an inkling, but no real knowledge of the profundity of that engaging youth’s ignorance of worldly affairs. Everything was set for the initial delivery.

Melville Long had selected his list of prospective customers more or less at random. He prepared it sketchily, according to the appearance of the homes he chanced to pass in his rather purposeless rambles. One house had especially impressed him, and into this house he had insinuated his ingratiating presence. That this house was the residence of Mr. Brickett, the most important bootlegger within a radius of twenty miles, was unknown to Mr. Long.

Mr. Brickett received his caller with his usual urbanity, believing him to be a new customer. His shock was therefore the greater when Mr. Long offered to sell him an unlimited supply of gin and whisky at a price well below Mr. Brickett’s minimum.

Beneath this blow the bootlegger rallied gamely and lent an interested ear to his young competitor’s plans. It seemed, according to Mr. Long, that all the bootleggers in the neighborhood were slow and inordinately expensive poisoners. He, Melville Long, was going to put an end to all that. From now on, all other bootleggers would have to reckon with him. He had no doubt that within a month or so they would either move away or give up the game. Now, all of this interested Mr. Brickett a great deal more than Melville Long realized. And the fateful part of the interview was that both of them placed a certain amount of credence in the words of Mr. Long. In this smooth, well-turned-out young gentleman Mr. Brickett saw the potentialities of a dangerous if not successful rival. In himself Mr. Long saw the possible solution of the liquor question, and the longer he listened to himself talk the clearer and closer grew the solution.

The interview ended on a note of mutual confidence and respect, Mr. Brickett requesting Mr. Long to deliver two cases of gin and one of whisky on the evening now at hand. Upon the departure of the budding young bootlegger, Mr. Brickett got in touch with numerous minions of the law who had reason to love him well, and with these same minions arranged a little surprise party for Mr. Long on the evening of his virgin delivery.

It was to this party that Mr. Lamb in a state of blessed ignorance was being driven. He had been told by Hebe that it was to be a mere pleasure trip, a short spin in the cool of the evening. She wanted her father along to lend an atmosphere of eminent respectability to a rather dubious enterprise. And because she wanted to do well by her father she dropped by and picked up Sandra. Thus they sped with high hopes and hearts aglow to the scene of the treacherous ambush. Mr. Lamb afterwards remarked that the spot should be marked by a double cross.

The car drew up before the residence of Mr. Brickett, and on some flimsy pretext Melville Long, who had been driving, made it known that he had to see a man for a minute. He hurried into the house and was affectionately greeted by the double-dealing Mr. Brickett. If Mr. Long would unload the cases, Mr. Brickett would send some servants to carry them into the house. Mr. Long then returned to the automobile and much to Mr. Lamb’s surprise extracted a box from the trunk on the rear of the car. Mr. Brickett’s servants, it turned out, wore the livery of the police department, and when Mr. Long hurried forward with the box in his arms he found himself on the point of entrusting its safety to one of these gentlemen.

It can be said for Mr. Long that when light dawned in his mind it dawned with sudden clearness. In a blinding flash he saw and comprehended the situation. With a cry of warning he flung the box into Mr. Lamb’s lap – that startled gentleman receiving it with a grunt of pain – and swinging himself to the running-board urged Hebe to take the wheel and to drive practically anywhere at the highest attainable speed. The officer of the law dashed forward to lay hands on Melville Long only to be met with that agile youth’s foot in the pit of his undefended stomach. As several other officers rushed for the car Hebe got it started and swiftly under way. The chug of a motorcycle apprised them of the fact that they were not to be unaccompanied.

Mr. Lamb removed the box from his lap and carefully placed it on the floor of the speeding car. Then he turned questioning eyes on Sandra.

“Is this to be our habitual method of progress?” he inquired. “Because if it is I’d prefer to alight and to let the merry whirl continue without my superfluous presence.”

“Would you leave me here all alone?” demanded Sandra.

“Without a moment’s hesitation if you were mad enough to remain,” Mr. Lamb replied. “Of course, I would much prefer your company.”

By this time Melville had climbed into the back of the car and was about to join the busily occupied Hebe in the front seat.

“Melville, my boy,” asked Mr. Lamb, “may I ask what is in this box that made that officer so angry?”

“It’s just his way,” muttered Long, struggling forward to hide his confusion. “They’re all that way, Mr. Lamb. Don’t mind them.”

“I wouldn’t mind them in the least,” Mr. Lamb replied, “if they didn’t display such feverish interest in us.”

By this time the telephone in Mr. Brickett’s home had been pressed into active service. The key points throughout the country and the state were warned to be on the lookout for Mr. Lamb’s automobile, the license number of which was given with a businesslike description of the automobile itself and its occupants.

Hebe had wheeled into a rough dirt road, and for a few minutes they thought they had lost the motorcycle policeman, but as she stopped the car to enable Long to change places with her they heard a faint but persistent throbbing behind them. Looking back they made out the motorcycle and its implacable rider bounding along in the distance. Both were having rough going of it.

Then began a grim chase which Mr. Lamb to this day views with alarm and disapproval. On the rutted dirt road they more than held their own with the motorcycle, but when this road abruptly deposited them on a main thoroughfare, the persevering policeman began to gain. And when the road eventually placed them in the dead center of a thriving village they were indeed in great trouble, because it was here that two state troopers, also equipped with motorcycles, joined the chase. These alert and determined gentlemen were of a different caliber from that of the flying motor’s former nemesis. They believed in producing revolvers and pointing them at things. The sound of shooting brought joy to their hearts, and they now began to enjoy themselves to their hearts’ content. As the automobile hurriedly cleared the town they yanked out their gats and gave the party ahead what is sometimes known as what for, or a piece of their collective minds. The revolvers spoke eloquently in Mr. Lamb’s ears. He heard the whistle of bullets going by at full speed and he knew that those self-same bullets were busily looking for them. This knowledge brought him scant satisfaction.

“Our two new escorts,” he observed to his daughter, “seem to have an even greater capacity for anger than that other chap. Do you know why they’re trying to murder us all?”

“Well, major,” his daughter called back to him, “this automobile happens to be loaded to the scuppers with gin and whisky, and it seems that our guilty secret is known to practically the entire universe.”

“I knew nothing about it,” replied Mr. Lamb, lurching heavily against Sandra.

“You’re the practically part,” said Hebe. “Now everybody knows except possibly an old gentleman on the extreme peak of Mount Shasta.”

“Does it so happen,” continued Mr. Lamb, as the automobile skidded around a corner and the shooting died away, “that a few samples are lying within easy reach?”

Hebe produced a bottle from a side pocket and passed it to her father. Mr. Lamb received the gin with undisguised relief.

“I might as well be poisoned as shot,” he remarked, raising the bottle to his lips. “If I must meet death face to face I’d prefer to be wearing a broad, fatuous smile.”

“You’re not alone in your preference,” said Sandy. “My throat is parched with panic.”

Mr. Lamb handed her the bottle.

“No foolishness, remember,” he warned her. “This is to be serious drinking.”

Sandra gulped a few swallows of extremely vile gin, relinquished the bottle to Hebe and turned her deep, passionate eyes on the man at her side.

“I’d love to meet death with you,” she murmured. “With your kiss on my lips and our bullet-riddled bodies locked in a last embrace.”

“Bleeding profusely from every pore,” added Mr. Lamb. “Hebe, pass me that bottle quickly. This woman is turning me numb.”

Mr. Lamb drank deeply, clinging with one hand to the swaying car. Sandra relieved him of the bottle and followed his example. Melville Long was too busy to drink. If there was one thing that young man knew it was roads. In his own roadster he had explored the highways and byways of the entire state. He was in the way of being an animated road map. He now called on his knowledge and played a little trick on the state troopers, still hidden from view by a bend in the road.

Turning the car sharply, he drove it at full speed up what appeared to be a private driveway leading to a farmhouse. The road curved round the house and continued surprisingly on through a field of corn, down a short but steep incline, followed the arc of a meadow, and at last lost itself in the shadows of a forest. It was not a road for a large, heavy automobile, but Mr. Long made it so today. Once in the forest he stopped the car and silently took the bottle from Hebe. When he removed it from his lips it was good only for disposal. Hebe produced another one and passed it back to her father. Melville Long got out and listened. For the moment they seemed safe from pursuit.

“The rear mudguards have been dented by five bullets, and there are two holes in the body,” he announced with his usual optimistic smile. “It’s lucky they didn’t hit the trunk. The thing’s full of grog.”

“An act of God,” breathed Sandra.

Daylight was growing thin, and the late summer night was about to open for business. Mr. Lamb was making inroads in the new bottle. The gin was taking effect. He could hardly have felt better.

“Melville,” he asked, “would you mind telling me the name of that near customer of yours? A shade of memory has just passed across my rapidly receding brain.”

“Name of Brickett,” Long answered a little bitterly. “Seemed to be a pleasant sort of man.”

“Oh, he is,” Mr. Lamb continued. “He’s one of the pleasantest and most progressive bootleggers in the neighborhood. I’ve done business with him myself.”

An expression of infinite pity welled up in Hebe’s eyes as she regarded her future husband.

“Darling,” she said, “you’ve proved yourself far beyond any reasonable doubt, and what you’ve proved is that you’re the world’s worst bootlegger barring none.”

“I’m not even that,” the young man answered moodily. “Haven’t sold even one bottle yet. Didn’t ever get started.”

“And what, may I ask, was the reason for all this illicit enterprise?” asked Mr. Lamb.

Melville looked helplessly at Hebe, and she put her hand on his.

“Well, you see, major,” she explained. “We were trying to get married and it was all my fault. I suggested the idea to this billiard ball with a view to obtaining quick and ample funds. I thought it would be better than his just doing nothing. He absolutely refused to ruin me.”

Mr. Lamb looked at the pair with sad, reproachful eyes.

“He’s absolutely ruined me,” he said at last. “And between you you have made us all eligible for full membership in the Atlanta Country Club. Your short cut to matrimony leads but to the jug. If you succeed in getting me out of this fix alive I’ll carry you both in my arms to the nearest church and not leave the place until you are married to a turn.”

“Let’s have a drink on that,” suggested Sandy. “It sounds like a sporting proposition to me.”

The second bottle went the way of the first, and a third was pressed into service. This time they switched to whisky with the aid of a corkscrew attached to a versatile pocket knife in the possession of Melville Long. Merely as a matter of interest Mr. Lamb also sampled this unworthy liquor, then leaned back against the seat.

“Damn the torpedoes,” he quoted to his probable son-in-law. “Get me back to my bed, and I’ll settle a fortune on Hebe.”

He rested his head on Sandra’s shoulder and became a very quiet and contented man. As the car sped through the woods slumber claimed him for her own. Sandra, too, for lack of anything better to do, dropped into a light sleep, and failed to notice how heavy the head on her shoulder was growing. Hebe and Long kept their eyes to the front.

Some time later, when the automobile drew up at an innocent-looking roadside garage to replenish the nearly exhausted supply of gasoline, the pair continued sleeping. Nor did either sleeper awake until the sound of coarse, commanding voices penetrated their remoteness.

Sandra sat up with a start only to find that the automobile was completely surrounded by state troopers. She turned to Mr. Lamb to inform him of this disheartening fact, then stopped with her mouth open.

“Hebe,” she said in a low voice, “just turn round and look at your father.”

Hebe stopped insulting the state troopers and obeyed Sandra’s urgent request. Her mouth also hung suspended. Then she closed it and swallowed hard several times. Mr. Lamb woke up and looked helplessly about him. He knew he was something else again, but for the life of him he could not make out what it was.

“Come out of there,” an unpleasant voice broke in. “We want to search the back of this car.”

The man thrust in an inquiring head, then immediately abandoned his inquiry. It is to be questioned if any man ever changed his plans so swiftly and radically. His head was no sooner in than it was out. And no sooner was it out than his voice made horrid sounds.

“May God save us all,” he announced. “They’ve got a live lion in the back of that car” – and leaping on the nearest motorcycle, he disappeared down the road.

“So that’s what I am,” thought Mr. Lamb with a thrill of pride. “Well, here’s where I assert myself to the limit of my capacity.”

With an ear-splitting roar of mock rage, he jumped heavily to the road and scattered disorder among the troopers. Some of them left on foot, some of them left on motorcycles, some of them seemed to have discarded both methods of leaving in favor of flying. The fact remains that where there was once a compact little gathering of state troopers, there was now not a single trooper. A few abandoned motorcycles remained behind, but had it not been for these there was no evidence that a state trooper had ever been within miles of the spot. High up on the top of the gasoline pump the garage owner looked on the scene of desolation and felt very lonely indeed. Nor would he come down in spite of the urgings of Sandra and Hebe and the apparent amiability of the lion. They left the man aloft, and drove noisily down the road, everyone talking at once save Mr. Lamb, who was practicing up on his growls and modestly receiving the congratulations of his three companions in flight.

Then Melville Long, without much effort, conceived another bright idea. He drove swiftly and directly to the seacoast – to a place of sand and pines where a secluded hotel quietly dreamed away a peaceful, fragrant existence among the trees that forever held in their arms the far-off throb of the surf. The lights were out in the hotel when the automobile rolled up the gravel drive. They had previously decided what they were going to do with Mr. Lamb. The lion was to become a dog. They figured out exactly how to do it. Mr. Lamb alone was skeptical. He failed to see how he could compress himself into a dog no matter how hard he squeezed. However, since the party had decided to make a dog of him, he was perfectly willing to coöperate to the best of his ability. It had taken nearly half a case of liquor to get him into this pliable frame of mind. He was now a trifle unsteady on his feet. Instead of stepping quietly out of the automobile he fell through the door held open by Sandra, and spread himself over the drive.

“Come on, major,” pleaded Hebe. “This will never do. Wait till we get our rooms.”

The thought of a comfortable bed gave the lion the strength to rise. Then began the transformation. As if they had previously rehearsed the scene each member of the party bore down on Mr. Lamb with an automobile robe. In these they completely muffled him. Even Melville Long’s raincoat was pressed into service.

“Now squeeze yourself together, major,” his daughter urged him. “That’s the boy. Squeeze hard, hump your back and walk low to the ground.”

The young lady was red with exertion as she tied the robes about the contorted form of the lion. From time to time Sandra was forced to retire as her mirth got the better of her. Low pants and grunts issued from the lion. Only his nose and eyes were now visible, his tail having been firmly strapped to his stomach. From the blankets his eyes peered out wistfully – hopefully – upon his three companions. Sandy could not meet those eyes bearing the mute question of, “Do I look much like a dog?”

When she had finished her operations, Hebe stepped back and surveyed her handiwork.

“He doesn’t look much like a dog,” she admitted, “but then again, he doesn’t look much like a lion, and after all that’s what we want.”

“He doesn’t look like anything else on the face of God’s world,” pronounced Melville Long. “We’ve got as much right to call him a dog as any other animal.”

“Now, major,” continued Hebe, “remember this, and for heaven’s sake don’t laugh. You’re a sick dog and an extremely self-effacing one. You’re shy and you don’t like strangers. Now show us how you can walk. Just think of a beetle and crawl along.”

Thinking hard of a beetle, Mr. Lamb crouched to the ground and, hunching up to his utmost, took a few trial steps. The effect was irresistible. It was heightened by the obvious earnestness of the lion. The three witnesses of this odd scene sat down on the running-board of the automobile and clung to their stomachs. Sandra was aching all over. And when the lion peered wanly back at them over his shoulder for some indication of approval, she collapsed into Hebe’s arms.

“Come on everybody,” said Hebe in a low voice. “I’ve taken a lot of trouble with that lion, now we’ve got to get him in. That will do very well, major,” she continued, going over to the crouched and muffled object. “Just keep up the harmless deception till we reach our rooms.”

Collecting several suitcases containing nothing but gin and whisky, Long rang the hotel night bell and waited on the broad veranda until a light appeared in the reception room. When a sleepy-eyed clerk with bushy hair and a large, smooth, well-fed face appeared at the door, the young man made known his needs and was invited to enter with his party.

“Ah, yes,” Long said to the clerk in as nonchalant a voice as he could muster when the robed lion made his mincing entrance. “I’d forgotten our most important member – one sick dog. I take personal charge of him myself.”

From behind his counter the clerk looked in astonishment at Mr. Lamb, who cast his eyes down and gazed demurely at the floor.

“Do you say that’s a dog?” the clerk demanded.

Melville Long laughed falsely as Hebe bent over her father and gave him a pat of encouragement.

“Of course he’s a dog,” put in Sandy. “What would you call him if he isn’t a dog?”

“Well, miss,” replied the clerk thoughtfully, “I don’t rightly know just what I’d call him. He’s unlike anything I ever saw before, or ever hope to see again. Are you certain he’s all right? This is a very quiet hotel, you know. It’s a sort of retreat for nervous persons – wrecks.”

Everyone, including Mr. Lamb, felt that they had come to the right place. As Melville Long was signing the register in such a way that Hebe became his sister and Sandra Rush her friend, Mr. Lamb suddenly remembered his daughter’s admonition about laughing. No sooner had he remembered this than he was seized with an uncontrollable desire to laugh. His legs gave way completely, and, sinking to the floor, his body shook with suppressed mirth as a gasping noise escaped his lips.

With blotter in hand the clerk forgot every other consideration in his interest in the convulsed animal.

“What’s wrong with him now?” he asked.

Long, studiously averting his eyes from the great, quivering hulk at his feet, looked impassively at the clerk.

“A bit of a chill, I guess,” he replied. “It’s the night air. A very delicate dog, that, and an expensive one. Only a few in captivity – I mean, only a few grow to manhood.”

“Or attain their majority,” put in Hebe sarcastically.

She bent tenderly down over the now hysterical lion and gave him a vicious jab in the ribs, from which the poor creature grunted so explosively that the clerk jumped back.

“There, there, Fifi,” she said. “Be a good doggie or you’ll get no nice warm medicine to make you sleep.”

At the inappropriate appellation of Fifi, Sandra broke down completely. Throwing her arms on the counter she hid her head in them and rocked her body to and fro in agony. The clerk scratched his mop of a head in perplexity, looked closely at the register, then giving everything up as hopeless, led the way to the rooms.

This entailed the mounting of several flights of stairs, a difficult task for Mr. Lamb in his present strapped and highly compressed condition. To add to his discomfort his robes began to slip off, and Hebe and Sandra were forced to hold them on as he dragged himself up the interminable stairs. Once the clerk looked back, and the sight he caught of the straining lion was enough to keep him from looking back again.

When finally the door had closed behind the mystified man, Mr. Lamb burst his bonds and lay exhausted on the floor. Sandra flung herself on the bed and Hebe sank down in a chair. Melville Long alone retained his composure. Quickly opening a suitcase, he extracted a bottle of whisky which he deftly uncorked and thrust into Mr. Lamb’s mouth, holding it there until its contents were half drained. From the bed came a series of muffled gasps. Sandra was still at it. Revived by the whisky, Mr. Lamb, trailing robes behind him, walked to the bed and gently spanked the prostrate form of Sandra. Gentle as it was, the spanking was sufficiently firm to bring her back to sobriety. She sat upon the bed, then suddenly threw her arms round the lion’s neck.

“Fifi!” she cried. “Fifi, us girls must stick together.”

Mr. Lamb drew back and, looking at his daughter, made it clear by a wave of his paw that he desired to retire. Sandra was all for sleeping with her Fifi, but compromised with tucking him into bed. This he permitted her to do with bad grace.

“I don’t quite like sleeping with a drunken lion, even though he is your father,” Melville Long told Hebe in a low voice. “He’s gentle enough now, but suppose he should dream he was back in the jungle? He might make a meal out of me and never even remember it.”

“The major,” replied Hebe with dignity, “is very careful about the quality of the food he consumes. One bite out of you, and his jaws would automatically cease to function.”

With this little parting speech Hebe led Sandra to their own room. Sandra blew a kiss to her Fifi, who gazed back at her with large, glassy eyes.

In spite of the precautions taken by Hebe the next morning to lock the sleeping lion in before they went down to breakfast, the chambermaid, after repeated knocking, entered the room with no difficulty by means of her master key. It is to be doubted if even God clearly understood her prayer so incoherent were her ideas when she pulled down the rumpled bed clothing and came face to face with a lion. Even then she did not move. The terrible sight had robbed her limbs of volition. It was not until the lion awoke and gave her a lazy cuff on a place usually associated with juvenile chastisement that she thought about going. As she left the room her limbs moved jerkily as if she were walking with snowshoes attached to her feet.

“There’s a lion in 46,” she informed the clerk. “He’s asleep and he has a mouth.”

The day clerk smiled indulgently at the maid’s terror, the night clerk having omitted to give him an account of the late arrivals of the previous night.

“Yes, I know,” he replied soothingly. “There’s an elephant in 82. Go up and give him his bath.”

The maid liked her job, so she did not stop to argue, but within a surprisingly short time a rumor was circulated about that among its other distinguished guests the hotel also entertained a lion. Support was given to this rumor when at noontime an order was telephoned from 46 to send up half a dozen large steaks. The order was duly delivered and consumed, but the waiter who delivered the steaks had no opportunity to see the consumer. When Sandra, Hebe, and Mr. Long appeared in the dining-room for luncheon the kitchen was thrown into an even more feverish state of speculation. A sick dog, no matter how rapid his recovery, could not possibly eat six large steaks. Therefore it stood to reason that the dog was not a dog at all but a lion.

For the remainder of the afternoon Sandra read the newspaper to Mr. Lamb, who alternately drank and drowsed. When it was about time for dinner she departed, promising to provide bountifully for him on her return. Not being Hebe, she forgot to lock the door.

It did not take many minutes for Mr. Lamb to become terribly, terribly lonely. He crawled out of his bed and wondered what he could do with himself.

“Can’t do much with a lion,” he thought discontentedly. “Nobody wants you around. Nobody understands.”

Then his eyes, falling on the suitcase, brightened a shade.

“Might as well drink,” he continued. “Left here alone. Nothing to do. Don’t want to drink, but it seems I must.”

He opened the suitcase and pawed out a bottle of gin, the whisky being beyond his powers because of the cork. Then he deftly lipped out the stopper and, taking the bottle well into his mouth, swung his head aloft. A river of raw gin ran down his great throat, not without causing him some keen physical discomfort. Nevertheless he took his punishment with fortitude until the river ceased to flow, after which he sat down to think; this in the case of a none too sober lion is not at all a good thing to do. He had been cooped up in the house all day. A bit of a walk would do him a world of good. It was dark now and almost everybody was dressing for dinner, his party having gone down early in order to tend to his needs. He did not doubt for a minute that he could get himself out of the hotel without being observed by a single human eye.

Mr. Lamb went to the door and tried the knob. It turned easily under the pressure of his paws. He was out of the room in a moment. Now, the hall was a narrow hall, and Mr. Lamb had been perfectly right in assuming that the majority of the guests of the hotel would be in their rooms dressing for dinner. Another thing, Mr. Lamb’s tail was long and large. And this long tail thumped imperatively against the doors on either side, as Mr. Lamb made his stately progress down the hall. It was an interesting study of human reactions to the unexpected presence of a lion.

The first summons of the lion’s tail was answered by an elderly gentleman wearing horn-rimmed glasses and an undershirt. To this gentleman Mr. Lamb bowed apologetically. For a moment the old fellow did not stir. He peered myopically at the lion as if disbelieving the evidence of his eyes, then closed the door slowly as suspicion grew to certainty. The other guests were more expeditious in their reactions. One lady hurrying out to dinner unfortunately received the lion’s tail full in the pit of her stomach and was toppled to the floor. Her terror was heightened by Mr. Lamb’s elaborate attempts to show her that the whole incident had been purely accidental. Her screams caused other doors to open, and the lion was discovered in the act of what appeared to be an attack on a prostrate woman, but which in reality was nothing more than a courteous endeavor to make gentlemanly reparations for an unavoidable occurrence.

What had once been a mysterious rumor now became an appalling fact. Few guests appeared at dinner that night. They preferred to remain hungry but safe behind locked and barricaded doors. Not quite satisfied with this precaution some of the more painstaking guests were later unwillingly hauled forth from under beds and the depths of closets.

During this brief period the hotel was decidedly no place for nervous people, although it was occupied by many.

Not altogether unaware of the disturbance he had created, Mr. Lamb made an exit through a side door and was now wandering pensively about in the pines. At last he came to the sea and poised himself on a rock. It was a beautiful night – a night of stars, silence, and beguiling breezes laden with the healing scent of salt and pine.

A man and a maid, new to the place, but obviously not to each other, were walking along the beach.

“What a lovely spot for a statue,” exclaimed the maid, pointing to the lion motionless on the rock.

“Funny,” said the man, “we haven’t seen it on any of the picture postcards.”

They hurried up to the lion and examined it in the darkness.

“Remarkably lifelike,” murmured the maid.

“And so are you,” said the man, leaning against the lion’s flank and taking the maid in his arms.

Mr. Lamb promptly sat down and the couple slid to the rocks.

“Did you push it over?” asked the maid.

“God, no,” whispered the man. “The damn thing’s alive.”

After this they covered their heads and lay perfectly still, each one wondering about how much of the other remained undevoured. When at last they gathered enough courage to look up, the lion was gone. That night they conducted themselves with a certain amount of discretion.

Mr. Lamb found the hotel in a condition of frantic activity. During his absence the state troopers had appeared, this time fortified with a machine-gun. He was just in time to see his automobile bearing Hebe, Sandra, and Long dash madly down the driveway. Troopers were rushing from all directions, and the machine-gun was brought into action. The troopers had no intention of getting too close to the lion they assumed to be in the car.

And Mr. Lamb was equally reluctant to be left alone with a machine-gun and a chorus of state troopers. He longed for the company of his friends. Casting dignity to the winds, he uttered a loud roar of protest and doubling his body under him made the gravel fly.

“Run, lion, run,” he urged himself. “Prove yourself now.”

Gravel sprayed out behind him. His tail was close to the ground. This did not prevent it from being slightly nicked by a machine-gun bullet.

The car was waiting for him at the end of the drive, and without stopping for the formality of opening the door he lurched over the side. The automobile jumped ahead and continued hurriedly along the road.

“Off again, major,” said Sandra resignedly. “How’s your head?”

Mr. Lamb was not worrying about his head. His thoughts lay with his tail.

“Not a scrap of evidence left behind,” Mr. Long optimistically informed the party. “I lugged both suitcases out. Open a bottle, Hebe.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Above the Battle

Sandra looked up from her drum.

“It’s a shame we haven’t a camera,” she observed.

It was.

Mr. Lamb was lying majestically beside an uprooted tree. Its reaching branches still drew vital sap that nourished fresh green leaves. The tawny coat of the lion was splashed with pointed shadows. They shifted over the great, still body as small, inquisitive breezes searched through the arms of the fallen tree.

Round the tip of the lion’s tail was bound a once dainty but now bedraggled brassière. Undoubtedly it had once been becoming to its wearer. Despite this fact it failed to add to the dignity of the lion. Sandra had insisted on sacrificing this restraining influence for the protection of the bullet-chipped tail.

The silence of the forest was unbroken save by the sporadic throbbing of the drum upon which Sandra practiced when the spirit moved her. The sound of the drum lent a barbaric note to this already sufficiently fantastic woodland scene.

Through a rift in the trees a green world unrolled far below them. The slanting sun sent a flood of gold along the path of a winding river. There were farmhouses down there, pasturelands and meadows. The quiet of evening seemed to have fallen over forest, field, and farm. From where they were sitting they looked the clouds in the face. Caught in the rays of the setting sun they fell burning down the sky.

Mr. Long was wandering leggily about in his drawers. Sandra and Hebe, from half to two-thirds naked themselves, were sitting cross-legged on the ground and endeavoring to make up for their lack of raiment by fashioning garlands of wild flowers for their hair. Sandra had promised the lion one for himself, but the lion without troubling to move his massive head merely rolled his large, disapproving eyes in her direction, then returned to the contemplation of the gold and green world in which he found himself.

All had been well rained upon. A heavy shower had wet them to the skin. Garments both dainty and ludicrous were decorating the limbs of neighboring trees.

“I find it fresh as the deuce,” complained Melville Long, shivering convincingly in his drawers.

“Break out the last case,” suggested Hebe. “Your clothes will soon be dry.”

At this suggestion the lion moved his head. Turning it to his daughter he nodded gravely several times, as an indication of his unqualified agreement. Sandra laid aside her garland and, picking up her drumsticks, made an enthusiastic noise.

The beating of the drum throbbed weirdly through the silence of the forest. From afar a wandering naturalist heard the broken rhythm and pictured again in his mind’s eye a certain clearing in a jungle on a distant tropic isle.

“Strange sound to hear in this part of the world,” he thought aloud, as he put some utterly useless-looking stones into his pack and resumed his way.

Back on the mountain top Hebe was asking questions.

“What becomes of the major’s clothes when he turns into things?” she demanded.

The lion looked interested. This subject touched him vitally.

“What becomes of all of him?” asked Sandra. “His clothes must go the way of all flesh.”

“No,” said Hebe. “His arms and legs and things turn into the corresponding parts of the animal he’s exploiting at the moment, but it’s different with his clothes. They have to go somewhere because they always come back.”

Sandra puzzled over this problem a few minutes, then her face brightened.

“I know what becomes of his clothes,” she announced. “They naturally turn into fur, feathers, or scales as the case may be.”

“But there’s his skin to be considered,” replied Hebe.

Mr. Lamb did not entirely approve of the drift of the conversation. To him it seemed hardly proper that these two young ladies should sit there as if he were not present, and dispassionately consider his skin and the various parts of his body. He gave a low cough of protest, but the girls continued.

“His skin remains his skin,” Sandra explained. “Sometimes stretched, at others shrunken. His clothes merely form the decoration.”

“Well, I wish to God I could get my hand in the pockets of his trousers right now,” Melville Long put in earnestly.

His wish was fathered by the realization that the money in his own trousers pockets was running low. Only an emergency fund remained, a small one.

To obtain food and supplies they had been forced to resort to rather high-handed methods. These methods had been as simple as they were successful. Mr. Lamb had merely presented himself at the local country store in the little village at the base of the mountain. He did not have long to wait. Everybody went away just as soon as they could and stayed away. Sandra then appeared with a list prepared by the efficient Hebe, and with this list before her deliberately selected the articles desired.

The drum had not been among the items on the slip of paper. The drum had been left behind by a member of the local band. Its existence had completely slipped his memory in the press of departure. One of Sandra’s many suppressed desires had always been the mastery of the drum, so seeing one conveniently at hand she made it her own. Someday she promised herself, she would also take up the fife. One thing at a time. Beating the drum very badly indeed, but with great contentment she had preceded the lion through the village and up the mountainside. The lion had carried the bundle of provisions. Through the slits in their blinds the village’s entire population had reviewed this incredible procession with bewitched eyes and prayed quite fundamentally to their variously conceived God. Needless to say both the lion and the lady were slightly drunk – not much, but just enough to make them believe they were convulsingly amusing.

For five days now they had been, as it were, on location. Having found the seacoast inhospitable they had gone to the other extreme and taken to the mountains. Through the uncanny driving of Mr. Long and the presence of Mr. Lamb they had eluded the state troopers, but not entirely escaped their memory. The automobile had been left concealed at the base of the mountain, but already, unknown to its owners, it had been discovered and reported. Several intrepid troopers had reconnoitered the position of the fugitives, and certain plans were at this moment well under way.

All these developments would have been highly disturbing to the lion and his three companions, happy as they were in their false security, had they but been aware of them.

That night they finished the last bottle of whisky and ingeniously hid the remaining case of gin in a hollow tree. Mr. Long was now taking no chances. He had agreed to get them alive out of the mess into which he had plunged them. No less than the sun-tanned hand of Hebe depended upon the success of his endeavors.

The lion placed his head on the fallen tree and stretched his massive limbs. A whistling sigh escaped his lips. Sandra, trailing an automobile robe, crept close to him and rested her head on a soft spot just back of his left foreleg. From within the body of the lion came the strong, steady beat of his great heart. The sound of it gave the girl a feeling of confidence and safety. Once she tickled his ribs, and the lion, raising his head from the leaves, gently but firmly nipped the ear that had been the cause of so much trouble. Sandra gave a little scream and draped her arms round the lion’s neck.

On the other side of the embers Hebe vainly attempted to interest Mr. Long in her plans. Mr. Long strove manfully to listen to the prattling girl, but sleep was among those things that he held most sacred. The last thing he remembered was a long string of unpleasant names that Hebe was muttering monotonously in his ear. The sound of her voice helped to lull him off to sleep.

In the darkness of the forest, one of the lion’s large yellow eyes shone brightly as if it were reflecting the beams from a sharply chiseled star, hanging directly overhead above the trees. Silence … only the voice of Sandra singing softly to the lion.

“Hebe,” she whispered suddenly. “How’s this: the lion and the lamb lie down together – actually in one.”

“A little too pat to be funny,” replied Hebe. “Tell that great hulk of an animal good-night for me. My little prize package has gone by-by.”

“So has mine,” said Sandra, and presently she emulated his example.

According to his custom Mr. Lamb arose at dawn next morning and took a stroll through the forest. He knew of a certain mountain stream in which he could partially submerge his body. It was a refreshing thing to do in the quiet of the morning. He would lie there and listen to the birds and allow an old squirrel to examine him from a safe distance. Each morning the distance had decreased. Today the old fellow was almost familiar.

Mr. Lamb lay quite still and let the water swirl and chuckle about his haunches. No trains to catch. No bonds to sell. No orderly rows of houses. No meaningless words to say. Not even the sound of a motorcar or the smell of gasoline. Lamb’s nerves were resting, taking on a protective coating of fat. He realized now that his life with Sapho had never been restful. There had always been a debilitating undercurrent of irritation. No room for laughter and heedless relaxation. No delirious unleashing of passion. No companionship in sleep. Like so many secretively immoral women, she had hidden her true nature behind a screen of diffidence and niceness. With her one could never be vulgarly natural any more than one could be self-forgetfully passionate. She was bad without knowing how to be bad. Life had entered her only a little way. It had never really settled in her body nor given animation to her brain. He himself had been only half alive. He had accepted things altogether too easily, and too consistently avoided trouble. Perhaps if he had been different Sapho would have been different. However, he knew for certain that he never could have brought himself to mingle with the Woodbine Players or to talk symbolically about sex as if he were actually feeling it with his hands. The thought of sex brought Sandra to his mind. There was a woman – sex with lightness and laughter and with other skylights of interest to let the sunshine through.

Thinking of this beautiful, bare-armed young sinner, the lion rose so abruptly that he startled the squirrel into a frenzy of precautionary measures. It was high time the camp awoke. Shaking the glinting beads of water from his flanks he passed with a consciousness of nobility and power between the trees.

The camp was empty – deserted. No clothing hung from the limbs of the trees. Even the automobile robes were gone. With growing suspicion and alarm the lion nosed about the place. The world which had been so cheerfully ordered only a few minutes ago was now a wilderness of vast discontent. Then his eyes fell on a note pinned to a tree. It had been scrawled hastily and was signed by Hebe. Mr. Lamb read:

Surprised and captured. The big stiffs are taking us to Brookford to visit the judge. Rescue suggested. They have no evidence, the crooks! … Curses.

Hebe

Then the lion descended from the mountain. As he crashed through the trees and sprang to the road he was a sight to inspire terror in the hardiest of souls. An automobile passing casually by stalled within a foot of the lion, then started again and went into reverse. Mr. Lamb did not even notice the car. Hebe had suggested rescue, and he fully intended to act on her suggestion. Was he not the monarch of all he surveyed? Or was that title a mere piece of flattery. He would soon find out. With powerful strides he disappeared down the road to Brookford, some five miles distant.

A lion is seldom crowded, that is, a lion on the loose. Round him one usually finds a considerable quantity of unoccupied territory. As Mr. Lamb passed down the main street of Brookford no one got in his way. What traffic there was withdrew to the pavements or turned into side streets. An earnest gentleman drove his car clear through the front window of a furniture store, where he partially concealed himself beneath the ruins of a completely demolished bed. A horse harnessed to a farm wagon was found later in the wagon itself, and had to be driven home by a more courageous steed.

Utterly ignoring the small furor he was occasioning, Mr. Lamb padded down the street and entered the court-house in front of which he recognized his parked automobile. Behind his ponderous desk the judge was having a hard time establishing a case against the youthful prisoners. He was rapidly losing heart. No liquor had been found in the car or at the camp, no liquor had ever been delivered or actually seen. On a charge of bootlegging he could find no plausible grounds for holding them for general sessions. He was beginning to dislike state troopers as heartily as those they had captured and dragged to court without a scrap of evidence. For the twentieth time the judge was trying to discover what had become of the liquor.

“Now, miss,” he was saying, “what did you say your name was?”

“Doon,” replied Hebe promptly, “Lorna Doon.”

“Well, Miss Doon,” continued the judge – who officially was not a judge at all but merely a recorder and not as au courant as he might have been – “your face looks honest enough. Why don’t you help us out and tell us what you did with the liquor?”

“Why should I help you out to help us in?” asked Hebe with her sweetest smile.

The judge looked annoyed and shifted his discouraged eyes to Sandra.

“Will you make a clean breast of it?” he demanded.

“Why, your honor,” said Sandra, dropping her eyes. “What a thing to ask!”

“What do you mean?” asked the judge uneasily.

“I wouldn’t like to say,” the girl replied.

“Do you know what you did with the liquor?” repeated the judge, his face growing gradually red as he gazed into Sandra’s eyes now alarmingly raised to his.

“In view of the fact that we drank the liquor, your honor, your question seems rather indelicate,” the modest young lady replied.

At this moment a deep growl sounded in the rear of the courtroom. This growl was followed by a general and concentrated drive on the windows on the part of every single spectator present. The judge was about to rap for order when he stopped with gavel poised in mid-air as he found himself gazing into the open mouth of an enraged lion. Never had he seen such a furious animal, and never had he felt less like seeing one. Abandoning his prisoners to the lion and the mercy of God, he withdrew with his attendants to his chambers where he speedily produced a bottle of his own and did what any sensible man would have done under the circumstances.

The lion and his grateful companions wandered round the deserted courtroom for a few minutes, then emerged from the building into the equally deserted street. Leisurely climbing into the automobile, they drove off unmolested. Nor were they molested throughout the remainder of their journey back to their original point of departure, the Lamb residence – a place which its owner had come to fear he might never see again.

“Pardon our lion, Thomas,” said Hebe breezily, as the aged servant hurried out to meet them. “He’s not a bad sort at all if you like lions.”

“Never had much of a chance to get acquainted,” replied Thomas. “Is there anything I can do for this one, Miss Hebe?”

“Yes,” said Hebe. “Give the poor creature all the meat you can find either alive or dead in the kitchen. He’s been eating beans for the last five days, and he might start in on us if we don’t do something about it.”

Thomas hurried away, and Mr. Lamb went to show himself to the turtle, who as usual was not impressed.

CHAPTER TWENTY

A Decidedly Different Something

For some weeks now Mr. Lamb had been quite himself. This morning he wished he was not, for he was presently due at court to defend himself in a divorce suit brought against him by the revengeful Sapho. That gracious lady was at last striking for freedom. And she was striking in the worst possible way so far as Mr. Lamb was concerned. The summons had informed him that he should be both ready and willing to defend himself against charges of aggravated adultery, witchcraft, animalism, mental anguish, attempted murder, torture, and non-support. When Lamb read the official wording of the disagreeable document his brain swam. He had never before realized he had been such a versatile blackguard. How that woman must have suffered! And how she was going to let the world know about it!

Sandra Rush had been named as the other half of the adultery charge, and although she was most uninterestingly innocent she was highly satisfied with the trend of events. Her conduct greatly added to Mr. Lamb’s uneasiness. She assumed that she was an adulteress and acted the part so well that the poor man began to believe it must be true. Frequently she spoke of their guilty love with downcast eyes and generously declared that she fully intended to share at least half of the blame. When Mr. Lamb appealed to her better nature she accused him of trying to cast her aside like a broken reed and swore violently to God that she would sue him for chronic assault, seduction, and breach of promise. As his own daughter stoutly supported Sandra’s charges he held his peace and relapsed into sweating silence. It was all terribly upsetting.

Mr. Lamb had received notice of the divorce on the morning after his return from the mountains. He had awakened that morning quite himself and fully clad. His clothes were in a state of great disorder, and a week’s growth of whiskers decorated his face. When he had finished reading the document he somehow wished himself back on the quiet, wind-fanned summit of that mountain retreat where life had been so pleasantly natural and simplified. Already the newspapers were beginning to discuss the amazing charges brought by the wife of a prominent financier against her husband. Apparently this much-sinned-against woman was willing to take the reporters into her confidence at any hour of the day or night. Almost overnight Mr. Lamb had become a national figure. His picture appeared in various papers, but not so large as Mrs. Lamb’s.

Only one ray of light penetrated the encircling gloom. Nothing had developed from the bootlegging charge. It seemed that the recorder’s report must have been of a nature to discourage further investigation. Flarebacks of this episode also appeared in print. Mr. Lamb’s name and that of Sandra Rush were still more firmly linked. The fact that the woman in the case was an underwear model was not neglected. News was scarce at that time, and Mr. Lamb and his affairs were received with thanks by the press.

Hebe and Melville Long accompanied Mr. Lamb to the court. Sandra refused to appear, feeling that her absence would give the impression of an admission of guilt. Looking insinuatingly at Mr. Lamb she assured him that she could never face the world after all that had taken place between them. An expression of indignant protest escaped Mr. Lamb’s lips.

“That night you escaped from my window,” whispered Sandy. “Wow!”

“Ah!” said Hebe with a deep intake of breath.

“For God’s sake, Hebe,” her father pleaded. “Don’t you see that this girl, this female snake in the grass, intends deliberately to ruin me?”

“She’ll be the making of you, major,” said Hebe calmly.

“And I wouldn’t call people snakes and things,” put in Sandra. “It doesn’t sound well coming from you, and besides, you’re not out of the woods yet.”

“I wish to heaven I was back in them,” fervently replied the much beset man.

Now the judge was regarding Mr. Lamb with amused interest. Mr. Lamb was aware that the judge was not alone in his scrutiny. Mrs. Lamb at her lawyer’s table alone refused to look upon her husband. She was artistically dressed for the occasion. Her lawyer was addressing the court.

“Your honor,” he said a little self-consciously because of the ridiculous nature of the charges he had to press, “I shall prove that my client’s husband not only turned into a horse, a seagull, a kangaroo, a goldfish, a dog, a cat, in order named, but also that he actually had the temerity to assume the form of a lion – a dangerous and destructive animal.”

The judge’s smile of amusement deepened.

“Sounds like a lot of bedtime stories to me,” he observed. “Why don’t you establish adultery and call it a day?”

“My client insists on justice,” replied the lawyer. “We have made no charge in our brief that we are not able to prove.”

“If she insists on proving all her charges this case will become a permanent institution I’m afraid,” said the judge. “Hurry on with the animal business, and don’t make me feel too silly. I’m a serious-minded man in spite of the things to which I occasionally have to listen.”

To Mr. Lamb’s horror and surprise his daughter was asked if she would voluntarily take the stand. In his desperation he clung to her skirt as the young lady rose eagerly to go to the chair.

“Steady, major,” she whispered, “or you’ll be having your daughter testifying in the flimsiest excuse for a breech-clout.”

Mr. Lamb released her, and the girl swinging herself into the chair sat smiling innocently upon the judge, after she had taken an oath she had no intention of keeping. The lawyer for Mrs. Lamb addressed her.

“Miss Lamb,” he asked with the utmost politeness, “what did you first think when you discovered a horse in your father’s bed?”

“Why I naturally drew the conclusion that Sapho had invited him in,” she replied with compelling candor.

The judge coughed discreetly behind his hand and looked at the astounded lawyer with eyebrows slightly elevated. The lawyer was in a state of painful confusion. He would willingly have asked the witness to step down, but was afraid of the impression such a move would make. Mrs. Lamb had half arisen in her chair and was staring at her daughter with murder in her eyes.

“I’m a little astray,” remarked the judge. “You mentioned someone by the name of Sapho. I thought your mother’s name was Tilly, Miss Lamb?”

“It really is Mary,” Hebe explained with painstaking patience, “but mother never liked that name. So father always called her Tilly. She thought Tilly wasn’t romantic enough, so to humor her whim I called her Sapho because she was always play-acting in father’s best pajamas, and lying on the floor with—”

The hands of the plaintiff’s lawyer were churning wildly about in the air. His client sat white and trembling at her table. Behind her she could hear the sound of suppressed laughter.

“I protest,” the lawyer spluttered. “The witness is introducing a lot of irrelevant evidence. Whether Mrs. Lamb’s pajamas—”

“They weren’t Mrs. Lamb’s pajamas,” broke in Hebe. “I distinctly told you she sneaked them on my father.”

Then the lawyer lost all control.

“Why quibble about it?” he demanded furiously of Hebe. “What earthly difference does it make whether the pajamas belong to your father or your mother?”

“All the difference in the world,” replied Hebe, looking pityingly upon the lawyer. “You see, a woman’s pajamas are built according to an altogether different method of construction than a man’s. For one thing a woman’s pajamas—”

Laughter in the courtroom was now quite general, and, so far as the judge was concerned, uninterrupted.

“Your honor,” said Mr. Wilson with a hopeless droop to his shoulders, “if I hear any more about those pajamas I’ll have to withdraw from the case.”

“Very well,” replied the judge agreeably. “Let’s talk about something else.”

Mr. Wilson revived a little and turned once more to the willing and anxious Hebe. For a certain reason he wanted to establish a date.

“Miss Lamb,” he asked, “please answer this question as briefly as possible: after the appearance of the horse do you remember the exact date when you next found your father in bed?”

“On the morning of the twenty-fourth,” the young girl answered without a moment’s hesitation. “I remember because Leonard Gray was visiting mother over the week-end, and although she didn’t know that I knew it and—”

“You may step down, Miss Lamb,” interrupted the lawyer in a dead voice, “unless the defense wishes to question you.”

The defense did.

“Miss Lamb,” asked the legal representative of Hebe’s father, “you can’t possibly think of any reason for the viciously conceived rumor of some innocent intimacy existing between your father and the woman, Sandra Rush?”

“Hold on,” exclaimed the judge momentarily interrupting work on a picture he was drawing. “I never heard such a perniciously worded question in all my born days. Ask it all over again, Mr. Hedges, and this time don’t try to be so subtly leading, or rather, misleading.”

“Gladly, your honor,” said Mr. Hedges smoothly. “Miss Lamb, there is of course no foundation in fact in the childish gossip that your father and Miss Rush were ever anything more than nodding acquaintances – almost hostile?”

“Hold on again,” interrupted the judge. “You might be trying to spare our feelings, Mr. Hedges, but you’re not improving a bit. I’m afraid you’ll have to ask that question as if you desired information rather than confirmation.”

“All right,” said Mr. Hedges with ill humor. “Did this Rush woman and your father ever misconduct themselves?”

“Jointly or individually?” asked the literal-minded Hebe.

“Jointly,” replied the lawyer. “In each other’s company and at the same time and place.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised,” the girl admitted. “Now that you’ve made yourself clear I’ll have to say that I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. Not before me, of course, but my father is only human and the Rush woman is so laissez-faire. Then again, mother was always so busy. Can’t sit up all night and twirl your thumbs, you know.”

“She can step down so far as I’m concerned,” said Mr. Hedges, turning his back on the young lady.

The judge removed a handkerchief from his face and looked at Hebe with brimming eyes.

“They don’t seem to want to play with you any more, Miss Lamb,” he told her. “You may step down with the satisfaction of knowing that you have been perfectly disastrous to both sides.”

Hebe was popular with neither Mrs. nor Mr. Lamb when she returned to her chair beside the latter.

“What did you want to go and tell lies for?” her father demanded, his whispered words laden with indignation.

“Wasn’t telling lies,” replied Hebe. “How do I know what you and Sandy do with your spare time? I didn’t say you did and I didn’t say you didn’t.”

“No,” muttered Mr. Lamb sarcastically. “You did everything but draw a diagram. And why did you call her that Rush woman?”

“Sounded more desperate,” said Hebe. “Anyway, Sandy told me not to spare her feelings. She wanted to shoulder half the blame for everything.”

Mr. Lamb choked down his wrath. He would have preferred to choke his imp of a daughter. He turned his eyes on the next witness and started. The witness was the man who had bought him at the horse show.

“Mr. Rudd,” the opposing lawyer was asking, “did you purchase a horse at a horse show on the twenty-fourth of last month?”

“I thought I did at the time,” replied Mr. Rudd.

“Did you notice anything peculiar about the horse when you purchased him?” continued the lawyer.

“I did, sir,” said the witness. “That horse was drunk, dead-drunk and snoring.”

“And where is that horse now, Mr. Rudd?”

Mr. Rudd looked long and searchingly at Mr. Lamb, while that gentleman returned the look with an ironical eye. Then the farmer pointed an earthy-looking finger at him.

“Wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t the horse I bought,” said Mr. Rudd.

At this the judge slapped his leg and leaned over his desk.

“Pardon me,” he remarked, “but did I understand you to say the horse was dead-drunk?”

“He was, your honor.”

“And how about yourself, Mr. Rudd?”

“Sober as a judge, your honor.”

“Thanks for the compliment, Mr. Rudd, but do you mean to tell me you didn’t know the difference between that gentleman and a horse?”

“Well, I found him between the shafts, your honor, and the thing I’d bought for a horse had clean disappeared. Ain’t never seen it since.”

Mr. Wilson intervened at this point.

“How did the gentleman explain his presence between the shafts of your cart, Mr. Rudd?” the lawyer asked.

“Said he was playing horse,” replied Mr. Rudd. “Told me a long cock-and-bull story about how he couldn’t break himself of the habit of playing horse.”

Mr. Wilson laughed scornfully and turned to the judge.

“You can see for yourself, your honor,” he said, “what a lame excuse that was under the circumstances.”

“There’s nothing wrong under the law in playing horse,” observed the judge mildly. “It’s rather an odd sort of amusement for a great, tall man like Mr. Lamb. Still if he wants to ride a broom or even to pull a cart he has a perfect right to do so.”

He paused for a moment and looked curiously at Mr. Wilson. “Do you actually believe in this man’s story?” asked the judge.

“Certainly, your honor,” Mr. Wilson replied. “The witness is on his oath.”

“I know all about that,” replied the judge impatiently. “I’m not suggesting perjury, but I’ve known men who would have taken an oath that they were seeing snakes and pink elephants and green devils that existed only in their feverish imaginations. The judge that Mr. Rudd said he was as sober as, must have been a judge of whisky. That’s the only way to justify his obviously impossible statements. Now, Mr. Wilson, let’s get down to cases. If you can’t prove that the defendant was a horse, you’re going to have a great deal harder time trying to prove that he was a goldfish or a lion. And so far as I’m concerned it’s going to be practically impossible for you to convince me that that gentleman sitting there with his sweet, innocent young daughter was ever a kangaroo. This is the silliest divorce case so far that I’ve ever tried. It has its amusing side, but I’m not here to be amused. Why don’t you drop all this animal business and press a charge that you can get your teeth into – something more homelike and understandable – adultery for instance?”

“One moment, your honor,” said Mr. Wilson hastily. “Listen to this.”

The lawyer drew near the rail and spoke in a low voice to the judge. Both of them looked with interest at Mr. Lamb, who under the combined gaze of the two legal minds began to grow decidedly uncomfortable.

Suddenly the judge broke down and buried his face in his hands, his shoulders shook and strangling noises came from between his fingers. Presently he mopped his face with his handkerchief and fixed his tearful eyes on the lawyer.

“You’re only guessing, Mr. Wilson,” said the judge. “And besides you haven’t even established the fact that he was a horse. You’ll have to do better than that or I’ll throw this case out of court.”

Mr. Lamb’s face was flaming. Strange things were going on inside him. If his wife had wished to humiliate him her wish was amply gratified. Through hot eyes he saw that Mr. Rudd’s place in the witness box had been taken by the woman in charge of Sandra’s underwear shop. His heart sank. Was that scene to be repeated for the benefit of the public? Mr. Lamb wanted very badly to be somewhere else. He would gladly have turned to a stone or to any other inanimate object for a change. Madam was gorgeously arrayed. She seemed to regard the occasion in the light of a pleasant diversion.

“It was an assault partial,” she was saying in answer to some question the opposing lawyer had put to her. “Not an assault complete. A moment more and it might have been utter.”

“How was the victim of this brutal attack clad?” continued Mr. Wilson.

“The assaulted one was clad in a costume most revealing,” explained madam. “An irresistible creation of my own. Should you remove all of your outer garments, m’sieur, and cut the little that remained into ribbons, retaining only the smallest possible protection, you would arrive at something of the same effect.”

“Don’t try it, Mr. Wilson,” put in the judge. “I’ve stood about enough for one day.”

“What was Mr. Lamb doing?” continued Mr. Wilson, striving to maintain his dignity in the face of the quietly mirthful courtroom.

Madam seemed completely surprised by this question. She elevated her shoulders eloquently and seemed to be taking the courtroom into her confidence.

“Why, m’sieur,” she protested. “What would you do? What would the judge do? What would any man do under the circumstances?”

“I hate the way that woman talks,” observed the judge. “The situation is sufficiently clear, don’t you think, Mr. Wilson?”

But madam was well launched on her description and would not be denied. “When I re-entered the room—”

At this point the human elements contained in Mr. Lamb seemed to crash and to fall into disorder. The little russet man had at last surpassed all his previous efforts. Either out of pity for Mr. Lamb or through some caprice of his own, he had changed him into what might be roughly termed, a combination animal. Lamb had the feathered head of a large rooster, the body of some strangely designed prehistoric animal and the tail of a lizard. Not knowing what a sight he presented, he was able to gain some slight conception from the fact that even his own daughter shrank from him. The opposing lawyers leaped the rail at the same instant and took refuge with the judge behind his desk. Their bulging eyes slanted across its surface as if the three gentlemen were being strangled. Mrs. Lamb appeared to have swooned. The courtroom was in an uproar. With a strange, whistling gasp Mr. Lamb looked uneasily about him, then turned and shuffled awkwardly down the aisle. No one raised a finger to stay his progress.

“I take everything back,” said the judge when order had been restored. “It seems I was all wrong. Do you know what that thing was, Mr. Wilson?”

“I doubt if anyone does,” replied the gentleman.

“Well, whatever it was,” continued the judge, “I’m sure your client cannot be expected to live with it. I wouldn’t do so myself for the world. The papers will be drawn up immediately. This court is officially adjourned, but those who care to remain until they have collected their scattered wits are at liberty to do so.”

With dignity befitting his exalted office, the judge gathered his robe about him and withdrew.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Exit the Little Russet Man

When Mr. Lamb caught sight of himself in a store window he jumped three feet in the air so great was the shock he received. Once more the strange, whistling sound came from between his beak as he hopped and shuffled along the street. More than ever now he felt cut off from humanity. Even the automobiles seemed to shrink from him. What would Sandra think of him? Would she, too, be revolted like Hebe? He was going to find out.

Sandra, having withdrawn from the swollen ranks of the employed, was sitting on her front veranda. No one else seemed to be in sight as Mr. Lamb hopped up the steps and squatted down beside her. He was breathing wheezily from exertion – wheezing and whistling distractedly. His lonely, frightened eyes peered questioningly into Sandra’s, then he looked away as if ashamed to meet her gaze. Now that he was there he wished he had not come.

“Sit down and rest,” said Sandra quietly. “Don’t you think you’re laying it on a little strong? I stood you as a lion and a kangaroo without turning a hair. When you were a seagull and a goldfish I did what little I could to protect your interests. When you were a cat I actually took you to bed with me. Not satisfied with your past achievements it now seems that you’ve begun to make up animals, combining them, trying to be three animals at once. It’s a trifle more than a potential wife or mistress can stand. I think it’s very silly to make up animals. Have you seen yourself yet? Look.”

She took a small mirror from her vanity case and held it up before Mr. Lamb. With a strangled, gasping squawk he flopped down the steps and shuffled away as fast as his queer, ill-fashioned legs could carry him. A thin film seemed to have settled over his eyes. He could see only dimly. He was totally unfitted for the world in which he found himself. His heart was heavy, however, with human despair.

Sandra rose quickly from her chair and looked after the retreating animal. Once she called to him, but Mr. Lamb did not appear to have heard her. Filled with misgiving for the safety of this defenseless creature she hurried to Mr. Lamb’s home, but he was not there. Hebe greeted her at the door and gave her an account of what had taken place at court, after which they sat down and wondered what had become of Mr. Lamb.

The subject of their speculations knew neither what to do or where to go. News of a strange animal being at large spread rapidly through the countryside. Parties were organized to capture or to kill this animal. Big, quick-tempered, hard-biting dogs were pressed into service. The animal was different, therefore it did not belong. It was the invariable attitude of humanity – destroy what you cannot understand. Mr. Lamb became a hunted thing.

His trail was picked up on the outskirts of the town. Soon he heard the hue and cry behind him. Sheer panic weakened his efforts as he hopped laboriously along. He was about to enter a wood when he spied a small hut before which a man was sitting, a man with vague, troubled eyes and a head of matted hair. Mr. Lamb recognized the man. He was the local half-wit, almost as far removed from his fellow men as was Mr. Lamb himself.

When the half-wit saw the winded and hard-pressed creature he showed neither surprise nor alarm. He rose from the ground and approaching Mr. Lamb, looked sympathetically into his dim eyes. “Tired,” he said as if to himself, “and thirsty. Scared near to death.”

The sound of pursuit was growing steadily nearer. Three dogs, nose to the ground, were streaming across the field. Behind them came the rabble of the town. The half-wit frowned and looked at Mr. Lamb.

“They’re after you,” he said quietly. “They’ve been after me for years. Come along.”

Mr. Lamb hopped after him to the hut and drank thirstily when the man gave him a cup of water. Then the man went out and stood before the door. In his hand was a heavy stick.

Within a few minutes Mr. Lamb heard the voices of his pursuers and the snarls of the dogs. The house was surrounded and shouts rang out.

“Leave the poor creature alone,” he heard the half-wit saying. “He’s not hurting anybody, and I won’t let you at him.”

The dogs were urged forward, and the crowd fell upon the struggling half-wit. In spite of his terror Mr. Lamb tried to come to his aid.

“There it is!” a voice shouted. “Get him.”

A large rock crashed against the side of Mr. Lamb’s head and the strange animal sank down, a crumpled, uncouth mass. A dog worried his tail, and by his side the half-wit was feebly trying to rise. Through bruised lips he was muttering something about the crucifixion of Christ. The crowd stood over the still animal with a feeling of great accomplishment, particularly the man who had thrown the rock.

When Mr. Lamb regained consciousness he was lying on a large marble slab. A group of near-sighted-looking gentlemen were examining him minutely. One of these gentlemen was clad in white. In his hand was a long, thin, and extremely businesslike knife. Mr. Lamb sat up abruptly and looked about him. The room in which he found himself was rigged out as a laboratory. To Mr. Lamb it had the appearance of a torture chamber. The men seemingly were highly excited. They were staring at Mr. Lamb with deep interest.

“Oh, I say,” said one of them in remonstrating tones, “that was really too bad of you.”

“How too bad?” asked Mr. Lamb, a trifle giddily.

“Well,” continued the man, “a moment ago you were a most remarkable type of animal. Now you’re only rather a commonplace sort of person.”

“You’re not so exceptional yourself,” replied Mr. Lamb, irritated by the man’s manner.

He swung round on the table and addressed another member of the group.

“I wish you would remove the knife from that unreliable-looking individual’s hand,” he said. “What are all of you trying to do anyway, murder me?”

“No,” replied the other. “This is a meeting of scientists. We were just going to find out what manner of animal you were. You seemed to be quite dead.”

“Well, I don’t seem quite dead now,” said Mr. Lamb. “And I’m not an animal. You’ll have to stick that knife into someone else, I’m afraid. I want to go home. My head hurts.”

“But aren’t you going to be that way any more?” one of the men protested.

“Come, come,” urged one. “Snap back for us, won’t you?”

“All I can say,” remarked a third, “is that as you were, you were a great gain to science and that as you are, you are not much of a contribution to the human race.”

“Won’t you even try?” pleaded a bearded individual. “Come now, make an honest effort. Try hard. Be an animal.”

“Yes,” urged still another member of the group. “Pull yourself together.”

“And you’ll pull me apart,” replied Mr. Lamb.

“I’d like to cut him open anyway,” remarked the man with the knife. “There must be something strange inside him. No one would ever know.”

Mr. Lamb slid hastily from the marble slab.

“Everyone would know,” he announced. “If you come a step nearer with that horrid-looking knife, I’ll let out a yell that will bring in the entire neighborhood, you cold-blooded, long-faced murderer. You look like a horse yourself. Why don’t you slit your own hide open?”

Mr. Lamb felt better after this little outburst. He walked to the door with a dignified step, then turned and faced the bewildered and disappointed scientists.

“The next time I turn into an animal,” he announced, “I’m going to call in an osteopath.”

It was quite late when Mr. Lamb reached home. The house seemed empty. He went directly to his study, and without troubling to switch on the light sat down in his usual chair. He wanted to rest his eyes to see if the pain would not leave his head. Through the doors to his little porch the starlight shone into the room. Presently Mr. Lamb became aware of the fact that a small red light was glowing steadily opposite him. He caught the aroma of cigar smoke.

“Are you satisfied?” came a voice through the darkness.

Mr. Lamb recognized the voice, and his heart began to beat a little more hopefully. He got up and switching on the light, stood looking down at the little russet man. That cheery individual was sitting exactly as Mr. Lamb had last seen him. In one hand he held a half-smoked cigar, in the other a half-consumed highball. His umbrella was neatly arranged on the floor at his side.

“I hope you are,” replied Mr. Lamb. “I’m fed up. You’ve ruined everything for me including the zoo.”

The little russet man smiled.

“Well, Mr. Lamb,” he said, “you’re all through now. It’s done you a world of good. Respectability almost had you. You could never have stood the strain.”

“I’m not respectable now, God knows,” said Mr. Lamb. “I’m the most talked about person in the nation. I’m divorced, disgraced, and forever marked as a freak of nature.”

“Do you regret your experiences?” asked the little russet man.

Mr. Lamb thought over the past few months and grinned.

“No,” he replied. “Not exactly.”

“The world has a short memory,” his visitor resumed. “And anyway, you should travel for a while. See something new, Mr. Lamb. As an animal you seem to have a faculty for getting yourself into trouble. As a man your life should not prove to be so devoid of interest. The best side of you is your bad side – bad, I mean, from the point of view of Mrs. Grundy and her friends. Develop that side. Drink, eat, love, and laugh to your heart’s content. Don’t worry about people who peer through windows. Don’t hurt others, but don’t let others hurt you. They’ll do it every time if they can get you on the run. The world envies successfully unmoral people. Also it hates them. What your generation refers to as a hangover is not necessarily a mark of shame. There’s plenty of room in the world for a decent-spirited drunkard. Sobriety is good for certain persons only. You are not one of them. And, by the way, if I were in your place I’d look up that half-witted chap who tried to help you out. I find him one of the most likable characters in the community.”

Mr. Lamb walked over to a table and picked up the decanter. He was considering the words of his guest. A breeze passed through the room, and Mr. Lamb, turning, saw that the doors to his porch were open. Evidently the little russet man had passed through them, because he was no longer present. Only his umbrella remained beside his empty chair, and as Mr. Lamb stood looking at it the umbrella rose from the floor and moved slowly across the room.

“Almost forgot it that time,” from nowhere in particular came the voice of the mysterious little fellow.

Mr. Lamb walked out on his porch and sat down. A small hand slipped through the darkness and came to rest on his. Mr. Lamb sprang up with a smothered cry of fear.

“For God’s sake,” he complained, “why is everybody creeping up on me in the dark? I’m as nervous as a bug.”

“We’ll have to do something about that,” said Sandra. “Sit down and keep your shirt on.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

In the Wake

Sandra and Mr. Lamb were too much in the public eye to get married, so they agreed to play make-believe. However Mr. Lamb had extracted a promise from Sandra in the presence of Hebe and Melville Long to make him an honest man the moment they reached Paris.

Mr. Lamb had readily consented to go abroad for an indefinite period.

“If I stay here,” he had remarked at the breakfast table, where the suggestion had first been advanced by Sandra, “all my friends will be sitting around expecting me to turn into something for them. As far as business is concerned, I’m pow. A man who harbors the horrid fear that at any moment I may become a centipede or a panther is hardly in a receptive frame of mind to concentrate on a list of securities. Billings will have to carry on at the office, and Thomas will stand by the goods here at home.”

“I might run over with a contingent of Boy Scouts myself,” announced Brother Dug. “You’ll know when we get there because we’ll all be singing.”

“Tell us where you’re not going to be,” said Hebe, “and we’ll go there.”

Douglas grinned amiably.

Hebe and Mr. Long were married. During the last ten days he had proved himself useful in procuring the wrong tickets for the right boat or the right tickets for the wrong boat. The efficient Hebe had at last been forced to assume the responsibility of getting the party started. Mr. Long senior had been so pleased at the prospect of getting his son out of the house for some time to come that he had disgorged great quantities of money.

“I hope that at least you’ll be able to prove yourself a father,” the old gentleman had said upon relinquishing the check.

The three young people were now pushing Mr. Lamb up the gangplank. To outwit the newspaper reporters he was wearing a false beard above which his eyes peered out guiltily at the world. Unfortunately the beard fell off half-way up the gangplank. He quickly slipped it into his pocket, leaving part of it sticking out.

“I thought you were wearing a beard, sir,” observed his steward when he had placed the luggage in the stateroom.

“No,” explained Mr. Lamb. “That was someone seeing me off.”

When the steward was about to leave Mr. Long appeared wearing the beard and solemnly shook hands with his father-in-law. The steward departed baffled. Needless to say the party had been well primed for the occasion.

On the table in the Lamb suite reposed a bowl of animal crackers and a large Noah’s Ark.

“Don’t forget to sing,” ran the accompanying note from Brother Dug. “Love and kisses.”

The ship was now well under weigh. Several miles up the river two odd-looking characters were emerging from the pier shed – ancient Thomas and the vague-eyed half-wit, both of whom were already missing Mr. Lamb. That gentleman and Sandra were standing in the stern. Sandra was getting very close to him. They were both looking back at the wake of the ship. It was the same ship on which Mr. Lamb had once been such a disturbing stowaway. Sandra continued to cram herself against her companion. Mr. Lamb gave her a pinch of protest.

“Don’t hurl yourself at me like that,” he complained, looking nervously about him. “You’re practically sitting on my chest. I’m not an open subway door.”

Apparently Sandra did not hear him. She wedged herself even closer. Suddenly Mr. Lamb pointed to a weather-beaten old seagull raucously following the ship.

“See that old devil?” said Mr. Lamb. “Well, I think I know that gull. He asked me to eat fertilizer with him once.”

“Do you happen to know who’s aboard this ship?” asked Hebe, brightly, suddenly appearing at the rail.

“I hope not,” replied her father. “Who?”

“Sapho and Leonard Gray,” announced Hebe.

Mr. Lamb stood as if contemplating a rapid descent into the sea. Sandra seemed highly delighted by the news.

“Married or not?” she asked.

“Not,” said Hebe briefly. “Leonard doesn’t know the meaning of the word.”

“A nice ship, this,” observed Mr. Lamb.

“Where do you get off?” demanded his daughter.

Mr. Lamb turned back to the rail and gazed along the trailing wake, where the old seagull and his mob were scurrying greedily among the waves. A suggestion of a grin was beginning to gather slowly at the corners of his lips.

“Well, two can play at that game,” thought Mr. Lamb. “Or rather four … and a very amusing game it is.”

Then he addressed himself to his daughter.

“Hebe,” he said, “with your usual efficiency, will you discover if the bar is working yet?”

“Go on, Hebe,” urged Sandra. “He’s been sticking his head in and out of the smoking-room so often, the stewards think he’s trying to play peek-a-boo with them.”

And Hebe scuttled away on her edifying quest.

— THE END —

THE NIGHT LIFE
OF THE GODS

DESCRIPTION

Quirky inventor Hunter Hawk strikes gold when he invents a device enabling him to turn living matter into stone and to reverse the process at will. After a chaotic field test, he meets stunning 900-year-old Megaera, who teaches him to turn stone into flesh. They and some friends set their sights on New York City to bring the Roman gods of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to life

Dedication

To borrow from
Mr. J. B. Priestley,
this book is in gratitude
offered to a couple of
GOOD COMPANIONS
Neal and Dorothy Andrews

CHAPTER ONE

Criticizing an Explosion

The small family group gathered in the library was only conventionally alarmed by the sound of a violent explosion – a singularly self-centered sort of explosion.

“Well, thank God, that’s over,” said Mrs. Alice Pollard Lambert, swathing her sentence in a sigh intended to convey an impression of hard-pressed fortitude.

With bleak eyes she surveyed the fragments of a shattered vase. Its disastrous dive from the piano as a result of the shock had had in it something of the mad deliberation of a suicide’s plunge. Its hideous days were over now, and Mrs. Lambert was dimly aware of another little familiar something having been withdrawn from her life.

“I hope to high heaven this last one satisfies him for this spring at least,” was the petulant comment of Alfred, the male annex of Alice.

“I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting,” came a thin disembodied voice from a dark corner. “Night and day I’ve been waiting and expecting – —”

“And hoping and praying, no doubt, Grandpa,” interrupted Daphne, idly considering a run in her stocking and wondering what she was going to do about it if anything, and when would be the least boring time to do it if she did, which she doubted.

“Alice,” complained Grandpa Lambert from the security of his shadows, “that baggage has no respect for her elders.”

Stella, femininely desirable but domestically a washout, made one of her typical off-balance entrances. It started with a sort of scrambled hovering at the door, developed this into a mad dash into the room, and terminated in a tragic example of suspended animation somewhere in the immaculate neighborhood of Mrs. Alice Pollard Lambert.

“Been an explosion, ma’am,” announced Stella in a deflated voice. “Mr. Betts says so.”

“Now all you need to do is to fall dead at our feet to make the picture complete,” remarked Daphne.

“Yes, Miss Daffy,” said Stella brightly.

“And if Mr. Betts says there’s been an explosion,” Daffy continued, “then there must have been an explosion. Betts is never wrong. You go back, Stella dear, and thank him for letting us know so promptly.”

“But, Miss Daffy, what shall we do about it?” asked Stella, vainly looking for some light to guide amid the encircling gloom.

“About what, Stella?” asked Daffy.

“This explosion, miss,” and Stella extended her hands as if she were offering a young explosion for the inspection of Daphne.

“Stella,” that young lady explained with sweet but jaded patience, “one doesn’t do things about explosions. Explosions are quite competent to do things for themselves. All sorts of things. The most one can do for an explosion is to leave it entirely alone until it has decided to become a ruin. Also, you can blink at an explosion respectfully in the news reels and feel good about its ghastly results. You’ll probably gasp at this one on your night off next Thursday.” She paused, then added, “With that stout fellow Tim breathing heavily in your left ear.”

This last realistic observation was enough to effect the untidy departure of Stella.

“Oh, Miss Daffy,” was all that maiden said.

“I do wish she would refrain from calling you by that vulgar sobriquet,” said Mrs. Lambert.

“Why, Mother?” the daughter asked. “I am. Very. That’s why I like myself, and that’s why I like him. He’s daffy, too.”

She pointed in the general direction of the explosion.

“In that you’re right, for a change,” agreed her father. “He belongs in some institution. What does he mean by getting us here in this house and then having explosions all over the place? I call it downright inconsiderate.”

If Mr. Alfred Pollard Lambert had forgotten the small detail that after having lost his wife’s fortune in various business misadventures he had sought sanctuary for himself and dependents in his brother-in-law’s previously tranquil home, Daffy had not been so remiss. However, out of an innate sense of sportsmanship she rejected the opening her bumptious parent had offered her, merely contenting herself by observing:

“Well, if I had a home of my own I’d explode all over it as much as I jolly well liked. I’d explode from attic to cellar just as long as I felt the least bit explosive.”

“I know, my dear,” said her mother. “No one is saying your uncle hasn’t a perfect right to explode whenever and wherever he pleases, but you must admit there’s a certain limitation, certain restrictions of decency. One explosion, even two, we could understand and condone, but a series, a constant fusillade – it isn’t normal. Good taste alone would suggest a little less boisterous avocation and a little less dangerous one.”

“But, Mother,” protested the girl, “he has never invited any of us to participate in one of his explosions. He’s been very decent about it and kept them entirely to himself.”

“Most of these scientific johnnies are content with a couple of explosions,” said Alfred, “but your uncle is never satisfied. He seems to think that life is just one long Fourth of July.”

“The day will come,” intoned the devitalized voice from the corner. “Mark the words of an old man. The day will come when we’ll find ourselves completely blown to bits.”

This dire prediction struck Daphne as funny. She allowed herself several contemplative giggles.

“I can see it all,” she said. “A lot of bits rushing busily about in a mad scramble to find one another. Hands collecting feet, legs, livers, and such, and putting them aside in a neat pile until all the bits have been assembled. Well, I hope I don’t find some of this,” she continued, spanking herself resoundingly. “I’m getting altogether too self-assertive in that quarter.”

“Daphne!” Mrs. Lambert exclaimed. “You’re positively obscene.”

For a moment the young lady stood in rapt contemplation of some inner glory.

“I have it,” she said at last. “Listen:

“Said a certain king to his queen:

‘In spots you grow far from lean.’

‘I don’t give a damn,

You’ve always loved ham,’

She replied, and he said, ‘How obscene!’ ”

From the dark corner inhabited by Grandpa Lambert issued a strange and unexpected sound, a sound which partook of the nature of both a cough and a cackle, such a sound as might clatter from the lipless mouth of a skull well pleased by some macabre memory.

“Why, Father!” exclaimed Alfred Lambert. “You’re laughing, actually laughing.”

“And at such a thing,” added Mrs. Lambert with deep disapproval.

“Can’t help it,” wheezed the old gentleman. “Always had a weakness for limericks. Got a few of my own if I could only remember them.”

He promptly fell to brooding not uncheerfully over those lost limericks of other years.

“You old darling,” said Daffy, going over to the thin, crouched figure. “You’ve been holding out on me.”

“Disgraceful,” sniffed Alice Pollard Lambert. “Demoralizing.”

Alfred made no further comment. He had a well defined suspicion that the old chap was holding out on him something far more desirable than limericks. If he could only lay his hands on his father’s bank book. For some years now an inspection of that little book had been one of Alfred Lambert’s chief aims in life. Just one little peek was all he asked. After that he could order his conduct according to the size of the figures in the book. As things stood now he was being in all likelihood dutifully and enduringly filial without any assurance of adequate compensation. Yet there was always that chance, that slim but not impossible chance. Hellishly tantalizing for an acquisitive nature. Alfred’s was such a nature.

“There’s one about the Persians,” the old man was saying to his granddaughter. “Oh, a delightful thing, my dear child, an exquisite bit of vulgarity. Of course, I couldn’t repeat it to you. Maybe after you’re married. I’ll tell your husband, and he’ll tell you – if he’s the right sort of a husband.”

“I’m sure Alfred never sullies my ears with such indecencies,” said Mrs. Lambert with a rising inflection in her overcultured voice.

“He doesn’t get out enough,” grated the old man. “Do you both good.”

“Your suggestion, Grandpa, is the greatest inducement to matrimony I’ve ever had,” said Daphne, patting the old man’s shoulder. “I’ll look for a victim immediately.”

“A full-legged girl like yourself shouldn’t have far to look,” the old man said with an unedifying chuckle. “In my day young men had to depend almost entirely on the sense of touch in such matters. Nowadays the sense of sight seems to play a more important part. It simplifies things, perhaps, but robs courtship of a lot of adventure.”

“Disgusting!” pronounced Mrs. Lambert, then added with a view to changing the subject, “Don’t you think, Alfred, that Stella was right? Shouldn’t we do something about this explosion?”

“Perhaps,” agreed Alfred. “He usually comes out after he’s had one.”

“Rather rapidly,” remarked Daffy. “The last time he came out through the side of the house with a couple of bricks in his pants.”

“But he hates to be disturbed,” went on Mrs. Lambert. “You know how he is.”

“I know how he was,” replied Daffy. “How he is now, God only knows.”

“Perhaps it got him this time,” suggested Grandpa Lambert, not without a touch of complacency.

“Think we should go, Alfred?” asked his wife.

“Well, if that explosion failed to disturb him,” Mr. Lambert observed, “I don’t see how the intervention of mere mortals could make much of an impression. But why ask me? You’re his sister. You should know best what to do about his explosive highness.”

At this stage in the deliberations Alfred, Junior, age seventeen, lolled into the room. He tossed his hat at a chair with which it failed to connect. He thrust his hands deep into his pockets and looked ugly. He confronted his mother and began to speak in one of those voices which had it been a face one could have instinctively slapped.

“How long am I going to be made a laughing stock out of?” he demanded. “How long, I ask you?”

“If you asked me,” put in his sister, “I’d say as long as a suffering world allows you to live.”

“What is it now, darling?” Mrs. Lambert asked with cloying solicitude.

The youth laughed unpleasantly.

“You ask me that?” he exclaimed. “Does another explosion mean nothing to you? Am I to have my friends saying, ‘That loony uncle of yours has blown up his house again’? Am I to be made the butt of all the humor and wisecracks of the community? Do you know what all my friends are saying? Would you like to know?”

“No,” said Daffy. “Emphatically not.”

“Shut up, you,” snapped her brother. “They’re saying that they wouldn’t be caught dead in this house. That’s what they’re saying.”

“If they’re caught in this house they will be dead,” remarked Daffy with great decision. “I’ll jolly well blow the whole kit and boodle of ’em to smithereens.”

“Children, children,” Mrs. Lambert protested.

“We’ve got to put a stop to it, Mother,” announced Junior. “We’ve got to have a talk with him. I can’t afford to be saddled with the stigma of a mad uncle.”

“Yes, darling,” his mother agreed. “I know how you must feel.”

“Why don’t you go yourself, dearie, and have a talk with him now?” asked his sister. “Lace it into him good and proper. Give him what for. Also, a microscopic portion of your infinitesimal mind.”

“Think you’re funny, don’t you?” retorted the hope of the Lamberts.

“I do,” replied Daffy. “I am.”

“What I want to know is why does he have all these explosions?” Alfred Lambert inquired in an injured voice. “Are they essential to his happiness? What is he trying to prove, anyway?”

“Cellular petrification through atomic combustion,” quoted Daphne weightily, “and vice versa. It’s highly electrical and can be, when it feels like it, no end smelly.”

“And noisy,” came from the corner.

“I’ll tell you what let’s do,” suggested Mr. Lambert with the verve of one who has just conceived a bright and original idea. “Let’s all go see him.”

“Why not?” replied Daffy with a slight shrug.

“All but me,” amended Grandpa Lambert. “I’ll sit here and think up limericks. It’s safer.”

“And naughtier,” said Daffy as she led the way from the room. “Horrid old man.”

“Wanton,” he retorted.

CHAPTER TWO

Blotto’s Tail Astounds

From the method of progress employed by the Lambert family, one would have gained the impression that the correct way to approach an explosion was on tiptoe. There was something reverential yet subduedly daring about the small procession as it silently moved down the long hallway leading to the laboratory. It was as if its members were preparing themselves to gaze upon the face of an important but erratic corpse.

Daphne alone of the expedition’s personnel was sincerely concerned about the safety of her uncle. She had no desire to find him scattered all over the place. Daphne was fond of her uncle. He constituted the larger part of her world – the more inhabitable part. Without him she would be thrust back into the narrow confines of her immediate family. Under such circumstances, she felt, life would hardly be worth the effort. Hunter Hawk was for her an escape and a revelation. He appealed to her imagination and added a small dash of color to her rather empty days. She entertained for him the healthily selfish devotion of her twenty-one years, the majority of which, she decided, had been shamefully wasted – the years before she had been brought to live in Hunter Hawk’s home. Yet she was well aware of the fact that he was not much of an uncle. He was neither whimsical, dashing, nor debauched, one of which, at least, she had gained from her voracious reading, an uncle had to be, or else he was hardly any sort of an uncle at all. It was only on rare occasions that this uncle of hers realized she was alive. For the most part he went silently about his wondering way and did strange and mysterious things with impossible-looking instruments in the privacy of his laboratory. Occasionally he indulged in an explosion. Daphne had come to believe that what a periodical binge meant to some men these explosions meant to her uncle. They served to relieve his feelings, and she was surprised at his moderation in confining them to only one section of the house. Quite frequently Daphne Lambert felt like blowing up the entire neighborhood, especially that part of it which at the time chanced to be inhabited by her mother, father, and brother.

Sometimes she would catch her uncle looking at her with an expression of mild astonishment in his dark, biting, and invariably delving eyes. Whenever this occurred, the girl for some inexplicable reason experienced a sensation of inner elation. There was always something maliciously challenging in his gaze, some derogatory reservation. She more than a little suspected that since the ruthless incursion of her family he had dimly felt that his home had been more or less taken away from him and that this side of bloodshed he was unable to figure out just what to do about it. Also she suspected that Hunter Hawks almost constantly carried about with him great quantities of violent yet unexpressed exasperation engendered by his sister, her husband, and their son. The three of them were enough to do terrible things to the most loosely constructed system of nerves.

Between her grandfather and her uncle there seemed to exist a sort of acrimonious bond of sympathy. True enough, the old man would have gladly seen him dead and welcomed the occasion as a pleasant interlude in the monotonous march of time. However, this meant nothing. The old man would have welcomed virtually anyone’s death with the exception of his own. His son, his daughter-in-law, and the horrid results of their combined efforts to create an heir in the semblance of man he heartily detested. He had been forced to listen to their conversation for too many years. For Daphne he entertained the envious regard of the unregenerate and senile male.

This young lady now paused with her hand on the knob of the laboratory door.

“Perhaps we should have brought a basket,” she suggested as she grimly surveyed the expectant faces.

“How can you!” exclaimed her mother in a tremulous voice.

The girl threw open the door, and the four of them stood gazing in upon the wreck of the laboratory. It was a long, high raftered apartment filled with more than enough instruments and paraphernalia to satiate the lust for descriptive detail of an avalanche of Sinclair Lewises.

There were several long tables supporting innumerable objects only remotely connected with life. Much of the equipment Hunter Hawk had been forced to devise himself. There were test tubes, Bunsen burners, pressure tanks, dynamos, mixing slabs, and all sorts of electrical appliances. In fact, almost everything seemed to be in that laboratory except a vacuum cleaner and Hunter Hawk himself. Most of the objects now lay smashed and twisted on the floor. It was like the disintegration of a bad dream. All of the windows were shattered, and innumerable jars and bottles carpeted the floor with their fragments. Heavy, evil-smelling clouds of gaseous vapor drifted casually about the room, while through these clouds from time to time appeared various bits of wreckage.

At the far end of the room a small but intense white light streaming from a huge wire-filled glass tube was splashing its rays against a silver ball about the size of an adult pea. From the other end of this tube a green light of equal intensity was treating another little silver ball in a like manner. These balls were poised about one foot from the floor at the ends of two thin rods. How they retained their positions during the violence of the explosion remains one of the many mysteries that Hunter Hawk never saw any occasion to elucidate.

“It must have blown the poor chap clean through one of the windows,” remarked Mr. Lambert at last, in an awed but hopeful voice. “No man could have lived through such a shock as that must have been.”

“Poor, poor Hunter,” murmured the exploded one’s sister. “We did everything we could to discourage him, but he would persist. I knew this would happen someday.”

She hesitated and looked appraisingly about the long room. An acquisitive light was growing in her eyes.

“This place could easily be made into a perfectly charming lounge and breakfast room,” she unconsciously mused aloud. “Long yellow drapes and the right sort of furniture. We might even try this modern stuff for a change.”

“Make a bang-up billiard room,” commented Alfred Lambert with a trace of wistfulness in his voice. “I could entertain my friends here.”

“Say, Mom,” demanded Junior, his tongue growing thick with anticipation, “does it all come to us – the house and the money and everything?”

“Everything,” replied Mrs. Lambert with crisp finality. “All. I am his next of kin.”

“You’re his only of kin, aren’t you?” her husband demanded in sudden alarm.

“I am,” said Mrs. Lambert complacently. “The poor boy’s only sister. Of course, there’s Daphne and Junior.”

“Then that settles that,” said Mr. Lambert with obvious relief. “No legal complications. Lucky for us he never married, eh, my boy?”

Mr. Lambert slapped his son jovially on the back.

“Lucky for some poor girl,” was Junior’s bright reply.

A sound like a strangled sob, only more frustrated and inarticulate, drifted weirdly through the room.

“Did anyone hear that?” Alice Lambert demanded with a startled light in her eyes.

Apparently no one had.

“Must have been the wind,” replied her husband impatiently. “Now what about the size of his estate, roughly speaking?”

Daphne had been peering through the various broken windows in the hope of finding her uncle or some part of her uncle.

“Of course,” she remarked, sensing the drift of the conversation as she approached the self-congratulatory little group, “it will be necessary for you to produce the body before you can claim the estate. Anyone who knows his R. Austin Freeman even sketchily must realize that corpus delicti is one of the first essentials.”

“My God!” Alfred exclaimed. “Daphne’s right. We’ve forgotten all about the body.”

“And perhaps there still flickers within it a small glimmer of life,” said Daffy. “What then?”

At this uncongenial suggestion Alfred’s cheerful face darkened perceptibly.

“He couldn’t possibly have lived through this,” he replied, as if striving to reassure himself. “It wouldn’t be normal.”

“He never was normal,” Mrs. Lambert observed gloomily.

A furious chattering sound suddenly broke out somewhere above in the smoke-draped rafters. It was almost animal in its inability to express the full burden of its emotions.

Daphne’s heart skidded round several sharp corners and came up with a thump against her ribs. A triumphant smile lighted up her face as she gazed aloft. Her mother, father, and brother stood looking at one another in guilty desolation. Each was trying to recall exactly what had been said and exactly who had said it. A heavy reluctance now weighted their tongues which only a moment ago had wagged so glibly. With an effort they brought themselves to follow the direction of Daffy’s delighted gaze. A gas cloud drifted away revealing the long, lean, angular body of Hunter Hawk precariously draped on a rafter. It was like the unveiling of a statue of impotent rage. The man’s mouth was opening and shutting without any apparent reason. Every time he endeavored to bring gesticulation to the aid of speech he lost his balance and nearly fell from his perch. The frantic clutching necessary to restore his equilibrium served only to increase the violence of his anger. Exhausted at last by the uselessness of his efforts he fell face forward on the rafter and lay there panting.

His straight black hair fell in a dank shingle over his left eye. He made no effort to remove the obstruction but gazed balefully down at them with his free one. It was big, black, and smoldering. An expression of utter weariness lay across his tanned, deeply lined face. Sweat beaded his forehead. His hollow cheeks were unbecomingly dappled with dark smudges. There was a large rent in the right sleeve of his jacket. It hung down over his hand and interfered with his grip on the rafter. This had added to his irritation. He had now abandoned all effort to keep the sleeve up and was grasping the rafter through it. His large, ungainly nose showed evidence of having recently bled. In his present state of disrepair he looked many years over the thirty-seven that rightfully belonged to him.

“Oh, Hunter,” his sister began with a desperate rush. “You’ve made us all so anxious. We were just – —”

“Yellow drapes,” he gritted.

“Yes, my boy,” Alfred cut in throatily. “Thank God you’re alive and safe. I was beginning to fear – —”

“Billiards! Billiards!” Hawk spluttered. “Ha!”

He fixed Junior with his one clear eye and proceeded to bore into the very marrow of that uneasy youth.

“Go on!” he said in a dead voice. “Go on, you little nit. Make your speech. It’s your turn. Tell me some more about that lucky girl I didn’t marry.”

Junior dropped his gaze and became absorbed in contemplating the extreme tips of his collegiate sport shoes.

“Don’t know what you’re driving at,” he mumbled.

“I’ll drive at you if I ever get down from this rafter,” said his uncle.

Daffy grinned her appreciation. Her uncle darted a one-eyed glance at her, then disconcertingly closed that eye. It immediately snapped open again and came to rest on his sister.

“Now don’t start in on Junior,” she began defensively. “You’ve upset us enough as it is for one day – you and your silly explosions. The whole neighborhood is talking about it. Isn’t it about time you gave up this sort of thing?”

“Yes, Hunter,” spoke up Alfred, emboldened by his wife’s words. “You’re subjecting us all to danger, you know. My boy here says his friends are laughing at him now – the nephew of a mad uncle.”

“Oh-o-o-o-o,” mouthed Mr. Hawk, unable to form words, “Oh-o-o-o – down – down – I wanna – at him.”

His poorly expressed wish was almost granted. Mrs. Lambert uttered a little cry as he swayed perilously on his rafter. Junior placed a hand on his father’s arm and tried to strike an attitude of outraged youth. The room became quiet save for the gasping of its presiding deity on the rafter. He rallied gamely, however, and made an effort to pull himself together.

“Oh, shut up,” he said at last, somewhat inanely inasmuch as no one was saying a thing at the moment. “Shut up and go away somewhere. Go soak your heads. Get the hell out of here, or I’ll blow the whole damn house up. Daffy, you stay with me.”

“Well, I must say this is hardly the treatment one would expect after all our trouble and anxiety,” Mrs. Lambert announced huffily.

“Yellow drapes,” shouted her brother. “Modern furniture. Bah! Nothing goes to you. Not a plugged nickel.”

His sister hastily swallowed a projected retort and, closely accompanied by her son and husband, sailed majestically from the room. They were altogether too wise in the ways of life to attempt to enroll the sympathies of Daphne or to coerce her to join the ranks of the insulted and injured. After all, Hunter Hawk was tremendously wealthy in his own name, and he did seem to be rather fond of his niece, the least lovable member of the family. It was just like him. Now, if only it had been Junior …

“Hello, aloft,” called Daffy as soon as the door was closed, “do you want me to get you a ladder? I know where one lives. A long one. Betts could help.”

“A ladder,” repeated Mr. Hawk, blinking down at her. “I don’t like ladders. I don’t trust ladders. And if Betts gets a look at this room he’ll make remarks. I can stand no more remarks. No. No ladder. Don’t need one.”

“Would you care to have some dinner flung up at you and a couple of sheets for tonight?”

“I’m coming down directly.”

“How, down?”

“Listen,” said the scientist ingratiatingly. “It’s all very simple. There’s no occasion for any excitement or rushing about. I hate excitement and rushing about.”

“I suppose being blown about is an entirely different matter?”

“It is. I don’t choose to be blown about, you know. In spite of what the rest of your family says, I really have no fondness for explosions. They are merely the less agreeable results of scientific research.”

“Don’t be an old hypocrite. You know perfectly well you couldn’t get along without your explosions.”

“I’m afraid I won’t be able to get along very much longer with them. But, listen. I’ve figured it all out. It’s simplicity itself. All you have to do is to come over here and stand directly beneath this rafter. Then I’ll drop my feet down to your shoulders …”

“And then?” inquired Daffy.

“And then?” here a rather vague, covering note crept into his voice. “And then we’ll manage to get down the rest of the way without the aid of the ladder.”

“What do you mean by ‘we’? You’re the one on a rafter, not I.”

“I realize that,” said her uncle amicably. “And I’m depending on you to do something constructive about it. Come on over here, Daffy. You’re a great, strong, strapping young girl. You can get me down somehow. Come on over.”

Daffy, with the resignation of one accustomed to temporize with inebriates, children, and maniacs, placed herself beneath the rafter occupied by her uncle.

“I hope to God your divine confidence isn’t misplaced,” she remarked.

“Everything will be all right,” Mr. Hawk assured her as, with the reckless abandon of a man who has little left to live for, he heavily dropped his large feet upon Daphne’s shrinking shoulders and released his hold on the rafter. The celerity with which this maneuver was performed took the girl entirely by surprise.

“What goes on? What goes on?” she managed to get out as she strove to keep her knees from buckling beneath her.

“Stop prancing about like that,” the man of science complained. “This is no time for larking.”

“Larking,” came painfully from between the girl’s clenched teeth. “Lolling about, why don’t you say?”

After this there was no more conversation for some moments, packed with intense anxiety for the fluctuating Mr. Hawk. The silence of the room was broken only by the sound of unsteadily shuffling feet, a flight of staccato grunts, and several long, tremulous sighs.

“Well,” gasped Daffy bitterly. “What are you going to do, live there?”

“Damn it all, what can I do? You’ve got a strangle hold on both my ankles.” Hawk’s voice was equally bitter. “Can’t you crouch down gradually?”

“Oh, God, what a man,” groaned his niece and collapsed unconditionally to the wreck-strewn floor of the laboratory beneath yard after yard of unupholstered uncle.

“Didn’t hurt me at all,” he announced triumphantly as he uncoiled great lengths of himself from the small of Daffy’s back. “How did you make out?”

“Not at all well,” replied Daffy. “Rather poorly, if you must know. But I’m glad it didn’t hurt you. Would you like to try it again?”

“It saved all the bother of getting the ladder, anyway.”

“You certainly must loathe ladders to subject another human being to such brutal punishment,” replied the girl. “Did you ever get into any trouble with a ladder?”

With another unladylike grunt she rolled over and struggled to a sitting position beside her uncle.

“Well,” she observed, surveying him critically, “you must be a tough son of a gun to have come through that alive.”

“Do I look all mussed?” asked Mr. Hawk.

“You’re not quite at your best,” she replied.

“I’d like to see you after an explosion,” said Hawk.

“You see enough of me as it is,” answered Daffy. “After a thing like that you’d see too much.”

Hunter Hawk gazed about the laboratory with professional interest.

“This is about the best yet,” he remarked philosophically.

“It is, Hunter. It is. You should feel greatly encouraged. This is about the biggest thing you’ve done so far in the way of explosions.”

“Thanks, Daffy. Wonder what became of Blotto? The poor beast was here when the thing happened.”

“If it blew you up to the rafters, Blotto must be well on his way to Mars.”

“Hate to have anything happen to Blotto,” said Hunter. “Here, boy, where are you? Blotto, you dumb clown!”

From a corner of the room came the sound of diligent scraping. Presently the head of an animal not totally unlike a dog, yet far from being the living image of one, cautiously appeared above the rim of a table. With deep suspicion two black beady eyes studied the pair on the floor. A moist nose quivered delicately as it sniffed the malodorous air. One tan ear pointed starchily aloft. The other, a soiled white, was not doing nearly so well. The farthest north it was able to achieve was a rakishly tilted flop. As the dog shifted his gaze and looked about the laboratory something like an expression of dismay came into its eyes.

“He doesn’t like it at all,” commented Hunter. “Come here, Blotto, for a minute.”

Blotto placed two putty-like paws on the edge of the table, let go of them, and allowed their weight to drag his rump into view. It was a most disreputable-looking rump, shaggy, unenterprising, and hurriedly patched here and there with odd scraps of black and tan. There was a large tail on the extreme end of it, a willowy object composed chiefly of hair and burrs. Originally it had been white.

When Blotto had finally surmounted the obstruction he undulated across the room and stood looking inquiringly into his master’s face. Hunter took the dog in his arms and felt him carefully, while Blotto, with his tongue sprawling out, gazed from his inverted position at Daffy, the whites of his eyes unpleasantly displayed. Releasing the low-geared, supine creature, Hawk arose and stretched his long legs.

“No bones broken,” he announced.

“All bones broken,” said Daffy, “and flesh bruised.”

She followed his example.

Blotto, as if trying to satisfy himself as to exactly what had happened, ranged busily about the room. His tour of inspection completed, he stood at the far end of the laboratory and wagged his tail in appreciation of the fact that he was still alive. Suddenly and most disconcertingly for everybody concerned, but much more so for Blotto, of course, the mop-like appendage refused to wag. For one brief moment it had dipped its extreme tip into the rays of the white light on its blinding passage to the little silver ball.

“Look!” exclaimed Daffy, pointing at the dog. “Something has happened to Blotto.”

Something had happened to Blotto. To be exact, something had happened to Blotto’s tail, but just what it was the astounded dog was unable to figure out. Concentrating what little power he had on this recalcitrant member, he strove desperately to make it perform its proper functions. Not a wag. Not even a quiver. An expression of sharp anxiety sprang into Blotto’s eyes. He cocked his head over his shoulder and thoughtfully scrutinized his tail. Yes. He could tell at a glance that there was something radically wrong with it. It neither looked the same nor felt the same. Instead of the white, fluffy brush in which he was wont to take so much pride, the tail was now a formidable, implacable looking club. Not one hair that contributed its quota of glory to the tout ensemble even so much as stirred. It might as well have been a thing of stone, bereft of life and purpose. And the affair was heavy, decidedly heavier than could be conveniently managed. Obviously it was no sort of tail to go carrying about with one. Apart from the ill conceived merriment it would evoke, there was the question of fatigue. Would he be forced to remain in one place because of an abnormal tail? Were his amorous excursions at an end? Competition, God knows, was close enough, but with such a tail – impossible!

Unwilling to entertain this tragic thought, the overwrought Blotto made a final effort. This time he completely reversed the familiar order of the operation. Instead of wagging his tail he violently wagged himself. Behind him the tail swung ponderously, so ponderously in fact, that Blotto was thrown off his balance and was forced to do some pretty clever footwork to keep from falling over. This was just a little too much for the dog. He sat down heavily and washed his hands of the tail. But Blotto was to discover that no dog can completely wash its hands of its tail. His, for example, clattered noisily on the floor behind him. The dog looked seriously disturbed. He stealthily curved his head back over his shoulder and approached his shrinking nose to the tail. Then with a great effort he touched it with the extreme tip of his tongue. To his horror he discovered that it was as cold and unresponsive as a stone. He suspected it was a stone.

It speaks well for the dog’s strength of character that in spite of his obvious disinclination to have anything further to do with that tail he pursued his investigations to the end. With a tentative paw he reached back and gently pushed the unnatural manifestation. The noise it made as it scraped across the floor caused him hurriedly to avert his eyes. Blotto was sweating. His gaze sought his master. If he wanted a dog with a stone tail it was up to him to do something about it – put it on wheels or something. Blotto could do no more.

“By all the gods,” said Hawk in a hushed voice, “I believe I’ve done it at last, Daffy.”

“What have you done now?”

“Turned that dog’s tail into a statue, or at least, a part of a statue.”

“I never knew that turning the tails of dogs into statues was one of your aims in life.”

“You don’t quite understand. I have succeeded in achieving complete cellular petrification through atomic disintegration.”

“You mean Blotto has.”

“Observe,” continued Hawk, seizing the outraged dog and holding him upside down. “Isn’t it a beauty? Regard that tail. As if carved by a sculptor’s hand. The white ray turns it to stone. The green one changes it back to its normal state. I can now make both rays invisible and retain the same action.”

“I think Blotto would appreciate a slight dash of green,” said Daffy. “I know I would, under the circumstances.”

“I’ll fix him up in a minute,” said Hawk enthusiastically.

He turned and dipped the dog’s tail into the green ray. Instantly, and to Blotto’s intense relief, the tail returned to its former unlovely state. Hawk then set the dog on its legs. For a moment Blotto regarded his restored member reproachfully. What had the damn thing been doing with itself anyway – trying to make its owner look foolish? Then Blotto did a very silly thing. He viciously bit his tail. The sudden yelp of pain and indignation arising from this shortsighted attempt at retaliation eloquently testified to the complete success of the restoration. Then, with a sudden revulsion of spirit for which he was noted, Blotto bounded to his feet and performed hitherto unachieved altitudes in the line of wagging. It would be just as well, he decided, to register his satisfaction with his tail as it was, or else the same misfortune might overtake it again.

Thus did Blotto, a dog of low and irregular birth, contribute to one of the most spectacular discoveries of modern science.

“I hate to seem to fly so unceremoniously into your ointment,” remarked Daffy, “but now that you’ve got it what are you going to do with it?”

For a moment Hunter Hawk’s face went perfectly blank.

“What am I going to do with it?” he repeated slowly. “Why, I hadn’t thought about that.”

“Well, you’d better begin to think about it.”

“Right off, for one thing,” he said, his face clearing and a malicious light gleaming in his dark eyes, “we can have a bit of fun with it.”

“Nice man,” remarked Daffy, for the first time permitting herself to smile. “Lovely character. And just for a bit of fun you’ve been cheerfully blowing yourself to pieces for God knows how many years.”

Mr. Hawk looked at her broodingly.

“You know what happened to Blotto’s tail?” he asked her.

“I’ll never quite forget,” replied Daffy. “Neither will Blotto.”

“Well,” continued Hawk, looking warningly at what he was thinking about, “if you don’t want to chip when you sit down you’d better keep a respectful tongue in your head, or I’ll splash yours with a dash of white.”

“Sweet scientist,” said Daffy. “Lofty mind.”

CHAPTER THREE

Reluctant Statues

“Finished?” asked Daffy.

“Finished,” replied Hawk. “Finished in spite of the fact that for the past three quarters of an hour you have been breathing with monotonous regularity on the back of my neck.”

“I was so interested,” the girl explained.

“And well you should be, my girl,” said her uncle. “You have been privileged to witness the most unusual scientific discovery of all times, compared to which the Egyptians with their jolly old mummies were slapdash morticians. I do not claim that it is a useful discovery, but even you will have to admit it’s a most diverting one.”

“Yes,” agreed Daffy. “It offers no end of pleasing possibilities.”

“Practically inexhaustible,” said Hawk. “I am contemplating one right now.”

He turned to his work bench and picked up the two rings on which he had been working. In each ring was deeply imbedded one of the small silver balls most potently charged with its remarkable properties.

“I have merely to direct the rays emanating from this ring,” he continued, “at any living object and that object, whether man or beast, will immediately be turned to stone. A slight pressure of the finger on the back of the ring is all that is required to release the ray. With this ring I can achieve either partial or complete petrification. For example, I could turn your left leg to stone if I felt so inclined.”

“Think of something else,” said Daffy.

“Now with this one,” resumed her uncle, “I can restore the subject or subjects to their former state of cellular elasticity, which in this world is none too happy. I dare say there are many persons who would consider it a favor just to be allowed to remain things of stone forever.”

He paused and considered the rings with a dreamy expression in his eyes, then shifted his gaze to the girl.

“You,” he said, “would make a lovely statue. I could keep you in the garden. Might even make a fountain out of you.”

“You mean, let me stay out there winter and summer in the rain and snow and all?”

“Certainly. Why not? Are you particularly pleased with your present state?”

“No,” admitted Daffy. “My present dull mode of existence is not an enviable one, but your alternative is even less attractive.”

“For the present, then,” said Hunter Hawk, “we shall keep the idea under consideration. There are other things to do.”

“Yes,” replied Daffy. “Let’s do them all before we take up the matter of the fountain.”

“Good,” said her uncle. “On second thought you might make a better sundial or rustic bench.”

“Sure,” put in Daffy hastily. “There are ever so many things. If I wasn’t so large you could make an ash tray or a book end out of me.”

“Out of part of you,” corrected Mr. Hawk. “Such utilitarian articles can be easily devised with a little chiseling and hacking here and there. Take Blotto’s tail, for instance. I could easily have cracked it off and made a paper weight out of it, a most attractive paper weight. The same could be done – —”

“I do wish you’d lay off this constant association of that hound’s tail with my own personal anatomy,” Daphne protested.

“As I remember it,” replied her uncle, “you were the first to suggest the comparison.”

“Well, I’m sick of the subject now,” said Daffy. “Let’s leave out tails altogether.”

“It might be just as well,” observed Mr. Hawk. “Would you like me to explain to you the fundamental principle on which this monumental discovery is based? There is a complicated part and a simple part, but they are so inextricably mixed that the whole thing becomes amazingly confusing. Some of it I’ve forgotten myself. To be quite frank I’m not altogether clear in my mind yet as to just what has happened. The explosion has left me a trifle dazed.”

“I think we might profitably omit any attempt to understand the fundamental principles of this, as you say, diverting discovery of yours,” said Daffy, “and put them to a practical demonstration instead.”

“As you like,” replied Mr. Hawk. “Go now and tell your mother, father, brother, and grandfather that I would like to have a word with them in the library. I have stood quite enough.”

As the girl departed on her mission the scientist slipped one of the rings on the index finger of his right hand and the other one on his left. Had he realized at the moment the ultimate outcome of what he was doing it is barely possible that he might have hesitated, or at least thought twice about it, but in the end it would have made no difference. Destiny had made arrangements for a radical change in the even tenor of Hunter Hawk’s days at this time. If it had not come to him in one way, it would have come to him in another. Nothing that he could do now could retain for him the cloistered, unworldly order of things. Mr. Hawk, had he but known it, was already well launched on his last and greatest discovery – woman and all of the complications she trails in her wake.

At thirty-seven Hunter Hawk was still rather a decent, unspoiled character. Although there was not one handsome feature in the composition of his face – save perhaps his eyes – the general effect was not displeasing. He was tall, lean, untidily crumpled, and permanently stained about the fingers. His disposition was evenly somber, and he had an infinite capacity for quietly but thoroughly disliking a great many persons and things. His laboratory was his life. It also served as a means of shutting out life. In it he moped, puttered, dreamed, and experimented most of his days away. He belonged to several scientific societies, and occasionally contributed to scientific quarterlies and reviews. By his fellow scientists he was considered a brilliant but erratic worker. This was perhaps due to the fact that he approached his researches with a certain element of humor.

“Wouldn’t it be amusing if I could do this?” he would say to himself, and then devote much time and money endeavoring to find out how funny it would be. Quite frequently he would discover that it was not funny at all, whereupon he would abandon his experiments and be greatly upset for several days. He was fully satisfied that his latest discovery was the funniest thing he had done so far and, also, the most important. It was much funnier than the dissolving safety razor blade he had invented as a result of a wager with a certain derisive column conductor.

Until the arrival of his sister, Mrs. Alice Pollard Lambert, and her family, he had lived contentedly alone under the proprietorial management of Mr. and Mrs. Betts, two nice old creatures who knew a great deal more about Mr. Hawk’s infantile explosions than the scientist did himself. Daphne had compensated him in part for the punishment involved in being forced to associate with his sister, his brother-in-law and nephew. Old man Lambert he could understand and appreciate.

Hunter Hawk’s chief relaxation was tramping about the countryside and not acknowledging the salutations of his neighbors. He felt much more at home with strangers, and made many chance acquaintances by the roadside. Although he had little to do with women, he had an alert and observant eye and was able to distinguish with unerring accuracy between a possible and a probable. He would have made an eminently successful rake. Occasionally he would mix himself strange potions in the privacy of his laboratory and become slightly inebriated. At these times he could be heard to sing, yet no one, not even Betts, had ever been able to tell the name of the song. He was a strange, wrong-headed, acidulous man with a sardonic sense of humor which he kept for the most part to himself. He was fond of Blotto and Daffy in almost the same way. Both amused him. Because of his wealth and scientific prestige he was much sought after in the community in which he lived, but seldom gotten. His money alone lent warmth to his anti-social nature. He was not essentially a selfish man, but so far he had lived an entirely self-centered existence.

He now rose, and going to a wash basin, effaced the marks of the explosion. After sketchily combing his hair he donned a more presentable jacket and left the laboratory. As he made his way to the library he was more elated over his discovery than he cared to admit even to himself. It was stupendous, and he knew it.

“There is no need to apologize,” his sister began when he had slouched into the room. “That explosion must have upset you.”

“I know there’s no need,” he answered, his white teeth glittering wolfishly against the dark background of his face. “Nor any occasion.”

“Of course, if you feel that way,” she began.

“I do,” he interrupted. “Very much that way. Let’s drop the subject. I have no desire to add to the almost general disappointment arising from my inconsiderate escape from death.”

“You told Daphne you had something to say to us,” Alfred Lambert suggested.

“I have. Better still, I have something to do to you – the successful results of more than seven years of research and experimentation. Inasmuch as you all have suffered somewhat from these experiments, I have decided that you are at least entitled to be the first to witness the conclusive demonstration of my discovery. I may even allow you to take an important part in it.”

“Very nice of you, I’m sure,” Mrs. Lambert murmured.

“Mother, may I borrow Uncle Hunter’s roadster?” demanded Junior in his high whine of a voice.

“No,” replied Uncle Hunter, “you may not. I want you here – you especially.”

He looked grimly at his nephew, whose gaze speedily sought the carpet in an effort to avoid the pent-up hostility blazing in his uncle’s eyes.

“Now, listen,” continued Hawk. “I have at last achieved complete cellular petrification through atomic combustion or disintegration. How I have achieved this incredible thing would overtax my capacity to explain and yours to understand. The important part is that I have done it. From now on there will be no more explosions. As a matter of fact, this house is going to be a quieter and happier place.”

He paused to consider his small audience with a disconcertingly enigmatic smile.

“Much quieter than it ever was before,” he went on. “Much, much quieter. It will be like a museum at midnight, if that means anything to you.”

“I knew you’d be reasonable once we had spoken to you,” said Mrs. Lambert uneasily. “But, Hunter dear, you don’t have to go to extremes. We can stand a certain amount of noise, and after all, Junior is still a boy. We can’t expect him – —”

“He’s going to be the quietest one of all,” Hunter interrupted grimly.

Junior’s scared eyes instinctively sought his mother’s. Mrs. Lambert smiled reassuringly.

“It’s one of your uncle’s jokes, darling,” she said. “You know how he is.”

Junior was afraid that he knew only too well how his uncle was.

“Well, I’m delighted to hear that you’ve got hold of something at last,” said Alfred Lambert heartily. “Has your discovery any commercial value? If so, my experience in promoting products and organizing companies is freely at your disposal.”

“Thanks,” replied Mr. Hawk dryly. “Wait and see.”

The voice of old man Lambert came querulously from the corner.

“No nonsense, now, young man,” it said. “I don’t like all this. I don’t like that look in your eye. It’s a mean look. I’ve seen it there before.”

“You have nothing to fear,” replied the scientist. “You’re practically petrified now as it is.”

“Too much so,” complained the old man. “I don’t want to be any more than I am.”

Hunter Hawk advanced into the center of the room.

“I am now going to turn myself into a human statue,” he announced. “This is the first time it has ever been done. To all intents and purposes I shall be a thing of stone although retaining my mental faculties. Only my left hand will escape petrification. I shall need that to restore myself to the bosom of my devoted family.”

“Half a moment,” interrupted Daffy. “Suppose that left hand doesn’t work? What do you want me to do then?”

“Chip me up into small pieces and fling my remains at the neighbors,” Hawk replied. “Be sure you hit them.”

“Not a bad idea, that,” said the girl.

“Horrible,” breathed Mrs. Lambert.

A tremulous chuckle came from the corner. Grandfather Lambert was amused.

Hunter Hawk, arranging his features in a malevolent grin, folded his arms and, pressing the ring on his right hand, allowed the invisible rays to pass through his body. It was a delicate piece of work. He had to be extremely careful not to overdo it. Later, when he became more familiar with the action of the rays, he would know exactly how much his body could stand. At present he had no data from which to judge.

The effect of the ray was almost instantaneous. The terrible grin became fixed and solidified on Mr. Hawk’s face. His body stiffened and turned to the color of marble. Even his clothing became white and ridged under the influence of the powerful ray.

Mrs. Lambert gave a gasp of horror as she looked at her brother’s face.

“Now he will kill us all,” she said. “His face is the face of a murderer. Look at it.”

“I can’t keep from looking at it,” replied Alfred Lambert, “but God knows I don’t want to. The only comforting thought is that if he’s right in what he was saying he’s more helpless now than ever before.”

“Then why don’t you knock his head off and say it was an accident?” suggested the old man.

A small but ominous rumble seemed to drop from the distorted lips of the statue.

“Oh, my God!” The words came from Alice Lambert, and they were nothing if not sincere. “Did anyone hear that?”

“I heard a very disagreeable something,” replied her husband.

“You heard him,” she declared, dramatically pointing at the hard-shelled Mr. Hawk. “It’s just the sound he would make if he turned into a statue – a disturbing, sinister sound.”

“Perhaps the beggar can hear you,” suggested the ancient Lambert.

Alice Lambert shivered slightly.

“If he can,” she replied, “I think it’s downright indecent of him.”

“Why does he have to look that way?” whined Junior. “Do you think he’s gone mad?”

“I suspect he has always been mad,” said Alice Lambert.

Once more the diminutive rumble rolled from the statue’s lips. In it there was a note of warning.

At this moment Blotto, with the air of a strolling player, ambled into the room. He gave one look at his inanimate master, then showed the whites of his eyes and sat down heavily. A loud lament ascended to the ceiling from his elevated muzzle. The dog seemed to realize that the same misfortune had overtaken his best friend that had temporarily deprived him of the use of his own tail. Only in the case of his master it was much more so.

The howling of the dog did not add to the general merriment of the situation. Once more Mrs. Lambert shivered. Even Daffy became a little worried.

“For the love of Pete, dog,” she exclaimed, “take that to a graveyard somewhere, won’t you?”

Evidently Blotto wouldn’t. His place was beside his master. He strained his throat desperately in another display of grief. This dismal cadence was interrupted by the tense arrival of Stella with the tea things. The sight of so much food made the dog thoughtful. When had he last eaten? When would he ever eat again? Perhaps Daffy might be prevailed upon to do something about it. He glanced significantly in her direction.

As for Stella, that comely maid was in great trouble. One look at Mr. Hawk had been sufficient to convince her that something was radically unorthodox in his appearance. After receiving the full force of the hellish smile on his twisted lips she froze in her tracks and outwardly became as much of a statue as he was. It seems unfortunate that at this moment Mr. Alfred Lambert nerved himself to investigate this miraculous phenomenon. Leaving the comfortable security of the lounge, he approached the statue with the alert trepidation of an explorer drawing near an unknown shore. With a reluctant forefinger he pushed Mr. Hawk in the neighborhood of his diaphragm. A ghostly grunt emerged from the depth of the statue. Mr. Lambert hastily withdrew his finger. Stella, retaining her rigidity, began to breathe heavily.

“As hard as a rock,” announced Mr. Lambert. “He couldn’t have felt it.”

“No, but he knew it,” his wife replied.

“If he ever hits you a clip with one of those stone fists of his there’ll be one less Lambert left to trouble my days,” Alfred’s father remarked. “Here, why don’t you use my stick?”

The unpleasant possibility embodied in the old man’s words effected a watchful retreat on the part of his son. When he returned to his investigation of his petrified brother-in-law he was in possession of a stout stick heavily mounted with a silver knob. With this he briskly tapped the statue. The statue responded with a hollow sound. What Mr. Hawk had accomplished only after seven years of dangerous and laborious experimenting Stella now accomplished through the simple medium of fear. She became perfectly white, her eyes became fixed in her head, and an expression of suffering congealed on her face. A stranger entering the room would have been tempted to applaud her warmly for her realistic impersonation of a statue. Once more Alfred Lambert tapped the man of stone, this time on his nose. The result of this was a cold click followed by a faint sneeze. Then the statue spoke and said in a far-off, eerie voice:

“Not on the nose, you fool,” it said. “Tap hard enough for experimental purposes, but for God’s sake don’t chip me.”

“Saints preserve us!” came from the numbed lips of Stella. “The thing will be moving next.”

She abandoned all further responsibility for the safety of the tray and its burden and allowed it to drop on Blotto. For the dog it was like manna descending from heaven or the gentle dropping of dew. He escaped the hot water and found himself virtually surrounded by sandwiches. Amid the confusion resulting from Stella’s unconsidered action Blotto sat and did what he decided was the wisest thing under the circumstances. He expeditiously consumed sandwiches. When order had been restored the company was amazed to see Hunter Hawk comfortably seated on the floor beside his dog and greedily wolfing down a large piece of cake while deftly snatching a sandwich from under Blotto’s disgruntled nose.

“That sort of thing makes one hungry,” he announced. “You see, I gave myself only a surface treatment. My material processes continued to function. Well, what do you think of it?”

“All very well for a side show,” remarked his sister, “but hardly the sort of thing one would expect at tea time.”

“A bit of devil work, it was,” murmured Stella.

“It was very good,” commended old man Lambert. “Very good indeed. I only regret I wasn’t able to take a whack at you myself.”

Hawk looked up with a grin.

“I heard your thoughtful suggestion,” he said.

The old fellow chuckled wickedly.

“I meant it, too,” he replied.

“It’s all very interesting,” said Alfred, “but I can’t see any commercial possibilities for the thing – no practical application.”

“Oh, you can’t,” exclaimed the scientist. “How about putting an end to the activities of objectionable individuals? Think of what it could do for humanity. If I had made this discovery previous to the World War I could have turned a flock of statesmen to stone, and then there wouldn’t have been any war. And the economic as well as artistic waste entailed by eventually making statues of those selfsame wholesale butchers would have been eliminated. The majority of statesmen should be born statues, anyway.”

Alfred’s face began to glow avariciously.

“Got it!” he cried. “Got it! The United States government would give you millions in cold cash for the use of your discovery. We could play up the bloodless side of the thing. That sort of drip is popular right now. Victory without death, you know. Do you want me to get in touch with the right parties and arrange for a demonstration?”

“We haven’t quite finished with our own little demonstration here,” Mr. Hawk replied darkly. “But why don’t you try to sell it to Mussolini first? He’d put his country in hock to see himself as a statue and to experience while still alive something approaching the adulation of posterity.”

“I’m serious,” protested Mr. Lambert. “Provide me with the formula, and I’ll make a fortune for all of us.”

“Yes, Hunter,” spoke up Alice. “You can trust Alfred. I can see his point now. Why, this discovery is a gold mine, but of course you could never do anything with it yourself. Executive ability is required to make it mean anything, and the man who has that and who can put your discovery over is entitled to share equally in the glory and financial reward. It’s lucky Alfred is not doing anything at present.”

“You have no idea how lucky it is,” replied Hunter, rising.

“Are you going to do it, Uncle?” asked Junior, unable to restrain his eagerness.

“I’m going to do something,” Mr. Hawk replied. “I’m going to put an end to long years of insufferable boredom. You go first.”

He raised his right hand and crooked its index finger at the youth. Alfred Lambert sprang to his feet as he saw his son turn to stone.

“I say,” he began, but his voice failed as he followed his Junior’s example. His mouth remained open as if still framing a protest. Mrs. Lambert was next to go, and after her the old man solidified comfortably in his chair. Mr. Hawk turned and considered his niece.

“Don’t pick on me,” she told him. “I’m going to make a heavy date for myself tonight if you keep them frozen long enough.”

“With whom?” asked her uncle.

“Cy Sparks,” she replied.

Mr. Hawk considered.

“All right,” he said at last. “Cy’s not altogether impossible. Try to get back in the general direction of midnight.” He turned to Stella. “You may go now, Stella,” he told her.

“If I can,” replied the maid. “My knees are all wrong. They wobble.”

Cautiously she crept from the room. At the door she halted and cast one swift, awed glance at the petrified family.

“Saints preserve us,” she muttered and diligently crossed herself.

Hunter Hawk stood regarding the statues he had created. There was a gleam of triumph in his eyes.

“That,” he said at last to his niece, “greatly simplifies matters. Your father is a particularly arresting study. I’m rather proud of him. Grandpa isn’t half bad either. His venerable appearance gives him the dignity he ordinarily so lamentably lacks.”

“Can they hear us?” asked Daffy.

“I hope so,” Hawk replied. “I gave them just a dash. My dear sister would love to make a few choice remarks, I’m sure of that. When I turn my laboratory into a breakfast room and lounge, as she suggested, I’m going to put her in an alcove just as she is. She can have the room all to herself.”

A blotchy pink color crept for a moment into the cold pale cheeks of Mrs. Lambert, then faded away. A dry croak came from the corner in which her father-in-law was sitting. Alfred Lambert looked on in stony silence.

Of all the statues Junior pleased Blotto the most. Blotto particularly disliked Junior. Junior had kicked him once, and Blotto still remembered that kick. Junior was a detestable young man. Something should be done about him. The dog hoped that the transformation was permanent. He could do without a lot of Junior. As he busily sniffed the feet and legs of the statue Blotto forgot his manners for the first time in years. Daffy uttered a scream of delight.

“Why, Blotto!” she exclaimed. “What a thing to do.”

Blotto with head and tail erect marched proudly from the room. The kick had been avenged.

“Dogs do enjoy certain advantages over human beings,” observed his master as he followed Blotto. “On occasions their lack of formality is greatly to be envied.”

“If not emulated,” added Daffy.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Little Man
and the Scarecrow

Dinner that evening was one of the most enjoyable meals Mr. Hawks had taken into his attenuated body for many a long day. It was attended only by himself and his niece. That was the reason. Blotto lurked in the background.

The scientist was in excellent fettle, and his mood seemed to have communicated itself to the equally excellent Betts, who moved about the table with unaccustomed briskness. A quarter of a century had dropped from the old servant’s shoulders.

“It’s like old times, Betts,” remarked Mr. Hawk, “with the exception of Miss Daffy here.”

“It is, Mr. Hunter,” replied Betts beamingly. “And a very pleasant exception it is, to be sure, if you’ll pardon my saying it.”

“Go on and say it, Betts,” said Daffy. “Say it loud and often. I’ll pardon you as much as you like just as long as you keep on making such encouraging little speeches.”

“Thank you, Miss Daffy,” said Betts.

“And, Betts,” commanded Mr. Hawk, “descend into the bowels of this structure and return with a couple of bottles of something sort of especially that way. You know what I mean, Betts.”

“La vie mondaine,” gloated the girl. “La vie joyeuse. Oh, my! Wine is good, and my uncle the salt of the earth.”

Betts’s beam was almost audible as he hurried to carry out the most congenial instructions he had received in a long time. Stella, who assisted at dinner, entered with a bowl of soup. It was plain to see that she looked upon Hawk as a none too minor demon. Her reluctance to linger in his vicinity caused her to spill a plate of soup as she nervously snatched it from under the tureen. Hawk fixed her with a stern eye.

“What do you think of what happened in the library?” he asked her.

“I’m trying not to think of it,” she replied, dabbing at the carpet with a serving cloth. “It’s all right for Mr. Betts. He didn’t see what I saw.”

She rose from her crouching position and almost sprang across the room.

“Would you like to make a fifth?” Hawk demanded.

“Mary, Peter, and Joseph!” gasped Stella, putting in a three-alarm call for heavenly succor. “I would not, Mr. Hawk.”

“Then stop flinging soup about the place, or I’ll damn well turn you to stone,” he assured her.

“She’d make a lovely Venus,” suggested Daffy. “I’ve seen her that way.”

“Miss Daffy!” admonished Stella, her outraged modesty momentarily overcoming her fear. “You shouldn’t say such things.”

“Rubbish, Stella,” replied Daffy. “You’re as proud of your shape as a peacock. Wouldn’t she make a bang-up Venus, Uncle Hunter?”

“Not having enjoyed the same opportunities as you,” Mr. Hawk answered judicially, “I am not in a position to say without considerable research and investigation. However, purely superficial observations would lead me to believe that perhaps you are right. She’d bang as a Venus.”

Under the penetrating scrutiny of Mr. Hawk’s glittering eyes Stella sought refuge in the kitchen.

“They’re a couple of black-hearted devils, the pair of them,” she informed Mrs. Betts.

“What are they up to now?” inquired that good woman.

“Miss Daffy said I’d make a lovely Venus,” Stella replied with a rush. “A bang-up one.”

Apparently this meant little to Mrs. Betts.

“And who might that party be?” she asked.

“Some naked heathen she-goddess,” explained Stella. “I saw a statue of her once.”

“Oh, that one,” said Mrs. Betts, peering into the oven. “I remember her now. Well, a worse thing might have been said. She used to have a clock in her stomach.”

“But the way he looked at me,” continued Stella. “You don’t know. There was ruin in his eyes.”

Mrs. Betts rested her hands on her hips and looked steadfastly at the large-eyed girl.

“Listen, my fine young wench,” she said. “If Mr. Hunter wants to ruin you, which I doubt, supposing such a thing was possible, which I also doubt, you can consider yourself ruined and a very lucky girl at that. It’s not every woman he ruins. He’s not ruined a maid since I’ve kept house for him, and that’s been all of his life. He’s been a great disappointment to me in that direction.”

“What do you know about it?” Stella demanded a little defiantly.

“All,” said Mrs. Betts with admirable compactness. “Everything.”

“I’d rather sleep with the devil,” declared Stella.

“There’d be little sleep with that busybody,” replied Mrs. Betts, “if we’re to believe the half of what we hear about him.”

Deriving scant comfort from the unedifying observations of the elder woman, Stella returned to the dining room, where she made herself generally unhelpful and kept getting in the way of the exasperated Mr. Betts. Occasionally she would dart speculative glances at the prospective source of her approaching ruin. If only he were not in league with the powers of darkness the future would not have been altogether unendurable.

Unconscious of the delicate office allotted to him Mr. Hawk proceeded cheerfully through his dinner. This finished, he rose and, wishing his niece good hunting, sought the seclusion of the back veranda. As a result of the wine and the complete success of his discovery the scientist found himself in a slightly elevated mental condition. There was a tingling sensation in his veins. He felt as if something unusual were going to happen, that some remarkable adventure was already on its way to him. Ordinarily Mr. Hawk, when thus assailed by this inexplicable exaltation of spirit, would have retired to his bed and endeavored there to return to reason through the medium of some abstruse scientific treatise, but tonight he was in no mood to share his bed with a book.

Across the dark tops of the trees a brute of a moon was casting bolts of golden gauze. An August night filled with haze and the scent of moistly breathing vegetation lay around him. Clouds scuttled across the sky and cavorted weirdly in a far-away wind only the lingering breath of which moved among the trees.

In front of him stretched the country and the night. His eyes followed the familiar path that twisted up a grassy slope and dipped into a grove of trees only to appear again on the margin of a cornfield. That path had a fascination for Mr. Hawk. He never grew tired of treading it – of thinking about it. To him it was like some huge serpent that never got anywhere but which in the fullness of time would move along to some dangerously enchanted place. Mr. Hawk was one of those persons who retain a keen awareness of the impressions and sensations of early youth. He still remembered a patch of sun-baked mud that had exerted over him a spell of attraction far stronger than the gardens and orchards surrounding his home. He could still recall the cracks in its tawny surface and the smooth, hot feel of it against the soles of his bare feet. The acrid, febrile smell of the weeds that flourished round its margin frequently drifted back to him from the past. This path had something of the same influence on his imagination. A whisper seemed to be running down it now, summoning him out to the woods and fields where unknown but pleasant things were waiting.

In obedience to some inner prompting he went back into the house. Unhesitatingly he descended to the cellar and returned presently with two bottles of Burgundy. For more than half a century these tubes of magic had lain under old dusty dimness dreaming of vineyards gratefully ripening beneath the far, fair skies of France.

On the way out he looked in at the library to see how his petrified encumbrances were getting along. Silently he displayed the bottles to them, raised one bottle to his lips in a dumb show of drinking, then appreciatively patted his stomach. Mr. Hawk was enjoying every moment of his revenge. As he left the room something like a groan followed him from the cold lips of old Grandpa Lambert.

Crossing the back lawn he passed through the fragrance of an old-fashioned garden and, opening a small white gate set in a hedge of box bushes, set out along the path. He had no definite destination in mind. He had hardly anything at all in mind save a floating, hazy sensation of well-being, an intimate relationship with the night and the world around him. All he knew was that he was going to some place and drink a lot of wine and, perhaps, sing a little to himself and the trees, if he felt so inclined.

On the summit of the hill he paused and looked back at his long rambling house sprawled peacefully out in sleep beneath the yellow flood of the moon. For a moment he stood silhouetted against the sky, a tall, lean figure of a man with two large bottles dangling at the ends of his arms – a rather enigmatic outline in the night. Then he dipped down into a grove of trees and became lost in the darkness piled up against their trunks. As he passed through the grove an expectant hush lay about him, a sort of breathless hesitation trembling on the verge of some strange revelation. But Mr. Hawk did not linger in the grove. For some blind reason he continued along the path. It was as if a muted voice at the end of it were endeavoring to get his ear. Presently the trees were left behind and, coming out into the full flood of the moon, he followed the course of the path as it circled a vast cornfield, and then, as if suddenly changing its mind, took a short cut through it.

Dark, keen-leafed stalks rose and rustled on either side of Mr. Hawk. He caught the pungent scent of corn silk and absently decided that he was inordinately fond of corn – preferably on the cob. He came upon a scarecrow, and on a mound beside the scarecrow a little tattered man was sitting. And the little tattered man was crying bitterly, his tear-stained face raised to the distinguished figure flapping against the stars.

Under ordinary circumstances the scientist would have been slightly mystified by this encounter. In his present all-embracing frame of mind it struck him as being the most natural thing in the world. Why shouldn’t a little tattered man be sitting in a cornfield in the moonlight crying bitterly at a scarecrow? And why shouldn’t he, Hunter Hawk, stop and ask this little tattered man what the devil he was crying about? Hunter Hawk did.

“Why all the lachrymose moisture?” he demanded. “Speak, little tattered man.”

The little man gasped and looked startled. He promptly ceased crying and seemed on the point of flight. Some wayward strain in Mr. Hawk’s nature must have reached out to the other, however, for he remained alertly poised on the mound.

“Why all the what?” he faltered.

“The tears,” Mr. Hawk explained.

“Oh, those,” said the little man. “I shouldn’t have taken on so, but sometimes I get so furious I can’t help it.”

“What were you furious about just now, if it isn’t too long a story?”

“I’m furious about that scarecrow. I want his clothes. I especially want his hat.”

Mr. Hawk glanced up at the scarecrow. It was wearing a beaver hat in rather a fair state of preservation. As a matter of fact, the scarecrow was about the best dressed specimen of his deceitful tribe Mr. Hawk had ever seen. It was decked out in a morning coat, gray-striped trousers, and patent-leather shoes. There were spats. A withered gardenia decorated its lapel, and a gray Ascot tie adorned its neck. It was stoutly stuffed with straw.

“That’s about the most up-stage scarecrow I ever met,” Mr. Hawk observed.

“Isn’t it?” exclaimed the tattered individual eagerly. “And look at me – a living creature. Rags and patches. More of a scarecrow than it is.”

“Then why don’t you assault this scarecrow?” asked Mr. Hawk. “Lay the beggar low and strip him to his straw? I know the person who owns him. Man named Brightly. It would give me no little satisfaction to see his scarecrow outraged. He’s a rich, profiteering, shot-and-shell sort of a chap, and he belongs to the League for the Promotion of Class Distinction. Also, he has warts and an exceedingly dizzy wife. In short, he makes me sick. Why don’t you despoil this scarecrow? It looks too damn smug.”

The little tattered man shook his head sadly.

“Can’t do it,” he answered. “I’m afraid. You see, I’m one of the last of the Little People, and it’s against our magic to rob scarecrows. It would bring us some great misfortune. And God knows we’ve had enough already. Only a few of us are left now. We’re the last family in the neighborhood, although we’re older than the oldest settler. We’re even older than your family. I knew your father well by sight. He was much like you, only by this time of night he usually staggered more.”

“Thanks,” said Mr. Hawk rather dryly. “I can tell you must have known him. Exactly what did you say you were – one of the Little People? I’ve heard of them or read of them or something.”

“Yes,” replied the little man. “We emigrated from Ireland long before the great-great-grandfather of Christopher Columbus ever climbed through a bedroom window.”

“I never knew he did,” said Hunter Hawk.

“Neither do I,” replied the little man, “but I imagine he must have done. Most every man does at one time or another, if it isn’t too far to the ground. Haven’t you?”

“You’re getting a bit personal,” Hawk replied with a grin, “but now you’ve asked me, I’ll say that I never left that way.”

“Then you’ve missed one of life’s most illegitimate thrills,” said the little man, sighing reminiscently. “Also spills, perhaps. I’m disappointed in you, my dear sir. Once at least to every man, you know. But perhaps she wasn’t married?”

“I make a practice of never asking,” Mr. Hawk hastened to assure him. “You get lied to less that way. But were you saying you came over from Ireland?”

“I was saying exactly that,” replied the little man, with a note of sadness in his voice. “The country virtually belonged to us then. We didn’t have to listen to ‘Mother Machree,’ or ‘Come Back to Erin,’ or ‘The Rose of Sharon,’ or to any bum jokes about It Seems There Were Two Irishmen, Pat and Mike. Taking the good with the bad, we were quite happy and contented. In later years the uninterrupted wailing of those songs over on the other side was one of the reasons for our migrating. Of course, we had the Indians here to deal with, but they were an essentially simple-minded lot, and we were soon able to get around them. Everything went along well until the police force came over from Ireland. After that we began to wane. Our magic gradually weakened, until we have only a little left with which to eke out a bare existence. Most of our people have moved away to China or to South America for the revolutions. Many of them just crawled into caves and crevasses in rocks and went to sleep forever. Is there wine in those bottles?”

“There is,” replied Mr. Hawk, thinking the little man deserved at least a drink of wine after his long speech. “Do you want some?”

“Yes,” answered the little man. “I want some, and then some more.”

“So you’re that kind of a little man,” observed Mr. Hawk, eying him with approval. “A regular winebibber.”

“In my time I have bibbed a little,” he modestly admitted.

The quiet of the cornfield was broken by the pop of a cork. A small patch of moonlight was splashed by the spray of the wine.

“It’s a heartening sound,” said the little man.

“One of the sweetest sounds I know,” said Mr. Hawk.

“How does the sound taste?” asked the little man.

“After you,” replied Mr. Hawk with admirable self-control.

The little man accepted the bottle and, tilting back his head, drank long and deeply. Mr. Hawk watched the proceeding with a mixture of admiration and concern. At last the bibber returned the bottle and drew a deep breath. Then he faced about and aggressively eyed the scarecrow.

“I feel like knocking your block off,” he muttered. “You big toff.”

“Let’s give him the bum’s rush,” suggested Mr. Hawk, wiping the tears from his eyes as he set the bottle down in the path. “I can’t bear the sight of that scarecrow.”

The little man shook his head.

“You’re big enough to do it alone,” he said. “Why don’t you reach me down that hat?”

“I will,” replied Mr. Hawk, taking another swig at the bottle. “I’ll strip the devil mother-naked, and you can have all his clothes. How do you go in spats?”

“Oh, thank you so much,” breathed the little man, his hand reaching out for the bottle. “I don’t know. I never went in spats. How do you think I’d go?”

“Dandy,” exclaimed Mr. Hawk ecstatically, and coiling his long body he released some hidden spring suddenly and dived through the air at the scarecrow. For a moment the figure flapped frantically in the moonlight, then toppled among the cornstalks beneath the weight of its assailant’s body.

“Got him!” cried Mr. Hawk, thrashing about among the corn. “Now we’ll undress his nibs. Wonder if he wears drawers?”

“Don’t wear them myself,” said the little man. “I’m much more interested in that hat. Hope you didn’t smash it.”

“Here it is,” announced the man of science, rising triumphantly from the corn with the scarecrow’s coat and trousers. The hat was tilted rakishly over his left eye.

He flung the garments at the Little man, passed him the hat, then dived back in the direction of the scarecrow.

“No. No drawers,” he called out. “I’m afraid you’ll have to do without drawers, but here’s his shoes and spats and necktie.”

“You will insist on my wearing drawers,” the little man replied, “when all the time I keep telling you that the Little People wear no drawers.”

“Not even the little ladies?” asked the cornfield.

“They least of all. Couldn’t get a pair on ’em.”

“Then they’re not such little ladies.”

“And they don’t pretend to be. That’s why they’re superior to your brand of women.”

“I should say so,” Mr. Hawk replied, emerging from the cornfield with the last shreds of the scarecrow’s wearing apparel. “He’s as clean as a whistle now.”

“Half a minute,” replied the little man. “Thanks a lot. I’ll be ready before you know it.”

Rapidly he divested himself of his tattered clothing, and Mr. Hawk discovered to his amusement that his companion of the cornfield had spoken no less than the truth. The little man wore no drawers. In almost less than half a minute he was fully attired in what had once been perhaps the most fashionable scarecrow that had ever given a crow a raucous, ribald laugh.

“How do I look?” asked the little man. “Are the spats on right?”

“Splendid!” cried Mr. Hawk. “Perfectly right, only they’re on backwards.”

“Necktie, too?”

“A neat knot.”

“I’m so pleased,” murmured the little man. “My daughter will be quite surprised.”

“Have you a daughter?” asked Mr. Hawk.

“A howling hell of a daughter,” replied the other. “She was born in this country, so of course she’s much larger than the native-born Little People. And she’s taken up American ways. Dresses and talks like the modern young girl, but in spite of all that she can still turn a pretty trick of magic when she has a mind to.”

“How old is this daughter of yours, this howling hell of a daughter?” Mr. Hawk inquired in a casual voice.

“Not more than nine hundred years, I should say. The exact date I don’t rightly remember, but she’s still just a girl.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Hawk a little blankly. “I see. A mere flapper. Shall we open the other bottle?”

“You practically took the words out of my mouth,” said the little man admiringly.

“I hope I won’t have to do the same with the bottle,” Mr. Hawk said without any attempt to disguise his meaning. “You almost inhaled the bottom out of the last one.”

“I was afraid you might think I didn’t like it.”

“You may dismiss all such qualms now,” said the scientist, most unscientifically fumbling with the cork of the second bottle. “I’m convinced that the stuff doesn’t revolt you.”

“Far from it,” said the little man. “I am very fond of your wine. I shall probably steal your wine now that I know you have it. You must understand, sir, we live by stealing. It’s our only recourse. Although I wouldn’t touch that scarecrow, I’d steal the eyeteeth out of your head.”

“Thanks for your frankness,” said Hunter Hawk. “Would you like my eyeteeth now?”

“I do not need eyeteeth,” replied the little man.

“Well, any time you’d like to have a couple of eyeteeth – or are there four of them? – I’ll have them packed up and sent around to you. ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ I’ll do even better than that. I’ll give you all my teeth – the whole damn set – and not ask for even an eye.”

“Any gold in them?” the other asked.

“Filled with gold,” replied Mr. Hawk, and collapsed in such a surge of laughter that the night became alive with the cacophony of his mirth.

“That wasn’t so funny,” said the little man when Mr. Hawk had pulled himself together.

“No? Wasn’t it?” he replied weakly. “Well, I’ll get much funnier later on. Wait and see.”

“And not laugh,” said the little man.

“Oh, all right,” replied Mr. Hawk. “Have it your way. Entirely your own way.”

Once more the pop of a vigorous cork ricocheted against the astonished cornstalks and once more the venerable bubbles renewed their youth as for a brief moment they lent grace to the moonlight before falling in foam to the soil.

“The call to arms,” said Mr. Hawk. “By the way, just what is your name?”

“Name?” replied the little man. “I used to have lots of names – Lim, Shawn, Angus, and Mehal. There’s safety in having a change of names. Since the World War I’ve rather fancied Ludwig Turner.”

“Sounds extremely un-Irish to me.”

“It is. It does. Where were we? Oh, yes, the wine. Let’s drink it. My name saves a lot of nationalistic, or should I say racial, singing. No one knows where I come from, what I am, or who I am. I once knew an English barmaid – —”

“Not interested in low memoirs of a personal nature,” proclaimed Mr. Hawk. “Don’t want to hear about your English barmaids. Have you ever gone through an explosion?”

“On and off for two dozen centuries as time is inaccurately reckoned by mortals, I’ve been a married man,” said Ludwig Turner. “Most of them were explosive. All were explosive. One after the other exploded herself into premature ugliness. I have no wife now. Only one spawn. She is on the explosive side also, but it seems to do her good. It damn well agrees with her. More beautiful every day.”

“Well, I’ve just been through a most thorough explosion,” said Mr. Hawk, not without pride. “A real one. The seventh. I’m still a little bit dazed. Not sure of anything. Not sure of you or the night or this cornfield full of cornstalks – —”

“What would a cornfield be full of?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me if it was full of azaleas,” said Hunter Hawk. “It might not be real at all. Nothing seems real. Nothing quite is.”

“If you don’t pass me that bottle there’ll be another explosion,” the other one remarked. “That will be real enough.”

Mr. Hawk absently passed the bottle to his small companion.

The scientist had spoken truly. Nothing seemed real to him. And perhaps on that strange night nothing was quite real. Otherwise there seems to be no rational explanation for all the things that took place. Certainly this little man could not be real. Obviously. Wrapped opulently in the drapery of much wine Hunter Hawk no longer cared to question the reality of things. He had a strong impression that he was sitting in a cornfield drinking wine with a little man in a top hat who declared that he was twenty-four centuries old. It was a great age to Mr. Hawk, but not an impossible one. He chose to believe the little old man. Had not he himself just achieved the impossible? Had not he accomplished a miracle of science? Perhaps the impossible came to those who did the impossible. Perhaps not. Or maybe it was the other way round. Anyway, the little man’s spats were on backward. That fact, assuming the reality of the wearer, was as plain as the nose on his face. Mr. Hawk would establish reality on the backwardness of his friend’s spats. That was something if not much. He reached out and seized the bottle from the avid Mr. Turner. The wine tasted real enough, though perhaps that also was just a little too marvelous to be real. Anyhow, what did it matter? What did matter was that he wanted to sing. In fact, he would sing. But what song? Try as he would, Mr. Hawk, what with the wine and the moonlight and the natural perverseness of a man’s mind, could think of no song save “Mother Machree.” It would have to be that song. He began to sing it not well but willingly.

“Oh, for God’s sake, don’t sing that!” exclaimed the little man, rising.

Mr. Hawk stopped and looked impatiently at his friend.

“Then what shall I sing?” he demanded.

“Almost anything but that.”

“I’ve tried to, but I can’t think of anything but that at the moment,” Mr. Hawk explained. “Won’t you sit down?”

The little man sat and thought, and the scientist sat and thought, and presently the little man looked up brightly.

“I have it,” he announced. “The very song. Heard it the other night when I was stealing vegetables from your garden. I remembered it because it’s the most non-partisan song I ever heard. The most impartial. It means nothing and it goes: Boop-Boop-a-Doop. I love it.”

“Sounds like a motor boat lulling its young to sleep,” said Mr. Hawk, “but I’ll try it if only because you heard it on my radio while stealing my vegetables from my garden.”

“We’ll both sing it,” said the other, and they did just that.

A late stroller suffering from insomnia heard the strange noise issuing from the heart of the cornfield. It had a salutary effect on him. He no longer was a late stroller, but became a man of actions, a man of single purpose. So briskly did he return to his home and jump into bed that the exhaustion caused by his exertion speedily brought the sleep that had eluded him.

Unaware of the favor they had done the man, Messrs. Hawk and Turner back in the cornfield blissfully continued Boop-Boop-a-Dooping until the bottle of Burgundy was no longer able to lubricate their hard-working throats. It was drained to the last drop. The scientist lifted the empty bottle and held it between his eyes and the moonlight.

“All gone,” said the little man.

CHAPTER FIVE

A Furious Reception

“Doesn’t sound so good without wine, does it?” observed Mr. Hawk at length, stopping to replenish his exhausted lungs.

“No,” admitted the little man gloomily, “nor feel so good, either. Let’s go to your house and get some more.”

“Don’t you live anywhere?” Hawk demanded. “No home?”

“Oh, yes,” replied the little man. “I have a home of sorts.”

“Then why don’t you go there and take me with you?”

“We might do that,” was the skeptical reply. “Only applejack there, and not so much of that.”

“Let Providence take a turn,” said Mr. Hawk. “After what you’ve got is all gone we’ll think of something else.”

“And I know just what we’ll think of,” returned the other. “We’ll think of me struggling through the dark in search of more drink.”

“Your daughter, perhaps?”

“She might – if she’s in a good humor, which she seldom is. Still, she might. Anyway, we’ll try that. Sure you won’t go to your house?”

“Not now. Later, perhaps.”

“Then I guess we’ll have to go to mine. Rightly speaking, it isn’t a house at all, but you’ll see for yourself. I hope you’ll not be sorry.”

“Sorry? Why should I be sorry?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the little man evasively. “There might be many reasons.”

There were, but no one will ever know if Hunter Hawk at any time seriously regretted his visit to the abode of his casual little friend of the cornfield. Certain it is that many a more intrepid soul, foreseeing the remarkable results of that visit, would have bade the little man good-night on the spot and returned to the safe, sane, and familiar surroundings of his own home. And, of course, it will never be ascertained now whether or not Mr. Hawk would have turned back or even hesitated, had he been able to read the meaning of the little man’s prophetic words. Perhaps that appointment had already been made for him by some unseen, unknown secretary who, without consulting our preferences, makes all our important appointments, including the final one. Perhaps Hunter Hawk, even had he tried, would have been unable to avoid this one. The answer to these minor questions will never be known. Their answers do not matter. What is known and what does matter is the simple fact that on a certain night in August, Hunter Hawk, three sheets in the wind, accompanied an exceedingly small and queerly garbed creature to his home, and that there he met one Meg or Megaera, and that forever after he was never quite a free man. At times he even kissed the chains that shackled him. And rumor has it, he went a great deal farther than that.

The way was mostly moonlight and lurches. There were trees and a world of bushes, dense, aggressive bushes. There were patches of moon glow and tunnels of utter darkness. There was the sound of much sincere cursing and always the thrashing of leaves being crunched under foot. Both sounds were made by Mr. Hawk. The little man did his lurching with surprising silence and deftness. And he knew every twist in the mystifying way. Hawk was never able to return to the spot alone. Finally and most amazingly he found himself in a murmurous grotto – a secret pocket in the earth, remote from the world of men.

From the roof of this grotto a tiny stream splashed to the floor, and running through the center of the chamber, disappeared with a whisper through a small, bush-concealed opening. Straddling this strand of water was a rough table, and only those who were adepts could sit at the table without getting their feet wet. But few ever sat at that table now, although many had in the past. On either side of the table were two long benches, and somewhere in the remote shadows there was the suggestion of bunks made from the boughs of trees. And in this chamber there were the smell of moist earth and drenched bushes and the everlasting splash and murmur of falling water. And in this chamber, there was a small girl – or woman – one of the smallest and most furious-looking creatures Hunter Hawk remembered ever having seen.

Great eyes were hers, great black, fuming eyes, astir with sullen lights, eyes ready to blaze and flame, but seldom to caress. A dark skin. Short, straight, blue-black hair. A beautiful mouth and the appealing features of a delicate child. It was a face of confusing contradictions. And when this girl arose from the table at their entrance, Mr. Hawk needed only one glance at her slim but delightfully developed figure to appreciate the fact that here was a woman to deal with, not a child, not even a slip of a girl. This small thing with the hostile eyes, the child’s face, and the provocative breasts of a well formed woman, could, he more than half suspected, be a highly diverting companion on certain auspicious occasions. It was only too immediately apparent that this was not going to be one of those occasions, for at the mere sight of the two strangely matched gentlemen she sprang from the table and words entirely unpleasant fairly sizzled off her tongue.

“So,” she said, and again, “so. We’re back, are we?” A pause to permit the gentlemen to receive the full benefit of her furious eyes. “And what do you think I am – dirt? Dirt to sit here in this filthy hole and wait?” Although neither gentleman attempted to answer these questions, Mr. Hawk felt strongly inclined to make the observation that that was usually what dirt seemed to enjoy most – sitting in holes and waiting. “Where the hell have you been?” she continued. “You look like the devil. Worse. And what’s wrong with that person? Tell him to go away. Get out of here, both of you,” the deadly voice continued. “Disappear!”

“A true explosive,” Mr. Hawk remarked to his companion, at whom he was looking with increased respect and admiration. “Tell me, have you had that with you for nine hundred years?”

“That and more,” said Mr. Turner. “Much. That’s nothing. She’s only playful now.”

“Am I?”

Bang! A heavy mug whizzed past the left ear of the small man and shattered itself against a rock in the wall of the grotto.

This act of swift and efficient violence sobered Hunter Hawk considerably. He realized that at any moment his turn might come. It was a matter of dodge or die. Nevertheless, he regarded the enraged, but in every other respect most desirable young lady, with critical admiration. Instinctively he felt that he figured her out just a little, no more than that.

“You deliberately missed him,” he informed her, his eyes no less dark and glittering than hers.

Startled and annoyed, she looked back at him. In that swift moment contact was established. It was never to be quite broken thereafter. She looked into his eyes and liked them. Not for a hundred years had she liked the eyes of a mortal. Those eyes, those black, quiet, sardonic eyes of Hunter Hawk both troubled and fascinated her. All of which made her more angry.

“A lot you know about it,” she said sullenly and sat down. Hawk made no attempt to answer. He stood there quietly looking at her. She knew it. She hated it. “I could have hit him,” she said defiantly. “I have hit him and if you get fresh with me, I’ll damn well hit you – you long-legged booby.”

Hawk had a peculiar temper of his own. Certain words – not necessarily desperately insulting ones at that – had the power to throw him off poise, to stir up the usually placid springs of his nature. Booby was one of those words. The word always evoked for him the mental image of a fat, bubble-lipped boy.

“Booby, am I?” he retorted. “Well, what are you but an ill-natured little snip, a mere thing, a pea?”

“What!” cried the girl incredulously. “Me, a snip? A thing? A pea?”

Bang!

The crash of the second mug completely sobered Mr. Hawk. This conduct was unreasonable. It would have to stop. One of those mugs might find its mark. With the unfailing good fortune of a man who attracts women and never knows quite why, he played his trump card in spite of the muttered urgings of Mr. Turner to have nothing to say to her “just yet.”

“Listen,” he said. “I’m nervous as a cat. Got an awful hangover. Been drinking for a week. Have you got a little pick-me-up anywhere round?”

A light of morbid interest came into the mad black eyes. The girl considered him darkly but not venomously.

“Nervous, eh?” she said. “Headache? How are your eyes?”

“Bad. Awful.” Mr. Hawk blinked rapidly several times.

“What you need is a good physic.”

“I know, I’ll take one, but I’ll crack unless I get a pick-up right now.”

“Got anybody at home to look after you when you get there?”

“Yes. Lots of ’em – too many.”

“Well, I hope to God you don’t go blabbing to them that you met some woman in the woods who got you drunk. Not that I give a damn,” she added inconsistently.

She rose from the table and moved swiftly to the end of the chamber. There was the sound of secretive rummaging – things being swiftly moved. Soon she returned with a quart bottle two thirds filled with applejack.

“Here,” she said, handing him a glass. “Pour your own. I don’t know how much you take, but watch yourself.”

“I’d prefer to watch you.”

Ludwig Turner stood dumbly by, his eyes fixed wistfully on the bottle.

“How about—?” Hawk nodded significantly in the direction of his host.

“What – that one?” replied the girl scornfully. “What he needs is a good thrashing. Wouldn’t you think that after twenty-four centuries he’d have sense enough, self-respect enough to give up this knocking about the country, staying out late at night and bringing home with him the first tramp he picks up? Present company not excepted.”

“I refuse to answer that,” said Mr. Hawk.

For a full minute packed with suspense for Mr. Turner she looked appraisingly at him while she drummed irritatingly on the table with the tips of her fingers. To relieve the strain of this protracted scrutiny, her father made an attempt at an ingratiating smile.

“Don’t smile at me, you old dog,” she said. “Come over here and get your drink. No pride, no shame, just a plain sot. I’m through with you. Here, swallow it down, bottle and all.”

This invitation, in spite of the rough verbiage in which it was couched, led to one of the most pleasant nights Hunter Hawk had so far spent in the course of his rather confined if casual existence. One drink led to another, and by the time the story of the assaulted scarecrow had been thrice repeated at the special request of Miss Turner, who was able to extract from it at each telling fresh sources of enjoyment, the applejack had long dissociated itself from the bottle.

“Miss Turner,” asked Hawk with elaborate politeness, “could you manage to rummage up another one?”

“If you’ll call me Meg I might. Otherwise, no,” she replied.

“I am fond of the name of Meg,” said Hawk. “It sounds so old and hard. You are well named, Meg, my wench.”

“I don’t like that. Wench isn’t nice,” replied Meg. “And I’ll have you to know that my name is a damn sight older than yours.”

“It is,” put in Mr. Turner mollifyingly. “It is, Meg. Yours is the oldest name of all. It dates way back to the days of pagan Greece, when life was worth living. You are a direct descendent of Megaera, one of the Three Furies.”

“I was always under the impression,” observed Mr. Hawk, “that those ladies were so ill favored and disagreeable that propagation and that sort of thing was way out of their line.”

“In that you are correct,” replied the little man academically. “And that is what made them so furious. But Megaera seems to have been a little more fortunate than her sisters.”

“Might have happened at a masked ball,” Mr. Hawk observed speculatively.

“Possibly,” replied Mr. Turner. “It’s an interesting point. There are several possibilities.”

“Never have I listened to such dull drivel in all my life,” Meg broke in wrathfully, having established what was for her a record in temper holding. “Without saying a word I’ve sat here and listened to you insult my first and most famous ancestress. I’ve stood for that, I say. But when it comes to having to sit here and listen to such stupid, drunken drip, then I’m through. Get your own damn applejack. I’m going to bed.”

“Be reasonable, Meg,” pleaded her father, holding out a detaining hand as the girl rose to leave the table. “You’re altogether different. You’re not like the original Megaera, the one we were talking about. Nothing in common. You’ve different tastes and different inclinations. And much better luck.”

“What do you mean, much better luck?” demanded Megaera menacingly.

Mr. Hawk unfortunately was unable to restrain his mirth at this rather delicate point. She turned on him furiously, and for some reason the flames in her eyes had spread to her cheeks and neck.

“Shut up!” she said in a low voice. “You low-minded sot.”

Mr. Hawk’s laugh died to an appreciative chuckle as the girl turned back to her father.

“I said you’d be sorry you came,” was the lament of that unhappy individual.

“I’m not, and you didn’t,” replied Mr. Hawk. “You said, you hoped I wouldn’t be.”

“What do you mean by much better luck?” Meg’s voice cut in like a chilled knife.

“What I meant to say, my dear,” propitiated Mr. Turner, “was that you had better luck many centuries ago.”

“It never was a matter of luck,” said Meg. “It was looks and ability.”

“Hear! Hear!” cried Mr. Hawk. “I agree entirely. How about that applejack, Meg? Good old Meg. A dear girl.”

“Be quiet, you blotter,” she replied, but there was the suggestion of a smile lurking round the corner of her mouth as she tossed a black cloak over her shoulders and slipped through the small opening. For several minutes thereafter Hunter Hawk had the uncomfortable impression that two large black and strangely compelling eyes were intently fixed on him from the night that curtained the entrance.

A sigh of weary relief escaped Mr. Turner’s lips. He spread out his hands in a gesture of resignation.

“You see how it is,” he said. “Such is my life.”

“Not every man has a daughter who will go out at this hour of the night and steal applejack for him,” was Mr. Hawk’s answer.

“No,” admitted Mr. Turner. “Nor is it every father who will allow his daughter to go out and steal applejack for him at this or any other hour of the night.”

“When you put it like that,” said Mr. Hawk, “there’s something in what you say. You pride yourself on your liberal attitude, I take it?”

“Live and let live, say I.”

“That’s all very well for you who have had twenty-four centuries of it, but with us, our span is so short it’s almost die and let die. What you meant to say is, drink and let drink, isn’t it?”

“Well, it comes to the same thing. There’re altogether too many crimes attributed to drink which rightly belong to natures that would be a lot more vicious without it. Drink doesn’t create crime. It modifies it.”

“Makes it more democratic,” suggested Hunter Hawk. “Spreads it over a wider area and reduces its velocity.”

“Absolutely,” agreed Ludwig with enthusiasm. “If the world kept itself staggering drunk for a couple of centuries there wouldn’t be any wars. Armies would fall down and go to sleep before they could reach each other.”

“And when they woke up,” Mr. Hawk amplified, “the soldiers’ hands would be so unsteady they wouldn’t be able to do much damage.”

“You’ve got it,” said the little man. “You’ve gotten my point exactly. Instead of going over the top the soldiers would barely be able to crawl along on their bottoms.”

“An inspiring picture.”

“War has no inspiring pictures that cannot find their counterparts in peace.” Mr. Turner looked exceedingly solemn when he brought forth this one.

“Then, as I understand it,” summed up Hawk, “you hate war and love drink.”

“Exactly, sir. Exactly.”

“Well, I’m agreeable,” the other continued. “Let’s form a League for the Promotion of Peace through the Medium of Strong Drink.”

“Light wines and beer, also,” added Ludwig Turner.

Just as they were about to shake hands on this, a disturbing noise held their outstretched arms suspended. The deep-throated baying of a dog strained itself devilishly through the branches of wildly thrashing bushes. Both men sprang to their feet. The little man’s face was pale.

“I think that’s your friend Brightly’s pet watchdog,” he said, his lips grim and drawn. “God, if he gets at Meg.”

This was too much for Hawk. He knew Brightly’s watchdog. A big brute, a blood-letting brute, a creature of jaws and teeth and evil appetites.

“What a dog to be chased by,” thought Hunter Hawk as he outlurched Ludwig to the opening.

“Here I am,” Meg cried out in the darkness. “And here he is, too. He’s following me.”

Hawk, his long legs flashing with energy, waded through the bushes in the direction of Meg’s voice. He ended by falling both over and upon her. A dog was baying in one ear, and Meg was screaming in the other.

“Look out!” she cried. “You’ll break the bottle.”

“Bottle hell,” he replied. “This animal’s trying to swallow my head.”

“Wouldn’t be much loss,” came the muffled reply. “Why don’t you file your knees?”

Brightly’s dog was in a state of demoralization. He was not accustomed to so much thrashing and casual conversation. He wondered if these people realized this was an actual attack, that he was going to bite them, mangle them, perhaps.

“This is the second time today I’ve fallen on a woman,” Mr. Hawk complained as he deftly placed a foot in the dog’s ribs.

Then suddenly he remembered.

“My God, what a fool I’ve been,” he said, and raising his right arm he put an end to the dog’s offensive by speedily petrifying the beast.

“He can get at you but not at me,” Megaera gloated from beneath Mr. Hawk.

“He can’t get at either of us now,” said Hunter Hawk complacently.

“What have you done, killed him? You almost have me.”

“No, I haven’t killed him. I’ve turned the beast to stone.”

“What?”

“Turned the dog to stone, I said.”

“How did you manage that?”

“Easily. Want to see?”

“No – to breathe.”

Now that the danger was past Mr. Hawk removed himself from the crumpled object and permitted it to un-crumple. Meg was gamely clinging to the bottle.

“Very good,” she said when she had carefully felt the stony body of the dog in the darkness. “Some of your own magic?”

“My latest,” replied Hawk proudly. “I can turn people and animals to statues and back again.”

“Very good,” repeated the girl with professional appreciation. “Unusual for a mortal.”

“I’m a very unusual mortal.”

“So I’ve decided,” said Megaera. “I’ve got a trick that goes yours one better. I can turn statues to people and back again. Come inside, and I’ll show you. And,” she added impressively, “because you saved me from that dog I’ll show you how to do it. Then you’ll have two tricks, both knockouts.”

On their way back to the grotto a small voice arrested their progress.

“Would you mind tugging me out of this unfortunately placed hole?” asked Mr. Turner. “What with wine and applejack and dogs and darkness and daughters I’m completely undone. The night has been too much for me.”

Mr. Hawk collected the little man, and together they proceeded to the grotto, leaving the forest richer by the addition of one rather absurd stone dog caught in an attitude of pained surprise.

The events of the night had not dealt kindly with Mr. Wetmore Brightly. He had sustained a double loss. His scarecrow had been outraged and his watchdog turned to stone. On the other hand, the squirrels in the forest had a new mystery to solve and Mr. Ludwig Turner a new suit of clothes to wear – after radical alteration. Meg made them with both plain and fancy stitching.

All of which goes to support the almost universal impression that a wind has to be ill indeed not to turn over a new leaf.

CHAPTER SIX

The Invasion of Hawk’s Bed

By the time Megaera had initiated Mr. Hawk so well into her magic for turning statues into people and back again that he would remember the simple ritual even when not quite sober, no one was quite sober, not even Megaera herself. As she had previously told him, it was really a bang-up trick and not so difficult to master if taken without applejack. With his own discovery and Meg’s magic literally at the tips of his fingers, Hunter Hawk, with an emotion of exaltation not entirely unbeholden to applejack, felt himself well equipped to face a new and eventful life.

“An eminently satisfactory night,” said Mr. Hawk, an hour or two later, extending his hand to his friend Ludwig, who with Meg had falteringly escorted him home. “I would ask you in, but the hour forbids and the flesh fails, the spirit flags and the body swoons. Good-night, my dear Ludwig, good-night. And you, my charming Meg. Bring your father to see me soon. If he insists on hiding his face in that top hat, cut eyeholes in it for him.”

“You talk too much,” replied Megaera softly. “Look at me, Mr. Magician.”

She came close to him and placed a small, firm hand on either shoulder. Her dark, smoky eyes, half concealed by drooping lids, caught and held his.

“I won’t,” exclaimed Mr. Hawk. “Not if you look at me that way. It isn’t a good look. Bad things lurk behind it.”

“Look at me,” she repeated. “Good things lurk behind it, O mortal pig.”

Mr. Turner had wavered down the path and had now lost himself in shadows. Megaera came still closer. Her small, delightful body clung to the lanky scientist.

“Look at me,” she commanded.

“Listen,” replied Hawk. He was extremely uneasy. “Do you have to come so close? I can hear you without effort at the customary conversational distance. First thing I know you’ll be perching on my shoulder.”

He heard her low laugh and felt her arms slip round his neck. He backed away and dragged her with him. The toes of her small sandals scraped across the gravel. The sound caused him to stop.

“This is no way to act on a warm night,” he objected.

“You are a pig,” she murmured.

With a light, unexpected jump she bounded up into his arms. He was forced to hold her in spite of himself. Both of his arms were thus engaged. Thus, having him at her mercy, she calmly proceeded to give him anything but a calm kiss.

“Now say you didn’t like it,” she said when at length he had placed her on her feet.

“If you don’t get off my property,” he told her, “I’ll begin shouting and throwing rocks.”

“It’s a brutal pig, at that,” she jeered. “Listen,” she continued, her voice sounding suddenly serious, “I’ve placed my seal on you, Hunter Hawk, you’re my man, such as you are, and I don’t pride myself any on my selection. But for some reason I can’t explain even to myself we belong to each other. You’ll fight against it and go through no end of unnecessary moralizing, but in the end you’ll give in and know I was right. Good-night now, dim mind. I’ll see you soon – sooner perhaps than you expect. You can’t lose me.”

“Good God!” groaned Mr. Hawk.

Then, with amazing swiftness, she was gone into the shadows where the estimable Ludwig Turner still lurked beneath a top hat which rightfully belonged to the demolished scarecrow of Mr. Brightly. Hawk was a little bit stunned and no end perturbed. Still he was thrilled. The blood in his veins raced waywardly. This almost goes without saying. After nine hundred years of varied experience a pretty woman should know a little something about kissing and the allied arts.

“Cripes,” he muttered, mopping his brow with his coat sleeve, to which some leaves were still clinging. “Dear me. Wonder if she meant that stuff. That would be just too bad.”

Perhaps, after all, he had better go to sea forever.

For a moment he stood looking after her in the darkness; then he turned and entered his house.

“No more of this sort of thing,” he assured himself as he switched on the light. “Old enough to be my grandmother ten times over. Wonder if she is? Wonder if anything is? Tonight, for instance. Did it really happen? Seems like a drunkard’s dream. One of the pleasanter sort. Opium.”

The light from the hall partially illuminated the library, and as Mr. Hawk passed the door he was brought to a sudden standstill by a glimpse of his congealed brother-in-law standing in an attitude of frozen indignation.

“My God!” breathed the long man of science. “I’d forgotten about them.”

His distaste for the heavy reproaches of those four still figures when restored to their natural state tempted him to leave them permanently petrified. He stood and considered this possibility. No, it wouldn’t be quite right. There was old man Lambert. He wasn’t such a bad sort. And from the strange sounds that were issuing from his lips he must be the toughest of the lot. The old fellow was still battling against the effects of the powerful ray.

“No,” Mr. Hawk decided. “I’ll give them a suspended sentence first.”

He approached Grandpa Lambert. Pressing the ring on his left hand, Hawk allowed the restorative or contra-active ray to play for a moment over the figure seated in the chair. In an instant the old gentleman was back again, his mouth filled to spluttering with insults and invectives.

“Now, listen,” said Hawk quietly. “If you don’t want to go back where you came from you’ll cut all that out. Understand me, Grandpa?”

Apparently the old man did. A startled look came into his eyes, and the spluttering died away.

“Damn you,” he muttered. “You and your devil’s tricks.”

Hawk then turned to Alice, his superior sort of a sister. Although it pained him to do it he would give her another chance. As he was about to raise the left hand he was arrested by the voice of the old man.

“Wait!” he cried. “Wait! Why don’t you love her as she is, she and the other two? Think of the life we could lead without them, Hunter – the peace and quiet and freedom – just you, Daffy and me.”

Hunter looked at the unregenerate old fellow sympathetically.

“I’d like to,” he told him, “but they’re in the way here.”

“Then take them down to the cellar and turn them back to stone,” the venerable gentleman pleaded, “or lure them down to the lake, then petrify them and tip the lot of them in. We’d be rid of them then for good.”

“I’ll think it over,” said Mr. Hawk and, raising his hand, released his sister.

Mrs. Alice Pollard Lambert returned to herself in full cry. Her jaws were wagging before the rest of her body was completely restored.

“Of all the outrageous conduct,” she began. “I’ll sue you for this.”

Without a word Mr. Hawk raised his right hand and Alice Lambert’s voice died away as she once more turned to stone.

Alfred Lambert restored was a more tractable subject altogether. He stretched himself wearily, and looked respectfully upon his brother-in-law. He even grinned a little weakly.

“The joke’s on us, all right,” he said, “but, for God’s sake, don’t do it again.”

“Then watch your step,” replied Hawk as he passed on to Junior.

“If you have any heart at all, you won’t change that pest back,” exclaimed the boy’s grandfather. “Carry him up to bed and drop him on the way. Let him shatter to bits.”

Hunter Hawk hesitated. He realized that life would be a great deal pleasanter without Junior, and that the world would never miss him. After all, it wouldn’t be such a crime to drop Junior on some hard surface. It would be an act of divine justice and a public benefaction. Yet Hunter Hawk, in spite of all that he had suffered at the hands of these people, could not bring himself to do away with anyone of them – with all of them later, perhaps, but not at present. He shook his head at the old man and gave Junior back to the world. The boy, whimpering like a kicked dog, ran to his unresponsive mother. This was too much for Hawk. He promptly restored Alice Lambert to her son. This time she had nothing to say as she clung to her offspring and looked fearfully about her.

“You may all get to bed now,” Hawk told them. “I’m sorry I forgot you, but no harm’s done. Remember this, however, from now on I hold the whip hand. If you don’t want to take up a permanent existence as statues, walk lightly and pay strict attention to your own affairs. Now clear the decks, or I might change my mind.”

The company moved hastily toward the door. Alice paused and looked back.

“May I have a word with you in the morning?” she asked. “Something happened last evening. Callers. Most humiliating it was.”

“Drop in to see me in the morning,” said Hawk. “This morning, in fact. Lots happened last evening.”

Alone in his own room, Hunter Hawk undressed triumphantly and prepared himself for a much needed rest. Never had his bed looked so inviting. In one corner of the room Blotto, undisturbed by the arrival of his master, was snoring volubly, a thing he did quite well.

“Wish he’d try to break himself of that habit,” Hawk idly mused, “but he doesn’t even try. Perhaps he doesn’t know. Stupid dog. A great bother.”

Still pondering over the bad habits and abysmal stupidity of Blotto, Hunter Hawk threw open all the windows and, turning his back to the night, sought the safety and sanctity of his bed.

“He sleeps at night just like a gross human being,” his thoughts ran on as he maneuvered his ungainly body alongside the bed preparatory to that most grotesque of all actions – the lifting of the leg that swings one on to the mattress. “Doesn’t care whether I live or die. Look at him.” At last he was completely ensconced. “What the hell!” he said aloud, his face going blank. “How in the name of all that’s – —”

He was unable to finish his sentence. Megaera, her great eyes astir with the night from which she had emerged, was sitting on the ledge of one of the windows.

“At its best getting into bed isn’t pretty,” she observed, “but you make it unnecessarily unpicturesque. People should have sunken beds like sunken tubs.”

“I’m not here to discuss the aesthetic side of bed-going with you,” replied Mr. Hawk in a low voice.

“Oh, no?” she replied. “You’re not, eh?”

She stripped off her dress and stood before him in a ragged shift. Mr. Hawk promptly closed his eyes and switched off the light.

“Leave this room by the way you entered,” his voice commanded through the darkness. “I don’t know what sort of magic you used, but if you flew up, you’d better damn well fly down again.”

In answer to this he received a violent jab in the ribs.

“Ug!” grunted Mr. Hawk. “What the devil are you trying to do, stab me?”

“Don’t get me mad,” a small voice gritted in his ear. “Move over now and be quick about it. I’m getting into this bed.”

“Then I’m getting right out. This bed would be too small for the both of us if it were as wide as the Sahara Desert.”

“No bed could be too small for us,” she whispered. “You and I could sleep on a straw.”

“There’ll be no sleep for me tonight, my dear young lady.”

“You’ve said it!”

“What do you mean?” Hawk’s voice was weak with alarm. “Out I go.”

“I mean just that. Budge from this bed, and I’ll scream so loud every damn neighbor within a radius of five miles will come pelting in here to see what we’re doing.”

“We?” replied Mr. Hawk. “I’m not going to be doing a thing.”

“We’ll see about that,” Megaera said grimly.

“Just like your ancestress,” Mr. Hawk groaned.

Meg giggled, and one small hand stole playfully along his ribs. For such a large man Mr. Hawk gave vent to a surprisingly small shriek.

“Don’t do that,” he told her. “No familiarities. If you insist on staying in this bed, stay just where you are.”

“I can’t. You’re so attractive. Don’t turn your back on me. I’ll kick it.”

She did.

“Oh, for the love of Pete,” exclaimed Hunter Hawk indignantly. “You’ll be having me black and blue. As if I hadn’t been through enough bangs and explosions already.”

“Then turn over.”

“I will not – not on your life. Why, you’re just a depraved woman crashing your way into my bed like this without even so much as an invitation.”

“You deliberately set out to make me. You know you did.”

“Horrid little liar. Just like a woman.”

“Exactly like a woman,” agreed Megaera gloatingly. “Only a whole lot nicer than most. You should thank your lucky stars.”

“For what?”

“For me, of course.”

“I don’t want you.”

“You do, but you don’t know it.”

“Perhaps I do.”

“Oh, you dear.”

“Easy there with that hand. A kind word doesn’t constitute an invitation to an orgy.”

“Nothing like a good old orgy occasionally.”

“Don’t be common. And here’s something else. You’ve been doing this sort of thing on and off for nine hundred years. For me, it’s almost an entirely new experience.”

“It hasn’t been even that yet,” replied the girl. “And you said, almost. Who was she?”

“None of your damn business. Anyway, I’ve forgotten.”

“Well, this will be one you won’t forget.”

“That’s the truest words you’ve ever spoken. I’m going to lock my windows hereafter. Wish that dog would stop snoring. It keeps me awake.”

“Good for the dog,” said Megaera.

Mr. Hawk had an inspiration. He flashed on the light just long enough to enable him to petrify Blotto’s nose. The snores diminished to the mere whispers of their former selves. The dog opened one eye and squinted down his nose. Yes, it had happened again. From one extreme to another. Blotto closed his eye, allowing the lid to drop heavily and did the best he could.

“Now, let’s try to get a little sleep,” said Hunter Hawk. “I’m all in.”

Megaera was concentrating all of her magic on Blotto’s nose. She wanted that dog to snore, and she meant to see to it that he did. Her magic proved successful in counteracting the potency of the petrifying ray. Before Mr. Hawk had settled himself comfortably Blotto was snoring with increased volume, so much so, in fact, that he woke up even himself.

“What? Is it working again?” he asked himself. “Well, I wish it would stay one way or the other.”

Hunter Hawk was thoroughly aroused. He flashed on the light and redirected the ray at the dog’s nose.

“I’ll petrify that damned dog’s nose so hard he’ll wish to God he’d never even sniffed,” declared the scientist.

Megaera was sitting hunched up in bed, looking for all the world like a wicked child. She said nothing. She was calling on centuries of magic to bring back those snores. She was proudly pitting her pagan powers against those of modern science. For some minutes the contest continued, Blotto alternately sparking and stopping like a willing but brokendown motor. Finally the bedeviled animal, abandoning all attempts at sleep, raised his head and looked with moist, reproachful eyes at his master. The poor dog’s nose was in a state of the utmost confusion. One minute it was a thing of life and vigor, the next a cold, unresponsive stone. Blotto felt that his nerves would prove hardly equal to the strain. The wail of protest he attempted to register was cut off in its prime only to burst out unexpectedly and frighten him out of his wits. As proud as he was of his scientific achievement, Mr. Hawk was unable to resist the mute entreaty of his dog. After all, why should their differences be taken out on Blotto’s nose?

“I give up,” he said at last as he switched out the light. “Snore your damn head off. Go on. Shake the walls and rattle the windows. I give up.”

“Do you?” cried Megaera. “Then so will I.”

Between Blotto and his uninvited bedfellow there was scarcely any sleep at all for Hunter Hawk that night.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Playful Petrification

When after several fluttering attempts Megaera succeeded in lifting the long lashes from her heavy eyes some hours later she found herself gazing up at no less a personage than the outraged Alice Pollard Lambert. This excellent lady, remembering her brother’s invitation, and hoping to propitiate him before attempting to carry out her fell purpose, had quietly arrived at his bedside armed with a cup of coffee. This she now set down on a small table and devoted all her attention to the amazing joint occupant of Hunter Hawk’s bed. It had been her dark design either to wheedle the formula for his disagreeable discovery from him or else to destroy it. She was not going to permit anyone to hold the whip hand over herself and her family. Even though a dependent, she intended to be the dominating factor in the household. Now, however, here was another situation to face.

“What are you doing in bed with that man?” she demanded in a voice of chilled reproof.

“What do you usually do under the circumstances?” Megaera asked lazily.

“I don’t go to bed with men,” said Mrs. Lambert, her chin elevated virtuously.

“For goodness’ sake,” said Meg with innocent interest. “What do you go to bed with?”

“Don’t be low and ridiculous,” replied Mrs. Lambert.

“Well, if you think it’s ridiculous,” remarked the girl, “you’ve got something on me. I think it’s the most natural thing in the world.”

“Perhaps you do,” said Mrs. Lambert. “I repeat my question. What are you doing here?”

“I wouldn’t like to say,” replied Megaera with one of her wickedest smiles.

“How did you manage to get yourself in?” Mrs. Lambert continued inflexibly.

“If you must know,” said Megaera, indulging in a small but frank yawn, “your son deliberately dragged me in here last night and threatened to strangle me if I screamed.”

Mr. Hawk’s disorderly head popped up from the pillow as if suddenly jerked by a wire.

“Oh, what a lie!” he exclaimed.

“Furthermore, he’s not my son,” said Mrs. Lambert whose indignation at this reflection cast on her age had for the moment made her forget the moral issue involved.

“Sorry,” said Megaera, “but how was I to know? Perhaps he’s your lover. If he is, I’m sorry for him.”

“He’s neither my son nor my lover,” Mrs. Lambert announced with great dignity.

“Then who is your lover?” asked Meg. “All this puzzles me.”

“I want you to know I have no lover,” Alice Lambert hurled at the girl in bed.

“I’m very sorry about that,” replied Megaera. “But why do you want me to know it? I can’t help you out.”

“That besmirched creature on the bed beside you is my brother,” said Mrs. Lambert.

“Well, madam, all I can say is, you’ve got some brother.”

“Oh!” breathed Mrs. Lambert as Meg reached out a bare arm and took several appreciative sips from the cup of coffee her companion’s sister had so considerately placed within her reach.

“So thoughtful of you,” she remarked with a sweet smile. “How did you know I liked it?”

“Are you going to wallow there and allow this creature to insult your own sister?” Alice Lambert demanded of her supine yet interested brother.

“Yes,” he replied, “I am. And when she’s finished I’m going to try my hand.”

“Do you realize that the Ashleys called on us last night?” continued his sister. “Stella forgot the terrible condition you left us in and brought them right into the library. There they sat for fully fifteen minutes, asking about this and that and trying to be pleasant. And do you realize we were unable to say a word back, not one word?”

“That must have been hell for you, dear sister.”

“It was,” agreed Mrs. Lambert. “It was. Suddenly Mrs. Ashley – you know how nervous she is – uttered a piercing scream and cried out, ‘They’re all dead! Stone dead!’ With that she rushed from the room, the rest of the Ashleys right behind her. I could have fallen through the floor from mortification. By this time the news must be all over the countryside. Alfred and Junior and myself are ashamed to go to church, to be seen on the streets. And you are responsible for that, you and your silly discoveries. Now we have a fresh scandal on our hands, this creature you are openly flaunting in our faces.”

“Cheer up, Sis,” Mr. Hawk grinned as he thought of the Ashleys’ call. “I’ll go to church with you. Forgot it was Sunday.”

“We’ll all go to church with you,” put in Meg. “That is, if I can get some decent clothes to cover my nakedness.”

“Good!” cried Hunter Hawk. “You, Daffy, and I will form ourselves into a hollow square and protect the respectable members of the family from the gaze of the curious public. And now, my dear sister, if you will be good enough to withdraw, I might try to get a little something done.”

“Open and shameless iniquity,” his sister replied, looking directly at Megaera, who met her gaze with a pleasant smile. “I don’t know what to make of it. I’m sure you must have taken leave of your senses. What will Alfred and Junior say?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” replied Mr. Hawk. “Something dull and hypocritical, no doubt, but you can tell them both for me that they’d better be damn careful what they say or I’ll petrify ’em beyond recall. And that goes for you. Now clear out.” He turned abruptly to the girl beside him. “Say there, you wench,” he continued, “quit hogging that Java. Give Daddy Long-legs a sip.”

“Oh,” breathed Mrs. Lambert once more as she hurried from the room. “Oh – Daddy Long-legs – this is too much.”

The moment the door was closed Megaera attempted to become violently demonstrative. Mr. Hawk foiled her, however, through the simple expedient of kicking her out of bed.

“See that window,” he said, pointing dramatically.

“What about it, you big bully?” asked Meg from the floor.

“Well, out you go, my girl,” he replied. “Fling yourself through it, and make it snappy.”

“Ah, Hunter darling, you said you were going to take me to church – you, Daffy, and myself.”

The girl’s eyes were large, round, and reproachfully pleading. Mr. Hawk considered her with something more than a parental interest. She was a bad one, no doubt, nine centuries sunk in depravity, but what a refreshing creature, what a relief from the undercover impulses of everyday life. Hastily he ran over the experiences of the past twenty-four hours. Events marched. First there had been the explosion and Blotto’s bewitched tail. Then he had petrified the family and gone walking with two bottles of Burgundy. There had been a little man crying in a cornfield for the clothing of an overdressed scarecrow. The assault had followed, the visit to the grotto, Brightly’s dog, new magic, more applejack, and the trip home. The latter was still a trifle vague to Mr. Hawk. Then there had been the release of the family and the entrance of Meg through his window. Then the battle over Blotto’s nose and – no sleep. Yes, he remembered it all, but somehow it still did not seem quite real. The whole thing was too incredible. Events were certainly marching. He grinned inwardly as he quickly made up his mind. Church it would be. Surely there could be no harm in taking a nine-hundred-year-old girl to church, even a small, pagan, and utterly unmoral one.

“We go,” he said at last. “Slip on one of my dressing gowns. In there – that’s a closet.”

“And that?” she pointed to another door.

“Bathroom. Tub, shower, and everything.”

“Oh, good! What a grand life!”

Meg rose from the floor and became very active in exploring the room, its contents and possibilities. Presently she disappeared, and the voice of the shower was heard in the land. Hunter Hawk pushed a bell.

“Betts,” he said when that old gentleman appeared, “bring me three things: lots of breakfast, two of Burgundy, and all of Miss Daffy. Bring also innumerable plates and cups and eating tackle. There will be three of us breakfasting here.”

Betts received this command with a decided elevation of spirit. He felt even more elated when, just as he was leaving, Meg, lost in a trailing dressing gown with dangling arms, emerged flappingly from the bathroom.

“Good-morning,” said Meg with a smile. “I like you. You look nice like me. I’m Meg.”

“Thank you, Miss Meg,” said Betts and hastily withdrew.

“A beauty,” he told the interested Mrs. Betts when he reached the kitchen. “Small, but a rare beauty. Makes one feel that life is still worth living.”

“Doesn’t it just,” mused Mrs. Betts. “A girl and Burgundy before breakfast. I knew he was a chip off the old block, even if he did take a long time chipping. Stella, my child, you’ve lost your chance. The master’s gone and done it.”

“Done what?” demanded Stella, who had just come into the kitchen.

“Started in ruining,” replied Mrs. Betts complacently.

For a moment Stella’s face fell, then she rallied.

“I should think you two old people would feel ashamed,” she said, “talking like that to an honest, high-minded girl like me. What does the ruin look like?”

“She’s small,” offered Betts with a reminiscent eye. “Small she is, but, oh, how succulent.”

“Small,” repeated Stella with manifest satisfaction. “Venus, I’m told, was a large, full-bodied woman.”

She threw out her breasts and walked majestically from the room.

“She’s got those, too,” Mr. Betts flung after her.

“Apples,” was Stella’s cryptic retort. “Grapes.”

Daphne, in a scarlet kimono, sped down the hall like a living flame. Betts’s report had thrilled her. It seemed too good to be true. All her life she had been fed-up with so many smug hypocrisies and so many arbitrary taboos that a little open shame appealed to her sense of proportion. She rejoiced in this heaven-sent opportunity to share in her uncle’s depravity.

“Come in,” called Mr. Hawk when she had tapped lightly on his door.

“Good-morning everybody,” said Daffy in the most offhand manner in the world as she entered the room. “I hear that a little moral leprosy has broken out in here. Is this the lepress? She’s sweet.”

“Hardly that,” her uncle replied. “She’s nine centuries deep in iniquity. She’s a scheming, unscrupulous, and sometimes violent woman. At present she’s hungry and without any decent clothes. The three of us are going to eat here in this room, then we’re going to church with the family. Without any further explanations, however, let me introduce you to Meg or Megaera. Her last name doesn’t seem to matter. Sometimes it’s Turner. Related remotely to the Furies. Bar sinister, I suspect.”

Meg, who had been studying Daffy hopefully, now spoke.

“The man’s a liar, to begin with,” she said quite calmly. “In the second place, he suffers from delusions, and, finally, he’s no fit person for decent girls like you and myself to associate with. Nevertheless, we’ll associate. He has ordered Burgundy. That’s why.”

“Can you fix her up?” asked Mr. Hawk.

Daphne considered Meg with an appraising gaze in which she made no attempt to conceal her admiration.

“You’re about one of the cutest little tricks I’ve ever seen turned out,” she said at last. “No wonder you’re not quite respectable.”

“Listen to her,” Meg complained. “You’ve got her calling me names now.”

“Complimenting you, my dear,” said Daffy briefly. “Let’s see. I’m just about twice of you. That makes it easy because it means doing things by halves. I’ve always done that. You’ll need everything.”

“Except drawers,” put in the scientist dispassionately. “Her father says she wears no drawers – none of them does.”

“If they’re pretty I might,” said Meg. “I’ll go that far.”

“A great concession,” Hawk replied.

By the time the girls had returned Hunter Hawk was dressed and shaved. The breakfast was growing cold, but the Burgundy was just right. Betts had been allowed to hover in anxious attendance. His master felt that he owed him that much, at least. As the girls entered, the old domestic was replenishing Mr. Hawk’s glass. Hawk was sitting by the open window breathing deep of the morning air. Sunday was resting gracefully on the countryside spread out before him. Down in the orchard a number of birds were making agreeable noises. The air was faintly tinged with the scent of blossoms. Life was not at all bad. Sunlight and sparkling Burgundy made a cool little hell in the depth of his glass. He was committed to a life of sin. And he was content. Few men, he felt, were better equipped.

“He could not wait,” remarked Daffy.

“I told you he was a pig,” said Meg.

“I’m a pig who couldn’t wait,” Mr. Hawk replied with a pleasant smile. “Catch up. You’ve done a good job, Daffy. The girl looks fine.”

“Mrs. Betts helped,” Daffy replied. “She can sew and fix slick.”

“The loveliest pull-offs,” Megaera began.

“Step-ins,” Daffy corrected.

Betts was heard to make strange noises.

“Oh, yes. How silly of me,” the girl continued. “Step-ins, of course. Must have been thinking of something else. Want to see them?”

“Come, come,” frowned Mr. Hawk. “We’re going to church now. Snaffle down some food and try a glass of this wine. You know, the more I think of church, the more the idea appeals to me.”

“Yes,” responded Daffy. “We should do well at church. Never drank wine before in the morning. It’s a good idea.”

“An old, old custom,” observed Megaera. “Much older than church.”

The small creature looked really presentable in a black and white georgette thing. A small hat, also of the black and white color motif, had been slashed to fit her head. There was something a little amiss about her feet. They were loosely confined in a pair of pumps Daffy had retrieved from the attic. Small as they were, they were still too large for their present incumbent. The general effect, however, was not displeasing. In fact, quite the contrary.

Betts’s report of the breakfast is all that is necessary.

“They sat there drinking wine and crunching toast and enjoying themselves for dear life,” he recounted to his wife and Stella. “Never saw the master in such fine feather. He’s a changed man since he met that little girl, Meg. Claims she’s nine centuries old. Well, the way she went for her breakfast you’d think she’d never had a bite to eat in all that time. She’s a queer one, she is, but you can’t help liking her.”

“Then what did they do?” Stella interrupted.

“Nothing,” replied Betts anticlimactically. “Miss Alice spoiled everything. She tapped on the door, and off they all trotted to church. Mrs. and Mr. and the boy walked on ahead. The other three followed jeering quietly and whispering and giggling. Mr. Hunter tried to look dignified, but he couldn’t keep it up. Looks like trouble to me.”

And trouble there was, but it did not start until it was time for the collection. Even then it began gently. It so happened that Mr. Hawk and party sat in the two front pews near the center aisle of the church and that Mr. Brightly and his beautiful wife sat directly back of Mr. Hawk, Megaera, and Daffy. Nothing could have been more unfortunate – for Mr. Brightly, who was deep in the bad books of Hunter Hawk. It was one of those fashionable churches one occasionally finds in a semisuburban community largely inhabited by snobs. It was smart to be seen there occasionally. Members were forever returning to it from Palm Beach, Deauville, St. Moritz, or Park Avenue. It was their way of officially registering the fact that after having spent oodles of money in fashionable travel they were once more honoring the neighborhood with their presence from the upholstered seclusion of their country estates.

“Look well while you have the chance,” the set of their backs seemed to say. “We will soon be expensively on our way again.”

Mr. Hawk did not like this church, and he did not like its preacher, and he felt strongly inclined to do something about it. The impulse was especially strong because he realized his sister and brother-in-law and even their son looked upon being seen in church as one of the high lights of the week. Yet no one looking at his dark, thin, and serious face would have suspected him of contemplating retaliation for all the weary hours he had passed in that pew.

The first note of discord was struck when the plate was being passed. Meg, dutifully remembering the training of her father in matters of money, made a rather clever snatch. Mr. Hawk, very much upset by this display of cupidity, promptly seized the small offending hand and squeezed it. A shower of coins fell back into the plate. At that moment Meg would have bitten Hunter Hawk’s hand had not Daffy restrained her. However, the ancient young lady’s attempt was not without some reward. She successfully retained in the palm of her hand a neatly folded five-dollar bill.

“Try and get that,” she muttered, giving Mr. Hawk a glimpse of the bill, “and I’ll knock you into the aisle.”

“If you need money why don’t you ask for it?” Hawk demanded in a furious whisper. “I’ll give you as much as you want.”

“All right, give me some,” she retorted.

“After,” said Mr. Hawk.

“Ha!” she laughed nastily and noisily. “I knew it would be that way.”

By this time the usher was presenting the plate to Mr. Wetmore Brightly. Hunter Hawk turned and petrified them both from the neck down. They formed an interesting group, Brightly and the usher. The supplicant stood with extended plate while the rich man slouched in his seat, one hand stubbornly thrust in his pocket as if to protect its contents. Both regarded each other with expressions of suspicion and growing animosity. Necks began to crane and eyes began to peer. What was the meaning of all this? Why was the rich Mr. Brightly refusing to contribute to the collection? Something like a murmur began to stir through the church. Brightly grew red in the face. What the devil had happened to him? Hunter Hawk turned and looked severely at the man.

“Go on, be a sport,” said Mr. Hawk in a voice intended to carry. “Give the usher some money and let him go.”

“I can’t get my hand out of my pocket,” gasped Mr. Brightly.

“What’s wrong with it – too full of money?”

Mr. Brightly looked pleadingly at the usher.

“Please take that plate away somewhere,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”

“I can’t,” replied the usher.

“Why can’t you?” demanded Brightly. “Trying to make a fool out of me? I’d like to break your damn neck.”

At this moment Mr. Hawk released the usher so swiftly that the poor man lost his balance and toppled over into Brightly’s lap. This was the right moment for the release of Brightly. Hawk restored his power to him. There was the sound of falling coins. Brightly and the usher became entangled in an effort to retrieve the money.

“By Jove,” said an old gentleman aloud. “Looks as if the beggars are actually fighting over the money.”

“Disgraceful!” exclaimed a lady.

“Oh, good,” muttered Megaera, rapidly concealing coins about her person.

“Stop! Stop!” whispered Mr. Hawk. “I told you I’d give you some money.”

“One dollar in my stocking is worth two in your purse,” breathed Meg. “I hope I don’t jingle when I walk.”

Order was at last restored, and the usher, with a sadly diminished collection in his plate, proceeded on his way. Mr. Hawk sat watching the minister closely. The moment he started to rise the scientist promptly froze him in a half-sitting position which of all positions is perhaps the most grotesque. It was in this unprepossessing pose that the man of God was so ill-advised as to announce:

“We will all rise now and sing – —”

Exactly what it was expected to sing the congregation never found out. Mute with astonishment, the Reverend Dr. Archer turned and took a quick, frightened look at his ecclesiastical rear, which for the first time in its life refused to do his bidding. Then he turned a white face to his congregation, a strained, white, bewildered face. Although not quite as strained and white as his, the collective face of the Reverend Archer’s congregation was equally bewildered.

“Looks as if he was going to spring at us,” observed the old gentleman to his wife. “What’s going on in this church, anyway?”

The minister licked his dry lips and cleared his throat several times. Finally he gained command of his voice.

“Something extremely odd has happened to me,” he said. “Don’t know what it can be. Perhaps it is some divine manifestation. Whatever it is, I certainly won’t be able to preach to you in this position. It would be too trying for all of us.”

At this point the nervous Mrs. Ashley, remembering her previous experience with the Lamberts, uttered a little scream and fainted. She was carried from the church.

“In view of this mystifying occurrence,” continued the Reverend Archer, “I think it would be best for you all to leave me now. In the meantime, I trust you will pray for my speedy recovery.”

When the church was empty, six members of the choir carried the Reverend Doctor to the vestry and deposited him tenderly on a sofa.

“I implore you not to drop me,” said the Reverend Archer as he was being lowered. “I am sure it would smash to bits.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Meg Removes Her Pull-Offs

That Sunday established Hunter Hawk’s undisputed sway over his home and household. A counsel of war had come to nothing. That is, it had ended in unconditional capitulation. Mr. Hawk was given to understand that he was at liberty to have as many mistresses and explosions as his heart desired and physique could stand. It was the secret hope of the three opposing Lamberts that the general wear and tear involved in the overindulgence of these two luxuries would soon make a wreck of the man. So long as he refrained from practising his black arts on them the Lamberts would tolerate if not welcome the establishment of a harem.

Hunter Hawk, after listening to the magnanimous sentiments of his sister, expressed his gratification and gave her to understand that in view of the circumstances her concessions were rather pointless. The Lamberts could hardly do otherwise. He himself offered nothing in return. To quote him verbatim he said, “You’ll do as I damn well please, and so will I.”

Alice Lambert did not like this attitude at all. She felt that her brother should have shown more gratitude for being allowed to do as he pleased in his own home. However, she very wisely refrained from giving expression to her feelings. She withdrew with a gracious smile while he watched her departure with a cynical one.

Megaera became more or less a member of the household, although her vagrant ways made it impossible to count on her presence. Twice she had taken Mr. Hawk to the grotto in the woods, and on the latter occasion Daffy had been brought along to admire the stone dog. Mr. Turner profited by the cementing of the unconventional relation between the two houses. He was provided with wine, food, and raiment and a supply of ready money with which he made various little purchases through the agency of a mysterious friend who later turned out to be the proprietor of a still. He throve and prospered and quarrelled a little less frequently with his daughter. So, considering everything impartially, it would seem that when Megaera swung a slim leg over Mr. Hawk’s window ledge she was acting in the best interests of everyone concerned. The conventional demands of the community were more or less satisfied by the shallow deception of foisting Megaera upon it as a visiting school friend of Daphne’s. Often with murder in her heart, Mrs. Lambert found herself conversing with neighbors about her daughter’s sweet young friend and how delighted she was they could be together for the remainder of the season, if not longer, a possibility she very much feared.

Events marched.

This evening Megaera and Mr. Hawk were returning from the village after the consumption by that young lady of several ice-cream sodas. Where the pavements yield to grass they encountered the charming and voluble Mrs. Wetmore Brightly, looking more possible and cosmetic than ever. After she had finished congratulating herself on her good fortune she announced the fact that she had been simply dying to meet Megaera ever since she had seen her in church.

“You’re such a beautiful creature, my dear,” she said. “I’m sure you must be such company for Mr. Hawk’s delightful niece – or shall I call you Hunter?”

The eyes came in very effectively here. Meg hated the woman from that moment, and knowing herself as she did, she naturally suspected the purity of the other’s motives. Her intuition was amply justified in this, for Mrs. Brightly’s motives were notoriously low. On her part, Mrs. Brightly regarded the official report concerning the visit of Meg to Daffy as being nothing more than an entirely justifiable lie concocted on the spur of the moment to conceal a much more interesting situation.

“And now,” announced the lovely woman, “I’m going to ask you a special favor, one that I ask only extra special people.” Here her voice dropped to a note of confidence. “We are opening up Greenwood next week,” she continued. “I do wish you would come. You and my husband were once awfully thick.”

“Your husband is still awfully thick,” Mr. Hawk replied, “or is that why you’re opening up Greenwood? I didn’t know he was even sick.”

“Hunter, you’re such a cynical person,” Mrs. Brightly pouted, “and such a wicked one. Of course my husband isn’t sick. Our camp was named long before the cemetery. It’s been in the family for years.”

“Well, you’ve got nothing on the other Greenwood,” said Hawk. “Many a family’s been in it for years.”

“What a ghastly sense of humor you have,” exclaimed Mrs. Brightly. “But I’ll forgive even that if you’ll only say you’ll come – you and Miss Turner and your niece and an extra pair of pants.”

“Trousers,” corrected Mr. Hawk. “Women wear pants.”

“Panties,” replied Mrs. Brightly. “What do you know about it, anyway, you old bachelor? And you didn’t say I could call you Hunter. I have been – —”

“I know you have,” said Mr. Hawk. “Now that it’s become a habit, why not keep it up?”

“You’re so gracious,” observed Mrs. Brightly. “You may call me Tom.”

“Why that?” asked Mr. Hawk.

“A hangover from the days of my youth. I was once a great tomboy. The name stuck. I think it’s rather cute.”

“So do I,” agreed Meg, with a much too sweet smile.

“I don’t know a thing about it,” said Mr. Hawk, “but I do know this: if anyone called me Flo or Gracie or Glad I’d knock his damn block off. Don’t see why the same reasoning doesn’t apply both ways.”

“You’ve an exceptionally agreeable companion,” Mrs. Tom Brightly said, addressing her remark to Meg.

“Isn’t it?” replied the girl.

“Will you come?” asked the elder woman. “Say, yes.”

“No,” said Mr. Hawk promptly. “I’m afraid it can’t be done. I don’t go to riots. A good old-fashioned stag party is bad enough for me. The performers there get paid for their folly.”

Something sharp and painful was making its way into Hunter Hawk’s ribs.

“Accept,” gritted a low voice in his ear, or rather a low, gritty voice drifted up to his ear. “Accept, damn you, or I’ll drive this knife clear through your bladder.”

Mrs. Brightly, who had unexpectedly moved a pace to one side, suddenly turned pale.

“For God’s sake!” she cried out. “What are you doing, child? Don’t murder the man.”

Mr. Hawk smiled falsely. “She’s merely scratching my back,” he explained. “Can’t reach it myself. And by the way, I accept your jolly old invitation. My second thoughts are always best.”

“I’m glad,” said Mrs. Tom Brightly. “Does she always scratch your back with that desperate-looking blade?”

“She carries it for that express purpose,” said Mr. Hawk.

“My family has always carried knives,” said Meg, slipping the knife in a sheath attached to a startlingly well turned leg. “Good in cases of assaults and such. Lots of times a girl doesn’t feel like being assaulted.”

“I didn’t know,” murmured Mrs. Brightly. “The women of your family must have led such interesting lives.”

“I’m afraid they were a pretty hard lot,” Meg answered with a small smile. “I’m quite different. I’m really a very nice girl. You’d be surprised.”

“I’m sure I would,” Mrs. Tom replied with a world of meaning in her voice. “Then it’s all settled?”

“We’ll be there,” replied Mr. Hawk, “even though it kills me. So long, Tom.”

Mrs. Tom flashed them both a smile and turned down the street, her shapely body swaying to advantage. Mr. Hawk’s gaze followed her.

“Take your eyes off that,” amended Meg.

“Off what?” asked Mr. Hawk.

“You know very well what I mean. Take your eyes off it and keep your eyes off it, or there’ll be a whole lot of trouble. Just remember that.”

“I’ll do my best,” Hawk replied, his thoughts centered on the knife. “The only thing wrong with that leg of yours is that murderous weapon you carry on it. I never knew you toted a dagger.”

“You’ll find out lots of things about me before I’m through with you,” Meg commented darkly.

Mr. Hawk found scant comfort in this remark.

•   •   •   •   •

Greenwood was situated on a wooded hill. There was a tracery of pine boughs around the house, and a constant whispering could be heard from a breeze that moved among them. From a long wide veranda one looked down on a silver lake lying like a coin tossed among the trees. And from the veranda one could trace the graceful course of a smooth gravel road twisting leisurely down to the pavilion and boat house rising like a fairy palace from the waters of the lake. The wind seemed cooler on this hill than elsewhere, and the sun warmer and more friendly – the air sweeter and more stimulating to the lungs. The house was an ancient and immense structure. It dominated the landscape, thrust itself up through the trees, and scrutinized the countryside with a baronial eye. It was a mansion of many chambers – large, fragrant rooms, intimately associated with boughs and birds. Their windows framed the sky and were forever capturing for awhile little wind-blown clouds. Wild woods and terraced gardens lay below these windows. Huge wide-treaded stairs walked up through this house, their turnings watched by empty niches that had once held statues of unrivaled ugliness. The first step of this ample staircase, or the last, as the case may be, rested on the smooth, solid surface of an immense assembly room used for dancing, mass drinking, and associated revelry. It was a vast room with intimate corners, a place of windows, convenient tables, and divans that defied fatigue. In this huge hall one could enjoy life. The floor made a splendid place for crap games. Almost always, from midnight until dawn, dancing couples were forced to circle round groups of vociferating gamblers.

Today Mrs. Tom Brightly, surrounded by a number of guests, was leveling a cocktail glass and gazing through its amber-colored contents at the Emperor as it made its way majestically up the drive. The Emperor was Mr. Hawk’s carry-all. He could never discover why he had bought this barge on wheels save for the fact that barring a van it was the largest motor-propelled vehicle he had ever seen. It was utterly out of proportion to his needs. There is something satisfying in being able to afford a thing for which one has no earthly use. It lends that meretricious touch to a purchase without which few pleasures can be fully savored.

The Emperor was now transporting its owner, slumped behind the wheel, Meg curled up quite a little too close beside him, and Daffy trying to recline in the back in the arms of a young gentleman who looked upon her advances with disapproval and mistrust.

“He’s always protecting me from myself,” the young lady had complained of Cyril Sparks throughout the course of the trip. “Has a quaint idea that my neck was made only to swallow with.”

“You deserve to be hung by yours,” Mr. Sparks had growled. “Can’t you leave a fellow alone?”

“No,” had been the emphatic rejoinder, “I can’t. What is a fellow for if you’ve got to leave him alone? Might just as well have a mummy for a boy friend.”

Cyril Sparks was a large lad, horselike and rangy. A seemingly endless supply of arms and legs was attached to his body. He had a long, honest face, prominent cheek bones, and startlingly blue eyes, always a little troubled. Situations got the better of him. He seemed to jerk along through life on the minimum amount of words. Few persons suspected that behind those blue, perplexed eyes lay a world of acute and devastating observations. Little if anything escaped those eyes or failed to register a definite impression on the brain that directed them. He was interested in two things – Daffy and bugs. He knew no tricks and could play no games. Many miles a week he tramped and wandered. When Mack Sennett stopped producing his slapstick comedies a source of genuine enjoyment was removed from his life. He was one of Blotto’s warmest admirers, contending that a dog, to be so completely dumb, must necessarily possess some human attributes. His hair was red, and his father was rich. He himself seldom had more than a couple of dollars in his pocket at one time, but he had the happy faculty of being able to dig up money from the various women who dwelt in his house. His three brothers, all of whom were competent but essentially decent sorts, gave him large checks which he usually kept in his pockets until they became so soiled and dog eared the teller at the bank handled them with shrinking fingers. When he had money he spent it on presents, candy, nuts, books, and an especially vile brand of rum of which he was inordinately fond. He was always so distrait and inarticulate his family could tell he had been drinking and was pleased about it only when he was heard to croon wistfully to himself about some laddie who kept going away somewhere and never coming back. On such occasions his mother and his various aunts would smile sympathetically and hold their peace. His father never grew tired of quietly observing Cyril and trying to follow the workings of his mind. He realized that the boy, though very much a part of the household and more dependent on it than any other member of the family, nevertheless lived in a world entirely apart from the others. Recently Mr. Sparks had come to regard this son of his as a rather gifted animal that eluded classification. Hunter Hawk was fond of young Sparks, and, strange to say, Sparks lost much of his restraint in the presence of Mr. Hawk. The boy would converse with him long and laboriously, preferably over a bottle of something. Next to his rum, Cyril Sparks loved the ethyl alcohol he found in Mr. Hawk’s laboratory. Whenever he entered the place he would rove about with deceptive inconsequence until he had located a bottle labeled with the familiar C_2 H_5 OH. This satisfactorily accomplished, he was able to answer questions and exchange ideas with a surprising degree of intelligence. It was his hope that in time Daffy would take up the subject of marriage and perhaps make arrangements. Also he hoped that these arrangements would not include Mr. and Mrs. Lambert and the boy Junior. It was a puzzle to him how three people could be so thoroughly undesirable on all counts. Mrs. Lambert both despised and venerated him on account of the Sparks fortune.

“Don’t forget,” he now said anxiously to Mr. Hawk. “You said you’d get this Brightly woman to give us some bottles for our own use. Don’t like this punch-bowl business. Always step on some woman. It’s better to go up to one’s room and take off one’s coat and talk and drink – —”

“And spit and swear and tell bad stories,” supplied Daffy. “Wouldn’t you enjoy yourself even more if we hit you over the head with an ax at the start and put you to bed? The results would be about the same, only quicker.”

“An ax is hard, and it would hurt,” he answered reflectively. “It might do for once, but you couldn’t keep it up. No head could stand much of that sort of thing. No, I’m serious about those bottles. A lot of people fatigue me. Bottles in the room will be much the best.”

“In other words,” said Daphne, “you prefer to drink furiously with a few rather than foolishly with the flock.”

“Frantically,” amended Cyril. “Your alliteration remains intact.”

“Don’t worry about your private supply, my boy,” said Mr. Hawk in a large manner that Cyril greatly admired. “I’ll attend to that.”

“Do,” put in Meg sweetly. “And only that. Observe that leg.”

She gave her skirt a flip and displayed the businesslike dagger snugly sheathed against a sheer silk stocking.

“Ah, there!” cried Mrs. Tom from the veranda. “Crawl out of that hearse and join a live party.”

Hawk led his three charges up the gracious steps and accepted a cocktail, which he courteously passed to Megaera.

“Yum,” she mouthed avidly. “This is so much nicer than school, isn’t it, Daffy?”

Daffy, over the rim of her glass, agreed that it was.

“Well,” said Sparks, eying her drink critically and wishing it was composed entirely of alcohol, “here’s gobble, gobble.”

Down went the cocktails with admirable precision and dispatch.

“You four appear to be snappy drinkers,” Mrs. Tom observed. “I can tell by the way they went down that you’ll make fast friends here.”

“The faster the better,” said Mr. Hawk.

Meg was completely hidden from view by a circle of knickers and white flannels.

“I’m already meeting a few,” she said. “Call off your pack, Tommy. Haven’t these gentlemen ever seen a small woman before?”

She broke through the circle and joined her hostess just in time to hear her say, “You’re my neighbor, Hunter Hawk. Your room is next to mine. If you get frightened in the night by all these bad people just knock three times on the wall and I’ll send my husband in to keep you company.”

“That’s the most appalling anticlimax I’ve ever heard,” he replied. “Why not come yourself?”

“Why not be yourself?” Mrs. Tom replied. “But if you really do need me, just scrape on the wall very, very gently.”

Wetmore Brightly approached none too pleasantly.

“It had better be damn gently,” he rumbled. “I sleep with one ear open, Hunter.”

“Hello, there,” said Mr. Hawk. “Has your hand fully recovered the use of its pocket?”

Brightly’s face darkened.

“That’s far from funny,” he answered, “unless one has a sophomoric sense of humor.”

“Did you get much in the scramble?” asked Meg. “I made out fine, but dear Mr. Hawk, noble Mr. Hawk, made me return it later. It’s not often one gets such a chance.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Brightly, “I remember now. You’re the cute little thing with the busy hands. You snatched a coin right out from under mine.”

“It was fifty cents,” replied Meg quite seriously. “A nice bright new one. That’s a worth-while piece of change, fifty cents. Two of them make a dollar.”

Hunter Hawk took the avaricious young lady by the arm and forcibly led her down the veranda.

“Don’t,” he pleaded, “don’t go on in that horrid way about money. It sounds terrible coming from your sweet young lips, even if centuries of lies have slipped through them.”

“I’m sorry,” replied Meg, this time with sincere humility. “You can’t understand what money has meant to us. You see, it’s the hardest thing to get. We can’t work for it, and still at times we must have it. Once we had no need of money, but now, with our magic running low, it seems to stand for everything. The Little People have gotten a tough break in your so-called Christian Era. We are neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. You see how it is? You belong to me, but I don’t belong to you. I just keep on going, and sometime you’ll stop … come to an end … and I’ll go on raising hell, no doubt loving but yet not wanting to love … living yet fed-up with life.”

She flung herself down in a large leather chair and looked with unseeing eyes at the panorama stretched out before her. Through a French window leading into the great hall drifted a haunting and rather pathetic little air. Mimi was dying gracefully somewhere in a Vocalion, her tiny hands being quite frozen. The small, broken voice, poignantly sad because reminiscent of happier times, carried in its note of suffering a yearning still to live and to share the warmth of life. The sad voice was appealing directly to Megaera and the tall man looking down at her. Mimi, dying, her love story ended, was saying farewell to them. Meg’s large eyes, touched with a new depth and just a little frightened, were gazing into Hawk’s.

“I want to belong to you,” she said in a low voice that crept close to the man’s heart. “I want to end with you or before you. I don’t want to go on and on … hell raising and all that.”

“There’s a few breaths left in me yet,” Hawk forced himself to reply.

“I know, but what is that to me, my tall? … a moment snatched from time. What is the name of that damn tune, anyway? It’s made me feel awfully low. You never saw me cry, did you?”

“Don’t,” said Hawk hastily. “Think of your lovely new pull-offs and cheer up.”

“Oh, be quiet and bring me another cocktail or I’ll have an emotional breakdown all over the place.”

Her modifying grin was rather forced and fragile. Hunter Hawk who suspected her every move and mood studied her intently. She seemed so thoroughly downcast at the moment, yet could he trust her? If he made the slightest display of his own emotions she might toss them brazenly in his face and do some terrible thing – kiss him, or climb a tree, or start in picking pockets. Feeling a bit upset himself, he silently departed in search of cocktails. And all the time he had the uncomfortable sensation of being intently watched by a pair of dark brooding eyes.

When he returned with the cocktails – four of them on a silver tray – Meg’s mood had altered but not improved.

“Put them down,” she said impatiently as he held the tray before her. “Put them down on that table and listen well to me – if you so much as touch a finger nail to your wall tonight the blade of this knife will be red with blood. Understand that now. I won’t put up with any monkey business.”

“Don’t be silly. As if I’d do such a thing.”

“Silly nothing,” she snapped. “And you would do such a thing. Look at me. Before you bought me body and soul I was a decent girl. My father sold me into shameful bondage, and you persuaded him to do it … you and your tainted money.”

“For goodness’ sake, don’t go on like that. Here, have a drink. If I gave you clothes and money it was only to keep you from stealing them. I had – —”

“So that’s how you feel about it. I suppose if I hadn’t asserted myself with the last shred of my pride you’d have let me go naked and hungry.”

“Naked, perhaps, my dear, but never hungry.”

She cast him a quick look, then her face darkened again.

“Don’t try to get around me,” she answered, “and don’t be lewd. Talk to the Brightly woman that way if you want, but if you do I’ll cut your tongue out. You’ve gotten me into an awful fix. I’m going to be a mother … and my child will have no name. I’ll make you pay for this through the nose, just see if I don’t.”

“If you succeed,” Mr. Hawk replied, “you’ll have discovered a new source of revenue. Anyway, about that having a baby business, it’s all a lie.”

“What if it is?” she answered hotly. “I might have a baby – I might have a flock of babies, great seething litters of them for all you care. You don’t have babies. I have babies.”

“I understand, dear,” Mr. Hawk’s voice was placatory. “I didn’t claim I had babies. You have babies.”

“I don’t have babies,” Meg replied furiously. “Never had a baby in my life, but I wish to God you’d have some – wish you’d have a cartload.”

“I’d do anything to be agreeable, but having a cartload of babies, or even a small carriage full, is out of my line altogether.”

“That’s it!” she exclaimed. “That’s it! Just like a big hulking brute of a man. You go round giving people lots of babies and then wash your hands of them. What are we going to do with all these babies? I ask you that – what are we going to do?”

The small creature looked tragically about her, as if literally surrounded by babies. Wherever Mr. Hawk’s eyes rested he could see a small bald head. He was lost on a sea of babies, the immensity of which dazed him.

“How,” he asked rather wearily, “how did so many babies get into the conversation?”

“What conversation?”

“I don’t know even that.”

“Well, you brought it up, and now you’re trying to lie out of it. It’s all because you insist on scratching on that wall.”

“No such thing. I told you I wouldn’t even breathe on that wall.”

Meg laughed nastily.

“That’s not because you wouldn’t like to. It’s because you don’t want to have your throat slit.” She paused and fixed him with her suspicious eyes, then continued: “And see that your bed’s pulled out into the center of the room. Those long tentacles on the end of your feet might start in scratching the wall in your sleep, then in she’d pop. And that’s another thing – your toes are too damn long. They make three of my fingers.”

“It’s too late to do anything about that now, isn’t it?” Mr. Hawk asked mildly.

“Well, keep them tucked under tonight or off they come, too.”

“Don’t get started on toes,” Hunter Hawk pleaded. “Let’s keep to the point.”

“I will talk about toes,” Meg replied passionately. “Don’t try to stop me talking about toes. I suppose splendid Mr. Hawk’s toes are too fine to be talked about – long, knobby, stalks like the twisted limbs of trees.”

This revolting picture of his toes got under Mr. Hawk’s skin. Nevertheless, he still endeavored to keep his temper.

“I never claimed my toes were works of art,” he said with some show of dignity. “I know very well they’re not lilies, but still they’re not so awful as toes go.”

“They are! They are!” she cried frantically. “They’re the most terrible toes in the world. Don’t tell me. I know.”

“I’d like to place five of them where they’d do you the most good,” was Hawk’s heartfelt reply to this.

“So that’s how you feel, is it?” she answered and snapped down the second cocktail. “Like to kick me, would you? I knew all the time you were a bully and a brute. Well, place those five horrible toes where you want to and see what happens.”

She had risen and now stood confronting the man, her eyes mad with rage. Hunter Hawk was outfaced. He ignominiously wilted. Taking her soothingly by the arms, he smiled down upon her as if she were a child.

“Now, now,” he said. “This is no time to get yourself all worked up and angry. Think of all the lovely things you have to wear and all the fun we’re going to have. Think of those snappy pull-offs you got from Daffy. I’m just – —”

“If you’re going to keep throwing those pull-offs in my face,” she cried, “I’ll damn well throw them in yours.”

She wrenched herself free, and before he could stop her she had ripped off the flimsy garment and flung it in his face.

“Take that,” she said, rushing down the veranda, “and if you make another wisecrack I’ll rip off all my clothes and tear ’em to shreds.”

“What goes on here?” came the unperturbed voice of Mrs. Tom.

“You mean, what comes off here,” said Hawk, emerging with a grin from the step-ins. “Are all girls like that?”

“All that count,” his hostess replied.

“Then do me a favor,” he told her very earnestly. “Send up to my room about three quarts of the strongest grog you have in the house. I’m going to take off my coat and talk and drink with men.”

“Certainly,” said Mrs. Tommy. “I understand. I might even join you later. Being on parade becomes such an awful bore. I’ll see about it right away. Any one of the servants will direct you to your room. Your things are already there.”

She moved gracefully away. Hawk looked about for Cy and Daffy. They were just entering the hall. He started to follow them.

“And I’m not coming back,” said a small, positive voice. It came from the shrubbery at the edge of the veranda. “You’ve seen the last of me.”

“Well, if you change your mind,” replied Hawk, addressing the shrubbery at random, “you’ll find me in my room with three quarts of grog.”

Silence a moment, then from the shrubs, “Where’s that?”

“One of the servants will tell you.”

“I’ll find it, never fear, but you don’t get me back.” A pause. “I said, you don’t get me back.” Another pause. “Just for that I will come back, damn you,” the voice continued. “Be careful what you do with those pull-offs.”

Hawk smiled, thrust the step-ins into his pocket, and walked down the veranda.

“I think I’ll give them to Tommy,” he tossed over his shoulder.

Behind him the shrubbery seemed suddenly to have gone mad.

CHAPTER NINE

A Nude Descends the Stairs

Mr. Hawk was singing terrifically in his tub. He was quite a little drunker than that well known lord one hears so much about. The three bottles of grog had been removed empty. Mr. Cyril Sparks had been removed full. Across the hall in their spacious chamber, Daffy and Megaera were dressing, were probably dressed and dancing, for all Mr. Hawk knew. He was far above time and circumstance. In his present mood he believed in doing one thing at a time and that thoroughly. From the great hall below came the sounds of music, dancing, and what not. Vaguely he wondered if people no longer ate, then he remembered he’d already eaten. Dinner had been served in the room. The remains of it were still outside. Tommy Brightly ran her place like a hotel.

Hawk’s bath was concluded on a crashing climax of vocal ferocity. He emerged from the tub, rubbed himself down until he lost his balance, decided to abandon the effort, and knotting a bath towel around his waist made for the nearest door, his eyes still smarting from an overgenerous application of soap.

Now unfortunately for Mr. Hawk’s evening it just so happened that the nearest door opened into the bedroom of the Brightlys. Even more unfortunately, it continued so to happen that Mrs. Tom Brightly had chosen this moment to shift to another and lighter gown, the night being what it was. She had progressed very satisfactorily to this end and was looking her best in hardly anything at all when the bathroom door, which she had forgotten to lock, was suddenly opened, and a man even a little more naked than she staggered briskly into the room. He was singing.

Mrs. Brightly glanced quickly in the mirror to see if her wind-blown was okay – she was not a woman to overlook essential details – and turned smilingly to deal with the situation.

“I hope your knot is on tight,” she said easily. “That towel doesn’t make much difference, but it does make some difference.”

Mr. Hawk brought his song to a close and eyed the fair revelation reproachfully.

“I didn’t scratch on the wall,” he observed. “This towel makes all the difference.”

“What do you mean, scratch on the wall? This isn’t your room.”

“It’s mine as long as I stay under your roof. An Englishman’s home is his castle. Don’t try to kid me just because I’ve been drinking a little – a very little.”

“My dear man, you must have been drinking a lot if you can’t tell this room from your own.”

A heavy footstep sounded outside, and the knob of the door shook. Mr. Hawk with great presence of mind leaped grotesquely to a corner, where he froze himself in the attitude of Greek pugilist, his features distorted almost beyond recognition in a scowl.

Mr. Brightly also had been drinking a lot. Always nearsighted, he was now more fog eyed than ever. He lurched into the room and asked his wife why the hell she wasn’t downstairs entertaining their guests. Then, unfortunately, his eyes fell upon the frozen but bellicose figure standing threateningly in the corner.

“Oh,” said Mr. Brightly in a nasty drawn-out manner, “So-o-o-o. Well, I’ve got the low-down on you at last.”

He lurched over to the statue and stood confronting it.

“Want to fight, eh?” said Mr. Brightly also striking an attitude of hostile intent. “Got anything to say for yourself before I give you the licking of your life?”

Mr. Hawk’s silence increased Mr. Brightly’s rage.

“Don’t be an ass, Wetty,” said his wife. “That thing’s a statue. No human being could have a face like that.”

“He won’t have any face at all when I’ve finished with him,” Wetty flung over his shoulder. “Nothing to say, eh? Well, take that.”

Brightly’s fist smashed against the stony chin of the statue.

“Godamighty!” cried Mr. Brightly, holding his damaged fist in his left hand. “Why didn’t you tell me the damn thing was made of stone?”

He turned and glared at his wife.

“I did,” she replied sweetly. “And if your head wasn’t made of the same substance you’d have known it right off. No man could be made like that. Look at those funny legs and those long skinny arms. I had it made especially for tonight. We’re going to have some fun with it.”

Mr. Hawk’s temper was rushing busily about in the hard shell of his body. Megaera had said unpleasant things about his toes. He had stood for that, but damned if he was going to have comparative strangers hold up his arms and legs to ridicule.

Brightly turned back to the statue and examined it closely. To Hawk’s indignation, the man felt his face and slapped various parts of his body. Then he began to laugh drunkenly.

“You’re right,” said Brightly at last. “Should have known it right off, but my eyes are not so good. That’s the silliest looking statue I ever saw. A physical wreck. He looks like Mutt in the funny strips.”

He turned beamingly upon his wife.

“You’re a great kid, Tommy,” he told her. “That thing will be the hit of the evening.”

This was just a little more than Hunter Hawk was willing to stand from Brightly. Taking advantage of the man’s unprotected rear, he released his right leg and, still retaining his rock-like sledge hammer of a foot, delivered upon Mr. Brightly’s person one of the most devastating kicks ever received by man. The recipient lunged forward and descended on his face. Mrs. Tom Brightly was as astounded as her husband. Up to this moment she had been too preoccupied with the situation itself to be impressed by the strange and sudden metamorphosis of Mr. Hawk. Now, however, when she came to think of it, there was something decidedly odd about the man, something inexplicable.

On all fours Brightly regarded the statue; then, after scratching his head in perplexity, he transferred his hand to his injured quarter.

“What the devil happened?” he asked.

“You tripped and fell,” lied Mrs. Tom.

“I distinctly felt a kick,” replied Brightly. “I’ll bear its mark to the grave. If you don’t believe me, look.”

“I believe you,” said Mrs. Tom, hastily averting her eyes. “Fix yourself up and go downstairs. I’ll be with you in a jiffy.”

The situation was becoming too complicated – too Rabelaisian. One naked man was enough at a time. If her husband didn’t stop his solicitous inspection, she’d have one naked man and at least a half on her hands. A derisive chuckle floated from the statue. Mr. Hawk was feeling ever so much better.

“It’s nothing to laugh at,” Brightly complained.

“I’m not laughing at it,” Mrs. Brightly replied rather coldly. “I agree it is nothing to laugh at. It shouldn’t even be seen.”

While Brightly was rearranging his toilet, Mr. Hawk took advantage of the intimate little interlude to make a spasmodic dash to the door. Brightly turned at the sound and looked over his shoulder. Hawk cleverly froze himself on the spot. But this time the man’s suspicions were not to be lulled. He looked long and thoughtfully at the statue. There was something vaguely familiar about it. Mr. Hawk in his haste had made a slight mistake. He was grinning now instead of scowling, and this reversal of expression made a decided difference in his appearance.

“The damn thing’s moved,” said Brightly in an awed voice. “Statues don’t move by themselves.”

“Nonsense,” replied Mrs. Tom. “It hasn’t moved an inch.”

“Don’t tell me, my dear. I’m not as drunk as all that. Furthermore, the damn thing’s laughing at me right this minute.”

Brightly stopped and felt the place of the kick. His face cleared, then darkened suddenly.

“I see it all now,” he said grimly. “That statue isn’t a statue at all. It’s a plot. It’s your lover, and by the living God he kicked me in the pants. I’ll kill him for that.”

He rushed to a chest of drawers and snatched out an automatic, blue-black and mean-looking. At the same time Mr. Hawk made an earnest endeavor to reach the door and thus to put an end to a situation which, painful as it was, had in it the possibilities of becoming even more painful. He flung open the door and, in his overwhelming desire to keep on moving as rapidly as possible, forgot to close it behind him. This gave Megaera, who was just emerging from her room, a splendid opportunity to see what was what. Mrs. Brightly in step-ins, Mr. Hawk in less, and the husband mostly gun – that is what she saw. And being a young lady of no little experience she placed upon the situation the only interpretation that seemed reasonable. Fire leaped to her eyes, and her dark face was flooded with the crimson of her rage. Flashing out her dagger, she blocked Mr. Hawk’s passage to his room.

“So you couldn’t even wait,” she taunted. “I’d like to cut your liver out, and hers, too, for this.”

Hunter Hawk was keenly appreciative of the importance of speed. He realized perhaps better than anyone present that this was no place to dally. One look at that gun had convinced him of this.

“Can explain everything,” he gasped as he sprinted for the broad staircase leading down to the hall. As he sprang into one of the niches he prayed to God that the knot in the towel would remain steadfast to its purpose.

Bang! Zing! The scientist became morally as well as physically petrified as Wetmore Brightly, gun in hand, came bounding down the stairs. A sea of upturned faces seemed to be washing at Mr. Hawk’s feet. Dancing had ceased to interest its votaries. All eyes were fixed on Messrs. Hawk and Brightly.

“I never remembered a statue being in that niche,” a primitive-looking blonde remarked.

“What is it supposed to be?” another girl demanded.

“Starving Apollo,” replied her companion.

“Oh,” said the young lady in a disappointed voice. “I thought he wore a leaf.”

“You shouldn’t think of such things,” she was told. “That towel might be the Greek for a dinner jacket.”

“But what’s the matter with Brightly?” another male inquired. “What on earth does he want to go shooting at a statue for?”

“I’d shoot at that statue myself if I had a gun,” another voice stoutly declared.

“My God! Look!” a woman cried hysterically. “Brightly has turned to a statue now.”

It was true. Mr. Hawk in desperation had been forced to petrify his host. Brightly stood motionless before him, the gun leveled at his head.

“I can’t be as drunk as I seem to be seeing,” one of the guests confided to anyone who cared to hear. “Brightly actually turned white and became as rigid as a block of marble.”

“He damn well is a block of marble or something,” replied another observer.

At this moment Megaera appeared at the head of the stairs. Her large dark eyes were fixed on Mr. Hawk. She was concentrating desperately, putting all her will power into her eyes, calling upon her reserve supply of magic to overcome the potency of Hunter Hawk’s ray. She was determined to play an exceptionally dirty trick on this man who had betrayed her trust. Her heart glowed with triumph as she felt herself succeeding.

Hunter Hawk reluctantly came back to himself, sweating. A moment later Meg effected the restoration of Mr. Brightly. And a moment later than that there was the report of another shot. Bang! Zing! Going at great speed something small but hard buried itself in the wall less than an inch from Mr. Hawk’s ear. Accustomed as he was to explosions, he was nevertheless unable to regard his present predicament with equanimity. He found himself in the position of a man who is forced to do several difficult things at once. One of these things was to maintain his towel in the important capacity it now filled. The knot, he feared, was working loose. Another thing was to continue rapidly down those stairs regardless of the throng awaiting him at their base. Finally, it would be helpful if he could repetrify Mr. Brightly. That should be done without further delay.

At the sound of the shot Meg underwent a sudden change of heart.

“What the devil do you mean by shooting up my man?” she demanded.

“Watch,” said Brightly with an unpleasant laugh as he took careful aim at the diligently descending Hawk.

Before he could make the gun work, however, Meg had seized a huge vase which never should have been made and dashed it at Mr. Brightly. From the floor of the hall Hawk turned and directed the ray on the stricken man. The result was a rather interesting statue remotely resembling the Dying Gladiator. At the sound of the crash Daffy appeared, supporting her friend Cyril Sparks. That gentleman selected the top of the stairs for a base and sat there cheering. Mr. Hawk felt himself being closely examined by many pairs of bright and penetrating eyes. A less modest man would have passed through the crowd as quickly as possible and lost himself in the night. Hawk felt that he could go no farther. He had consumed a little more than his share of three quarts of strong liquor, and in spite of his activities he was far from being himself. Assuming the pose of wing-footed Mercury, one arm aloft and one foot delicately raised from the floor, he balanced himself skilfully on the ball of the other foot and, sending the ray through his body, remained in that position. Interested spectators crowded around him. Incredulous hands caressed him intimately. Fingers poked. One enterprising wag went even so far as to attempt to dislodge the towel. It clung with commendable loyalty to the middle section of the scientist. Meg was standing at his elbow, and in her hand she held a gun – the gun that Wetmore Brightly had relinquished upon the descent of the vase. There was a cynical smile on the young lady’s face and a look of determination in her eyes. She would teach this man the lesson of his life.

Once more Mr. Hawk found the strength of the ray failing. And once more he appeared before the amazed guests as a creature of flesh and blood. At this point Meg discharged the revolver at his feet. Hawk leaped high in the air and cleared a space for himself on the great floor of the hall. From his place on the stairs Cyril Sparks redoubled his cheering. The sound fell ironically on Hunter Hawk’s ears. For the security of the towel that wild leap had proved disastrous. The knot became merely two disconnected ends. With one hand Hawk seized these ends, with the other he wiped the sweat from his forehead. He looked about him for some means of escape, but wherever his anxious eyes searched they encountered the amused gaze of a group of guests. Cut off from escape in every direction Hawk lost hope and with it he lost all presence of mind. He became blindly and unreasonably enraged. Deliberately he removed the towel and flung it to the floor.

“So you won’t stay on, won’t you?” he shouted. “Well, damn you, you will!”

Then to the surprise of everyone he executed a dance of wild abandon. Suddenly he changed his mind and snatched up the towel. A man with nothing but a towel, even though it is strategically arranged, is a figure to give pause to any party. It did.

His rage expended in his dance, a great calm settled down on Mr. Hawk. He seemed to realize that everything was lost now and that he could lose no more. He felt much like a man who having been thoroughly drenched in a rainstorm can afford to loiter by the wayside. With unhurried dignity he walked to a table and, picking up a tray full of cocktails, made his way into the night through one of the French windows. Mrs. Brightly, now fully clothed – for Mrs. Brightly – arrived on the scene in time to witness Hawk’s classical exit.

Ten minutes later a servant in striped drawers and the remains of a tattered undershirt rushed heedlessly into the hall, where an interested crowd immediately collected. The servant was white and trembling as he recounted his story to Mrs. Brightly.

“I was walking up the drive,” he said, “keeping an eye on the cars. It happened just at the turn. That’s where I lost my pants.”

“And almost everything else,” added Mrs. Tom. “But go on. What happened at the turn?”

“It was a madman – a maniac,” continued the despoiled domestic, “and if you’ll believe me, madam, he was mother-naked.”

“Not even a towel?” asked Mrs. Tom.

“Not even a towel, madam.”

“Better and better,” the primitive blonde remarked.

“He flung himself upon me, this madman did,” went on the servant, “and began to undress me. I was so shocked and surprised I wasn’t able to defend myself. Presently, after he had stripped off my coat, I thought I would try to reason with him like they say you can do sometimes with lunatics. ‘What do you want to undress me for?’ I asked him, and I remember his exact words. ‘Your curiosity is justified,’ he said, ‘but have no fear. I don’t want to undress you. It’s most repugnant to me, but I must do it. It’s your nakedness against mine, and I prefer yours. Turn about is fair play. Look out or I’ll bite.’ Well, of course, nobody wants to be bitten by a madman, that being a very dangerous thing, so I kept still. When he had gotten me down to my drawers he looked at them considering like for a long time. ‘I leave you those,’ he said at last. ‘I can’t imagine where you ever got such drawers. Consider yourself lucky,’ and believe me, madam, I did.”

The man paused and gulped.

“Go on,” said Mrs. Brightly, her eyes dancing.

“Well, there’s not much left,” replied the man. “He took everything else except my undershirt, which had gotten torn in the first scrimmage. Then he insisted on having me help him to dress, which I did very nicely, tie and all. After that he gave me a cocktail, which I took just to please him.”

“I dare say you needed one by then,” observed Mrs. Tom. “You may withdraw now if you have nothing further to add. You’re excused from duty for the rest of the evening. Try to keep those drawers. They’re priceless.”

As the servant departed Mr. Hawk nattily appeared. He had selected his victim with a discriminating eye. If anything the dress suit he was now wearing fitted him better and was more presentable than his own. Considering all it had been through, the stiff shirt front made a brave showing. His white tie was much more dexterously arranged than ever he had been able to achieve himself. He was slightly drunk but perfectly collected. About him seemed to glow the aura of a conqueror. In his right hand he held a long glass vase whose rightful occupation was flowers. At present it contained about two dozen cocktails.

“I poured them all in,” he explained easily. “It made things less difficult.”

“What a mind!” said the voice of Daffy. “That man’s my uncle.”

Mr. Hawk turned to Megaera.

“I have danced once already this evening,” he said, “but unfortunately that was alone. Would you care to join me and my cocktails now?”

Megaera handed him the revolver and smiled almost shyly.

“Yes,” she said. “Especially the cocktails.”

“Before you go,” Mrs. Tom asked, “won’t you please try to do something about my husband? He’s in a terrible state up there, and he’s blocking up the stairs. One gets so tired stepping over him.”

“Doesn’t one just,” replied Mr. Hawk. “I’ll try to do something about him if you guarantee he’ll do nothing about me.”

“I fancy he’s about through for the night,” Mrs. Tom assured him.

Mr. Brightly was indeed in a terrible state, and he was very much in the way. He was lying in a stiff, distorted attitude amid the ruins of the shattered vase. Mr. Hawk restored him to the use of his body, but he could do nothing with the man’s mind, which seemed to have been seriously affected by the events of the night.

When he had risen painfully to his natural position he looked wildly about him. His eyes finally rested on Mr. Hawk. A look of fear and loathing came into them. Without attempting to utter a word he turned and staggered up the stairs to his room. There he tried to puzzle out some of the various things that had happened. Eventually he gave it up. However, he was sure of one thing. Hunter Hawk was at the bottom of it all.

In the meantime the mysterious subject of his thoughts had once more descended the stairs – this time in a less original manner – and after circling the hall with the diminutive Meg disappeared with her through one of the French windows.

“We have a lot to thank them for,” Mrs. Tom observed as she followed the disappearing couple not without a trace of envy in her eyes. “Already they have made the party a success.”

“Yes,” replied the primitive blonde in a tone of anticipation. “After what we have seen tonight one can’t blame any girl for standing for anything, can one?”

“Well, hardly, my dear,” said Mrs. Tom, casting about for something fresh in the line of masculinity.

CHAPTER TEN

An Epidemic of Escapes

From a distant roof garden in the heart of a glowing city a waltz was throbbing over the air – Victor Herbert’s “A Kiss in the Dark,” many of which were being exchanged at that moment between Mrs. Brightly’s guests, Mrs. Brightly herself being by all odds the most indefatigable exchanger.

Neither Meg nor Hunter Hawk was in the mood for such mild pleasantness. On the low hanging limb of a tree the small creature was perched. Hawk was standing beside her. This arrangement made it possible for them to converse almost as equals so far as height was concerned.

Below them in the dying light of an old moon the little lake lay fitfully glimmering. The white pavilion rising gracefully from the silver-flecked water looked like an enchanted barge that had gently drifted to shore from another world. Silently it floated on the surface of the lake, like a little prayer or dream passing in the night. Then, as the man and girl watched, the white pavilion became very much a thing of this world. Suddenly there burst from its doors a rout of white bodies. Flashing for a moment in the wan light, they sped like naiads across the platform and plunged into the quiet water, the ivory of their supple forms momentarily silhouetted against the night. Faint sounds of shouts and laughter drifted up the slope.

“Pretty,” commented Meg, her eyes fixed on the lake.

Hawk considered. He was a trifle shocked.

“If I had the nerve I’d like to try it myself,” said Hawk.

“You’ve contributed about enough nudity for one night,” replied Megaera. “That dance of yours was almost more than mortal eye could bear. I didn’t mind it in the least.”

“You were responsible for it.”

“Perhaps,” she admitted, “but you were really at fault – you and that shameless woman.”

“I keep on telling you it was all a mistake, Meg. I barged blindly through the wrong door. Soap in my eyes and all that. Wouldn’t believe her when she told me it was her room.”

Meg laughed mirthlessly.

“And naturally you stayed to argue the point in a friendly way,” she observed sarcastically. “And no doubt you’d have arrived at an agreement perfectly satisfactory to both sides if himself had not arrived first with his gun.”

“How many times do I have to tell you – —”

“No more times,” she interrupted brusquely. “You could keep on telling me until that horselike face of yours turned blue, and still I wouldn’t believe you. When I see a man and a woman strutting about in nothing at all or nearly, with a bed in the background, it doesn’t take much imagination to put one and one together.”

“Evidently not,” remarked Hawk bitterly. “You just naturally fling them together.”

“I don’t have to,” she replied, “but I know what’s what, never fear. However, my lanky lecher, you’re forgiven this time. I can’t help admiring your singleness of purpose. Just a real good time is all you’re after – the playboy of the Christian Era of which you speak so highly.”

Hopelessly Hawk regarded his companion. A nature such as hers would never credit the truth of the unfortunate affair. Even if he did succeed in making her believe him, he would in all likelihood lose caste in her eyes. She would not be able to understand. He shook his head and gave it up.

“All right,” he said, “you win. Have it your way. What I would like to arrange right now if we could would be some sort of a working agreement between you and myself. You can see for yourself how silly it is for your magic and my discovery to be forever clashing, working against each other. See what I mean? If I don’t interfere when you want to turn a trick of magic I wish you’d give me a free hand with my science. When we work against each other the results are most unexpected – even dangerous. That chap Brightly nearly blew my head clean off of my shoulders when you brought him back to himself.”

“You’d gotten me properly aroused,” Meg explained. “What girl wouldn’t be, in the same circumstances? I wanted that madman to blow your head off. The ugly thing deserved to be blown off, but what did I do instead? I almost knocked his ugly head off with an overgrown vase.”

“And very neatly done it was, too,” commented Hawk, inwardly smiling at the memory. “It must have been a scene of astonishing activity. I was rather busy myself.”

“As busy as a drunken jumping jack,” she said, laughing softly in the darkness. “Yes, you certainly had your hands full. The old man would have enjoyed seeing you. His sense of humor runs to violence. He enjoys the uncouth, and you were about the most uncouth object I ever saw. And I was so ladylike and well poised myself – bashing my drunken host over the head with a couple of tons of clay. Hope he has no hard feelings.”

“Doubt if he knows who did it. Things were happening far too fast. I very much fear, though, he’ll never be the same man, although God knows he can’t be worse than he was.”

A man and a woman, closely linked, passed by. They were unaware of the presence of Megaera and Hawk.

“If the maid answers,” said the woman, “tell her it’s the dentist calling up to let me know that Thursday will be all right for an appointment.”

“But suppose himself should answer?”

“Then ask him to play golf.”

“Where is he now, by the way?”

“On the business end of a cocktail,” the woman replied. “I encouraged his libations tonight. The dear man thinks I’m a good sport.”

“Think it will be safe to go swimming?”

“Have to take a chance on that,” she replied with a light little reckless laugh. “If he finds out and tries to get stuffy I’ll pull an attack of hysterics and scare him out of a year’s growth.”

“That’s the way I like to hear you talk,” her companion said triumphantly. “If all wives were like you – —”

“You’d have a much easier time.”

Both of them were laughing as they passed out of earshot. Meg looked after the couple. There was a scornful expression in her eyes.

“You know,” she said at last, “there are lots of things about this party I don’t like, and most of them are people. They don’t strike me as being wicked because they can’t help it, but because they feel that they should be. Seem to have an idea that they’re missing something unless they follow the mob. You’re not like them.”

“Thanks.”

“No. You’re just naturally a wicked man.”

“The hell you say.”

“Yes. You can’t help being wicked. You don’t try to be – probably you don’t want to be. It just comes to you spontaneously, and there you are – wicked. And that’s why you’re so much better than these so-called good men – the moral sort. People who are not naturally wicked don’t find it so hard to be good. I can stand good people and bad ones but these trollops up here with their dancing darlings, they bore me overmuch.”

“You mean the kind that pack their suitcases on Friday, have an interview with their bootleggers, and then start out to have one hell of a wild week-end. They’re always throwing parties or being thrown at parties and having a nice vicious time generally.”

“I guess so,” said Meg, “but I haven’t had much experience with them, after all. I’ve a feeling that they never just find themselves in bed with each other casually and clubbily. They make all sorts of elaborate arrangements, scheme, whisper, and telephone like those two that just passed. It must be an awful anticlimax. No zest. No element of surprise. They don’t drift into depravity. They deliberately wade out to find it. Are the cocktails all gone?”

“Not quite.”

“Give me a gulp.”

Mr. Hawk passed the vase but kept one hand on it, while the girl drank, after which he refreshed himself.

“That’s much better,” she sighed, wiping her lips with her bare arm. “Whee!” She blew out her breath and gave her thigh a smart slap. “You know,” she continued, waxing philosophic, “almost any man if he stays in bed long enough and enjoys sufficient privacy will find some woman alongside of him sooner or later.”

“Trouble is,” said Mr. Hawk, “the majority of men are not so optimistic as that – or so patient.”

“Then they don’t know women,” Meg replied in a decided voice.

“Some of my best friends have been good people,” said Mr. Hawk reflectively. “You know what I mean – really good people.”

“Most good people have wicked friends,” put in Meg. “They seem to attract them and to understand them. It sometimes takes a really good person to appreciate a wicked one. That’s why I appreciate you.”

Mr. Hawk laughed scornfully.

“You’re the worst woman I ever met,” he declared with unchivalrous sincerity. “I put nothing past you.”

“Nonsense!” exclaimed Meg. “You don’t know anything yet. Compared with this mob up here I’m a back number. Really good people like myself are all right, and really bad people like you are all right. It’s the exploiters of either class that are all wrong. They’re what you might call white-collar sinners. They lack distinction in their vice. They’re just party people, if you know what I mean.”

“I get what you mean,” said Mr. Hawk. “They have to throw a party to get their courage up. A sort of I-will-if-you-will idea. Mass production of an inferior grade of sin.”

“It’s mostly vanity and competition that get the best of the women,” went on Meg. “That and bad booze. These girls today will give up almost everything if not all to keep from losing a man even when they’re sick of him. They’re so constituted that they just can’t bear to let the world see some other woman trotting the poor deluded ass across the floor. It galls them.”

She reached for the vase, shook it, and turned it upside down.

“Empty,” she said. “Damn. Just as I was getting moral, too. In the old days, before it was considered quite the proper thing for nice women to advertise their wares, men had to damn well fight for their folly. A lover of any consequence had to qualify first as a successful poisoner, knifer or clubber. Women were really appreciated then.”

She sighed and sniffed the empty vase.

“Oh, well,” she went on, “I dare say I’m getting old. I wouldn’t have talked like this perhaps a couple of centuries ago. Something seems to have gotten the best of me tonight. I have a suspicion that you depress me. You’re lots too long and much too sober. Let me down, and we’ll refill that vase.”

She flung her arms round Mr. Hawk’s neck and, slipping from the limb, clung to him.

“See here,” he began, but she interrupted him.

“Aw, shut up,” she said. “Do you know what’s wrong with me? No. Well, I don’t belong. These women are so much prettier and bigger than I am, and they seem to know just what to do and how to do it. I feel sort of out of things and a little bit envious. Even if they are a bunch of petty, sneaking adulteresses they don’t have to live in a hole in the ground like I do.”

“Drop off, won’t you?” complained Mr. Hawk. “Your knees are jabbing me right in the stomach. They hurt like anything.”

“What do I care about your old stomach?” she cried, and silenced his further protests with her lips.

As they passed back through the trees towards the house they encountered numerous couples posed in attitudes of varying degrees of amorousness. The prediction of the primitive blonde had been a conservative one. With admirable fortitude every girl seemed to be standing for everything. The man who could calmly stand for any amount of explosions became more alarmed as he progressed. He did not know what he might run into next. His fears were not without some justification.

“The other day,” he told his unperturbed companion, “they ran in seventeen girls for spooning along Riverside Drive.”

“Then, if the law ran true to form,” said Meg, “these couples here would get the chair, or at least a life sentence.”

“No,” replied Mr. Hawk. “The difference between the conventional thing and dissolute conduct is the difference between Saturday night on a country estate and a park bench in the city. I beg your pardon, sir. I didn’t know you were there.”

Mr. Hawk hastily removed his foot from the dark figures beneath him and hurried on with averted eyes. A slow giggle followed after him on the wings of a muttered oath.

They passed through the great hall, now a place of wild disorder, and ascended the stairs. Cyril Sparks was seated on the top step. He was crooning dolefully about the laddie who kept on going away and never coming back. Daffy, who had been hearing about this nonreturning Scotchman for some time, was looking a trifle fed-up. Already she had rejected the oily suggestions of numerous gentlemen who had approached her with a view to getting her to indulge in activities that offered a little wider latitude to her talents. To all of these disinterested individuals her answer had been the same.

“I am sorry, sir,” she had replied, “but I’m about to become a mother.”

This answer had proved most effective. The gentlemen, shocked by this revelation, had hastily withdrawn.

“Hasn’t it moved from this step?” inquired Meg of Daffy.

“It goes occasionally to get drinks when I won’t bring them to it,” she replied. “It is sitting here because it hopes it will all happen again.”

“Wouldn’t miss such a spectacle for the world,” said Cyril with a bland smile. “First you appear with a towel, then you turn to a statue. I saw it with my own eyes. Don’t tell me. Then Brightly arrives with a great big gun, takes a pot shot at the statue, and then plays statue, too. I’ve got it all down by heart. Can’t think of anything else. Then, by gad, both of you come to life again and he starts in shooting. You sprint down the stairs, Meg wangs him over the head with a vase, and down he goes, once more a statue. You follow his example for a moment, then probably you feel like dancing, because you come back to life again. After that you pull off a real snappy dance and snaffle a tray full of cocktails. The surprising part is that you disappear into the night, naked, and presently return better dressed than I ever before saw you. Tell me, did everybody see all this? If not I’m going to stick to good old C_2 H_5 OH, a comparatively mild stimulant.”

“It happened that way,” said Mr. Hawk. “You didn’t miss a trick, but let’s retire now to my room and discuss several bottles.”

When the jaded servant had brought the bottles and everyone was arranged according to his or her idea of comfort, that of the ladies being a flop on the bed, Mr. Hawk advanced a proposal.

“Let us,” he said, “shake the dust of this place from our feet. Let us go out into the night and seek adventure. Roadhouses are still roading, and the night is not too far advanced. I know where the Emperor is parked.”

“And I know where there is a secluded side entrance,” contributed Daffy.

“It shall serve as an exit in this case,” said Hawk. “Shall we escape without further procrastination?”

“Shalt,” agreed Cyril readily, “avec bottles.”

“Escape!” cried Meg, her dark eyes dancing. “That’s my idea exactly. I’m ready now. When friend Brightly wakes up in the morning he will be in a none too agreeable mood.”

There followed several minutes of rather scrambled packing, several more of earnest drinking, and a few devoted to stealthy retreating before the four departing guests found themselves rolling smoothly down the drive in the capacious interior of the Emperor. As the huge car circled round the lake the party watched with interest the sportive antics of the bathers. One stout youth was busily engaged in the pursuit of a slim girl. Mr. Hawk leaned out of the car and petrified the two figures in their tracks.

“They will never be missed,” he remarked, “and they will add materially to the artistic value of Mrs. Brightly’s garden.”

“Adequate recognition of indifferent hospitality,” said Cyril as the car gained headway and moved towards the wide flung gates of the estate.

The main highway practically flung them into the arms of a roadhouse, and from that time on the stages of their journey were measured by the last roadhouse and the next.

At about three o’clock in the morning they were enjoying the advantages of a ringside table at an especially swanky resort. Money was running low, but spirits were still mounting. They were hungry and consumed by thirst. Mr. Hawk regarded the waiter not like the bird whose name he bore, but more like that predatory nocturnal one. He demanded the speedy satisfaction of both hunger and thirst, and without any undue delay his demands were abundantly satisfied.

It was then that the petty misfortunes which were to dog them for the rest of the trip began to arrive. Mr. Hawk was performing something hitherto unattempted in the line of dancing when a large lady planted her high heel heavily upon his instep. In addition to this the lady remarked to her partner that there seemed to be a number of drunken couples on the floor. Her partner gallantly assured her that there would be one less drunken couple if it bumped into them again. To put an end to what promised to be an unpleasant situation Mr. Hawk firmly froze the lady to the dance floor. Her partner, in endeavoring to proceed with the dance, found his gyrations suddenly arrested. The lady refused to budge. Redoubling his efforts, he tugged at her manfully, but still she remained glued to her tracks.

“Come on,” he grunted. “Get started. What’s the big idea?”

Receiving no answer to what he justly considered a reasonable question, he summoned his strength and, putting his weight behind his shoulder, grappled with the lady. The general effect was more that of an assault than a dance. Several couples, observing the man’s energetic actions, preferred to watch instead of dancing. Thus an interested little group gathered round to witness the unequal contest.

“Refuse to budge, do you?” panted the man who had not spent the evening unrefreshed. “Well, I’ll damn well see that you budge.”

He lunged at the petrified woman. His shoulder coming into violent contact with her received damaging punishment.

“God!” breathed the man, standing off and observing the immovable figure. “What’s happened here?”

One of the watching ladies, who at that time of night would have found it difficult to stand under the most advantageous conditions, now yielded to the law of gravity and sank to the floor.

“Look!” she screamed hysterically. “He’s trying to dance with a statue. That isn’t a real woman.”

“God,” repeated the man, thoughtlessly touching the petrified woman with a long finger. This action elicited general merriment on the part of the low-minded spectators.

“If she’s a real live lady she’d never let you do that,” someone remarked.

“No,” agreed another voice. “Not even if you were married to her.”

The man flushed.

“Wasn’t thinking,” he said apologetically.

“I should say not,” said a lady indignantly.

The man’s eyes sought and found Mr. Hawk, whom he regarded as the author of his misfortune. The scientist’s gaunt features were registering his amusement. This did not improve the temper of the man.

“What did you do to her?” he demanded, advancing on Mr. Hawk.

“Who, me?” asked Mr. Hawk in a surprised voice. “My dear man, what do you think I am, a magician? If anyone is responsible for the unresponsive condition of your partner it obviously must be you, who were dancing with her at the time it happened.”

“Is that so?” replied the man, making a wide pass at Mr. Hawk, who, ducking adroitly, allowed the fist to continue on over his shoulder and into the face of an interested spectator standing directly behind him. With a howl of indignation and surprise the assaulted man seized Mr. Hawk and pushed him violently into his assailant. This gentleman, on plunging back, succeeded in inflicting painful injury upon another eyewitness. Thus several unpleasant contacts were established. The result was a brawl in which all present eventually became involved. It was one of these brother against brother conflicts in which every participant was for himself or herself for no good reason that they could discover. Mr. Hawk, taking advantage of the confusion, released the innocent cause of hostilities from her petrified condition. Meg and Daffy seized her by either arm and, whispering something in her ear, hurried her unnoticed to the Ladies’ Room. Above the din of the battle rose the amazed voice of the woman’s partner.

“My God!” he shouted. “She’s gone entirely. She’s not here.”

Blows were arrested and oaths swallowed. Hostilities came to an abrupt end as the embattled participants, forgetting their meaningless fury, made a common cause of looking for the disappearing statue.

“Damn if I’m going to fight any more,” announced the partner at last in a thoroughly discouraged voice. “There’s something funny about this business.”

With that he returned to his table where, sitting down heavily, he tried to think the thing out. As no one could discover any reasonable pretext for the resumption of the fight the various couples repaired to their seats, where they remained for some time earnestly discussing the strange occurrence. While this was at its height the large lady, flanked by Daffy and Meg, came unconcernedly across the floor. The three women seemed to be the best of friends and were laughing inanely together as women seem to find it helpful to do when getting acquainted. The partner of the large lady watched her approach with dazed eyes.

“Later,” he said as he hurried her to the door of the roadhouse. “Not here. Explain outside.”

The poor man was mortally afraid that the lady might take it into her head to turn into a statue again. This would be most inconvenient. He would never be able to explain the affair satisfactorily to her husband.

As the couple departed the waiter appeared before Mr. Hawk and presented him with the check. There was hardly enough room on it to edge in another figure. Mr. Hawk glanced at the total and gulped. Then he smiled weakly at the waiter and became an inanimate thing of stone.

“Look,” whispered the waiter, “It’s happened again.”

Cyril removed the check from the nerveless fingers and looked at it to see what had so affected his friend. One look was enough.

“I want to join you, brother,” said Cyril, and Mr. Hawk accommodated him.

There remained the two girls and the waiter. Within the hard shell of his head Mr. Hawk was doing some quick thinking, but think as he would he was unable to think himself and his party out of that room without paying the check, and this he could not do. The girls looked into the two stony faces of their escorts, then looked at each other. The waiter was visibly upset. His knees were trembling under him. In petrifying himself Mr. Hawk had still retained partial control of his lips. A sound now issued hollowly from them.

“Go away,” he said to the waiter. “Be gone, you dog, or I’ll petrify you for life.”

The waiter made an honest effort to be gone, but his limbs refused to function.

“It seems he’s already petrified,” observed Daffy.

“Go away,” repeated the hollow voice. “Make those legs work. Snap ’em into action.”

This time the waiter succeeded in getting himself started. He did not stop until he had collapsed in the manager’s office. There, in garbled form, he gasped out what had happened.

“You say he turned to stone and then began to talk?” asked the manager.

“He did, sir,” replied the waiter.

“What’s gotten into this place?” the manager went on. “Are all you waiters drunk tonight? Just a few minutes ago one of the men was telling me a cock-and-bull story about some woman who turned to stone. The stuff we serve here is rotten, God knows, but I didn’t know it was as bad as that.”

“It’s God’s own truth,” declared the waiter. “I saw her do it myself.”

“Well, God’s own truth is hard as hell to believe,” remarked the manager, rising from his chair. “I’d better go out and see these petrified birds for myself. Take me to their table.”

“I wish you would, sir,” said the waiter. “I’m worried about their check. It’s a knockout.”

After the manager had devoted several minutes to making minor improvements on his already immaculate self he turned from the mirror and, beckoning the waiter to precede him, quitted the room.

In the meantime events had not stood still at the table of the petrified birds. Meg had taken decisive steps. She had accepted the invitation of a fat gentleman sitting at a table on the opposite side of the dance floor. This invitation had been extended and rejected several times during the course of the night or rather the morning. Now, however, Meg reversed her decision. She smiled sweetly at the fat gentleman and nodded. Unsuspectingly that individual approached, Meg rose to meet him, and in a moment she was circling the floor in his putty-like embrace. A low growl of suppressed rage broke from the lips of Mr. Hawk. He was tempted to return furiously to himself, but thought better of it. The unpaid check lay on the table before him. So far he had been able to think of only one way out of the difficulty – flight. The odds were greatly against the success of such an enterprising move, Cyril Sparks being one of the odds – at this stage of the game his legs were unreliable.

“Damn bad jam,” said Hunter Hawk to himself. “Wonder what she’s up to?”

The music stopped, and the manager arrived at about the same time. Meg returned to the table. Her face was flushed, and her eyes sparkled, and strange to relate her left breast seemed to have outgrown its fellow. Daffy was the first to notice this rather disconcerting change.

“My dear,” she whispered. “You’re getting overbreasted on the left.”

“Yes,” agreed Megaera with a gin-induced giggle. “I’m what you might call busting out.”

In her enjoyment of her little joke she slapped Mr. Hawk on the back.

“Ouch!” she cried, blowing on her fingers. “This man of mine is certainly hard boiled.” Then in a lower voice she added, “It’s these damn low-cut, tight-fitting dresses. A girl nowadays can’t hide a thing.”

The manager, who had been an interested observer, now made his presence known. He picked up the check and rapidly ran his eyes down the column to the only place that mattered. At the sight of the total his face darkened. Still he retained his poise.

“I hope everything has been satisfactory,” he said, with one of his Ittest smiles, virily showing his white teeth.

“No, it hasn’t,” snapped Daffy. “This place is altogether too rough for a woman of any refinement. I’ve been greatly perturbed by the conduct of some of these lousy bums.” She waved her hand at the room and attempted to look indignant.

The manager opened his eyes wide, then blinked rapidly. The lady’s miscellaneous selection of words made it difficult to place her exact position in the social scale. He tried again.

“Sorry,” he said, running a hand through his boyish bob, a gesture he had always found effective when dealing with women. “Are the gentlemen quite well? If you’ll excuse me for saying it, there seems to be something wrong with them.”

“Nonsense,” replied Daffy. “They’re as hard as a rock – as hard as a couple of rocks. We want some drinks here. What’s happened to the waiter?”

“Stop scratching your head in public,” put in Meg, “and get down to brass tacks.”

The manager nervously handled the check. Evidently these two women were not of the impressionable type. So many women nowadays considered themselves lucky to be singled out by managers of roadhouses, leaders of orchestras and other, for the most part, God-fearing and hard-working members of a restaurant’s staff. He gave up all attempts to It the ladies and came to the point.

“It’s about the check,” he said quite frankly. “It’s a whale of a check, and I wouldn’t feel at all disappointed if a little something were done about it.”

A deep sigh came from the direction of Mr. Hawk. The manager stepped back a pace and regarded the scientist suspiciously.

“Oh, the check,” said Meg indifferently. “Let’s have it.”

She reached out and took the check from the manager. Then she dived into the bosom of her low-cut dress and produced a fat wallet – pin seal trimmed with gold and bearing the irrelevant letters T. H. G.

“I have to keep it for him when he gets this way,” she explained. “It’s an awful bore. Makes one left breasted. See, I’m all right now, Daffy. Not a penny’s worth of difference between ’em.”

As she rapidly examined the contents of the purse a delighted smile lit up her features.

“Why,” she continued in a pleased voice, “he has ever so much money. We can drink gallons more. Here’s one hundred and twenty dollars, and don’t let me see any change. Take that check away and frame it. You’re in luck. And, waiter, bring us a flock of drinks.”

At the sight of the strange wallet, Mr. Hawk had returned to himself with a click. He had then resuscitated Cyril Sparks. Both of them now sat staring at the fat roll of bills in Meg’s brown hand.

“For the love of all things sacred,” said Hawk when the manager and the waiter had withdrawn, “get that wallet and money out of sight. Where did they come from?”

“Oh, so you’re back, are you, you coward?” replied Meg. “Well, don’t worry about this money. It’s an old game to me. If you want any more I’ll get you lots.”

She crammed the bills into the wallet and carelessly returned it to her breast.

“I say,” put in Cyril Sparks to Daffy, “your uncle just did the most surprising thing to me. He actually turned me to stone.”

“And you weren’t any more useless than you ever are,” Daffy hastened to assure him. “We didn’t miss you at all.”

The waiter, also a changed man, returned with the drinks. These were dashed down with avidity and more ordered.

“Now you lugs are going to turn into a couple of gigolos,” announced Meg. “I’m paying for this party, and I insist on being entertained.”

“About that money,” began Mr. Hawk as she led him from the table.

Disaster had been delayed but not averted. It descended swiftly as Meg was whirling past the fat gentleman with whom she had just danced. It was not the final disaster, but rather the prelude to disaster. It began with a plop as the well stuffed wallet slipped down through Meg’s dress and landed on the floor. Quick as a flash the girl ducked and seized the lost article. Mr. Hawk, taken by surprise, hurdled on over her and sat heavily on the floor. The fat man, recognizing his wallet, uttered a strangled cry and strove to retain Megaera’s hand. She eluded his grasp and darted across the floor. In her own mind she was satisfied that she had a moral right to the wallet and all that it contained. On the other hand, the fat gentleman had certain definite ideas of his own concerning the rightful ownership of the wallet.

“Run!” cried Meg to the recumbent scientist. “I’ve got it.”

“Then give it back,” called Hawk, rising hastily from the floor and sprinting after the girl.

“Thieves!” shouted the fat gentleman, as was only just and proper. “Robbers! Stop those two!”

“They seem to be running,” observed Daffy to Cyril Spark. “Perhaps we’d better run after them.”

“I’ve already started,” said Cyril who at that moment was in entire agreement with the law of self-preservation.

“Wait for me!” cried Daffy, dashing after him to the door.

As she sped along in the rear of the retreat she encountered several waiters standing in attitudes of petrification. Apparently they had been so ill-advised as to attempt to place themselves between Mr. Hawk and liberty. Behind her she could hear the shouts and excited voices of the multitude. From in front came the sound of ground being scraped energetically by several pairs of flying feet. Her companions were toeing in. Redoubling her efforts, Daffy succeeded in overtaking the main body of the retreating party just as Mr. Hawk was getting the Emperor under way. A long arm reached out and hauled her aboard as the car gathered speed and shot down the drive. Nothing was said until they were well clear of the roadhouse. Mr. Hawk then became vocal.

“Well,” he announced nastily. “You’ve succeeded in making thieves of three honest people. You never were honest yourself.”

“I know it,” said Meg, still panting a little. “We’re all in it now. If they catch us I’m going to swear you made me do it.”

At this information, Mr. Hawk increased the speed of the already flying car.

“Damn these new-fangled dresses, anyway,” Meg continued. “They might have certain advantages, but they’re no good for plunder.”

“Hadn’t you better get rid of that wallet, dearie?” casually inquired Daffy. “And wouldn’t it be a good thing to distribute some of that money among the rest of us?”

Although Meg was far from enthusiastic about the latter suggestion, she complied with both. The wallet was hurled through the window into the bordering woods, and the money was unequally divided among the four. Meg tucked the lion’s share alongside the dagger and took the precaution to warn Mr. Hawk about his hand.

“Not that I object,” she assured the indignant man, “but it’s a sin to fool with money.”

And all this time a motorcycle policeman was burning up the road behind them while several brother officers were approaching from in front. Telephone communications had been established between the roadhouse and the various headquarters of law and order along the road. The hue and cry was out. As fear of apprehension grew farther from the minds of the Emperor’s passengers the actuality of such an occurrence was taking more definite shape.

Cyril Sparks was the first to voice his relief.

“I feel that we all deserve a drink,” he announced as he drew a bottle from some mysterious place of concealment. “I’ll bet no one knew I had hidden this.”

“You win,” said Daffy. “Occasionally you have a brain wave. Pass it around.”

She elevated the bottle, then handed it forward to Meg. That young lady drank without reluctance and asked her companion what he was going to do about it. He stopped the car and proceeded to show her. This was an unwise move. It could not have been better timed for the convenience of the elements of restraint. Three of its members jumped into the glare of the headlights and a fourth sprang to the running board of the car.

“Oh, Goddy,” breathed Mr. Hawk as he dropped the bottle to the roadside.

Then he did about the most effective thing he could have thought of to annoy and baffle the officers. He petrified the entire personnel of the Emperor. When the investigating officer shouted out the customary no-monkey-business warning, he found himself looking into a face of stone. And when he glanced at the others in quest of some explanation of this incredible occurrence he was prodigiously shocked to find their faces equally stony. For a moment he thought he had gone mad or lost the sense of touch, then, being an officer of no little resource, he summoned his colleagues to a conference.

“This isn’t the mob we’re after,” he told them. “This damn car is full of abandoned statues.”

“The hell you say,” exclaimed another officer. “There’s some funny business about this. These things can’t be statues. They’re all sitting.”

“Why can’t statues sit?” asked a third officer, remembering his Bulfinch days. “There’s crouching Venuses and flying Mercuries and leaping fawns and a hell of a lot of other funny statues.”

“Then I suppose you’d call these Sitting Automobilists?” the second speaker put in sarcastically.

“Not necessarily, but they might have been removed from someone’s garden,” was the nearly impossible reply.

“Well,” replied the other, “from the looks of them they might have been removed from a graveyard suffering from an attack of acute cramps.”

This was too much for the fourth officer, who up to that moment had been content to remain in wondering silence.

“Who ever heard of a corpse having cramps?” he demanded.

“Who ever heard anything to the contrary?”

The fourth officer was not prepared for this essentially unfair question.

“Oh, of course,” he hedged, “a corpse might have cramps, for all I know. I’ve heard that their teeth keep on growing.”

“Not teeth, you dunce, hair.” Mr. Hawk had been unable to restrain himself. His voice fell like a ghostly whisper among the officers.

“Who said that?” one of them asked nervously.

Receiving no reply, he backed hastily out of the car, his interest in the problem completely evaporated. Let those who would carry on the investigation so far as he was concerned. He would be satisfied to remain at a modest distance and watch the car, the number of which he took as a pretext for his absence.

“There’s something fishy about this,” said the senior officer of the group. “Statues or no statues, I’m going to put the lot of ’em under arrest. We got to show something to the chief.”

“He’ll be tickled pink to put that outfit behind the bars,” remarked the mythological expert.

“Yeah,” put in another. “What are you going to charge ’em with, resisting arrest?”

“No,” replied the senior officer quite seriously. “I’ll charge ’em with obstructing traffic. Get in there, Delaney, and drive this bus to the lockup.”

“One of you guys lend a hand and help me push this statue or corpse or whatever the devil it is over,” complained Delaney. “Damned if I’ll sit on its lap.”

With much puffing and panting the two officers succeeded in prying the unhelpful Mr. Hawk clear of the steering wheel. He clattered dangerously against Megaera. Then Officer Delaney, feeling none too happy at the prospect of the drive that lay ahead of him, slid down in the seat by the petrified scientist and set the car in motion.

Everything went well for the first mile or so, then Officer Delaney began to have an uneasy feeling that eyes were fixed watchfully upon him. It was an unpleasant feeling to have, and it became even more so when it grew from a feeling to a conviction. He turned his head quickly and could have sworn he detected an ironical flicker in the sightless eyes of the figure beside him.

“Nerves,” muttered the officer, beginning to sweat profusely. “Shouldn’t have gone on that party last night.”

Then, to his profound discomfort, he distinctly felt himself being tapped on the shoulder. The first three taps he allowed to pass unchallenged, but at the fourth and most impatient of the series he spun round in the seat and looked behind him.

“Eyes on the road, Delaney!” a ghoulish voice commanded. Officer Delaney whirled back to the wheel and looked numbly at the road ahead.

“That’s better,” said a feminine voice. “Have you enough room, Delaney?”

“No,” said Delaney in a hoarse but positive voice. “I haven’t near enough room, but I’m going to get a lot more.”

He brought the car to an abrupt stop and signaled to his escort.

“Listen,” he told its leader, “these damned statues are talking and asking me foolish questions, and one of them had the nerve to go tapping me on the back. Get somebody else to drive this car. I’m a sick man.”

“Nonsense,” said the senior officer. “This won’t look at all well on your record, Delaney.”

“I’ll turn in my resignation before I’ll touch that wheel again.” Delaney was firm about it.

“All right, Brownell,” snapped the officer. “Get in there and relieve Delaney.”

Brownell reluctantly obeyed. With a shrinking feeling he climbed into the seat and squeezed over to the door as far as possible. With the starting of the car his ordeal was begun.

He didn’t think, he actually knew someone was breathing heavily on his neck. Also he was certain that the gaunt figure beside him was scrutinizing him disapprovingly out of the tail of its eyes. Then the officer had a bright idea. He raised his eyes quickly to the driving mirror and uttered a wild cry. Over his shoulder was peering a white grinning face.

“Great Godamighty – whew!” rushed from the lips of the officer as he endeavored to bring the car to a stop.

“What, again?” demanded a disgusted voice. “Drive on, Brownie. Have we far to go?”

“None of your damn business,” Brownell shouted. “But if you want to know we don’t go one inch farther. I don’t know what you are or who you are, but whether you’re human or devils you should feel damn well ashamed of yourselves, carrying on like this.”

“Come, come, Brownie,” said an admonitory voice from the back of the car. “Don’t you carry on like this. You’re making yourself ridiculous. Hurry up and drive this car, or something decidedly unpleasant might happen.”

“Something unpleasant is happening,” vouchsafed Officer Brownell. “If you were any sort of statues at all you’d shut up and act like statues. You’re more talkative than a bunch of drunks.”

“What an unpleasant officer,” came a woman’s voice from the back of the car.

“My God, is there another one of you?” demanded the officer.

“There is,” said another voice, this time a man’s. “Do you want any more?”

“No!” shouted the officer.

“Your voice, Brownie, your voice,” said a soft, reproving voice from the front seat. “Do something about it. We don’t want any trouble, you know. And you’d better lay off making these wisecracks about what sort of statues we are. We’re about the finest body of statues yet uncaught. If you don’t believe it, just take a look at that leg.”

Officer Brownell was so heavily married he even depressed his wife. This ribald invitation on the part of a female statue shocked him more than anything else so far. The color mounted to his face; he elevated his chin haughtily and drove on in silence. The statues were singing a drinking song when he pulled up before the police station.

By the time the last statues had been lugged into the charge room and seated in a chair Chief of Police McGowan was almost crying with rage.

“I’ll break the whole damn lot of you,” he shouted. “What are you trying to do, anyway, turn my jail into a goddam museum?”

The motorcycle policemen had filed into the room and now stood facing their chief. There was an expression of dismay on their faces. Suddenly from among them came a wild, insulting noise, sounding like the neighing of a demented stallion or a sail being ripped in a mighty wind. The chief’s face went white.

“Who did that?” he thundered. “Speak up, or I’ll strip you clean of every damn button you own.”

A shriek of feminine laughter greeted this dire threat.

“That settles it,” said the chief. “I break you all. Tear each other’s buttons off. Start in.”

The officers were about to obey this drastic order when the sound of an engine starting outside the door of the station house attracted their attention.

“They’re gone!” an officer suddenly shouted. “Look! Their chairs are empty.”

“Go out and round up those statues,” commanded the head of the motorcycle squad.

“Come back here, boys,” called the chief in a weak voice. “Let’s forget the whole damn thing ever happened. I’ll stand for a certain amount of skylarking, but, for God’s sake, don’t bring me any more statues. We don’t want to get this town laughed at in the newspapers.”

“Do we keep our buttons, chief?” sang out an officer.

“Sure you do,” grinned the chief. “And be sure to keep ’em buttoned.”

“Say, you guys,” announced a bright young officer coming snappily into the room, “every damn one of your motorcycles is punctured both fore and aft.”

Far down the road four limp and drunken occasional statues were speeding through the dawn and singing at the top of their lungs a song derogatory to the morals, antecedents, and personal appearance of Chief of Police McGowan.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Pursuing Beard

Hunter Hawk sent the Emperor bounding across one of his most inaccessible fields. In the slanting light of dawn four stiff and disheveled figures emerged from four separate doors. They stretched, yawned, and held their respective heads. Then they assembled in a compact little knot like battered football players after a tough scrimmage.

“This will never do,” declared Cyril Sparks. “Have you any ethyl alcohol at home?”

“As a last resort, yes,” said Mr. Hawk.

They decided without being invited temporarily to collapse upon the hospitality of Meg and her father. It would be unsafe to appear en masse at Hawk House until their status in the criminal class had been more definitely established. In the grotto they would entrench themselves and await developments. Cyril Sparks was all for setting fire to the Emperor and thus destroying one of the most damaging pieces of evidence against them. But Mr. Hawk was sincerely attached to the Emperor. In its lumbering way the car had served him well. As ungainly as it was, it concealed a heart of gold, and, even more important still, a reliable and responsive engine.

Meg greatly preferred a comfortable bed to the grotto, but when Hunter Hawk tactfully pointed out to her that his body might be seized and placed in a dungeon, the comfortable bed lost much of its attraction.

“Come along, then,” she said at last. “We’ll all crowd in somehow.”

They trailed away to the forest through a rising flood of sunlight. A fresh breeze soothingly stroked their foreheads and brought momentary relief. Meg, with an arm around Hawk’s waist, was allowing him to drag her along.

“Did you have a good time?” she asked.

“One of those times that is good only after it is over,” he replied. “Good in the retrospect.”

“I thought you were awfully clever, the way you manipulated that ray,” she went on, her eyes fixed admiringly on his unshaven face.

“It kept me pretty busy,” replied Hawk, “but I’m getting better at it all the time.”

“Do you like knocking about with me?”

Hawk’s face grew serious.

“Listen,” he said. “Since you climbed into my room and took a mean advantage of my yielding nature and aversion to publicity, I have been living what I call dangerously – on the fringe of some startling dénouement. Already I’m beginning to feel just a wee bit déclassé. It’s been amusing at times, I’ll quite readily admit, but where, oh, where, is it going to lead?”

“If we knew the answer to that,” she said, “none of us would carry on, perhaps. I hope it leads to bed.”

“Are you unable to entertain an abstract thought?” asked Hawk.

Meg laughed a little unchaste scrap of a laugh.

“And to sleep,” she added.

Ludwig was squatting disconsolately at the entrance of his grotto as they approached. When he saw them he brightened up a little, but when pressed for food and drink, especially drink, he shook his head sadly.

“There is nothing, my friends, nothing,” he announced, spreading out his small, clever-looking hands. “I have neither drunk nor eaten in twenty-four hours.”

“Which is less than a second, as you reckon time,” said Mr. Hawk.

“But not as my system reckons it,” he answered. “My appetites are the same as yours.”

“On even a grander scale,” said Hawk admiringly.

“That would be difficult,” he retorted with a faint smile, “if past performances count for anything – but what is my daughter doing? It looks unusually interesting.”

He hurried over to Megaera, who, seated on a fallen log, was leisurely counting a fat roll of bills, wetting her thumb from time to time on the red tip of her pointed little tongue.

“Ahem,” coughed Ludwig Turner. “Your old father has missed you, my child.”

“Two hundred and fifty-five,” said Meg.

“He has more than missed you,” hastily continued Ludwig, his realization of how much he had missed her growing keener with the size of the figure.

“Two hundred and seventy,” said Meg. “What?”

How his fingers itched. He thrust them into his pockets to keep them from making a diplomatic blunder.

“I was just saying it could be arranged,” he replied. “All things can be arranged. Everything. And most agreeably. I have a friend. An invaluable fellow. Through him there is little that can’t be done – for, of course, a purely nominal consideration – what would be a mere trifle to those who are – er – warm with money.”

After a certain amount of noisy and unpleasant haggling and the exchange of a few mutually demolishing recriminations, the financial side of the bargain was struck. Mr. Turner disappeared into the bushes, and presently various baskets began to arrive. Eggs, bacon, bread, butter, coffee, and milk took up some but not too much room. The remainder of the space was given over to applejack, an arrangement to which no one made objection. While breakfast was in the course of preparation Cyril Sparks and Hawk took turns at holding their heads under the miniature waterfall in the grotto, Mr. Hawk observing that he wished it were Niagara. Breakfast served and dispatched in a rough-and-ready manner, the party unceremoniously slept. Meg’s head, pillowed in the pit of the scientist’s stomach, kept rising and falling like a wax figure animated by clockwork, as the long man sought for air. Mr. Ludwig Turner and his bottle sat companionably at the entrance of the grotto. In vain did the little man endeavor to perfect some plan whereby he would be able safely to transfer the roll of bills from his daughter’s stocking to his own sock. At last he shook his head and gave it up. He had never been able to steal successfully from Meg. A most unsatisfying offspring.

After three days of this woodland existence Mr. Hawk came to a decision. He had been home and learned to his horror from his sister that an officer of the law in plain, unbecoming clothes had called and made certain inquiries regarding the present whereabouts of Mr. Hawk. Mention had been made of a small dark woman who was wanted on a charge of theft. He had left with every assurance that Hawk House had not seen the last of him.

“Of course, when he asked me to describe your car I had to tell him the truth,” said Mrs. Lambert. “Fortunately I was able to give him the number of your plates. Junior found it for me. Betts had told the man all wrong. He said your car was a small two-seater, sky blue, with pink trimmings. Of course, I couldn’t let the man go away believing such a thing as that.”

“Of course not,” Mr. Hawk had replied. “Pity you didn’t give him a photograph and a set of my finger prints.”

“But we did,” she replied triumphantly. “That is, we gave him a photograph. He said the finger prints would come later.”

“Much later,” was Hawk’s reply. “Did Junior also find the photograph?”

It seemed that Junior had, but only after a great deal of diligent searching for which his mother gave him due credit. She had then mentioned in passing the talk that was going round about a man who had performed a nude dance at Mrs. Brightly’s house party. She understood it was generally known that the dancer, the nude dancer, was her own brother. Of course, he had lost standing in the community – the whole family suffered from it – and now, with this arrest hanging over his head, oh, well, wouldn’t it be better if he took a trip somewhere and stayed away for a long time, until people had had a chance to forget? And while she was on the subject he really should do something about the poor Reverend Dr. Archer. In spite of the fact that he had had a chair built to conform to his odd position, the dear man was still very uncomfortable. Then, of course, there was his appearance. It wasn’t very reassuring, especially for a man of God. Some respect should be shown for the cloth, even if a man had fallen so low as willingly to drag his family through the mire. Of course, she would make no reference to the effect of all this on her husband and her son Junior. After all, the boy was only his nephew, his own sister’s child. Her remarks, she hoped would be understood, were made merely in passing. Naturally she had nothing to say. It was none of her business.

It was only with this last observation that Mr. Hawk was in entire agreement. He had then asked his sister if she in turn would like to take a long trip. But Mr. Hawk had been much more specific. He had been even good enough to name the place. She had not liked this. Few persons do like to be told to go to such a place, even when they are intellectually convinced that the place does not exist. It must be the spirit of the thing. However that may be, the invitation resulted in Mrs. Lambert’s leaving the room, much to the satisfaction of her brother. Mr. Hawk rang for Betts and made known to that worthy and subtle domestic the decision to which reference already has been made. And it was this decision, made on the spur of the moment, that launched Mr. Hawk on the last and least credible stage of his not altogether commonplace experiences.

The quartet was disbanded. Cyril Sparks and Daffy returned to their respective homes. Mr. Turner was given nearly, but not quite all, of Meg’s ill-gotten bank roll. All of it, that young lady could not be induced to give. Some she must have for herself. The woods were filled with her protestations of the necessity for a girl to have a little something in her stocking. Would they drive her out into the streets – force her into a life of shame? Although her father almost tearfully assured the company that to achieve this end neither driving nor force would be required, Megaera was allowed to retain a light little anchor to windward. Still protesting against a life of sordid commercialism into which circumstances would undoubtably precipitate her, she was virtually hurled into the Emperor and a thick veil pulled down over her indignant face.

“A gag will follow if you don’t shut up,” Mr. Hawk calmly assured her.

“Damn you, anyway,” she mumbled. “If you’d had enough money in your pocket I wouldn’t have had to become a thief.”

Mr. Hawk was too deeply involved with a large, flowing beard to which he was attached, to reply.

“I’m afraid we’ll have to sacrifice several inches of this damn thing,” he told Betts. “It’s getting all tangled up in the steering gear.”

“Tie it behind your ears,” Meg suggested rudely.

“You might button it under your vest, sir,” Betts offered with admirable gravity.

“There are a number of things I might do with it,” Mr. Hawk replied slowly and bitterly. “I might take it off and hang it on the radiator. I might stuff it under the seat or build a bonfire with it. I might decide simply not to wear the beard. The possibilities of this beard are endless, and your suggestions are not helpful.” Over the rim of this startling disguise he peered passionately at them. His face seemed to be all eyes and beard, which, as a matter of fact, it was. It cannot be said that the beard had improved him, but it had made him a different man, so different as hardly to look human at all. “All that I want to do with this beard,” he continued, “is to sit quietly and unobtrusively behind it and to drive speedily out of this state into New York City. After that I don’t very much give a damn what becomes of the beard. You can raffle off the beard. You can take the beard to an art dealer or have it framed. The beard can be used to stuff a pillow with a picture of Niagara Falls on it. Or if you can think of nothing better to do with the beard, you can thriftily roll it up in moth balls and tuck it away in a trunk in the attic.” He paused and looked searchingly at Betts and Meg. “Now,” he added, “I hope you no longer feel that I need any further damn fool suggestions regarding the use and ultimate disposition of this beard.” Another heavy pause. “I trust it is clear to you that I don’t want to wear this beard. It’s not a thing I naturally run to. This beard is most offensive to me. I wish to God you were both wearing one exactly like it.” Mr. Hawk appeared to have said all he was going to say about the beard.

The thoughtful silence that followed was broken by the hopeful voice of Mr. Betts.

“Would you like me to carry the beard, sir,” he asked, “so as you could snap it on when you needed it? That would give your chin a chance to air out a bit.”

Hawk shrank hatefully in his seat but still endeavored to control his anger.

“Think, Betts,” he said in a cold, level voice, “think of what you’re asking. Try to picture the thing to yourself. You are carrying the beard, let us say. I am driving at fifty miles an hour. A motorcycle policeman approaches – rapidly. I cry out, ‘The beard, Betts, the beard!’ You pass it forward to me. I stop the car and hastily attempt to don the beard. People stop and look. A small boy jeers. Laughter is heard. I grow confused. In the meantime the policeman arrives. He looks at me in a strange way. ‘What is that?’ he asks, pointing a soiled finger at the beard jumping in my hand as if impatient to be attached. ‘It’s a beard,’ I answer, not because I want to, but because it’s the only thing it could be. He looks at me more closely. A smile of satisfaction touches his cruel lips. I shrink back and wonder to myself, ‘What on earth am I going to do with this beard?’ Then the policeman speaks. He says, ‘Well, you and your beard come along with me,’ and he adds, ‘and no monkey business.’ Now, Betts, do you understand how unintelligent your suggestion was? I hope we shall hear no more about this beard.”

“Yes, sir,” said Betts. He glanced respectfully at his master, then quickly hid his face in his handkerchief. As the scientist listened to the sounds issuing from the handkerchief, his eyes took on an injured expression. The man was actually laughing. Hawk had never before realized that Betts had a perverted sense of humor. Bearing his beard proudly, Hawk gazed directly ahead.

“A man with a mind like yours must die a million deaths,” Megaera observed.

“Since meeting you,” he replied, “it’s been one long, lingering death,” was Mr. Hawk’s reply. “If there are no more questions or suggestions regarding this beard, I shall now endeavor to drive with the damn thing.”

Bracing himself grimly behind his streaming facial adornment, he viciously kicked the starter and drove the Emperor from the field. Once more he was on the road with a newly risen sun dead ahead. An hour and a half later, a long matted object was picked up in the dead center of Holland Tunnel. Mr. Hawk had taken no chances, and so far as the scientist and his destiny were concerned, that was absolutely the last appearance save one of the beard, for which everyone devoutly thanked God, considering it the least that they could do. As the Emperor came to rest before the house on lower Fifth Avenue in which its owner maintained an apartment, a car which had been patiently following drove slowly past. A man at the wheel leaned out and, tossing the beard into Mr. Hawk’s lap, sang out cheerily, “Here’s your beard, mister. You look much funnier with it on.” At the unexpected reappearance of the beard Mr. Hawk shrieked as if bitten by a snake. Between them Betts and Megaera succeeded in dragging the temporarily demented man to his apartment. On entering the place Meg, who had been carrying the beard carelessly, tossed it to a chair. Most unfortunately, Mr. Hawk selected this chair in which to collapse.

“Eh!” he exclaimed. “What’s this?” and reaching down he withdrew the beard from under him.

For a moment he stared at the thing with dilated eyes. Meg and Betts stood speechless, rooted to the spot.

“Oh!” cried Hawk suddenly. “It’s alive. It’s pursuing me. Don’t leave me alone. Yet don’t come near. I’m crazy. I’m mad. Something has snapped in my brain. Bring me a drink, Betts, or I’ll slit your gullet from ear to ear. Ha! ha, ha! I’m going to my room.”

As he staggered from the library he was singing about Mother Machree and the dear silver he intended to kiss in her hair. Betts picked up the beard from the floor and thoughtfully examined it.

“I don’t see anything so wrong with this beard,” he said, turning to Meg. “It’s almost as good as new. A little combing, perhaps.”

“It’s the color,” she replied briefly. “Should have been red.”

Undecided about this, Betts bore the beard from the room.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Looking the Gods Over

Meg took New York in one diminutive but buoyant stride. Nor was that all she took. There were things. All manner of things. Such things, for example, as handbags, stockings, brassières, lipsticks, perfume, underwear, even, and many other small articles her quick hands encountered as she demurely followed the tall figure of the impeccable Mr. Hawk along the aisles of the various department stores they visited.

Had the scientist but known of the petty pilfering in progress behind him he would have lost all poise and made a dash for the nearest exit.

There were articles Meg appropriated to herself for which she had no earthly need. Penknives, soup spoons, mousetraps, fish hooks, banjo strings, baby rattles – anything, in short, that appealed to her roving eye. Doubtless she was working on the theory that one never can tell what the future held in store.

With her, stealing was a point of honor, a racial instinct and family tradition. It seemed almost as if she were disinterestedly striving to get an even break for her benefactor by reducing the excess profits the stores made on his uninquiring purchases.

On one memorable occasion she nearly caused the poor man to swoon by staggering out of a shop with the great-grandfather of all portable phonographs tenderly strained to her breast. For one panic-stricken moment he debated whether to petrify himself or the entire neighborhood. Rather than risk a scene, he compromised by pushing both Meg and her plunder into the nearest taxi and offering the driver a five-dollar bonus to take them away from the scene of the crime with the least possible delay. Not until they were five miles removed from the spot did he breathe with any degree of freedom.

“This sort of thing,” he said at last, “will come to no good end. You’ll be taking up murdering next.”

“That,” she replied, looking at him darkly, “would be nothing new to me.”

Mr. Hawk felt a little like screaming.

After this unsavory episode Mr. Betts became Megaera’s shopping companion. Soon he developed a sincere admiration for her sleight-of-hand ability. “Well, what will we get today?” became his attitude. And they got plenty.

Always, after these cheerful little raiding parties, both would return with their arms laden with untidy packages, the legitimate ones having been opened to make room for certain articles which from the nature of things could not be wrapped in the store. Betts became redolent with new cravats and socks. From these Mr. Hawk turned a sorrowing eye.

The man of science lived in constant dread of being summoned to his telephone by a police officer and told that a couple of shoplifters had given Mr. Hawk’s apartment as their address, and that he, the policeman, did not believe one damn word of it. For the sake of the records would Mr. Hawk kindly verify the fact that these two crooks were a couple of low liars? What! Mr. Hawk could not oblige? Then something must be all wrong with everything. Perhaps they weren’t shoplifters after all, but just a team of kleptomaniacs. Would Mr. Hawk hurry round and talk things over? Thanks. The young lady was corrupting the force and swearing something terrible.

After one of these imaginary conversations Mr. Hawk would mentally put down the receiver and turn a blanched face to an empty room. Not until his two responsibilities were safely home did he have a happy moment. Meg had spoken rightly. A man who could imagine ghastly details as vividly as Hunter Hawk must die a million deaths before he called life a day and took the final plunge.

The very sight of a package made him shudder. Vaguely remembering something unpleasant about accessory after the fact, he refused to have articles legitimately come by or otherwise displayed in his presence. He was taking no chances.

“You’ve succeeded in making a thief out of your accomplice, Betts,” he grimly informed Meg, “but I’m damned if you’ll make a jailbird out of me. You seem to forget, young lady, that both of us are probably being looked for in another state for practically every crime except arson and rape.”

“I could get you run in for the latter,” she replied; and Mr. Hawk choked.

To vary the routine of shopping, night clubs, roof gardens, and talkies, Mr. Hawk began taking his charge to those eminently respectable places optimistically referred to in guide books as Points of Interest. He solemnly pointed out to her various fishes of the better class with the air of one who had brought them into the world. He made her gaze down upon his city from many unnecessarily lofty points of vantage. He tried to tell her intimate things about the past of the Statue of Liberty, only to discover that he was a liar by the clock. He showed her a large building in which a great quantity of books were knocking about and vaguely speculated in so doing upon the parentage of the silly-looking lions that graced its portals. Once he went so far as to take her for a long dull ride on a ferry boat and expatiated with profound inaccuracy upon the Narrows and Butter Milk Channel.

With surprising docility Meg accepted these little excursions. She intuitively knew that her guide did not know himself just what they were all about and that he cared even less.

The finishing touch was a visit to several museums specializing in this and that. Thus it came about that close to closing time one afternoon they found themselves wandering bleakly through a forest of marble limbs, busts, and recklessly applied leaves in the sacred precincts of the Metropolitan. By this time Mr. Hawk was almost morally certain that to walk six yards in such a place was equivalent to walking six miles in less edifying surroundings. Meg knew that it was. Her companion’s face was lined and drawn, his eyes hollow and aching.

“Damned if I can understand it,” he said at last, painfully easing himself to a bench, a hard, inhospitable bench. “I don’t doubt for a moment that all these legs and torsos and busts and backsides are works of sheer inspiration, exquisite things, and all that, but some low element in my nature keeps me from responding. I find myself insufferably bored and, oh, so weary.”

Meg looked with a considering eye at the offending thighs and torsos.

“You know,” she said, “I think the trouble between you and these statues lies in the fact that you can’t use them. You can’t put the women to bed, and you can’t put the men to work. They’ve reached a sort of inanimate perfection, can’t go any farther in either direction – neither forward nor back. They’ve no potentialities. They’re just beautiful uselesses.”

“Don’t care much for the motives you ascribe to me regarding these lady statues,” replied Mr. Hawk. “And as for their potentialities, I’m not so sure. Not at all so sure.”

There was a brooding light in his eyes. “It could be done,” he was thinking. He’d like to know more about these chilly-looking people of the past.

“An exquisite thing,” continued Meg, “deserves the dignity of isolation. It should have at least a room and bath of its own. A lifetime would not be too long to devote to its contemplation. These gods and goddesses here, as well housed as they are, suggest to me a lot of men and women who have lost most of their clothes in a subway rush.”

“More like a large but loosely conducted Turkish bath,” observed Mr. Hawk. “I get a jumbled-up impression of a lot of perfect anatomical parts and wholes that must have been no end of fun to do, but to look at them all at once, to appreciate them as they deserve to be – that’s beyond my capacity. I can see all of these things any night on Broadway, and there would be life in them – life, grace, and all sorts of agreeable suggestion.”

“Dearie,” said Meg, “you don’t have to go as far from home as that.”

She demurely fringed her eyes with their long lashes, then raised them with startling suddenness and flooded the dismayed Hawk with an unnecessarily passionate glow.

“My own,” she breathed.

“Come, come,” Mr. Hawk rebuked. “None of that now. Not here at any rate. Refrain from being an utter trollop.”

“All right, my boy,” she replied briskly. “Let’s be arty and instructive. I’ll go on about these statues, get to the bottom of the trouble. And this is it: They bore us because they’re complete and detailed reproductions of men and women. Our imaginations don’t have to supply a thing. Even the fig leaves fail to suggest. We know. That’s why it’s easy. All one has to do is to gape, admire, and look seriously cultured. If someone should slip in among these statues a grotesquely comical figure people wouldn’t have the spontaneous appreciation to laugh at it. They’d stand and stare and murmur, ‘Exquisite! How gripping! Only the Greeks could do it. And some others.’ The last they’d add just to be on the safe side.”

She paused and looked as if she were about to spit on the floor. Mr. Hawk, watching her, grew a trifle nervous.

“Don’t,” he muttered. “Please.”

“Don’t what?” she asked.

“Don’t spit,” he faltered. “On the floor. There are people.”

She looked at him uncomprehendingly for some moments, then burst out into a loud unladylike laugh.

“I wasn’t going to,” she explained. “That’s the way I look when I’m being arty and instructive. As a matter of fact, I was thinking about that old boy you called Rodin. A clever devil. He never bores one. Why? Because he didn’t give everything. Always held a little back – suggested something beyond the mere medium in which he worked. He leads us along and points out the rest of the way, but he doesn’t take us there and plop us down as if to say, ‘Here you are, damn you. This is good. Like it or be forever lost.’ No. Rodin holds out and gives our brains a chance to shift gears for themselves. There should be a bar in a place like this. The streets are lined with speakeasies. Let’s go and find the speakiest of the easies or the easiest of the speakies.”

“Let’s,” sighed Mr. Hawk. “I’m greatly cast down about myself and art. We don’t seem to click.”

“Don’t worry, old dear. It’s your business to make statues, not to admire them.”

Through the vast wing of the museum they made their defeated way. The place was now nearly deserted. Even the usually alert guards seemed to have overlooked the two weary loiterers. Paying scant heed to their progress, Meg and Hunter Hawk followed their feet down a flight of stone stairs. Once more fate was guiding the footstep of Mr. Hawk, guiding him towards his last and most astonishing undertaking.

“What the hell!” he suddenly exclaimed. “No speakeasies here. This isn’t the street.”

They were in a long corridor, a section apparently not intended to be used by the public. There were many doors. One stood open. It was at the moment that Hunter Hawk set eyes on that open door that the idea which had been sprouting in his mind sprang to full flower. The step of a guard sounded from somewhere at the far end of the corridor. Hawk was moved to action.

“In there,” he said, “and strip.”

“What’s the grand idea?” asked Meg, for once a trifle startled.

He pushed her through the door and quickly looked about him. An overhead light flooded the room. There were several benches and a low stand. A few feet from the door and at the right of it stood a long table.

“Strip,” repeated Hawk. “And make it snappy.”

“What, here?” protested Meg. “Well, of all things. Why now? And in such a place.”

“Strip,” he said in a fierce whisper. “Hide your clothes in that box. Crouch, use your hands, do anything a ladylike statue might do, but for God’s sake don’t be indecent or funny.”

Meg’s wits were quick, and her clothes were few. She made no further protest save to observe that of all unsuitable places a public museum struck her about the most unsuited. However, anything to please the king. Her stripping was a small matter. She sprang to the stand, crouched like a frightened virgin and did helpless things with her hands. A perfect pose.

“Hold it,” whispered Mr. Hawk, and froze the figure in that position.

He ran to the box and snatched out one of Meg’s garters. It was yellow. Good. When the guard entered he found Mr. Hawk industriously measuring the left calf of what even that blasé protector of priceless property had to admit was an exceptionally charming figure. As the guard entered the scientist turned and holding up a hand for silence strode to the table and jotted down a few figures on the back of an envelope. For a moment he stood frowning down at the figures, his head cocked on one side. Suddenly he looked up and squinted at the man standing in the doorway.

“Yes?” said Mr. Hawk, slipping Meg’s garter into his pocket. “Yes, my good man, you were saying?”

“I wasn’t saying a thing,” replied the guard.

“Then why begin now?”

“Begin what, sir?”

Hawk eloquently elevated his shoulders. “You’re perplexing me,” he said. “Is it deliberate?”

“I’m kinda slipping myself,” said the guard.

“Then slip on,” beamed Mr. Hawk.

“But it’s closing time, sir. I got to lock up.”

“What! Closing time already? Dear me, I fear I’ll have to be staying on. Not half through here. So far my examination has been merely superficial.”

“But I don’t rightly recognize your face, sir,” said the guard with some show of deference. “Nor that statue – she’s a new ’un to me.”

Apparently Mr. Hawk had not been listening. He was reverentially regarding the statue.

“What a bust!” he murmured. “What a thigh! But the face – an evil image.” He paused and considered the puzzled man. “Pardon me,” Hawk continued. “What is it you’re having such difficulty in getting out of your obviously overripe system?”

“Your face is new to me, sir,” the guard faltered, feeling sure now he was in the presence of some important maniac.

“And yours is to me,” replied Mr. Hawk, “although,” and here he scanned the man’s face as if seeing it for the first time, “it is not a new face. The face itself is far, far from new. Not even second-hand. But you did not come here, I hope, to chat about faces, did you? If you did I’m afraid you’re doomed to disappointment. Busts and thighs and torsos are more in my line.”

“Would you mind telling me, sir, if you are officially connected with the museum?” asked the dispirited guard.

“Let these speak for themselves,” replied Mr. Hawk.

He opened his wallet and selected five or six cards. It was an overwhelming array. Several were from members of the Board of Trustees, two gave Hawk’s own important scientific connections, and one, hand signed by one of the Metropolitan’s most important officials, gave Hunter Hawk the freedom of the museum. These tributes, long unheeded, had come to the scientist as a result of many a boring banquet and lecture. They belonged to the natural order of things.

The guard was visibly impressed.

“Want any more?” asked Mr. Hawk pleasantly.

“Beg your pardon, Mr. Hawk,” the man replied. “Line of duty, you know, sir.”

“Perfectly right. Perfectly right. You should have told me at once what you were after. How was I to know? I must go into the texture of this new statue now and find out whether the young lady is genuine or spurious. Today, in such investigations, art recognizes the feeble existence of science, you know.”

“She looks genuine to me, sir,” the guard observed with a lewd smile. “Small, perhaps, but all there, I should say, if you’ll pardon me.”

“You shock me,” said Mr. Hawk. “I can hardly pardon you. The face is bad. It’s the face of a wanton of ancient times. A dangerous, destructive face.”

“Never pay much attention to their faces,” said the guard as if to himself.

“You continue to shock me,” replied Hawk. “But I must get on with this texture business.”

“Yes, sir,” murmured the guard. “Think I’ll go out and examine a little texture myself. Something not quite so tough. You know, sir, associating so much with these here nude statues keeps giving a man young ideas.”

“Don’t let them get the best of you,” said Hawk. “You seem to be a bit of a bad egg. The air is tainted.”

The guard grinned and departed. Hawk promptly released his prisoner, and his prisoner as promptly started in to abuse him for the aspersions he had cast on her face. As Hawk was about to take her in his arms the guard reappeared at the door. Hunter Hawk never used his ray with greater swiftness. He froze the girl as she was and seized her in his arms. At the same time he turned a strained face over his shoulder and looked with bulging eyes at his tormentor.

“Lifting her down,” he grunted. “Ah, that’s better. The little lady is quite a weight.”

“You fairly shocked me that time, sir,” said the guard. “Looked as if she’d come back to life. Just wanted to say, Mr. Hawk, that you seem to be known at the office. Everything’s okay.”

As the guard left a second time he subjected the statue to a long and speculative look.

“That’s about the most lifelike bit of marble I ever saw, Mr. Hawk,” he observed, “and I’ve seen plenty. The guy who turned her out didn’t miss a trick. He knew his women.”

“And so do you it seems. Once more, good-night.”

“Thank you kindly, sir,” said the guard, accepting the proffered five-dollar bill with the air of a man who did not need to be told too much. “There’s a private entrance – a small one – at the extreme end of the corridor. Hope you make out with the texture.”

“Oh, that,” said Mr. Hawk a little startled. “Thanks. Same to you.”

This time he watched the man’s retreating figure until it had mounted the stairs; then, feeling dimly disturbed by his somewhat significant parting remark, he returned to the statue. The guard seemed an unscrupulous sort of a chap. Might be wise to cultivate him. Unscrupulous people were always the most useful. With this thought in mind he turned the beautiful statue into an even more beautiful woman.

“You had your arms around me, I think,” she said. “I liked that.”

“On with that dress,” snapped Hawk, “and be ready to yank it off at a moment’s notice. The Board of Trustees might drop in to view the most dangerous statue the Metropolitan has ever acquired.”

“A lovely invitation and an even lovelier compliment,” Meg murmured as she wriggled her supple body into a scrap of silk and sat hunched up on the edge of the stand idly observing the tips of her toes. Hawk switched off the light.

“Well, mister,” she said at last, “what do we do next?”

“We wait,” replied Mr. Hawk, “and after that we wait some more.”

“For what?”

“For the most desperate of all adventures – the return of the gods.” His voice sounded unnaturally solemn in the room now gradually filling with dusk. “And,” he added on a less solemn note, “perhaps a couple of goddesses.”

Meg’s eyes gleamed.

“I thought as much,” she said. “You’d have to work in a couple of those ample-breasted hussies. Nevertheless, it’s an adventure worth waiting for. They never should have left us, those gods.”

“And goddesses,” added Mr. Hawk.

“One grows weary of your Christian Era day after day, year after year,” observed Meg. “Too much of a strain for an effect.”

“It doesn’t seem to place any restraint on you,” commented Mr. Hawk.

“But it does on my associates – you, for example. All inhibited.”

Hawk grinned in the shadows.

“Yes,” he admitted, “I can’t bring myself to murder, and I’m still delicate about theft. Aside from those two undeniable forms of pleasure I’m fairly well broken in, thanks to you.”

He crossed the room and seated himself beside her on the stand. Presently the small creature edged closer to him, until at last she maneuvered herself into his arms.

“By the way,” she whispered, “what did you find out about my texture?”

“My examination so far has been merely superficial,” said Mr. Hawk academically.

“I’m glad,” she replied, nestling closer.

For a long time they sat thus in silence, then, with her dark eyes taunting his, “ ’Lo there, long legs, whose lover are you?”

“ ’Lo yourself, you runt. Let us merely say instead of lover that we have many things in common.”

“Very common,” she murmured.

Once more silence.

Above them the vast storehouse of the ages gathered the deepening dusk into its sprawling corridors. The dead eyes of Egypt, Greece, and Rome peered sightlessly into their respective pasts. Jewels, fabrics, and pottery fashioned by hands long turned to formless dust gave their beauty to the night that lay upon them. Death and oblivion were defied by the living works of the dead. The unbroken stream of life fed by the currents of genius showed the toughness of the spirit of man in his eternal quest of something to make, something to leave behind. In this dim place century followed century and era merged with era on a rising tide of beauty. Surging onward, surging onward, checked, yet always flowing, it advanced to add itself to the unborn beauty of centuries yet to come. There was a sort of hopeless sublimity about it all. The mighty works that man could fashion, and yet he was so small. Through the smoke at the mouth of his cave the hand of the original potter reached across the ages to salute his fellow craftsman of today. Time in the great museum became merely a family affair – not a matter of age or distance. Here beauty was neither old nor new, but a part of the creative whole, as ageless as genius itself.

Something of this feeling must have communicated itself to the two very much alive figures in the lower reaches of the building. For them there was neither time nor distance. Forever and always a man and a woman would be the same. From the rise of the first sun they had sought blindly for beauty and ecstasy, striven to burst through the confines of their bodies, at last to find what they sought only in themselves. Meg in the darkness gloated. No matter where his mind might lead him, she knew that his feet would return to her.

Presently they rose. Meg sighed and sought for garments.

“Snap to it,” said Mr. Hawk. “The gods await our coming.”

“Is my hat on straight?” asked Meg.

“It is,” said Hawk without looking.

She thrust a firm little hand in his, and together they left the room.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Gods Step Down

Soon they were among the statues, the symmetrical relics of an age that had lived with the creative buoyancy of a conscience-free child, a precocious child, perhaps, but not pernicious. From Fifth Avenue the street lamps sent pale shafts of light against even paler bodies. Here a back was favored, there a breast. It was a still place, this spacious hall, made even stiller by the motionless figures standing or sitting or crouching there in the eternal grip of bronze or stone.

Megaera and Hunter Hawk walked on lightly. Their steps felt like whispers.

Presently they found themselves standing before the statue of Mercury, faintly discernible in the dim light.

“Competent-looking chap,” observed Mr. Hawk in a low voice. “Looks as if he’d know his way about.”

“I like his funny hat,” said Meg. “Wonder if he’d lend it to me?”

“You should hit it off well with Mercury,” Hawk continued. “Next to you and the once unblemished Betts he was one of the greatest thieves that ever went unhung. Also, he was the messenger of the gods, an office which demanded no end of finessing, not to say unobservance. I suspect he lived by blackmail. Altogether your sort. Shall we try him?”

“I think he might prove helpful,” Meg conceded.

Then Hawk performed the incredibly simple yet effective rites into which Meg had introduced him back in the grotto on the night when he had first met her – the night following his own great discovery. It was fortunate that Mercury was not aware of himself, else he would have been surprised, if not a trifle shocked.

For a brief moment the statue remained motionless, then, with disconcerting agility, it came to life. Jumping down from its pedestal it stood before its grateful liberators.

“My thanks,” said Mercury, looking at Meg with suave admiration. “Standing poised on the ball of one’s foot for Zeus knows how long is no Roman holiday. One is supposed to do that merely in passing, you know. If sculptors must continue to sculpt they should favor the recumbent school. Of course, when they’re doing mixed doubles they’d have to exercise a certain amount of decent self-restraint, but not much, if you get what I mean.”

“Without a struggle,” replied Mr. Hawk smiling pleasantly. “How have you been all this time?”

“Inactive, sir,” said Mercury. “Hibernating, I think is the word. I long for some errand to run or some pockets to pick.”

“I didn’t know they used pockets in your day,” interposed Meg.

Mercury smiled deprecatingly. “Figuratively speaking, my dear young lady,” he replied. “In my day pockets were merely bare flanks, but I run on. What I wanted to ask,” and here he turned hopefully to Mr. Hawk, “can I be of any service to you, perhaps? Some slight message to convey, a purse to snatch, a lock to pick or, if you’ll pardon me, sir, an assignation to arrange. I am not unskillful in such delicate matters. The gods found me good.”

“Mercury,” said Meg quite frankly, “I’ve taken a fancy to your funny hat.”

“It will be a pleasure to let you wear it sometime,” answered Mercury, “but not now. By the look in your friend’s eye it would seem there is work to be done. Your name, sir?”

“Hawk,” said the scientist. “Hunter Hawk. This small thing is Meg. Your services will be exceedingly helpful.”

“What, may I ask, is the exact idea?” Mercury inquired, tentatively scratching the head of one of the snakes on his caduceus.

“The return of the gods,” said Mr. Hawk. “That is, the return of some of them. We would like a small, congenial group. Not too large to handle. Whom do you suggest, for instance?”

Mercury smiled smoothly.

“Few little groups are congenial without the presence of that debauched half brother of mine, Bacchus,” he observed. “You may have heard of Bacchus. He is one of the few gods who is wise in his cups though gross in his habits.”

“Certainly,” replied Mr. Hawk. “Bacchus was in my mind.”

The three of them found their way to the statue of the god of wine and social amenities. Mr. Hawk performed his rites, simple almost to crudeness, but powerfully effective. Mercury was alertly interested.

“So that’s the way it’s done,” he observed. “I see. I see.” He laughed softly. “Well, Bacchus wouldn’t mind. He’s the sort that stands for anything. But take Jupiter, there.” Once more Mercury laughed, leaving his sentence unfinished.

“We’ll take Jupiter next,” said Mr. Hawk.

“Don’t,” replied Mercury shortly. “Too stuffy.”

“Look!” breathed Meg. “Look! A noble paunch he swings.”

As Bacchus stepped carefully but lightly down from his elevated seat he had the effect of making the vast hall seem less spacious and austere. A little feeling of intimacy had crept into the place. Vineyards seemed to be mounting sunward behind him. Low, provocative laughter floated in the air.

The huge god huskily cleared his throat and favored his half brother with an affectionately ironical grin.

“Up to some of your old tricks,” said Bacchus in a deep, wine-warmed voice. “You always were a great hand at doing the inexplicable.”

“You have Mr. Hawk to thank for your presence here,” replied Mercury.

“And my name’s Meg,” put in the girl. “Megaera.”

“How wonderfully you have improved, my dear,” said Bacchus with a gigantic smile. “Couldn’t bear the sight of you once.”

“Oh, I’m just a poor relation,” Meg hastily corrected the god. “A sort of long-distance hangover.”

“I’ve had them,” said Bacchus. “I’ve had them.” He turreted his bulk on Mr. Hawk. “My dear sir,” he continued, “my dear Mr. Hawk, we are happily met, and I am deeply grateful. It hurts me, sir, it hurts me much to ask it, but have you anything to drink about you – a small flask or, even better, a large one? You can see how low I’ve fallen, I who have dispensed in the past veritable oceans of grog.”

“You are at a considerable disadvantage,” replied Mr. Hawk, placing a friendly hand on the great man’s arm. “You are not, so to speak, in your own home town, and consequently you should not be expected to dispense hospitality. The pleasure is all mine.”

Here Mr. Hawk produced a long, flat silver flask from his hip pocket and extended it to the already reaching Bacchus.

“Knew it was there all the time,” said Mercury. “I felt it.”

Strange things were happening to Bacchus. He had suddenly staggered back and was now clinging to his pedestal for support. In the pale light sweat could be seen beading his forehead like jewels.

“Zeus Almighty!” he exclaimed, looking with awe at the flask. “What was that?”

Mercury, unable to restrain his curiosity, removed the flask from his half brother’s palsied hand and swallowed a generous drink. For a moment he stiffened, then quietly wilted to the pedestal beside Bacchus. From that position the two gods gazed inquiringly at Mr. Hawk.

“Are we poisoned?” asked Mercury in a strangled voice, “or merely disappointed?”

“Or both, perhaps?” added Bacchus.

“Neither,” Meg assured them. “Just hold on for a minute or so and you’ll feel yourself greatly improved. You’ll be begging for that flask, Bacchus. We won’t be able to pry you away from the end of it.”

“Interesting if true,” groaned Bacchus.

“Will the same thing happen to me?” asked Mercury rather wistfully. “It doesn’t seem possible I’ll ever feel well again.”

“You will,” said the scientist, retrieving his flask. “That whisky is gentle and kind in comparison with some of the stuff we habitually drink today.”

“Well,” replied Bacchus, his voice a trifle hoarse, “I’m generally credited with being the great-great-grandfather of all good bartenders, but I’ll have to admit that was an entirely unknown beverage to me. However, you are correct. I’m beginning to feel slightly improved already.”

The wings on Mercury’s hat, which after the drink had suddenly flopped without even folding, began to show signs of life. Gradually they lifted until they had assumed their former position of poised alertness.

“I, too, have escaped the clutch of Pluto,” he announced, “but only by the breadth of an exceedingly fine hair. Whether the game is worth the candle remains to be seen. That remark about the conformity of one’s conduct when visiting Rome holds about as true today as it did when it was first made. We must learn to drink the stuff.”

The party of four that had started as two wandered quietly about the hall and off jutting corridors. Mercury was looking preoccupied. The business of selecting the most congenial group of gods and goddesses was not as easy as it seemed. Suddenly an exclamation from Megaera arrested them.

“Aren’t they lovely?” she said, seizing Hawk by the arm. “We must have those two.”

“Why?” asked Mr. Hawk. “They look thoroughly unreliable to me.”

They were looking at the figure of Cupid amorously bending over the recumbent figure of Psyche, no less amorous.

“That’s why I like them,” replied Meg. “They seem so wrapped up in what they’re doing.”

“Yes,” agreed Mr. Hawk. “It’s what they’re doing that worries me.” He turned to Mercury. “Doesn’t that couple look a little – er – dangerous to you?”

Mercury shrugged his shoulders eloquently.

“It all depends on what you call dangerous,” he said. “Some consider it rather a diverting pastime.”

“Oh, quite,” hastily agreed Mr. Hawk. “I understand perfectly. What I mean is, I can’t rightly tell whether he’s saying goodbye or hello. That makes a lot of difference, you know. Can we depend on Cupid’s sense of the fitness of things? He’s a determined-looking chap in spite of his pretty ways.”

“We can but try,” smiled Mercury.

“Go on, give the kids a break,” urged Bacchus.

“Here goes, then,” said Mr. Hawk.

Deftly he performed the double rite and stepped back to regard his handiwork.

Meg uttered a sharp exclamation of dismay.

“Why, Cupid!” Psyche cried.

Bacchus and Mercury were laughing silently. The scientist was stung to action. He turned the couple back to stone.

“Whew!” he muttered, wiping his forehead. “Just in the nick of time. What a bad actor that Cupid turned out to be.”

“Well, obviously he wasn’t saying goodbye,” remarked Meg. “That’s dead sure.”

“He has a single-track mind,” Mercury explained. “He can think of only one thing at a time. Always was that way.”

“I wouldn’t give a penny for his thoughts at this moment,” Mr. Hawk observed with a sympathetic grin. “Poor fellow. Don’t blame him a bit, but I hardly think that in his present frame of mind he’d work in very well with our plans.”

“Depends on your plans,” said Bacchus. “Mine are usually extremely inclusive. How about Neptune, now? He’s by way of being an uncle of ours and not at all a bad sort. Minds his own business, enjoys a good time in a quiet way, and is a handy man in a brawl.”

“Like him myself,” commented Mercury. “He’s no damn booster. Throw him a couple of fish and he’s as happy as a lark.”

“He’s tiresome about fish,” agreed Bacchus, “but he knows how to carry his wine, though God only knows how this stuff will affect him. By the way, Mr. Hawk – —”

“Here it is,” said Hawk once more producing the flask. “Help yourselves.”

The two gods drank, smacked their lips, shivered slightly, and threw back their shoulders.

“If mere mortals can handle that brand of fire,” said Bacchus, “it should prove child’s play for an old-timer like me. I must try a whole lot of it, just to find out what it does.”

“I’ve a suspicion it will do plenty,” said Mercury. “Much more than enough, in fact.”

Neptune, they discovered when he had been released from the imprisoning stone, was not at all interested in women. What he wanted was fish, lots of fish, lobsters and virtually anything that swam.

“Would you mind very much taking me to a good fish and chop house?” he asked Mr. Hawk after Mercury had managed the introductions. “Both of my nephews here are just crazy about fish, aren’t you, boys?”

“Guess we are,” said Bacchus, “now that I come to think of it.”

“Good!” exclaimed Neptune, playfully prodding Mr. Hawk with his trident in a spot where it would prove the least painful if the most demeaning. “Then it’s all arranged. Let’s hurry up with the selection. I nominate young Hebe, the cup bearer of the gods, and that handsome devil Apollo.”

Megaera looked upon Apollo with approval and Hebe with dark suspicion. She was altogether too pretty and too agreeable. So agreeable, in fact, that Meg feared she might agree to almost anything. At present, however, the amiable young goddess was a trifle distrait.

“Anybody got a cup?” she kept asking. “I want to bear a cup.”

“If you limit your bearing to cups,” remarked Apollo in his musically insinuating voice, “you’ll be an exceptionally fortunate young girl.”

“You would make some such remark as that,” said Neptune. “Don’t pay any attention to this advertisement for the latest thing in fig leaves, my child. We’ll get you a cup pretty soon – about the same time as I get my fish. How will that do?”

“That will be fine, Uncle,” replied Hebe with a grateful smile. “Just give me a cup and watch me bear it. It’s been ages since I bore a cup or watched a god get drunk.”

“You’re due for a deluge tonight,” Mercury observed rather grimly. “The stuff you used to bear in that cup of yours was flat and tepid water in comparison with the robust brew that goes into cups today.”

“Oh, I don’t mind so much what goes into the cup,” Hebe replied quite cheerfully, “just as long as there’s something in the cup and everybody gets sort of that way.”

“We’ll do our best to oblige,” said Mr. Hawk. “Now let’s drop the cup for a moment and get down to business. Any further nominations?”

“I nominate Perseus and Diana,” announced Mercury. “Perseus is not only good at killing women, but also on occasion he can save them with equal charm and dexterity. As for Diana, she can run like hell, and she’s got a level head on her shoulders. Also, since Hebe insists on getting us all slopped when Zeus only knows what might or might not happen, Diana will lend a touch of respectability to an otherwise demoralized party.”

“I’m told she’s chaste,” said Neptune in a puzzled voice. “Now, I wonder why is that?”

“Don’t worry too heavily about it, Uncle,” Apollo observed casually. “There has to be a virgin goddess just the same as there has to be a virgin queen or a virgin martyr or a virgin priestess. In other words, there always has to be a virgin in the woodpile just to keep on reminding women of something they don’t want. She and Venus tossed for the job and Venus cheated. Neither took the matter seriously, and I hardly see how they could, because by the time Diana assumed office I understand it was quite, quite too late.”

“Scandal monger as well as home wrecker,” muttered Bacchus. “I’ll drink him under the table, damned if I don’t.”

Neptune’s face cleared.

“That’s better,” he said.

It took considerable searching to locate Perseus, but eventually that godlike but gory young man was found. As usual he was clutching the unpleasant head of Medusa by its serpent’s hair in one hand and displaying a mean-looking sword in the other. His pedestal was high, but he achieved the jump with surprising agility. Carefully placing the horrid relic of past heroism on the floor and laying the sword beside it, he straightened himself and rubbed his hands together. At his feet the serpents hissed and snapped spitefully. The gods stood back at a respectful distance and eyed the unattractively bobbed head with mild distaste. Perseus, noting their obvious disapproval, leaned over and slapped the snakes with the flat of his hand.

“That’s the trouble with you snakes,” he told them. “Always butting in and making a lot of noise. Don’t give a man a chance to think. Coil up there and keep quiet.”

At this moment Mercury unfortunately approached his caduceus a little too close to the sinister object on the floor. A terrible battle ensued. The serpents on the severed head rose to a snake and viciously attacked the two representatives of their race straining angrily at the end of the rod in Mercury’s hand.

“Better take those feeble worms of yours away from my serpents,” said Perseus, “or they’ll get their foolish heads eaten off.”

Mercury laughed unpleasantly.

“These two feeble worms,” he replied, “will make a meal of the whole damn lot of your fangless fish bait. They’re a disgrace to the reptile kingdom.”

“Reptiles haven’t any kingdom,” said Perseus. “That shows how much you know.”

“Then what have they got?” shot back Mercury.

“What?” repeated Perseus a trifle confused. “Ah, just places to crawl back and forth in – holes in the ground, trees to climb, and such like.”

“Then I’d call that a kingdom,” said Mercury.

“Go on and call it a kingdom,” retorted Perseus. “Show the world how dumb you are.”

In the meantime the battle of the snakes was progressing with unabated fury. Mercury’s two contestants were putting up a game fight in spite of the superiority of numbers they were facing. The gods had become interested in the little unpleasantness. They seemed to regard it in the light of a sporting event and were heatedly backing their favorites. The supporters of the Perseus group were forced to give heavy odds. Meg had become so enthusiastic she was betting on both sides.

“What shall we use for money?” Neptune asked her.

“Don’t worry,” she replied. “Daddy Long-legs has lots of money. He’ll settle up for all.”

“You mean our liberator Mr. Hawk?” asked Neptune.

“The same.”

Mr. Hawk had the unpleasant sensation of feeling his legs being critically surveyed. He turned round just in time to catch the tail end of an appreciative grin vanishing from Neptune’s face. The sea god bowed politely and looked away. So did Mr. Hawk.

The battle between the snakes was not adding to the peace and calm of the museum. Mr. Hawk viewed the situation with growing alarm. He feared that the gods themselves might become personally involved. Such a contingency must be avoided at all costs. Mr. Hawk had no desire for any undue publicity. It was his responsibility to get these freshly awakened immortals quietly and successfully out of the museum. How was he going to do it if they kept betting recklessly on a snake fight and losing their poise at the first opportunity? He could no longer depend on Meg’s cooperation. The whole affair had proved too much for her unstable nature. She was as childlike as the gods themselves.

“That’s the girl, Minnie,” Mercury was saying with urgent encouragement. “Snap off a couple of heads. Come on, Jove. Get into it! Don’t let your little sister do all the fighting.”

“They’re flirting,” observed Apollo. “Dating each other up, those snakes.”

Mr. Hawk decided it was high time to intervene. Hebe was growing nervous. Apparently she did not share her brother’s passion for snake fights.

“I hate to spoil a good time for you gods,” said Hawk, “but all bets are off. Watch those snakes.”

He raised his right hand and petrified the warring factions. Perseus leaned back against his pedestal and grinned at Mercury.

“That saves you,” he said. “In another moment you wouldn’t have had an inch of snake left.”

“You always were a braggart,” retorted Mercury without rancor. “You and your rescuings and your slayings and silly expeditions. Publicity stunts, all of them. Without the aid of an unscrupulous press agent you wouldn’t be the half god you are today.”

“You forget, my dear brother,” said Perseus, “I had no prenatal control over our common father’s amorous delinquencies. But that reminds me. Are there any women about in need of rescuing or slaying? It doesn’t matter to me which. I do both with equal enjoyment and precision. I’d like to tackle a couple of sea monsters if it could be arranged.”

“What do you mean, arranged?” inquired Mercury. “Do you want us to bribe a couple of sea monsters to lie down at your feet and throw the fight?”

“I never bribed – —” began Perseus hotly, but Hebe cut him short.

“Listen, everybody,” she said, “I want a cup to bear.”

“And I want a fish to eat,” added Neptune.

“And I crave some bathtub hooch,” put in Meg.

“I agree with the little lady,” said Bacchus. “If we drink enough of this current grog we’ll be able to see all the snake fights we want without even troubling to open our eyes.”

When Diana was released from her gracefully poised position she sprang noiselessly to the floor and looked coolly about her.

“I’d like to take a pot shot at a deer,” she announced, inspecting her bow, “if any of you happen to know where one is knocking about. If I had my hounds along I’d rustle up a deer for myself.”

“There are enough hounds along as it is,” observed Apollo. “We have fish hounds and meat hounds and cup hounds and grog hounds and all sorts of hounds in the party. We don’t need any more hounds.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Megaera.

“I have,” replied Apollo. “I’m the meat hound.”

“That’s the truest word you’ve ever spoken,” said Mercury, then added as if it were an afterthought, “And that isn’t saying much.”

Meg inspected the beautiful Diana and felt herself growing small. She looked covertly at her lanky scientist to ascertain what his reactions were to this new and altogether delightful arrival. How could she hope to compete, she thought rather ruefully, when these well formed women went striding cheerfully about with nearly nothing at all on? Of course, she could flirt with Perseus or Apollo, but, after all, she was not really interested in them. They were the sort that appealed to the ordinary run of women. They were great big beautiful boys with hearts of gold and all that. Her long-legged scientist was different. He was homely and nervous and refreshingly bitter about things in general. She knew more than he did. She was able to get around him. No, she decided, the gods were all right in their places. Mercury was perhaps the most interesting of them all. But she loved Hunter Hawk. She was sure of that now. And she was a little bit afraid for him. She realized he had kicked over the traces for good, and she knew that a mere mortal would never be able to get away with it.

“I nominate Venus,” came the deep voice of Bacchus. “She was always a good sort at an orgy.”

“But she hasn’t any arms,” said Hebe.

“Venus doesn’t need any arms,” replied Bacchus with a low chuckle. “She has everything else that’s necessary.”

“Oodles of it,” agreed Apollo. “Almost too much.”

The gods and goddesses with Meg and Mr. Hawk gathered round the statue of the high priestess of love. A little self-consciously the scientist performed the rites. Low murmurs of amusement from the gods. Diana endeavored to look shocked but was unable to restrain a cynical grin. The beautiful goddess stirred on her pedestal. Life sprang to her eyes, and she looked languorously down at Hunter Hawk. The sea from which she had sprung was caught in her gaze, the blue, warm, dreaming Mediterranean, plunged with unknown depths. With voluptuous grace she moved her hips, then uttered a little cry. The drapery was falling. Being without arms, the fair lady did the next best thing and promptly turned her back on the audience. Then she glanced over her shoulder and giggled.

“For once it’s not my fault,” she declared.

“An unavoidable exposure,” replied Mercury. “Forgivable and at the same time diverting. I don’t know how it is exactly, but you can manage to look nakeder than any naked woman I ever saw.”

“And you’ve seen enough,” supplied Perseus. “What are we going to do about her?”

Venus looked sadly at the head of Medusa.

“She was a good old girl once,” she said, “before she vied in beauty with Minerva. That one always did have a jealous disposition. And there were others not far behind.” Venus allowed her gaze to linger for a moment on Diana. That slim creature merely sniffed scornfully and looked away.

“You’ve got me on weight, my dear,” she said, “but I’ve got you on speed.”

“I don’t have to chase my men,” drawled Venus.

“You don’t even have to know them,” said Diana.

“Oh, la, la,” laughed her sister. “If I only had fingers I’d snap them. Now what are we going to do about the condition I’m in? Can’t stand like this all night.”

“Someone will have to hold the thing up for you,” replied Mercury. “How about Hebe?”

“No,” replied Venus promptly. “I’d much prefer a man.”

“You would,” said Diana.

“It’s not that at all,” Venus explained. “Men are more reliable. I know what to expect from them.”

“And you generally get it,” the moon goddess retorted.

“I’ll hold it up for you,” said Perseus, gallantly stepping forward. “Allow me.”

“You always were a dear,” replied Venus cooingly. “Especially with ladies in distress.”

Perseus gathered the garment round the hips of the goddess of beauty and assisted her down from her pedestal. She was delighted with Meg and Mr. Hawk. She said nice things to them and complimented Mr. Hawk on his good taste.

“Size really doesn’t count,” she assured him. “It’s a matter of being interested. That’s all there is to it.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Mr. Hawk, feeling somewhat uncomfortable.

“Ask the lady,” replied Venus. “I’ll bet she understood me.”

“Miles ahead of you,” said Megaera. “He’s not quite so dumb as he acts. Nearly, but not quite.”

“If everyone is agreeable,” said Mr. Hawk, “I suggest we adjourn to surroundings that would give our various talents greater scope.”

“He’s not so dumb at all,” commented Mercury.

“Oh, good,” said Neptune. “Fish!”

“Cups!” put in Hebe.

“Women!” cried Apollo.

“Wine!” mouthed Bacchus, then added thoughtfully, “or any potent substitute.”

“Don’t peek,” murmured Venus in the ear of Perseus. “That’s not fair.”

“Stop putting ideas into the young man’s head,” Diana told her, “and for the love of Pluto don’t be girlish. You can’t get away with it.”

“Bet you wish you didn’t have any arms,” jeered Venus.

“Enjoy yourself,” was the sarcastic reply. “I suppose you’ll have to scratch next.”

“Thanks,” said Venus. “The idea had not occurred to me. It’s a good one.”

“Thought it would appeal to you,” smiled her sister.

“If you ladies will stop your little unpleasantries,” cut in Neptune, “we’ll all go somewhere.”

When Mr. Hawk had shepherded the gods and goddesses into the lower corridor he addressed them.

“Now you gods and you goddesses,” he told them, “listen to me. You’ve got to get some clothes on. You can’t go round as you are. I’m going to take you to a store, and I won’t stand any skylarking. Grab anything you like and put it on, but put it on fast. If you don’t we’ll all get arrested. I’ll help the men, and Meg here will help the women. You she-gods must understand that you can’t linger over your toilettes at the start. You must cover your nakedness first. Later on, we’ll see that you’re rigged up swell.” He paused and looked at Megaera. “Meg,” he continued, “the Emperor is outside. The ten of us will have to squeeze in somehow.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” put in Venus.

Hawk regarded her with a sardonic grin.

“I didn’t think you would,” he said. “Meg, you lead the way, and I’ll bring up the rear. Pile into that automobile and pull down the shades. What follows is going to be ticklish business. Nip and tuck with law and order. Now, snap to it, the lot of you.”

He opened the door, looked out, then stood aside. Behind the back of the diminutive Meg the large Olympians strode innocently into the night in quest of clothes.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Gods Get Dressed

“Why the hell couldn’t you have left that damn head behind?” demanded Apollo as the great Perseus, still clinging to Venus’s precarious girdle, tried to snuggle down beside him in the back seat of the automobile.

Perseus carefully placed his ghastly souvenir in his lap and patted it affectionately.

“You know,” he admitted quite seriously, “I’d feel lost without this head. And, anyway, why can’t I have my head if I want it? Neptune has his trident, and Diana’s brought along her bow, and Mercury still clings to his craven worms. I wouldn’t swap this head for all of them put together.”

“There’s no accounting for tastes,” remarked Diana from somewhere in the depths of the swiftly moving car.

“What’s wrong with this head?” asked Perseus defensively. “Why does everyone keep on picking on my head?”

“Your head is a horrid head,” retorted Diana. “Both of them.”

“And to pick on either properly,” put in Mercury, “one would be forced to use an ax.”

“You’re quite funny, aren’t you?” replied Perseus after a moment’s thought. “But for all that, I keep my head. If Mr. Hawk hadn’t stricken my snakes flat, you’d be singing a different song about my head. You’d be smiling into its face, making much of it.”

“There’s too much of it as it is,” said Apollo.

“Dear boy,” put in Venus soothingly, “don’t believe a word they’re saying. All it needs is a haircut.”

“What! Lose all my snakes?” cried Perseus in horror.

“Well, wouldn’t they grow out again?” asked Venus innocently. “They might grow even longer, you know, and thicker.”

“Yes, and I’d like to know what barber would take the job?” Mercury sarcastically inquired.

“We’d have to find some snake-loving barber,” said Venus easily. “That’s all.”

“But if he loved snakes,” observed Apollo, “he wouldn’t like to snip ’em off.”

“Then we’ll have to find a barber who doesn’t like snakes,” replied Venus. “That’s not so hard to figure out.”

“But ninety-nine barbers out of a hundred don’t care for snakes,” said Mercury.

“All the better,” replied Venus. “They’d welcome the opportunity to do ’em a bad turn.”

“Not necessarily,” retorted Mercury, who seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the argument. “They might hate snakes so much they wouldn’t want to have a thing to do with them. Prefer to leave them entirely alone.”

“I’m not listening to a word anybody is saying,” put in Perseus. “This head goes to no barber. Only over my dead body.”

“That would make it all the pleasanter,” said Diana.

“How long, may I ask,” inquired Neptune with dangerous mildness, “are you all going to keep on about those snakes and that head? While history is being made you all forget everything for the sake of a handful of low-caste reptiles. If you were talking about fish it would be an altogether different matter.”

“But barbers couldn’t do anything with a fish,” objected Perseus, who apparently was not nearly so bright as he was heroic.

Neptune grew crimson with exasperation. “I know, I know,” he said. “I didn’t claim that barbers could do anything with fish.”

“Might not be able to do anything professionally,” Mercury observed judicially, “but socially they might eat them.”

“Of course, of course,” replied Neptune.

“Not necessarily,” interposed Bacchus, drawn into the argument in spite of himself. “Did it ever occur to you that a great many barbers might not care for fish? I haven’t the slightest doubt that there are as many anti-fish barbers as there are pro.”

“Exactly,” put in Mercury. “And you never can tell what might turn the scales in their favor.”

Nobody laughed.

“I said,” repeated Mercury, “you never can tell what might turn the scales in their favor.”

“We didn’t hear you,” said Venus. “We don’t now.”

“And anyway,” continued the sea god, “what does it matter whether barbers do or do not like snakes or fish? A hundred years from now who will even know whether any barber alive today ever expressed an opinion one way or another?”

“Of course, if you put it that way,” said Diana. “But, just the same, the principle of the thing holds true.”

“And that is?” inquired Neptune.

“This head goes to no barber,” Perseus supplied with finality.

“Then don’t take your head to a barber,” snapped Diana.

At Fifty-ninth Street Mr. Hawk skirted the park and headed the car west. He knew of a store on Broadway that catered both to men and women in all things wearable. If he could only succeed in getting these scantily clad gods and goddesses safely inside all might be well. Once dressed they were safe from detection. On the front seat beside him Meg and Hebe were wedged. Meg had made friends with Hebe and was now explaining to her about stockings and step-ins and garters and allied feminine adornment. Hebe’s eyes grew brighter as she listened, but suddenly a disturbing thought occurred to her.

“But they’re easy to get off, aren’t they?” she asked.

“Simplicity itself,” Meg assured her.

Hebe sighed contentedly and once more became all attention.

“Meg,” said Hunter Hawk, “once we get some clothes on their bodies, I will call the adventure a complete success. Help those women to dress. Stick ’em in booths and hurl things at ’em. You’ll have to take care of Venus yourself.”

“Wouldn’t you like that job?” she asked a little spitefully.

“Don’t be lewd,” Mr. Hawk admonished.

“I will,” said Meg, “at the earliest convenient moment.”

At Broadway the Emperor turned south and joined the stream of traffic. The great car continued on for a certain number of blocks, then drew up before a highly lighted shop. Its windows attractively displayed raiment and accessories of all description for both men and women. Behind him in the body of the car the gods and goddesses were in a great state of excitement.

“As I understand it,” Neptune was saying, “as soon as the doors are opened we’re to pop out and run like hell.”

“Correct,” said Mr. Hawk. “And when I fling you a pair of trousers you’re to yank ’em on your legs with a snap.”

“Have these trousers you’re talking about any possible means of escape?” asked Apollo anxiously.

“He means, have they any exits?” explained Bacchus.

“Adequate exits,” Mr. Hawk assured the two Olympians. “But be careful how you use them.”

“Oh, we know a thing or two,” Bacchus replied confidently.

“Good,” said Mr. Hawk. “Everybody all set? The women are to stick to Meg, the men follow me.”

“What about this lady’s girdle?” asked Perseus. “It seems too bad to let it slide at this late date.”

“Diana will pinch hit for you,” said Mr. Hawk.

“And I’ll bet you an old sandal she’ll do me dirt,” quoth Venus.

“None of that sort of stuff,” the scientist warned sternly. “As I said before – no skylarking. When I open these two doors, out you pop. Here goes, and may luck be with us.”

A moment later the traffic policeman standing in the center of one of the world’s most famous thoroughfares, and about half a hundred pedestrians received the shock of their lives. To this day a majority of the witnesses of the unique scene are not sure that they actually saw the sights their eyes registered. Many of them believe they heard a nearly naked armless woman exhorting another woman wearing little more than a bow to do something about a girdle.

“Hold the thing up,” Venus was panting. “I’m not ashamed of my feet, you know.”

This interruption in the ordinary routine of Broadway’s night life had a disturbing effect on the policeman. At the sight of the nude figures piling with nervous alacrity out of the automobile and hot-footing it across the pavement as if the devil himself were behind them, the officer stopped traffic in all directions. He had no belief that this was going to prove in any way helpful, but he urgently felt the need for some sort of drastic action. The sight of Bacchus lumbering delicately along behind his vast paunch at the heels of a beautiful but brazen woman caused the policeman to reverse his decision. He started traffic in all directions. As a result of this, Broadway in his vicinity became an extremely confused area. In the midst of this confusion, and totally disregarding it, the policeman stood diligently scratching his head.

“This Earl Carroll guy is getting too damn fresh,” he mused to himself. “He’ll be having his girls bathing under the fire hydrants next.”

For a few moments he considered this possibility, while motor cars clashed and clattered about him.

“What are we to do?” asked one driver, leaning far out of his car and peering anxiously into the officer’s blank face.

“Do?” said the policeman vaguely. “I don’t know. What are you going to do?”

“That’s what I’m asking you,” replied the motorist.

“Well, don’t ask me,” said the policeman. “I’m thinking about something else. Go away and bother another cop.”

The motorist obediently wedged himself inextricably between a couple of ill-temperedly bleating automobiles, and the officer returned to his thoughts. He had a feeling he was not doing exactly the right thing. Some effective action had been omitted. He had failed to take steps. Leaving the traffic to worry along for itself he walked slowly in the direction of the store into which he had seen the naked bodies disappear. A large crowd had gathered, and through it he toilfully made his way, wondering if all these people had seen the same thing as had he.

And in the meantime the gods were getting dressed.

Mr. Hawk at the head of a solid phalanx of nudity burst into the store and cornered an immediately interested individual who proved to be the manager. Behind Mr. Hawk’s back crowded the bare Olympians, their eyes darting about the shop with acquisitive alertness.

“I’ll buy everything,” gasped Mr. Hawk.

“You’ll need to,” replied the manager, looking with amused admiration at his prospective customers.

“Close the doors,” continued Mr. Hawk, “and lock them. I’ll make it worth while.”

“You have already,” the manager assured him, stroking his smooth black hair as his eyes dwelt on Diana. “How did you manage to keep your clothes?”

“We won,” said Mr. Hawk. “This lady and myself.”

“You must have played your cards pretty close,” remarked the man as he quietly directed a subordinate to close and lock the doors and also to pull down the shades in the store windows. The few customers remaining in the establishment were fortunate. They were the sole witnesses of a scene well out of the ordinary.

“I think your friends will take everything fairly large,” continued the manager. “Shall we begin at the beginning?”

“Yes,” replied Mr. Hawk. “And make it snappy. I expect a cop at any minute.”

The manager appeared utterly unperturbed.

“I’m surprised the reserves are not here already,” he observed with a bland smile.

“If the law steps in,” Mr. Hawk told him, “don’t be surprised at anything that happens. Just take your cue from me.”

The manager nodded and signaled to the various members of his staff. By this time the Olympians had grown restive and had distributed themselves over the store. In one corner Apollo was busily engaged in trying on a high hat while close beside him Perseus was strutting gallantly back and forth with a gold-headed cane. Neptune and Bacchus were sticking strictly to their instructions. Both were struggling into a pair of trousers. Hebe, in spite of the pleadings of Megaera, had managed to get her head through a pair of salmon pink step-ins, while Diana, with gales of laughter, was doing things to Venus with a flimsy brassière. Meg saved the situation by dropping a black satin dress on the goddess’s shoulders and helping her to adjust it. The dress fitted Venus perfectly and completely changed her appearance.

“If I only had arms,” the poor creature murmured, surveying herself in a long mirror.

“How about me?” demanded Diana. “Get me something in white or green. I’d do well in both.”

Mercury alone appeared to entertain no desire for clothes. He was standing near a cash register and regarding it with a glittering eye.

It was at this unauspicious moment that the traffic policeman rapped heavily on the door. Mr. Hawk was stung to action. He even forgot his customary urbanity.

“Will you two gods please stop messing about with hats and canes,” he called out, “and snap on a pair of trousers?”

“What do you mean,” asked Perseus, “one pair of the things between us?”

“No, a pair on each,” explained Hawk.

“On each what?” called back the god.

“Leg, you blockhead! Leg!” shouted Hawk.

“Oh,” said Perseus in an injured voice to Apollo. “How were we to know? Wonder if this wouldn’t do as well?”

He snatched up a sports sweater from a near-by counter and endeavored to draw it over his massive limbs. The effect was engaging.

“Don’t do that, you great ass,” Apollo told him. “You’re supposed to tie the damn thing round your waist.”

“Give me a chance,” heaved Perseus. “It will get to the same place in due time.”

On the doors of the shop the knocking was growing louder and more imperative. Hawk’s glance traveled swiftly about the store.

“Strike attitudes,” he called out, “and don’t try to be funny.”

“How the devil can a god strike an attitude other than an amusing one with his trousers half on?” demanded Bacchus, red in the face from exertion.

“Are fish never to be?” complained Neptune, who was in an equally undignified condition.

The scientist darted swiftly from god to goddess and back again and turned them to their original composition regardless of the state into which they had gotten themselves. A busier and more lifelike group of statues had never before been seen by the eyes of man. He seized the head of Medusa and hid it behind a counter.

“That damn head,” he muttered to himself. “It’s always in the way.”

Then he hurried back to the manager.

“If anyone gets stuffy,” said Mr. Hawk, “just tell them they’re a consignment of window models that has just been delivered. Get me?”

“I get you,” replied the manager, “but damned if I see how you did it.”

He walked briskly to the door and allowed Traffic Officer Muldoon to enter.

“What’s going on in here?” that worthy demanded, stepping into the store and looking quickly about him.

“Lots,” replied the manager easily, closing and locking the door behind the officer’s broad back.

“I saw a mob of naked men and women dash into this store,” continued Muldoon. “Where did they get themselves to? That’s what I want to know.”

“Is it possible he’s referring to these window models I just delivered?” Mr. Hawk inquired, stepping up to the manager.

“Window models me eye,” said the officer. “The people I saw were running like hell, and as far as I could see they were mother-naked.”

“I fancy the officer has good eyesight for such things.” Meg observed sweetly.

“Well, lady,” said Muldoon, “a traffic cop ain’t supposed to be blind. It wouldn’t be a healthy job if he was.”

“Then if your eyesight is so good,” continued Meg, “you must have seen my husband carrying these models into the store.”

“He must have been busy as hell, lady,” said the officer, “and even at that he couldn’t have carried them all at once.”

“Perhaps you were overtired,” suggested Mr. Hawk. “Protracted standing in the midst of traffic will do that, for no matter what you think you saw, carry them I did. Otherwise they couldn’t have gotten in here at all. Take a good look at ’em and see for yourself if I’m not right.”

Traffic Officer Muldoon walked up to Hebe and inspected her with something more than mere professional interest. Suspiciously but respectfully he reached out and applied one finger to the cold tip of her nose.

“I seem to recognize this one,” he said, turning back to Mr. Hawk.

“By what?” asked Meg innocently.

“By her face, lady, of course,” replied Muldoon with a triumphant smile.

“Oh,” said Meg. “I didn’t know.”

“But what the devil has she got round her neck?” he continued.

“Step-ins,” supplied the manager. “The lady here was dressing her.”

“Well, I wouldn’t interrupt her for the world,” said the officer. “A model as true to life as that deserves to be dressed just as soon as possible.”

“You speak as one who knows, officer,” remarked Meg in an offhand tone of voice.

“I’ve had five children,” Muldoon retorted proudly.

“How you must have suffered,” murmured Meg.

Muldoon eyed Meg with a half grin.

“Pretty smart girl you got there,” he said, turning to Mr. Hawk.

“They don’t come any smarter, officer,” Mr. Hawk replied.

As Muldoon wandered from statue to statue the perplexity in his brain increased. He became so skeptical of his own sanity at last that he decided it would be far, far better if he did not think at all. Obviously these inanimate figures could not be alive. And it was equally obvious that if they were not alive he could not have seen them dashing across the street to the store. But see them dash he had. Therefore the only logical conclusion to be drawn was that out there in the middle of traffic he had momentarily gone mad and become the victim of hallucinations. The less said about this the better. When he came to Perseus, poised awkwardly with the sports sweater drawn halfway up his legs, the officer abandoned all attempt to read any reason into the situation.

“Whoever tried to dress this guy mustn’t have known how to dress himself,” he remarked.

“Oh, one of the boys was merely fooling,” explained the manager.

“A peculiar sense of humor,” replied Officer Muldoon.

He continued on until he came to Bacchus. The heavy god was seated on a bench in an attitude of complete discouragement. Even his munificent paunch appeared weary and disillusioned. A pair of golf knickers, several sizes too small, stubbornly refused to continue any farther up his legs. It looked as if it would be equally difficult to pull them off. Altogether Bacchus had succeeded in making quite a mess of himself. Neptune was little better.

“What are these two models supposed to represent?” asked Officer Muldoon. “Ready-made clothes for stout parties?”

“Exactly,” replied the manager. “If you’ve any fat friends, just bring them round and we’ll give them a discount. This store caters to all shapes and sizes.”

“And sexes,” added Meg.

“You have to on Broadway,” said Officer Muldoon wisely. “I’ve got a fat wife myself.” His eyes dwelt wistfully on the slim form of Diana, then passed with approval to Venus of the stony breasts slouching with voluptuous grace in her gleaming black gown.

“Just bring your wife in,” said the manager, noting the direction of the officer’s gaze, “and we’ll make her look like that one.”

Muldoon grinned good-humoredly. “Can’t be done,” he said. “The old girl needs a tent, God bless her soul.”

“Then if you’re perfectly satisfied that everything is as it should be,” continued the manager, “we’ll continue with our dressing.”

Muldoon took the manager’s hint and Mr. Hawk’s five dollars. At the door he paused and looked back.

“There’s something wrong somewhere,” he said, “but damn me if I know just where. If you see me suddenly tear off my own clothes out there and start to run about naked just put me down as crazy and let it go at that.”

So departed Officer Muldoon, a tremendously puzzled man. The snarling traffic received him and spitefully tried to cut him down in his prime. And Officer Muldoon, sticking valiantly to his post, little realized that for a brief moment he had stood in the presence of the gods.

Back in the store Megaera and Mr. Hawk were busily engaged in returning these selfsame gods to life. This accomplished, the male Olympians were placed in the hands of several competent salesmen, while Venus, Diana, and Hebe followed Meg and a couple of intelligent young girls to a private dressing room where all things were done and well done.

When finally the gods and goddesses reassembled for inspection Mr. Hawk was as proud of them as if he had been their father.

“You’re the finest looking outfit of men and women I’ve ever laid eyes on,” he told them. “You look just as well this way as you did the other. Even the ladies do, and that’s saying a lot.”

“If I only had my arms,” Venus lamented prettily.

Diana resplendent in white laughed scornfully.

“Now that you’re fully clad,” she said, “you suddenly discover you need your arms.”

While Perseus was collecting his head Mr. Hawk went into conference with the manager.

“I suppose you’ll accept my check for the damages?” asked the scientist.

“I suppose I’ll have to,” said the manager smiling. “It would never do to let your friends depart in the condition in which they arrived. That would be a poor advertisement for the shop. I don’t mind if customers come in naked, but I’d hate like the deuce to see them go out the same way.”

Before Mr. Hawk filled in his check he had a number of suitcases packed with clothes and placed in the Emperor. Then he settled the bill and called to his party.

“Come on,” he told them, “we are drawing nearer fish and everything.”

Neptune dashed to the door, and the others followed close behind. Perseus, with his head tucked under his arm, brought up the rear. He was nonchalantly swinging a walking stick in emulation of the immaculate Apollo.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Gods Get Housed

“When you propose to do the worst,” said Mr. Hawk to Meg, “always use the best.”

He dropped a nickel into the telephone slot and gave the operator the number of one of the toshiest hotels in town.

“Reservations, my dear,” he told the girl at the switchboard. “Put me on to Mr. Stevens, if you will.” A short wait, then, “Hello, Stevens, this is Hawk speaking – Hunter Hawk.”

“Hello, Mr. Hawk. What can I do for you?” came the voice of Stevens.

“Stevens,” said Hawk, “fix me up right away with a flock of rooms. I’m entertaining some friends for a week or so, and I want everything to run off smoothly.”

“About how many rooms, Mr. Hawk?”

The scientist thought rapidly, taking into consideration the loose habits of the immortals. They should be allowed ample space, he decided, if only as a matter of self-protection.

“Oh, about fifteen rooms, Stevens,” he replied. “We’ll need a couple of large reception rooms, baths, and all that.”

“Certainly, Mr. Hawk. I understand. I’ll give you half a floor. Your own elevator goes with it, and a private entrance on a side street.”

“Excellent, Stevens,” said Mr. Hawk as he hung up the receiver, then added to himself, “God help the other half of that floor.”

He next got Betts on the wire.

“Betts,” he said, “events march. It doesn’t look as if they’re going to stop for some time. Listen. Pack a couple of bags with Miss Meg’s stuff and mine. You know what to do. Then fill a steamer trunk with all the grog that’s in the house and put in as much decent wine as you can lay your dishonest hands on. After that join me,” and Mr. Hawk gave his man the address of the headquarters of the gods.

“Too bad his wife must miss all this,” he said to Meg as he returned the receiver to the hook. “We might think about getting her in. She’d go nicely with the gods. Like them, she was born without morals.”

“Everyone is born without morals,” asserted Meg.

“I know,” replied Mr. Hawk, “but they very soon develop a faculty for picking up a devil of a lot of superfluous morality on the way.”

“You should worry,” retorted Meg. “What’s found can be lost again. I’m sure you don’t miss yours.”

“What do you mean?” said Hunter Hawk. “I’m one of the most moral men that ever breathed.”

“In short, staccato gasps,” added Meg. “Come on, let’s get back to our gods, or they’ll be swarming all over the city.”

As they left the cigar store they ran into no less a person than Mercury himself. He had been mingling with the Broadway crowd and was now leaning against the store window, his hands carelessly thrust in his pockets.

“What did I tell you?” said Meg as they accosted the casual god.

Mercury looked at them innocently and grinned. There was something about this suave god’s grin to which Mr. Hawk never grew quite inured. There always seemed to be a little something on Mercury’s mind, some project of dubious honesty held lightly in reserve.

“Just taking a look round,” he told them. “Thought I’d wait here while you were telephoning. Everything all right?”

“Fine,” Hawk replied, studying the smile distrustfully. “Come along. Any other gods out, or goddesses?”

Mercury hesitated for a moment, then evidently made up his mind to speak.

“Well, I saw Venus walking down the street a piece with a tall, dark man,” he admitted. “No harm in it, you know, but anyway, that one always was a bit of an old hooker.”

At this moment Venus under full sail undulated up to the group.

“I just met the sweetest man,” she exclaimed. “You should have seen him, dear girl. He was plush. Wanted to see me later, but I couldn’t give him our address. Haven’t the vaguest idea where we’re going next. Wish I had a couple of arms. Do you think some drunken sculptor made me this way deliberately, or did I get damaged in shipment?”

“You got damaged in more than shipment,” her brother replied. “What do you mean by letting yourself get picked up by a perfect stranger?”

“Who does one generally get picked up by?” asked the goddess in innocent surprise. “Certainly not old friends. And besides, I haven’t any old friends in this town. A girl must put her best foot forward. Don’t you agree with me. Mr. Hawk?”

The smile she favored the scientist with was a delicious thing indeed.

“Oh, certainly,” he hastily answered. “So long as you confine yourself to your feet.”

“Oh, Mr. Hawk,” she murmured, gazing at him with archly lowered lids.

“And speaking of feet,” said Megaera, “I think I can do something about your arms. It will be rough work, of course, but at that it will be better than no arms at all.”

“You’re a darling, Meg,” cried Venus delightedly. “Without arms a girl’s style is terribly cramped.”

“You keep referring to yourself as a girl,” put in Mercury. “Don’t do it, you ancient dragoon.”

“I’m still a girl at heart,” Venus replied lightly.

“Hurry up,” boomed a deep voice across the street.

“Uncle grows restive,” observed Mercury as they moved in the direction of the parked Emperor.

The arrival of the gods at the hotel created a little stir among the guests. Instead of making use of the private entrance Mr. Hawk led them to the main lobby, where he with the help of his old friend Stevens succeeded in covering the register with a neat array of lies. Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Jones and Brown came in for a strong play. And for some strange reason, unknown even to himself, Mr. Hawk made the gods hail from Canton, Ohio. While this heavy work was in progress the Olympians disported themselves about the lobby, in their artless way endeavoring to make friends with anyone they chanced to encounter, regardless of sex or station.

“This man won’t talk to me,” Hebe complained loudly to Meg and pointed to a dignified-looking gentleman at the moment grimly engaged in hiding as much of himself as possible behind a newspaper. “I asked him if he had a cup, and he wouldn’t even answer me.”

“Don’t mind him, my dear,” said Venus soothingly. “He looks like a washout, anyway.”

“And this fellow apparently has lost his tongue,” Neptune thundered across the lobby. “Doesn’t seem to know a thing about fish.”

The unfortunate individual whose lamentable ignorance of fish had occasioned the sea god’s criticism looked about him uncomfortably and edged away. As he did so a scream was heard, and a woman fell fainting to a sofa. Perseus in a moment of playfulness had thrust the head of Medusa in her face. An arrow whizzed across the lobby and pinned an old gentleman’s panama to the back of the chair in which he was sitting.

“A fair hit!” boomed Bacchus. “Well done, Diana.”

The moon goddess hurried across the lobby and retrieved her arrow.

“Did I frighten you?” she asked the old man sweetly as she handed him his hat.

“Did you frighten me?” said the old gentleman, looking up at her with an uncertain smile. “My dear young lady, if you must know the truth, you nearly scared the shirt off my back. Don’t do it again, please.”

“You’re an old duck,” replied the goddess, and bestowed on the old gentleman a smile so gracious that he felt fully repaid for the damage she had done to his nerves and his hat.

The confusion created by the unconventional conduct of the gods caused Mr. Hawk to turn sharply from the desk. He was just in time to see Mercury unobtrusively transferring a fat wallet from an innocent bystander’s pocket to his own.

“A nice little selection of gods we made,” he muttered to himself as he hurried over to Meg.

“Collect the women,” he told her, “and herd them into the nearest elevator. I’ll get the men.”

As the Olympians ascended in the magnificent cage gasps of dismay issued from them.

“It gets me right in the pit of my stomach,” groaned Venus.

“Me too,” said Hebe. “Whoop! There it goes again.”

The moment they were ushered into their sumptuous quarters Diana pulled up her skirt and diligently began to undress.

“For God’s sake!” cried Mr. Hawk. “What are you doing that for?”

“Want to save it,” explained Diana thriftily. “It’s too nice to wear about the house.”

“Keep it on and I’ll buy you a new one,” said Hawk.

Meg was convulsed in a chair.

“Look!” she gasped. “Look!”

Hebe had opened a little cupboard in a stand by one of the beds and withdrawn a large vessel.

“I’ve found a cup!” she cried merrily.

Meg doubled up. Mr. Hawk clapped a distracted hand to his forehead. The attending bus boys were momentarily shocked, then quietly exchanged grins.

“Put it back!” cried Mr. Hawk. “Put it back where it belongs. That thing isn’t a cup. I’ll get you one. I’ll get you a dozen if you’ll only put it back.”

“What! Not a cup?” said Hebe, inspecting the vessel with disappointed eyes. “Looks like a cup to me. It must be a cup.”

“Hebe,” explained Mr. Hawk as soberly as possible, “you can’t bear that cup I tell you. Put – —”

A fresh explosion of mirth from Meg interrupted Mr. Hawk’s sentence.

“Neither can I,” she managed to get out. “I can’t bear that cup.”

In spite of all objections Hebe clung to her prize. Finally Mr. Hawk turned to one of the bus boys.

“Will you please go downstairs,” he told the boy, “and bring back as many cups as it is physically possible for you to carry.”

Hebe’s face brightened.

“Then I’ll put this one back,” she said, “though I’m sure I don’t know what’s wrong with it.”

“Do,” replied Mr. Hawk. “That’s a dear, sweet girl.”

With a pleased expression Hebe returned the vessel to its cupboard.

Weakly Meg made her way from the room. In a moment she returned, her eyes still moist from tears.

“Laughing makes me that way,” she explained. “These people don’t need any grog. They act drunk already.”

“What are these things for?” asked Mercury, dangling two gold watches before Mr. Hawk’s horrified eyes.

Once more Meg collapsed. Mr. Hawk was too full for either sound or speech.

“Where did you find those watches?” he managed to ask at last.

“Found them in my pockets,” the messenger of the gods replied.

“Yes?” said Hunter Hawk. “And in whose pockets did you find them before that?”

“Can’t remember the fellows’ faces,” answered Mercury with a winning smile. “They passed me by in the street. Watches, you say they are?”

“Yes, watches,” gritted Mr. Hawk. “Stolen watches. They’re supposed to keep time, and people who steal them are supposed to do time. Understand that? They do time behind bars in dark cells. Between you and Meg and Betts you’ll have us all in jail.”

“Who’s Betts?” asked Mercury.

“This is Betts,” said Mr. Hawk. “As big a thief as you.”

Betts entered the room respectfully. Behind him came two boys bearing bags and suitcases, and behind the boys came another one balancing a trayful of cups. Mercury inspected Betts with lively interest.

“Can he steal as well as I can?” the god asked Mr. Hawk.

“Not quite,” replied Mr. Hawk. “But he hopes to be able to soon. Meg is trying to teach him. She’s in your class.”

“I’ll make a master thief of you, Betts,” said Mercury. “Here, have a watch.”

“Thank you, sir,” replied the old servant, examining the watch appreciatively before thrusting it into his pocket. “I’ll do the same for you, sir, at the first opportunity.”

Once more Betts looked at the watch, this time with a peculiar expression – a mixture of amusement and embarrassment.

“Isn’t this yours, sir?” he asked at last, extending the watch to Mr. Hawk.

The scientist took the watch, glanced quickly at it, then looked for a long, long time at Mercury, who skillfully avoided his gaze. The look finished, Mr. Hawk carefully put the watch away and turned to Betts.

“Thank you, Betts,” he said quietly but distinctly. “It is my watch. Someone must have deliberately stolen it.”

“Some low-lived god, perhaps,” put in Megaera with an admiring glance at Mercury.

At this moment Venus came quietly into the room. A large and drunken man had an arm round her neck.

“Look what I found,” the goddess announced proudly. “He lives across the hall. I’ll take him to one of the rooms and try to sober him up.”

Diana laughed cynically.

“You’ll sober him up all right,” she said.

“The little sweetheart of all the world,” jeered Apollo.

“I’m sure I don’t understand you,” retorted Venus in an injured voice.

“Throw that drunk out on his ear,” said Mr. Hawk in a voice of command. “Take him away from her and pitch him across the hall.”

Snatching the head of Medusa from Perseus he placed it at the inebriate’s feet and made use of Meg’s magic. The snakes came to life with a hiss and a snap.

“Look!” cried Hawk to the swaying man. “Look! Snakes! You’ve got ’em, and you’ve got ’em bad.”

The man took one look at the fearful object at his feet, then, clapping a hand over his eyes, turned and staggered from the room. Venus looked after him regretfully.

“He was such a nice man,” she said. “If you’d only given me a chance to sober him up. I’m sure he was a perfect gentleman.”

“Oh, quite,” Mr. Hawk assured her. “Sorry to have been forced to deprive you of him, but there will be quite enough drunks around here before the night is over.”

A steamer trunk was brought into the room by one of the hotel porters.

“Take it to that large lounging room of ours,” said Mr. Hawk, “and put it down there. Betts, you tip the men and then lock all the doors. My brain is threatening to crack. Hebe, if you want some cups to bear just bring that tray along and help Mr. Betts. The rest of you follow me if you want something to drink. Don’t push me,” he added hastily as the Olympians surged behind him. “There’ll be grog enough for all.”

“Dear Mr. Hawk,” cried Venus, her recent frustration forgotten. “The sweet man thinks of everything.”

The lounge was exactly that – a large room filled with lounges and easy chairs. It was a room for either revelry or reflection as the spirit inclined. Mr. Hawk surveyed it with approval.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “please stop making such an infernal noise and sit down somewhere. Hebe will bear the cups, and Mr. Betts will mix. Break open that trunk, Betts, and start us off with some cocktails – strong and dry. I’m sadly in need of a drink. Running this outfit is worse than handling a circus with an infinite number of rings.”

Megaera was at the telephone.

“Yes,” she was saying. “I want plaster of Paris, and if you haven’t that, putty will do. Oh, you can get plaster of Paris? Good! Send it right up. Yes. This is Mrs. Hawk speaking.”

“Ask for a basket of fish,” said Neptune, but Meg had hung up the receiver.

“You shouldn’t have said you were Mrs. Hawk,” the rightful owner of the name told her. “You’re down on the book as Miss Turner of Canton, Ohio.”

“Want to have them think I’m living in sin?” she demanded indignantly.

“Aren’t you?” asked Mr. Hawk.

“What is sin?” Venus inquired.

“Almost everything that is worth while doing,” Mr. Hawk answered, sinking back in a deep chair. “The word has no meaning for you. Neither has it for Meg, but she likes to pretend.”

“Sin,” came surprisingly from Mr. Betts, “is forgetting to pull down the shades.”

“Oh,” said Mercury, “I understand. It’s not unlike leaving the door unlocked.”

“Or grabbing the wrong sandals when you jump through the back window,” Apollo added reminiscently.

“So it’s that,” said Venus, her face clearing. “Well, if you ask me, I think sin is nice. I’d like to live in it.”

“You’ve never lived out of it,” Diana tossed at her.

“Why bring up the past?” Venus again asked rather wearily. “Can’t a girl make a remark round here without someone getting personal?”

“What girl?” demanded Apollo.

“Any,” replied Venus. “It doesn’t really matter. Let’s drop the subject.”

“A wise suggestion,” quoth Neptune. “Sin is merely a matter of thinking out loud. It’s always been the same. Some people thrive on it while others take it too seriously – make a sort of cult of it. Sin is nothing to revel in – it’s essential to a comfortable and cultured existence. It should go without saying. But enough of sin. Here’s fair Hebe, bearing at last her cups. How does it feel, my rosy hired huzzy?”

“Like old times, Uncle,” said Hebe. “Take a couple while you’re at it. There’s lots more cups, and I’m going to bear them all.”

When everyone had been served Bacchus rose from his chair and held his cup on high. His magnificent paunch was now swathed in a buff-colored vest. An impressive figure, he stood there, an infectious smile well set off by the ruddy background of his jovial face.

“To Mr. Hawk and Meg,” he called out in his husky, wine seasoned voice, “the liberators of the gods. Bottoms up!”

“Oh, Bacchus!” said Venus coyly.

Neptune’s polite but not overenthusiastic, “Hear! Hear!” was lost amid a series of sharp explosive coughs and exclamations. Perseus sat heavily down on his head, then rose with a cry of pain. He had been seized on in various places by several snakes, who had blindly resented this uncalled for interruption in their night’s repose. Mr. Betts regarded the god with respectful concern edged with a touch of triumph.

“Did you find it strong, sir?” he asked.

“Zeus, yes!” gasped the professional hero. “Jupiter’s thunderbolts were as gentle sunbeams in comparison.”

“And you, sir?” asked the servant of Apollo. That gentleman raised a tear-stained face from his hands and looked moistly at Mr. Betts.

“It’s a far cry to nectar,” he said, “but I suppose we should be thankful the things weren’t served in vessels the size of that mysterious cup fair Hebe originally attempted to bear.”

“You have another one right beside you,” Betts reminded him.

“Yes, I know,” said Apollo evasively. “I can almost taste it from here.”

“And to think,” came the strained voice of Diana, “that mortals subject themselves to that painful experience time after time throughout the course of an evening and believe they’re enjoying themselves.”

“It’s one hell of a commentary on the monotony of modern existence,” replied Apollo.

“I can’t understand it,” said Mr. Betts, pouring himself a large drink and sampling it with a convincing show of relish. “If you’ll pardon me,” he continued, “that’s one of the best cocktails I ever made.”

“Then may Zeus protect us when you’re off your game,” came piously from Perseus.

“I thought it was swell,” said Meg.

“Me, too, my dear,” agreed Venus who apparently had not turned a hair. “I don’t see what they’re all kicking about.”

“You, you old hooker,” exclaimed Apollo indignantly. “Anything alcoholic seems good to you.”

“Well,” she replied sweetly, “I don’t believe in looking a gift horse in the teeth.”

“Wisely spoken,” said Neptune, struggling out of his chair. “That cocktail, whatever it was, might be hard to know at first, but it certainly seems to wear well. I feel quite bucked up already. I, too, drink to our host. There is only one thing wrong with him. He’s slow on his fish.”

Once more the party drank, this time with better grace. There was a knock at the door, and Betts hastened to open it. A bus boy stood there with a large paper bag on a tray.

“The plaster of Paris,” he announced, as if the order were one of the most frequent the hotel received.

Megaera took Venus and the plaster of Paris to one of the many bathrooms.

“Set a couple of drinks outside the door at frequent intervals,” she told Mr. Betts.

“Strong ones,” added Venus as she followed Meg from the room. “Our stomachs are strong enough to stand them.”

“Yours should be,” Diana enigmatically flung after her seductively undulating form.

Half an hour later she swept back into the room the proud possessor of a complete pair of arms. How she had acquired them was never quite revealed, although Hunter Hawk had his suspicions. Of course, the plaster of Paris was a clue.

“It’s rough work,” said Meg with pardonable pride as Venus displayed her new acquisitions to the party. “The texture doesn’t quite match, but we can pass it off as sunburn.”

“There’ll be no holding her now,” said Diana. “She’ll drag them in by the hair.”

Venus was too pleased with herself to object to a little coarse jesting at her expense.

“It’s such a relief,” she exclaimed. “You can’t imagine. Now I’ll be able to look after myself.”

“And a couple of others,” said Apollo.

Venus smiled at him coyly. “You fresh thing,” she said.

Mr. Hawk examined the arms critically. He was scientifically interested.

“Excellent technique,” he remarked at last. “Very well done indeed. A little out of proportion, but no one would notice that.” Venus was gazing at him with glowing eyes.

“Want to see how they work?” she asked suddenly, and throwing her arms round his waist strained him to her. It was a hug that would have done credit to a bear in the pink of condition.

“Oof!” grunted Mr. Hawk. “They’re a complete success. In fact, they work too well. Let me go while life remains.”

“I guess I’ll do,” said Venus, releasing him.

“What?” asked Apollo.

“None of your business,” said Venus. “Let’s go out and meet a lot of men.”

“I’d like to go out and meet a lot of fish,” put in Neptune.

“And I suppose you’d like to go out and crack a couple of safes,” Mr. Hawk said to Mercury. “I hope you’ll remember to keep your hands in your own pockets, and if you must steal things, don’t pick on me. You’ll merely be fouling your own nest if you do.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t for the world think of doing a thing like that,” replied Mercury with an embarrassed little laugh. “That would be going altogether too far.”

“Suppose they get lost or separated?” Meg demanded suddenly. “They wouldn’t know where to go or what to do with themselves. They’d get into all sorts of trouble.”

“That’s easily remedied,” replied Mr. Hawk. “We’ll tag the lot of them.”

He telephoned to the porter for tags, and when they had been brought he wrote down the name and address of the hotel on eight of them. The gods and goddesses, rather than feeling humiliated by the tags, seemed to regard them in the light of decoration. They inspected them with childish pride and compared them to see who had the best.

As Mr. Hawk led them from the room he heard a seething noise behind him. Turning, he was confronted by the snaky head of Medusa held carelessly under the left arm of the stalwart professional hero. Hawk turned the snakes to stone.

“Aw, what did you want to do that for?” complained Perseus. “They weren’t bothering anybody.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Neptune Gets His Fish

The Olympus mob was foregathered at what is perhaps one of the world’s fishiest eating establishments. There might be places equally fishy, but certainly no place could get itself fishier. It far surpassed the sea god’s fondest expectations, for more fishiness per square foot was crammed into the shabby, antiquated room than he ever believed possible outside of his spray-crested realm.

The room was not lacking in personality. It had an atmosphere entirely its own. In it were to be found some of the smartest and most desperate fish eaters in the city – fish eaters in on the know.

Whereas fish fanciers congregated at the Aquarium a few blocks south to gaze ineffectually at humiliatingly indifferent fish, the habitués of this river-front room – the real natural-born fish eaters of serious purpose and honest intent – came here with much heavier business in view. Their object was not merely frivolously to contemplate fish. Far from it. They came here to do something about fish, something positive and definite, something held clearly in mind. In short, to eat the things.

One cannot tell by observing a person looking at a fish whether that person is genuinely fond of fish or thoroughly detests them – loathes them, in fact. The fish watcher might be doing either one of two things – gloating over the incarceration of the fish, or deriving enjoyment from the contemplation of their stupid activities. No such doubt can exist when observing a person eating fish. One can tell at a glance whether that person is sincerely fond of fish or is merely tolerating the fish until something less disagreeable turns up, such as tripe.

The true fish eater never hides his light beneath a bushel unless it happens to be a bushel of oysters or clams. Fish eaters are frank about it. And if not extremely careful they can develop into terrific bores.

The restaurant was redolent of fish. Outside, the streets were slippery with them – lined with fish markets. Pretty nearly every water-loving creature that ever swam, crawled, oozed, or drifted seemed to have settled in the neighborhood. In this district no fish need ever feel lonely. Few ever did, because most of them were quite dead.

The Hawk party was seated at a large round table. There was ample elbow room and a feeling of spaciousness. It was a table designed to hold a great many fish or one lightweight whale – as many as a party of ten could decently eat at one sitting. Perseus had placed his head beside his chair on the sawdust-sprinkled floor. He had done this because the negro waiter had refused to approach the table until the disconcerting object was out of sight. Mercury had laid aside his caduceus and Neptune had slipped his trident under the table. Diana had left her bow at home.

“To begin with,” began Mr. Hawk, “does anyone here want fish?”

“The very word revolts me,” Venus declared. “This is no place for the goddess of love. I belong in a night club.”

“Ask the waiter to bring us a cup,” said Hebe in a low voice, “and fill it from that flask you have on your hip. The gods are getting low.”

Neptune was too bemused to answer his host’s question. His eyes were fixed on an ice-filled tank on the top of which reposed in horrid state a number of ill-tempered-looking lobsters. Unable to bear the sight any longer, the great man left the table and laid violent hands on two of the ugliest, most anti-social-looking crustaceans Mr. Hawk remembered ever having seen. With this wickedly animated pair of pliers he returned to the table and prepared to do battle with them there and then in cold blood.

“Those damn things are worse than my snakes,” Perseus complained. “Look at the faces on them.”

“I can’t bring myself to look at him,” said Diana. “He’s actually going to eat the things alive.”

The negro waiter’s eyes were doing something good in the line of popping.

“Gawd, brother,” he muttered to an associate, “that pitchfork-toting party sure is one tough gentleman. See him snapping at them great big green rascals.”

“Would you mind going away to some secluded corner and fighting out your battles alone?” Venus asked her uncle.

“Tooth against claw,” observed Mercury. “I bet on the teeth.”

“What’s wrong with the lot of you?” demanded Neptune, sighting at the table between the jagged claw of one of his opponents. “I always tackle ’em this way.”

A few of the more advanced fish eaters in the room were regarding the sea god with attentive admiration. They had never tried lobsters quite so fully alive themselves and were anxious to see just how one went about it. Although aware of the attention Neptune’s impulsive action was attracting to the table Mr. Hawk retained his self-possession. He reached over and quietly but firmly removed one lobster from Neptune’s grasp; then with his left hand he removed the other. The god was too astonished to protest effectively. The scientist nodded to the waiter.

“Take these things outside,” he said, “and cook them.”

Neptune gazed after the departing waiter in speechless indignation, then turned to Mr. Hawk.

“What did you want to do that for?” he demanded.

“Had I known previously,” replied Mr. Hawk quietly, “that you wanted to fight lobsters I’d have made more suitable arrangements.”

“But I always polish off a couple of live lobsters before I wire into the fish,” the god protested.

“I was unfamiliar with your habits,” the scientist explained with a faint smile. “However, I think you’re going to enjoy these lobsters just as well. They’re delicious when they’re broiled.”

“Are they?” Neptune exclaimed, his face brightening up. “I can hardly wait.”

“You didn’t,” remarked Mr. Hawk briefly.

Hebe was cheerfully moving round the table with a cup full of cocktails. A rose-pink gown adorned her exquisitely feminine figure. A beatific smile wreathed her lips. She was happy. She was bearing a cup.

“Bear your cup to me, sweet wench,” said Mr. Hawk. “My nerves need a little bolstering up. I wasn’t counting on a lobster fight.”

Hebe eagerly complied. “Go on,” she urged prettily. “Get a little bit that way.”

“How about yourself?” he asked.

“Someone has to bear the cup,” she answered simply.

“You’d make an ideal wife,” he observed as he swallowed a drink.

“I’ve never found it necessary to marry,” she answered with a look too innocent to be true.

“It is rather an ostentatious gesture,” agreed Mr. Hawk. “Never tried it myself.”

“It all comes to the same thing,” remarked Hebe, and moved gracefully away.

Across the table from him Mercury was showing Meg a new way to steal knives and forks.

“Of course,” he explained, “these things are hardly worth the trouble, but you never can tell who’s going to ask you to dinner. Just as well to keep your hand in.”

“Oh, quite,” replied Meg. “Is this yours?”

With a puzzled expression Mercury took the proffered wallet and examined it.

“Haven’t had it long enough to get used to it,” he explained with an embarrassed laugh. “Originally it wasn’t mine, but I thought I’d just bring it along to see what was inside. How did you come by it?”

“In a like manner,” she answered. “You see with you stealing is merely a diversion; with me it’s been a means of existence.”

“You must have made out well,” Mercury remarked dryly.

Meg acknowledged the compliment with a slight bow.

“They’re here! They’re here!” cried Neptune as the waiter placed the lobsters before him. “Broiled, you say? Well, it doesn’t matter. Dead or alive, they’re the same to me.”

The deep-sea god fell to with avidity, as did the others. Years of enforced fasting had put an edge on their appetites. Mr. Hawk, watching them, decided that one of the most likable features of the Olympians was that they put their whole hearts into whatever they chanced to be doing. Their enjoyment of life had the added zest of complete self-absorption which, paradoxically enough, is the same thing as self-forgetfulness. And taking everything into consideration, their table manners were not bad, with the possible exception of Neptune who insisted on casting his lobster shells to the floor with truly godlike indifference.

The only really unpleasant feature of the dinner occurred when Perseus reached down and placed the head of Medusa in the center of the table. Meg, who had been one of Hebe’s best customers throughout the course of the repast, decided in her elevated condition that it would be an amusing thing to bring the whole head back to life. This she did, and it was bad enough, but matters became even worse when Perseus began feeding Medusa with bits of fish snatched from various plates. Mr. Hawk was so gripped by the weird spectacle that his own powers became for the moment atrophied.

Medusa fairly snapped at anything that came her way. She had to be fast about it, because the snakes had little ideas of their own. Many a choice morsel they snatched from the lips of the head they graced. Even the gods were a trifle upset by what they saw.

“Where does the damn stuff go to?” demanded Bacchus. “She hasn’t any stomach.”

“Hebe,” said Medusa with her mouth full of fish, “what you got in your cup, dear?”

“This,” replied Hebe emphatically, “is the one time I refuse to bear. Here.”

She passed the cup to Perseus who in turn held it to Medusa’s lips. She thirstily drained its contents, then blinked rapidly several times.

“Whee!” she cried suddenly in a hoarse voice, causing the gods to start in their chairs. “That’s the kind of stuff I like. You’re a good sort, Perseus, even if we did disagree. You couldn’t dig me up a body somewhere, could you?”

Mr. Hawk shuddered. Medusa’s form of expression was a little too vivid for a man with an active imagination.

“Will somebody please tell me where she put that last drink?” Bacchus asked in a discouraged voice.

“Why don’t you ask me, you tub?” snapped Medusa. “If you must know it went straight to my head. I don’t need any stomach.”

The burst of wild laughter that followed this grim sally horrified the entire room. In one corner the negro waiters were grouped in a dark mass.

“When Ah think that ma ten toes were within nibbling distance of that mouth it’s pretty nigh mo’ than Ah can bear,” said the erstwhile attendant at Mr. Hawk’s table.

“Toes, toes, stop tremblin’ in yo’ boots. The lady like to got you.”

Hunter Hawk took a swig from a second flask without waiting for a cup to be borne.

“Ah, there,” said the head. “At it again, I see. How about a little drink for baby?”

“Let her have just one more,” pleaded Perseus. “I’ll look after her.”

Without a word the scientist relinquished his flask to the god, who thrust it between Medusa’s distended lips and tilted it at a generous angle. The owner of the restaurant took one good look at what was going on, then tightly closed his eyes.

“Does anyone want to buy this place?” he asked. “You can name your own price. When things like this begin to happen, it’s time to quit. I know when the stuff’s got me.” He laughed a trifle hysterically. “Go on, everybody, have a good time. Have a fish on me,” he shouted. “I’ve gone ga-ga.” As he passed through the service door he was heard to remark to himself, “A disembodied, rum-drinking head, smartly trimmed with snakes.” The poor man’s voice rose to a yell. “Break out a couple of quarts, Steve. I want to get blind drunk.”

“But I saw it, too,” said the unseen person addressed.

“What!” screamed the owner. “Trying to humor me, are you?”

Further discourse was drowned by the sound of breaking plates.

“I can stand very little more of this,” said Diana. “Won’t you turn that head back to stone, Mr. Hawk?”

“If I had my old cunning,” retorted Medusa, “I’d damn well turn you to stone.”

“Don’t turn her back to stone,” put in Perseus. “Please don’t, Mr. Hawk. She’s having such a good time, she and her little snakes.”

“Do you expect to go about town with a boisterously drunken snake-bearing head under your arm?” Mr. Hawk asked mildly.

“Certainly not,” declared Apollo. “The damn thing gives me the creeps.”

Medusa, indifferent to her fate, had begun to sing in a deep bass voice. This decided Mr. Hawk. He raised his right hand and returned the head to stone in the middle of its most ear-piercing effort. Meg immediately turned it back, and the interrupted voice continued to tell the world all about silver snakes among the gold.

“Hey, quit that,” protested Medusa. “I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. You’re making me dizzy.”

“You’re going,” replied Mr. Hawk, and once more returned the head to stone. “Lay off that head, Meg,” he continued, “or I’ll have to do the same thing to you.”

Meg’s brow darkened rebelliously, but she made no further attempt to interfere with the head. Mr. Hawk, observing her expression, suspected her of designs as black as the glances she cast him from time to time.

“Can you eat any more fish?” he asked Neptune.

“If I did,” the god retorted, “you could play the scales on my back.”

“The old boy’s getting funny,” observed Diana.

“Fish affect me that way,” he replied. “You should eat more of them, my dear.”

But Neptune received his biggest thrill when the party, well primed with food and drink, had shaken the sawdust of the restaurant from its feet and was walking cheerfully along the waterfront. Mr. Hawk was determined to leave no stone unturned to give the sea god his fill of fish. It was the scientist’s private hope that Neptune would become so sick of fish that the mere sight of a tin of sardines would revolt him. He little suspected, did Hunter Hawk, the profound depths of the god’s fondness for the dumb creatures of his realm.

As they passed by the fish markets, busy even at that hour of the night, the sight of so vast and so varied a quantity of fish, rather than exerting a soothing and reassuring influence on Neptune, seemed only to excite him, to arouse in him that latent spark of cupidity without which no person, whether god or mortal, can struggle along with any degree of enjoyment. The more fish Neptune looked upon, the more he wondered why these people should have so many fish while he himself could lay claim not even to a minnow. Surely no one had a better right. Was not he the great Neptune, the boss of all the damn fish that swam? This matter would have to be looked into, the situation rectified. Now, if he could only bring a fish home with him. That would be a start at least.

He stopped before a large box of fish and picked up one of the slippery objects. Now, it just so happened that the man who had things to do with that particular box of fish, whatever it is one does with a box of fish, was in an atrocious humor. Perhaps a fish had bitten him, or he was tired of looking at fish lookers, or fish had simply gotten on his nerves. Whatever the cause may have been, the fact remains that the man was in no mood to take any shilly-shallying from Neptune. He approached the god and addressed him with brutal directness.

“Put down that fish,” said the man.

“Why should I put down this fish?” asked Neptune with deceptive mildness. “Is it your fish?”

“Don’t ask foolish questions,” replied the man. “Of course it’s my fish. Put it down.”

“Who gave you this fish?” asked Neptune. “Where did you get it?”

“Nobody gave me that fish,” declared the man.

“No?” said Neptune, slightly elevating his eyebrows. “Do you mean to say you didn’t come by the fish honestly?”

“Say,” retorted the man, “what are you trying to pull, anyway? I haven’t time to stand talking to you all night long. Put that fish down.”

“Are you busy?” inquired Neptune. “Busy about fish?”

“What’s that to you?” snapped the other. “As it happens, I am busy. It’s fish, fish, fish, morning, noon, and night.”

“You’re fortunate,” observed the sea god. “I envy you your agreeable occupation.”

“What are you trying to be, funny?” demanded the fish-weary individual. “Are you going to put that fish down?”

Mr. Hawk and his party had stopped at the street corner and were clustered there, looking back at the apparently harmlessly conversing god.

“Did it ever occur to you,” Neptune asked of the man, “that I might grow tired of hearing you tell me to put this fish down?”

Here Neptune gently shook the fish under the man’s affronted nose.

“And did it ever occur to you,” sneered the man, “that I might grow tired of having to tell you to put that fish down?”

“Do you happen to know,” demanded Neptune, drawing himself up to his full height, “that I am the god of all fish?”

“You’re not the god of that fish,” the man replied with absolute conviction.

This piece of defiance infuriated Neptune. “What!” he exclaimed, raising his voice slightly. “Not the god of this fish? Do you mean to stand there and tell me that?”

“That fish hasn’t got any god,” said the man.

Neptune examined the fish with renewed interest. “Do I understand you to say that this is a godless fish?”

“I don’t know what you understand me to say,” replied the man, “or what you don’t understand me to say, but I wonder if you understand me when I tell you to put down that fish?”

“I understand you well enough,” said Neptune, “but I’m not going to put down this fish. That’s flat.”

“What are you going to do with that fish?” asked the other, growing pale from exasperation.

Once more the god examined the fish as if seeing it for the first time.

“What am I going to do with this fish?” he repeated in a slightly puzzled voice. “Well, I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do with this fish, but I do know one thing, and that is, I’m not going to put it down.”

“Oh,” said the man, “you’re not going to put it down?”

“No,” replied Neptune with great dignity. “I’m not going to put the fish down.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” exclaimed the other, casting all hope of patience to the wind, “you’re not going to stand there all night long holding that damned fish, are you?”

“No,” replied the sea god, “I’m certainly not going to do that.”

“Then just what do you intend to do with that fish?” asked the man in one of those deadly calms that presages a complete abandonment of reason.

“I don’t just know what my intentions are regarding this fish,” declared Neptune with cocktail begotten ponderosity. “I don’t care to hold the fish, neither do I feel at all inclined to put it down. Furthermore, I’m extremely tired of observing your silly face. If you want to know what I think of you and your fish – watch!”

With this Neptune threw the much-discussed fish into the astounded man’s face. It was a telling shot, and it landed fairly. With the unpleasant sound of a solidified splash the fish impinged on the man’s left cheek and a considerable portion of his nose.

There is something in being hit with a fish that arouses all that is worst in human nature. A pie or a brick may affect different persons in different ways, but with a fish it is always the same. There is only one result – homicidal rage on the part of the recipient of the fish. This invariably happens.

For a moment the man stood stunned; then quite automatically he dipped his hand into the box and hurled several fish into Neptune’s face.

“Just what I wanted,” cried the god with a nasty laugh. “I love fish.”

“Oh, you do, do you?” panted the other, more from anger than from exertion. “Well, how about this one?”

He picked up a fish that barely missed being a whale and flung it with all his might at Neptune. The sea god dodged nimbly, and the fish took up its position in the gutter. As the man bent over to seize upon another fish, Neptune prodded him in an investigatory spirit in the part thus prominently exposed. It was not so much a painful act of retaliation as it was a degrading one. There was something about it that the man found intimately insulting. He snapped erect with another large fish in his hands and this time his aim was more accurate. The fish descended heavily on the sea god’s head, and for a moment the Olympian was dazed. He staggered back, then relieved himself of a roar that meant nothing less than war to the death.

The gods and goddesses gathered at the corner observing that all was not well with their fish-inclined relation, and recognizing from eons past the nature of his bull-throated roar, legged it down the street without even pausing for the formality of a huddle. They were filled with fish and grog, which make a fighting combination. Mr. Hawk, despairing of peace, cast his lot with the gods and bounded down the pavement in the direction of this novel altercation.

Perseus, the professional hero, was the first to arrive at the scene of action. His movements were precise and definite. It was like a smooth first night after weeks of conscientious rehearsals. He picked up a barrel of fish and permitted the silvery shower to play over the head of his uncle’s adversary. The man went down under a deluge of fish. From his clammy place of confinement his head emerged and began to make significant noises. He was earnestly summoning aid. And aid was not long in arriving.

It so seems that men who spend much of their time in the company of fish either dead or alive are strong, hostile, and active men. The group that joined battle with the Olympians were of this type, at any rate. They emerged from many doors, and Hunter Hawk, who was ever interested in experimenting, wrapped a large eel round the leader’s neck. So far eels had not entered into the battle, but from now on they played an important part.

Even a man most accustomed to fish does not like to have his neck adorned with an eel. Proceeding on the assumption that one cares for eels, it is only a person with a perverted taste who cares for them that way. This man did not care for them that way. He unwound the eel from his neck and, twirling it round his head with the dexterity but not the charm of Will Rogers, released it to its own devices. The eel sped over the immediate area of conflict, and as if spying Venus, who was pantingly bringing up the rear, sought seclusion down the bosom of her dress. It was then that this ravishing creature performed on the sidewalks of New York and in sight of the battling multitude what could only be classified as a lascivious dance. An eel on the exterior of one’s stomach is even less agreeable than an eel twined round one’s neck, and a lady finding herself in such a predicament may be forgiven for dancing almost any dance that pops into her head at the moment. So effective were Venus’s convolutions that each faction paused in its effort to outfish the other until the eel had been dislodged from its intimate place of concealment.

Having successfully rid herself of her uninvited guest, Venus turned her thoughts towards methods of reprisal. With a critical observation regarding the casual parentage of the eel slinger, she hurled herself into the forefront of the conflict and, disregarding the aid of fish, knocked the man flat with one Olympian blow. Couched on a layer of slippery fish the semiconscious individual made a surprisingly neat exit towards the gutter, where he remained. Undiscouraged by his enforced absence, the fight continued with, if anything, augmented abandon.

Megaera, with her usual resourcefulness, had endeavored to equalize the discrepancy in cubic stature by arming herself with a swordfish, with which she was doing painful execution. Mr. Hawk, clearing a fish from his eyes, caught a glimpse of her industriously sawing away on the leg of a large party upon whose face Bacchus was comfortably seated while searching about for a certain kind of fish he had in mind. Hawk laughed madly and dispatched a flounder with scientific accuracy into the face of his nearest adversary. Apollo and Diana, from behind a barricade of barrels, were methodically emptying them of their salty contents by leveling an effective barrage upon the enemy. Perseus, having retrieved his head which momentarily he had laid aside, was holding single-handed three stout fish flingers at bay. Everyone seemed to be conscientiously doing his or her bit. They would have done even more had it not been, for the intervention of the police. These civic joy killers arrived in a body of three. Mercury, from his point of vantage on the driver’s seat of a cart, was the first to be aware of their arrival. Mistaking them for partisans, he discharged two handfuls of fish stingingly upon them. The officers of the law were both annoyed and disgusted. Somebody was going to pay for this indignity. A few revolver shots they might have overlooked, but fish, never. One of them sprang to the seat by Mercury and raised his night stick on high. Mr. Hawk broke through the seething crowd and turned the god to stone. The club descended with a loud report and snapped in two. The blank astonishment written on the officer’s face repaid Mr. Hawk for many fast-traveling fish. Incredulously the policeman reached out a hand and felt Mercury’s face. The hand was swiftly withdrawn.

“Be God,” muttered its owner, “it’s the first case on record of a fish-flinging stone.”

For a moment he stood amid the din and confusion, completely submerged in his thoughts. Then with a sigh he decided to dismiss the incident entirely from his life and let one of his brother officers carry on where he had left off. However, he was too late. Mr. Hawk reversed the order of things. He petrified the policeman and released the messenger of the gods. Then, above the shouts and imprecations and the steady patter of fish, the scientist made his voice heard.

“Cease firing,” he shouted, “and follow me. Don’t lose your tags.”

Picking Meg up bodily, he sprinted down the street and turned a corner. The Olympians streaked after him, and after them the policemen, frantically blowing their whistles. This would never do, Hawk decided. There was enough noise already, without the policemen adding to it. He jumped into a doorway, and as the officers rushed past at the heels of the gods he added two more impressive-looking statues to the police force of New York.

Into a cruising taxi he bundled as many gods and goddesses as he could find. He gave the driver the address and told him to drive like hell. He then hurried down the street in search of another taxi. Behind him the two petrified members of the city’s finest looked as if they were playfully indulging in an adult game of Still Water, No More Moving. Later, when two members of the Flying Squad came across their statuesque colleagues, they did not have the temerity to report their find to Police Sergeant Burk, the officer in charge.

“It would sound too damned silly,” said one of the discoverers, “to report to him that Officers Sullivan and O’Boyle had been found turned to stone.”

“We wouldn’t have a button left,” agreed the other.

Police Sergeant Burk, however, had discovered strange things for himself. When he had demanded of the petrified figure on the driver’s seat of the wagon just what was all the trouble about and received no answer he had climbed up beside the figure and examined it closely. It was an odd coincidence that Sergeant Burk, like his two subordinates, made no report of his discovery. He felt that it was one of those things that might lead to profitless discussion. Let others find out for themselves, was his not unwise decision. Thoughtfully he climbed down from the wagon and ordered the arrest of every living being in sight. After that he went home and got speedily into bed. The next day he put in an urgent request for a long vacation. What subsequently became of the three petrified officers was never officially recorded, although rumor has it that they were successfully used as shock absorbers on several important raids. Neither is it known whether they still received pay for their services or were ever carried to visit their respective families. Such purely irrelevant considerations are merely matters of conjecture.

In Mr. Hawk’s arms Meg was singing “Rock-a-bye, baby, on the tree top,” while above her the scientist’s lean face peered into the darkness for a possible means of escape. Presently he spied a taxi, and toward this yellow hope he dashed, head on. It was not until he was seated with his burden in the cab that he noticed she was clinging to a swordfish.

“What do you want that thing for?” he demanded.

Meg looked at the fish in surprise. “I don’t know,” she said. “Didn’t realize I had it. Let’s bring it home to Neptune.”

It was then that a harmless citizen was given something to talk about for many weeks by the sudden appearance at his feet of a swordfish which seemed to have descended from the sky.

“Is anyone in?” Mr. Hawk asked the operator of the private elevator.

“Yes, sir,” replied the operator, then added after a moment’s hesitation, “Ever so many.”

The Olympians, virtually stripped to the skin of their fish-battered garments, had distributed themselves clubbily about the lounge and were thirstily watching Mr. Betts as he diligently mixed cocktails. Hebe was standing by with a trayful of cups.

Meg and Mr. Hawk were greeted enthusiastically upon their entrance. Inquiries were made regarding the probable whereabouts of Neptune, the missing cause of all the trouble. “Probably in jail,” said Mr. Hawk wearily. “If so, Betts will have to bail him out.”

“A well chosen word in connection with Neptune,” observed Mercury whose mind was ever alert for trifles.

There was a hint of dawn in the sky when the sea god finally put in an appearance. He walked jauntily into the room with a huge fish over his shoulder impaled on the prongs of his trident.

“That elevator boy seems to be upset about something,” he told Mr. Hawk.

“I can’t imagine what,” that gentleman replied.

With a dignified bow to the assembled company Neptune hastened to the telephone and removed the receiver.

“Hello,” he said, “I have a fish up here I want you to put on ice. It’s an unusually large fish, and I want it served whole for breakfast. How big is it?” He paused and looked appraisingly at the fish, then turned back to the telephone. “Oh, I’d say about six feet six,” he announced, not without a note of pride. “What’s that? Too big, you say? Then I’ll eat the damn thing in the bathtub.”

He hung up the receiver with a snap and accepted a cocktail that Hebe bore him. Extending his cup courteously towards Mr. Hawk, the god of the sea addressed him.

“My regards, Mr. Hawk,” he said. “This is a splendid town for fish.”

“I’m glad you like it,” said Mr. Hawk rather lamely.

Venus had to be forcibly restrained from attacking her uncle.

In such a strained situation Hebe the cup bearer and Betts the cup filler proved themselves invaluable in restoring congenial relations. By the time the members of the party sought their beds the hint of dawn in the sky had become an open avowal.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Meg, Mercury & Betts, Inc.

Mr. Hawk was sitting in his bedroom, and he was a little bit drunk. It was five o’clock in the morning. He was still clad in evening clothes. A high silk hat, straight black stick, and a bottle of Scotch formed a swagger group on a near-by table.

Hawk was looking mildly at nothing. His eyes shifted to the bottle of Scotch and refused to budge therefrom. As if impelled by a desire to satisfy his eyes rather than his thirst he rose from his easy chair and arranged himself a drink. This accomplished he reseated himself, glass in one hand and cigarette in the other.

For the past half hour he had been vaguely troubled by the need of something, the exact nature of which he had not been able to discover. Only a few minutes ago he had succeeded in doing this. Hunter Hawk knew now that he needed a little more Blotto. He missed his dog. Also, he missed Daffy. Several times he had rung for Betts to tell him about his discovery, but either the bell or Betts was out of order. For once the old gentleman had failed to answer the summons. Neither was Meg anywhere to be found. She and Mercury had gotten separated from the party. Hawk was more nervous about this than he cared to admit. Not that he suspected the loyalty of either one of them. What he did suspect most definitely was their honesty. Now that Betts was among the missing, Mr. Hawk’s suspicions became more firmly rooted.

“Meg, Mercury, and Betts,” he said to himself with a hopeless shake of his head. “A bad lot. A very bad lot. They will come to no good end.”

Such bleak reflections quite naturally led to another drink of Scotch. He enjoyed this. He enjoyed being alone. It was the first spell of solitude he had had in the last five days. Since the return of the gods life had whirled at hurricane velocity. There had been little time for reflection. The Olympians were all in bed now, if not asleep.

Mr. Hawk knew for a fact that with the exception of the first night not one of them had slept alone. How they managed to gather in transient guests was still a mystery to the scientist. He had grown quite accustomed to entertaining perfect strangers of both sexes at breakfast. The gods, in spite of the late hours they kept, were early risers and insisted that those who shared their beds should be early risers also. Breakfast over, past favors and friendships were callously forgotten and the guests summarily dismissed. Mr. Hawk ascribed this to a delicate disinclination on the part of the Olympians to be reminded of their delinquencies, whereas the truth of the matter was that they were very easily bored by mortals and were constantly seeking fresh fields to conquer. Venus, Diana, and Hebe, in the order named, had made a strong play for Mr. Hawk, Venus being the strongest, but he had successfully resisted their blandishments, more from a desire for peace than a love of purity. With Meg the gods showed a little more self-restraint. True enough, Apollo had made advances, but they had been tentative to the point of being perfunctory. Meg had found no difficulty in telling the so-called irresistible god to go to hell. Although he had not gone, he had desisted from further endeavors. They were now the best of friends. Although Meg greedily laid claim to virtually every known vice, she scornfully excluded cheating.

“Sex,” she said, “according to our advanced thinkers, is the most important single factor in life. Having gotten this bearded profundity off their chests they sneak down a dark alley and proceed to test the truth of their theory with some other person’s husband or wife. I believe in giving sex its due importance. If you can’t get along with one man or one woman at a time, then hang out your shingle and make a business of it.”

This sort of thing, of course, meant nothing to the gods. They listened to her with polite interest and said, “Quite right,” soothingly, after which they went cheerfully about their own disreputable affairs just as if Meg’s gratuitous moralizing had been an incentive to their misconduct.

Mr. Hawk had been good to the gods. He had stinted them in nothing. He had gone far out of his way to be decent and had done his utmost to satisfy their every whim and fancy. When Mercury had stepped on the dance floor of a night club and spilled out an assortment of knives, forks, and spoons to which he had taken a fancy, Mr. Hawk had not been stuffy about it. In fact, he had joined in the general laughter the incident had evoked, not heartily, to be sure, but he had done his best. When he had come upon Diana shooting arrows from her window into an office building across the street and causing consternation among the staff, he had made no outcry or hot-headed protest. He had helped her with the aid of innumerable pillows to rig up a dummy figure in the lounge, where he silently hoped she would shoot her damn head off. When Perseus, during the most exciting moment of a talkie, had leaped to the stage and attacked the screen, mistaking it for the villain, Mr. Hawk had allowed himself to be ejected with the rest of the cheering Olympians and later had done his best to explain to the overemotional god that the characters were not real and that even if they were they were only fooling. That time when Hebe, unable to restrain herself, had snatched a wine-filled goblet from the hand of an indignant cloak-and-suit buyer from St. Louis and then sweetly held it to the amazed man’s thick lips the scientist had casually flung out the suggestion that hereafter she should limit her cup-bearing to her own party. On the occasion when Venus had insisted on entering an impromptu beauty contest clad in little more than her garters it had been Hawk who had carried home the prize for her. Of all the Olympians, Bacchus and Neptune were the least bother. After his first fling with the fish Neptune had settled down to a comfortable humdrum existence. He loved to potter about, and after Mr. Hawk had bought him an attractively decorated miniature aquarium full of goldfish the sea god was as pleased as a pup with a greasy piece of rope. Nor did Mr. Hawk make any reference to the constantly diminishing supply of gold fish, although he was convinced that Neptune was cheating on him. He tactfully passed over the bearded god’s little weakness and gave instructions to Betts to see that new goldfish should be acquired.

“A man as large as he is,” said Mr. Betts tolerantly, “needs a little snack between meals.”

“Snack,” replied Mr. Hawk with a slight shiver of revulsion, “is the one word next to tasty I dislike most. Make a strong effort, Betts, to find less repellent substitutes.”

As for Bacchus, that jocund god was hardly any trouble at all. He required only a sufficient abundance of wine, women, and song. These innocent pastimes he indulged in for nearly the twenty-four hours of the day.

“You’re the most godless gods I could have possibly selected,” Hawk told them on one occasion, “but I’m responsible for getting you here, and it’s up to me to do the right thing by you. If you have any complaints or suggestions to make, don’t hesitate to let me know.”

The Olympians were loud in his praise.

“You’re a good sort, Hunter,” Venus had replied, “even if you did practically kick me out of your bed.”

“Listen, my dear,” Diana had put in, “if you held a grudge against every man who had been forced to kick you out of his bed at one time or another, virtually every member of the male population of Italy and Greece would be in your bad graces.”

“I’ll have you to know I’ve been kicked out of very few beds, all things considered,” had been the lovely goddess’s hot retort.

“All things considered covers a multitude of kicks,” Diana had shot back.

As usual Hebe had restored the quarreling goddesses to good humor with her inevitable cup.

Only one thing was making Mr. Hawk uneasy. He had noticed that of late his guests were not carrying their liquor well. The stuff seemed to be making inroads on their systems. They bickered more in the morning and were becoming more critical every day. Modern night life was evidently not agreeing with them. They were making a practice of getting themselves half lit before breakfast in order to be able to eat it. Sometimes Neptune would lie all morning completely submerged in a tub overflowing with water. In addition to its being rather a ghastly sight – particularly the floating beard – it was also terribly messy. It became even more so when the sea god insisted on taking his goldfish into the tub with him. As a result of this childish caprice Venus slipped on a straying goldfish and was inconsolable until almost every male member of the hotel staff with the possible exception of the manager had tenderly rubbed the injured spot. When, not satisfied with this, Neptune suggested that a couple of large live eels might add to the gayety of his morning tub, Mr. Hawk demanded bitterly if he would like to bathe in clam chowder or perhaps oyster stew. When Neptune told him that would be just great, the scientist turned on his heel and left the god bubbling merrily beneath the water.

As he sat there now in his luxurious armchair with the strains of a waltz from the last night club still knocking about his ears, Mr. Hawk decided that perhaps his Olympians needed a change and that he himself needed another drink. He would have liked to show them his place in the country had it not been for the threat of arrest hanging over his head.

He rose from his chair and mixed himself a stiff drink, but paused with the glass at his lips. A knock had sounded on the door. The next moment Betts had entered the room.

“There’s a cow outside, sir,” he announced with a slight show of embarrassment.

The scientist gave no indication of surprise other than to toss off his drink at a gulp.

“A cow,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Do you know what it happens to want, Betts, or rather, what she wants?”

“I think she wants to come in, sir,” the servant replied.

“Have we any spare rooms?” asked Mr. Hawk.

“Sometimes we have and sometimes we haven’t,” said Mr. Betts. “You know how things are, sir. Never can tell from one night to another. Some nights they bring home one. Some nights they bring home two.”

“Exactly,” commented Mr. Hawk dryly. “Well, don’t keep the cow standing there in the hall. Bring her in here temporarily.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Betts.

“Don’t thank me, Betts,” replied Hawk. “Have you any personal interest in this cow?”

Betts hastily disclaimed having any interest in cows in general and in this cow in particular.

“You must admit,” Mr. Hawk observed mildly, “that it is rather unusual to have a cow calling on one at this hour of the morning. Not that I find it so,” he added, deliberately replenishing his glass. “I find nothing unusual any more. If a herd of bison should come stampeding across this floor I wouldn’t turn a hair. If an ostrich should approach me right now and ask me if I could lend him a pocket in which to hide his head I wouldn’t be able to dig up even so much as an attenuated exclamation point. But bring in this cow, Betts. I run on.”

The servant retired, and the next moment a large, gentle-looking cow walked with stately self-possession into the room. Behind the cow came Meg and Mercury, pushing its rump diligently. Once in the room the animal looked back reprovingly, as if all this pushing were entirely uncalled for.

“Close the door behind you,” said Mr. Hawk quietly. He returned to his chair, sat down with elaborate caution, and leveled his eyes on the cow. A look of mutual respect and understanding passed between them. At that moment a friendship was established. So far neither Meg nor Mercury had offered any explanation. They stood bunchily together looking about them uncomfortably. Mr. Betts stood a little apart steadily refusing to meet their eyes. They seemed to regard him as their leader and protector, and it was evident that Mr. Betts had no desire to be regarded in either capacity.

Mr. Hawk cleared his throat, and the three figures started visibly. He inspected them each in turn and decided that they, too, were not quite sober. He forgave this. He forgave everything.

“Did you just happen to run into this cow by chance in the hall?” he asked, fixing Meg and Mercury with a speculative eye, “or did you think that I wanted a cow – that I stood in need of a cow?”

He spoke slowly and reasonably, as if addressing small and not overintelligent children.

“We thought it would be nice,” offered Meg after a hopeful look at Mr. Betts.

“Nice for whom?” continued Mr. Hawk in the same tone of pleasant inquiry. “For me or for the cow?”

“Sort of all around,” said Mercury. “Nice all around.”

“I see,” went on Mr. Hawk. “Then, I take it, you did not meet this cow by accident?”

“Oh, quite by accident, sir,” hastily interposed Mr. Betts. “I mean, sir, we didn’t plan the cow.”

“You couldn’t plan a cow, Betts,” Hawk told the old gentleman. “That requires a bull.”

“Yes, sir. Certainly,” agreed the servant. “That requires a bull.”

“To say the least,” put in Mercury, hoping to please Mr. Hawk.

“Not to say the least, Mercury,” the scientist replied. “Just a bull, neither more nor less.”

“And a cow, perhaps?” suggested Megaera.

“Oh, a cow by all means,” replied Mr. Hawk. “That goes without saying – but to return to this specific cow. How did you get her up here, may I ask?”

“We crammed her into the private elevator,” said Mercury with almost brutal directness.

“It must have been pretty,” observed Mr. Hawk. “And the elevator boy, did he offer no feeble objections?”

“That’s a funny thing,” said Mercury, grinning for the first time. “He didn’t seem to have an objection left. Said he’d carried up so many strange things since we’d been here that one cow more or less made no difference to him. We gave him quite a lot of money.”

“And where did you get the money?” Hawk demanded, then added quickly, “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care to know. Let us say you found it – as usual. An ill wind and all that sort of thing.”

“It’s a nice cow,” Meg advanced timidly. She suspected her patron’s calmness.

“An excellent cow,” said Hunter Hawk, regarding the animal with frank admiration. “One of the best, no doubt, but hardly the cow for a bedroom, do you think?”

“The fact is,” supplied Mr. Betts, “we didn’t know exactly what to do with her after we’d got her here.”

“So you thought you’d give her to me,” said Mr. Hawk sweetly. “You probably decided there had been too few cows in my life. Got yourselves all worked up about it. But, tell me, how did you get the cow here and why did you get the cow here?”

“You see,” replied Mercury with a winning burst of confidence, “we met her quite by chance wandering drearily about over by the river. She was lost – without a home, and of course, she couldn’t sleep in the park.”

“Of course,” said the attentive scientist. “They don’t like cows in our parks.”

“New York,” observed Betts in a sorrowing voice, “is a lonely place for a single cow.”

“I should imagine it would be twice as lonely for a two-headed calf,” Mr. Hawk commented. “Continue, please. We were up to the point where you had met this cow and received the impression that she was rather low in her mind. Then what happened?”

“Meg here said,” Mercury resumed, “that you’d never stand for seeing a cow wandering round the city without a place to lay her head and insisted on bringing her along with us.”

“I wonder how she knew that?” mused Mr. Hawk. “She must be clairvoyant.”

“Then I told her,” continued Mercury, “that that wouldn’t be at all a nice thing to do and that you wouldn’t be expecting a cow. I pleaded with her, Mr. Hawk, but you know how she is. She just laughed rather derisively and said that if you didn’t like it you could jolly well lump it. So that’s – —”

“Oh, what a liar you are!” exclaimed Meg. “I didn’t say any such thing, did I, Betts?”

“I was holding the cow, Miss Meg,” the old servant replied. “But it certainly doesn’t sound like you.”

“There, what did I tell you?” said Meg. “The man’s a natural-born liar and a congenital thief.”

“And that’s how it happened,” finished off Mercury rather lamely.

“It seems to me, Mercury,” Mr. Hawk remarked after a thoughtful silence, “that there’s some truth in the old saying yet – ‘There’s no honor among thieves.’ ”

Mercury smiled faintly. The truth of the matter was fairly obvious. Meg, Mercury, and Betts, the latter having accompanied the party to the night club so as to be on hand in case of emergency, had become bored with the forced gayety of the place and had withdrawn in search of fresh pockets to pick. The course of their wanderings had at last brought them to the west side of the city in the very heart of the cattle-car district. Here they succeeded in losing themselves quite thoroughly. Picking in this quarter of the city so far as pockets were concerned was not a flourishing business, so Mercury, who was leaning against a freight car when he came to this conclusion, decided to pick its lock. This he did with masterly skill and no little enjoyment. Sliding back the door the deft messenger of the gods thrust in a nimble arm.

“Oh, look what I got,” he announced triumphantly. “I’ve found a cow.”

“Seems to me you’ve found a great many cows,” rejoined Megaera as a stampede of cattle came pouring down the broad runway which the ever efficient Betts had hooked over the steel ledge of the door.

“Almost too many cows,” murmured the servant as he jumped back just in time to avoid the mass of released animals falling and staggering from the car.

In the story he told to Mr. Hawk the god had omitted to mention the fact that there were a number of homeless steers and cows that night wandering about New York. As a matter of fact, had the scientist been fully acquainted with the true facts of the situation, he would have congratulated the three thieves on the restraint they had exercised in bringing back only one cow.

The general confusion that followed the escape of the cattle served as a cloak for the further activities of the unholy three. They drove a well favored looking animal down a side street and in the darkness held a hurried consultation. In justice to the abductors of the cow it should be stated that Mr. Betts was carrying two large flasks of rye which were seldom if ever in his pockets for more than a moment at a time.

“This,” said Meg, gazing with bright eyes upon the cow, “is the very biggest thing we’ve stolen yet.”

“By far,” agreed Betts in an awed voice, “and furthermore, Miss Meg, it lives, breathes, and moves.”

“We just can’t let her go,” continued Meg pleadingly in the darkness. “We must bring her back with us.”

“I have a rope,” said Mercury. “I found it under here.” He indicated the loading platform of a warehouse squatting swartly in the night.

It must also be said in justice to the three semi-sober conspirators that no cow was ever more willing to be abducted than was this one. The creature actually thrust her head through the noose that Mercury had cleverly contrived. How so gentle and home-loving a creature could have strayed into a car filled with reckless, devil-may-care steers remains one of the unsolved mysteries of cattle transportation. Perhaps some dim, maternal instinct had moved her to follow the destiny of some beast she mistook for her son, or rather, for one of her sons. However that may be, she seemed to realize now that she was in a decidedly unhealthy neighborhood for cows of any description. It was due to her strong desire to remove herself from this neighborhood that the team of Meg, Mercury, and Betts was able to return to comparative civilization. They followed the lead of the cow and triumphantly circulated the flask.

“It’s a funny thing,” Meg said in a subdued voice as they moved behind their leader down the dark, uneven street, “but a cow like this, a great, dumb, gentle cow, always makes me wish I had led a better life. I can’t bear her eyes.”

“I’ve led a fairly decent life,” Mercury replied complacently. “Apart from a little plain and fancy stealing I have nothing to regret.”

“Why, I’ve always considered you as the world’s leading procurer,” answered Meg. “Please don’t disappoint me. Weren’t you always arranging parties for the gods?”

“Only as a gifted amateur,” responded the messenger of the gods. “Never professionally.”

“But you would have made a good professional, don’t you think?” Meg asked hopefully, still clinging to her girlhood illusions.

“Oh, if you put it that way,” replied Mercury modestly.

They crossed a wide, gloomily reaching avenue and continued on.

“I’ve never been able to sin very effectively or consistently,” came the rather depressed voice of Mr. Betts. “A good bodyservant unconsciously absorbs the character of his master. Mr. Hawk has always been until recently an exceptionally clean-living man.”

“Well, I like that!” exclaimed Meg. “Do you mean to imply I’ve soiled him?”

“I hope so, Miss Meg,” answered Betts. “I hope you’ve blackened him. You see, I don’t hold with overclean living. I think it sort of paralyzes one’s moral sense. Morals should be kept in a state of constant circulation to be healthy. All progress is due to unmoral persons turning over new leaves.”

“That observation is especially applicable to my time when people wore hardly anything else,” put in Mercury. “Turning over new leaves in my day was of all sports the most popular.”

Betts and Meg laughed politely at this little sally of the nimble-witted god.

“Sin,” continued Betts, not to be deflected from his train of thoughts, “that is, so-called sin, is the working capital of religion – all religion. It would sound very presumptuous, wouldn’t it, to assure some god every morning and night in your prayers that you were every bit as good as he was? No. The whole system works on sin, and I haven’t done enough of it.”

“Well, if stealing’s a sin and it goes by size, you’ve made up for a lot of lost ground,” Meg told the old man encouragingly.

“I certainly hope so, Miss Meg,” he replied seriously. “I want it chalked up against me.”

Thus philosophically conversing, the little party came to Broadway. There was not much traffic here at this hour, but there was too much for the cow. In the middle of the crossing she sat down behind a policeman and gave vent to a plaintive moo. Interested to see the automobile that carried such an unusual horn, the policeman turned round and found himself looking into two preternaturally large, humid eyes. He jumped back several feet and startled the cow nearly out of her wits.

“Sweet St. Patrick!” breathed the policeman. “What are you doing with that, lady?”

“That’s a cow,” Meg informed the officer.

“I know, I know,” said the policeman impatiently.

“You didn’t seem to when you first saw her,” the girl replied accusingly.

“Well,” admitted the officer, “I did get quite a start, but you’ve got to admit, lady, a cow is a queer thing to come staring you in the face at this time of the morning on Broadway.”

“What is the most popular cow hour on Broadway?” Meg inquired.

“Any hour but this, lady,” the officer replied wearily.

“Okay, officer,” said Meg snappily; “then we’ll come back some other time. Tweak her tail, Betts.”

The cow responded to the tweaking, and before the policeman had the time to formulate any convincing objection the cow and its three escorts had crossed the wide thoroughfare and were heading towards Sixth Avenue. At Fifth they were once more checked. Mercury had come to know well and hate heartily the uniform of the law. He decided to outface this one.

“Now, no questions, officer,” he said in a voice of extreme annoyance. “We’re very busy.”

“I’m not going to ask any questions,” replied the officer, looking the party over with an unfriendly eye. “I’m going to do things and issue orders. The first one is that you can’t cross Fifth Avenue with that cow.”

“Why not?” demanded Meg. “They let us cross every other avenue.”

“Fifth Avenue’s different,” the officer replied boastfully. “Better.”

“Oh, come now, officer,” Meg continued sweetly. “If you’d say that about Park Avenue we might agree with you, but not Fifth. You know yourself that Fifth Avenue is nothing more than a vulgar commercial racket. It’s just a great gully, officer, filled with envious and acquisitive humanity.”

“Well, it ain’t going to be filled with cows,” replied the officer, “and that’s flat.”

“Just one cow, Mr. Policeman?” said Meg, her smile fairly dazzling the man. “Just one little girl cow who doesn’t know her way about?”

The officer began to grin.

“You see,” put in Betts respectfully, “my mistress just got this cow from the slaughter house.”

“Snatched it from under the blade of the knife,” added Meg.

“And it’s going to be raffled off this evening at a charity bazaar,” continued Betts. “A very fashionable function.”

“So you see, officer,” said Meg with sweet simplicity, “we have to get this cow across the Avenue. Both she and myself are losing our beauty sleep as it is.”

“All right, lady,” replied the officer. “Things can’t be much worse than they are. Take your cow and raffle her off.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Meg. “You startled me. I thought you were going to tell us to do something entirely different with our cow.”

With a coy laugh she bade the puzzled policeman goodbye and the party continued on.

It was fortunate for the success of the expedition that the private entrance provided by the hotel for the exclusive use of Mr. Hawk and his guests was situated on an unfrequented, narrow side street and involved no traversings of halls or reception rooms. A small door gave directly to the elevator, and in the elevator dwelt a youth who apparently had no interests in life, not even in his elevator. When a full-grown cow was tightly wedged into it he looked away as if to rest his eyes. And when Meg, Mercury, and Betts filled in the chinks not taken up by cow he closed the cage doors and informed them dispassionately that in all likelihood the elevator would refuse to lift. It did not quite refuse, but its ascent was of a hesitating, uncertain nature.

“It will probably drop,” said the boy as they passed the tenth floor.

“You waited for the right time to tell us,” replied Meg. “This is just a nice height for a perfect open break.”

At the fifteenth floor they pried the cow loose and Mercury gave the boy much stolen money for his silence.

“I never say anything, anyway,” said the boy, “to anybody. A cow more or less makes no difference after all the queer things you people have brought up.”

And this was how it came about that a cow was brought to call on Mr. Hawk between five and six in the morning.

“I’m very much obliged,” he said at last, looking up from his thoughts, “for thinking of me in connection with this cow. Did you happen to find out her name?”

“No,” replied Meg, “but I think she would like Dora.”

“Very good,” continued Hawk. “The cow’s name is Dora. Pour some drinks, Betts, and tell me, Betts, do cows lie down?”

“Well, yes and no, sir,” the old man answered.

“Not yes and no, Betts,” the scientist objected. “It has to be either yes or no.”

“I mean,” said the servant, looking up from the glasses, “they don’t rightly lie down like a dog. You can’t just tell ’em to lie down and expect to be obeyed. It has to come to them, sort of.”

“I have a dog,” observed Hawk, “who has never lain down once when I’ve asked him to during the course of our long years of association. He doesn’t seem able to get those two words through his brain.”

“He’s very much like a cow in that,” commented Betts with a wise shake of his head.

“Perhaps he was already lying down when you first told him to lie down and he mistook it for get up,” said Mercury. “I did that once to a dog and forever after I had to tell him to get up whenever I wanted him to lie down.”

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Hawk. “Let’s get back to this cow, Dora. She’ll have to stay here until more suitable arrangements can be made for her. We’ll keep this room locked to prevent the chambermaid from finding out.”

“She has a key,” said Mercury.

“Then we’ll tell her to stay out,” replied Mr. Hawk, “and later we’ll padlock her in her own room. Do you think you could make her lie down now? We should all be getting some sleep. Not much, but some.”

“Why don’t you petrify her?” Meg suggested.

“A good idea,” said the scientist, “but she’s only just come. Doesn’t seem very hospitable, and it might sour her milk.”

“We can make her lie down,” declared Mercury. “I’ll take her back legs, and, Betts, you take her front, and, Meg, you and Mr. Hawk can push. She’ll topple over very nicely.”

“Sounds rather brutal,” remarked Mr. Hawk, “but the damn fool should lie down. I suspect she’s been traveling for several days and stands in need of a rest.”

Dora, with a look of mild astonishment on her kindly face, allowed herself to be assaulted and toppled over. Once lying comfortably on her broad side she wondered why someone had not thought of it before. With a deep sigh, she fell asleep and dreamed fitfully of slums.

Half an hour later, after the consumption of several more than enough highballs, Meg and Mr. Hawk flung themselves down on their beds. Mercury and Mr. Betts were already slumbering peacefully, their heads cushioned on Dora’s tan-and-white flank. It was a scene of happy domesticity not usually to be found in a bedroom of a New York hotel.

Meg rolled out of her bed and, slipping off her excuse for a dress, curled up beside Mr. Hawk.

“I never could understand the reason for twin beds,” she murmured.

“Suppose you had an enemy or a girl friend?” asked Mr. Hawk, sleepily speculative.

“That,” she replied, “would be a horse of another color.”

He dropped an arm across her and whispered, “Sleep.”

Betts and Dora contested bitterly for the audible sleeping honors.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A Demoralizing
Tank Party

Neptune had been drinking heavily all morning and had eaten up all the goldfish. He was now ranging through the rooms making himself a general nuisance. Venus had caught him at a bottle of her most dependable perfume. After she had driven him off with the aid of a long nail file the thwarted god had sneaked into Apollo’s room and finished off that immaculate Olympian’s hair tonic.

“How do you expect your nieces and nephews to respect you,” Mr. Hawk had asked him, “if you make a practice of drinking up their toilet preparations?”

“I only wanted a little sip,” Neptune had defended himself, “but they had to get stuffy about it. And besides, my nieces and nephews have no respect for anyone. They’re hard, Mr. Hawk. They’re hard. Like that,” and Neptune extended a huge clenched fist. “Like that, Mr. Hawk,” he repeated.

“But why don’t you stick to whisky?” asked Mr. Hawk. “Isn’t that strong enough?”

“It is, my dear sir. It is,” the god assured him. “I am very fond of whisky. I might say I love it. It was merely a passing whim. The stuff smelled so damned good. But to return to whisky. Where is some?”

Mr. Hawk provided him with a bottle, and Neptune retired with it to his room where he could drink in peace and security.

“They get that way,” Mr. Betts sympathetically observed, looking after the huge figure of the bearded god. “It’s this stuff – the official poison of a free country. It’s so bad that those who drink it begin to experiment after awhile, because they feel that nothing could be worse. These gods of yours are not used to the idea. They keep on hoping.”

“It’s worse for Neptune than for the rest of them,” said the scientist. “He’s more out of his element. A man who’s been used to taking his morning dip in any one of the seven seas can hardly be expected to adapt himself overnight to a tub.”

Betts nodded wisely and placed a cool shakerful of cocktails on the table beside his master. Mr. Hawk swallowed one of them and returned to his morning paper. He was interested to find out the latest news from the Metropolitan. At first the amazing disappearance of the statues had been withheld from the press, but after the museum had been inexplicably closed for several days the truth had leaked out and an official statement had been issued. Mr. Hawk had been relieved to find that his name was not mentioned in connection with the case. Apparently the guard who had visited him in the lower corridor and the man to whom the guard had shown Mr. Hawk’s cards had decided that safety lay in silence. A world-wide search for the lost gods was already under way. Thousands and thousands of persons who previously had felt no qualms from their inability to tell one god from another were today discussing with intense interest the removal of the statues from one of the world’s most scientifically protected treasure houses of art. Mr. Hawk had contributed this much to the advancement of learning, at any rate. He had furnished the world with a pretty problem.

He poured himself another drink, and after sitting quite motionless for a few moments decided he was feeling a little better. It had been a hard night and an irritating morning. Neptune was not the only god who was acting up. The whole disorderly lot of them had gotten out of the wrong side of the bed. Diana’s transient guest had departed screaming down the hall with one of her arrows planted firmly between the tails of his hastily donned dress suit. Venus had loudly refused to take her shower unless Mr. Hawk turned it on for her. When finally he had consented to do so for the sake of peace and quiet, she had pulled him under the downpour and playfully mauled him about. In addition to this he had been unable to dislodge Mercury from the flank of the recumbent Dora, although Betts had responded at the first summons. It had been a morning of constant interruptions through which Meg, cuddled up like an abandoned doll, had slept quite undisturbed. Even Perseus, who usually was rather quiet and self-satisfied in the morning, had made himself particularly disagreeable because he had been unable to find any soap sufficiently gritty with which to wash Medusa’s face.

Mr. Hawk looked enviously at the peacefully slumbering Meg and felt the need of privacy.

“I might as well be the purser on a ship full of lunatics,” he mused. “Why do they have to drag me into all their arguments and expect me to humor their every damn whim? Olympus must have been a madhouse.”

At this moment Dora decided to call it a sleep and managed to get herself to her hoofs by a series of heaves and jerks. Mercury remained behind her, sprawled on the floor. The cow greeted her host with a low moo. Mr. Hawk returned the greeting with a thoughtful gaze.

“Betts,” he asked, “what do cows usually have for breakfast?”

“About ten square feet of meadow,” Mr. Betts replied promptly.

Mr. Hawk considered this in silence. “That would be hard to arrange,” he said at length. “Don’t they ever vary their diet?”

“We might give her some Puffed Rice or Shredded Wheat, sir.”

“A good idea, Betts. Telephone down for a dozen orders of each and take the tray from the waiter yourself outside. Don’t let him come in.”

While Mr. Betts was telephoning Hebe tripped rosily into the room. She gazed at the cow in delighted surprise.

“What a sweet cow!” she exclaimed. “Why, the poor thing needs to be milked. It’s ’way past her time.”

“Do you expect me to take up cow milking in my old age?” Mr. Hawk demanded. “And besides, she hasn’t had her breakfast yet.”

“Of course not, silly,” laughed Hebe. “You’re not expected to milk her. Cows are always milked before they’ve breakfasted.”

This struck Mr. Hawk as being another example of man’s inhumanity to beast.

“Damned if I’d go through such an ordeal on an empty stomach,” he said.

“You’ll never be called upon to do so,” the cup-bearing goddess assured him, whereat Mr. Betts barked sharply into the mouth of the telephone.

“And if you’d like to know,” continued Hebe, “cows like to be milked before breakfast.”

“Did anyone ever hear a cow put herself on record to that effect?” asked Mr. Hawk. The cocktails were taking effect.

“No, but – —” Hebe began.

“I knew it,” Hawk interrupted. “You can’t name one cow. It’s all a piece of propaganda gotten up by farmers to excuse their unchivalrous conduct.”

“Be that as it may,” replied Hebe with a determined light in her young eyes. “I’m going to milk this cow right here and now. She needs it. May I use that large cup you didn’t want me to bear?”

“Oh, certainly,” replied Mr. Hawk with a broad grin. “I don’t like milk anyway. The cow’s name is Dora. I think you should know at least that much, if you are going to become so intimate with her.”

Hebe became busy and efficient. In a short time the sound of milking could be heard. Dora still holds the unique distinction of being the only cow that was ever milked in a hotel bedroom. Whether the cow considers this an honor or a matter to be hushed up is not known.

In the midst of the milking Meg awoke and sat up in bed, her eyes gradually growing larger and rounder as the true importance of what she was witnessing dawned upon her.

“A person has to get used to some weird and incredible awakenings,” she said, “to live at all comfortably with the gods. What’s happened to Mercury? Did he die?”

“Not quite,” came feebly from the floor. “If someone will provide me with a strong, chilled drink, I’ll make a game attempt to lift my head off the spot where I was under the impression a cow by the name of Dora used to live.”

The news of the milking of the cow spread rapidly through the apartment, and the Olympians, forgetting their various grievances and quarrels, dropped everything and hastened to the spot. They seemed to be the sort of people who hate to miss anything, even though they find no enjoyment in whatever it is.

The milking finished, Hebe generously passed the cup and was greatly disappointed to be met with polite but emphatic refusals from all present.

“Perhaps Dora might like some milk,” suggested Mr. Hawk.

“Cows don’t drink milk,” was Hebe’s scornful reply.

“This one might,” said Megaera. “She seems to stand for anything.”

“If a cow drank milk,” the scientist advanced thoughtfully, “it would be something like discovering perpetual motion.”

“But what earthly use would a cow be if she drank her own milk?” asked Bacchus.

“She could pose for the news reels,” said Mr. Hawk, “or go into vaudeville, maybe.”

“Not a constructive sort of a life for a cow,” put in Mercury from the floor, reaching out a hand for the cocktail shaker.

“Better than reading want ads, isn’t it?” snapped Neptune.

“I hate these nutty discussions,” said Meg. “They never get you anywhere, and they always make me feel much worse than I really am. Don’t let’s go on with it. Send that shaker along, Mercury. I feel like one myself.”

“I have a suggestion to offer,” announced Mr. Hawk. “Surprised I never thought of it before. Why don’t we all go swimming? This hotel sports a tremendous tank with Turkish baths and everything.”

“Oh, let’s,” breathed Neptune, his eyes gleaming wildly above his flowing beard.

“I’m jolly good at floating,” remarked Bacchus.

“Then fill up your flasks and come along,” said Hunter Hawk. He rose from his chair and picking Meg up in his arms, tossed her back on the bed. “Slip on a dress,” he told her. “And pry yourself loose from that cocktail shaker. Betts is waiting to fill it.”

At the entrance to the pool the Olympians good-naturedly accepting the conventional order of things, split up according to sexes and under the guidance of Meg and Mr. Hawk retired to the dressing rooms where they were provided with suits which also elicited a certain amount of subdued merriment. Previous to donning them, however, the attendants put them through their paces. Mr. Hawk was hurled to a table by a Swedish giant and his lean body subjected to the most brutal treatment. Nor was he alone in his suffering. All of the gods were receiving like punishment, beneath which their good-humor was gradually giving place to amazed indignation. In their untutored minds the impression grew that their assailants were grimly determined to do them in, and with equal grimness the gods were determined not to be done in. Strangely enough, it was Mr. Hawk, who should have known better, who first broke into rebellion. After repeatedly asking his furious Swede not to do a certain thing to him and receiving no satisfaction he petrified the man in his tracks and painfully rose from the table, leaving the Swede standing in a half-crouching position, his huge, torturing hands impotently pawing thin air. The scientist was just in time to witness Bacchus’s quaint idea of retaliation. The fat god, red in the face and kneaded beyond further endurance, suddenly placed a foot in the earnest face of his attendant and pushed it with truly Olympian vigor. The man slid across the floor and landed with a thud against the tiled wall, many feet away.

“That,” said Bacchus, rolling himself off the table, “will teach you how to handle a gentleman and a god. What a way to carry on!”

From the table on which Neptune was contorted came the sound of unpleasant squabbling.

“Keep your horrid talons out of my beard, I’m telling you,” the sea god was saying.

“Then why don’t you hold your beard up like I asked you?” demanded the man.

“I’d look pretty lying here, wouldn’t I, holding it up in the air?” Neptune scathingly retorted. “I won’t do it.”

“Well, if you don’t hold up that beard you can’t blame me if I get my hands all tangled up in the damned thing,” said the man, making a lunge at the prostrate god, who grunted beneath the impact.

“One moment, my good man,” Neptune continued. “Be a little more careful how you address this beard. I feel like knocking your block off as it is.”

“Try and do it,” said the man.

Neptune did not try. He did it. The block was not exactly knocked off, but it and its owner found themselves crumpled up on the floor beside the body of their still dazed fellow countryman. The discovery of Mr. Hawk’s petrified attendant was attracting increasing attention. The rubbers of the gods gave up their rubbing and hurried to inspect the solidified figure of the ex-mangler.

Taking advantage of the lull in the hostilities, Mr. Hawk led his gods into the steam room, which was immediately filled with their cries and imprecations.

“Who in Hades thought of this one?” demanded Apollo, springing up from a flesh-searing deck chair and regarding parts of his scorched self ruefully. “Plato himself would object to this.”

“Will you kindly turn me to stone?” pleaded Bacchus, wallowing through the vapor towards the faintly amused Mr. Hawk.

Neptune, his beard glistening with moisture, was addressing himself to a perfect stranger who had apparently just awakened from a comfortable nap.

“My dear good sir,” asked Neptune, “how the deuce can you lie there sleeping when people are dying all around you?”

“I don’t understand,” gasped the man.

“Neither do I,” said Neptune, turning his back on the man.

Mr. Hawk could tell at a glance that the steam room was not going to make a hit with the gods. Accordingly, he led them from the room and induced Bacchus to get himself under a stinging shower of ice-cold needles.

“More punishment!” screamed Bacchus. “Howling Cerberus, what a day!”

The Titanic laughter of the Olympians resounded in the room. Bacchus staggered from the shower and made for the dressing room. The gods were at his heels. They, too, had just remembered the flasks.

“This,” said Bacchus, removing one of them from his lips, “seems to me to be about the only reasonable thing we’ve done since we were lured into this small but efficient hell. What happens next?”

“This way,” replied Mr. Hawk. “Follow me.”

“One moment,” said Bacchus, holding out a restraining hand. “This way to what? We’ve just followed you through enough.”

“The swimming pool,” he was told.

They helped each other into their bathing suits, greatly deploring what to them was an exceedingly prudish precaution. Neptune seized his trident and followed Mr. Hawk from the room. They were joined in the pool by Meg and the goddesses, and experiences were excitedly exchanged. A group of swimmers stood listening close by and marveled at the innocence of the gods. It was a surprising thing to them how such a splendid-looking body of men and women could display such profound ignorance of Turkish bath technique.

“We locked all those female murderers in a room and had a swell time,” giggled Venus. “Slipped down a lot of cocktails. I feel dizzy as anything.”

Apparently so did everybody, including Mr. Hawk and Meg.

“Here I go on the crest of a wave!” cried Venus and flung herself with a splash upon the contented face of an elderly gentleman who immediately disappeared from sight. When at last he came up for air, his face did not look nearly so contented.

“Sorry I got my face in the way,” he remarked bitterly. “Why don’t you hold me under the next time? Make a thorough job of it.”

“Why, you seductive old duck,” smiled the goddess, “I do believe you bit me right there of all places.”

The old gentleman paddled disgustedly away.

Diana, poised on a high springboard, dived gracefully into the tank. The other gods and goddesses unceremoniously followed her. Meg sought a shallow corner, where she did considerable splashing, to the annoyance of all in her vicinity. Mr. Hawk launched his lean frame into the pool and swam about with dignity and concentration. While thus engaged he received a violent slap in the face delivered by a lady who had suddenly and spasmodically leaped half out of water. When Mr. Hawk came up the lady was glaring balefully at him.

“Take that,” she said, and down went Mr. Hawk again.

“Before I go down for the third and last time,” said the scientist when he had once more reached the surface, “I would very much like to know for what reason I’m being drowned?”

“You know already,” snapped the lady. “Keep your hands to yourself.”

“What did he do?” asked an interested bystander.

“He gave me an awful pinch below the surface,” the lady announced in a loud voice. “I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to explain the mark to my husband. Such a place to pinch.”

Mr. Hawk felt like going down for the third time of his own free will, but he gamely trod water and faced the mysteriously assaulted woman.

“I don’t know what place you are speaking about,” he told her, “but I want to assure you it wasn’t I who took the liberty of pinching it.”

“Isn’t he the roguish devil?” a feminine voice exclaimed.

“You did pinch it,” retorted the woman.

“What?” shot back Mr. Hawk.

“You know what,” she answered.

“My dear lady,” Mr. Hawk said pleadingly, “I don’t know what on earth you are talking about.”

“I can make a pretty close guess,” observed Venus, swimming up to the little group that had gathered round Mr. Hawk and the affronted woman.

At that moment she uttered another startled cry and made a frantic attempt to rise from the pool. She only half succeeded and fell back with a splash.

“I suppose I did that?” demanded Mr. Hawk. “I wasn’t within three feet of you.”

“He did it again!” gasped the woman.

“Not that gentleman,” said another woman. “I was watching his hands all the time.”

“Then there must be a gang of them,” the twice pinched lady replied. “I felt it distinctly. One can hardly make a mistake about a thing like that.”

“Hardly,” smiled Venus sweetly in her most insinuating voice. “I should say not.”

The goddess had scarcely finished speaking before she herself made an earnest effort to project her flexible form into the air.

“Well, whoever is doing all this pinching,” she said, tenderly rubbing herself below the water line, “should certainly get his nails cut if he intends to keep it up.”

“How do you know it’s a man?” asked a voice from the crowd.

“There wouldn’t be any fun in the thing if it wasn’t,” she replied innocently, and was surprised at the general merriment that followed her answer.

“Oh, look!” cried a young lady standing at the edge of the pool and pointing down into the water. “Look! Am I going crazy?”

Mr. Hawk looked down through the clear water and received a decided shock. Neptune, his beard floating wildly about him, was grinning up at them in malicious glee. He was seated comfortably on the floor of the tank and in his right hand he held, deftly poised, his three-pronged trident. As Mr. Hawk gazed the sea god made a feint in his direction, then opened his mouth and rocked himself from side to side. Evidently he was roaring with laughter and enjoying himself thoroughly.

“There, madam,” said Mr. Hawk, “is the person you should have slapped and then publicly rebuked for pinching you in some rarely named part of your anatomy in which I am not at all interested, if the truth must be known.”

The woman uttered a shriek and climbed out of the pool.

“But won’t he drown?” someone called in an excited voice.

“I hope to God he does,” said the woman. “The dirty dog.”

An individual with a reasonable mind and a pair of knees that knocked as he ran appeared with the swimming instructor. This noble youth, realizing that something must be done in front of so many eyes, dived into the water and seized Neptune by the beard. For a moment the two seemed to be arguing, both gesticulating angrily, then the interview was terminated abruptly by the intervention of the trident in the pit of the instructor’s stomach. He shot back to the surface and became busy about filling his lungs.

“He won’t come up,” he announced when this necessary precaution had been taken.

“That seems fairly obvious,” said the dignified-looking gentleman, “but does he give any reason for his extraordinary conduct?”

“He tried to tell me something,” the instructor replied, pulling himself out of the pool, “but I couldn’t understand him. That must have made him furious, for he jabbed me with his pitchfork.”

“But my dear fellow,” the gentleman protested, “you can’t expect us to enjoy our swim with the knowledge that a fellow creature is drowning before our very eyes. The poor chap’s probably mad or something.”

“He’s mad all right,” said the instructor, “but he doesn’t seem to be in any danger of drowning. Look at him now.”

Neptune, pleased by the presence of so many interested spectators, was doing his best to entertain them. His best consisted of sliding industriously down the steep floor of the pool, then stopping himself grotesquely with his feet at the end. It was an extremely childish performance for a bearded god to give, but Neptune was at that stage of inebriety at which everything seemed convulsing. Growing tired of sliding, Neptune played dead. It was a horrifyingly convincing demonstration. Gasps came from the audience. Several women were led screaming hysterically from the room. All they had seen was the whites of Neptune’s eyes, his matted beard, and his lifelessly swaying limbs. The general effect was quite enough to unnerve the staunchest of souls. After this the sea god lay down on the floor of the tank and went to sleep, his massive head cushioned on his arms.

“The most amazing thing I’ve ever witnessed,” remarked the dignified gentleman at last. “The man must be part fish. He couldn’t drown if he wanted to, and I have no intention of letting him frighten me out of my swim any longer. One must look facts in the face.”

With this he pointed his hands over his head, gave snappily at the knees three times, rose froglike into the air, and entered the water in the good old-fashioned way. Many of the spectators followed his example, if not his quaint style, and soon the tank had resumed its normal appearance.

Mr. Hawk looked up from his contemplation of the recumbent god just in time to see the lady who had so thoughtlessly assaulted him poised on the end of the springboard. It was an ideal set-up for his purpose. As she curved in the air from the board the scientist turned her to stone. In that position she struck the water a smashing blow and continued on to the bottom of the tank, where she remained without budging.

Screams and shouts once more attracted the swimming instructor, who, since the advent of Neptune, had been seriously considering throwing up his job. Realizing that he could not follow his natural inclination and let the woman drown in front of so many witnesses, he dived into the water and tried to move her. Looking up through the water at the blurred faces peering down at him, he shook his head in a gesture of discouragement. Then, as if seized by a new idea, he swam over to Neptune and once more tugged his beard. The god awoke with a furious churning of water and looked about him wildly. With bursting lungs the instructor pointed to the figure of the woman on the bottom of the tank. With a shrug of his shoulders the god removed his beard from the clutching hand and lay down beside the woman. The instructor popped to the surface with an expression of utter bewilderment on his strained face. For a few seconds he clung to the side of the tank gasping for breath. Then he pulled himself out and sat down heavily, his feet still dangling in the water. He was through with that tank forever. He even doubted if he would ever swim again or have anything to do with water even to the extent of taking a bath.

“What are you going to do?” asked an indignant lady. “That woman’s drowning.”

“Search me, lady,” said the instructor. “That’s not a woman down there. She’s a rock in female form. If anybody else wants to save her they’re welcome to the job.”

A number of men jumped into the pool, and Mr. Hawk petrified them for their pains. Down they went to the bottom of the pool in all sorts of odd positions. Soon the tank was filled with the petrified bodies of dozens of men and women. Neptune woke up and looked about him with a pleased expression on his face. Thrusting out his trident, he struck one of the bodies and was surprised to discover that the blow took no effect. He rose and jabbed viciously at several others, with the same result. Those watching from above were overcome with horror. Fainting and hysteria became the order of the day.

“Open all outlets,” called the instructor to one of his assistants. “We’ll have to drain the tank.”

He rose wearily and sauntered away to supervise the execution of his order. As far as he was concerned everybody present could drown to their heart’s content. He washed his hands of the whole business. It was a damn queer pool, and it was filled with damn queer people. Saving pieces of statuary was not in his contract, and no one was going to tell him anything different.

The manager and several members of his staff arrived on the scene of action just as Neptune’s head and the business end of his trident emerged from the rapidly receding waters of the tank.

“My God! Who is that person?” asked the startled official. “Looks like old man Neptune himself.”

“Don’t know what his name is,” replied the instructor, “but he’s been making a public nuisance of himself on the bottom of that tank for the last hour or more without coming up once to breathe.”

“Then the man must be drowned,” said the manager decisively. “That’s all there is to it.”

“I’m afraid there’s lots more than that,” the instructor muttered.

“And who are all these other persons lying about down there in those ridiculous postures?” demanded the manager impatiently.

“I didn’t ask them their names, sir,” said the instructor, “but a short time ago they were all alive and kicking. Now they’re just so many rocks.”

“Then they’re all dead, too,” the manager snapped out. “This is really too bad. It would have to happen on a hot day just when we need the pool. Can’t you hurry up with the bodies?”

“Can’t even lift them,” was the reply. “We’ll have to use a derrick.”

“Nonsense,” replied the manager. “The excitement has affected your brain. I’ll go down myself and investigate.”

There was no foolishness about this manager. A dozen or so dead bodies in his tank meant little to him save trouble and unfavorable publicity. He was a man of action and quick decisions, the majority of which were bad. When the pool was empty he descended the ladder and seized the first body he saw. The body failed to budge. He then laid violent hands upon another with the same result. After he had wasted his energy on a third he stopped and looked up with a frown.

“Who’s been chucking all these statues into the pool?” he demanded.

“They might be statues now,” replied the instructor, “but they were living men and women half an hour ago. Ask anybody here.”

“Impossible,” said the manager. “Never heard such rubbish in all my life. These things were never living beings. They’re just plain, everyday statues, and not very good ones at that. Some prize ass has been having a bit of a joke at your expense.”

As if to refute the manager’s words Mr. Hawk released the figures. They rose from the floor of the tank and angrily confronted the manager.

“We’d like to know the meaning of this,” one of them demanded.

“Of what?” replied the manager, breaking out in an opulent sweat.

“We don’t know,” replied the other.

“Neither do I,” said the manager. “Let’s get out of here.”

In the meantime Meg and Mr. Hawk had piloted their charges safely away from the observation of an altogether too inquisitive public. The company was now assembled in the lounging room of the luxurious suite. Hebe and Mr. Betts were busy at their appointed tasks. Everyone looked more refreshed and in better humor.

“When you’re feeling low in your mind,” Mr. Hawk observed, momentarily freeing himself from the strangle hold Meg had on his neck, “there’s nothing like a good swim if you can only work up the energy.”

“Well, you and Whiskers did your best to make a go of it,” said Meg. “Both of you.”

“Thanks,” replied Neptune, “but if you don’t mind I’d prefer not to be called Whiskers. Don’t ask me why, for I haven’t the vaguest idea. If you call me just plain beard it doesn’t seem to matter. How did you like my dead man? Was it good or just so-so?”

“It was perfect,” said Diana. “Too good to last.”

“I’m not so bright,” answered Neptune, “but even I can feel dimly that your last remark was not all milk and honey.”

“Say beer and skittles,” amended Bacchus. “It sounds better.”

“When do we eat?” asked Perseus. “You gods keep the most irregular meal hours. Now, when I was in training for monster baiting – —”

What Perseus did when he was in training was never learned, for at that moment Dora thrust her head through the door and mooed wistfully.

“Come in, Dora,” said Mr. Hawk politely. “You make the party complete. Wonder if she wants a drink.”

“Mr. Hawk,” protested Mercury, “she’s the only lady in the lot. Don’t get her started.”

“Well, I like that,” drawled Venus. “How about our little Phoebus Apollo?”

“Come. Come,” put in Mr. Hawk hastily. “Let’s all have another little drink and think up something else to do.”

“Glasses, Miss Hebe,” called Betts cheerfully. “We’ve got a lot of customers.”

With sweet, glowing eyes Hebe passed among the gods and deftly collected the empty glasses. The sound of tinkling ice made music for her feet.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Gods Leave Town

“So this is the home of our host,” observed Bacchus, gazing placidly from the Emperor at the gracious lines of Hawk House. “We should do very nicely here. Did you say there was a cellar? A cellar with wine and things?”

“One of the most businesslike in many miles around,” Hunter Hawk assured the god. “My father and his father before him drank on a generous scale, but fortunately for us their flesh failed before their thirst.”

Mercury was taking the lie of the land with a practical and swift shifting eye.

“I notice,” he said, “you have a high and comfortably protective wall on three sides of the place but none in front. Why is that?”

“Never got round to it,” Hawk briefly replied. “Intended to someday, then forgot all about it.”

“Walls not only protect but also conceal,” the light-fingered god observed significantly.

Mr. Hawk grinned. “Had I known sooner that you Olympians were going to visit me I’d have had one thrown up if only for the sake of concealment.”

Mercury hummed a thoughtful snatch of a song he had heard at some night club.

“The man across the way has a nice stone wall,” he remarked. “The stones are well selected. You see,” he added, “I know quite a lot about stone walls. I’ve climbed over so many of them.”

Blotto, like a red mouth shot from hell, hurled himself into the car. So furious and inclusive were his emotional demonstrations that Mr. Hawk, for the sake of convenience, momentarily turned him to stone.

When the Olympians piled out of the automobile Alice and Alfred Lambert, ably assisted by Junior, were entertaining some friends on the veranda. Alice had just been telling them that she had recently received a letter from her brother announcing his intentions of living in Japan. His unexpected arrival with a flock of boisterous men and women did not work in so well with her story. Her face grew set and determined. Something would have to be done to put an end to this. A certain detective by the name of Griggs was still interested in the movements of her brother. Perhaps a telephone call might—

Her thoughts were interrupted by the Olympians as they came charging noisily up the steps.

“Hello, all,” said Venus including Mr. and Mrs. Blythe-Brown and Miss Amelia Blythe-Brown, age thirty-eight, in her genial greeting. “Not drinking, I notice. We’ll have to remedy that. Hey, there, Mr. Hawk, how about some grog?”

“Betts is already mixing them,” shouted Meg above the racket. “He went round the back way. Hebe went with him.”

Alice Pollard Lambert, in spite of the healthy dread in which she stood of her brother, could not bring herself to receive his disorderly guests with any display of cordiality. Junior was openly snobbish, while his father, Alfred, stood by, speechlessly humiliated. The Blythe-Browns, of course, did not quite know what it was all about, but they were secretly delighted, for radically different reasons. Mr. Blythe-Brown hoped to get a drink. Mrs. Blythe-Brown to get a fresh scandal. Miss Amelia Blythe-Brown hoped – and how she hoped – to get an introduction to any one of the stalwart gods. Thirty-eight years is a long time for a girl to keep her patience. Amelia had recently decided after a private inventory of her rapidly fading allurements that her supply of patience was just about exhausted. She was out for business now, and she did not intend to be finicky any longer about partnership arrangements.

Strangely enough, Perseus took an immediate liking to Amelia. Perhaps something told him she was a woman in distress. He worked quickly and smoothly. After a brief conversation the two of them retired indoors. In the general confusion their absence was not noticed except by Mrs. Lambert and the eagle-eyed Mercury, who smiled cynically to himself.

“Keep your places,” Mr. Hawk courteously begged his sister and her company. “I’m going to show my friends over the house a bit.”

“How is dear Reverend Dr. Archer’s case of squats getting on?” Meg asked sweetly from the doorway. Receiving no reply, she added a little less sweetly, “I hope it doesn’t strike any members of his flock.”

“We’ll slide you out a bucket of cocktails,” Venus called clubbily over Meg’s shoulder. “Just keep your shirts on. Pip! Pip!”

Alice Lambert’s face looked frozen. She was fairly snorting from injured dignity, but she was keeping a strong check on herself.

“What were you saying, dear?” she inquired, touching Mrs. Blythe-Brown’s black satin dress with the tips of her carefully manicured nails. “Oh, you weren’t saying anything. Then if you’ll excuse me for just a moment I’ll run in and telephone. Some man is so anxious to meet my brother. He would never think of doing it himself. Lost in his science.”

At that moment her brother was lost in something a great deal more interesting than his science. His face was partially submerged in a glassful of cocktails, and the Olympians were cluttered round him. The kitchen presented a homelike scene. In one corner old man Lambert was seated in Mrs. Betts’s own rocking chair. Near him stood the maid Stella, to whom he had been telling some particularly spicy stories gleaned from the unedifying recesses of his wicked old memory. Mrs. Betts was examining her husband with impersonal disgust. Daffy and Cyril Sparks, with Blotto dangling his tongue between them and trying to give the impression that he had arranged everything, were seated on the kitchen table. Grandpa Lambert was waving a half-empty glass in his clawlike hand.

“And since you went away,” he was saying, “this has been the only comfortable place in the house to sit. Mrs. Betts has been very kind to Daffy and myself. That boy Sparks is always hanging about. I think he wants to marry her or something.”

“Probably something,” put in Venus, “if he’s like the boys I used to know.”

“You’re wrong,” declared Daffy. “I’ve already suggested something, but he insists on leaving me untaken-advantage-of.”

“My poor dear child,” said Venus sympathetically. “What a rotten shame. I’ll have to have a talk with him.”

“Don’t let her,” warned Diana. “He won’t be the same man.”

“Betts,” said Mr. Hawk, “take a shaker full of cocktails to the veranda and see that that Blythe-Brown party transfers its contents to his skin. He’s a sadly overwifed man.”

When Betts had departed on his delicate mission, the scientist led the Olympians to his partly demolished laboratory. Cyril Sparks took Bacchus and Neptune aside, while Mr. Hawk was explaining to the others scientific apparatus in which they displayed a polite but wavering interest. Cy took down several bottles and mixed a synthetic highball. Its effects on the two gods completely revolutionized their conception of drinking. After that powerful drink the fish and grape fanciers wandered round the room looking speculatively at the shelves filled with jars. They were thinking dangerously. If a mere mortal could mix such a drink as that what couldn’t they accomplish if they set their minds on it? Stimulated as never before by the drink now leaping inside them, and fired with ambition for the drink yet to be created, these two ample gods discussed in undertones the possibilities of various jars containing liquids of unknown potency.

While Mr. Hawk was becoming more hopelessly tangled in the intricacies of the generator of the atomic ray, or whatever the remarkable gadget was called, Neptune and Bacchus sought a quiet corner of the laboratory and there prepared to mix themselves what they fondly hoped would prove to be the strongest drink ever sampled by man or god. Each selected a jar of liquid which for some reason appealed to them; then together they selected a third. Pouring the first two liquids into a large container they sniffed the results delicately.

“It’s going to be good,” murmured Bacchus.

“Shall we keep it to ourselves or whack it up?” asked Neptune.

“Pour in that other stuff, and we’ll find out,” replied Bacchus.

When this was done the sea god’s question was immediately answered, immediately and unequivocally answered. The drink they had mixed so expectantly in the innocence of their godlike hearts turned out to be one that they could not keep to themselves. Whether they liked it or not, that drink was whacked up not only among those in the laboratory but also among persons some distance removed from the immediate neighborhood.

After picking themselves up from their overturned chairs on the veranda, the Lamberts and the Blythe-Browns, with the exception of Mr. Blythe-Brown, rushed to the scene of the explosion. The exception remained behind comfortably seated in his chair. In one hand he held the cocktail shaker, in the other a large goblet. In his eyes was a gleam of deep satisfaction. Explosions were rare occurrences, but a shaker full of powerful cocktails was rarer still and should not be neglected.

Betts, closely pressed by the others, was the first to reach the smoke-filled laboratory. He was armed with a fire extinguisher which he began to play indiscriminately about the room.

“For God’s sake,” came the voice of his master. “Isn’t it bad enough to be blown to hell and gone without having a heaping portion of chemicals squirted in one’s eye?”

“Pardon me, sir,” Mr. Betts replied, politely addressing the smoke in the direction whence the voice had sounded, “I suspect there’s a bit of a fire about.”

“I suspect so, too, Betts,” Mr. Hawk answered gloomily. “I seem to have sat on much of it.”

“But not all,” came the voice of Meg. “Not all, my good man. My sitter is quite singed.”

“Where are we?” demanded the voice of Neptune.

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” was Mr. Hawk’s heartfelt reply.

“If the lady who is sitting on my face would move about three inches to the right,” observed Mercury from the far end of the room, “I’d feel a little less destroyed.”

“Sorry,” said Diana calmly. “I thought it was a piece of glass.”

“That was my teeth,” said Mercury.

“Where’s that head?” demanded Apollo out of the gloom.

“Whose?” asked Meg.

“Medusa’s,” the god replied. “Perseus asked me to hold it for him.”

“Now, who the hell cares about that?” asked Mr. Hawk. “Where’s my dog?”

“I have him,” called Daffy. “Right in the pit of my stomach. He made a fair landing and has remained there ever since, together with the heel of a certain Mr. Sparks.”

“Sorry, Daffy,” was the conventional retort of Cyril. “It’s twisted.”

“What? My stomach?” exclaimed Daffy. “You would complain.”

“No. My ankle,” said Cy.

“Well, keep on twisting it off my stomach,” replied the young lady. “That fair region has troubles enough of its own.”

“Mr. Betts,” asked a faint voice which sounded as if it belonged to a terribly enfeebled Bacchus, “would you mind squirting that stuff in another mouth for a few minutes? I can’t swallow another drop right now.”

“How’s that?” inquired Mr. Betts.

“You’re bathing my eyes now,” said Bacchus.

“Any better?” asked Mr. Betts, changing the direction of the stream.

“Not so good!” shouted Neptune. “My left ear is sinking.”

“Better take it away, Betts,” advised Mr. Hawk. “Your efforts are not appreciated. Let the house burn a little, and do something about all this smoke.”

In spite of this illogical suggestion the smoke eventually did drift unfragrantly through the shattered windows, leaving the Olympians disclosed in shreds. The Lamberts and Blythe-Browns gave off a series of shocked gasps when their eyes fell on the denuded gods. Megaera, looking at the smoke-blackened faces in which glittered large questioning eyes, began to laugh softly.

“Looks like a minstrel show,” she said to Mr. Hawk. “The poor dears have never seen one.”

“I see nothing to laugh at,” declared Mrs. Lambert cuttingly.

“Neither do I, lady,” agreed Bacchus, a fair portion of whom had been blown through the wall of the house and was now dangling over the lawn. “Life to me at present is a very earnest affair.”

“Hunter,” went on Alice Lambert, ignoring the fat god. “This really is too bad.”

“It will be a damn sight worse,” snapped Hunter, “if you don’t pipe down.”

And strange to say, as he finished speaking, the situation did get worse. That is to say, another complication was added to it. From the already weakened ceiling large slabs of plaster began to descend with increasing weight and rapidity upon the inquiringly upraised faces of the gods. Thrusting themselves weirdly through a white powdery cloud, the four legs of a bed hesitated modestly above them a moment, then continued to the floor of the laboratory with a crash. From one side of the bed Miss Amelia Blythe-Brown, clothed in little more than confusion, was bounced to the floor. From the other side Perseus rose and fell and then remained, thoughtfully clutching a pillow to him.

“What happened?” demanded Mrs. Blythe-Brown when she had recovered a little from the shocking revelation.

“Nothing,” replied her daughter with a discouraged droop to her shoulders. “Absolutely nothing.”

“Then how did you get into bed with that man?” the mother continued. “Surely not for nothing.”

“I didn’t say that,” said the girl wearily. “You asked me what happened and I told you. Nothing happened. But,” added the young lady, a reckless light in her eyes, “if it hadn’t been for that explosion – —”

Perseus made a frantic gesture intended as a plea for caution.

“This lady,” he said hastily, “was blown into that bed and I was blown after her. From the violence of the blow both of us lost much of our clothes, as apparently did everyone else.”

“Very nice and neatly put,” drawled Venus. “That explains everything.”

“Why does he have all the breaks?” protested Bacchus. “He gets blown into bed with a woman while I get blown through a bed of stone.”

“You were merely on the wrong end of that ill wind you’ve heard so much about,” Mercury explained.

“I’m not quite satisfied about all this,” Mrs. Blythe-Brown said in a puzzled voice.

“Neither am I,” answered Amelia. “It seems as if fate were against me. If someone will toss me a sheet I’ll withdraw and let you figure it out for yourself.”

“There wasn’t any hole in that ceiling when we came in,” the mother of the girl mused aloud, lines of perplexity still wrinkling her face.

“You couldn’t see the ceiling when she came in,” retorted Mr. Hawk. “They were the very first to go up.”

“Seems odd,” continued the woman, “that the rest of you should have conveniently remained behind.”

“Are you deliberately trying to make your daughter a loose woman?” demanded Meg.

“Certainly,” replied Mrs. Blythe-Brown in a surprised voice. “Wouldn’t you? She’s thirty-eight as it is, and this is the nearest she’s come to it yet. Never did have any get up and go. She’s just like her father. I wish you’d postponed your explosion, Mr. Hawk, for at least fifteen minutes.”

“My watch was fast,” explained Mr. Hawk in a tone of apology.

“I’m afraid that doesn’t help Amelia very much,” replied the mother.

“Why, my dear Mrs. Blythe-Brown!” Mrs. Lambert exclaimed in a shocked voice. “Can I believe my ears?”

“Not if they’re like your tongue,” the lady replied. “Catch you waiting thirty-eight years. Why, you wouldn’t wait thirty-eight minutes.”

The Olympians to a god looked up at Mrs. Lambert with awakened interest not unmixed with approval.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” began Alice Lambert, but was interrupted by the rushing appearance of Stella.

“Mr. Blythe – —”

“Mr. Blythe-Brown, Stella,” Mrs. Lambert corrected.

“Well, whoever he is,” continued the girl, “he’s just knocked a man down on the veranda who says his name is Griggs. He’s got an awful-looking badge on his vest, Mr. Hawk.”

“My family seems to be going to hell,” Mrs. Blythe-Brown remarked complacently.

“My brother’s going to jail,” announced Mrs. Lambert with equal complacency. “That man’s a detective. He’s been here several times.”

“If I do,” replied Mr. Hawk, “I’ll turn you and your family, with the exception of Daffy and the old man, so solidly to stone you wouldn’t even melt in hell.”

Alice Lambert turned white.

“Stella,” continued Mr. Hawk, “you go back and tell that guy to get up and that we’ll deal with him in a minute.” He paused and looked about the room. “There’s a man out there who wants to lay violent hands on me,” he went on. “He’s a dumb, self-important detective, and he might have his gang with him. Will you gods stand by me?”

Loud cries from the gods and goddesses alike.

“Yank me out of this hole,” shouted Bacchus. “I’ll pound the beggar to pulp just as if he were so many grapes.”

Bacchus, together with a circle of adhering bricks, was hauled into the room, and a motley crew of disheveled figures rushed from the laboratory to interview the already assaulted Griggs. Before the grim advance of the Olympians the detective stepped back a pace and dropped his hand to his pocket.

“I don’t want any more trouble,” he said warningly. “This drunkard has already knocked me down once.”

“And he’ll knock you down again,” Mr. Blythe-Brown replied thickly from his chair. “Have a drink, somebody – I mean, everybody.”

“What in hell do you want here?” demanded Mr. Hawk. “You’d better get out now, while you’re well and healthy. We don’t like you worth a damn.”

“I’ll go all right,” replied Griggs, “but Mr. Hunter Hawk goes with me. I’ve a warrant here for his arrest, and I’m going to serve it before I leave this house.”

“Do you mean me?” asked Mr. Hawk, stepping towards the man.

“No, I don’t mean you, and you know it,” answered the detective. “Don’t try to pull any of that stuff on me. You know who I mean just as well as I do.”

“You’re mad,” said Mr. Hawk. “If you don’t mean me, whom do you mean?”

Griggs laughed nastily and turned suddenly on the amazed Neptune.

“It’s no use, Mr. Hawk,” he said. “The game’s up. You can’t fool me. I know you were wearing a false beard.”

Before the great sea god had a chance to know what was happening to him the detective reached up and gave a violent tug at his beard, several tufts of which came away in the dumbfounded man’s hand. With a roar of rage and pain Neptune flung himself upon detective Griggs and whirled him about in the air; then, as if not knowing what else to do with him, he released his hold on the man and allowed his limp figure to loop through the air and land on the gravel path. Neptune in all likelihood would have let matters stand at that had it not been for the excessive merriment of the Olympians, not to mention the group of mortals, among whose loud laughter the whoops of the drunken Mr. Blythe-Brown led all the rest.

Seizing his long trident, the bearded god charged down the veranda steps. Griggs, observing the terrifying spectacle, bounded to his feet and sprinted down the drive, his flat feet spraying out gravel behind him in the face of the pursuing god.

Neptune had never boasted of his speed on land. Had this scene been enacted in the Atlantic or Mediterranean it would have perhaps had a more tragic and satisfactory ending. As it was, the detective gained the security of his waiting automobile and drove off at top speed amid the cheers of the delighted company assembled on the veranda.

“I’ll be back,” Griggs shouted at Neptune. “The boys will drag that funny-looking beard off your ugly face then.”

The god, with a scream of baffled fury, hurled his trident at the moving car. The spare tire on the back popped, but the detective did not stop to find out what had happened.

Picking up his trident, the god returned to the house, tenderly stroking his beard and planning the death of Briggs and the various indignities he would practice on his remains. By the time he had reached the house he had become quite cheerful again.

The gods, though intellectually juvenile, had facile minds and were especially quick at picking up new methods of torture and mutilation in connection with their enemies. Formerly they had considered it no end amusing to change their victims into cows, dogs, snakes, Harpies, Gorgons, and such like, but of later years such relatively painless retaliations had begun to pall on them. No mortal had yet pulled Neptune’s beard and gotten away with it. Neptune, one of the kindest-hearted gods that ever drew breath when not crossed, had thought up some pretty mean things to do to Mr. Griggs, if and when their paths ever crossed.

As he heaved himself up the steps he overheard Mr. Hawk saying to his grimy and tattered guests: “Take my word for it, he’ll be back with his gang before morning.”

“Damned if I would,” said Mr. Blythe-Brown decidedly. “Not after such a reception as he got. What’s this I hear about my daughter being blown into bed with a man? Where’s this explosion, anyway – it might do something about me? I’d stand for a lot of blowing if that half-clad lady over there would get in on the blow.”

He waved the cocktail shaker at Venus, who dropped her eyes girlishly.

“Oh, Mr. Blythe-Brown,” she gushed, “what things you say!”

“Put down that shaker, you decrepit old lush,” came the calm voice of his remarkable wife. “It’s empty.”

“That can be rectified, my dear,” he told her.

Betts removed the shaker from the waving hand and hurried into the house. Hebe hurried after him, gathering glasses on the way. Mrs. Betts had taken a fancy to the cup-bearing goddess. Stella was not so fond of her. Hebe was usurping her place. Suspecting this reaction on the part of the maid, Hebe asked her to share in the bearing and immediately won her heart. She had already opened tentative negotiations with Mercury, who had always had a weakness for domestics, and now fair Stella wanted to perfect them.

At the moment Mercury was holding forth. “What we need,” he said, addressing his remarks to the Olympians, “is a high stone wall. I know all about such matters, and if you’ll all bear a hand we can throw one up in no time.”

The deliberations following this proposal exhausted the contents of three shakers, after which the gods and goddesses alike hurried enthusiastically to the uncompleted section of the wall. Sand and cement were brought from the work sheds, and rocks were collected with feverish energy. The gods were good workers once their minds had been set on a task to accomplish. Mr. Betts, realizing the futility of mixing drinks in a shaker, began to use a bucket which Hebe carried along the line of activity whenever she saw an Olympian’s ambition flagging through lack of fuel. Mr. Hawk regarded the whole affair as being quite in keeping with the unstable enterprise of the gods, but as it kept them happy and out of other and perhaps more disturbing pursuits, he gave them a free hand.

It was pleasant to sit on the veranda with Meg, Blotto, Daffy, and Cy Sparks and observe the labors of the Olympians. Not every man could boast of having a bunch of real authentic gods build a stone wall for him. True enough, Mr. Hawk never expected to see the wall finished, but the idea was refreshing. They seemed to be happy in their occupation, for the deep booming bass of Neptune harmonized agreeably with Apollo’s ringing tenor as they sang some unintelligible song, probably dealing playfully with bloodshed, pillage, and rape, pastimes in which they were chiefly interested.

“They’re a great crowd, your gods,” remarked Cyril Sparks rather wistfully. “Wish human beings could be more like that.”

“Go ahead and invent a new economic system,” said Mr. Hawk, “and you can have your wish. How can a man be happily irresponsible or develop the really charming possibilities of his character when the fear of losing his job through no fault of his own is constantly in the back of his mind? A man who gets up in the morning, washes his face, kisses his wife, and catches his train is not nearly so interesting as the man who gets up around noontime, mixes himself a cocktail, kisses someone else’s wife, and misses his train. Yet under our present economic system the train misser loses out unless he is privately endowed or subsidized.”

“Does a man necessarily have to kiss someone else’s wife to be interesting?” asked Daffy, not without a thought to the future.

“By no means,” replied Hunter Hawk. “I’m glad you checked me up on that. As a matter of fact, the man who kisses someone else’s wife is hardly interesting at all, because he is usually following the line of the least resistance. A large quantity of married women are much easier to kiss than single ones. Although most women seem to make no objections to getting married, a whole lot of them hate to withdraw permanently from competition, and one of the most practical methods of getting the best of her unencumbered sisters is to offer a little more and to suggest a great deal more. That type of woman isn’t interesting either, although she has her uses.”

“Seems to me you’re talking a hell of a lot,” cut in Meg. “To what nurses’ weekly do you subscribe? Don’t think I’ve forgotten your conduct with that Brightly woman. You weren’t following the line of least resistance then. Oh, no, dearie. You were following the line of no resistance, you big stiff.”

“A mind so steeped in depravity as yours,” replied the scientist, “can put but one interpretation on that unfortunate occurrence. You can neither understand nor appreciate a really pure-minded man, you common thief.”

Meg grinned. “Listen, my good man,” she said, “I’m probably almost everything, but I won’t admit to being common about anything, and most emphatically not, when it comes to thieving. In that I know from experience that I’m a really exceptional woman.”

“Are you proud of it?” asked Mr. Hawk.

“Naturally,” answered Meg. “Can you pick a pocket as clean as I?”

“My ambitions have never led me in that direction, thank God!” said Mr. Hawk.

“And if they had,” Meg retorted scornfully, “your victims would have sounded like sleigh bells, your hand would have shaken so.”

“Shall we take a walk to the village?” asked Mr. Hawk, dismissing Meg with a lordly gesture that was especially irritating to her. “I have a little business with my lawyer I’d like to put through before I make my last stand and leave the field to the train catchers and window watchers and mirth controllers, and all the rest of the filthy, criticizing, vice-coveting tribe that at present sets the standard of life.”

Both Meg and Daffy looked up at the lengthy man, who had risen from his chair and was gazing unseeingly at a very busy and none too sober group of gods. In his words the girls had detected a note of bitterness. If such a thing were possible, Hunter Hawk was an idealist in loose living and straight thinking, and such a person is almost as difficult to bear as an idealist in anything else.

“Why don’t you call them lousy and save yourself a lot of words?” asked Daffy.

“It’s too fashionable,” replied Hawk. “And I hate conformity. Before the word was taken up, so to speak, and made smart, I used to get a great deal of comfort out of it. Now the damn thing’s been ruined for me, and I can’t think up another.”

“You have a terrible time of it, don’t you?” asked Meg, sarcastically sympathetic.

“I do,” said Hawk briefly.

“Well, if you ask me,” she continued, “you’re just a pair of stilts in human form.”

“I don’t ask you,” Mr. Hawk snapped back. “Shake a leg there and let’s get started. I can’t leave those gods by themselves too long or they’ll be swarming all over the countryside, leaving ruin in their wake.”

At this moment Mercury was questioning Mr. Betts closely regarding the possible whereabouts of the owner of the wall across the road.

“His name is Mr. Shrewsberry,” said Betts, “and he’s on the Continent, I think. The house has been closed all summer.”

“It’s a nice wall, Betts,” remarked Mercury.

“Yes, sir. It’s a nice wall. Certainly is.”

“Do you see that sort of peculiar shaped, reddish rock in it, Betts?” continued the god, gently edging the old man across the road.

“My eyesight is not so good as it was,” replied Betts. “You’d better point [it] out to me with that sledge hammer, sir.”

“I mean this rock, Betts,” explained Mercury, bringing the great hammer against the side of the rock with a smashing blow. “Why, the damn thing’s fallen inside!” exclaimed the god. “I’d better go over and get it.”

Mercury showed his godlike prowess by the ease with which he scaled the wall. Presently he thrust his head through the opening he had made when pointing out the rock to Mr. Betts.

“Hand me the sledge, Betts,” he said. “I can’t climb back. It’s harder that way. I’ll have to tap a small hole in the wall to let myself through.”

“That’s the only thing left to do,” agreed Betts. “Tap yourself a comfortable exit.”

Within a few minutes a considerable pile of choice rocks had fallen at the waiting servant’s feet. Through the place where these rocks had once been, Mercury emerged, carrying a rock in one hand and the sledge hammer in the other.

“Whew, Betts,” he observed. “Thought I’d never get out. Why, what a lot of rocks! Where did they all come from?”

Mr. Betts shrugged his shoulders. “Must have been lying here, I suppose.”

“How do you think the wall looks now?” asked the god.

“If anything, better,” said Betts.

“I knew you’d say that,” exclaimed Mercury. “Of course it does. That wall didn’t need all those rocks, to begin with. The thing was just full of rocks, quite unnecessarily so.”

“For a rock wall,” agreed Betts.

“Yes,” said Mercury. “I think you’re right. Do you see this one?”

“Don’t tell me,” cried the old man. “I know just what you’re going to say. I noticed the spot myself. It would fit perfectly there. Too bad to waste it and these other rocks too.”

As a result of this hypocritical colloquy Mr. Shrewsberry’s wall eventually was moved across the road and neatly rearranged on Mr. Hawk’s property. Mercury’s bright idea was enthusiastically taken up by the other gods and goddesses and put into execution. Soon they became so adept at wall moving that whole sections of the wall were transferred in a single operation.

“Don’t know what use he has for a wall, anyway,” panted Bacchus, “seeing that his house is all locked up and everything.”

“You’re right for once,” agreed Apollo. “That wall of his was a lot of unnecessary ostentation.”

“A vulgar pretense,” grinned Neptune.

“Yes,” remarked Diana, her hands resting lightly on her beautifully moulded hips. “Mr. Shrewsberry certainly has a lot to thank us for.”

“He probably wouldn’t,” commented Venus, momentarily lifting her head from the bucket. “All men are ungrateful.”

“What I’d like to know,” asked Perseus, skillfully balancing a column of well cemented rocks, “are we wall movers or wall builders?”

“You would ask a question like that,” observed Mercury. “But it does raise a nice point. To Mr. Hawk, our unexcelled host, we probably appear in the light of wall builders, whereas Mr. Shrewsberry might be inclined to call us wall movers or even wall snatchers. It all depends on from which side of the wall you consider the question.”

It really doesn’t matter what the gods decided they were. The important fact remains they had arranged a strong protective barrier for their host. If the latter part gave the impression of a wave done in stone or if they did omit the insignificant detail of providing some sort of a way to get in other than by scaling, these slight defects should be laid to the enthusiasm of Hebe and her bucket rather than to the craftsmanship of the stout-hearted Olympians.

On the way back from the village Mr. Hawk led his friends past the picturesque rectory of the Reverend Dr. Archer. The man himself was sitting on the veranda in some sort of a trick chair. He looked for all the world like a person nerving himself to jump down the steps in front of him to the path below.

“I can’t stand that,” remarked Mr. Hawk in a low voice, as he considered the man of God from the tail of his eye. “I’d be a nervous wreck if I had to live in the same house with him.”

“Must have gotten used to it by this time,” said Meg. “He’s been squatting like that for many weeks now.”

“After a life devoted to non-squatting could you get used to such a posture in a few weeks?” asked Mr. Hawk.

“It might be easier for me than it is for him,” replied Meg thoughtfully. “You see – —”

“We won’t go into that,” Mr. Hawk interrupted. “Let’s call on the Reverend Archer.”

They turned up the path and saluted the afflicted man.

“Pardon me for not rising,” apologized the rector in his beautifully modulated voice, “but God in His wisdom has seen fit to visit me with this rather unprepossessing malady. I feel no pain, but the mental anguish is terrific.”

“The seats of the mighty are sometimes hard,” was Mr. Hawk’s pious observation.

“That is especially true in this case,” replied the Reverend Archer a little bitterly.

“I wonder what His idea was?” asked Meg innocently.

“My dear,” returned the rector, “I have sat, or, rather, squatted here for many a long hour endeavoring to answer that question myself. I can only conclude that God has his lighter moments, for surely no deity in a serious mood could wish anything so utterly silly on a man. In spite of the humiliation through which I have passed, it has somehow brought God closer to me. He seems much more human now.”

“That’s all pure gain,” Mr. Hawk assured him. “It will probably influence your sermons and your relations with the individual members of your congregation for the rest of your life.”

“It has already begun to do so,” said the Reverend Archer. “I see many things differently now. In many instances I have completely reversed my attitude. Previously I believed that the majority of the members of my congregation, which is, as you know, a fashionable one, did not need saving. Now I feel that they are not worth saving.” The Reverend Archer consulted the faces of his visitors rather anxiously to ascertain the effect of his words. “I trust,” he added, “my opinions do not shock you?”

“Not at all,” replied Mr. Hawk. “I’ve always felt that way about it myself. But, my dear Dr. Archer, are you sure you won’t backslide upon the restoration of your middle section to its former flexious condition?”

“Frankly, Mr. Hawk,” replied the rector with a charming smile, “I shall carry on much as usual, but with certain mental reservations, if you get what I mean. My life here is fairly comfortable. I see no reason to change it. No good would be accomplished.”

“And again,” put in Daffy quite calmly, “after having been deprived of the advantages and slight compensations of a group of important functions one appreciates them more upon the resumption of their pleasurable activities.”

For a brief moment the Reverend Archer looked startled, then once more he smiled even more charmingly.

“Admirably expressed, my dear young lady,” he replied. “I feel somewhat that way about it myself. One should not, so to speak, look a gift horse in the teeth.”

“That’s right,” put in Meg. “Don’t pass up a thing.”

“He’s a good guy,” muttered Cy Sparks, whose sympathies were easily aroused. “How about it, Mr. Hawk?”

“Right,” replied the scientist. “I feel that I have accomplished some good in this world after all.”

Slightly altering the position of his left hand, he directed the restorative ray against the mid-section of the Reverend Dr. Archer.

“Dr. Archer,” he said, “I have reason to believe that if you rise now from that impossible-looking roost of yours you will find upon closer examination everything is as it should be.”

The delight of the rector was a pleasure to witness. Abandoning for the moment all consideration for the respect due to his cloth, he executed several rather snappy dance steps, the knowledge of which he could not have come by honestly. After this surprising display of gratitude he took his guests into the house and treated them to a couple of stiff hookers of excellent cognac.

“You know,” he announced, when they were leaving, “I think I’ll run over to see dear Mrs. Brightly. She’ll be so interested to learn that – —”

“Your mid-section has been restored,” cut in Daffy. “I’m sure it will be an occasion for mutual congratulations.”

Once again it was the turn of the Reverend Archer to look startled; then his smile came to the rescue. “Prettily put, young lady,” he said, “but slightly tinged with malice. By the way, does anyone know if Mr. Brightly is still absent from his home?”

“I know he is,” replied Meg.

“Good,” said Dr. Archer involuntarily. “I mean, I hope he is having a pleasant vacation.”

So much for the mid-section of the Reverend Dr. Archer. The party strolled homeward feeling a little more cheerfully disposed toward life in general. It is always more pleasing to see a good man going wrong the right way than a bad man going right the wrong way.

Immediately upon his return Mr. Hawk was surrounded by a noisy group of gods and goddesses all talking at the same time and greatly exaggerating their individual contributions to the building of the wall.

When Mr. Hawk made a tour of inspection, the sight of the imposing barrier vaguely reminded him of something he had seen before. When occasionally he paused to examine a weather-seasoned bit of mortar, he noticed a decided tendency on the part of his escort to hurry him past that section of the wall. And when finally he climbed a ladder and looked over the wall, the Olympians made every effort to discourage him.

“It’s just the same on the other side,” Mercury suavely explained. “One rock is very much like another.”

“So true is that,” replied Mr. Hawk as he mounted the ladder being held by Perseus, “that it really doesn’t matter where you pick up your rocks.”

“Makes no difference at all,” agreed Mercury, anxiously watching the expression on Mr. Hawk’s face.

If the god had expected to see some sudden and alarming indication of the scientist’s true feelings he was quite mistaken. Mr. Hawk merely glanced across the road, saw exactly what he had expected to see, then looked down into the innocently uptilted faces of the wall builders.

“There are a couple of good rocks over on Mr. Shrewsberry’s property you might use if you happen to need them,” he remarked casually. “Not many, but still you never can tell when a good rock will come in handy.”

“But don’t you think he would mind?” asked Mercury.

“No,” replied Mr. Hawk with perfect gravity as he descended the ladder. “I don’t think he would mind – now. You see, by the time he’s gotten round to missing those few rocks, he’ll have become so used to missing rocks – whole walls of rocks – that their absence wouldn’t be noticed.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Battle and Flight

Sectionally folded in a deck chair, Hawk sat that evening on the broad veranda of his old home. He was waiting. He was waiting most unpleasantly. He was waiting for the return of Griggs, an avenging Griggs reinforced this time with great quantities of highly explosive state troopers.

Of course, he could petrify the lot of them, but who wanted a small army of petrified policemen scattered about one’s lawn in various bellicose attitudes?

Lumps of darkness surrounded Mr. Hawk as he sat there in brooding silence. These lumps bore names. The oldest and darkest lump was Grandpa Lambert. Then there were Daffy, Cyril Sparks, and Meg – an exceedingly small lump, Meg, quietly observant.

The excellent Betts, with the devoted assistance of Hebe, was engaged in transferring bottles from the cellar to the capacious body of the Emperor. The car had been parked in a back lane ready for instant action.

Diana was sitting on the veranda steps. As she whistled a song of the hunt she cleverly fashioned arrows with the aid of a bread knife. The gods were knocking about outside the great wall which had once been the rightful property of one Mr. Shrewsberry. The gods also had done some considerable transferring of bottles. But not to the Emperor. Not the gods. Within their huge bodies surged and seethed an amazing mixture of wines and spirits, for the gods were by nature indefatigable experimentalists. Their stomachs now represented so many chemical experiments, the vast cavern of Bacchus being perhaps the most interesting – a complete laboratory in itself.

Venus was attempting to carry on with the father of Amelia. That poor mortal was at present only fit for carrying.

Out of the darkness came the voice of Mr. Hawk.

“How’s your old man?” he inquired of Meg.

“About the same as yours,” she replied.

“No. I mean it.”

“If you really want to know, it grieves me to state that the ancient sot was so busy counting the roll of bills you sent him that he didn’t even have time to say goodbye to me when I left.”

“Your parental thief is an excellent rogue. I like him.”

“Yes. He steals and drinks, but still I am fond of him, myself,” mused Meg.

“So do you, my speck, but still I am fond of you,” replied Mr. Hawk.

“With me it’s an art. With him it’s a vice,” said the girl.

“A distinction without a difference,” observed Mr. Hawk. “Did you tell him to consider my house his own?”

“He told me to tell you he always had.”

“Then he won’t feel out of place.”

Once more silence settled down on the group. There was a feeling of tension in the air, a sort of anxious expectancy. Presently Hawk spoke again.

“I created an irrevocable trust today,” he announced.

“Not in me,” snapped Meg. “I wouldn’t trust you out of my sight.”

“And I don’t trust you even when you’re in my sight,” replied Mr. Hawk, with dignity. “But that is neither here nor there. You fail to understand. I have disposed of my property. I am now a comparatively poor man, most of it goes to you, Daffy, and to Cy.”

“Thank God,” breathed Cy. “Now for the booze and bugs.”

“Sweet boy,” remarked Meg.

“How about me?” demanded old man Lambert. “Am I to be left to the tender mercies of three who should be dead?”

“By no means,” replied Mr. Hawks. “Daffy will care for you. She’ll buy you a lovely pornographic library and read to you every night.”

“Sounds good,” admitted the old man.

“And Daffy,” continued Mr. Hawk, “I’m afraid you’ll just have to marry Cyril. Here it is the end of summer, and he hasn’t ruined you yet. I doubt if he ever will, this side of wedlock.”

“I’ll wed the beast,” Daffy agreed after a moment of thoughtful silence, “but I’ll jolly well hold the key to the lock.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Cy Sparks. “Die on us or something?”

“Something,” said Mr. Hawk, sitting up suddenly and listening. “And all of us are going to do something else pretty soon. The time has arrived. Let us gird our well known loins for battle.”

From the other side of the wall came the sound of much evil speaking – the voices of coarse men making no attempt to disguise their hostile feelings. The lumps on the veranda became animated with life. Diana, with her bow and fresh supply of arrows, was already streaking across the lawn.

“I’d like to get in on this myself,” grated old man Lambert, struggling to his feet.

Betts, flanked by Hebe and Venus, popped from the house and made after the flying goddess. From an upper bedroom window Perseus carelessly hurled himself and hit the ground running. Amelia’s voice floated sweetly after him.

“Murder them all, my dear,” was her Spartan injunction. “Then return to me.”

“Shall we go?” Hunter Hawk asked in the most casual manner in the world. “Let’s take a last crack at the forces of law and order. Events march to a grand and inglorious climax.”

He rose, and followed by the others, hurried across the lawn in the direction of a burst of unpleasant words crackling in the air near the wall.

Thus opened the final stage of Mr. Hawk’s classic contest with organized society – the Battle of the Stolen Wall, perhaps one of the most wonder-provoking conflicts of its kind ever to go officially unrecorded. Had Hunter Hawk been less of a philosopher, victory would have gone to his forces. There is no question of that. However, the man was what he was – an anti-social moral objector, and being such he was growing a little fed-up with many things. He had no intention of being further fed. It was not that he was too proud to fight. He was too bored or, perhaps, too detached.

At the start of this weird encounter most of the action was confined to the opposite side of the wall where, judging from the oaths and cries of anguish of the enemy, the gods fought fiercely and well. Presently, however, the scene of the conflict shifted. The gods, apparently growing weary of smiting the foe, began to cast them bodily over the top of the wall. Soon state troopers were raining down on the heads of Mr. Hawk and his small contingent like maledictions from on high.

“You damned fools,” came the voice of Hawk, “you’re chucking ’em in, and we want to keep ’em out.”

“Our mistake,” shouted Perseus, who had joined his brother gods on the opposite side of the wall. “We’ll be right over and chuck the beggars back.”

“Gord,” a voice complained in the darkness, “are we going to be pitched and tossed over this damn wall all night long?”

It seemed that they were.

Perseus, accompanied by the mighty Neptune, swarmed over the wall and laid violent hands on two of the prostrate figures.

“Hold on, Brother,” one of them managed to get out. “This is the strangest way of fighting I ever saw. First you heave us in, then you heave us out. It might be a game to you, but it’s a pain all over to us.”

“All we want is Mr. Hawk,” wheezed the other.

“Is that all?” grunted Perseus, feeling deftly in the darkness for the seat of the man’s trousers. “Well, my man, you’re going to get much more than you wanted. Over you go.”

And over he went. Likewise the other.

It was a battle marked by many novel methods and hitherto untested forms of attack. Things were done that night that had never been done before.

Above the swish and thud of falling bodies sounded the deep voice of the sea god.

“Where’s Griggs?” he shouted. “I want Griggs.”

Hebe looked up from something she had been doing and peered mildly through the darkness.

“Does anybody want Griggs?” she inquired. “I think I have him, but he doesn’t seem to go any more.”

Neptune rushed to her side and found the dawn-bosomed bearer of the cup methodically churning Griggs in the back with the trident the great god had cast aside on his way over the wall.

“Is he any good?” asked Hebe. “When I first started doing this to him he sort of moved about, but now he doesn’t do it hardly any.”

“I’ll make him move,” gritted Neptune, seizing the trident from the accommodating goddess and plunging it deep into the most mountainous part of Griggs.

“There he goes!” exclaimed Hebe, highly pleased. “He’s working beautifully now.”

“But not enough,” muttered Neptune. “No man can pluck at my beard with impunity.”

While these two Olympians were carrying the battle into Griggs’s quarter or quarters, Venus was doing a peculiar thing. Having found a man sitting up in a dazed condition, she had promptly thrust a bucket over his head and then proceeded to beat upon the side of the bucket with a large stick. It was like some new musical instrument. Every time the bucket resounded the man inside emitted a piercing scream. Venus seemed to derive no little enjoyment from this.

The tactics employed by Meg and Daffy, although totally different, were equally novel and effective. These two enterprising young ladies had seized upon an unfortunate trooper and were holding him well immersed in a trough of cement, discussing the while how long it would take for the stuff to solidify round him.

From the low limb of a tree Diana was sniping earnestly with her bow and arrows. So far she had succeeded in stinging Cyril Sparks as he was stooping over to ascertain if his victim still had breath in his body.

“That’s not a nice thing to do,” cried the youth, more outraged than injured.

“Pardon me,” said Diana. “I was trying out my point of aim.”

“Well, try it out on someone else’s,” retorted Cyril.

Naturally the state troopers were at a great disadvantage. Their plight was due not so much to their lack of courage as to their method of training. When they were studying how to state troop no one had told them how best to resist an infuriated bucket, or what would be the right thing to do when being flung into a trough of cement by two attractive young ladies. Such forms of attack were entirely new to them. Familiar as they were with clubs, machine guns, and revolvers, they were altogether puzzled by flying arrows and twisting tridents. All these things were not put down in the Troopers’ Manual. How were they to know?

Old man Lambert’s method of attack was of all the most difficult to anticipate. The devil himself would have been both shocked and surprised by it. Having observed a trooper descend heavily on the back of his neck and lie still, the dear old gentleman, in lieu of any other weapon, had fumbled out his fountain pen and carefully seated himself beside the fallen enemy. Whenever the trooper attempted to open his eyes or mouth the venerable Lambert promptly shook red ink into the opening thus offered. Only a viciously senile mind could have conceived such a trick. Naturally the injured trooper was both enraged and amazed.

“Stop that!” he told the aged creature.

“No!” retorted the old man. “They gave me this thing for Christmas, knowing I never wrote. This is the first time I’ve had a chance to use it.” He paused to try the point of the pen on the man’s forehead, then continued, in a confidential tone, “Daffy wasn’t in on it. She gave me a bottle of gin. A good girl, Daffy.”

“I don’t give a damn how good Daffy is,” replied the man. “Stop doing things to my face.”

This remark did not help matters any for the trooper. When they found him at last, he appeared to be the bloodiest of the lot.

Thrice had Mr. Hawk been brutally felled by the same man. The scientist was on the point of losing his patience. When he arose from the third felling he danced spryly away from his assailant, and at the same time vividly drew the man’s attention to the evil nature of his parentage on both sides. Having thus successfully lured the indignant fellow to a soft spot in the wall, of which there were many, Mr. Hawk neatly sidestepped the next rage-blinded rush and permitted the man to pass partly through the wall. The part that passed through was immediately set upon by the gods without. The part that remained behind was roundly kicked by the avenging Hawk within.

“Who might this be?” asked Perseus, seizing the man’s legs and inspecting all that could be seen. “Don’t seem to recognize him.”

“Do you usually recognize your friends that way?” asked Mr. Hawk mildly.

This question so upset the great hero that he pushed the man clean through the wall, where he was given an additional beating for having damaged the handiwork of the gods.

While this justly merited punishment was being administered, Mercury, always on the alert, glanced up in time to see a fresh contingent of motorcycle troopers speeding down the road.

“More law and order coming,” he cried. “Much more.”

“All right, boys,” shouted Mr. Hawk. “Let’s call it a day and make for the Emperor.” Then he added as an afterthought, “It’s full of wine.”

Bacchus was painfully pushed through the wall by his loyal fellow gods.

“That makes two walls I’ve been through in one day,” remarked the fat deity on all fours. “I fancy one can grow accustomed to this sort of thing.”

He rose and wearily followed the line of the retreating Olympians across the lawn.

“It’s now or never,” thought Blotto to himself as with a tug of sheer desperation he secured what he had been after for some time. With this ragged prize held firmly in his mouth, the souvenir hunting dog raced after Bacchus. The trooper, relieved of the weight of Blotto, felt what little was left of his trousers and fervently thanked his patron saint the dog had gone no farther.

Into the Emperor piled the Olympians. From the front seat Meg, Betts, and Mr. Hawk watched and counted them. Blotto hurtled after his friends. Mr. Hawk petrified the dog, but was too late. Blotto, a thing of stone, rainbowed through the air and landed with a dull thud on the heaving paunch of Bacchus.

“Zeus Almighty,” groaned that god. “Am I giving this party?”

Mr. Hawk thrust a long arm through the window and beckoned to Daffy.

“Come here,” he said quietly.

Across the lawn the troopers were speeding. Some enthusiast was working a gun. There was the sound of many voices. Mr. Hawk took the girl’s face between his thumb and fingers and shook it gently.

“You’re a good kid,” he said in a low voice. “Take care of our pet drunkard and the Bettses. Also my friend Turner. We’ve had grand times together. I would like to think you’ll remember them at times.”

Daffy’s throat grew tight. Her heart was filled with little inarticulate cries. She wanted to say something.

“I – I – —” she gasped.

“Aw, go on,” said Hunter Hawk, and gave her face a gentle push. “So long, consumer of my alcohol. Good hunting.”

The car dashed down the lane, and Daffy stood looking after it, her hands pressed to her cheeks where the touch of her uncle’s fingers still lingered. Old man Lambert and Cyril Sparks stood looking after the car over her shoulder.

“There goes the damnedest uncle a girl ever had,” said Daffy.

“And the most useless, black-hearted brother of a daughter-in-law an old man ever had,” observed old man Lambert, who seemed not to care how involved he became.

Daffy turned on him with a smile. “You old devil. You terrible old man,” she said. “If you don’t keep a civil tongue in your head I won’t buy you that lovely pornographic library.”

“Let’s catch a drink,” muttered Cyril. “State troopers are literally stepping on my toes.”

Daffy turned back once more to the lane. The tail light of the Emperor had vanished.

“He’s gone now,” she said. “Gone for good.”

Together the three of them made their way to the house where for some time they listened to the complaints of various representatives of law and order. Later they sat quietly on the veranda and discussed the battle. Amelia joined them and asked timidly about Perseus.

“Don’t bother us,” Daffy told her. “Perseuses can be had for the picking.”

This cheered the girl up considerably.

Meanwhile things were none too good with the Hawk outfit. Once he had been forced to stop the car until Perseus had found his head, which he insisted had been left behind out of sheer malice. He had previously packed the thing in the car in anticipation of the flight.

“I hope you know what I wish you would do with that head,” Mr. Hawk bitterly observed as he jammed the car into action.

The retreat of the gods was punctuated by the popping of many corks. They were flying hither and yon, and foam soaked into the upholstery. If earnest, the retreat was none the less a merry one.

Three yellow eyes were tailing the car. Meg looked back apprehensively at them and cursed under her breath.

“Darling,” she said to the man beside her, “there are always too many cops and gods knocking about. I need a little cherishing.”

“You’ll pet it soon enough,” was the scientist’s grim reply, “A judge will cherish you.”

“I’d prefer to have you undertake the job,” said Meg. “Let’s give up this mad life and go back to the grotto, or visit Niagara Falls, or learn how to play the zither. I’m too old for this sort of business and far too much of a lady.”

“I can believe the first, but the second part offends my ears,” said Hunter Hawk. “But I’m with you, Meg, only I’m far, far older. However, just look at those gods. Think how ancient they are, yet they’re having the time of their lives.”

“Just wait,” was Meg’s reply. “In a short time they’ll be pleading for their pedestals.”

“One thing I know,” observed the scientist, watching the following eyes in his mirror. “There’s little room in this world for me, and damned if I blame the world.”

For several miles he concentrated her attention on the wheel and the road ahead. He was looking for some unexpected byway into which he could heave his car, but no such fortuitous avenue of escape offered itself.

“Evidently this road never gave birth to any pups,” he remarked at last. “It’s just road all the way through. And the Emperor was never built to retreat. It is essentially an advancing car. There are sinister lights coming towards us and equally sinister lights in the rear. The next town has a large jail, and that jail draws closer with every mile. I do not like jails.”

“Are we licked?”

“Let us say delayed. I have a plan. Father Neptune is going to play Hunter Hawk. He has already been mistaken for me to the everlasting sorrow of Griggs. It was a lucky day when I donned that false beard. In their present condition our Olympians will be just as happy in jail as anywhere else.”

“You’re not going to leave them flat?” Meg’s voice was reproachful.

“Only temporarily suspended.” Hawk turned a little to Betts. “Snatch a couple of bottles from those milling hands back there and stand by to abandon ship.”

He stopped the Emperor and turned to the gods.

“Listen,” he said. “Pipe down, you gods and you goddesses. Venus, for the memory of your long lost maidenhood, please stop singing the Roman equivalent of Frankie and Johnnie. Perseus, please interrupt your maudlin sobbing for a moment. Thanks.”

He paused to look back at the lights, striving to judge their distance and the speed of their approach. He would have to hurry. That was evident.

“In a little while I must leave you,” he resumed.

Shouts of protest from the Olympians.

“Half a minute,” pleaded Mr. Hawks. “Give me a chance. We won’t be parted long. Neptune, I depend on you. You must play you’re me, Hunter Hawk. I’ll slip all my papers in your pocket. It’s because of your beard. Mine was false and not nearly as splendid as yours, but yours looks too good to be true, at that. When we slip out, you take my place behind the wheel and just sit there doing absolutely nothing until they come to arrest you.”

“Good Zeus!” exclaimed Neptune. “Are we all to be arrested?”

“Only for one night,” explained Mr. Hawk soothingly. “Tomorrow I’ll get you off. It’s an experience.”

“Why don’t you want to share it, then?” demanded Mercury, suspiciously.

“I don’t need it.”

“What makes you think we do?” asked Apollo. “We’ve had lots of experience already – centuries of it.”

“Are jailers nice?” inquired Venus.

“Do they have cups in jail?” asked Hebe.

“Sure,” Mr. Hawk assured her. “Cups and everything.”

“Then I’ll go,” agreed Hebe.

“We’re all with you,” rumbled Bacchus. “You’ve been a father to us, so we’ll be felons for you.”

“Don’t recognize me in court tomorrow,” said Hawk as he handed Neptune a few of his personal papers, such as bills and dunning letters. “And remember – I’ll see you through. Wait right here, and don’t worry. The officers will take care of everything.”

“You’re painfully right they will,” was Mercury’s cynical observation, as Hawk, followed by Meg and Betts, slipped from the car and faded into the bushes.

The approaching lights swooped down on the Emperor and came to a halt. From behind the glare a number of officers with guns in their hands advanced on the Olympians. This time the law was taking no chances. The loud pop of a champagne bottle momentarily brought everything to a standstill, but the loud laughter of Bacchus reassured the enemy. The car was boarded and captured. Neptune, drunk as only a god can be, had no difficulty in playing Mr. Hawk. He actually thought he was Mr. Hawk.

From the security of the bushes the three watchers saw the car drive off down the road. Venus was still singing her wild pagan ballad. When the last light had vanished, the three of them sat down in a field and drank wine. Presently they rose and moved off carefully in the direction of the town. They were in quest of sleeping quarters.

In the town only a mile distant the police station gave the appearance of old home week. It was reeking with an assortment of sportive Olympians, one stone dog, and one stone head. The last two objects gave the captain behind the desk much to think about. He could not bear the head.

“A clean haul,” he said, “but I wish to God you’d have left those two horrible things behind. This night’s work will mean a boost all along the line.”

The captain failed to state whether the boost would be up or down.

“That was a good idea of mine,” said Mercury as he was being locked in his cell.

“Which, Son?” asked Bacchus.

“That idea about building a wall.”

“Oh, that,” said Bacchus thoughtfully as he felt his steel-ribbed bunk. “That was a fine idea as ideas go. It was a funny idea. I enjoyed my trip through that wall.”

In the bedroom of a near-by hotel Mr. Hawk suddenly clapped a hand to his forehead.

“What’s wrong with you?” asked Meg, pausing with stocking in her hand.

“I forgot all about Blotto,” said Hawk, “and the poor beast is petrified as stiff as a stone.”

“That’s the only way to be in jail,” the young lady replied, and calmly continued making herself ready for bed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Gods on Trial

“Bring ’em in,” commanded examining magistrate Plenty. “All of ’em.”

From a carefully selected seat in the courtroom Mr. Hawk, Meg, and Betts watched the Olympians, a fine, full-bodied, disorderly-looking lot, file into the room. The trio also noticed that Griggs, game but sadly crippled, was very much in evidence in this the hour of his triumph.

“Line ’em up,” grunted Magistrate Plenty as he thumbed through a file of papers.

Before the seat of mortal justice the stalwart Olympians were lined. Hawk contemplated them all with a kindly eye, feeling somewhat the pride of a father in a nobly erring son.

“Your name?” snapped Plenty, pointing suddenly at the goddess of love.

“Venus,” came the reply in a cooing voice, as the goddess smiled on the magistrate.

“Venus what?”

“De Milo,” Venus startlingly answered.

“Hah!” almost gloated the magistrate. “That explains a lot. Foreign, eh? Italian. And yours?”

Plenty suddenly pointed to Bacchus.

“My name is Bacchus,” said the god.

“Come, come, man! Your real name. This is neither the time nor place for levity.”

“Bacchus has been my name for thousands and thousands of years. Bacchus it is today,” the wine god spoke with dignity.

Magistrate Plenty looked heavily at the stout fellow and pondered. He decided to bide his time. He passed more hopefully to the next offender.

“Your name?” he snapped.

“Mercury,” said that god.

“See here. See here,” cried the magistrate. “What are you all trying to do, hang yourselves or rattle me?” He pointed a trembling finger at the handsome god of music. “I suppose you’ll be telling me you’re Apollo next?”

“I am, sir,” said Apollo simply. “I always have been and I always shall be, except on certain occasions of a nature well known even to yourself.”

“Stop! Stop!” cried the magistrate. “Am I mad? Am I an ass? Am I clean gone?”

“Yes to all,” smiled Apollo, who was at his best in public.

“Stop! Stop!” shrilled the magistrate. “Take ’em away. No, bring ’em back. What am I saying? Is this a court of law or a madhouse?”

As no one saw fit to enlighten the jaded magistrate he settled back in his chair and spent some time getting himself together. Finally he looked up and asked in almost a whisper, “Which one is Hawk?”

“There he stands, your honor,” said Griggs, indicating Neptune.

“Why is he allowed to wear that loathsome looking false beard in court? This is no masquerade.”

“He won’t take it off.”

“But he must take it off.”

“We asked him to take it off.”

“And he wouldn’t take it off?”

“No, your honor,” said Griggs indignantly. “He refuses to take it off.”

“Then,” gritted the magistrate through his clenched teeth, half rising from his chair, “drag the thing off.”

The scene that followed hardly befitted the dignity of the court. It goes without saying that Neptune defended his beard with all the spirit of a man who knows he is in the right. It further goes without saying that the court attendants under the eyes of the magistrate did their best to deprive Neptune of that which was rightfully his. The result was a decidedly awkward scuffle, during which Magistrate Plenty could be heard muttering from time to time:

“My God! to think of this. My God! Oh, that I must witness this!”

The decision must be called a draw. In fairness to all it should be called that. It is barely possible that if given enough time and opportunity the attendants might have succeeded in literally dragging off Neptune’s beard, lock, stock, and barrel. It is also barely possible that Neptune might have killed them all and thus retained his beard. Magistrate Plenty could stand it no longer.

“Stop! Stop!” he shouted. “Come away from that beard.”

“It won’t come off,” said one of the attendants, who had actually succeeded in laying hands on the beard. “I gave it a yank, a good one, and it wouldn’t budge.”

“Will you please shut up?” said the magistrate wearily. “If the beard won’t come off, then I guess it won’t come off. And that’s all there is to it.”

He sank deep down in the chair and brooded. Presently he raised his head and very calmly, very earnestly addressed Neptune.

“Mr. Hawk,” he said, “let’s forget the last few minutes. I think I know how you feel about it. But now I ask you as man to man and in all good faith, won’t you please take off that beard? It does not become you.”

Neptune by this time was so exasperated he was on the verge of tears. He in turn addressed the magistrate in a calm, earnest voice, almost as one trying to reason with a child or an inebriate.

“But I can’t take off the beard,” he said. “It’s there. It’s on me. I’ll do anything else to please you – take off anything else – my coat or my trousers or my boots, but not my beard. That I can’t take off.”

“You can’t take it off?” said the magistrate.

“No, sir. I can’t take it off. Anything else, yes.”

“Then,” said the magistrate with a remarkable show of self-control, “let us say no more about the beard.” Here his fine command of himself broke down. He rose from his chair and in a cold, white, passionate voice hurled at Neptune the last word, “Keep your damned beard!” he shouted, and collapsed in his chair. Only the top of his head could be seen above his desk.

“What the hell has he got against my beard?” Neptune whispered to Mercury.

“It’s supposed to be false, you damn fool,” the light-fingered god replied.

“Oh,” said Neptune, and again, “oh. I see it all now. Well, it isn’t a false beard. It’s one of the realest beards alive.”

“For the love of your brother Zeus,” pleaded Mercury, “let us hear no more about that beard.”

But more was heard about the beard, for unfortunately Neptune had a bright idea.

“Your honor,” he called suddenly, “would you like to step down here yourself and handle this beard?”

“What!” the magistrate’s head popped up as if blown from his body. “Me handle that beard? Oh – oh – oh – how revolting!”

For a moment the stricken man looked helplessly about the courtroom, then once more sank below the horizon of his desk top. No more was heard of the beard for the moment, but Magistrate Plenty steadfastly kept his eyes averted from Neptune’s face. Whenever, as if fascinated, they strayed beardward, the gears of his brain seemed to begin to slip a little, his thoughts wavered, and his words dragged.

The examination that had opened so inauspiciously failed to improve with time. The magistrate hated everybody. Nothing seemed to go right for anyone concerned.

When Officer Kelly came to the witness chair another crisis was precipitated.

“I want to tell your honor about the conduct of these here prisoners,” announced Officer Kelly.

For some reason Magistrate Plenty seemed to buck up a trifle at this suggestion. Perhaps he craved relief or was fond of bedtime stories.

“Tell us, Kelly,” he said pleasantly.

“Well, your honor,” began Kelly, “we had a terrible night of it.”

“Too bad, too bad,” murmured the magistrate.

“We did that,” continued the encouraged Kelly. “This slick-looking party” – Kelly indicated Mercury – “kept unlocking all of his confederates’ cells. Out they’d barge into the hall and go tramping about the place, laughing and scuffling like.”

“Didn’t they try to escape?” inquired the magistrate.

“No, your honor,” replied Kelly. “They were thoroughly at home. Seemed to like it here.”

“Good of them,” beamed the magistrate, but the beam was laden with venom. “Go on, Kelly.”

“Then they got the women over,” said Kelly, “and had one high old time.”

“Of course, it didn’t occur to any of you to drive them back?” The magistrate’s voice was soft and low. “Hated to spoil their fun, perhaps?”

“We did, your honor, repeatedly, but every time we did, out they’d bounce just as if they didn’t know the meaning of a lock.” Kelly paused for a moment to moisten his lips, then rushed right into trouble. “Then, your honor,” he said, “they stole the stone dog.”

The magistrate sat up. He was all attention.

“The stone dog, Kelly?” he said. “What stone dog? I have heard of no stone dog.”

“Yes, your honor. There’s a stone dog.”

“What sort of a stone dog, Kelly?”

“Just an ordinary stone dog, your honor.”

“There is no ordinary stone dog, Kelly. The very fact that the dog is of stone makes it extraordinary, gives it a place of its own, makes it peculiar, unique, and arresting. But, tell me, Kelly. Is it a little stone dog or a medium-sized stone dog or, let us say, a huge stone dog?”

“Oh, no, sir,” replied Kelly, somewhat confused. “It’s a very lifelike stone dog, it is. Large and heavy.”

The magistrate pondered a moment. This stone dog intrigued him. He had never seen a lifelike stone dog, a large and heavy one.

“Bring me this stone dog,” he said at last.

It was unfortunate that the court attendant dispatched to fetch Blotto was nervously as well as physically fairly well wrecked. Merely to lift the stone dog was for him no small achievement. Nevertheless, he did lift the dog, and not only that, he carried the dog to the courtroom, but here his strength failed. The dog was about to slip from his numbed arms and would have crashed to the floor had not the quick wit of Hunter Hawk saved his old friend. As the magistrate was peering at the stone dog clutched in the arms of the failing court attendant, he was both startled and dismayed to see it wriggle impatiently and then bound to the floor.

“What!” ejaculated the good man starting from his chair and leaning far over his desk. “There’s something funny about all this.”

He removed his glasses and hastily rubbed them. The attendant took one look at Blotto; then, with a cry of sheer horror, fled from the room. Mr. Hawk swept the floor in Blotto’s vicinity with the petrifying ray, thus turning the bottoms of the dog’s feet to stone. For a short time the dog stood still, as if trying to get his bearings, then, spying his friends, the Olympians, set out to join them. It was a noisy progress. The placing of each paw occasioned a distinct little bang. The magistrate watched the dog with fascinated eyes. At last he turned to Officer Kelly.

“Kelly,” he said, “that’s the loudest-walking dog I ever heard. What’s wrong with the beast? I thought you said that dog was made of stone. That’s not a stone dog at all. That’s a real dog with funny feet – very funny feet, if you’d ask me.”

“It was a stone dog, your honor,” declared Kelly. “All of the boys who saw it said it was a stone dog.”

“Well, it isn’t a stone dog now,” said the magistrate. “It’s some sort of tap-dancing dog. I really do believe that all this has slightly deranged my mind.”

Blotto clattered across the floor and sat down by Neptune, leaned, in fact, a little against the sea god’s leg.

“There are other things,” offered Kelly timidly.

“Thank God for that,” said the magistrate. “What sort of other things?”

“There’s a head,” gasped Kelly.

Once more the magistrate started.

“What sort of a head, man?” he gritted. “A calf’s head, a horse’s head, a fish’s head – what sort of a head? Try to be specific.”

“A human head,” Kelly managed to get out.

“Your honor,” broke in Perseus, unable to restrain himself, “it’s my head.”

A long, low, animal-like howl broke from the lips of his honor. He rested his forehead on the edge of his desk, and his hands fluttered helplessly above it.

“What is this?” he muttered. “Where am I? His head. His head. What does it all mean?”

“Your honor,” came the voice of Hebe, “may we sit down somewhere? We’re getting awful tired.”

“So am I,” snapped the magistrate, looking dimly at the fair goddess. “Mortally tired. Yes, my child. Sit down. I’m going to charge you all with something in a few minutes. I don’t know what, but now it looks like murder.”

Suddenly he turned fiercely on Officer Kelly.

“Make yourself clear,” he flung at the man.

“It’s a stone head,” said Kelly.

“I know. I know,” replied the magistrate. “So was that dog. Is the head like that?”

“Oh, your honor,” said Kelly, turning white. “I hope not. I do indeed. Not this head of all heads.”

“Then bring it in, man, together with all of your other exhibits. Hurry.”

Kelly brought Medusa and placed her on the magisterial desk. The honorable Plenty gave one look at the head, then twisted his own away, twisted it nearly off.

“O-o-o-o-o, what a head,” he moaned. “I never saw a more unpleasant head. Thank God, it isn’t alive!”

Kelly then placed Mercury’s caduceus on the other side of the desk and leaned Neptune’s trident against it.

“That’s all, your honor,” he said.

“And quite enough, to be sure. You’ve done very well, Kelly! Too well, I might say. I’d like you all to know that this has been a terrible morning for me – a terrible trial. Come up here, Griggs. I want to ask you some questions.”

Painfully but proudly Griggs mounted to the witness chair. It was plain to see he fully intended to do his worst for everybody but himself.

Magistrate Plenty looked long and with great distaste upon the red, raw face of Griggs.

“Griggs,” he began heavily. “You got me into all this, and I’m not grateful. I depend upon you to get me out and Mr. Hawk and his followers in. Now, listen to me and answer my questions.”

“Yes, your honor,” from Griggs.

“Yes what?” clipped Magistrate Plenty. “I have asked no question yet.”

“I meant,” said Griggs, “yes, I will.”

“Yes, you will,” repeated the magistrate. “Yes, you will what? Are you deliberately trying to puzzle me, madden me, infuriate me?”

“What I meant to say was, yes, I will get you out of it,” stammered Griggs.

“Thanks,” said the magistrate dangerously. “Answer this one. Does or did the prisoner Hawk wear a false beard?”

“Yes, your honor.”

“Is that man there the Hawk in question?”

“He is, your honor.”

“And is his beard false?”

“It is, your honor.”

“If it is not false, Griggs, then it follows the prisoner is not Hawk. Am I right, Griggs?”

“You are, your honor.”

“Did you ever tug at that beard, Griggs?”

“I did, your honor.”

“And did it come off?”

“No, your honor.”

“Would you like to take a tug at it now, Griggs?”

A deep growl from Neptune.

“No, your honor.”

“How do you explain the fact that in spite of all our combined efforts we have been unable to dislodge that beard from the prisoner’s chin?”

“I can’t, your honor.”

“Still you claim the prisoner to be one Hawk?”

“I do, your honor.”

Magistrate Plenty scratched his head while Hunter Hawk played the petrifying ray across the lower part of Griggs, as that unfortunate individual sat perspiring in the chair. At last the magistrate spoke and said:

“I would like to help you, Griggs, but from all the evidence before us I am forced to conclude that the prisoner cannot be Hawk, and that, furthermore, you have arrested the wrong man. You may step down, Griggs.”

The stricken detective tried in vain to step down. He turned an ashen face to the magistrate.

“I can’t step down,” he got out.

“And why can’t you step down, may I ask?”

“I don’t know, your honor.”

“You can’t step down and yet can give no reason. That seems hardly reasonable, Griggs.”

“Something has happened, your honor.”

“What has happened, man? Tell us.”

“I can’t say what has happened, your honor.”

“Do you mean you can’t say or you won’t say?”

“I’d like to say, your honor.”

“Ah, you’d like to say but you won’t say.”

A long pause while Magistrate Plenty thought this out. Suddenly his face cleared, and he leaned far over towards the completely wilted Griggs.

“Do you want to whisper it, Griggs?”

The detective recoiled as if stung.

“Certainly not, your honor.”

Control had long since flown from the courtroom. Tears were running down the faces of many present. The magistrate no longer seemed to care what happened. His one mad desire was to finish up this terrible business so that he could go home and drink himself into a state of complete forgetfulness. Looking about him for some source of inspiration his eyes encountered the baleful stare of Medusa. “Oh, God,” he thought to himself. “Who could have thought up such a frightful face, such a completely devastating face? What demoniacal mind? I’ve been mad for at least two hours. Sanity will never return.” With desperate self-control he faced Griggs and asked in a quiet, reasoned voice:

“Then do you want to speak right out here in court, Griggs, and tell us about it like a man?”

“I can’t tell about it, your honor,” Griggs was almost sobbing.

“Is it a secret, Griggs?”

“No secret, your honor.”

“Griggs, you’re being very stubborn about this matter. Something must be done. You can’t expect to be allowed to occupy that chair forever, you know. Someone else might want to sit in it, Griggs. Won’t you leave it quietly now instead of lumping selfishly in it as you are?”

“I can’t, your honor.”

“Then, Griggs,” cried the magistrate in a voice that broke from sheer exasperation, “I’ll have you dragged out of it. Understand me? Dragged out of that chair. Dragged bodily and brutally.” He pounded on his desk with both clenched hands. “Drag him out, I say! Drag him out! Quick.”

While Griggs was being removed from the chair Meg worked her magic on the head of Medusa and the serpent-twined caduceus. The hissing and crackling of the snake and the wild cries of Medusa caused the magistrate to turn from watching the dragging down of Griggs to see what was happening on his desk. He gave one swift, horror-stricken, incredulous look at the head; then his frenzied shriek rang through the courtroom. Still screaming like a soul in torment, he turned and on tottering legs disappeared through a door directly behind him. Nor was he alone in his flight. In a surprisingly short time the room was empty save for the Olympians, Mr. Hawk, Meg, and Betts.

Without undue haste they gathered up their possessions and departed. Betts led them to the Emperor. They entered the car in an orderly manner and drove off. That was all there was to it.

“Won’t they follow us?” asked Hebe.

“No, dear child,” said Hunter Hawk. “Settle back and think of cups. No one in that entire building could be induced to come within a mile of us.”

“I say,” said Meg, turning to Neptune, “you can take that beard off now. It doesn’t become you.”

The sea god’s grin was expansive as he fondly stroked his beard.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Last Sigh

Hebe was bearing her last cup, and the Olympians, scattered round the lounge room of their suite in the hotel were drinking their last drinks. The scene gave one the impression of a fancy-dress ball. All save Betts were in costume. Even Mr. Hawk, looking not unlike Abraham Lincoln gone Roman, was swathed in white drapery. To please the Olympians, and especially the lady Olympians, on this last evening he had allowed a little variety to be used in their costumes. The colors were riotous, but the costumes themselves were essentially the same – yards of material wound or draped according to the fancy of the individual wearer. Altogether the effect was picturesque.

Mercury was wearing his funny hat and Perseus had retrieved his heroic sword.

On the floor in their midst lay Dora, the stolen cow, who during their absence had been forced to remain in a state of acute petrifaction. She too was adorned gayly with ribbons which she failed utterly to appreciate.

The reason for the bizarre regalia of the outfit was that Mr. Hawk, for reasons of his own, wanted no marks of identification left behind when the Olympians returned to their pedestals, as they were just about to do. One by one they had rather sheepishly admitted that they were just a little tired. The world was too much with them, or after them. On all sides they either encountered trouble or created it. Then again, their stomachs were not what they had been. It was not Mr. Hawk’s fault. No blame could be attached to him. He was not responsible for irresponsible persons who made ill-advised laws.

“Volstead,” said Bacchus, “must be a most remarkable fellow. I would have enjoyed a little chat with him in spite of the fact that we don’t see eye to eye.”

The discussion now centered round Dora. What disposition should be made of the cow?

“I say bring the old girl along and make her a gift to the museum,” suggested Mercury. “Petrify her along with the rest of us.”

“You would say that, because you stole the cow,” observed Bacchus.

“I found the cow,” said Mercury. “Betts and Meg stole her. I merely came along.”

“Then why not give her to Betts as a token of appreciation of his splendid mixing?” asked Neptune, idly dipping a hand in the goldfish tank.

Betts looked startled.

“Couldn’t think of accepting her,” he said hastily but modestly. “Mrs. Betts dislikes the idea of cows. Never got along well with them.”

The heavy business of transporting the animal appalled the old man.

“Isn’t there some society that does things about cows?” Meg inquired vaguely. “There seems to be a society for almost everything else either for or against.”

“I don’t think there’s a Society for the Redemption of Lost Cows,” volunteered Mr. Betts. “How about the Zoo?”

“Not a bad idea, that,” said Mr. Hawk. “The Zoo might like to have a nice domestic cow just to make its collection complete. Tell you what we could do, though. We could write a letter to the Police Commissioner saying, ‘If you will look in room 1537 you will find something to your interest.’ We could sign it, ‘A Well-Wisher.’ ”

In the end it was decided to do nothing at all about the cow, a decision that could have been predicted from the very outset of the discussion.

At the appointed hour the Olympians arose, drank a final toast and followed Mr. Hawk from the room. Hebe was bearing in triumph the cup she had originally wanted to bear. Mr. Hawk had not the heart to deprive her of this last pleasure.

“There’s a cow knocking about my rooms,” Mr. Hawk told the elevator boy, who did not seem greatly interested.

“Is that cow still there?” he asked carelessly.

“Of course it is,” snapped Mr. Hawk. “What do you think we did with the animal, eat it raw?”

“I wondered what you were going to do with her in the first place,” remarked the boy.

“Well, do something about it now,” said Mr. Hawk.

“What, for instance?” asked the boy.

“Damned if I know,” said Mr. Hawk as he stepped into the Emperor and drove off with Betts at the wheel.

It was late now, and no one witnessed the return of the gods to the Metropolitan. Mercury with his magic fingers had somehow managed the door. Before Hawk followed them in he pressed the restoring ring into the hand of the faithful Betts. Its usefulness was over. It could do no harm. The ray had nothing to operate on save the lower half of Griggs, a stone dog in the woods, a couple of policemen, a few waiters, and two fleeing figures by a woodland lake. Betts would never use it.

“Take care of things,” Mr. Hawk told him as he squeezed the old man’s arm. “That ring may serve to remind you of a few pleasant occasions.”

Old Betts just looked at his master, then smiled.

“I may bring you back someday?” he said.

“By that time the ring will have lost its power,” Mr. Hawk replied. “By the way, are you sure Miss Daffy picked up Blotto at the station?”

“Yes, sir,” said Betts in a low voice. “I had her on the phone. She said, sir, to tell you—” the old man hesitated, then resumed – “I think the exact words were ‘pip pip.’ ”

Hawk left the Emperor and crossed the short distance to the door. Inside the Olympians were waiting for him in the long corridor.

“I thought you were never coming,” whispered Meg, looking like a small child in her white drapery.

Neptune was the first to mount to his stand. He settled himself properly and beamed down at Hawk.

“Thanks for the fish,” he said.

“Goodbye, old friend,” replied Mr. Hawk, shaking the sea god’s hand. “Your beard was a great help.”

Meg did what was necessary, and the great god became even greater as he returned to his original state.

Thus passed the Olympians, one by one, mounting to their pedestals, to resume once more their rightful function of edifying and enlightening the general public. The world could stand for them in bronze or stone, but in the flesh it was an altogether different matter.

“We’ve had a nice clean time together,” said Venus as she smilingly stepped up. “Oh, what about my arms?”

“Let the museum staff puzzle about them,” replied Meg. “They’re damn good arms, old girl, but they’ll probably break ’em off.”

Hebe returned, still clinging to her cup. It was this incongruous article that shocked and amazed the museum authorities, officials, and staff more than anything else connected with the whole strange affair.

“You can’t say I didn’t keep my head,” grinned Perseus as he was about to go.

“You can keep right on keeping,” said Mr. Hawk. “I’m sure Magistrate Plenty won’t envy you.”

“Well, my boy, I’m as near being a confirmed drunkard as I ever was in my life,” observed Bacchus. “I don’t know whether that’s a compliment to your modern stuff or not. I think not.”

“It’s been nice to meet you both,” murmured Diana. “I trust you will not judge me by the conduct of my sister. She really is a trollop. Thanks for a lovely time.”

“If you meet a girl named Mabel,” said Apollo, “just tell her not to worry. Not that she will. I wish to thank you, Mr. Hawk, for all of us, in case the others forgot.”

“Goodbye, Mercury, old son,” said Mr. Hawk when it came time for that smooth fellow to return. “You’ve been a great help and comfort. I hope you enjoyed your thieving.”

“I did. I did,” replied Mercury. “Meg’s not so bad herself. Tell me, Mr. Hawk. Do you happen to remember in which hand I held this damn caduceus? I can’t recall for the life of me. It really doesn’t matter. The whole pose is ridiculous. Please hurry, or I’ll fall on my nose.”

“Well, thank God that’s over,” said Meg when the restoration of the Olympians had been completed. “Now we’re alone at last.”

She sank wearily to a bench beside the lean, white-draped scientist. In the vast hall the two figures looked like people from another age returned to claim their own. Mr. Hawk looked thoughtfully round him at the dim, inanimate forms of the Olympians.

“Only a moment ago they were alive and active,” he said in a low voice. “They were full of thoughts and ideas, of wants, likes, and dislikes. They could move and make themselves felt. Now – nothing. So much imperishable beauty.”

“They played hard for a while and tired quickly,” replied Meg, drawing closer to the man beside her. “Now they have gone back to rest. In a world that has forgotten how to play there was no room for the Olympians.”

“Nor for us,” said Mr. Hawk, taking the girl in his arms and slipping off her drapery as they sank to the cold stone floor.

And Meg took the man to her as a woman takes a man.

“Your lips on mine,” she said. “Always.”

As the current passed through the locked bodies a little sigh of ecstasy escaped the lips of Meg. The stone closed round them, shutting out the world. Nothing could get at them now. There was no time nor age. They had themselves forever, the man and the woman.

Yet through the deep silence of the vast hall something of them seemed to linger – Meg’s last little sigh still floated like a mocking kiss on the cold cheek of convention.

— THE END —

TURNABOUT

DESCRIPTION

Turnabout pits two modern married people into a battle of the sexes. Noticing the bickering and jealousy of a young man and wife, an Egyptian idol causes them to switch bodies.

Dedication

For My Brother, Skyring,
His Wife Irene,
My Nieces, Virginia and Carol.
Also for Pal, a Dog
That Served as
a Pillow.

CHAPTER ONE

Mr. Willows
Removes His Socks

Clad in a fragile but frolicsome nightgown which disclosed some rather interesting feminine topography, Sally Willows sat on the edge of her bed and bent a pair of large brown eyes on her husband. This had been going on for some minutes – this cold dispassionate appraisal. At the present moment a growing sense of exasperation was robbing it a little of its chill. Warmth had crept into her eyes, making them even more beautiful and effective, but still they were not pleasant. Far from it.

As yet, however, Mrs. Sally Willows had denied herself the indulgence of speech. For this she is to be commended. It was a piece of self-discipline she seldom if ever inflicted on her tongue. She was waiting, waiting for that sock to come off, hoping against hope that the crisis would pass and the evening remain calm if dull.

Meanwhile she was content to sit there on the edge of her bed and silently consider her husband. At the moment she was considering him as she would have considered a mere thing, or some clumsily animated object that forever kept knocking about her private life and getting in the way. Terribly in the way.

Five years ago everything had been so different. Then she never would have looked at Tim Willows as she was looking at him now. In those early marital days this man creature had never been in her way, could never get in her way too much. Naturally. That had been before he had become a mere thing in her eyes. Also, that had been before her own personal experience, enhanced by the vicarious liaison dished up by the high priests of Hollywood, had given her a true appreciation of men, had shown her how really attractive and devastating men could be and yet retain a quality so charmingly boyish and unspoiled … great, silent, passionate men with whimsical eyes and just a shade of helplessness … men who could find a taxicab when no taxicabs were to be found and who could purchase first-night tickets or reserve an illimitable vista of rooms on the Île de France – never forgetting the flowers and a trick toy or two – with admirable precision and dispatch and without the slightest display of nerves. Whenever her own husband attempted similar operations on a much smaller scale, of course, he invariably returned unsuccessful, a nervous wreck bitterly complaining about the chicanery of mankind and the complexity of modern existence. Why, the poor beast could hardly make change without becoming so helplessly entangled that he was forced to turn to her with trembling hands. Frequently she feared the man would begin to chatter instead of talk.

As she sat there on the edge of the bed, a trim, sleek, wholly desirable figure with a smartly tailored head of glossy black hair, Sally Willows could think of at least a couple of dozen men more appealing to her than her husband, more worthy of her favors. When she had married Tim Willows she had not sufficiently appreciated her own possibilities or the possibilities of others. Idly she wondered how it would feel to be kept by a gloriously wealthy man who would give her everything she wanted, including unlimited freedom to exercise her charms on other men perhaps a trifle younger. Like most women who permit themselves to think at all she felt at times that she had it in her to become something pretty good in the line of a demimonde, one in a position to pick and choose her votaries, even to command them. Nothing sordid, of course.

And at that moment, sitting on various beds in various parts of the world, innumerable wives were thus considering their wretched husbands and thinking the selfsame thoughts. Who can blame them?

Yes, things were a good deal different now from what they had been five years back. For some time past – ever since she had danced with Carl Bentley, in fact – she had come to regard her husband as being just an animal about the house, an animal of the lower order that had been thoughtlessly endowed with the gift of speech and an annoying ability to reason rather trenchantly. It had to be fed at certain times, kept clean and profitably employed. In a way she was responsible, and it was all so very tiresome. Occasionally she still found this animal useful, extracted from it a certain amount of physical satisfaction. It brought home money and did things to the furnace. Sometimes it even made her laugh and feel unexpectedly tender. But romance – where was romance? Deep, vigorous, headlong passion – what had become of that? Had the cinema screens absorbed that precious commodity as blotting paper absorbs ink? And why did this animal fail to arouse in her that deliciously meretricious feeling that lent such zest to her flirtations with other men … with Carl Bentley, especially?

All of which goes to show that Sally Willows was in rather a bad way. The girl stood sadly in need of a friendly but invigorating kick in her spiritual step-ins. But who was going to confer this favor upon her? She was worth it. She really was, for fundamentally Sally Willows was a good sort. One of the best. And at twenty-eight even a modern woman still has a lot to live and learn as well as to forget.

Cheerfully unconscious of his wife’s protracted scrutiny, entirely ignorant of her state of mind, Mr. Willows, his slender body plunged in a deep armchair, was dreamily engaged in removing his socks. That is not quite accurate. The man was not actually removing his socks, but rather working himself up gradually to such a pitch that he would be forced to take some decisive action about his socks, one way or the other. It was almost as if he entertained the mad hope that the socks, once having ascertained his purpose, would obligingly remove themselves. From the expression in his rather dim, dissipated-looking eyes one would have been led to believe that he was enmeshed in the web of some mystic ritual of transcendent loveliness.

After thirty-five years of hostilities the man was still at war with himself and the world in general. So many men are, and like Tim, not altogether without reason. He had not succeeded in getting himself anywhere in particular, and he rather more than half suspected he never would. Somehow he could not bring himself to care greatly about it. That is bad, the very antithesis of the red-blooded, two-fisted, he-man attitude that invariably leads to success. He was too erratic ever to establish himself securely in the advertising agency that tolerated his presence. Also, he was far too brilliant. Brilliance in business as distinguished from cleverness is a disturbing factor. It is slightly immoral and always subject to change.

Underpaid although frequently patted on the back, he was nevertheless held suspect by the powers that were. An accusing aura of cynical detachment seemed to surround him. He was unable to shake it off, unable to conceal it. From somewhere within his being emanated a spirit of unorthodoxy. At times in his presence his superiors experienced a vague feeling of insecurity and for the moment even suspected the efficacy of their most dependable platitudes. Even while they were showering praise upon him for some brain wave they seemed to realize that in Tim Willows they did not have a willing worker for whom the honor and the glory of the Nationwide Advertising Agency, Inc., trod hot upon the heels of God and country, so hot, in fact, that at times both God and country were left a trifle winded.

From his point of vantage on a nearby bookcase Mr. Ram, in his turn, considered both husband and wife.

Mr. Ram was a small Egyptian statue. Old, ages old. The wisdom of the powdered centuries lay behind his eyes. He was a colorful little figure and quite authentic. Mr. Ram through the sheer charm of his pursuasive personality had established himself as a household deity from the first days of the Willowses’ joint experiment. He had moved with them from house to house, traveled with them over land and sea and shared in the ebb and flow of their never opulent fortunes. During those five years he had observed much and thought more. Whatever detractors might say about Mr. Ram they could not accuse him of having failed to take seriously his responsibilities to Tim and Sally.

Tim was more fortunate than he realized in possessing the casual affection of a globe-drinking uncle beside whom the blackest of sheep would have appeared pallid. Dick Willows, so far as the family had ever been able to ascertain, had only two aims in life: to keep bartenders on the alert and to ward off the pangs of solitude from as many lonely ladies as time and nature would permit. Upon the occasion of his nephew’s wedding this amorous philanthropist had from some corner of Egypt dispatched Mr. Ram to the young couple, together with an indelicate note in which he suggested that the little man be appointed chamberlain of the ceremonies of the nuptial couch, adding that Mr. Ram was that sort of little man and that his presence would banish the last shred of decency as was only right and proper at such a time.

From the first Tim and Sally had been drawn to Mr. Ram. He, on his part, was attached to them both, although of late their constant bickerings had worn a trifle on his fine Egyptian nerves. He was beginning to suspect that perhaps a little something should be done about it.

Tonight as he considered the pair there was something inscrutable in his beady, black little eyes. Although time meant absolutely nothing to Mr. Ram he could not figure out for the life of him why Tim was consuming so much of it in the removal of his socks. They were not such remarkable socks. Just the opposite. They were the most infamous-looking socks, an unsightly hole disgracing each crumpled toe. And as he watched and waited on the bookcase a suggestion of gathering purpose touched the usually benign features of the colorful little idol. Most assuredly, something should be done.

Apparently Sally felt somewhat the same way about it. She fixed her bemused husband with an unadoring gaze and gave utterance to a single word which sounded strangely cold and hostile in the silence of the room.

“Well?” she said.

Across vague leagues of nebulous speculations Mr. Willows’s eyes sought Sally’s.

“Huh?” he inquired inelegantly. “You said what?”

“The sock,” she went on in the level tones of one exerting the utmost self-restraint. “Does it come off?”

Slowly and uncomprehendingly, Tim’s eyes journeyed down the long reaches of his thin leg until they rested broodingly on his sock. Gradually intelligence dawned.

“Oh,” he exclaimed, a pleased expression animating his face. “It’s the sock. How stupid of me, Sally. It comes off. In fact, I’m going to take it off myself.”

“That’s good of you,” said Sally Willows. “I would.”

And he did.

He took the sock off, then sank back in the chair and regarded his liberated foot with an expression of mild surprise, as if trying to remember where he had last seen the thing. Then he indulged in a display of sheer animalism which his wife found exceedingly trying to bear. With a sigh of almost voluptuous contentment he deliberately wiggled his toes, some of which in the process gave tongue to a crackling sound.

“Don’t,” was all she said, slightly averting her gaze. “Please.”

“What’s that?” demanded Tim, who under the fascinating spell of his toes was rapidly receding into a vast expanse of fresh speculation.

“Don’t wig – —” Mrs. Willows began, then hesitated. “What you are doing,” she continued with dignity, “is both revolting and extremely childish. Don’t do it.”

Tim Willows stilled his agitated toes and thoughtfully considered the surprising request.

“Can’t see anything wrong in a man wiggling his toes a bit,” he observed at last. “Good thing to do. Good for the toes … for the entire foot, for that matter. Why don’t you wiggle yours? Exercise ’em.”

“There’s only one place where I’d like to exercise my toes,” replied Sally.

Mr. Willows disregarded this ruthless ambition and pondered a moment more.

“You know,” he offered in a confidential voice, “I’ll bet that almost everyone wiggles his or her toes at one time or another. It’s not nice to think of Keats or Shelley or Lord Byron doing it, but they must have done it. Even that sloppy movie hero of yours. I’ll lay odds he wiggles his priceless toes.”

“Perhaps he does,” conceded Sally, “but he doesn’t explode a bunch of writhing firecrackers virtually in his wife’s face.”

A smile slowly arranged itself on Tim’s lips and became fixed in a grin.

“I’m different,” he declared irritatingly. “Bigger than he is. I take you into my confidence.”

“There are certain little intimacies which even after five years of married life might just as well remain unrevealed,” replied Mrs. Tim. “I don’t like toes and never have. Can’t bear the thought of toes, much less the sight.”

“But I didn’t ask you to think of my toes,” observed Tim, in one of those gently reasonable voices that drive wives mad. “I can jolly well think of my own ten toes.”

“How can I help it when you’re waving the horrid things before my eyes?” A tragic note had crept into Sally Willows’s voice.

“Trouble with you,” continued Tim reflectively, “is that, you’ve got a phobia against toes. You allow them to dominate your mind. They get the best of you. Now, take these toes, for instance. Look at ’em.”

“I won’t take those toes,” Sally protested passionately. “You take those toes and get them out of my sight. Cram them into your slippers. And, furthermore, I have no desire to get into a long, involved argument with you about toes or any other part of your miserable anatomy. Is there no fragrance in life? No romance? Must I be compelled to sit here all night with my thoughts no higher than your crablike toes?”

“Oh, all right. All right,” Tim hastily agreed, realizing from past experience that the breaking point was dangerously close at hand. “We’ll say no more about toes.”

He snapped off his other sock, thrust his feet into his slippers, struggled out of the chair and strayed off nakedly about the room.

“I say, Sally, seen anything of that shirt?” he called out after he had succeeded in methodically disarranging the contents of the closet and knocking down several of his wife’s dresses, which he gropingly retrieved and blindly flung back in the general direction of their hangers. “Wonder why women invariably hang up their things in such a hell of a way,” he continued irritably. “No brains at all. Now where could that shirt have got itself to? Just where? Tell me that.”

“I just saw you taking it off,” replied Sally, ice edging her words. “For goodness’ sake cover your nakedness. You’re unlike anything in heaven above or the earth beneath or the waters under the earth.”

Mr. Willows allowed this remark to pass unchallenged, but stuck gamely to his aimless quest.

“I don’t mean that shirt,” he explained. “I mean that long voluminous garment I bought in Paris.”

“When drunk,” supplied his wife, then asked in a rather hopeless voice, “Aren’t you ever going to use your pajamas, Tim – the bottoms as well as the tops? Is it essential to your happiness that you rig yourself up in these weird costumes and go trailing about the house like some anemic beach comber? Are you so physically different from all other adult males of your species that you must flaunt the lower half of your body in the eyes of the world?”

“I keep telling you,” Tim retorted with weary patience, “that I can’t stand pajama bottoms. It’s like toes with you. And I don’t know anything about other men. I don’t go around investigating. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. If the Lord Himself appeared before me at this very moment clad in a pair of pajama bottoms I could only find it in my heart to feel sorry for him. The damn things get in my way. They roggle up. They – they choke me.”

“You needn’t trouble yourself to make it any plainer,” said Mrs. Willows with some attempt at dignity. “Don’t give me a demonstration. Just the same, I’m sure other women’s husbands must wear the trousers of their pajamas.”

“Sure, a lot of lizzies,” proclaimed Mr. Willows derisively. “Real men take their pajama trousers off when they go to bed.”

“Don’t be vulgar,” said Mrs. Tim.

“Well, we won’t go into that,” he remarked, turning to a bureau drawer and pawing through its contents. “I’m different, as I told you before,” he went on. “Much franker. I take you into my confidence – entirely.”

“You’re altogether too frank for decency.”

He dragged several yards of material from the drawer and finally succeeded in draping it over his body. Above this tentlike arrangement his face emerged with a triumphant expression. The remainder of him was far from lovely.

“I imagine the reason the French build their shirts like this,” he observed, “is because they’re constantly running in and out of doors with husbands and wives and entire hotel staffs running after them. It must be that.”

“I’m not interested,” returned Sally, “but I do know that that atrocity you’re wearing is neither one thing nor the other. There’s too much of it for a day shirt and too little for a night. It’s simply an unsatisfactory compromise.”

“Well, at any rate,” replied Tim thriftily, “I’m not letting it go to waste. I’m getting my money’s worth out of it like any French gentleman would do.”

“I’d even pay good money to have you take it off,” said Sally.

“Oh, my dear!” her husband murmured, looking at her archly.

“Shut up,” interrupted Sally. “You’re not amusing. Is there no romance anywhere in that feeble frame of yours? Must I spend all my nights with a comic-strip character – a clown?”

Tim looked thoughtfully down at his wife.

“Romance, my child,” he told her, “does not reside in the tail of a shirt. Its seat is here – in the heart.”

He slapped himself so vigorously just below that organ that the front of his shirt gave a startled flip, and Mrs. Willows hastily closed her eyes. The effect of his little speech was somewhat marred.

“If I were you,” remarked Mrs. Willows, “I wouldn’t strive for nobility in that costume. It doesn’t quite come off.”

“Is that so?” he replied unenterprisingly, turning his back on his wife and running his eyes along a row of volumes in the bookcase. “What shall we read tonight?”

“I don’t feel like reading anything tonight,” Sally Willows replied petulantly. “That’s all we do in this beastly place, anyway. It’s read, read, read, night after night. No change. Nothing. First thing you know we’ll be old. Life will be over. Other wives go places and do things – —”

“Right!” shot back Mr. Willows. “They sure do.”

“And I don’t mean that either,” Sally went on. “They are seen – not buried alive. What do I see? Where do I go? Cooped up here in this miserable house all day long. No companionship. No relaxation. Same old thing day in and day out, year after year. Then home you come, his lordship from the office. And what do you do? Do you offer me a couple of tickets to a play? Do you suggest going out to a dance or something? Ha ha! Not you. No. You go prancing round the house in a horrid old shirt like a third-rate comedian in a burlesque show. And then you ask me to read. Of all things, to read. Well, do you know, my darling husband, you haven’t even taken me to one honest-to-God night club? Not one. When I married you – —”

Tim Willows swung round to confront his wife, and the tails of his shirt flared alarmingly.

“If you made a phonograph record of that set lament of yours,” he said nastily, “you could turn the damned thing on whenever you felt like it and save no end of breath. I know it myself by heart. Word for word, sentence for sentence it’s graven on my brain. Now go on and tell me what I led you to expect before you married me – how I tricked you to the altar with false promises. Come to an hysterical climax about my unjustifiable jealousy and then we can both rush out into the night and offend the damn neighbors.”

He turned bitterly away from the small, furious figure seated on the bed and, going to the window, stood there gazing out into the pinched face of winter. Hardly thirty feet away stood another neat little suburban home – with garden and garage – and in between lay nothing but dirty snow, its flat surface broken by a straggling line of frozen shrubs. Lifting his eyes a little he saw the roofs of other houses. There were thousands of them – too many of them. He felt himself sinking, going down in a sea of neat little suburban homes. In desperation he again elevated his eyes and let them rest on the dark outline of the distant hills. Bright stars were hanging above those hills. The stark limbs of numb trees reached achingly up to their cold beams. And lights studded the hills, the lights of other homes. ’Way off there people were living and carrying on life. Tim wondered idly what they were like, those people who lived over there. Did they, too, commute? Did they go eternally to offices? Did they have to hang up their pride with their hats and coats and swallow rebellious words in the teeth of secure executives? Was economic necessity always goading them on, marshaling them down windy platforms, cramming them into subways that steamed and stank and finally plopping them down in front of dreary-looking desks, nervously baited and physically ruffled even before the long day had begun? Was life just going to be like that all the damn time? He had a dim understanding of his wife’s restlessness of spirit. In a way he sympathized with her. Probably their glands were all wrong. They weren’t real people. Not properly equipped for life. Maladjusted to the world. Tim did not know. Nor did he give a hang. Something was all wet somewhere. He, too, would like to try a night club, look at a lot of naked girls. It might be entertaining. Damned if he knew. He’d like to vary the monotony of the daily routine and talk with some interesting people – that is, if they would talk with him. Whom had he ever licked? Never done anything much. Only thought and talked … complained. But as things stood, what could he do about it? He was in no position to create his own circumstances … to pluck friends, funds, and entertainment from thin air. And anyway, what the hell was she grousing about? She was out all the day gallivanting round. She had freedom of action, thought, and speech. What was eating her? God knows, she was not repressed unless she created her own inhibitions through sheer intellectual vacuity. She had her day, her bridge, movies, shopping, teas, lunches, and even men. He was painfully aware of the latter. No, there was little about which she could complain. Perhaps he was wrong at that. What, after all, did he know about this woman? What did she know about herself? They were all in it together. A mess … a cul-de-sac.

Tim Willows, standing by the window, experienced a feeling of utter frustration. It was a spiritually debilitating feeling – a miserable thing. More profoundly hopeless than a nauseating hangover after a long-distance spree. More hopeless because now the brain was clear and could look into the future. And what a future it was! Tim realized he had just about reached his highest peak. He wouldn’t be earning much more money ever. Less, if anything. And he did not have much faith in breaks. People who waited for breaks, he had found, usually went broke. There she blew, the future, the taunting white whale. Constant bickerings and recriminations paved the way. And the rest – just sour grapes and shabby expedients. Well, it was a good thing they had no spawn, although a baby or two barging about the house might have given them a bit of a kick. At least they’d have something to think about besides themselves.

“There’s going to be a change,” came coldly from the bed. “I don’t intend to stand this life any longer. Other women work. Why shouldn’t I? If you won’t make a life for me I’ll make a life for myself. I deserve a life. I’m still under thirty and not altogether unattractive. All you seem to care about is reading and writing and bad gin.”

At that moment she saw herself as the glorified secretary of a huge Wall Street wolf with a boyish smile. She was helping him to ruin thousands of inoffensive lives in one mad and dazzling coup. Then the Riviera and a series of top-notch seductions. Perhaps in the end she would discover that she had always loved her husband. But, of course, she’d have to do considerable experimenting before she found that out.

Tim’s mirthless laugh smeared a streak across the pleasant picture.

“You’ve got a damn poor chance of finding life and romance on a desk top,” he said. “And if you’re satisfied with what you do find there you’re a whole lot dumber than I thought you were, and that would make you a little less than a half-wit.” He turned from the window and confronted the charming feminine figure which for him at the moment had lost a great deal of its charm. “What in the name of God are you kicking about, anyway?” he demanded. “You haven’t a damn thing to do, no drudgery or monotonous routine. The Twills, such as they are, still take care of the house. You can pound your ear all day long or do what you jolly well please. No cooking, no washing – not even a child. I leave you here in the morning literally drugged with sleep only to find you at night a nervous and physical wreck. Your first words are either a complaint or a criticism. And always in the offing is the threat of a nice, noisy case of hysterics. You hold that in reserve as a last resort because you’ve found out that it’s an infallible weapon. You can win every time no matter how wrong you are, but nothing is ever changed, nothing is ever settled. You don’t even drive me down to the station in the morning. At night you habitually arrive there late through some unavoidable delay. Your excuses are so illogical they fairly sicken me to hear them. I wish to several different sets of gods I could change places with you for a while. Believe me, I do. I’d jolly well find something to occupy my time without looking for work. I’d sit down and write myself a book. It might be a rotten book, but at least I’d have the satisfaction of finding it out. I know I could do it, and in your heart, when you use it, you know I could do it, too.”

Strange to say, Sally did know he could do it. Even at that heated moment she realized that this husband of hers was a little better than she allowed herself to admit. There was a lot more to him than any of the men she knew. That was just the trouble. There was too much to him. He was not a normal male animal and he wouldn’t act like one. He was a sort of artist without an art, which was much like being a man without a country. An unexpected wave of sympathy almost smothered the retort trembling on her lips. That would never do. They were often like this with each other now, their best words remaining unspoken while their worst ones came tumbling out.

“I’d like to take you up on that,” she flung at him. “I wish I could change places with you. Oh, how I do! You clear out of it all every morning, go to the city and see something new – eat where you like and what you like – interesting men to talk to – good-looking girls to see – lots of them. And you don’t miss one, I’ll bet. You’ve got a rotten pair of eyes. You’re like a little old lascivious hermit – a twittering dog.”

“Why like a twittering dog?” Tim Willows inquired. “I don’t quite get that. Twittering dogs and hermits don’t seem to – —”

But the course of Sally’s words was not to be deflected by irrelevant questions.

“Don’t worry, my darling,” she continued. “I’d change places with you quick as a wink. At least, you do something, move about, create a little world of your own, travel places and stay overnight. I never stay anywhere overnight. No, here I am – chained down. A prisoner. All I need is a striped suit and a number.”

Mr. Willows smiled fleetingly at this, then stood for a moment, looking seriously down at his wife.

“Sally,” he said gently, “I think you must be mad or else you get a certain backhand satisfaction in being so consistently wrong-headed. You know damn well I don’t enjoy the work I am doing, the mock importance and the hypocrisy of it, the daily drip I have to listen to and the humble pie I have to eat. A week of it would bore you to tears. Don’t know how I’ve hung on so long myself. And I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t exploded occasionally. But I don’t think I’ll be able to hang on much longer. I feel a bust-up collecting itself right in the pit of my stomach. It’s due almost any day now. Old man Gibber gets dottier all the time. He and his Nationwide – —”

“Do all men complain – —”

Sally’s question was never finished. A knock sounding irritably on the bedroom door put an end to further hostilities. As if overtaxed by this unreasonable formality, Mrs. Twill, as was her wont, opened the door just wide enough to permit the inthrust of her head. More than once Mrs. Twill had told her husband that it always made her feel foolish to knock on Mr. Tim’s door, “him being hardly out of the cradle yet.”

“You’ll feel a whole lot foolisher some night if you don’t knock,” had been Twill’s sage advice.

For as far back as Tim could remember, the Twills had worked in tandem for one or another member of his family.

“Would you like to have the Twills help you out for a while?” his grandmother would ask some visiting relation, and upon receiving an affirmative reply the Twills would be packed up and bundled off to another household. In this way they gained a more comprehensive knowledge of the Willows family history and private affairs than was possessed by any single member. It had been an old family of old people. Most of them were now beyond the need of servants, but the Twills still went on tenaciously clinging to a world which for them was peopled mostly with memories. It was as if they had been granted a special dispensation by Time to keep on going until the last of the Willowses had stopped. Then their work on earth would be ended and they would be free to follow into another world the family they had so faithfully served, there to begin the whole thing over again under the divine auspices of a chatty, pro-Willows God. Although the Twills were rather more of an obligation than an asset, they were comforting to have about the house. Their chief interest in life centered round Sally and Tim. Sally’s girth they constantly studied with patiently hopeful eyes, but so far no embryonic Willowses had rewarded their watchful waiting.

“I can’t stop him,” Judy Twill announced tragically.

“Whom do you want to stop?” demanded Sally.

“The old fool,” continued Mrs. Twill. “I know he’ll break his neck on those basement stairs. Will you call him up, Mr. Tim? The furnace is stone cold.”

“The mother of that damned furnace must have been done in by an ice box,” complained Tim as he made for the door, uttering loud and discouraging noises as he went.

“Do hurry,” called Sally, all other considerations forgotten in her anxiety for the safety of the venerable but pig-headed Mr. Twill.

“Come out of that, Peter,” shouted Tim down the back stairs. “Don’t you dare put a foot in that basement.”

Through the floor, hollowly, came the protesting voice of Twill:

“But I can fix it, Mr. Tim,” it said.

“God, Himself, couldn’t fix that furnace,” replied Tim. “Don’t you even breathe on the thing. Snap out of it, Peter, and go to bed. Get yourself a drink if you can find one.”

There was no response to this, but certain noises in the kitchen assured Tim that Peter had changed his mind and found warmth for himself instead of the house.

“Yes, Miss Sally,” Mrs. Twill was saying as Tim returned to the room. “I certainly agree with you. It’s a shame and scandal he doesn’t wear pants.”

“I can stand to hear very little more of that,” announced Tim, looking darkly at the two women. “What I do with the lower half of my anatomy is no one’s business.”

“Oh, is that so?” put in Sally, slightly elevating her eyebrows. “Well, I like that.”

“How do you mean?” asked Mrs. Twill.

“Be still,” snapped Tim. “I’m speaking of raiment now. If you mention those pajama trousers again I’ll take them out of the drawer and cut them up into little bits. I’ll burn the – —”

“He was just like that as a baby,” interrupted Mrs. Twill as calmly as if he had not been present. “No matter what we put on him at night you’d find him mother-naked in the morning – bare bottom and all.”

“You can find him like that almost any time when he’s not at the office,” announced Sally. “But who wants to?”

“If you all have thoroughly finished,” said Mr. Willows with frigid politeness, “I’ll go down to the basement. Good-night, Judy. Tell that ancient wreck of yours that if he ever attempts to go down there again I’ll put him on the retired list for good.”

When Judy had withdrawn, Tim Willows looked down long and thoughtfully at his young wife.

“You know,” he said at last, “my idea of hell is to be chained to a line of smugly secure home owners. Every one of them is stoking a glowing furnace and liking it. Everyone but me. I am crouched on my bare knees, eternally doomed to pull cold clinkers from the sneering mouth of that damned thing down in the basement. That would be hell, and I’m already getting a sample of it right here on earth. In fact,” he added as he walked to the door, “everything in this house is a little bit of hell.”

“Then why not say ‘To hell with everything in the house’?” inquired Sally, with one of her most disagreeable smiles.

“I do,” replied Tim earnestly. “I most emphatically damn well do.”

There was a pained expression in Mr. Ram’s eyes as he watched Tim Willows leave the room. High time that steps were taken to show these two mere mortals the error of their ways.

CHAPTER TWO

Interlude with a Furnace

Wedged rather than crammed into the narrow confines of a packing case the great animal slumbered, sighing deeply in its sleep. It looked terribly uncomfortable, this creature, but was either unaware of the fact or ascetically disregarded it.

“With the entire house at his disposal,” Tim wondered as he stood in the kitchen and looked down upon the dog, “why does he insist on pouring himself into that box? It’s sheer stupidity – an inability to adapt himself to changing conditions.”

Dopey was a large dog – too large, thought Tim Willows. Dopey would have made a better cow or even a small mule. The man’s sense of irritation increased. Why, in God’s name, why did this dog prefer the slow torture of that box to a pillow-strewn divan, a soft rug, or a comfortable corner in the front room?

Tim failed to realize that what little mind Dopey owned ran on a single track. He had always slept in that box; why should he not continue to sleep in that box? Night after night and even on dull afternoons, on fair days and foul, in sorrow and disgrace that box had been his refuge, his sanctuary. Other dogs no doubt were just waiting for an opportunity to take that box from him. This long had been Dopey’s secret fear. But it would never be. That box was the one thing in the world that he actually owned. Growth, either physical or intellectual, meant little or nothing to Dopey. He brushed them aside as trifling considerations. He liked the smell of that box. It was familiar, homelike, and soothing to taut nerves.

When Tim had acquired this dog he had not been in search of a small dog. No. Neither had he wanted a large dog, a pounding, crashing, monolith of a beast. What Tim had been looking for was a nice, middle-size dog, and Dopey had appeared about to fill the bill. As a pup he had given every indication that in the due course of time he would evolve into a conservative, moderately proportioned creature. At that time there had been no suggestion that the dog secretly entertained ambitions to become if not the largest of all animals at least the largest of all dogs. In short, Dopey had appeared to be just such a dog as Mr. Willows most desired, a creature whose size would conform with the specifications of a modest suburban home. But in this Mr. Willows had either been deliberately tricked by the seemingly guileless pup or else had mistaken his intentions. It is possible that Dopey for some time had been deliberately curbing his natural tendency to vastness until he had attained the security of a good home. Certain it is that immediately upon arriving at the Willowses’ establishment the dog had abandoned all pretense of self-regulation and had started in growing dizzily before the alarmed eyes of his master. It is barely possible, on the other hand, that the thought of deception had never entered the dog’s mind and that he was merely giving an outward manifestation of his appreciation of his great good fortune. It is just conceivable that Dopey said to himself, “This kind gentleman seems to have his heart set on owning a dog. Well, just to please him, I’ll make as much of a dog of myself as I can manage. In me he will have more than just a dog. He’ll have half a dozen dogs in one.”

This might have been Dopey’s attitude of mind, although his subsequent conduct makes it rather dubious. He speedily developed into a thief, a glutton, and a hypocrite, a nervous wreck in the face of attack, a braggart when danger was past. Had he been able to speak he would have lied steadily from morning to night, for the sheer sake of lying. He was a dog without a redeeming trait, without a spark of pride or an ounce of chivalry. Small dogs were his dish – that is, if they were small enough. In spite of which this animal had succeeded in worming his way into the good graces of Tim and Sally. Even the Twills tolerated him. On his part Dopey liked almost everybody who did not frighten him and who belonged to what he fondly believed to be the upper classes, but as almost everyone frightened him Dopey had few friends. He was also a snob.

For this attitude there was no justification whatever. He was the lowest of low-bred dogs. It would have taken several commodious closets to accommodate his family skeletons. At first there had been some loose talk about his Airedale ancestry. There was nothing to it. At some time during the love life of his indefatigable mother things must have become terribly involved. The result was Dopey, a creature who could call almost any dog brother with a fair chance of being right nine times out of ten. He was a melting-pot of a dog, carrying in his veins so many different strains of canine blood that he was never able to decide what breed of dog he should try hardest to be, or to develop any consistent course of canine conduct. He had no philosophy, no traditions, no moral standards. Dopey was just dog. His mother might have seen an Airedale once or even made a tentative date with an Airedale, but after one good look at her son it was obvious that the date had never amounted to anything definite.

Dopey now lifted a long, tan, knobby head and gazed meltingly at his master, his moist nose quivering delicately. Heaving his great, angular bulk out of the box he stretched painfully, yawned, shook himself, then suddenly became possessed of the devil. After a crashing, three-lap turn about the kitchen he flung his moplike paws against Mr. Willows’s chest in a whirlwind of hospitality.

“God Almighty!” protested Tim, ruefully regarding several parallel red welts running down his chest, “What’s the meaning of all this? Down, damn you, down.”

Now nothing, save perhaps an amorous woman when a man wants to sleep, can be more exasperating, more fiendishly tormenting than a dog that insists on being violently playful and affectionate when one’s nerves are about to snap. It is then that one’s mind morbidly conceives the idea that an evil spirit has entered into the dog for the purpose of driving one mad. Tim Willows’s nerves were at their worst and Dopey was at his. The harassed man turned to the stairs leading down to the basement, cursed them bitterly from the depth of his heart, then slowly descended, while Dopey, in close attendance, licked the back of his neck with a tongue that felt like a recently used wash rag. He paused before the furnace and directed the stream of his profanity against its cold, bloated sides. Then he opened the door of the fire box and peered unhopefully into unresponsive blackness. Dopey went him one better and tried to crawl in. This resulted in a struggle between man and beast for the possession of the furnace. It ended in a draw. Tim pulled out the clinkers with one hand and pushed Dopey’s inquiring face away with the other. This operation finished, Tim Willows sat down on a box and looked murderously at the dog.

“Blast you,” muttered the man. “It’s hard enough as it is without you making it harder. Why don’t you go away somewhere and find something else to do, you great big ninny?”

He reached out to cuff the dog, but Dopey, his tongue lolling foolishly out, pranced just beyond reach and stood in an attitude of sportive attention. At that moment Tim thoroughly despised this dog with its silly face and ungainly paws. Rising wearily from the box he set about to collect some sticks of kindling wood, an action that sent Dopey into ecstasies of excitement. With wild eyes and teeth bared the dog snapped and lunged at the sticks, several of which he succeeded in snatching from his master’s hands. Then strange noises were heard in the basement of that house. They issued from the distorted lips of Mr. Willows. That gentleman was chattering to himself with exasperation. He was in no fit condition to be allowed at large. Finally he picked up the dog bodily, staggered with him to the far end of the basement, dropped the perplexed creature, then rushing back to the furnace, seized some sticks and hurled them into the fire box. It had been an elaborate but successful maneuver. Mr. Willows was breathing heavily both from emotion and fatigue. Sweat ran down his face and cut paths across patches of soot and coal dust. His hands were the hands of a man who has toiled long in grimy places. At last he started a blaze, then once more seated himself on the box and thought up horrible tortures for Dopey. That stout fellow, muzzle pressed to the floor, rump outrageously elevated, front paws spraddled, was uttering deep-throated growls of mock ferocity.

“Shut up, you,” said Mr. Willows, flinging a stick of kindling at the dog.

Dopey dodged adroitly, seized the stick in his powerful jaws and crushed it. Realizing he was entertaining rather than injuring the animal, Tim pretended to ignore it.

The business of putting coal on the fire proved even more trying. Every time the man attempted to swing the shovel the beast flung himself upon it, thus diverting its aim and spraying the floor with lumps of coal. This, thought Dopey, was the best game they had played so far. Mr. Willows made even more peculiar noises. He experienced a strong desire to break down completely and to abandon himself to waves of maniacal hysteria. Presently he took hold of himself and faced the situation squarely. He realized that nothing short of brutality would be effective in dealing with that dog. But at that moment Tim was too exhausted to employ such methods. Therefore he was forced to resort to subterfuge. It was an example of mind over matter.

Taking up the shovel he filled it with coal and placed it within easy reach. Then, squatting down, he lured the unsuspicious dog over to him. Suddenly he rose, delivered a kick of some force on the astounded rump of Dopey, seized the shovel and hurled its contents into the furnace before the dog had time to recover from his surprise and indignation. Mr. Willows was elated. He hurled insults at the baffled dog.

“Got you that time, you reptile,” he grated, and proceeded to tell the discomfited creature just what he was a son of. The information left Dopey cold. Nor did he appear to be any the worse from the punishment he had received. Not so Mr. Willows. That gentleman’s right foot, encased in a soft slipper, was throbbing with acute pain. He hobbled to the box and sat down. Perhaps he had broken a toe, one of those toes against which Sally was so unreasonably prejudiced. Tim Willows felt the return of his former depression, which had been momentarily dispelled by his triumph over the dog. He realized now that it had been a hollow victory, Dopey’s mental capacity being what it was. Anyone with the merest suggestion of a brain could outwit that dog. And then there was the toe. Surely it had been one hell of an unpleasant evening.… Sally? That dear young thing was probably asleep by now. What a wife! Well, he would go up, grab off a consoling drink, and do a little reading. It was cold as the grave in that basement unless one kept moving. No place for a man clad only in a French shirt. Unconscious of the fact that he was still carrying the shovel, he made his way wearily up the steps, with Dopey panting hotly, but happily, on his heels. At the head of the stairs he stopped and looked down at the dog. In the presence of that great dumb beast words seemed inadequate.

“This is the end,” he told the dog. “Tomorrow you go. If I wasn’t so tired now I’d cut you into tiny little bits. I’d make you sweat. Don’t even look at me.”

Dopey did not take the trouble to listen. He fawned upon his master and waited for something new to turn up. Why not make a night of it?

In a low, monotonous voice Tim continued to scold his dog as he passed through the box of a serving pantry and crossed the dining room. It was not until he had reached the portières separating this room from the lounge that he became aware he was an object of intense interest to five pairs of seemingly fascinated eyes. He looked up and to his disgust discovered that the room had been invaded by five persons, all of whom he disliked. At that moment their faces were registering a disconcerting blending of amusement and surprise. Tim stopped cursing and, with admirable presence of mind, reached out and drew the nearest portière to him. This he draped picturesquely over the lower half of his body. The remainder of him went unimproved. From a soot-streaked face his dim eyes peered out malevolently at the silent group facing him. Close by his side Dopey crouched and indulged in a few inhospitable growls. The dog was extremely nervous. It had all been so sudden. Sudden changes were unsettling. Dopey was frightened.

Then the rich, lazy voice of Carl Bentley made itself heard. It would. The man had a way of making his voice heard. Not that it ever said anything. It was just that sort of voice.

“Well,” said Mr. Bentley, beaming down from a great height on a strangely diminished-looking Mr. Willows, “if it isn’t Tiny Tim himself – Tiny Tim in all his glory.”

Tim offered the group a wan smile, such a smile as might distort the lips of a man gamely but unsuccessfully fighting off an attack of sea sickness.

“Yes,” he replied. “Yes, indeed. So it is.”

Silence greeted this lame effort. The company continued to gaze. Mr. Willows began to grow a trifle uncomfortable. He hated being looked at as if he were some particularly noxious specimen of bug life.

“Indeed, yes,” he continued, for lack of anything better to say. “Here I am. Been making a bit of a fire in the furnace.” At this point he displayed the shovel as if to forestall any attempt at contradiction. “The other one went out,” he added feebly. “There wasn’t any fire at all.”

Were these people either dumb or dead? Were they deliberately trying to upset him even more than he already was? The silence continued unbroken. The eyes continued to stare. Were parts of him sticking out, perhaps? He looked down at himself. Yes, lots of him was sticking out. Redraping himself furtively he essayed another smile and swallowed hard. How oppressive it was in that room … the silence and those eyes. Once more he sought cowardly refuge in the sound of his own voice.

“It was too bad,” he went on, his thin words trailing away into infinity. “I mean about that fire. The first one. The one that went out.” What the devil did he mean, anyway? Taking a fresh grip on himself he continued, “There should be a law about fires going out at this time of night.” Here he laughed meaninglessly. “Ha ha! Not a bad idea, what?”

No one else laughed. Obviously the idea was not so good. The graven images remained unimpressed. They refrained from committing themselves either for or against it. Tim had feared as much. Then, suddenly, the spell was broken – snapped. Blake Watson had done it. Blake was the slave of a furnace of which he was inordinately proud. At the mention of the word “furnace” life always took on a new interest for him. He became a changed man – changed for the worse. Snappily stroking his military mustache he glared at Tim severely.

“Can’t understand that, Willows,” he said accusingly.

“And that’s not all you can’t understand,” Tim shot back. “Do you think I put the damned thing out on purpose just for the fun of making a new one?”

“Come, come!” admonished Mr. Watson. “Don’t trifle. Now, I have a furnace and the fire never goes out. Does it, my dear?”

My dear, being his wife, Helen, an exhausted blonde with attractively bad eyes, languidly agreed with her husband in a voice that proclaimed she wished to God it would go out occasionally, thus relieving her of the unexciting company of the military mustache for a short time at least.

“You’re a regular vestal virgin, Blake,” Tim retorted. “And I don’t intend to become one. No, not for any furnace.”

“Good!” put in Helen briskly. “Don’t become a vestal virgin. But tell us. What are you trying to become, Tim? From your attractive little costume I take it you’ve joined something pretty snappy.”

“I’d like to take a look at that furnace of yours,” cut in her husband in an executive voice he carried somewhere in the neighborhood of his boots.

“Go right ahead,” said Tim. “Take a look at it, but I won’t accompany you. If I see the miserable thing again I’ll slit its throat from ear to ear.”

“You know, old boy,” Carl Bentley observed, still being his whimsical self, “we had no idea you were building a fire. You looked as if you’d just been picking lilies.”

Nobody laughed much at this, and Bentley looked wistfully at the door leading to the hall. His stuff needed the right sort of audience, people who appreciated subtleness. Tim’s voice recalled him to the room.

“No,” he was saying quite seriously, “I really was building a fire. When I pick lilies it will be for a much more welcome occasion than this, but you won’t be alive to enjoy it.”

“Bur-r-r-r,” muttered the irrepressible Bentley, turning up his coat collar and going through an elaborate pantomime of a shivering man. “That ought to hold me for a while.”

Mr. Willows looked at him coldly, then turned to the others.

“And now,” he continued, “if you don’t mind I’d like to know how in hell you all got in here.”

“Oh, we don’t mind in the least,” drawled Vera Hutchens. “We were barging by like a bunch of lost scows and we thought we’d just drop in. Make a night of it. Break out the flasks, boys.”

“That was a no-good thought, Vera,” observed Tim slowly. “In fact it was just too bad. And that little part about making a night of it is all wet. It’s a washout. Don’t trouble about taking off your things. If you want to make a night of it why don’t you go out and build yourself a great, big snow man?”

“Oh, I say,” complained Carl Bentley. “This is no go. We’ve just dropped in, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” said Tim, grinning, “and you can just drop out again. And I don’t quite understand how you managed to drop in, to begin with. You must have damn well broken in. I locked the door myself.”

“Wrong again,” retorted Bentley in a gloating voice. “We were invited in most cordially.”

“And who was so ill-advised as to do a mad thing like that?” demanded Tim.

“Sally,” trumped Bentley.

Tim was momentarily stunned.

“Where do you get off calling my wife Sally?” he got out. “So far as I know you’ve only met her twice in your life.”

“You never can tell,” insinuated Vera. “It’s a small world, you know. Small and wicked, Tim.”

Tim cast the speaker a mean look.

“Viper!” he said. “You’d be writing poison-pen letters if you knew how to write.”

“Listen, Tim,” chimed in Helen. “Don’t be such a crab. We all live in the same town, don’t we?”

“Unfortunately we do,” snapped Tim. “Wish we didn’t. If we all lived on the same street, I suppose, according to your way of thinking, we’d be entitled to sleep with each other as a sort of neighborly gesture?”

“Something like that,” said Helen.

“How do you mean, something like that?” demanded Tim. “It must be that or nothing.”

“Oh,” replied Helen. “Is that the type of man you are? No half measures for you.”

“You can see that for yourself, my dear,” put in Vera. “Look how he’s dressed. Always ready for something to turn up.”

“Come, come!” exclaimed her husband, a thickset, well-dressed gentleman, solid, successful, and sly. Ted Hutchens felt that he had at least one valid claim on local immortality. He had played polo at the Westchester-Biltmore once and only once. “Come, come!” he repeated, as if rebuking a child, as he looked heavily at Tim Willows. The look and the admonition infuriated Tim.

“Go, go!” he shouted. “Everybody go. Get out. Beat it. Do you think I’m going to hide behind this curtain the whole damn night?”

“That was your own idea,” drawled Vera. “For my part I think you looked sweeter in your simple little shift.”

“Vera!” cried Mr. Hutchens.

“Sally!” exclaimed Carl Bentley. “At last.”

“Why are your voices raised in unseemly dissent?” asked Sally with easy good nature as she came gracefully into the room. “Oh, I see. It’s only Tim,” she continued, looking curiously at her husband. “You do look brisk, dear. I thought you’d died in that basement ages ago.”

Tim was bereft of words. He clutched at the curtain and stared at his wife. She was clad in a flaring pair of pajamas and was wearing a short, silly-looking little jacket that did not seem to mean anything. He recalled having seen such outfits featured in newspaper advertisements.

“Sally!” he called in a hoarse voice. “Are you walking in your sleep? Look at yourself.”

“What do you mean?” she retorted, sidling up close to the statuesque Mr. Bentley, who was looking at her with glowing eyes. “Why don’t you look at yourself?”

“I mean those things you’re wearing,” said Tim. “They’re not decent for public display. Go up immediately and put something on.”

“Don’t be dull, Tim,” his wife replied. “These are hostess pajamas. They are supposed to be worn on informal occasions. Just such occasions as this – among friends.”

“You’re putting it mildly,” replied Tim. “They don’t encourage friendship. They invite ruin.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” said Sally, smiling up slowly into Mr. Bentley’s eyes. “I’ve a remote idea myself that one seldom sleeps in them.”

Mr. Bentley favored his audience with a laugh not unlike a neigh, a significant sort of a neigh.

“All right!” cried Tim, thoroughly aroused by this little exchange. “I can play, too.” With this he stepped out from behind the portières and stood revealed to the company in his disheveled shirt. “This garment, ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, turning slowly round with his arms extended, “is what is known as a host’s slip-on. It may not look so good, but it’s a damn sight franker and more practical than my wife’s costume.”

Taking advantage of the small panic created by his sudden unveiling, Tim limped to a nearby table, from which he snatched a hip flask and helped himself to a powerful drink, a gesture which gave to his shirt an amusing frontal elevation. Amid the appreciative giggles of the women and the subdued expostulations of the men he turned his back on the company and, with as much dignity as he could command, limped painfully from the room, the shovel still in his hand and Dopey at his heels. In the hall he placed the shovel in the cane rack, to the everlasting humiliation of several snooty walking sticks, then slowly mounted the stairs, his modesty becoming more assailable the higher he proceeded. Even the violent slamming of the bedroom door failed to shut off from his ears the pent-up frenzy of a jazz orchestra avalanching from the radio. For a moment he stood looking irresolutely at the door, then, opening it a little, he listened, Dopey doing likewise.

“Whoopee!” came the hearty voice of Carl Bentley. “Come on, gang. Let’s go.”

“I wish to God you would,” muttered Mr. Willows. “You big, inane bastard. Having a real nice time, aren’t you? Seeing life in the suburbs. Wildfire! Aw, go to hell.”

Once more he closed the door, this time quietly, and, hobbling over to a cabinet, took from it a glass and a bottle of whiskey. Thus equipped he sought a chair and sat staring vacantly at Dopey sprawled out at his feet.

“It’s a good thing, stupid, you don’t drink,” he observed. “You’re sufficient of a damn fool just as you are.”

Dopey tried, but failed to understand. It didn’t matter. Everything was all right. He was comfortable.

“Listen,” continued his master, choking over his drink. “I’ve a good idea to get drunk and beat you up … within an inch of your useless life … to a pulp … a regular jelly.”

The dog’s snakelike tail thumped against the rug. His master was being funny. He was such a nice man. Dopey felt himself moved to kiss him, but was too comfortable to make the effort. Some other time. Wearily his eyes closed. He sighed. Things always worked out for the best.

Tim Willows arranged himself another drink and sat listening to the radio. Gradually his feet began to tap time with the music. He had forgotten about his toe. Too bad he was such an indifferent dancer. He’d like to take a fling himself occasionally.

“Obsolete,” he muttered gloomily. “Should be scrapped.”

Mr. Ram looked thoughtfully down on man and beast. He felt that he would like to do a little something also about this dog. There was too much of it.

CHAPTER THREE

Good Clean Fun

In the lounge below, everything was getting better and better. That is, if noise counted. Something in the nature of a celebration in joint honor of modern and ancient days was in progress. It was rather a loose, heavy-handed affair, but those present seemed to enjoy it. Figuratively speaking, Diana was dancing improperly on the belly of a prostrate Volstead, while Bacchus poured gin in his eye. This interesting blending of Dionysian and suburban rites was, as a matter of fact, nothing more nor less than a typical cocktail-necking party such as many find it necessary to attend in order to discover if sex still appeals. The Pagan and Christian eras endeavored to merge while still retaining the worst features of both. The result was an evening of nice clean fun. After all, what is a neck more or less, plus adjacent territory, among friends? Wives were not so much exchanged as released on short-term loans. This was the modern touch, the smart thing to do. The festivities over, these fair ladies would be returned to their husbands a little bit thumbed and dog-eared and more than a little drunk. It was one of those sportive occasions at which enmities are inevitably aroused and sordid recriminations incubated, for by the very nature of things there are few husbands and wives whose limits of conduct and powers of self-control register exactly the same. One or the other member of the tandem is sure to go too far. Then all hell pops.

Husbands and wives who intend to carry on together at all permanently should never attend the same cocktail-necking party unless one of them passes out and is unable to know what the other is doing. Otherwise it either cramps the style of both or furnishes the divorce courts with fresh customers.

Really, it’s the devil and all to be modern – much too much of a strain. It involves, oddly enough, a swift return to a primitive state of arboreal promiscuity. Few people can follow this path with linked hands and light hearts. Each side is too heavily weighted with inhibitions and prejudices. Each side is vainly endeavoring to nibble the icing of the cake in order to retain the whole. The result is rather crummy.

Into Mrs. Tim Willows’s party half a dozen fresh votaries had been introduced. They had been rung up and called in, and among them were a couple of unattached young women.

There is nothing like the presence of a couple of young women, unattached, among a number of not too old matrons to accelerate the tempo of a party. The young matrons were immediately put on their mettle when Joy Tucker and Agatha Green appeared. Then the married ladies started in to prove to the world that they had found in the matrimonial state a great deal more than they had lost. As a corollary of this they naturally had more to give. On the other hand the virgins hinted of fair but difficult, although not impassable, territory still unexplored. This, of course, was a challenge to the adventurous. Altogether it was a stimulating and healthy form of competition from which the males as usual profited, adding thereby to their already overflowing reservoirs of complacency.

Naturally there was little conversation. Under the most favorable circumstances there would have been little conversation. These people were not so constituted. However, everybody talked a great deal and shouted even more. Risqué stories which were neither risqué enough nor funny enough occasioned sporadic gales of laughter. And through it all, above and around it all, piercing the smoke and perfume and the good old American tang of gin, the tireless-tongued radio lashed dancing couples into fresh paroxysms of activity.

It was just as well that Tim Willows remained alone in his room save for the companionship of Dopey and Mr. Ram. To begin with, at such parties he was not so good. He generally drank too much and observed too much, and the more he drank the more he observed, until at last he saw things that were not there at all. Then, again, his ideas of necking were disconcertedly crude.… He believed in treating a girl like a human being entitled to an intelligent exchange of ideas. Frequently women who had been gamely prepared to offer almost unlimited necking facilities were surprised to find that they had actually been talking for at least half an hour with Tim Willows, and enjoying it. This rather frightened them. They became a trifle subdued. Several stiff drinks of gin were required to bring them back to their former state of carefree animalism. On the other hand, there had been several occasions when only the intervention of Sally and several husbands had prevented him from dragging some woman upstairs and teaching her what for, as the English insist on having it. He steadfastly refused to remember these occasions, claiming that he had been too far gone in his cups to know what he was doing. Tim Willows was too simple and direct a person to be a successful modern. He belonged to a vanished era when people talked and played and loved with effortless enjoyment.

For another reason it was just as well that Tim remained in his room. It was Carl Bentley’s evening. By tacit consent the women of the company had left that gentleman to Sally. He was her man. Not even the young women attempted to horn in. Had they tried, their efforts would have proved fruitless. Carl Bentley was now hot on the scent. He had put in some of his best work on Sally and he had reason to believe that his campaign would soon be crowned by a complete capitulation. Sally was the pick of the lot, by far the most desirable woman in town, with no exceptions.

So Carl Bentley danced with Sally, drank with Sally and whispered suggestively in Sally’s small pink ear. Above stairs Tim just drank and sought comfort in Kai Lung, than whom there is hardly a greater comforter, thanks to Ernest Bramah. When the unattached young women began to tap dance more with their abdomen than their toes, Bentley took advantage of the occasion. Everybody was present and accounted for, although neither clean nor sober.

“Sally,” said Mr. Bentley in a voice almost as low as his intentions, “let’s go out to the kitchen where there aren’t so many people. You can’t hear yourself think in here.”

Sally looked indifferently round the room and carelessly moved off kitchenward. The blood was racing in her veins and her head felt delightfully dizzy and confused. Nothing much mattered except a good time … a little life. This man, Bentley, was so much more dominating and possessive than Tim. She liked that. Tim, in spite of his horrid ways, was rather too much of a gentleman. He made no parade of virility. He did not endeavor to master her. Sally decided he was not quite big enough. She preferred the size of Carl Bentley. He could smother her, and at the moment she felt like being smothered. It must be said for Sally that she was far, far from being herself. Modern gin is not a good thing for good girls, although it is awfully good for bad ones. Carl Bentley, well knowing this, followed her with a bottle.

What happened in the kitchen is nobody’s business. It should be stated, though, that Tim Willows and his dog descended into the small pandemonium of the lounge only a few minutes after the disappearance of Sally and Carl Bentley. He was just in time to witness Vera Hutchens slapping her husband in the face because that unfortunate gentleman had remonstrated with her for kissing the same man too long and too often.

“He always gets like this,” she complained to the company at large. “Because he has a nasty mind he thinks everybody else is like him. Insults me, he does. Well, just to satisfy you, my dear,” – and here she laughed recklessly – “I’ll kiss him as much as I like and you won’t stop me.”

This she proceeded to do. Throwing herself into the arms of a tall, quiet person who was extremely well heeled with grog, she satisfied herself and her husband as well as the man she was kissing. It did not matter so much to the man. He hardly knew whom he was kissing. He was just kissing some woman and so far that was all right.

“Suburbia at play,” observed Tim in his quiet, sardonic voice. “Don’t you girls and boys ever learn any new games?”

Tim was regarded with interest, particularly by several women in the room. He had managed to struggle into a pair of pajama trousers and was wearing a magnificent dressing gown. His feet were encased in a pair of comfortably padded slippers. He had done things to his hair and tidied himself up generally. Few persons if any realized how binged Tim Willows really was.

“Carry on,” he continued pleasantly. “Some of you men who are able had better do something about Hutchens or we’ll be having a murder on our hands.”

This was nearly the truth. Hutchens, Vera, and the man of her choice were involved in an unseemly tussle. Vera was beginning to scream and cry, and the men were calling each other some pretty bad names. It was not a thing to see, yet at these parties it was always being seen.

Tim, whose dim but all-observing eyes had noted the absence of his wife and Carl Bentley, moved quietly toward the kitchen. Dopey, his ears flat against his head, followed fearfully. Quietly Tim passed through the pantry and opened the kitchen door. So engrossed was Bentley in his occupation that he failed to note the presence of an observer. Tim gazed thoughtfully at the man’s back for a moment, then, lifting Mrs. Twill’s heavy rolling pin from the rack close at hand, he brought it down violently on Mr. Bentley’s head. That misguided gentleman swayed gently on his feet, then crumpled to the floor.

“Sorry,” said Tim, looking coldly at a white-faced Sally, “but really, you know, the kitchen is no place for this sort of thing. One doesn’t play with fire here, one actually uses it. But, of course, you know nothing about that.”

He rummaged about in a drawer and produced a long, sharp knife. With this he approached the prostrate figure.

“My God, Tim,” breathed Sally as the room spun round and round her, “what are you going to do?”

Tim was cold white drunk and his words seemed to proceed from an ice box rather than from a man’s chest.

“I’m going to cut his damn head clean off,” he told his wife, “and throw it in the faces of your friends. That will teach them to behave themselves – fighting and screaming and semi-fornicating all over my house … what a way, what a way. Yes, off goes this one’s head. Want to kiss it goodbye while it’s still on?”

With a shuddering cry Sally dropped to her knees beside the still figure of Mr. Bentley. She placed a hand over his heart and looked up at her husband with a drawn face.

“Tim,” she said at last, “you’ve killed him. His heart has stopped beating and he isn’t breathing any more.”

This information considerably sobered Tim. He walked over to the kitchen table and picked up a bottle of gin, from which he drank deeply. After this he passed it to Sally, who followed his example.

“Lock the door,” he said, and seated himself on the table.

Sally obeyed and then seated herself beside her husband. Together they gazed down upon the victim of the rolling pin.

“He wasn’t much of a guy,” observed Tim, hoping thereby to comfort his wife.

“I know,” replied Sally, “but if every guy that wasn’t much was murdered there wouldn’t be many guys left.”

“I wouldn’t mind that,” said Tim. “What did you want to go messing round with him for?”

“He was all right,” answered Sally. “Big and strong and passionate. You know how it is.”

“Yes,” said Tim rather gloomily. “I know how it was. Did you like him better than me?”

“No, not so much, but a girl gets that way on gin.”

“Sally, these parties are rotten things. This should teach us a lesson.” Tim looked at her seriously.

“Sure they are. I’m through with all of it,” said Sally. “Everything.”

“So is he – through for good, and so am I.”

Sally passed him the bottle and Tim drank mechanically. So did Sally. Both of them by this time were quite too numbed to realize the seriousness of what had happened.

“Guess you’re a murderer, Tim,” said Sally at last.

“Sure I am,” agreed Tim. “A confirmed murderer. What do you do in such cases? Telephone the police or just send for an undertaker and try to sneak him into a grave?”

“They’d be the last persons I’d telephone to,” replied Sally. “Under the circumstances.”

“Which are murder,” added Tim with almost morbid enjoyment.

“Murder most foul,” Sally managed to extract from some dim recess of her memory.

“He certainly does look murdered,” reflected Tim. “Never saw a man look quite so dead. And just to think he was kissing hell out of you only a short time ago. By rights you should be stretched out beside him.”

“If you’re not more careful of what you’re saying I’ll turn you over to the police,” replied his wife. “That would be a good joke on you.”

“You’ve got a hot sense of humor. What are we going to do with his nibs?”

Sally took a sip from the bottle and considered this in silence. From the lounge came the clatter of the radio and the hubbub of many voices.

“Bury him,” she said at last. “That’s what they do with bodies. They bury them.”

Mr. Willows regarded the erstwhile Carl Bentley distastefully.

“We’d have to dig a regular Panama Canal to tuck that body in,” he observed. “Why didn’t you philander with a dwarf if you had to amuse yourself?”

“Wish I had now,” said Sally. “By the time we’ve finished a trench for this one, the neighbors will think we’re getting ready for a barbecue.”

“A quaint whimsy,” murmured Tim. “The bottle, please.”

While Tim was drinking, the handle of the kitchen door rattled violently and a man’s voice called out, “What goes on in there, a murder or something?”

“Something,” called back Sally. “Go away and rattle another door.”

“Oh, Sally,” came a girl’s voice. “What we know about you.”

“What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” murmured Sally.

“That wisecrack about murder wasn’t so dulce,” remarked Mr. Willows. “We should be doing something about this body of ours. So far we’re safe. Dopey was the only other witness and he crammed himself so deep in his box I doubt if he saw anything. He hasn’t opened his eyes since. Guess he never will. Dogs don’t like murders.”

“Well, I don’t exactly gloat over them myself,” said Sally. “Somehow or other I don’t feel like the wife of a murderer, but never having been the wife of a murderer before, of course I don’t know. How do you feel?”

“Just like a murderer,” was Tim’s moody reply. “Like Landru, Bluebeard, and Jack the Ripper. That’s how I feel.”

“It must be awful.”

“It is. Break out another bottle, Sally.”

Sally went to the cupboard and extracted from its recesses another bottle of gin. Tim opened it and drank.

“Ugh!” he muttered. “Rotten stuff. At least he won’t have a hangover.”

“Yes,” said Sally, reaching for the bottle. “He’s got you to thank for that.”

“You know,” observed her husband, “what gets the best of me is that we’re taking this murder altogether too calmly. From the way we sit here and discuss it you’d think we polished off some guy every night of our lives.”

“It’s the gin,” explained Sally, nodding wisely. “And then again, people make too much fuss about murders. They’re not nearly so bad as they’re painted. I’ve felt much more upset over a game of bridge.”

“You’re heartless as hell. One of us should feel sorry for this body.”

“Oh, I feel sorry for it, but that doesn’t help any. It was a good body.”

“You seemed to enjoy it.”

Sally looked at him reproachfully.

“Don’t rub it in,” she said. “I’ll never have anything to do again with any person’s body except yours.”

“And you won’t have much to do with that if we don’t get rid of this one.”

“I’m too dizzy to start in grave-digging right now,” complained Sally. “Wow! I can hardly stand. Let’s put it in the basement for the time being. No one goes down there but yourself.”

“That,” replied Tim admiringly, “is what I call a swell idea. We’ll hide the beggar in the basement.”

And hide the beggar they did. It was not a pretty sight to see as they pushed and dragged the body across the floor. Dopey, aroused by the noise, took one horrified look at what was going on, then disappeared from view. He decided to give the incident a miss. One had to draw the line somewhere.

Difficulties arose on the basement steps. They were steep steps, and Sally, who had gone first, found Mr. Bentley’s feet pressing with undue emphasis against the pit of her stomach. She felt herself being shoved off into space.

“Can’t you hold this body?” she gasped. “I can’t stand its feet.”

“What’s wrong with his feet?” Mr. Willows inquired in an interested voice.

“There’s nothing wrong with his feet, you repellent ass,” replied Sally. “They’re coming down too fast, that’s all. Hold on to the body.”

“Can’t do it,” groaned Tim. “It’s too much. I can’t hold on to my own body. Do you think you could hang on while I got a drink of gin?”

“Listen, sweetie,” said Sally. “This isn’t my murder, you know. It’s all yours. If you don’t stick around now I’ll wash my hands of the body and call the whole show off. You can have the body.”

“I don’t want the body,” replied Tim.

“Well, you can’t wish it upon me. Do you think I want the body?”

“No,” replied Tim. “But someone must want a body. I wonder who?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Sally. “You can’t go round asking people if they happen to want a body.”

“I guess not,” admitted Tim. “They might ask me how I got the body in the first place.”

“Exactly. And then where would you be?”

“I’d be rid of the body if they wanted it.”

“But who wants a dead body, I’d like to know?”

“Well, I don’t, for one,” declared Tim emphatically. “I’m tired of dead bodies. Wish to God I’d never killed this one.”

“Are we going to stand here all night in idle conversation?” asked Sally.

Tim was not standing. By this time he had flattened himself on his stomach and was clinging with aching fingers to the shoulders of the much discussed body. Dopey, who had been unable to restrain his curiosity, mistook his master’s strange behavior for alluring indications of playfulness. Evidently everything was all right, thought the dog. That terrible still figure was going. Quietly he emerged from his box and with one bound landed in the middle of Mr. Willows’s back. With a cry of utter horror Tim momentarily released his grip and the body began to slip.

“Hey!” called Sally. “What are you trying to do?”

Her question was never answered. Mr. Willows was too busy. Desperately he seized the body again, but it was too late. Mr. Bentley had evidently decided to take matters into his own hands without any further shillyshallying. He began to descend purposefully into the darkness of the basement. Tim Willows was right behind him with Dopey on his back.

“I’m done for,” panted Sally as the pressure of Mr. Bentley’s feet grew irresistible. “Here I go and here it comes.”

She abandoned all further effort and the body descended swiftly upon her as she slid down the steps. Mr. Willows and Dopey were close behind and then on top.

“I’m through,” came Sally’s discouraged voice in the darkness. “You might as well bury me too. There’s not a whole bone in my body.”

“Dopey did it,” declared her husband. “Damn him.”

“Whether Dopey did it or President Hoover, the result would be just the same,” said Sally. “I’m a gone girl, that’s all I know. Heave this body off and let me die in peace.”

It was a ghastly position to be lying there in the darkness on and under a dead body with a demented dog scraping briskly about the place. Neither Sally nor Tim ever forgot it. It was one of the low lights of their lives.

Tim staggered to his feet and, after some painful groping, switched on the light. Then he bestowed upon the rump of Dopey one of the most venomous kicks ever received by a dog. After he had rolled Mr. Bentley off Sally and lifted her to her feet, they both stood swaying above the body and gazed down at it with reproachful eyes.

“That’s no way for a body to act,” complained Tim. “It’s more dangerous than a thing of life.”

“Well, if that rolling pin didn’t finish him this certainly has,” remarked Sally. “Let’s get the cadaver out of the way. I’m sick of the very sight of it.”

“Hadn’t we better cover it up in the coal bin?” suggested her husband.

“Not a bad idea after all we’ve been through,” remarked Sally. “Between us we’d make one competent murderer.”

Between them and with the interference of Dopey, who had come to regard the body with jovial familiarity, they succeeded in dragging the remains of Mr. Bentley into the coal bin. Tim Willows found a shovel and began to sprinkle coal over the unpleasant object.

“This is awful,” he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead. “I can hardly bring myself to do it. If people only knew how much trouble a murder involves they’d resort to some other method.”

“You should have killed him outside the house,” replied Sally, “or in his own bed.”

“You’re worse than Lady Macbeth,” retorted Mr. Willows, with a slight shudder. “By rights you should be taking this murder very much to heart, yet here you go complaining because I didn’t kill him in his own bed. I could never do a thing like that.”

“Why not?”

“What, wake a chap up only to put him to sleep for good? Horrible.”

“Why wake him up?”

Mr. Willows paused, with shovel lifted, and looked at his wife.

“Hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted. “But just the same it doesn’t seem such a nice way to murder a person.”

“And I suppose you consider whanging a man over the head with a rolling pin, shooting him down a flight of steps, and then sprinkling him liberally with coal is a nice way to do him in?”

“No, I don’t,” replied Tim, “and that’s a fact, but you see, this is my first murder and I didn’t have any time to plan it. It just happened on the spur of the moment, so to speak. In I come and down he goes. He dies and I’m a murderer. It seems too damn simple to suit me.”

“Then order your murders better in the future,” said Sally. “Do hurry up. I’m getting the horrors down here. The gin is wearing off.”

“Keep the damn dog out of my way. He’s trying to dig this body out,” replied Tim.

Moved by a sudden inspiration he pulled off Mr. Bentley’s shoes, then proceeded to submerge him in coal until the last of the body was seen. He was about to turn away when he paused hesitantly.

“Shouldn’t we say a little something?” he asked Sally. “Some sort of prayer.”

“Name one,” challenged that young lady.

“Well, I don’t know exactly,” he hedged. “Seems sort of cold-blooded to leave him here without some little thought. How about, ‘Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep’?”

Sally laughed unpleasantly.

“He didn’t lay him down, dearie,” she explained. “He was jolly well bashed down.”

“We might pray to God to forgive him for making me a murderer,” suggested Mr. Willows.

“He’s your responsibility, not mine,” said Sally indifferently. “Go ahead and take the matter up with God. I’m going to get a drink before I throw a fit.”

“You’re a hard woman, Sally,” murmured Tim regretfully, “but perhaps a drink would be the best thing after all.”

Picking up the shoes of the departed Bentley, he switched out the light and followed his wife up the steps to the kitchen. Dopey sought his box while they sought the bottle.

“Now,” said Tim with satisfaction, “you’re as much a murderer as I am. You’re an accessory after the fact. We can both get the chair. What do you think of that?”

“I don’t think so much of that, you worm,” she answered. “As a matter of fact, I think so little of that that I’ve a good mind to go in right now and call up the police.”

“That would make you a squealer,” Tim informed her scornfully.

“What do I care?” she retorted. “I’ll squeal like a pig if I feel like it.”

“Go on and squeal like a pig,” said her husband. “Squeal like a couple of pigs, for all I care.”

“I can’t squeal like a pig,” Sally replied sadly. “I don’t know how. Give me another spot of gin or I’ll squeal like a mouse.”

“Then,” said Mr. Willows, passing his wife the bottle, “the wisest thing that you can do is to go back to that bunch of drunken morons and make out that Bentley’s gone home. Tell ’em he left by the back way and that I’ve gone to bed. Get his coat and hat out of sight as quickly as possible, then break up the party. I’m going to put on those shoes and make misleading tracks in the snow. Lock the kitchen door and remove the key after you. I’ll lock the back door when I return.”

The moment the winter night struck Mr. Willows full in the face, reason forsook him. For a long time he wandered round in the snow, leaving what he hoped were misleading tracks in his wake, but presently he forgot all about this, and finding himself standing in front of a house of vaguely familiar aspect, and suddenly realizing he was exceedingly cold, he mounted the steps and unceremoniously entered the front door. In the vestibule he dimly remembered that a very pretty woman lived in this house, a Mrs. Claire Meadows, whose husband was ever absent and whose moral and social status was ever a subject of interest to those who had little interest left in life. He had met this shapely, vivid-lipped creature on several occasions and on this occasion he met her again.

As he entered the softly illuminated sitting room he saw her lying in nothing very much on a large divan. Eyes, lips, and silk stockings formed his first impression. Gradually he became aware of an aura of flame-colored hair and a dead white throat.

“Hello,” she said rather huskily. “I knew you would come sometime.”

“How’d you know that?” asked Tim suspiciously.

“Because you’re the most interesting man in town and I’m the most interesting woman,” he was told. Then she caught sight of his feet, burdened as they were with the huge shoes of a dead man. “God in heaven!” she exclaimed. “Why the Charlie Chaplin effect and why the pajamas and dressing robe? Did you come here to sleep, by chance?”

“Yes,” replied Mr. Willows. “By chance.”

She watched him with her deep blue shadow-touched eyes as he crossed the room and picked up the book she had been reading.

“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” he read, seating himself beside her as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “I’ve always liked that book. I’m glad you do too. I like you, you know.”

“I need a little liking,” she said in a low voice. “I don’t deserve it, perhaps, but that doesn’t keep me from needing it. This world is not overkind. I much prefer Alice’s.”

He reached out and stroked the cool skin of her white throat, and all the time the woman’s eyes were upon him. Her hands lay open at her sides, their palms upturned.

When Tim Willows left the house of Mrs. Claire Meadows some time later he had completely demolished still another commandment, for, as has been previously suggested, Tim Willows could not tolerate half measures.

“I feel that someone is dreaming me,” she said as he left, “and that when the dreamer awakes I won’t be here any more.”

“When you awake,” he told her, “perhaps I, too, shall be gone.”

Sally was in bed and peacefully sleeping when Tim turned into his. His mind was in utter confusion, filled with blank and vivid patches, with slowly revolving colors that comforted and accused. The events of the night formed themselves before his eyes and whirled blindingly like some weird effect seen on the screen. His thoughts were drugged to sleep.

A few hours later when the light was dirtily dim he awoke to find a tall, ghastly figure standing by his bed. The figure was wavering unsteadily as if moved by a spirit wind. Tim recognized the figure only too well, but no face of a living man could be as white as the face that Carl Bentley held down to him now. Tim was electrified with horror. He was shocked even more when words came out of the face … dull, mumbled words with a far-off sound.

“Move over,” moaned the apparition. “Move over. I must lie down.”

“Move over?” said Tim incredulously. “Me move over? Good God! I’ll do more than that. I’ll move clean out. You can have the whole damn bed.”

He sat up with a springlike snap and the figure started back, its eyes fixed with terror on the face of Tim Willows. A sudden, fearful memory gripped the tall, wavering shape. The face it saw was the face of a man it associated with the most deadly peril – death itself. One wild shriek pierced the silence as the figure turned with fluttering hands and fled from the room. Sally woke up in time to see it go. Immediately she disappeared beneath the coverings at which her husband was clawing with frenzied fingers.

“Oh-o-o-o-o dear, good little God, what was that?” she chattered. “Don’t pull those covers down. Stop it! Stop, I tell you!”

“I’ve got to pull those covers down,” said Tim, tremulously. “That horror actually wanted to get in bed with me. Imagine that. He might come back and try to do it again.”

“But if he sees you over here,” she protested, “he might follow and try to get in.”

“He won’t get a chance to see me,” said Tim, “and if he does we’ll just tell him flat there isn’t any more room.”

“You’ll tell him,” retorted Sally, letting her husband in. “I’ll have nothing to do with a ghost, particularly with one of your making.”

Tim pulled the covers securely over his head.

“Of all the nerve,” he murmured. “The appalling thing tried to get me to move over.”

“Pretty clubby for a man you’ve just murdered,” said Sally. “Magnanimous, I calls it. Sinister.”

“Shut up! He mightn’t know.”

“Spirits know all,” said Sally bleakly.

“Perhaps this one is dumb,” replied Tim, reaching for a straw. “I hope to God we’re still squiffed and merely imagining things. Of all the damned nights.”

Mr. Ram gazed disapprovingly down upon the headless bed. Things were getting out of hand … going far too far.

CHAPTER FOUR

Mr. Gibber Leaves the Room

Tim Willows’s pious hope that he was imagining things fell far short of fulfillment. Not only was it totally disregarded, but also virtually flung in his face.

Rising with a clamorous head the next morning, he gulped down some coffee, and leaving Sally still painfully sleeping, rushed from the house and along the too familiar ways that led to the station. He had had neither the time nor the inclination to visit the body in the bin. Sally would have to see to that. He scarcely cared whether she saw to it or not. Tim Willows was so nauseatingly sick and disgusted that he would have greatly preferred a quiet cell in the death house to a weary day at the office.

Of all the ghastly trips he had ever made to the station – and he had made many – this morning’s was by all odds the most like that. Never before had he achieved such abject and unqualified depths of physical, mental, and spiritual demoralization. Never before had he carried to the office such consciousness of guilt and awareness of impending evil. His body was sick and his soul was sick. He was unable to meet the eyes of the meanest of living creatures. Think as he would, he could find no redeeming quality within himself nor could he see any hope of salvation in the future. The sky ahead was drenched with ink and aggressively sinister. Soon it would swoop silently down and blot him out – smother him lingeringly. One circumstance alone saved him from going completely mad and running around in frenzied circles before the disapproving eyes of his fellow commuters. He was too physically debilitated to care a great deal whether or not he was a murderer. His mind had not yet had the opportunity to grasp the terrible significance of what he had done. That would come later in all its stark, blinding reality. Yes, there were many unpleasant things Tim Willows had to face. At the moment his reactions were merely mechanical. His conduct was dictated by sheer force of habit. Automatically he moved and thought, and with the nice instinct of a sick animal he isolated himself as well as he could from the main body of commuters exhaling frosty puffs along the station platform. A through train swept by. It was headed in the opposite direction, leaving New York behind. There was a dumb appeal in Tim’s eyes as he watched the swift passage of that train. He wished he himself were aboard it, bound away to parts unknown.

A few minutes later his own train glided in and came to a clanking stop. Like a man voluntarily approaching his own doom he climbed wearily aboard, found a seat next to a window, and arranged the protective screen of his newspaper round the upper half of his body. So far he had successfully avoided exchanging a word of greeting with a single acquaintance. He prayed that his Jovian aloofness would remain inviolate.

“Well, here goes nothing,” he said to himself as the train pulled out. “I wonder who’s missing Mr. Bentley now? Probably the whole damn lot of them.”

He had been such a hale and hearty commuter, Bentley, one of the most depressing types. And back home in the coal bin Mr. Bentley’s body was getting worse and worse. Involuntarily Tim shuddered. That lifeless body was looming larger on his horizon. It was taking more definite shape and growing more fraught with menace. Slow waves of horror churned up the nausea within his system. Print swam before his aching eyes as he strove to return to reason through the medium of an advertisement announcing a drastic reduction in the price of fur coats. Sally needed a new coat. She could wear it to the trial. A woman with a soft white throat, and a figure that shrieked in the night. Why had there been no blood?

A heavy man sank down beside him and Tim edged over closer to the window. He dreaded the sound of a voice, but no voice was forthcoming, only a ponderous sigh. Apparently his companion was mortally weary. Tim vaguely wondered what could be the nature of the trouble that had produced such a sigh. Another one fell like a swooning body on the lap of his meditations. This was awful. The man must have committed a whole series of murders. Probably wiped out an entire family. Decapitated it. Tim feared that if the man did not stop sighing he would begin to sigh himself. Then he decided that he had not sufficient energy to heave even the ghost of a sigh. The mere business of breathing was difficult enough. His lungs felt burdened. Not so his companion’s. His lungs continued to bellow forth sighs of increasingly tragic mournfulness. Tim had never heard such sighs. They seemed to proceed from the grave itself. He turned his eyes to the snow-patched fields and tried to forget the sounds. But no one could forget such sighs. They made themselves felt as well as heard. They were the palpable expression of misery. Unable to bear up under them any longer Tim turned from the window and appealingly confronted the man. One glance was all that was needed to galvanize him into panic-stricken action. Apparently the man’s reactions were exactly those of Tim’s. Both made a convulsive effort to remove themselves from the seat with the utmost possible speed. Both were pale and trembling. Both were desperate men. Their minds were so thoroughly atrophied that they failed to realize that if either one of them would only remain quietly seated the other would most willingly withdraw. As it was, in their passionate scramble they effectively succeeded in wedging each other inextricably in the narrow space. Perhaps no two men in all the world were less desirous of such propinquity. Tim’s haggard face thrust itself out into the aisle as if detached from the rest of his body. The man’s feet were shuffling busily on the floor of the car. He was running in spirit if not in body. He wanted to run with both.

“Water!” gasped Tim, to anyone who might happen to be theoretically interested in thirsts. “Wanna get water.”

“Water!” inanely babbled his companion, apparently too far gone to think up anything for himself. “Must go get some water.”

“Then I don’t want any,” said Tim hurriedly. “I’m not thirsty. You go get water.”

“I can’t,” panted the man. “You’re holding me back,”

“Holding you back?” exploded Tim with a short hysterical laugh. “I wouldn’t touch a hand to your mouldering body for all the gold in the mint.”

“That’s all right, then,” said Mr. Bentley, sinking back on the seat and carrying Tim along with him. “I thought you were going to strike me.”

The sudden revulsion of feelings caused by finding alive and kicking the man he had thought to be lying at that moment stark dead in his coal bin moved Tim profoundly. Even now he was not sure of his ground, yet it must be so. Spirits did not get wedged between seats or try to escape the blows of mere mortals. No, Carl Bentley was real enough, and Tim Willows almost collapsed on the spot under the stress of his emotions.

“Strike you?” he managed to blurt out. “I haven’t the slightest desire to do such a thing. I’d much rather hug you.”

“Don’t do that,” said Mr. Bentley stiffly. “You’ve done quite enough to me already.”

“All right,” replied Tim rather humbly. “I won’t, but are you sure you’re not murdered?”

“No,” said Mr. Bentley. “I’m not sure. I might die at any minute. I feel that way. I feel very much that way, let me tell you.”

Tim considered this information for a moment and took comfort in it.

“I’ll let you tell me,” he observed at last. “And you can die at any minute for all I care just as long as you’re out of my coal bin. I wouldn’t mind it at all. As a matter of fact, I’d like to see you die. I’d enjoy it.”

“Don’t work yourself up to a pitch,” the other put in hastily. “I feel very, very ill.”

“I will work myself up to a pitch,” retorted Mr. Willows. “I’ll work myself up to a terrific pitch. What the hell do you mean messing round with my wife?”

“That is easily explained,” replied Mr. Bentley. “It was all a mistake. Simply and truly a dreadful mistake.”

Tim Willows laughed nastily.

“I hope you discovered your mistake,” he said.

“Oh, I did,” the other replied. “The moment I came to and found myself buried beneath a lot of nasty coal I knew some mistake had been made.”

“It had,” remarked Mr. Willows. “I should have put on more coal.”

“Well, I managed to dig myself out somehow and to crawl upstairs. My head ached terribly.”

“Good,” quoth Tim feelingly.

Ignoring his companion’s elation Carl Bentley went on with his story.

“I was terribly confused,” he said. “Nearly dead. Quite actually nearly dead. You can imagine. To come to one’s senses beneath a pile of coal in total darkness and with a head that feels twice its normal size is not an agreeable sensation.”

“That’s what happens to men who get gay with my wife,” Tim Willows told him. “That and worse.”

Mr. Bentley chose to disregard this unfriendly remark also.

“There was a bottle of gin on the kitchen table,” he continued, “and I finished off what was left of it.”

“I must have overlooked that,” observed Tim regretfully.

“Yes, it was there,” said Carl Bentley, “and I drank it. But the doors were locked and I had no shoes. No shoes at all. Have you seen my shoes by any chance, Willows?”

“One can hardly help seeing them,” replied Tim. “Go on with your story.”

“Well, I went up the back stairs,” Bentley resumed, “and then my mind must have gone blank. I don’t remember anything after that. Apparently I contrived to get home somehow, but I was minus my hat, overcoat, and shoes.”

“You tried to get in bed with me,” said Tim accusingly.

“Then I must have been drunk,” Mr. Bentley declared. “Couldn’t tell one bed from the other.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?” demanded Tim.

“Nothing,” said the other hastily. “Absolutely nothing. Don’t know what could have made me say it. I’m still frightfully confused and upset and all. For God’s sake don’t work yourself up to another pitch, old man. I’m not strong enough to stand it.”

“Pitch, me eye,” muttered Tim. “I’d like to pitch you out in the middle of the aisle. That’s what you deserve.”

“Don’t do it,” pleaded Mr. Bentley. “I beg of you not to do it. You should be grateful to me for freeing you from the stigma of murder.”

“I have your thick skull to thank for that.”

“Yet the skull belongs to me.”

“But you’re not responsible for its thickness.”

“Then you can’t blame me for that.”

“For what?”

Mr. Bentley looked perplexed.

“I don’t quite know myself,” he replied. “I seem to have lost the thread.”

“Damn if I know what we’re talking about,” said Tim Willows. “Don’t let’s talk.”

“Perhaps it would be better,” agreed Carl Bentley. “Then you won’t work yourself up to a pitch.”

“That doesn’t matter at all,” snapped Mr. Willows. “I can work myself up to a pitch whether I talk or not.”

“Try not to,” murmured Bentley soothingly. “Be calm. You don’t look at all well.”

“Is that so?” retorted Mr. Willows brightly. “Well, you look fit for a hospital, yourself – you and your stomach-ripping sighs.”

“Better that than an inquest,” said Carl Bentley significantly.

With an inner tremor Tim turned back to the window and allowed Carl Bentley to have the last word. The man was right. His, Tim’s, escape had been a narrow one. Just an ounce or two more energy behind Mrs. Twill’s time-honored rolling pin and he would be sitting there a full-fledged murderer, a murderer with hardly any prospects of escape. Sick as he was he still felt that it was good to be at large and alive. Accordingly it was a greatly relieved Mr. Willows who dismissed Carl Bentley with a wave of his hand at the station and made his way up Park Avenue to the office building in which the Nationwide Advertising, Inc. awaited whatever it might devour.

The layout of this flourishing establishment was designed to submerge the ego of the most arrogant of mortals. If any caller chanced to have a wee bit of an inferiority complex lurking about his system the atmosphere of this place immediately brought it to full bloom. On entering the offices a prospective client who had been prepared to spend fifty thousand dollars in advertising hastily decided to spend at least fifty thousand more for fear of being snubbed by the reception clerk, cut by the office boy, and sneered at by the president’s secretary.

Everything was gorgeous. Everything was superior. Rich leather, subdued lighting, and wrought-iron work merged themselves into endless vistas of harmonious opulence relieved here and there by a slightly exotic touch of color. One gained the impression that unlike almost any other kind of writing the creation of advertisements required an environment of ease and refinement.

It was into this environment that Tim Willows stepped, feeling neither at ease nor consciously refined.

“Good-morning, baby,” he said to a gorgeous girl at a gorgeous desk. “I’d like to use the lounge in your rest room if none of the girls objects.”

“You’re not a good man, Mr. Willows,” she told him. “You’re a bad, bad man. I’m sorry about you.”

“Then give me a spot of something, sweetheart, or I’ll die right here before your eyes on this lousily gorgeous Persian rug.”

The girl gave him a critical look, then, opening a drawer in her desk, hastily poured some whiskey from a pint flask into a paper cup, which she passed to Tim.

“Go over to the cooler,” she said in level tones, “and pretend you’re getting a drink of water.”

“Thanks,” answered Tim, eagerly seizing the cup. “I already know the technique thoroughly.”

He tossed off the drink, crumpled up the evidence, and accepted a mint tablet from his calm-eyed benefactress.

“I wouldn’t have done that for everyone,” she told him.

“And you’re quite right, too,” agreed Tim Willows. “The rest of these copy writers are a lot of dogs. Don’t have a thing to do with them. Don’t give them an inch. Just me.”

“Don’t hang around here any longer,” she said. “You look like the devil today. I wish you’d behave yourself for a couple of months. Better pretend you have a bad cold.”

When he had gone the girl gazed musingly at the spot where he had been.

“All the interesting ones get married,” she thought, “and all of the interesting ones are bad, thoroughly bad. He isn’t really bad, though. He just doesn’t understand about morals. He’s too good for this place. He doesn’t belong here.”

Meanwhile Tim, no little resuscitated, tossed his hat and coat at a friendly office boy and joined a file of his confreres making its way into the conference room.

“What’s up?” he asked Steve Jones. “Are we praying for rain and prosperity this morning?”

“Same old thing,” replied Steve bitterly. “Just talk, talk, talk. The Old Man’s getting gaga. Damned if I know what it’s all about. You’ve been drinking.”

He looked at Tim with an enviously accusing eye.

“Lots,” agreed that gentleman. “I’ve been through a great deal, Steve. Altogether too much.”

“And you’re going through a lot more,” muttered Steve, “before he’s finished with us.”

They passed into the handsomely appointed conference room and found seats at a long table, at the end of which stood Mr. Gibber beaming good-morningly.

Mr. Gibber was a large man. He gave one the impression of being almost too large a man. He had a large, well-fed face coated with an expensively acquired tan. Mr. Gibber collected tans. He brought them back with him from diverse parts of the globe he so ornately decorated. He brought back his tans from Bermuda, from Florida, and from various sections of the Riviera.

“There’s nothing like travel,” he would tell various members of his staff, “to keep a man physically fit and mentally alert. I wish we could all run across to the Continent at least once a year. But everything comes with time – with time and hard work.”

“How true,” Tim had once replied to this optimistic utterance. “Even death itself. You know, Mr. Gibber, they tell me that all good Americans go to Paris when they die. Perhaps that’s how we’ll get there.”

Mr. Gibber was not amused.

And Mr. Gibber had hands. Large, brown hands that he rubbed and rerubbed. He was always immaculately dressed, impeccably manicured, and crisply groomed. It was almost as if he wanted to prove to the world that he was a clean man with nice, neat habits.

Tim regarded the man with something akin to affectionate contempt, and Mr. Gibber returned his gaze with the tolerance of one who realized it was in his power to discharge the impertinent young puppy on the spot. As he looked at the gentlemen seated round the table Mr. Gibber’s eyes seemed to be saying, “I bought that new tie for you. Those socks are indirectly mine. And you there, down at the end, had it not been for me you’d never have got that suit of clothes. You’re all mine, the whole lot of you, down to your very drawers.”

However, he greeted them all with what he fondly believed to be just the right balance of benign paternalism and presidential authority. Behind his most sunny words there always seemed to lurk the suggestion of a sudden cold snap with thin days ahead. He played, for all there was in it, the part of the upper dog.

“Gentlemen,” he began this morning. “Fellow workers in this vast organization. Men of the Nationwide Advertising Agency – and that includes you, Miss Meades, ha ha, ahem – hope you don’t mind – where was I? Oh, yes – co-creators of national prosperity,” Mr. Gibber’s voice dropped impressively, “We must not waste words. Words are valuable. The flashing wings of thought. We must not waste them.”

Mr. Gibber then proceeded to give a loquacious dissertation on the virtues of brevity. Leaning far over the table on which his hands were spread, he swayed slightly from the vibrations of his powerfully controlled emotions.

“Nationwide Advertising Agency,” he repeated with almost sinister intensity. “Men, do you get the full significance of that? Do you realize what it means – nation wide – those two words? Do you grasp it?” Here Mr. Gibber grasped it, opened his clenched fingers and examined it, then, with a forceful gesture, flung it rather rudely in the faces of his listeners. “It means this exactly,” he continued with awful calmness. “Take the nation in all its length. Take the nation in all its breadth. Take the nation in all its thickness.” He looked piercingly round to assure himself that everyone had taken the nation in the manner he had suggested. “Then take this organization,” he went on. “Take it in all its ramifications and superimpose it upon the nation. It means, men, putting the two together, that we’re just as wide as it. Sitting here in this gorgeously appointed room we are exactly as wide as America. Hence our name – the Nationwide Advertising Agency.”

Mr. Gibber sat down with disconcerting suddenness and tried to look exactly as wide as the nation. He very nearly succeeded. He did look almost as thick. In the face of such a huge conception the members of his staff appeared considerably shrunken. Having achieved the desired effect and for certain reasons of policy having to do with the discouraging of requests for raises it now pleased Mr. Gibber to look both severe and injured.

“Now, gentlemen,” he resumed, rising to his feet and towering above them, “I hate to say it. I’m actually ashamed to say it, but I fear, I very much fear, all of you have been wasting words. Mr. Bunce informs me that of late the copy mortality has been alarmingly high.” Pause. “Dangerously high.” Another pause. “Disgracefully high.” A most portentous pause. “This can’t go on. There will have to be changes. You have ceased to look for the fundamental idea upon which every campaign and every piece of copy in that campaign should be based and must be based. Words have been wasted – squandered shamefully. You have done it, this thing.”

Like criminals the men of the Nationwide Advertising Agency looked at the outraged Gibber, then accusingly at one another. Who had been wasting all those words? Who had been squandering Mr. Gibber’s most precious commodity? Tim Willows felt that he could do with a great deal less of what was going on. His head was full of rebellious thoughts and stale fumes of gin. Surely this man Gibber deserved to be murdered most brutally and finally. There was no justification for his continued presence on earth. The man was speaking again. He had them all at his mercy. Tim groaned spiritually as well as physically.

“Men,” resumed Mr. Gibber, “brevity is the breath of conviction, terseness the bone, and briskness the blood.”

He interrupted himself at this point to jot down a note about his last utterance. It was good, he thought. Good enough for that book he was writing, that sensational book showing how Christianity had been handicapped and its rapid spread retarded because the Nationwide Advertising Agency had not been in existence during the time of Christ. His note finished, Mr. Gibber fixed the table with a threatening eye.

“Now listen to me,” he said slowly and distinctly. “I want more punch in your copy. I want more hooks and” – he pawed the air as if sifting it for the right word – “I want more pith.”

Mr. Gibber’s last want almost finished Tim Willows. He fixed the man with round, incredulous eyes and asked in his blandest manner: “You want more what, sir?”

Mr. Gibber hesitated, then faced the situation like a man.

“I said pith,” he replied with painful distinctness. “I want more pith. I must have more pith.”

“You mean the stuff that goes into helmets?” Tim continued innocently.

Mr. Gibber’s thoughts were somewhat confused. Tim’s unexpected question had thrown him off his stride.

“What do you mean?” demanded Gibber gropingly. “Only heads go into helmets.”

“I know,” said Tim. “Only heads should go into helmets, but lots of things could go into them, things like pith and all.”

“How should I know what goes into helmets?” asked the exasperated Mr. Gibber. “Why should I care what goes into helmets?”

“Oh, of course,” replied Tim in a hurt voice. “I didn’t know you felt so strongly on the subject. Let’s say no more about helmets.”

“I don’t know why anything was said about them in the first place,” said Mr. Gibber, striving to control himself.

“It was in connection with the word ‘pith,’ ” observed Tim helpfully. “We were just wondering if it went into helmets.”

“Do I understand you to say that I was wondering whether pith went into helmets or not?” asked Mr. Gibber.

“And heads,” added Tim.

“But of course heads go into helmets,” said Mr. Gibber. “That’s what they’re for.”

“I hope you don’t think I didn’t know that,” replied Tim, laughing deprecatingly.

“But I made no implication that you didn’t know what went into helmets,” said Gibber.

“Of course I do,” answered Tim brightly. “We all know. It’s heads. Not pith, but heads. Did your head ever go into a helmet, Mr. Gibber?”

The good man was immediately mollified. His vanity was stimulated. It pleased him to be regarded as an extensively traveled person.

“Time and time again,” he replied. “As a matter of fact I have one at home right now.”

“And is there any pith in it?” asked Tim hopefully.

Mr. Gibber’s tan took on an apoplectic glow.

“I don’t,” he replied in a voice choked with emotion, “I don’t know what’s in that helmet, and frankly, Mr. Willows, I don’t give a damn.” He took a deep breath and added, “Will you excuse me, Miss Meades?”

“Do you mean you want to leave the room for a minute?” asked that young lady innocently.

“What!” ejaculated Mr. Gibber. “And why should I leave the room?”

“Mr. Gibber,” said Miss Meades reprovingly, then lowered her eyes in confusion.

“You don’t understand, Miss Meades,” Tim explained politely. “Mr. Gibber doesn’t want to leave the room. He doesn’t need to leave the room. That is, I don’t think so. He was – —”

“I didn’t say he needed to leave the room,” Miss Meades interrupted hotly. “If he needed to leave the room I hope he’d have sense enough to go.”

“Of course he has,” answered Tim soothingly. “He knows when he needs to go.”

“Well, I need to go right now,” gasped Steve Jones. “Excuse me a minute. Must telephone to a client.”

Mr. Gibber was looking at the table with appalled eyes. Was it possible they were making sport of him? Willows was at the bottom of it all. Willows was responsible. How in God’s name had the situation got so out of hand? It was like a bad dream.

“It’s all right, Mr. Gibber,” he heard Tim saying in an encouraging voice. “She knows now that you don’t need to leave the room and that you were simply asking her pardon for using a lot of bad language. Funny how things crop up like that – helmets and pith and leaving the room and all. Really, it’s quite confusing. Where were we, Mr. Gibber?”

“Where were we?” repeated that gentleman, wearily passing a hand across his eyes. “I hardly know where we are much less where we were.”

“It had something to do with brevity,” supplied Tim. “It was all very interesting even though most of the others didn’t seem to understand it.”

“I understood every word he said,” stoutly declared Miss Meades. “Even about leaving the room.”

“Certainly you did,” put in Tim pacifically, “Mr. Gibber isn’t so childish. He’d never do a thing like that.”

“Like what?” snapped Miss Meades in a stubborn voice.

Tim looked at the girl with admiring eyes.

“Well, I wouldn’t like to say,” he hedged. “Hadn’t you better ask Mr. Gibber?”

“Don’t ask me a thing,” Mr. Gibber shouted. “I won’t listen to another word.”

“He doesn’t like to talk about it,” explained Tim. “You know how it is. Nobody does. No gentleman, that is.”

“But I will talk about it,” Mr. Gibber cut in. “I’ll talk about it as much as I like.”

“Is that quite necessary?” inquired Miss Meades, elevating her eyebrows.

“Yes, by God, it is,” gritted the president of the Nationwide Advertising Agency. “It’s necessary for my sanity. It’s nobody’s business whether I need to leave the room or not. And if I do need to leave the room – which I don’t – I’ll get right up and walk out of the room and stay as long as I like.”

“What did I tell you?” said Tim triumphantly to the table. “He knows how to act.”

Miss Meades turned on him with battle in her usually calm eyes.

“I won’t let you put me in a false light,” she retorted. “From the way you go on one would get the impression that I deliberately accused Mr. Gibber of not knowing when he needed to leave the room. I meant no such thing. I know he isn’t a baby and furthermore – —”

“Stop!” cried Mr. Gibber. “For God’s sake, stop! I must put my foot down somewhere. This can’t go on.”

“Certainly not,” agreed Tim sympathetically. “Of all things.”

Mr. Gibber cleared his throat and once more flattened his hands on the surface of the table. With an earnest eye he searched the faces confronting him. He would win his listeners back.

“Boys,” he addressed them this time, playing the part of just a pal. “Boys,” he repeated, then his expression underwent a startling change. “Oh, dear,” he muttered. “Now I do have to leave the room.”

And leave the room he did, very rapidly and without looking back.

Miss Meades made a face and thrust out a small, red tongue at Tim Willows.

“Smarty,” she said. “Mr. Know-it-all. He did need to leave the room all the time.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tim told her with tremendous dignity. “I attribute the man’s strange conduct to nothing more nor less than the power of suggestion.”

“Which means,” retorted the girl, “that he needed to leave the room.”

“You win,” said Tim.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Malicious Magic
of Mr. Ram

Mr. Gibber did not return to the conference room. Few men would have in the face of such overwhelming odds. Instead, he sought the privacy of his office in which he did some highly concentrated fuming. Gibber’s skin was thick but not impenetrable. Tim Willows and that Meades girl had done terrible things to him that morning. He would not forget the pair. When the trees began to fall they would be the first to go.

Meanwhile the conference, relieved of the presence of its presiding officer, was rapidly assuming the aspect of a meeting of convivial friends from which those earnest spirits in whose nostrils advertising was the very breath of life promptly disassociated themselves amid the maledictions of the harder-boiled.

Tim Willows and Miss Meades were among the last to leave. They decided it was no more than their duty to await the return of Mr. Gibber. They were conscientious about it. While so doing there was nothing to prevent them from discussing the more important things of life such as books and plays and places to go and the numerous persons they disliked. It was a quiet, restful morning and Tim was both surprised and delighted to discover upon consulting his watch that it was time to be doing something about luncheon. Accordingly he took Dolly Meades to a lunch club at which they prolonged the conference well into the afternoon. Tim drank ale, which Dolly was unable to stomach. She had to be satisfied with rye. And she was. Back at the office Tim spent the remainder of the afternoon listening to the bedtime stories of several newspaper and magazine representatives, all of whom displayed a sort of well-bred pride in the quality and size of the circulations of their respective publications.

In this manner Tim passed his last day, had he but known it, at the Nationwide Advertising Agency, an organization to which he had already given almost all of his self-respect in return for just sufficient money to enable him to exist in comparative ease, what with buying things on time.

Sally did not meet him at the station, but she was waiting for him at the door. As a matter of fact, when he opened it she almost popped out of the house.

“It’s gone!” were her first words, her eyes round and fearful.

“What’s gone?” asked Tim, his mind on other matters, chief among which was the possibility of getting a drink.

“The body,” replied Sally. “It’s gone. It’s not there.”

Tim then deliberately did a little husbandly tormenting.

“What are you talking about?” he demanded. “Whose body has gone where?”

“Don’t be dull,” continued Sally sharply. “The body in the bin. The body of the man you murdered in cold blood. The body you struck down in its prime.”

“Oh, that body,” exclaimed Tim comprehendingly. “That body never had any prime.”

“Well, it would have had a prime if you hadn’t struck it down,” retorted Sally.

“How do you know that?” her husband asked. “Some bodies never have any prime.”

“Yours, for example,” said Sally. “Your withered mean, little rat of a body.”

“Come, come,” protested Tim Willows. “That’s no way to refer to your husband’s body. Why, only last night you were swearing to high heaven you were never going to have anything to do with anyone’s body save the one you are now so harshly criticizing.”

“Well, prime or no prime,” said Sally, “I’ve got to make the best of it such as it is.”

“You mean the most of it,” he told her crisply. “And I do wish you’d stop referring to my body as if it were a rather questionable rib of beef. Now tell me about this other body. You seem to miss it. Do you want it back in the bin? I should think the disappearance of that long, lugubrious stiff has saved us no end of mental anguish, not to mention unremunerative labor.”

“I know,” she said, “but we can’t have a dead body knocking about the streets. People will begin to talk.”

Tim laughed shortly.

“I suppose they’ll criticize us for not knowing how to entertain a dead body,” he remarked. “Well, if that dead body has left my bed and board I wash my hands of all further responsibility for it. It’s not my dead body if it goes visiting neighbors.”

“But suppose it hasn’t gone visiting?” asked Sally in a hushed voice. “Suppose it tries to crawl in bed with one of us tonight? That’s what’s burning me up.”

“Then it will be a doubly dead body,” said Tim, who, having divested himself of his hat and overcoat, was strolling in the direction of a cocktail shaker gleaming cheerfully on the sideboard. “By the way,” he called back casually over his shoulders, “that dead body rather intimated to me that he mistook my bed for yours this morning.”

“The nerve of the thing,” said Sally, then, suddenly grasping the full significance of Tim’s remark, she asked, “What do you mean by that, you grub?”

“Nothing,” the other replied. “Merely that the grub rode into the city this morning in the poisonous company of that dead body.”

“What!” gasped Sally. “Do you mean the body has taken up traveling?”

“Just that,” returned the other. “The body was most unappreciatively alive. Only the body, though, for as you yourself know, it never did have any brain.”

Sally sank down in a chair and considered this new situation. The dead body of Mr. Bentley was one thing. His live body was quite another.

“A body like that doesn’t need any brain,” she said at last. “Make it snappy with that cocktail, you shadow of a midget.”

Tim rang for Peter and immediately that aged creature appeared. He was small, sharp, and unbent, and he gave the impression of having been kept too long in front of a drying machine. He had swapped all of his hair with the years in exchange for a face full of wrinkles. From somewhere near the center of this complicated system a thin hooked nose projected itself and on either side of this object two small eyes glittered as brightly as a thieving sparrow’s. Peter had a way of swinging his arms at his sides as if he were keeping them in readiness for immediate action. Unlike the majority of domestics, he enjoyed being summoned to duty. If Tim did not call for him in the course of an evening he would invent an excuse to call on Tim, because, as he expressed it, Mr. Tim was his personal responsibility with whom he had spent many pleasant days in the past when both of them had been a whole lot younger.

Tim now fumbled in his vest pocket and produced three cigars, the day’s gleanings from the visiting representatives.

“Here’s your share, Peter,” he said, extending them to the old man. “They look pretty good tonight. Better than usual.”

Peter subjected each cigar to the expert examination of his nose, then permitted himself a smile of appreciation.

“Fifteen cents straight, at least,” he gloated. “This one looks like a quarter. I shall smoke them, Mr. Tim.”

“I know damn well you will,” said Tim, “but in the meantime can you do a little something helpful about orange juice and ice?”

When the shaker had ceased its shaking and the cocktails had been poured, Tim turned to Sally.

“I don’t know whether I’m to be congratulated or not,” he told her, “but the fact is I don’t happen to be a murderer any more. It all comes from not putting on enough coal. That body came to life sometime after we went to bed, finished off a bottle of gin, and went barging drunkenly about the house before it went home.”

“Was it – I mean, was he – in great pain?” asked Sally a little timidly.

“Yes,” said Tim complacently, delicately moistening his lips at the rim of the glass. “He was in excruciating pain. Agony, I’d call it. I made him feel even worse.”

“You would, you scorpion,” his wife replied. “Does he know all the things that happened to him – the part I played?”

“Not yet,” he smiled. “I’m saving that for some future occasion, my dear little accessory after the fact.”

Sally remained thoughtfully silent.

Because of a great lassitude induced by the high revelry and nervous tension of the previous night the Willowses did not linger long in the lounge after dinner had been served. Dopey appeared footily for a brief review of the events of the day, which he immediately forgot upon suspecting the presence of a few pieces of candy concealed in a bowl. After mouthing these individually and collectively he discovered they were not so good. Accordingly he left them messily on the rug and clumped back to his box in the kitchen and the soothing conversation of Mr. and Mrs. Twill. Tim and Sally proceeded to their room, where they became busy about going to bed. Tim was always a little puzzled at the speed and ease with which Sally completed these preparations. At one moment she would be fully clad, at the next there would be just Sally, unadorned, then amazingly she would appear decked out in some tricky nightgown all set for the sheets. Tim decided that she must wear practically no clothes at all to be able to disrobe with such breath-taking precision and dispatch. For him the business of getting undressed was a long, involved, and laborious one necessitating no end of searching for this thing and that. The good Mrs. Twill believed in putting everything in some place but preferably not in the same place twice if a new one could be found. Tonight, for example, he eventually found his slippers resting on a row of books on the lowest shelf of the bookcase. It was a good place, he had to admit, a splendid place, but then any place would have been good had he but known where it was. Thus cogitating on the strange ways of Sally and Mrs. Twill he came at last to his socks, and at this point he seemed to run down. After a few tentative pluckings his fingers ceased to work. He was thinking of Claire Meadows and wondering what she was thinking. That had been a queer experience, too. Like a song growing fainter in a swiftly fading dream. It seemed quite apart from life and the ordinary affairs of life. It was as if Time had suddenly remembered a moment it had forgotten to give him and had tossed it back at random. It could never be recaptured. He knew that, and strangely enough he was not disappointed.

“Tim,” he heard Sally saying, and her voice sounded grimly determined, “if you don’t stop doddering over those socks I’ll come over there and drag them off.”

“So you feel as strongly about it as that, do you?” replied Tim Willows, looking at her with a slow, irritating smile. “Well, what I want to know is, why should I take off these socks?”

“It’s customary to take off one’s socks before going to bed,” his wife replied with withering dignity. “Gentlemen don’t sleep in their socks.”

“How do you know that?” Tim shot back. “From the way you talk one would gain the impression that you’d made a life study of sleeping gentlemen. Thousands of gentlemen are sleeping in their socks every night of the year. Sleeping in everything – clothes and all, even their hats. And here’s another thing. These socks are my socks and these feet are my feet and that bed is my bed. If I want to take these feet, clad in these socks, and tuck them into that bed I don’t see that it’s anyone’s business save my own. What do you say to that?”

“I have nothing to say to that,” replied Sally. “Nothing at all. Just the same, you and your socks constitute a form of mental torture that would fully justify a divorce in any enlightened community. You’re so gross, so utterly common. You – you revolt me, you and your socks and your shirt and your thin flanks and – —”

“My toes,” interrupted Tim hotly. “Go on and pick on my toes. Say things about my toes. Your own toes are so damn crooked you look as if you were walking backward.”

“That’s a lie,” said Sally, deeply insulted. “I have perfect toes and you know it. Take a look at other women’s toes and see what scrambled monstrosities they are.”

“I don’t keep my eyes on the ground under such circumstances,” said Tim virtuously.

“No doubt you don’t,” said his wife, “you lecherous little animal man.”

“If anyone overheard this conversation,” remarked Tim bitterly, “they wouldn’t believe it possible. They’d put you down as mad.”

“And I suppose you’d be considered an abused husband,” said Sally, with elaborate sarcasm.

“That’s stating it mildly,” answered Tim. “All day long I’ve been working at the office, standing on wind-swept platforms and traveling on badly ventilated trains with the body of a man I almost murdered. I’m tired. I’m unstrung. I’m in a highly nervous condition. And all you can do is to throw my socks in my face.”

“I think more of your socks than to throw them in that face,” said Sally. “You’d bite a hole in ’em and swear I did it.”

“Speaking figuratively,” continued Tim in a weary voice. “You should know when I’m speaking figuratively.”

“You’re such a liar,” broke in his wife, “that one never can tell just how you’re speaking.”

“And with the knowledge of murder in my heart,” continued Tim as if he had not heard her. “I get up in the morning and carry on. I go to the office, by God, and put in a full day’s work. Catch any other husband doing it. And you talk about socks.”

“Exactly,” Sally hastened to answer. “You wouldn’t catch any other husband doing it, not even the lowest. You murder a man in the evening and the first thing in the morning you rush out of the house, leaving a dead body on my hands. How would you like to be cooped up in the house all day with a dead body? Pleasant, isn’t it? Lovely.”

“Why didn’t you take a walk?” he demanded.

“And leave the dead body behind?” asked Sally.

“You couldn’t very well have taken it with you,” replied Tim. “And certainly a dead body doesn’t demand much in the way of entertainment. You don’t have to play games with a dead body.”

Mr. Ram on the bookcase was rapidly losing patience. This constant, futile bickering was doing things to his usually tolerant and friendly disposition. He felt like taking the two of them and knocking their heads together. They deserved even less considerate treatment than that. Upon hearing Sally’s next contribution the little man decided to go the limit.

“You and your work and your stuffy trains,” she was saying. “It’s all a lot of bunk. Horses couldn’t have held you in this house. I’ll bet you didn’t draw an easy breath until you shut the door behind you. I guess you know what I mean now when I say I’d be glad to change places with you. I wish I could. I’m tired of being left alone in this house with dead bodies and clownish dogs and doddering old people who might die on my hands at any minute and add to the dead bodies. I want to change – —”

“I daresay I’ll come home some night and see you sitting on top of a pile of dead bodies,” remarked Tim. “You’ll be literally swimming in dead bodies. And by the way, lay off that dog of mine. He’s far from clownish. I’d like to change places with you if only for the pleasure of being able to stay home and keep him company. He’s a damn sight more agreeable than you.”

“That settles it,” said Mr. Ram to himself. “I’ll have to take steps this very night.”

“Then why don’t you go and sleep with your dog?” Sally demanded. “You’re just like a dog, yourself. You’ve got no more shame than a dog. Might as well sleep like a dog.”

“I wouldn’t talk about sleep if I were in your place,” said Tim. “You’re a horrid sloth yourself.”

“I’m not going to talk about sleep,” answered Sally. “I’m going to do it. Keep your damn socks on and your great mouth shut. Good-night!”

“Sweet woman,” observed Tim Willows as he watched, with a feeling of defeat, his wife curl herself up in bed.

“Miserable little man,” she murmured, and that was the last word. It was all Sally’s.

Mr. Ram, however, won the last trick.

The slumber of this happily married couple was troubled that night by strangely realistic dreams. Vague and intangible figures seemed to be flitting noiselessly about the room. There was much peering into faces, and Tim got the impression that his body was being critically inspected. Sally later admitted that she had experienced the same feeling. And through all these dreams and dim imaginings the figure of Mr. Ram was inextricably woven. The little man had grown to full stature and appeared to be directing the activities of the other figures that peopled the darkness. Occasionally he would pause to exchange a few words with a group of Egyptian friends and at such times Tim distinctly saw Mr. Ram’s white teeth bared in a malicious smile. Once or twice when the god glanced over at the twin beds Tim could have sworn he heard a subdued chuckle. Then amazingly the figures melted away and in his dream Tim saw Mr. Ram returning to his former size on the bookcase. It was all disturbingly vague and confusing. So much so, in fact, that Sally for the first time in her life woke up before her husband and immediately appropriated the bathroom, knowing full well that this would irritate him beyond measure and precipitate a morning row.

A few minutes later the sound of running water brought Tim back to consciousness. He sat up with a start, glanced suspiciously at the figure of Mr. Ram, who seemed to have changed his position during the night, then promptly rolled out of bed. Stripping off his shirt he stood before a pier-glass mirror to ascertain if his body was as ill-favored as Sally so eloquently made it out to be. The moment he did so he received a decided shock. In some manner unknown to him his wife had managed to get to the mirror first. He had not seen her do it, yet nevertheless there she was, standing in front of him and cutting off his view of himself.

“Please get out of the way,” he told her irritably. “I can’t see a thing of myself. And, furthermore, you’re a nice person to be talking about nakedness. Here you are flaunting yourself totally nude in front of this mirror. You should be ashamed.”

He was surprised at the sound of his own voice. It was unnaturally soft and had a distinctly feminine quality in it. He cleared his throat and tried again.

“Go on out of here,” he said. “I’ve got to get to my office.”

The woman seemed to be mocking him silently. Every time he opened his mouth to speak she very cleverly mimicked the movements of his lips.

“How childish of you,” Tim exclaimed, and was petrified on the spot by a wild cry issuing from the bathroom.

“What the hell!” began Mr. Willows, then said no more.

A figure looking strangely like himself came dashing out of the bathroom as if pursued by all the devils in hell.

“Oh, look!” chattered the figure in a voice reminiscent of his wife’s.

Tim looked incredulously at the figure before him, then quickly surveyed his own body. The sight that met his eyes almost unhinged his reason.

“My God!” he gasped. “Oh, my God! What has happened to us, or are we both going mad?”

“Oh-h-h, I don’t know,” breathed the other. “It all seems terrible to me. Here I stand talking to myself and yet I am you – you to the last detail. I can’t stand it, I tell you, I can’t stand it.”

“Well, I suppose you think I’m tickled to death to be occupying your body,” said Tim. “How do you fancy I feel?”

She looked ruefully at the body of which she had been so mysteriously deprived, and her heart sank.

“I had such a beautiful figure,” she murmured. “And now you’ve got it. I suppose you’ll put that silly-looking shirt on it when you go to bed at night?”

“No,” replied Tim triumphantly, “I’m going to wear your best and most expensive night dresses.”

“What!” exclaimed Sally. “You’re going to start in wearing my clothes?”

“Naturally,” replied Tim. “Do you want me to make your body look ridiculous? You don’t seem to realize that in the eyes of the world I am you.”

Tim was treated to the unnerving experience of seeing his own body wringing its hands.

“Oh, this is just terrible,” moaned Sally. “It’s the worst thing that ever happened. You won’t know how to wear anything and you’ll make me look all sloppy and probably end up by becoming a loose woman.”

Tim laughed hatefully.

“You know what I’m going to do?” he asked. “I’m going to torture Carl Bentley. I think he deserves it.”

“You leave that man alone,” cried Sally furiously. “Keep your hands off him and be careful what you do with my body. First thing you know you’ll be presenting me with a nameless child. I could never bear that.”

This thought sobered Tim Willows. He was truly in an extremely precarious position. Once he had been able to take his chances with the best of them, but now if he slipped from the path of virtue he would have to be continually worrying about the consequences. This was a most disagreeable realization. It wasn’t fair. What a devil of a thing to have happened to a full-grown man! And how the devil could it have happened? Tim very much wanted his body back.

“You won’t have to bear it,” he said slowly. “I’d have to bear it. Wouldn’t that be awful?”

“I don’t see why,” replied Sally. “I think it would be just dandy. It would teach you what women have to go through in this world. Please put something on my body and try to hold it a little better. I can’t stand seeing the poor thing the way it is.”

She passed Tim her abandoned night dress and that shrinking creature allowed it to be draped over his nakedness. The ordeal proved too much for him. He sank down on the bed and refused to meet his wife’s eyes.

“I’ve never been so ashamed of myself in all my life,” he murmured. “To think of me in this.” He plucked at the diaphanous material with nervous fingers. “In this of all things.”

“You’re the living image of myself,” said Sally, sitting down beside him and slipping an arm round his waist. “You certainly are a sweet little thing. I think you’re about the most attractive woman I’ve seen in years.”

“Take your arm away from me,” gasped Tim in a strangled voice. “And for God’s sake, don’t be common. I’ll stand for no monkey business. The sooner you know that the better.”

He sprang to his feet and stood looking down at himself with outraged eyes. Then something occurred that humiliated him to the very depth of his being. Sally picked him up in her arms and tossed him back on the bed.

“I’ll settle your hash later,” she said, and swaggered over to the mirror. After gazing into it for a moment she turned to the rumpled figure on the bed. “This vapid face of yours needs a shave terribly. What are we going to do about that?”

“Don’t give a damn what you do about it,” came gloomily from the bed. “You can cut the face to ribbons if you like. It isn’t any good to me any more.”

“Well, as bad as it is,” replied Sally, “it’s the only face I have and I’m certainly not going to allow whiskers to grow all over it.”

“I wish you’d stop talking about my face as if it were a mere thing,” Tim almost sobbed. “It was always a good face to me. If you don’t take care of it I’ll make such a fright of yours that babies will have convulsions and mothers will pass out the moment they clap eyes on me. You’ll hear people saying, ‘that hideous Willows woman.’ ”

“You’d never do a thing like that,” said Sally in a shocked voice. “I’ll hang this body of yours in the attic.”

“I will if you’re not mighty good to my face,” replied Tim, “and put in a new blade.”

“Oh, I’ll be good to your face,” promised Sally. “I’m going to try to improve it. God knows there’s enough room.”

Tim sat suddenly up in the bed and looked at his watch on the night table.

“Cripes!” he exclaimed. “You’ll be late at the office. Hurry up and get dressed.”

“What! Me go to your office?” Tim’s former face was starched with amazement.

“Who else?” he demanded. “I can’t go. You’ve got to carry on. We can’t starve, you know.”

“Do you mean that I actually have to go to work, catch trains, and be on time and all that?”

“Certainly,” replied Tim, beginning to enjoy the situation.

“But, Tim,” protested Sally, “I don’t know the first thing about it. I’ve never written a word of copy and I won’t even know the people at the office.”

“You’ll catch on quickly enough,” said Tim reassuringly. “Luckily I’m working on a chain of women’s shops at present. You’ll probably be able to write that copy a whole let better than I could. And just pretend you know everybody. Be particularly nice to the girl at the desk and also to Dolly Meades. They’re pals of mine. Also Steve Jones.”

“How pally are you with the two women?” asked Sally.

“Not consummated,” said Tim briefly.

“Then I’ll consummate,” replied Sally.

“Lucky dog,” observed Tim. “And they’ll blame it all on me.”

“But it is you,” said Sally. “I’m only inside.”

“Yes,” remarked Tim moodily, “and the trouble is you haven’t any gentlemanly instincts. You’ll do the first woman dirt who comes your way.”

“You shouldn’t be so irresistibly attractive,” explained Sally. “It won’t be my fault.”

“I have always exercised remarkable self-control,” Tim told her. “And that’s more than you will do.”

“I’m exercising it right now,” said Sally, looking darkly at the figure on the bed. “I’ve a good mind to have my will with you, young lady.”

“Don’t!” pleaded Tim. “Don’t! Even in fun it’s too much.”

“So that’s what you think of yourself,” said the other with a sneer. “Do you wonder I’ve been revolted?”

“I’m all right,” replied Tim. “Only thing is, I haven’t gotten used to being you yet, that’s all.”

“Then you’d better make it snappy,” replied Sally. “Remember, from now on, I am the dominant male.”

But by the time Sally had got herself shaved and dressed she no longer felt quite so dominant. Her mind was full of misgivings. She was loath to face the world alone.

“I just can’t go to your office,” she protested, sinking down in a chair. “I won’t know what to do or what to say or anything. I’ll just be a mess.”

“But that’s what you’ve been claiming all along you wanted,” replied Tim gloatingly. “Every night of your life you’ve kept dinning in my ears how much you’d like to change places with me. Well, now you’ve got your wish. Make the most of it.”

“Tim,” said Sally in an awed voice, “that must be it. We’ve kept wishing to change places with each other so long that someone has granted our wish. Only they’ve let us retain our personalities so we’ll know exactly what’s happened. Wonder who could have done this thing?”

“I rather suspect Mr. Ram,” Tim replied slowly. “There’s a funny look about him this morning and I seem to remember having met him in my dreams last night.”

“So do I,” exclaimed Sally. “I recall him now quite distinctly.”

For the first time since they had owned him Mr. Ram refused to meet their gaze. His position was changed so that he now stood looking innocently out of the window at the house across the way.

“I guess we had it coming to us,” remarked Tim. “God knows you wished it often enough.”

“Who wouldn’t,” said Sally, “if they had to live with a creature like you?”

“Go on, get to your office,” answered Tim, crawling back into bed. “I’m going to have a nice, lazy drowse. And by the way, you’d better try to do something about your voice. You sound awfully ladylike. Speak from your chest like I do.”

“But you shouldn’t speak from your chest.”

“Then I’ll practise feminine elocution while you work hard at the office,” Tim replied, yawning lazily.

Sally stamped over to the bed and stood there looking down at him.

“Do you mean to say,” she demanded, “that you’re going to lie there in that bed and let me go out to work for you, you worm?”

“Why not?” inquired Tim. “Isn’t that just exactly what I did?”

“And you’re not even enough of a gentleman to drive me down to the station?” she continued.

“Certainly not,” replied Tim smilingly. “I’m not supposed to be a gentleman. You never drove me down. You’ve changed places with me and got exactly what you’ve been asking for – now make the best of it.”

“Then do you know what I’m going to do?” she demanded in a voice cold with fury. “I’m going to give you a baby and I hope it’s twins. You just wait and see if I don’t.”

“I won’t be the mother of your children if I have to hang myself,” declared Tim. “I’ll jump in the river first.”

Sally paused at the door. She was laughing to herself.

“Then you’ll have to do one or the other,” she told him, “because I’m going to do you in. You just wait.”

“Get to your office,” shouted Tim, white with anger. “And I won’t be here when you get back. Remember that.”

“Good!” exclaimed Sally. “I’ll call up one of your conquests and get her to come over.”

“And I’ll divorce you flat,” threatened Tim. “I’ll drag your name through the mud.”

“It’s your own name you’ll be dragging,” said Sally. “Don’t forget that.” She paused and blew him a kiss. “See you later, cutie.”

The howl of a maddened animal followed her down the hall. The terrible sound died away and the person who had once been Tim Willows lay chattering on the bed. He was not going to be a mother. He was dead sure of that.

“Damn you, Ram,” he muttered. “You dog-faced Egyptian crook.”

CHAPTER SIX

Tim Tries to Be a Lady

After the departure of Sally in what had recently been his body Tim Willows found himself unable to enjoy that nice lazy drowse he had anticipated. He could not even entertain the idea. He got out of bed and forced himself to a shrinking inspection of his newly acquired anatomy.

“If I know anything at all about women,” he decided at last, “I certainly am one. There’s no getting away from the fact. And the worst of it is I’m supposed to act like a woman. If I fail to act like a woman I’ll be disgracing my own name. Too bad I’m so blastedly forgetful. I’m sure to break out at some critical moment and make a mess of it all.”

This line of thought naturally brought him to the problem of his voice. At present it sounded like a voice that was still undecided whether to become a grunt or a squeak. It was neither one thing nor the other, being too deep for a woman’s and too high for a man’s. Sitting on the edge of his bed he industriously practised the art of vocal elevation.

“This is about the silliest thing I’ve ever done,” he observed moodily to himself as he listened critically to the peculiar sounds issuing from his lips.

“Good-afternoon, my dear,” he heard himself saying. “What a perfectly sweet dress! It’s just simply too attractive. Isn’t the weather foul? I loathe foul weather. Simply loathe it! It makes one feel so – so lousy. Oh, hell,” he broke off, his voice dropping several degrees, “it’s no good. I could never go through with it. Suppose they ask me things, fiendishly personal things? I know women do it. They always do. They have to. It’s their specialty.”

He shrank within himself and stared bleakly at Mr. Ram, who steadfastly avoided his gaze.

“Wonder if she meant what she said,” Mr. Willows continued to muse, his thoughts once more reverting to his wife’s parting threat. “Wouldn’t put it past her. She’s like that. It would tickle her pink to do it. Gad, what a fix I’m in – no knowledge of female wiles.”

He went to the bathroom and made a great to-do about water and soap.

“Don’t have to shave,” he observed, critically surveying his wife’s pert face in the mirror. “That’s one good thing at least, but I do have to make up a little and arrange my hair some way. How does one manage that?”

But manage it he did. Sighing deeply, he returned to the bedroom and began to rummage through his wife’s bureau. A black piece of lace network caught his eye and he became idly interested.

“Guess I’ll put this on,” he muttered.

For five minutes he sweated over the delicate fastenings of the brassière, then, admitting himself baffled, he compromised by putting it on backwards. He had not the courage to bring himself to look at the result. After that, he went slinking about the room, furtively getting himself into this thing and that until finally he was fully if not any too securely arrayed. The garters had been a struggle. These, too, he put on backwards and dragged the straps round to the front. This weird arrangement made him feel rather peculiar and uncertain about the waist and upper legs, but he decided it was better than wearing no garters at all. By the time he had finished with himself, virtually every article of wearing apparel his wife had possessed was scattered about the room. Then with a deep sigh he seated himself at the vanity dresser and proceeded to do things to his face.

“I never thought she did this thing right,” he said to himself. “Think I’ll make a good job of it and make her feel envious when she comes home tonight.”

But by the time he had finished with lipsticks and eyebrow pencils and mascara and rouge, there were few women in the world who would have envied him his face. The lipstick was the first difficulty. In endeavoring to achieve a symmetrical and well-balanced effect, he kept adding color first to one side of his lips and then to another, until at last even he himself grew alarmed at the size his mouth was becoming. Abandoning this feature of his face as hopeless, he applied himself to his eyelashes, with decidedly streaky results which did not add to the neatness of his already untidy face. He then penciled his eyebrows heavily, unevenly, and, being of an experimental nature, curled them up at the ends.

“The exotic touch,” he murmured. “I’ve always been strongly attracted to exotic-looking women. I’ll make an exotic face of it.”

However, instead of making his face look exotic, as he fondly believed he was doing, he merely succeeded in making it look chaotic. To be truthful it was about the most chaotic-looking face that had ever been worn by a human being. This became even more apparent after he had liberally applied rouge to his cheeks and sprinkled several beauty spots in what he considered to be appropriate places.

“Must have earrings,” he muttered, now thoroughly engrossed in his artistic endeavors. “Got to have earrings and a sort of necklace thing.”

After emptying several small boxes of their contents, he found what he wanted and thus further adorned his person. With the earrings he experienced some difficulty, but was finally able to make them stay put. These last embellishments gave to his already miscellaneous appearance the suggestion of a frivolous but slightly smeared gypsy fortune teller. The general effect was exceedingly confusing. In his absorption in the decoration of his features, Tim Willows had overlooked the point that he was creating a face that was supposed to be worn in a civilized community. If seen at a masquerade at about five o’clock in the morning when everyone’s faculties were numbed by overindulgence, it might possibly have got by, but in a quiet suburban home it was a most astounding face to come upon unexpectedly.

Certainly Mrs. Jennings found it so when Tim, still fumbling with his rebellious garters, descended the stairs and made a rather crablike entrance into the lounge. Tim was no less astounded. To his memory he had never seen this person before. He did not want to see her now. And the look he directed upon her eloquently expressed his feelings.

“Oh, my dear,” began Mrs. Jennings, “whatever has happened to your face?”

“Nothing that I know of, madam,” replied Tim with deep-voiced dignity. “Is my face in need of a shave or are you under the impression that the thing has slipped?”

Suddenly remembering that this was not at all the sort of answer that was expected of him, he laughed a trifle hysterically, then attempted to look coy.

“I’m practising a part in a play,” he told the almost stupefied woman. “Don’t know when it’s going to be, but it’s going to be – that is, I think it is. The part calls for a deep-voiced woman. Don’t ask me why. It just does. Did you ever practise being a deep-voiced woman? It’s most remarkable what one can do. You should try being deep-voiced, my dear. Really you should. Just excuse me a minute. Be right back.”

Tim hurried to the dining room and, opening a closet in the sideboard, extracted a bottle of rye, from which he drank deeply without even troubling about a glass. Wiping the tears from his eyes together with much mascara, he rang for Peter, and returned coughingly to the lounge once more to confront Mrs. Jennings.

Mrs. Jennings, it developed after much astute fishing, was a neighbor who on the pretext of borrowing a meat grinder had dropped over to exchange a lot of dirt. She was young, attractive, and in every respect desirable, but, handicapped as he was with his present body, Tim did not know what on earth to do with the woman.

“Well, you certainly should have been an actress,” Mrs. Jennings observed. “When you first came into the room, I could have sworn a man was speaking. Thought perhaps it was your husband, although I’ve never met him. Only this morning Jack was saying to me, ‘Flo,’ he said, ‘I want you to meet Tim Willows. He’s one of the few interesting men in Cliffside.’ ”

This last declaration of Mrs. Jennings was a great help to Tim Willows. It enabled him to discover that the woman called herself Flo, and by the process of elimination, he decided that her last name could be none other than Jennings. Feeling a little better equipped to continue this unequal contest, he was about to reply to the woman when one of his earrings became detached and slipped down the front of his dress.

“Damn these earrings to hell!” he exclaimed gruffly but sincerely. “Why don’t they stay where they belong?”

Snatching irritably at the neck of the dress, he succeeded not only in unfastening his brassière, but also in ripping open the dress itself. As a result of this, he was almost naked to the waist.

At that moment Peter presented himself in answer to the bell. As Tim turned towards him, that venerable domestic was startled beyond measure. Tim, noticing the old man’s embarrassment, hastened to put him at his ease.

“Pardon me, Peter,” he said girlishly. “Just a slight accident. You can serve breakfast now.”

“Yesem,” replied Peter, hurrying from the room and thinking strange thoughts to himself in his flight.

“Of course, you’ll stay to breakfast, Flo, dear,” continued the spurious Sally. “At least have a cup of coffee.”

Flo Jennings stayed. She wanted to talk about Beth Johnson’s operation and she intended to talk about Beth Johnson’s operation. Nothing was going to stop her. She hoped to be able to talk about that operation for a long time and in great detail.

Meanwhile, out in the kitchen, Mr. Peter Twill was endeavoring to relieve his feelings through the unsatisfactory medium of words.

“All she needs is feathers to make her look like a red Indian,” he informed his good wife. “Painted wild like a heathen savage and nearly as naked. Doesn’t seem to mind. ‘Pardon me, Peter,’ she said, as cool as ice, just like it was the most natural thing in the world for a woman to be going about that way. Something’s come over her and the master, too. He gave me the coyest look this morning when he asked for a little pick-me-up. Then he said – and very nastily, too – that a woman’s place was in the home, but that instead of having a woman we had a lazy bum in bed. He never went as far as that about Miss Sally before.”

Dopey, gathering from the excited voice of Peter that rare and interesting developments were afoot, oozily emerged from his box and, pushing open the pantry door, presented himself in the dining room. The sight of his dog caused Tim once more to forget that he was a lady.

“Come here, you old son of a hooker,” he called out in a rough, vulgar voice to the confusion of Flo Jennings. “How’s every little thing?”

At the sound of his master’s voice issuing from his mistress’s body, Dopey stopped dead in his tracks and with reproachful eyes gazed at the speaker. One look at the face sent the hair up along the dog’s spine. There was something wrong here, something radically wrong with that face. God knows what it all meant. Unable to trust his legs, Dopey sat down and broke into a gentle sweat.

“Come here, damn your craven heart to hell,” grated the painted woman.

The dog could stand it no longer. He elevated his muzzle and pushed through it a howl of sheer bewilderment and mental anguish, then, turning, the great beast endeavored to crawl away on his stomach. The howl of the dog had already disconcerted Flo Jennings, but that which issued from the madly painted lips of her hostess froze the poor woman in her chair. Already Tim Willows had been through a sufficiently trying morning. He had stood enough for ten men. In the face of overwhelming odds he had done his best to be a lady. It was as if fate had conspired to defeat his efforts. His garters were all wrong and his breasts refused to work. Then this Jennings woman had greatly added to the difficulties of the situation. These things had he stood with fortitude. Even with the threat of motherhood hanging over his head, he had tried to remain calm, but when his own dog turned tail and denied him, Tim Willows went temporarily mad. With a howl even less agreeable to hear than his dog’s, Tim sprang from the table and hurled the nearest glass at the busily slithering body. Dopey, still close to the floor, gasped and, looking back over his shoulder with despairing eyes, gave himself up for lost. Then Mr. Willows heaped upon the head of the animal a flood of vile abuse in which he brought to light every defect in the creature’s character and every crime he had ever committed. Dopey longed to put his paws to his ears if only to muffle this horrid impeachment, but he was too busy scraping with them on the kitchen door to interrupt his frantic efforts. Succeeding at last in opening this he sneaked from the room.

“No wonder the poor thing is terrified,” said Mrs. Twill to her husband. “Hear her swear. Why she’s just like a man, she is. Worse.”

“Something strange has come over this house,” old Peter replied, with heavy assurance.

Dopey fully agreed as he collapsed into his box, where he lay shivering fitfully.

Back in the dining room Tim was trying to pull himself together.

“It’s my temperament, you know,” he explained, bestowing a smile of suffering upon his unwelcome companion. “I get this way when I act – lose myself in the part – forget at times who I am. What were you saying, my dear? Something awfully interesting. It was all about Beth Johnson and a lot of knives and blood.”

Flo Jennings, vainly trying to understand what had come over Sally Willows, soon lost herself in the ghastly narration of Beth Johnson’s operation. Tim, listening with shrinking ears, struggled as best he could to choke down the bacon and eggs which Peter had timidly set before him. The woman went into the most revolting details and dwelt gloatingly on the pain inflicted on what had hitherto been for Tim unheard-of organs of the body. With mounting consternation he wondered if he had all those organs inside him, and if he had, were they all okay. And all the time he was thinking to himself, “Why, this woman is no better than a ghoul – a horrid vulture. And they say men are crude, evil-speaking creatures. This Jennings person here has the worst of us licked. Wonder if she drinks blood instead of orange juice for breakfast?”

When Flo lightly passed on to the subject of cancerous growths and their prevalence among women Tim was reduced to the consistency of a submerged sponge. Rising unsteadily from the table he excused himself for a moment, with a feeble smile of apology. In the kitchen he seized Peter with shaking hands.

“Sneak that bottle out of the sideboard,” he told the old gentleman, who was himself beginning to shake. “That woman in there is killing me.”

Peter returned with the bottle, and Tim poured himself a stiff bracer.

“Take one yourself,” he told Peter, “and give one to Judy. We all need a little something today.”

When he had returned to the dining room Mrs. Twill turned to her husband with frightened eyes.

“Sounds exactly like Mr. Tim,” she said, “and doesn’t look much like Miss Sally.”

Peter nodded in silence and swallowed down his rye.

Tim led his guest to the lounge, where he absently selected a cigar from the humidor. After carefully lighting the cigar he politely offered one to the woman, who was looking at him with a peculiar expression.

“I’ve never smoked a cigar in my life,” said Mrs. Jennings in declining the offer.

“Oh, you should, my dear,” Tim replied with false sweetness. “George Sand did, and in Germany it’s all the rage among smart women. We’ll all be doing it soon. That, by the way, is who I’m supposed to be – George Sand. I’ve just remembered. Famous writer. Lived with a lot of men. All different.”

Flo hesitated. She dearly wanted to be a smart woman.

“I might try,” she said at last. “Now that there are no men about to see. Hope it doesn’t make me sick.”

“What a silly Flo you are,” scoffed Tim as, with grim satisfaction, he selected the blackest cigar he could find and lighted it for the unsuspecting woman.

“You know,” said Flo Jennings after she had finished coughing, “what I really came over here for was to borrow your meat grinder.”

“That’s just what she would borrow,” said Tim to himself. “She and a meat grinder should get along splendidly together.” Aloud he remarked graciously, “Certainly, Flo. I’d be delighted. What sort of meat are you going to mutilate?”

“Roast beef,” replied Flo, struggling with the cigar.

“I’ll bet it’s nice and rare,” said Tim.

“It is,” replied Flo with gleaming eyes. “I like it rare.”

Tim shuddered and left the room. He was sorry for the roast beef. While getting the grinder he helped himself to another drink, then returned to the lounge. He found Flo Jennings looking very pale and wan. The sight gave him no little satisfaction.

“I think I’ll be going,” she said weakly. “This cigar seems to have done things to me. Don’t feel as if I could ever eat again. Do run over to see me, Sally. It’s been such a lovely chat.”

“Hasn’t it just?” replied Tim. “It was really too simply sweet of you to have let me in on Beth Johnson’s operation. Try to dig up another one.”

Flo was too far gone to be aware of the irony in Tim’s words. She seized the grinder and made a hasty exit. Tim sank down in a chair and broodingly considered his breasts.

That afternoon, a trifle exalted, Tim took a walk, and in his reckless frame of mind allowed himself to be picked up by a couple of passing automobilists. When the machine turned down an unfrequented road and his companions attempted to become forcibly familiar, Tim’s immediate reactions both pained and surprised them. Seizing a spanner from the floor of the car he knocked one of the gentlemen out, then incapacitated the other with a well-directed kick. Realizing he was no longer welcome he got out of the car and trudged off down the road. It was five miles to home, and Tim, in his light, high-heeled pumps, felt hardly equal to the task.

“To think that such a thing should ever have happened to me,” he mused bitterly. “What a good girl doesn’t have to stand for in this world! I’m a damn good girl, myself, but it strikes me that no girl’s honor is worth a five-mile walk. On a good road it might be, and in the summer, but not on a road like this.”

Thus moralizing, Tim continued to plod through the slush and the gathering dusk. Behind him on the road two stricken automobilists were examining the extent of their injuries and radically revising their opinions of the weaker sex.

Gradually Tim began to chuckle.

“I certainly did that beggar dirt,” he muttered. “He’ll never be any earthly good. Serves him damn well right for trying to get rough with a lady. Hope the other one isn’t dead. Anyway I’ve still got my honor – whatever that is.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Man in Body Only

While Tim Willows was having his day, such as it was, Sally was also having hers in full measure. The poor girl was doing her best to be a gentleman. In this she succeeded only spottily. There were moments when she was quite good and others when she was very poor indeed. Her trip into town, for instance, was most unfortunate. Especially for Mr. Carl Bentley.

Sally should never have taken that pick-me-up from old Peter. It did more harm than good. Dashed down as it had been on an empty stomach it seemed only to make her disinclined to remember for any length of time the reversed position she was now so amazingly occupying. She preferred to be herself.

And, of course, she should never have sat down in the train beside Mr. Carl Bentley. This was a mistake. Almost anyone who sat down beside that insufferably boring gentleman anywhere was making a mistake, as was very speedily and painfully realized, but for Sally, in her mood of reckless elevation, the mistake could easily have proved disastrous. As it was, the young lady in her excited condition completely lost both poise and perception, and for an apparently case-hardened commuter conducted herself completely unlike the accepted conception of that unblessed creature.

Carl Bentley himself did a little long-distance poise-losing. The moment he became aware of the fact that he was going to have as a seat-mate the man who of all men he most desired to avoid, he became demoralized in all departments. Turning slightly he viewed with alarm the features of the bogus Mr. Willows. Carl’s temerity was rewarded by a smile of infinite tenderness as he looked for a startled moment into his companion’s brimming eyes.

“Good-morning, dear,” fell lightly from the other’s lips.

Mr. Bentley started and then tried to convince himself that he had both heard and seen wrong. He fervently hoped he had. If Tim Willows wanted to be friendly, so much the better, but there was no need for him to be gushing about it. Mr. Bentley felt called upon to make some sort of reply.

“We seem fated to be thrown together,” he observed a little resentfully as, with great ostentation, he unfolded his morning paper.

“Lucky fate!” exclaimed Sally with a rush. “You great big beautiful man.”

Carl Bentley blushed to the roots of his hair even while his blood ran cold. This is an extremely unusual feat and very difficult to do. But Carl Bentley, so great was his perturbation, achieved it with remarkable ease.

“I said,” continued the voice, this time a little louder, “you great big beautiful man.”

“Don’t keep on saying it,” Mr. Bentley pleaded earnestly. “People might begin to talk.”

With this he plunged his head in his paper and gave himself up to bitter thoughts. Was this man put on earth merely to torture him? Just because he, Bentley, had tried to dishonor the creature’s home, was that sufficient reason for carrying the feud into public life? Funny thing, too, he had never noticed before that Tim Willows had such a shockingly effeminate voice. It was either that or else the man was displaying the worst of bad taste in trying to be funny in such a questionable manner.

“What do I care how people talk?” he heard his companion proclaiming. “What do we care? For the first time in my life I am enjoying complete sexual freedom. I recognize no barriers.”

Sally was beginning to enjoy the situation hugely. All women are born with a well-developed desire to make men feel uncomfortable whenever possible. This retaliatory impulse compensates them in part for the long years of oppression heaped upon them by the self-satisfied male. It gave Sally infinite delight to make this large man squirm. And this feeling did not at all conflict with the fact that at the same time she found him passably attractive. For this reason her conversation was half in earnest and half in play, a most unfortunate combination for the peace of mind of Carl Bentley.

“Perfect sexual freedom,” she repeated defiantly. “Sex without let or hindrance. Everything! All!”

Carl Bentley shivered.

“Practise your freedom with someone else,” he told her in a low, hurried voice. “Don’t try to drag me down with you. I wish for neither everything nor all!”

“You’re right,” continued Sally resolutely. “It’s time we stood back to back and faced the world – threw our love in its ugly snoot. Why should we hide our guilty secret? I fear nothing, sweetheart, with you at my side.”

“I fear everything with you at my side,” groaned Mr. Bentley. “Won’t you go away from it?”

“All the seats are taken. All the seats are taken,” sang Sally in a happy voice. “It’s just as you said, Carl, dear. Fate has conspired to keep us inseparable.”

It was remarkable how uncannily the man could imitate his wife’s voice. It was terrible. Carl Bentley looked furtively about him and was convinced that his eyes encountered the amused and scornful glances of his fellow commuters. In particular he noticed a pretty stenographer who was looking at him in a most peculiar way. Then, for the first time, he realized that the heavy fragrance he had been smelling ever since he had boarded the train emanated from his companion. It was true. While shifting into her husband’s clothes Sally had been unable to resist spraying on herself a dash of her favorite perfume. It had been an instinctive action, a long-established habit, but Carl Bentley did not take this into consideration. He was very much upset.

“Why in heaven’s name did you put that stuff on you?” he demanded. “You smell like the loosest of women. People will begin to suspect me.”

“Let ’em suspect,” retorted Sally. “Why shouldn’t I perfume my body? I’ll anoint the damn thing with oils if I want to. I tell you I’m free – free!”

She tried to fling an arm round his neck, and for a moment they struggled unbecomingly together, to the delight of several spectators.

“I want to hug you,” gritted Sally through her husband’s teeth as she struggled manfully back. “Come on, handsome. Let me give you a hug.”

In the small turmoil arising from Sally’s amorous efforts she succeeded in yanking Mr. Bentley’s tie out from under his vest and in completely upsetting his carefully arranged hair. The man was in a pitiful condition, almost on the verge of collapse. Sally might have felt sorry for him had it not been for the fact that the drink was dying on her, and she could feel sorry only for herself. Recklessly she tossed discretion to the winds.

“You weren’t so backward the other night,” she flung at the discomfited Mr. Bentley as he struggled to rearrange himself. “You were only too anxious then to have me put my arms round your neck. Don’t try to deny it. You’ve been after me for weeks.”

“What!” gasped the stricken man. “Me after you? Are you mad or am I?”

He slumped down in the seat and buried his head in the newspaper.

“I’m mad about you,” he heard the soft voice say as its owner slipped affectionately down beside him and made a snatch at one of his hands. Then he became horribly aware of the conductor looking down at them both with ill-concealed distaste. What was the man thinking? Probably the worst.

Sally seemed to be the first to recover her poise. She realized that here was a situation in which she might as well act as a man.

“Hello, there,” she said in the voice of Mr. Willows, thereby driving Bentley into even greater confusion. “How are you today, officer? Meet my boy friend.”

The conductor punched the extended commutation ticket, then transferred his attention to Carl Bentley, and to that gentleman’s horror addressed him in a ladylike voice.

“Will you please show me your ticket, miss?” said the conductor to Carl Bentley. “I hope you won’t think me bold.”

Mr. Bentley guiltily held up his ticket with a trembling hand, and so great was the power of suggestion that when he tried to answer the man his voice cracked on a high note and he was forced to abandon the attempt. Well pleased with the success of his humor, for Sally had laughed heartily and deeply at the conductor’s words, the man passed on and, bending low over the passenger in the next seat, whispered a few sentences, then chuckled coarsely. Mr. Bentley felt sure the man must be pointing at him. He sank even lower down in the seat and became completely hidden by his paper.

“You’ve ruined me,” he muttered. “I’ll never be able to live this down. It was a sad day when I first laid eyes on your wife.”

“Oh,” replied Sally, lapsing into her feminine way of speaking. “Well, I’ll try to make it up to you for her.”

Bentley made no reply to this, and for several blessed minutes he was allowed to read his paper in quiet if not in peace. His respite was short-lived. From the tail of his eye he presently made out the face of Tim Willows peeking coyly round the edge of the paper. Then the face giggled and spoke and a long finger pointed at an advertisement.

“How’d you like to see me in those step-ins?” asked the face. “Wouldn’t I look cute?”

Carl Bentley shrank back, nearly overcome by his emotions.

“Wouldn’t I?” persisted the face. “Tell me, Carl, or I’ll make a scene.”

“Oh!” gasped Mr. Bentley. “This is too much. This time you’ve gone too far – overstepped all bounds.”

He tried to rise, but Sally clung desperately to the tails of his coat. Mr. Bentley, as he sank back, decided that this was one of life’s most embarrassing moments. People were looking at him, going out of their way to look at him. They were bending out into the aisle, peering over the backs of seats.

“Say yes,” continued the hateful voice. “If you don’t I’ll break into tears. I’ll sob. I’ll moan. I’ll growl.”

The thought of occupying a seat with a sobbing, moaning, growling Tim Willows completely cowed Carl Bentley. He would submit to any form of torture rather than have that occur.

“You would,” he managed to get out, nearly sobbing, himself. “You’d look just dandy. Here, you take this paper and read it to yourself.”

“You’re so sweet,” murmured Sally. “But I already have a paper.”

“Then for God’s sake read it,” snapped the baited Mr. Bentley. “Do you intend to drive me mad?”

Sally burst into a fresh, girlish laugh.

“Now you’re joshing me,” she said, slapping him playfully on the cheek with her husband’s gloves. “You tried to crawl into my bed the other night, didn’t you? What a bad, bold man you are.”

Bentley gathered himself for action, then, before Sally had time to realize what he intended to do, he sprang from the seat and sped down the aisle. For a moment she looked after him, then she, too, sprang up and hurried in pursuit, imploringly calling his name. Sometimes she called him by both names as if to make sure that the whole trainload of commuters should know all about Carl Bentley. She was still dogging his footsteps when the train pulled in at the station. Bentley was the first to alight, and as his feet hit the long ramp they instinctively started to run. So did Sally’s. The man fled through the gate to the huge waiting room and streaked across the floor. For a time Sally hung on, then decided it was hardly worth while. The last Mr. Bentley heard of the voice that had made him an outcast among men was, “Goodbye, dearie. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do myself.” This parting shot lent speed to his already flying feet.

Sally turned and was immediately disconcerted by the suspicious scrutiny of a policeman. At that moment a man she knew only slightly was so unfortunate as to pass by. Sally slapped him so violently on the back that the cigar he was smoking popped out of his mouth with such speed that for a moment the man thought his assailant had snatched it. Seizing the stunned man’s hand Sally pumped it vigorously.

“Hello, Jennings!” she cried in a deep, masculine voice. “How are you, old scout? Well, goodbye.”

And with that she swaggered off, leaving the old scout and the policeman feeling that a few words of explanation were due them both.

When she stood before the door of the Nationwide Advertising Agency Sally braced herself and prepared for the worst. She realized that now or never she must act the part of a perfect gentleman. Then Tim’s admonition to be nice to the girl at the desk returned to her. She thrust open the door and stood for a moment studying the girl’s face. Sally’s first glance was sufficient to assure her that few men would find it a difficult task to be nice to this fair creature. She was a luscious specimen of womanhood, fresh and in full bloom. Looking at her Sally gained the impression that the girl was wasting her time most shamefully when not engaged in amorous occupations. She was that type of girl.

“Good-morning, young man,” said the girl to Sally. “Why the enraptured gaze?”

“I’m looking at you and running a temperature,” replied Sally, in a fair approximation of Tim’s voice and manner. “You’re such a warm number you make me feverish.”

“What!” exclaimed the girl. “At this time of day?”

“Grandpa Willows was just that way,” explained Sally. “I’ve an uncle who’s even worse.”

Sally thought the responsive glow that sprang to the girl’s eyes should be prohibited from public demonstration. It was a menace to mankind.

“All of which, I presume, is leading up to the fact that you’d like your morning spot,” said the girl. “Tell me if I’m wrong.”

“I have nothing to say,” replied Sally.

“Come over here,” commanded the girl as she deftly filled a paper cup with a stiff drink from the seemingly inexhaustible flask in the desk drawer. “Toss that off and beat it.”

Sally tossed it off, then stood swaying slightly on her feet as the tears streamed from her eyes and strange sounds emerged from her throat.

“Very old and rare,” she gasped. “The person who drinks that should never suffer from baldness of the chest.”

“I don’t suffer from that disease,” the girl replied. “I glory in it.”

Sally, now invigorated by what she had received, felt truly thankful. She walked back to the desk and, bending down over the girl, neatly kissed her on the mouth, and was surprised to discover that she was more of a man than she had thought possible. In spite of her surprise the girl responded avidly. And this was what Mr. Gibber saw when he arrived at his office that fine, bright morning – his reception clerk being roundly kissed by one of his most troublesome copy writers.

“Mr. Willows!” snapped Mr. Gibber.

“It’s himself,” muttered the girl.

Sally was surprised at the sound of her own voice, or rather, Tim’s voice. It was deep, cool, and collected as she replied to Mr. Gibber.

“One moment, sir,” she protested, painfully pressing a thumb into the girl’s right eye. “I think I’ve got it. No, that’s odd. It was there a moment ago. Does it hurt much?” This last to the girl.

“Too much,” came the feeling reply.

“I’ll bet Mr. Gibber’s eyes are sharper than mine,” Sally announced, straightening her husband’s body. “Look, Mr. Gibber, the poor girl’s eye is all inflamed. There’s a cinder in it or something.”

“It’s a thumb,” said the girl under her breath.

“I’m sorry,” replied Mr. Gibber, as he examined the girl’s eye, which by this time was quite convincingly inflamed. “I misunderstood the situation, perhaps. You must be terribly nearsighted, Mr. Willows, or were you trying to bite the cinder out?”

“Ha, ha!” laughed Sally falsely, “you jest, Mr. Gibber, you jest.”

Leaving Mr. Gibber with the girl’s eye, Sally escaped from the reception room, and after wandering experimentally along various halls and passageways eventually located Tim’s office by seeing his name on the door.

No sooner was she seated at the desk than a man walked briskly in and brought a hand down crashingly on her back. Sally pitched forward on Tim’s face and lay among the pencils and pads.

“Morning, you sot!” cried the man. “How do you come up and fall off today?”

“I fall off,” said Sally feebly, “but I don’t come up. My good man, you’ve ruined me.”

Sally felt convinced this would be Steve Jones. No other man would take such a chance with Tim. She knew how he objected to back-slapping both in theory and in practice.

“What’s wrong with you?” demanded the man. “Are you weak today?”

“Very,” replied Sally. “Very weak today, Steve. Help me to resume the sitting posture you so brutally interrupted.”

When Sally was once more erect in her chair she looked at Steve with tears in her eyes. Steve was a likeable enough looking chap – dark, stocky, and with alert black eyes bright with bad thoughts.

“You owe me two dollars,” he announced happily. “Gold Heels lost.”

“I’d like to check that with Tim,” she began, then quickly checked herself and drew two bills from her pocket. “Here’s your dishonestly won spoils,” she hurried on. “You’ll excuse me, I trust, if I seem to dash away? That blow on the back did terrible things to me.”

“Double or quits,” Steve Jones suggested, flipping a coin in the air.

“What do you mean?” asked Sally, pausing on her way to the door.

“You know,” the other replied. “Don’t be dumb.”

And because Sally did not know she nodded vaguely and, taking a coin from her pocket, flipped it into the waste paper basket.

“Does that win?” she asked hopefully.

“Wait!” cried Steve. “Don’t touch it. I’m matching you.”

He nipped his coin again, caught it dexterously as Sally watched with admiring eyes a little tinged with envy, flattened the coin on the edge of the desk, then peered greedily down into the waste paper basket.

“Ah!” he exclaimed. “Good! It’s heads. You owe me another two dollars.”

Sally’s, or rather the face she was wearing, grew blank.

“What?” she demanded. “Already?”

“Don’t stall,” said Steve, “you big stiff.”

“All right,” replied Sally. “Seems very strange to me. I’ll have to owe it to you. Is that all that we do, or is there more?”

“Not unless you want to double it or nothing,” observed Steve.

“Let’s play nothing,” said Sally. “I really must be going.”

As she absently made her way to the ladies’ rest room she decided that hereafter she would shun the company of Steve Jones.

“It cost me just four good dollars,” she thought to herself, “to get pounded on the back. That’s not as it should be.”

The ladies’ room when she found it was a place of many partitions, which arrangement accounts for the fact that at first the presence of one they had good and sufficient reasons to believe to be a man was not noticed by several girls busily engaged in tightening their stockings upon their well-turned limbs. The conversation of these girls interested Sally and made her still further forget herself. It had to do with the price and quality of stockings and the best places to purchase them. So interested did she become, in fact, that she innocently approached the girls and attempted to join in the conversation.

“My dears,” she began in the most friendly of feminine voices, “where do you buy your – —”

Her question was neither finished nor answered. Never before had Sally realized that women could work up so much noise at such short notice. The air was pierced by a series of ear-splitting shrieks. Partition doors slammed and the figures of frantic women dashed clutchingly about the room. Sally stood appalled as she saw these figures break for the exit and heard excited voices carrying the name of Mr. Willows to the nethermost recesses of the Nationwide Advertising Agency. It was only a matter of moments before she had the room to herself, or nearly to herself.

“Oh, God, I’ve done it now,” she groaned. “I’ll never be able to live after this. What happens next?”

Unable to bear this thought she dragged at a partition door, only to have her efforts rewarded by a fresh outburst of shrieks and lamentations.

“Be quiet!” gasped Sally. “I’m a woman myself at heart.”

“Oh, what a liar,” came the voice. “You’re just a nasty man and you should be ashamed of yourself.”

Sally threw open another door, jumped in and snapped the catch just as Miss Reeder, the president’s personal secretary, bounced into the room with an expression of set purpose solidifying the wrinkles on her sharp, faded face. At the moment she was in her glory. She was hounding a man. At last she had the goods on one of the members of the sex that had neglected her for so many barren years.

“Mr. Willows,” she called in a harsh voice.

“He’s not here,” said Sally from her place of concealment.

“Oh, he is so,” cried the girl in the other compartment. “Make him go away, Miss Reeder.”

“I know where he is,” replied Miss Reeder complacently. “I can see his big feet. You might as well come out, Mr. Willows.”

“I can’t come out,” said Sally sadly.

“And why not, pray?” demanded Miss Reeder.

“I don’t feel like it,” replied Sally desperately. “Can’t you see I don’t feel like it.”

Then followed a period of silence which was even more unnerving than the shrieking of many voices.

“Well, Mr. Willows,” came the voice of Miss Reeder presently, “are you ready to come out? I’m waiting.”

“I’m never coming out,” declared Sally.

“Then I’ll send some men in,” said the determined woman. “They’ll break the door down and drag you out.”

The prospect of being besieged in a ladies’ rest room proved too much for Sally. She opened the door and with great dignity walked past Miss Reeder and out of the room where an informal reception committee was awaiting her arrival. Disdaining any words of explanation Sally averted her gaze from the faces of the interested group and walked slowly back to her husband’s office while the eyes of all the stenographers and clerks in the world seemed to be following her progress with hideous concentration. A memorandum was waiting for her on the desk. She picked it up mechanically and read:

Mr. Gibber will continue his talk on Brevity at 10:30 A. M. in the conference room.

Signed: G. M. Reeder, Sec’y.

By the time Sally had located the conference room the chairs at the table were nearly all occupied. Sally’s belated arrival created no little interest. The distracted girl in man’s image was painfully aware of the amused glances of numerous pairs of eyes. Mr. Gibber himself regarded Sally with a stern, censorious eye as she found a chair next to Steve Jones and sank down on it.

“What’s the matter?” Steve demanded in a low voice. “Are you turning into a nasty old man or did losing all that money temporarily derange you?”

“Don’t ask me now,” pleaded Sally. “I can’t bear to talk about it yet. Maybe I’ve gone mad. I don’t know.”

“Gentlemen,” began Mr. Gibber, “yesterday, as you doubtless remember, I was discussing the subject of brevity.”

“Yes, sir,” put in Dolly Meades helpfully. “You had just gotten to pith.”

“I had left pith,” replied Mr. Gibber, looking at the young woman reprovingly. “And I do not intend to return to it. In other words, we’ll waive pith.” He squared his shoulders, then leaning over the table, made a fresh start. “Gentlemen,” he said, “do you want to know something?” From the indifferent expressions on the faces of the gentlemen addressed it was only too apparent they had no desire to know anything.

Sally felt that some answer should be made to Mr. Gibber’s neglected question, but as no one seemed to give a hang she answered it herself.

“Yes, Mr. Gibber,” she said. “Go right ahead. I’d like to know something.”

“What do you want to know?” asked Mr. Gibber suspiciously.

“I haven’t the vaguest idea,” replied Sally. “Whatever you were going to tell us.”

“The question was merely rhetorical,” said Mr. Gibber.

“Sorry,” answered Sally. “I thought you were speaking on brevity. One can hardly be brief and rhetorical at the same time.”

Mr. Gibber’s face turned dangerously red and his eyes looked dangerously angry. Nevertheless he got hold of himself and made his third attempt.

“Boys,” he called them this time, “this is what I want you to know. It’s easy enough to write words, beautiful words. It’s as easy as falling off a log. It’s a joke. Any one of us here could sit right down now and dash off a novel or a play. We all could do it. And why don’t we? I’ll tell you – we have more important things to do with our words. I know it, because I have done it. Not a year passes that doesn’t see a new book or a play or a sheaf of verse that has been turned out by my pen. Why do I do it?”

“Yes, Mr. Gibber,” asked Dolly. “Why do you do it?”

“Just for fun,” thundered Mr. Gibber. “Just for a lark. I never even take the trouble to let a publisher have them.”

“A business, a man, or an idea that can be put on a paying basis must be fundamentally sound, must be essentially moral. But the vast majority of writers – these poets, playwrights and novelists – are not on a paying basis. Therefore they are neither sound nor moral. Some of them offend us while others amuse. All very good in their way, but after all, just froth – lightweights. We read them. We use them. We dismiss them. There’s no money in that sort of writing. They never get out of the red. Froth.” Once more a portentous pause. “Now, boys,” he continued, gaining inspiration from the sound of his own voice, “get this fact through your heads: we are the people. It is we who create the literature of progress and plan the campaigns of commerce. Right here in this quiet, gorgeously appointed conference room with my old golf trophies around us and souvenirs of the hunt looking at us from the wall – —” Here Mr. Gibber interrupted himself to point at the moth-eaten head of a misanthropic-looking moose gloomily surveying the people.

“He doesn’t seem to be tickled to death to see us, that silly-looking old moose doesn’t,” observed Miss Meades.

“What has the moose got to do with this discussion?” demanded Mr. Gibber.

“I don’t know, Mr. Gibber,” replied Dolly sweetly. “You seemed to be presenting him to us or us to him, so I thought – —”

“Don’t,” broke in Mr. Gibber. “What I was saying, gentlemen, is that right here in this room, moose or no moose, we are the people who are doing the real writing today, the real inspired creative work.”

“Hear! Hear!” cried Sally enthusiastically. “You’re dead right, Mr. Gibber. That’s exactly what my husband always tells me. He says that a copy writer must get along on less facts than a writer of fairy tales.”

“Your wife you mean, Mr. Willows,” corrected Mr. Gibber, highly pleased to be supported from such an unexpected quarter. He forgave Tim Willows much.

“Of course, of course. How foolish of me.” Sally’s blush spread over her husband’s face. “Naturally, my wife.”

“Gentlemen,” went on Mr. Gibber, plunging his right fist into the palm of his left hand. “It’s up to us to write words that sell rather than words that please. And that’s hard, gentlemen, damned hard. That’s real writing. I admit it. I have done it. The famous Bingo Reversible Puppy Biscuit Campaign, one of the outstanding successes of modern advertising, was mine, all mine. But it called for work, men, work before words, push before phrase, concentration before copy. That’s what I mean. That’s what I mean exactly. That and more. We who are gathered here together in the presence of – —”

“The moose,” suggested Miss Meades.

“—are carrying on a great work,” continued Mr. Gibber, brushing interruptions aside, “are shouldering a heavy responsibility. It devolves upon us to protect American capital and American industry from the insidious inroads of the deadly Red Blight. It is up to us to keep American labor contented and where it belongs – obediently on the job. It is my privilege, gentlemen, to be at the head of this splendid organization which I have created. Nay, it is my duty. I must face it. I must face it like an experienced field marshal standing in a – a – a – —”

“A field, perhaps,” suggested Sally. “That’s where he should stand by rights.”

“No, not a field,” gritted Mr. Gibber.

“In a daze, maybe,” put in Dolly Meades, not to be outdone in helpfulness.

“In neither!” cried Mr. Gibber. “Like Marshall Field standing – ha! Where am I? Oh, yes. Like a field marshal standing before the mast, one hand grasping the helm, the other one heaving the lead – —”

“A considerable stretch, that, Mr. Gibber,” observed the accurate Miss Meades. “Especially for a field marshal who is much more at home on a horse. Now if you had said, ‘Like a field marshal clinging to his horse, one hand grasping his tail, the other one holding his tooth—’ ”

Sally laughed scornfully.

“Do you mean to say that that field marshal’s horse had only one tooth?” she demanded.

“No, not necessarily,” retorted Dolly Meades hotly. “It might have had two teeth. Then again, it might have been an old horse – a toothless horse.”

“They never send a toothless horse to the front,” replied Sally.

“Just a minute! Just a minute!” cried Mr. Gibber.

“We’ve got to settle this, Mr. Gibber,” said Dolly Meades. Then, leveling her gaze on Sally, she continued. “Why not?” she demanded truculently. “Why not send a toothless horse to the front? Horses are not supposed to eat the enemy.”

“I know,” replied Sally. “But it’s the looks of the thing I’m thinking about. Not nice to see a lot of toothless horses knocking about the front. Should retire the poor things on half pay.”

“I don’t see that at all,” Miss Meades objected. “If Marshall Field happens to like a toothless horse I see no reason why he shouldn’t ride one.”

“Who is this Marshall Field, anyway?” asked Sally. “I don’t seem to remember him, or is he a place where you play games?”

“I haven’t time! I haven’t time!” Mr. Gibber protested, looking considerably dazed. “We’ll drop Marshall Field – —”

“And his toothless horse,” added Sally.

“Anyway, you know what I mean,” Mr. Gibber struggled on.

“I don’t,” spoke up Sally unhelpfully, but fortunately for this victim of Mr. Ram’s caprice Mr. Gibber did not hear her.

“And there’s money in it,” he continued. “Good money. Big money. Money enough for us all.”

Mr. Gibber pronounced the word “money” so succulently his listeners could almost taste it.

“Not now, perhaps,” – and here Mr. Gibber held up a restraining hand, fearing he had awakened false hopes in the breasts of his listeners. “Not now, of course, but later. For everyone in this room who devotes his entire time, thought, and energy exclusively to the best interests of this great organization there is sure money ahead. I have your welfare at heart. I think you know me well enough to trust your futures to me. Your interests are my interests. Your hopes and aspirations are dearer to me than my own. I am satisfied to be of service to mankind. Only two things do I ask – loyalty and hard work. If you give me those you need have no fear. I will carry each one of you with me along the highroad of prosperity to a happier and fuller life.”

Apparently overcome by the thought of the terrific task he had set himself, Mr. Gibber walked emotionally to a window while his prospective burdens, obviously much depressed, sat and gazed down that highroad where good money, big money, was never now, but forever and forever and for always just a little bit ahead.

Turning abruptly from the window through which he had apparently tossed his emotions, Mr. Gibber once more became his usual brisk, urbane self.

“So that, gentlemen,” he clipped out, “is what I mean by brevity. I thank you. Remember!”

“Thank you,” spoke up Dolly Meades sweetly. “We’ll never forget.”

While the conference, feeling rottenly let down, was slothfully disintegrating, Mr. Gibber was earnestly questioning Sally in a far corner of the room.

“How on earth did you manage to do it?” he asked, for Mr. Gibber was sincerely bewildered by the various stories he had heard.

“I didn’t try to do it, if that’s what you mean,” said Sally, equally in earnest. “I didn’t sneak in or plan to sneak in or await an opportunity. Can’t understand it myself. I was thinking of something – oh, yes – that chain store account. Had a swell idea and just didn’t pay any attention to where I was going.”

“But I’m told you approached some girls and tried to engage them in conversation,” Mr. Gibber continued. “Why did you do that? Why didn’t you make haste to leave after you’d discovered where you were?”

This was a very embarrassing question. Sally felt her nerve slipping.

“Still thinking about that chain store account,” she answered. “Wanted to get the girls’ reactions to a few questions.”

“You pick out a somewhat singular place for your investigations, I must say,” observed Mr. Gibber.

“No time like the present, I always say,” was Sally’s lame defense. “And of course legs mean nothing to me. I’m a married woman, Mr. Gibber, like yourself.”

“I’m not a married woman,” Mr. Gibber stoutly protested.

“Aren’t you?” replied Sally, genuinely surprised.

“Funny, I always thought you were. Then you must be a merry widow or a divorcee.”

Sally smiled at the man archly and his face grew blank with amazement.

“I’m neither,” he said at last.

“Then all I can say,” replied Sally, “is that you must have a rather peculiar nature.”

Mr. Gibber almost swooned at this. His face grew red with indignation and Sally began to fear that his body was going to pop at any minute.

“I tell you, young man,” he thundered, “I have no relations with men.”

“I can’t help that,” said Sally calmly. “It’s your loss, not mine.”

“But I don’t want to have relations with men,” said Mr. Gibber in a tortured voice.

“All right,” replied Sally soothingly. “No one’s going to force you. How did we get where we are, anyway?”

“You said you were a married woman,” said the badgered Gibber, “and claimed that I was one.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Sally, suddenly seeing the dawn. “Of course I meant man. How perfectly absurd!”

“You seem to be having trouble with your genders,” said Mr. Gibber, a trifle mollified, but still suspicious.

“My genders?” cried Sally in alarm. “Why, Mr. Gibber! I’m sure I don’t know what you mean. Do I show any symptoms of gender disease? Is it fatal, Mr. Gibber?”

“I mean you’re getting your sexes mixed,” the man explained wearily.

“Oh, that,” replied Sally, feeling greatly relieved. “Sex makes no difference to me. Man or woman – all the same. I’m practically sexless myself.”

Mr. Gibber received this gratuitous piece of information in a state of stupefaction.

“Listen,” he said at last. “I don’t want to talk with you. I can’t stand it. The things you say revolt me. They do indeed. But I will say this, and you can thank your stars it isn’t more serious. Keep out of the ladies’ rest room. I feel very sorry for you but more sorry for your wife.”

“You should feel sorry for her,” replied Sally feelingly. “She’s having a tough time of it.”

“I’m glad you realize that, at least,” said Gibber. “You may go.”

Sally went and had a solitary luncheon. The rest of the day she spent rehashing Tim’s advertisement of the Ducky Chain Stores, incorporating some ideas of her own. These advertisements were later okayed without a change and Tim Willows’s stock as a copy writer continued to rise.

Sally arrived home in time to find Tim tenderly nursing his feet, or rather the feet that had once been hers.

“I got these saving your honor,” he growled. “And I’m not going to do it again.”

“Well, I just about ruined yours, today,” replied Sally in a pleased voice. “I forgot myself and barged into the ladies’ rest room.”

Tim became interested, indignant, then amused.

After dinner that night they compared notes, and because they both felt strange and lonely they occupied the same bed.

CHAPTER EIGHT

How Not to Behave
at a Church Supper

Peter, seated on a kitchen chair, was doing nothing more important than scratching his venerable pate with a long, reflective finger. In the fullness of time this heavy operation would produce a vocal reaction. It did. Peter spoke.

“Judy Twill,” said Peter, “this house is going plumb to the dogs. Lately it’s been all cockeyed.”

“Something unnatural has come over it,” agreed Judy, turning from the stove and regarding her husband darkly. “And that’s certain sure. Some sort of a curse.”

“ ’Tisn’t a curse so much,” pursued Peter academically. “It’s more like an intermingling, if you get what I’m driving at. It’s a merger, that’s what it is.”

He paused and once more his finger revolved upon his head as if it were stirring up thoughts in the brain within.

“Strange and uncommon things are going on,” he resumed. “Unaccountable things. The master talks like the missus and the missus talks like the master, and before you’ve had a chance to get used to the change they switch back again to their regular voices. It’s upsetting, that’s what it is, upsetting. Take that dumb beast there, for instance. Low as he is he deserves some consideration. He hears coming from Miss Sally’s mouth the voice of Mr. Tim, yet sitting not ten feet away is Mr. Tim as large as life. It’s too much for the dog’s mind, which never was good, as you yourself will agree. What does he do? I saw it myself with my own eyes. First he starts to go to one of ’em, then he turns and starts for the other, then not knowing what the devil to do and not wishing to offend either he sits down exactly midway between ’em and looks perplexed. He can’t go on living and keeping his health that way. No dog could.”

Mrs. Twill had a word to say at this juncture, which meant that for the moment Peter’s voice was stilled.

“I can’t get over yet what happened the other morning,” she observed.

“What was that?” asked Peter obediently.

“Why,” explained his wife, “I was having a bit of a set-to with the butcher’s delivery boy over a leg of lamb I didn’t just take a fancy to when in strolls Miss Sally. She was nearly half naked, she was. That is, her kimono was all open in front. Might just as well not have had it on. She was smoking a big black cigar and carrying a glass of drink. ‘What the hell goes on here?’ she asks in a deep, rough voice. Then she notices the boy staring at her as if his eyes were going to pop out. ‘What are you looking at, funny face?’ she rips out. ‘Something wrong with my chest? Too much hair on it to suit you?’ For the sake of decency I made a sort of a motion and she looks down at herself and seems startled. Then she looks at the cigar and the glass and begins to giggle. ‘So sorry,’ says she in the rightful voice that God gave her. ‘I didn’t know. You see I’m rehearsing a part. Makes me forget myself.’ And with that she minces out just as ladylike as can be. I’d like to know what sort of a part she’s rehearsing. It will land her in the lock-up if she ever plays it in public.”

“Everything’s upside down,” complained Peter. “She does most of the drinking now while he stays sober. That’s no way. Another thing: he’s taken to smoking her perfumed cigarettes and she goes round with a cigar in her mouth – I’ve actually seen her pulling at a pipe. And another funny thing I’ve noticed. We get two morning papers now instead of one, and when he comes home at night she makes a grab for the evening paper. Never saw a woman take such an interest in the news.”

“The other morning I popped in on them and he was actually dressing her,” declared Mrs. Twill. “She was cursing and damning like a trooper. ‘How in hell do you get this girdle on?’ she asked him. Imagine that, a woman asking her husband how to get dressed. And only last night I caught him strutting around in one of her nightgowns. It gave me a fair start, it did.”

“This I do know,” said Peter. “I get real dizzy now when I’m serving meals. Their voices shift about so quickly that I can’t tell which one of them is asking me for things. Have to keep watching their lips to see who’s speaking.”

“Don’t know where it’s going to end,” quoth Judy Twill.

“Perhaps it’s some modern idea,” suggested her husband.

“No idea is modern,” replied his wife. “These newfangled ideas we hear so much about are just oldfangled ideas that have been tried out and forgotten or lost, but I will admit that whatever their idea is it’s absolutely new to me.”

Meanwhile the subjects of the Twills’ conversation were busily and none too happily dressing for the evening.

“I’ve always had ideas of my own about the way women should dress,” observed Tim, “and now that I am a woman to all intents and purposes I’m going to put them into practice.”

“Do, dear,” remarked his wife sweetly. “I hope they’re more attractive than going about half naked in an old shirt or the top part of a pair of pajamas.”

“Wish I could get those days back again,” said Tim with a heavy sigh.

“You should go on a diet,” Sally protested. “Honestly, Tim, I wish you would. If you don’t my beautiful figure will be completely ruined. You should take better care of your wife’s body.”

“Well, be extremely careful what you do with mine,” admonished Tim. “If I ever get it back again I’d like to find it the way it left me.”

Here he looked thoughtfully at Mr. Ram. In Tim’s eyes there was a respectful appeal, a mute entreaty.

“I think he’s responsible,” he told his wife. “I have an idea that little fellow up there is at the bottom of all our troubles.”

“If he is,” said Sally, “I hope he has a heart. We’ve never done anything to the little blighter. In fact, we’ve treated him very decently. Given him the place of honor.”

Tim’s thoughts were on other things.

“Tonight, for example,” he observed, “I think I’ll just wear that black georgette pleated skirt of yours and that stunning red blouse.”

“Take care of the blouse,” said Sally. “Don’t spill soup on it. I like that blouse. Wish I could wear it myself.”

“I’ll take care of the damn thing,” answered Tim, “but honestly, Sally, I don’t see why we have to go to this church supper. I’ve never been to a church supper and my technique will be rotten.”

This discussion had been going on for a week, and Sally’s nerves were becoming a bit frayed at the edges.

“Tim, dear,” she said wearily, “I don’t want to go to this washout any more than you do, but I must be there. I gave Dr. Jordan my word a long, long time ago, and now that you’re me you’ve got to keep my word. That’s all there is to it.”

“What a deuce of a fine idea that is,” complained Tim. “Hope you haven’t dated me up for any taffy-pulling parties or sewing bees or aesthetic dancing circles. I hate like hell to go tonight. It’s hard to face a church supper.”

“You don’t like the cocktail parties I pull here,” she replied, “and you don’t like church suppers. Will you kindly tell me just what you do like?”

“You might be wearing my body,” said Tim bitterly, “but your brain is just as illogical as it ever was. If I go to this joyless affair I’ve got to be primed before I start. Scream down to Peter to bring up a bottle of rye.”

Sally humored him. It was the only thing to do under the circumstances. She had to get him to the supper. It was going to be a superior sort of supper. All of the best people were going to be there, which meant, of course, the worst. Sally was determined that she should be seen although she realized with a feeling of dread that in trusting her body to Tim she was placing her reliance in a frail craft indeed.

“All I ask is that you don’t get me – my body, I mean – all lit up,” she said as Tim gulped down a drink. “And keep your own mind sober. You’ll need it.”

In spite of the injunction, both Tim and Sally were excessively well primed when they drove off to the supper.

“Don’t forget,” she told her husband, who was looking as pretty as a picture, “Dr. Jordan is a real sport, a regular hail-fellow-well-met sort.”

“I know,” said Tim. “He’s a he-man, red-blooded and all that. I’ll hate him. I’ll hate everybody.”

When they reached the church Tim parked the car on a side street where darkness abetted indulgence. After a steep drink from a flask that lived in one of the side pockets of the car they wiped their lips, took a couple of deep breaths, shook themselves and made for the church. Sally little suspected that beneath Tim’s skirt, strapped securely round his waist and held cleverly in a little holster of his own devising, rested a small but sufficient bottle of rye whiskey. Had she known this the situation might still have been saved. Unfortunately, however, she was unaware of the existence of this potential source of danger.

“Now don’t leave me,” Tim breathed to Sally, smelling noxiously of strong drink. “I’m depending on you to steer me through this slaughter.”

“I know,” replied his wife, looking down at him from her superior height, “but the trouble is you’re supposed to be steering me through the slaughter. It’s all quite mad.”

“And as it should be,” added Tim, at which both of them laughed loudly and entered the church in high merriment for no particular reason.

The supper was held in the basement of the church. It was a great, gaunt chamber with naked brick walls that flung back vindictively the songs that were flung against them. The place was now filled with long tables and long-looking people, long people with strained faces and bright smiles. Here and there were animated little groups of the smart set, the individual members of which tried so hard to be sweet and hearty whenever approached by a regular, bona-fide church supperite. Yet over these little groups hung an atmosphere of guilt and fear. For once they were out of their element, and where the real church worker walked with a confident tread these swagger members of the damned moved with a halting step. It was as if they felt that at any moment they would be committed irretrievably to something – to something dismal and demanding.

Church suppers should be. There is nothing else quite like them. There is nothing else within a mile of them. A person who has never attended a church supper has neither lived nor savored life. It is not wise to refuse an invitation to a church supper. It is not courageous. As a rule one gets a pretty good meal for a pitiful little piece of change. Of course one pays a thousand times over in mental anguish. One must be hearty and innocently merry at a church supper, and this comes hard to most of us. Then again, one must sing at a church supper, or at least give the appearance of singing. Also, at a church supper one must shake hands with people one doesn’t know and whom one doesn’t want to know. One must talk with these people and at the same time restrain the impulse to scream piercingly and to commit murder. There are ever so many things one must and must not do at a church supper. Among the hardest of the things one must not do at a church supper is to keep from making maniacal faces and obscene gestures at people who smile upon one with unfair suddenness and dazzling brightness. There are lots of other hard things not to do. For example: when the faded lady at your side sighs deeply and asks, “Don’t you think poor Dr. Scraggs is overworking? He looks so tired tonight” – when the faded lady uncorks that one it is a very difficult thing not to reply rudely, “Indeed I don’t. In my opinion, madam, Dr. Scraggs has one hell of an easy life. In my opinion he doesn’t work half hard enough. And as for him looking tired – stuff and nonsense! It’s the bunk, madam. The Rev. Dr. Scraggs is merely bored, and you are partly responsible.”

Of course this answer might be quite untrue, for the Rev. Dr. Scraggses frequently are both overworked and underpaid, yet there is a deal of satisfaction to be derived in brutally offending one’s neighbor at a church supper. One instinctively feels like doing it.

If one stopped to consider the hard work, the high hopes, and the tons of good will and better intentions that go to make every church supper a horrid reality one would be sunk in a mire of self-accusation and spiritual depression. But one must not think of such things unless one enjoys crying into one’s soup. To enjoy a church supper in the right spirit one must be able to take it or leave it just like that. It’s easy enough to take a church supper, but to leave it is an entirely different matter. It is almost impossible to leave a church supper. Houdini himself was never able to escape a church supper. Prisons, yes. Fortresses, yes. Chests at the bottom of rivers, yes, yes. Church suppers, no. His one great failure. They go on and on and on, do church suppers. After a while one gains the impression that one is going to live the remainder of one’s life at a church supper. One speculates whether it would not be a wise thing to send for one’s trunks and furniture so as to be properly equipped to do full justice to this church supper. The faces of old friends appear in fancy, and well-loved places now forever left behind float before one’s aching eyes.

And yet one smiles brightly at a church supper and keeps on smiling though not quite so brightly for interminable hours, and after it’s all over one goes home and kicks one’s dog, beats one’s wife, sets fire to one’s neighbor’s house, and feels a great deal better.

“I seem to see,” observed Tim, confronting this church supper, “quite a number of old ladies and they all look alike with the exception that some are thin and tired while others are stout and tired. I suspect them of being Supper Ladies.”

“They are,” whispered Sally. “They constitute the very backbone of the supper.”

“Then I don’t want to eat it,” said Tim resolutely.

“Those old ladies – we call them the Girls – are the only real persons here,” Sally explained rapidly. “They’ve thought this supper, planned this supper, sweated over this supper, and they’ll probably be too tired to eat the damn supper. I’m glad we came if only for their sake.”

“Stop, Sally, you’re breaking my heart,” said Tim. “I don’t know whether the Girls would be so glad to meet us.”

“Oh, they’d forgive anything so long as you come to their suppers,” replied Sally. “Are you swaying or am I?”

“Both of us are, but in different directions,” said Tim. “That’s what keeps us from falling. It seems so fantastic to be clinging to my own arm with your hand.”

“I don’t want to think of it,” murmured Sally. “It makes me feel a little distrait.”

The grip on her arm suddenly tightened and she heard him gasp.

“Look, Sally,” he whispered. “Is that man a maniac? I’m frightened. Take me home.”

Far down at the end of the room there was a man seated at a table and on the face of this man there was an expression, or rather, a contortion. In his eyes glowed a wild light. His mouth had achieved the limits of expansion. There were teeth, not good but abundant. Sally looked upon this man and started visibly, then steadied herself.

“It’s all right,” she said, “but I never can get used to it myself. That’s the Smile of Welcome and Good Cheer. You will encounter many more, but none quite so well developed. It’s one of the features of all church suppers. It also sings lustily and then its eyes turn up.”

“Oh, God. Oh, God,” breathed Tim. “Do you think it’s really happy, that it enjoys being here?”

“You couldn’t drive it out,” said Sally, “It eats these suppers up spiritually as well as physically.”

Suddenly Tim found himself looking a black button closely in the face. The button was on a black vest on which there were still other buttons. Slowly his eyes followed the course of the buttons upward. Would they never end? They did – just under a strong, pink chin. With an effort he kept his eyes going until at last they surmounted the crest of the chin, and to his utter dismay he found dwelling on a face that was looking down at him with a fixed glare. What eyes! What gleaming teeth! The very vitality of that face unnerved Tim. He swayed forward and grabbed two black-sleeved arms for support. At the same minute Sally, wishing to give a touch of realism to her masculine rôle, slapped the owner of the arms and face resoundingly on the back.

The effect to a bystander was that of a concerted attack by Mr. and Mrs. Willows upon the body and person of the Rev. Dr. Jordan. While one held the man’s arms pinned to his sides the other brutally assaulted him. It was the old army game that succeeds nine times out of ten.

The slap had disconcerted Sally far more than it had Dr. Jordan, who stood rooted firm in the faith of God. Sally had no such support. She lost all poise and began to babble in a high, effeminate voice – in her own voice, in fact.

“Oh, Dr. Jordan,” she gushed, “I have a surprise for you. I’ve brought my husband along.”

“She means our wife,” muttered Tim, still clinging to the preacher’s arms. “Don’t listen to him.”

This correction brought Sally to her senses. She dropped her voice to a deep rumble, and once more addressed the preacher.

“That’s a horse with another kidney,” she said jovially. “But what does it matter? Who knows?”

“Knows what?” asked Tim suspiciously.

“Why ask me?” replied Sally. “Perhaps Dr. Jordan does.”

But Dr. Jordan didn’t. Accustomed as he was to strange and mystifying situations he found himself for the first time unable to function effectively. Gently but firmly he pried himself loose from Tim, who, realizing that something must be done, smiled brightly up at Dr. Jordan and affectionately patted his arm.

“You see, Dr. Jordan, I kept my promise, didn’t I?” he said in Sally’s most seductive tones. “I did even better than that, but I knew he wouldn’t behave. That husband of mine never takes anything seriously.”

The great face of Dr. Jordan cleared. So that was the explanation. Tim Willows was a bit of a joker. Oh, well, the church needed more of that sort. He could use Tim Willows to advantage. Perhaps he might be induced to become a regular member of the congregation. True, there was a suggestion of rye in the air, but maybe … He beamed his beamiest upon the pair and spoke richly.

“Welcome, welcome, welcome, friends,” reiterated the doctor. “I need your sort behind me.” Tim wondered what he meant by that. “You’re a bit of a larker yourself, Mrs. Willows, but a lark flies up to heaven, as you, too, someday shall fly.” (“How gloomy,” thought Tim.) “Glad to have you with us tonight, Mr. Willows. I hope it will not be the last time. Come in someday and smoke a cigar with me. Mrs. Willows, I expect great things from you tonight. Find tables, find tables.” His strong hand swept the room and nearly knocked the false teeth out of the mouth of one of his staunchest workers. “So sorry!” cried the Rev. Dr. Jordan, turning to the injured party, who was clutching or rather muffling his mouth with both hands. And when Dr. Jordan turned back again both Tim and Sally were tottering among the tables.

“Charming couple,” thought Dr. Jordan, then moved away from the gentle cloud of alcohol still floating in the air.

“What did he mean about expecting great things of you?” demanded Tim.

“I’m on a committee,” replied Sally vaguely. “Civic Betterment. It means nothing.”

Blake and Helen Watson, Vera and Ted Hutchens, Flo Jennings and Carl Bentley were grouped in a depressed huddle. They all wore a beaten expression. They were furtively critical and just a trifle superior. At the approach of the Willowses the beaten look on Bentley’s face became almost mutilated.

“Ha!” snorted Blake Watson, pulling at his mustache. “Hah!”

“Bah!” retorted Tim, looking at the man coldly through Sally’s brown eyes. “What a hell of a jam this is.”

At the sound of Tim’s voice issuing from the sweet lips of Sally the statuesque Mr. Bentley gave a start and began to sweat unbecomingly.

“My dears!” exclaimed Sally, squeezing Vera’s and Helen’s hands with her much larger ones. “So sweet of you to have come. I knew you wouldn’t let me down.”

And with this she kissed them both.

“What’s the big idea?” cried Blake Watson, giving Sally a violent push.

This treatment of his wife immediately aroused Tim. With a small foot he neatly tripped Watson, who fell with a crash among the chairs.

“Nobody can treat my wife that way,” he announced, looking down at the fallen man.

Helen, although only occasionally fond of her husband, could not permit this incident to pass unnoticed.

She clawed Tim’s hat from his head and threw it on the floor. Sally, more outraged by the treatment of her hat than her husband, promptly shoved Helen down on top of Blake Watson, then, taking Tim’s arm, moved majestically away, disassociating herself as well as her spouse from the scene of disorder. It had all happened so quickly that even those who had been privileged to witness the scene at close range ascribed it to an accident. Church supper chairs are constantly doing things to people. They are almost human in their perverseness, either collapsing on a person or making a person collapse. Of course the noise attracted a great deal of attention, but the false and desperate laughter of the Watsons and the Hutchenses, swelled by the hearty boom of Mr. Bentley, served to dispel any suggestion of unpleasantness. Nevertheless the members of the little group were dazed. The strange conduct of the Willowses had momentarily numbed their faculties.

“Both of them are as drunk as coots,” said Ted Hutchens. “That’s the only way I can explain it.”

“She actually knocked me down,” observed Blake Watson in a puzzled voice.

“And he darned well hurled me down,” put in Helen. “It was a sort of mixed scuffle as far as I can make out.”

“It was very interesting to watch,” drawled Vera. “The hat part was pretty. How did you ever come to think of that form of retaliation?”

“It was an inspiration,” said Helen. “Sally loves her hats.”

“We all do – when we get them,” remarked Vera with a significant look at her husband.

“You don’t love hats,” sneered Mr. Hutchens. “You bow down and fairly worship them.”

A middle-aged but infinitely weary-looking woman came up to Tim and took him by the arm.

“Dear Mrs. Willows,” she said in an harassed voice, “would you mind lighting that newfangled gasoline stove for us? You’re so clever about such things.”

Sally, with a smile of unholy enjoyment, watched the dazed Tim being dragged off in the direction of the kitchen.

“Which stove do you mean?” asked Tim of the weary woman. The kitchen seemed full of stoves, all of which were working briskly.

“That one,” replied the woman, pointing to a sinister-looking object squatting defiantly in one corner.

“Ah,” said Tim with the confidence born of alcohol. “I’ll show you how to light that baby. It’s really quite simple.”

So saying, he turned on a tap until his ears were pleased by the jocund sound of gurgling fluid. Then he struck a match, pushed a button, and applied the light. There was a muffled boom, an odoriferous flame, then the room became lost in a deep, heavy pall of gaseous vapor. And from the bosom of this reeking cloud issued a volley of vile obscenities uttered in the deep voice of an infuriated male. The edges of this vocal display of frightfulness were garnished by the stifled shrieks of women. A short time later the Girls, gallantly led by Tim, debouched into the supper room like a troupe of blackfaced comediennes. Never had the Girls received such a shock and never had a church supper been so lively and entertaining. First Mr. and Mrs. Watson had got themselves entangled in some chairs, and actually fallen down on the floor in a most diverting manner. This was hugely funny and furnished no end of bright conversation. But to see the Girls in battle array issuing from the smoke of the kitchen was almost too much of a good thing. Of course, the explosion occasioned a certain amount of consternation, but this was quickly dispelled as soon as the bellowing voice of Dr. Jordan assured the company that all danger was past. The Girls and Tim required a certain amount of washing, which was administered by willing and tender hands. During the process of ablution Tim found an opportunity to empty virtually all of the contents of his flask. When once more he appeared in public he was feeling decidedly set up. The Girls were much more interested in trying to discover the source of the obscene language than that of the explosion. They never did, although they entertained some well-founded suspicions.

The supper proceeded coughingly, and although the food tasted weirdly of smoke and gasoline it was consumed with true Christian humility and fortitude. Then came the singing, which taxed the Willowses far beyond their capacity to stand taxing. This was especially true of Tim. At one moment he sang lustily in a clear, unmistakable baritone and at the next he startled both himself and everyone within hearing distance by swooping up to the dizzy altitudes of a soprano. Sally was experiencing the same difficulty, only not to the same extent. It was entirely forgivable if those sitting at her table were rendered mute with amazement when they heard proceeding from the mouth of an adult male the trebling alto of a choir boy. It is even more forgivable if they gasped with incredulity when they heard those ringing notes descend to a faint, embarrassed rumble. Up and down the scales fluctuated the voices of the Willowses until at times they seemed almost inspired. During a lull in the singing a lady leaned over to Tim and said, “My dear, I don’t know how you can do it.”

“It’s a gift,” replied Tim modestly. “I don’t know how I manage it myself. Nobody ever taught me.”

“Nobody should,” remarked an old man.

When a long-faced individual asked Sally how she accomplished the feat she passed it off by saying that her mother’s great-aunt by marriage had been a professional ventriloquist. This answer only partially satisfied the man. He kept brooding over the problem of how much influence one’s mother’s great-aunt by marriage could have on one’s voice. Not a great deal, he decided. Certainly, not enough to justify the amazing demonstration of vocal gymnastics he had just heard.

The singing ended, the speeches began, but little did Tim realize that he was to be among the speakers until he heard Dr. Jordan calling in a loud voice for Mrs. Sally Willows to address the assembled multitude on the subject of Civic Betterment.

“I’ll do no such damn thing,” Tim muttered to Sally.

“Don’t let me down, Tim,” she whispered. “You know as much about the subject as anyone else. Go on up there and just say you approve of civic betterment and all that.”

Whether it was Sally or the liquor within him that prevailed upon Tim to mount the platform and stand swaying dangerously at its edge will never be known. The fact remains that he did this mad act and actually offered himself up on the altar of Christian martyrdom.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began in a voice that snapped the supperites erect in their chairs. “Members of the Congregation,” he continued in softly cooing accents. “Friends, would perhaps be better,” he amended rather briskly. “I shall soon get started. A short time ago I gave a successful demonstration of how not to light a gasoline stove. I shall now endeavor to show you how not to make a speech.”

Tim paused to permit his audience to become convulsed, and during that pause he lost control of his thoughts and almost lost his balance.

“Look out!” Sally whispered piercingly, and Tim swayed back from the edge of the platform.

“Friends,” he began again, this time making no effort to disguise his voice, “I believe in physic betterment – I mean, civic betterment. We should have a bigger and better civic – pardon me again, I mean, physic – no, I don’t – what I mean is, we should have a bigger and better betterment. Oh, yes, and a much bigger and better city. We must have much wider streets with lots of sidewalk cafés.” Desperately Tim’s hands sought for his pockets and, finding none, plucked impotently at his skirt. “And we should have bigger gardens,” he continued. “Great big gardens running off to the skyline. Everything should be bigger, much bigger and much better. Bigger houses, bigger schools, bigger stores, bigger everything. Great big moving-picture theaters with fountains. Must have fountains.” Once more Tim’s hands struggled into non-existent pockets and succeeded in disarranging his skirt. Sally was beginning to get nervous. “Then there’s another thing. We should have bigger and better churches. And I suggest that congregations should be drafted so that all the churches would be filled and the preachers wouldn’t have to deliver their sermons to eleven or twelve dispirited-looking ladies who don’t need to be saved. And I believe in free education for preachers. So many preachers are dumb because they lack the time and opportunity to continue their studies. Give ’em a chance to dig into economics, psychology, and sociology – any number of subjects. Give the poor devils a break, say I.” Here the dress was strained to its utmost. “On the other hand I believe in the legalization of the ancient and honorable profession of prostitution.” Gasps from the audience. Wild signals from Sally but Tim was warming to his subject. “Many a sweet girl has gone wrong because she was not allowed to become a good, honest prostitute. Do you know that last year 2,540 girls disappeared from their homes? Why, I ask you, why? Why did all those lovely girls disappear from their homes? Because they weren’t allowed to become good, honest prostitutes – that is, most of them.” He paused to watch the frantic approach of the Rev. Dr. Jordan. “Prostitution is an amiable and artistic profession. It develops a social instinct and – —”

At this point the dress gave up all resistance and descended with a snap. The next moment the person believed to be Mrs. Sally Willows stood before the supperites and gave them the shock of their lives. The Rev. Dr. Jordan, whether from modesty or admiration, stopped in his tracks and gazed at the lovely figure. The step-ins were becomingly short and Sally’s legs were becomingly shaped. Altogether the revelation was not at all bad. The supperites were in a state of ferment. Tim was almost frantic. He was making fluttering signals of anguish to Sally. Strange to say, disgraceful to say, that hard-boiled young lady was laughing. Tim could have poisoned her. What had broken Sally down was the small flask of whiskey strapped so neatly around Tim’s waist. The presence of that flask explained a lot to Dr. Jordan. In fact, it explained everything. Tim took a few frightened steps, tripped and fell. During the general commotion that followed, Sally adjusted Tim’s dress and dragged the broken man from the church. Once in the car she gave him a huge drink. Then she drove him home herself.

“Well,” said Tim at last, “we certainly made a go of that church supper.”

“Yes,” agreed Sally. “The Willowses were an immense social success – a riot, in fact.”

“And the Rev. Dr. Jordan got a great deal more than he expected,” added Tim.

“You opened his eyes to a lot of things,” said Sally.

CHAPTER NINE

A Shocking Discovery

When Tim Willows discovered he was going to become a mother he nearly went mad. Sally was forced to lock up all the grog and to take a day off from the office in order to be with the semi-demented prospective mother of her child.

“I won’t be a mother,” Tim assured her in a trembling voice. “I’ll do something terrible to myself. A lake – that’s it. You’ll find me in a lake. All wet.”

“Now don’t work yourself up, dear,” said Sally soothingly. “It will be bad for baby. Let me give you this footstool, sweetheart. It will make you much more comfortable. And I’ll get you a little shawl.”

In response to these tender endearments, Tim Willows unleashed a scream of rage and dashed about the room looking for something to break. He picked up a clock, considered it, then returned it to its place. The clock was too expensive. Anyway he liked that clock. Finally he selected a large china vase. It made a very satisfactory sound when it crashed against the floor. He danced madly on the fragments, then fell exhausted into a deep chair.

“I can’t stand it,” he gasped. “I can’t. Footstools and shawls. Oh, God.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself to carry on like that,” admonished Sally. “One would think you were demeaning yourself to be the mother of my child.”

Once more Tim’s scream of impotent rage rang through the house. Springing up, he seized upon another china vase, which he shattered against the floor. The first one had proved efficacious. Why not this one?

“Thank God, they’re gone,” said Sally, as she led the trembling man back to his chair. “I’ve always felt like smashing them myself, but never could work up the courage. If it hadn’t been for baby, they might have remained in the Willows family for generations. What are you hoping for, dear, a boy or a girl?”

“A gorilla,” gritted Tim. “A monster. A two-headed calf.”

“Don’t be silly, sweetheart,” Sally told him. “You should have nothing but sweet and fragrant thoughts now. I’ll get you a book about it – The Program of a Prospective Mother. You’ll love it. It will do you good.”

Weakly, Tim looked round the room for another vase, then abandoned the idea through sheer physical lassitude.

“You stop calling me ‘dear’ and ‘sweetheart’ and all those things,” he muttered darkly. “And if you bring that book into this house, I’ll burn it up on the front lawn and dance round the fire naked, screaming the vilest words I can muster.”

“But, Tim, precious,” explained Sally, patiently, “neither of us knows the first thing about motherhood, or childbirth or anything along those lines.”

“Don’t want to know,” snapped Tim. “Bring me a book on how to forestall a prospective infant and you’ll be doing a guy a good turn. I feel like going upstairs and wringing that damn little idol’s neck. Of all the tricks to play on a self-respecting man. It was a bad day for us when that libidinous uncle of mine conceived the bright idea of sending him to us.”

“Don’t talk disparagingly of Mr. Ram at this critical time,” said Sally. “We’ll be needing all the luck he can bring us. They say the first one is always the hardest.”

“What?” ejaculated Tim. “The first one? Do you think for a moment I’d have another, assuming I have this one?”

“I see no reason why you shouldn’t,” replied Sally, callously. “I see no reason why you shouldn’t have several. It’s high time we were doing something in the line of babies. Neither of us is getting any younger.”

“That’s right!” cried Tim. “Make a regular Negro mammy out of me. Make me bear such a brood of children I won’t know exactly how many I have. I suppose you’re hoping for twins to begin with.”

“Twins would be awfully cute,” admitted Sally. “While you’re at it, you might as well make up for lost time.”

“You seem to regard me as a sort of factory,” Tim observed bitterly. “If I bear one very small and reluctant baby, you can consider yourself lucky.”

“Nonsense,” replied Sally, cheerfully. “I expect great things from you.”

“So did Dr. Jordan,” said Tim. “And he got much more than he expected.”

“Everyone will be so pleased and excited when they find out,” Sally observed with a bright, anticipatory smile. “All the girls. Think of it.”

“I’ll not even listen to it, much less think of it,” retorted Tim. “If you breathe a word of this to a single living soul, I’ll do something desperate and you’ll be eternally sorry. Just stick that in your hatband and keep it there as a reminder.”

“Oh, we’ll have to let them know,” protested Sally.

“That’s just what we won’t have to do,” said Tim. “Let ’em find out for themselves. They’ll know soon enough. God, what a thing to have happened to a man. I guess I’m the first member of my sex ever to have gotten this way.”

“You should be proud of the fact,” replied Sally. “And think of my feelings. I’ll be the first woman ever to have become a father.”

Tim looked at her hatefully.

“That’s right,” he muttered. “Go on and gloat. Feel proud and chesty. You should be ashamed of yourself for getting me in this ridiculous, not to say dangerous, condition. Suppose you lose me?”

“We must take our chances on that,” said Sally, with what Tim felt was altogether too much complacency.

“You mean I must take my chances,” he retorted with mild sarcasm. “You are taking no chances. It’s pretty soft for you.”

“I’ll be very upset and nervous,” replied Sally.

“Bah!” exclaimed Tim. “You’ll probably get squiffed and celebrate with Steve Jones. But believe me, I’m going to make you pay through the nose for the dirty trick you’ve played on me. When a woman’s this way she has to be humored. You know that as well as I do. At any time of the day or night, you must humor a prospective mother. And I’m going to have cravings. I’m going to think of the strangest damn things.”

“All right,” agreed Sally. “That’s good with me. I’d do almost anything to have a baby.”

“Except have one,” put in Tim.

“It’s not my fault,” said Sally. “It’s a physical impossibility. And Tim, dear, you will continue to write copy for me to take to the office?”

“Inasmuch as our bread and butter depend on it, I guess I’ll have to,” replied Tim. “At any rate, it will take my mind off of the horrible condition I’m in. But tell me, don’t you know the first thing about childbirth, Sally?”

“Well, I know the first thing,” she admitted. “That is, how to go about starting one.”

“Don’t be facetious,” said her husband. “I know all about that, too. What I mean is, doesn’t it hurt a bit?”

“From all that I’ve heard,” she told him, “it’s not what you might call a soothing experience.”

“And you get awfully large, don’t you?” Tim continued, with the fascination of horror in his voice.

“Tremendous,” said Sally, warming to the subject. “And sometimes sick in the morning.”

“I’m that now,” put in Tim. “Very.”

“Then you must be a shade pregnant,” Sally observed with assurance. “It’s almost a sure sign.”

Tim brightened a little.

“But, Sally,” he said, “you’re not absolutely sure I’m going to be a mother, are you? There might be some mistake. I mean it’s just possible?”

“Of course, there’s just a chance,” replied Sally. “That’s why I have to take you to a doctor.”

“What!” cried Tim. “And be examined? Never in this life. I won’t stand for that.”

He shrank back in his chair and looked miserable. The thought of the doctor revolted him. Was ever a man in such a fix? Strange that at that moment his thoughts should revert to Claire Meadows. He wondered what she would think of the situation. A strange woman.

“But you must, Tim, darling,” laughed Sally. “Don’t be so stupid. Everyone goes to a doctor. It’s the only thing to do. Especially with us. We don’t know a darned thing about it. Have to get some honest-to-God advice. Have to learn things and find out what you must do with yourself – what to eat and what not to eat, and, most important of all, how much you can drink, if any.”

“Hope he doesn’t stop my grog,” said Tim. “That is, not entirely. Before we go to this doctor, you’ve got to give me a drink or so. Otherwise I’ll call the whole childbirth off.”

Sally agreed because she realized that it would be in all likelihood the last time the poor devil would be able to indulge. It seemed a shame to stop Tim’s grog. He enjoyed it so. Give him a bottle and a book, and life for him was complete. He demanded of it nothing more.

Peter brought a fresh bottle of rye and some glasses and a siphon. After he had deposited these on a convenient table he stood looking appreciatively at the remains of the shattered vases. He was glad, but at the same time uneasy. If they began breaking up the household effects, they’d soon be eating off the floor like animals.

“I broke them, Peter,” offered Tim, in what he hoped was a sweet voice. “I did it in a fit of rage. And I knew you didn’t like them. You can clear away the remains later.”

“Thank you, Miss Sally,” said Peter. “They were horrid things. Remember when they were bought. His great-aunt, Mrs. Ames Willows, brought them home one day. They occasioned a great disturbance. Mr. Ames went on a bender for a month. It didn’t take much to send him off, he was so highstrung.” Peter paused and gazed reflectively at the table. “He was fond of the bottle, too,” he added significantly.

“Listen, Sally,” said Tim, when Peter had left the room. “I’ve had something on my mind I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time. Now that I’m in this serious condition, I think I will.”

“Shoot, old kid,” replied Sally, as she sipped the highball.

“Well, you know the night I nearly murdered Carl Bentley?” he began.

“I’ll never forget it,” said Sally.

“Well, that night,” continued Tim, “I drifted quite accidently over to Claire Meadows’ house and – and I didn’t act quite right. I guess I was a bit unfaithful.”

“If you can only guess about it,” said Sally, “it mustn’t have been much of a party.”

“It was more like a dream,” replied Tim in a low voice. “Like being inevitably guided in a dream. No power to control circumstances and no desire, Sally. But it was real, all right. You know I was in a bit of a fog – a dense fog, in fact.”

He gulped down his drink and looked at Sally out of her own limpid, brown eyes. She in turn was regarding him with affectionate amusement.

“Pregnancy,” she remarked easily, “is already making an honester man of you.” She paused to refill the glasses. “You know,” she continued quite seriously, “I can’t find it in me to blame you for being unfaithful with Claire Meadows. To me she is the most irresistible woman in town. Anyway, I wasn’t doing so well myself that night. As a matter of fact, I started you out on the primrose path. It’s a funny thing, though. It’s insight, that’s what it is. When I first met Claire Meadows many months ago, I had the weirdest feeling that someday you two were going to get together. She’s the sort of person who’d appreciate you and your silly attitude toward life and things. Yet, I had the comforting feeling, also, that she was not the woman you should have married. I’m that woman, or, at least, I was. Both of you are too hard-boiled and at the same time too idealistic. You’d burn each other up. You’d hurt each other terribly in some fool way.” Once more Sally paused and a slow smile, a wicked smile, crooked the lips that had once been Tim’s. “Just the same, Tim,” she resumed, “I’m much obliged for the tip. Think I’ll drop round to see Claire Meadows some night. She must be missing you, old thing.”

“And me in this condition!” Tim cried indignantly. “You’ll do no such thing, Sally Willows. Now that you’ve got me all funny the way I am, I’ll be damned if I’ll stand for any monkey business. I’ll abort myself, or whatever it is you do.”

“Now don’t get yourself all worked up and nervous over nothing,” said Sally, soothingly. “Of course, I was only joking. I wouldn’t think of doing such a thing.”

“And you’re not going about with a lot of light women, when I get all fat and ugly,” continued Tim, getting himself all fumed up and excited at the ghastly ramifications of his condition. “Give me another drink. I’m terribly cast down. I’ll stand for no messing about. Do you understand that?”

“Of course, I do, dear,” said Sally, smiling in spite of herself. “Don’t worry your head about me. I’ve learned my lesson. I almost made you a murderer once, and I did make you an adulterer. You’re indebted to me for the latter although you may deny it.”

“This is the weirdest darn conversation that ever took place between man and wife,” replied Tim, somewhat mollified, as he reached for the bottle.

“No question about it,” agreed Sally. “But I try not to think of it any more. You get sort of goofy if you do.”

Under the influence of the bottle, and morally liberated by his confession, Tim’s spirits rose until, by the time he had reached the doctor’s office, they had become rather unruly, almost boisterous.

“Hello, Doc!” he cried, throwing his arms round the neck of the astounded physician. “My wife, here, tells me I’m a wee bit pregnant. Not much, Doc, not much, but enough – almost too much. What about it, Doc, do you think I’m elected? Do I look sort of preggy?”

“That’s a silly word,” commented Sally. “Sounds like baby talk.”

Tim was almost convulsed. He released the doctor and flung himself upon Sally.

“That’s just what it is,” he cried. “It’s baby talk, and it’s all your fault, or at least, I think it is. Somebody blundered.”

At this point the doctor interposed in a suave voice while still adjusting his collar. Addressing himself in low tones to Sally, he suggested politely, “This is a mental case, I perceive?”

“Alcoholic,” replied Sally briefly. “Also somewhat pregnant.”

“And mental, too, Doc,” interpolated Tim. “Don’t forget that. I’m entirely mad, I assure you. And I’m going to have a mad baby – a regular monster.”

The doctor ignored Tim and turned once more to Sally.

“And the object of your visit, sir, is exactly what?” he asked.

“Absolutely no object,” put in Tim. “Just a visit. We thought you might like to know about me, that’s all.”

“And to congratulate us, perhaps,” added Sally, who was feeling quite giddy herself.

“Yes,” declared Tim. “We thought you might slip us a snifter. Doctors have lots of whiskey. They love it.”

“May I ask just who you are?” demanded the doctor, his disgust getting the better of his professional urbanity.

“Oh, we thought you knew that,” exclaimed Sally. “Everyone knows us. We’re the Willowses. This is my husband – I mean my wife, Mrs. Tim Willows. I’m Tim, himself, in the flesh.”

The doctor was undecided whether to call for assistance and forcibly eject this peculiar couple or to try to get rid of them peaceably.

“I presume, then,” he observed, “that you would like me to – er – run over Mrs. Willows?”

“What’s that?” demanded Tim. “Run over? Does the man think he’s a lawn mower or a sort of human Juggernaut? I didn’t come here to be run over.”

“Are babies in your line, Doctor?” asked Sally, also ignoring her husband.

“I’m an obstetrician, if that’s what you mean, sir,” replied the doctor with dignity.

“He’s a what?” demanded Tim.

Both Sally and the doctor looked at Tim wearily.

“You wouldn’t understand, dear,” she told him. “He obsteterates, does this doctor, so it seems that we’ve come to the right place.”

“Well, that’s nice to know, at any rate,” commented Tim, seating himself in a most uncomfortable chair.

“Could you tell me just when you noticed you were in this condition?” asked the doctor.

“Never noticed it at all, Doc,” answered Tim. “It sort of crept up on me like a – a – er – thief in the night.”

“Or a wolf on the fold,” added Sally.

“I don’t seem to find this very helpful,” said the doctor, rather impatiently. “I had better examine Mrs. Willows.”

“One minute, Doc,” interposed Tim, holding up a restraining hand. “Before we go any further, I’d like to know how much it’s going to set me back to have this baby. Because if it costs too darned much, we’ll waive the baby and buy a new car.”

When Tim discovered it would cost about five hundred dollars to cover the entire expense involved in presenting his wife with a child, he was terribly shocked.

“What!” he exclaimed. “All that money for the fun of suffering like hell? Why, it’s a racket, a regular racket. Women should be paid to have babies, and as for a man, why he should be elected mayor, to say the least.”

The doctor, becoming more aroused, informed Tim definitely and categorically that personally it was a matter of the most abysmal indifference to him whether he, Tim, had a baby or not.

“That’s not very neighborly of you, Doc,” Tim replied. “If women didn’t have babies you’d be out of luck. You’d probably have to become a magician and pull rabbits and things out of hats. It isn’t an easy life.”

“I could find something better to do than that,” replied the doctor, stung by Tim’s remark.

“For example?” asked Tim challengingly.

“Mrs. Willows,” the doctor explained, “if you and your husband dropped in merely to pay me a personal call, I must remind you that in spite of my gratification there are other demands on my time. Do you wish to be examined or not?”

“Suppose I don’t pass this examination,” demanded Tim, “won’t I be able to have a baby, then? Is it a written or verbal examination? It doesn’t matter, though, because I don’t know the first thing about childbirth. Why don’t you examine my wife instead – I mean, my husband? He’s nearly as dumb as I am, but at least he knows something. The whole damn business is Greek to me. I was never intended to be a mother, and if it hadn’t been for my innocence, which is a nice word for ignorance, I wouldn’t be the way I am now. You men seem to think that all a woman has to do is to toss off a baby and call it a day. Let me tell you right here, Doctor whatever-your-name-is, it’s men like you and my husband, lecherous, low-down, licentious bums – —”

“Madam, madam,” objected the doctor. “I’ve never experienced such a thing in my life. You must endeavor to calm yourself. We must endeavor to calm each other. In all my professional experience, I’ve never encountered a prospective mother who was quite so casual and unsympathetic, quite so hardened. It isn’t natural. We must endeavor to correct your mental attitude. Do you, or do you not, wish to be examined? If you don’t, well and good, but if you do, I urge you to come inside with me. Mr. Willows can come with you if you want him.”

The doctor’s voice was shaking a little and his nerves were beginning to jump. He realized how important it was for him to keep strict check on himself. Once let a woman get talking among her friends about the unfeeling methods of a doctor and he might just as well abandon his practice and move to another town.

“I wouldn’t let that guy in on my examination for anything in the world,” proclaimed Tim resolutely. “He’d gloat, that’s what he’d do, and I’ll have no gloating.”

“Be a good girl and go with the doctor,” said Sally coaxingly. “I’ll give you something when we get home if you do, otherwise, no – not a drop.”

Tim rose from the chair and suspiciously followed the distracted doctor into his private office. A long, oddly twisted glass tube attracted his wandering attention.

“What’s this thing for?” he demanded, seizing upon the tube and examining it critically.

Unfortunately the tube slipped from Tim’s careless grasp and crashed against the tiled floor with a loud report. The doctor froze in his tracks and hunched his back. Low, clucking sounds came from him. His fingers were twitching spasmodically. But he did not even turn round as he asked in a strained voice, “What was that, Mrs. Willows?”

“Sorry,” replied Tim casually. “It was some silly-looking object. Didn’t have any sense to it, seemingly. You’re well rid of it, Doctor.”

At this remark, the doctor renewed his clucking. He was gallantly striving to pull himself together. Sally, sitting outside, on hearing the report, naturally assumed that either the doctor had shot Tim or Tim had shot the doctor. She sprang from the chair and popped into the room.

“What’s that?” she demanded tragically.

The doctor jumped and spun about, then settled shudderingly to rest.

“Don’t startle me so!” he exclaimed. “I’m not at all used to such conduct.”

“No,” put in Tim easily. “Don’t startle the doctor any more. He can’t stand it. You know, I think we’d better examine him first before he examines me. He doesn’t strike me as being any too good at present. No control.”

This observation had the effect of starting the doctor off on his clucking again. He went to a shelf and, taking down a bottle, poured out a drink.

“A small sedative,” he muttered.

“Just what we need,” cried Tim, snatching up the bottle and taking an avid gulp. “A rose by another name would taste as strong.”

He passed the bottle to Sally, who followed his example, smacking Tim’s lips at the end of the operation. The doctor rushed up and forcibly retrieved his property.

“You mustn’t do that,” he chided. “It’s not the way to act, not at all the way to act.”

“Pardon me,” replied Sally sweetly. “I thought the drinks were on the house.”

At this moment Tim pressed a button on a switchboard and from somewhere in the room a dynamo began to tear through its paces. The button seemed to be in some way connected with the doctor, because he began to jump up and down as if he were riding an invisible pogo stick.

“Keep away! Keep away!” he shouted. “You’ll burn yourself to a crisp. The X-ray’s gone mad.”

“What a fascinating life a doctor leads,” commented Tim, above the hum of the dynamo.

This restarted the clucking on the part of the doctor, who was sliding along the wall in the direction of the button. When the switch was turned off, he carefully mopped his face with his handkerchief and took a deep breath.

“Another mild sedative,” suggested Sally, presenting herself before the weary man with a glass half filled with whiskey.

“Thanks,” he muttered, as he tremblingly reached for the glass. “The effect of the first one was spoiled. I do wish we could get along with this examination.”

“Directly, Doctor, directly,” said Tim, in a soothing voice. “What you need is a good rest. Can’t burn the candle at both ends, you know. Your nerves are all shot.”

“Yes,” added Sally, solicitously. “What you need is a nice long rest.” She took a sip from the bottle, then passed it on to Tim. “Would you like to lie down for a moment before you go on? Must get over that shaking. You’re not addicted to drugs, are you, Doctor?”

This time the physician’s clucking was not only excited but also bitter. He pawed at the air.

“Please go away,” he said, in a pleading voice. “Don’t talk to me now.”

“It’s drugs, I’m afraid,” murmured Sally, going to the door. “Something should be done.”

When Sally had closed the door, the doctor turned to Tim and spoke in a deadly voice.

“Lie down on that table,” he said, “and for God’s sweet sake, Mrs. Willows, stop fluttering about.”

Tim looked at the table suspiciously.

“What are you going to do to me?” he asked.

“That’s my business,” replied the doctor coldly.

“Not entirely,” replied Tim. “I’m in on it, also.”

“Are you going to lie down on that table?” demanded the doctor, advancing on Tim with a distracted look in his eye.

“Suppose I don’t?” Tim temporized.

“Suppose you don’t what?” continued the doctor.

“Lie down on that table,” Tim replied.

“If you don’t lie down on that table, do you know what I’m going to do?” asked the doctor.

“I don’t know,” replied Tim.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” said the doctor, licking his dry lips. “I’m going to damn well hurl you down on that table, Mrs. Willows. I’m going to get you down on that table if it’s the last thing I do on earth.”

“Oh, Doctor!” exclaimed Tim coyly.

The doctor stood clucking at Tim.

“Get down on that table,” he grated.

Momentarily overawed, Tim hitched himself upon the table and sat there swinging his legs.

“Be reasonable, Doc,” he said. “Let’s talk this matter over.”

“Flat on your back,” replied the doctor implacably.

“Just give me a hint,” Tim pleaded.

“Down there, down,” answered the doctor.

Tim sank back on the table.

“After all, Doctor,” he said, “I’m not exactly a dog. Not quite.”

The doctor extended his hands.

Exactly thirty seconds later Sally was startled by the sound of a maddened scream, followed by a tremendous crashing of glass. Once more the scream was repeated, then gave way to Tim’s deep-throated roaring. The door burst open and the doctor hurtled out with a look of congealed horror on his face. Immediately behind him appeared an infuriated Tim. With one hand he clutched at his clothing and with the other he carved great slices of air with a wicked-looking operating knife. The doctor jumped behind Sally and clung to her for protection.

“Speak to her, Mr. Willows,” he chattered. “Reason with her if you can. The poor woman has gone mad.”

The shock of suddenly confronting himself restored Tim to his senses. He halted and looked accusingly at the doctor.

“Of all the things to do with a body,” Tim exploded, pointing the knife at the trembling man. “Of all the low-life tricks. He might be a doctor, but he’s certainly not a gentleman.”

“She doesn’t understand, Mr. Willows,” hastily put in the doctor. “She’s just like a savage.”

“What did he do?” asked Sally.

“What did he do?” repeated Tim indignantly. “What didn’t he do. That guy did plenty. What a way to carry on. You’re a fast worker, Doc. I’ll have to say that much for you. But life is not all play, Doc. You’d better remember that.”

“I thought you knew,” explained Sally. “You poor dear.”

“Poor dear, hell,” snapped Tim. “I almost murdered the man. It’s a nice time to tell me about it.” He looked at the doctor and a grin spread over his flushed face. “Sorry, Doc,” he said. “There seems to have been a slight misunderstanding. We were both right according to our standards.”

By this time the doctor himself was in need of medical assistance. Between them they dragged him to his study and dumped him down on the sofa. He was making ineffectual passes at the air with a pair of limp hands. Sally brought the bottle from the almost demolished laboratory and she and Tim took a drink. Then they stood looking speculatively at the doctor.

“Better ring for the maid,” said Tim in a low voice. “There doesn’t seem to be any secretary knocking about. I thought all doctors managed a secretary by some hook or crook.”

“She’s sick,” gasped the doctor, his professional pride forcing him to speak.

“She would be,” replied Tim. “Bathe his temples, Sally, with that grog. He’d chatter the neck off the bottle if you tried to give him a drink.”

“Make a try at it,” whispered the doctor. “Don’t waste the stuff. It’s good.”

“What thrift,” said Tim admiringly.

“All right now?” asked Sally, after she had succeeded in feeding the man a drink.

“Better,” whispered the doctor.

“Then I guess we’d better be going,” she continued, rather lamely. “We’ll come back another time for that examination.”

“Okay, Doc?” asked Tim.

They left the doctor clucking wildly on the sofa.

“A most embarrassing experience,” observed Tim as they quietly let themselves out of the house.

“What I want to know is,” demanded Sally, “how do you expect to have a baby if you won’t let a doctor come near you?”

“By long distance,” replied Tim. “Or like a woman of the Stone Age. I feel like eating some pineapple.”

CHAPTER TEN

Tim Seeks Enlightenment

A few days later, after wolfing down a robust breakfast, Tim decided to call on his old friend, the village barber. Alfredo had lots of children, children without rhyme or reason. Mrs. Alfredo was always having a baby or about to have a baby or just getting over having a baby. She was in the baby business and seemed able to turn over her stock with surprising regularity and speed. Tim would speak with this Alfredo and pump him about babies. He would inquire into babies, their production and their upkeep. Sally would be surprised at his vast range of information. At the same time he would have his hair trimmed, or rather, he would have his wife’s hair trimmed as a pretext for acquiring wisdom. For the moment Tim had forgotten that in his metamorphosed form his old friend, Alfredo, would hardly recognize him.

He slipped on one of Sally’s smartest coats and crammed a small black felt hat carelessly on his head. Then he left the house, taking the lunging Dopey with him.

There was a touch of spring in the air and the snow was melting fast. The distant hills were coming through and the sun lay warm upon them. Soon they would arouse themselves from their winter slumber and take steps about getting green. It was quiet along the neat, well-ordered suburban street. Tim felt the quietness. It got inside him. He breathed deeply and stood at the curb, looking about him. He would like to efface all of the houses in sight as well as all of the persons who lived in them. Dopey lunged Tim across the street, then paused himself to investigate nothing much. The dog was too strong for Tim in his female body. Tim suspected that Dopey knew it and was prepared to take advantage of his knowledge. Yes, it was a nice suburb, mused Tim. That was just the trouble with it. It was too damned nice. But the spirit of the people was not so nice. It was too imitative, too acquisitive. A man had to have exactly what his neighbor had, or better – better if it could be managed. And a man had to live in a certain section or else exist under the burden of a steadily growing inferiority complex. It was sad about that. There were decent men and women living in other sections. Tim liked many of them. But there they were. They were just not on the in, and that was all there was to it. And women had such a way of lording it over their less fortunate sisters. It was cruel and it was senseless. He was glad Sally was not that way. She bought her meat wherever she liked. It was not her method, like so many of her friends’, to establish prestige through the butcher or baker. Yes, this suburb would be better with a lot of revisions and deleting. All these real estate people with their quaint ideas and parky minds. Restricted developments and all that. They thrived on snobbery. And in New York the bread lines were twisting round corners. Men standing bleakly in the cold for the privilege of remaining miserably alive on the surface of a world that had no use for them. Yet the bread lines had thoughts and feelings. They were composed of human beings, men who wanted things and who missed things and who watched others live through eyes that were too distantly hopeless even to express envy. And right here in Cliffside men and women were making themselves miserable merely because they could not afford a car as good as Sam Jones’s or a radio as fine as Bill Smith’s or a home on Upper Clear View Road. It was all out of proportion. Tim realized that he himself was a selfish individual, but at least he didn’t get all hot and bothered about those things. Give him a bottle and a book and leave him alone, that was all he asked. He realized that as an individual he could do nothing about the bread lines. He couldn’t even help materially one individual member. But he was aware of their existence. That was a start, anyway. Idly his thoughts drifted and absently he delivered a sharp kick on Dopey’s adamant rump. The dog made no protest. Tim rather suspected the beast enjoyed an occasional kick. It gave him to feel he was being noticed. Tim wondered if he was always going to be a woman, if life from now on was going to be just one baby after another. He knew he would never be clever about not having babies. He was altogether too careless and shiftless. He sighed from deep self-commiseration and started off down the street.

“Sally Willows,” a voice called.

He turned with a frightened expression and saw, hurrying toward him, a woman who as far as he was concerned had never existed before. Evidently from the warmth of the kiss she gave Tim she must have known Sally quite intimately and liked her. Tim, poor soul, was not enough of a woman to know that the kisses women so liberally exchange with each other mean exactly less than nothing.

“Hello! Hello!” cried the woman.

Tim contented himself with one small “Hello.”

“I’ve come back,” said the other. “Here I am.”

“Are you sure?” Tim asked her.

“Same old Sally, I see,” continued the unknown.

“A trifle renovated,” replied Tim. “Perhaps ‘altered’ would be a better word.”

“What’s all the news?” demanded the woman.

“The same old thing,” said Tim easily. “Scandal and philandering and concealed animosity – envy and a touch of heartbreak thrown in for good measure. The merry whirl, you know.”

“It’s dreadful how people go on,” the recently returned one contributed virtuously. “Of course Dan, my husband doesn’t know this, but I met the grandest man while I was away. I was all on my own, you know.”

“Yes,” said Tim, trying to keep the sarcasm from his voice. “Dan was just grinding dumbly along while you met the grandest man.”

“Dan loves his work,” declared the woman. “Couldn’t drag him away from it.”

“Did you ever try the dragging process?” Tim asked mildly.

“Don’t be horrid, Sally,” said the other. “Don’t you believe a woman should have her own life?”

“Oh, don’t misunderstand me,” replied Tim. “I believe a woman should have at least nine lives, like a cat. And all the grand men she can handle. It merely occurred to me that if there wasn’t a husband knocking about in the background stupidly loving his work or pretending to love his work she’d have one hell of a time struggling through one life in the manner to which she was accustomed. It was merely a passing thought.”

“No doubt about that,” agreed the other. “A husband is convenient at times.”

“Around the first of the month,” suggested Tim, thoroughly hating this woman.

“Yes,” said the woman. “What a horrible dog. Where are you off to?”

“That’s not a horrible dog,” retorted Tim. “That’s the finest mixture of canine strains that ever perplexed a bitch. And if you’d like to know, I’m going to get a shave.”

“A shave?” exclaimed the woman.

“I mean a trim,” Tim hastened to reply. “Did I say a shave? How stupid of me. What I really meant to say was a trim, you know, the hair.”

“I’ll walk along with you part of the way,” said the woman. “That is, if your dog will give me some of the sidewalk.”

Dopey received another kick and moved slightly in advance, gratefully wagging his tail. He hated this stopping on street corners and talking to people. It made him nervous.

“Did you ever have a baby?” Tim asked presently, with as much indifference as he could manage.

“Why, don’t you remember?” said the woman in a surprised voice. “You came to see me yourself at the hospital.”

“Did I?” asked Tim absently. “That was nice of me, but then I’m always doing nice things, and there are so many babies – too many.”

The woman laughed.

“You’re a queer little duck,” she said.

“Aren’t I,” agreed Tim. “Did it hurt much, this baby?”

“Why, didn’t you know?” asked the woman. “For days they thought I wasn’t going to live. I had septic fever and all sorts of complications.”

Tim shrank within himself and looked at the pavement with scared eyes.

“Are there lots of complications you can get?” he asked in a low voice.

“You wouldn’t believe how many there are,” said the woman. “All sorts of things can happen.”

Tim choked down a little gasp.

“Then it was pretty awful?” he went on.

“I wouldn’t go through it again for all of the money in the world,” the woman assured him. “And I’m fond of money, but I was lucky at that.”

“How do you make that out?” Tim inquired.

“The woman in the room next to mine died and the one next to her went mad,” replied Tim’s companion. “Stark, staring mad.”

Tim felt that within a very few moments he would follow the example of the woman next to the woman who died.

“Are the doctors kind?” he managed to ask after swallowing hard several times.

“Mine wasn’t,” replied the other. “He was as cross and callous as an old crab. It’s quite ghastly,” she continued. “I’m glad it’s all over. Any woman who has the nerve enough to have a baby has my sympathy. It’s nip and tuck for her.”

Tim had no use for the woman’s sympathy. She was burning him up. He parted with her on Springfield Avenue, and dragged Dopey, squatting sidewise, into the barber shop.

He found Alfredo disengaged and, after elaborate courtesies, seated himself in the glistening Italian’s chair. Dopey delicately rested his head on a cuspidor and endeavored to forget everything by going to sleep. Tim was very much upset. His conversation with the unknown woman had sadly shattered his morale.

“How are you today, Alfredo?” he asked in a weary voice.

Alfredo paused in his occupation and looked slightly perplexed. Then he glanced behind him to discover if another customer had been speaking, a customer with a strangely familiar voice.

“I am well, madam,” he replied at length. “You have been here before, madam?”

The twice repeated “madam” served to remind Tim even in his preoccupied frame of mind that he was no longer the customer with whom Alfredo had been wont to deal. He smiled sweetly upon the Italian and spoke in a ladylike voice.

“No, Alfredo,” he said, “but my husband, Mr. Willows, comes to you often. He has spoken to me of your family. Says you have a splendid lot of children.”

Alfredo’s eyes and teeth did some fairly snappy sparkling upon the reception of this compliment.

“Mr. Willows, madam,” he said. “He’s one fine man. One of my best. I like him very much.”

“He advised me to come to you for a nice trim,” continued Tim, deciding that Alfredo himself was not such a bad fellow. “About your family now – is your wife well? No ill effects?”

“My wife,” replied Alfredo complacently, “she make another baby now.”

“How interesting,” observed Tim. “Does she find it very difficult?”

Alfredo shrugged his shoulders rather discouragingly.

“You know how it is, madam,” he said. “It is never good. Like death itself.”

“No, I didn’t know that,” said Tim faintly, sinking a little in the chair.

“It is always bad, madam,” continued Alfredo. “There is nothing good about it. The first time, she nearly died.”

“O-o-o-o,” came shudderingly from Tim.

“Did I hurt, madam?” asked Alfredo, pausing with poised comb.

“No, Alfredo,” answered Tim, rallying in the chair. “Everything’s splendid. Go right on. You say she nearly died?”

“Yes, madam,” continued the barber reminiscently. “My wife she was at the death. What suffering, madam. What anguish. It is always thus with the first.”

“O-o-o-o-o,” gasped Tim, slumping miserably still farther down in the chair.

“I’m sure I must be hurting, madam,” said Alfredo.

“No, Alfredo,” answered Tim. “Not the way you think. You’re doing fine.”

“It was torture, madam, torture,” resumed the begetter of many progeny. “She was on the wreck.”

“What!” exclaimed Tim, starting up in the chair. “That’s painting the lily. She had this baby in a wreck?”

“No, madam,” explained Alfredo. “Not in a wreck. She was on this wreck. How do you say – the torture wreck.”

Tim’s thoughts dwelt broodingly on this mystifying but nevertheless chilling new item of awfulness.

“Because she wouldn’t bear down?” he asked. “Is that why they did it?”

Alfredo shrugged his shoulders uncomprehendingly.

“I don’t know, madam,” he replied. “She was on it, the wreck.”

“But they have no right to put people on wrecks when they’re going to have babies,” protested Tim.

“I don’t know,” replied Alfredo rather hopelessly. “There she was. On it.”

Suddenly the intention rather than the meaning of the Italian’s words dawned upon Tim.

“You mean she was on the rack,” he suggested. “Isn’t that it, Alfredo?”

Once more Alfredo resorted to one of his expressive shrugs.

“It’s all the same,” he said. “Wreck or rack, she was on it. Untold suffering and danger. Without cease.” He paused for a moment, then added proudly, “Italian women have their babies much easier than American.”

Upon the receipt of this information Tim’s eyes grew round with horror. The hair that Alfredo was trimming endeavored to rise up on its ends.

“You mean they have a harder time of it than your wife?” faltered Tim.

“Much,” replied Alfredo generously. “Many die. Poof! They are gone. It is sad.”

It was altogether too sad for Tim. When he left the barber shop he was plumbing the depths of spiritual depression. He was going to die, die like a dog on a wreck. There was not the remotest chance of escape. His number was up. Alfredo must know what he was talking about. Certainly he had had enough experience.

He stopped in front of a grocery store to consider a display of nuts. It was an attractive display. Tim was very fond of nuts. He thought of the vanished bar of a vanished Sherry’s where in bygone days he had eaten tons of nuts and swallowed gallons of cocktails. Gone, all gone. His past life swam before him. He was beginning to die a little already, he decided. A baby carriage had been parked near him. With morbid curiosity he bent down and regarded the small and disconcertingly complacent face of its occupant. A nice baby with nice little old wise eyes. A potential murderer. The baby looked long at Tim, then showed him how to blow bubbles without the use of either water or soap. The baby was good at it, had mastered the technique. From the number of bubbles it made it was apparent the baby knew it was putting on a pretty good show. “Bubbles,” thought Tim moodily. “For all the good we accomplish in this world we might just as well sit in a carriage and blow bubbles. I’ve even lost that art.” Then the baby’s mother appeared. Tim smiled timidly at her.

“You’ve a lovely baby,” he said. “I envy you.”

The young mother’s face flushed with gratification.

“He’s not so bad,” she smiled, endeavoring to keep a check on her inordinate pride.

“Did – did – did it hurt much?” asked Tim, almost in a whisper.

“My dear, I almost died,” said the woman.

With a choking cry Tim turned from her and hurried down the street. The woman looked after him curiously, then shook her head and dismissed the incident from her mind, for the moment. But Tim did not hurry far. Dopey had other plans. If there was anything the dog loved it was to give the appearance of ferocity without incurring the risk of putting it to the test. On such occasions he was an awful sight to behold. He foamed at the mouth and rolled his eyes. His jaws were a nest of teeth lined with hellish red. A very small dog already on the run was the excuse for the demonstration. Dopey’s fury was instantaneous. He lunged after the small creature like a maniac on four feet. The pursued uttered a despairing yelp and doubled on his tracks. Dopey followed his example with an unpleasant sound of scraping toenails. Unfortunately Dr. Jordan stepped blithely into the picture at this moment. Dopey rounded the clerical legs at great speed and brought his leash against them with terrific force. The sudden shock pulled Tim to the pavement. Dr. Jordan almost immediately emulated his example. As a matter of fact, for a moment it was a neck-and-neck race to see who would hit the sidewalk first. Tim won by a sufficient margin to permit Dr. Jordan to descend heavily upon him. Dopey, suddenly realizing that he was no longer under restraint, sat down abruptly and whimpered. At any moment that small dog might change its mind and return to bite him. In the meantime from beneath the body of the stunned man of God came one of the most convincing and comprehensive expositions of the baser side of the English language that had ever been heard on Springfield Avenue, or on any other avenue, for that matter. All the bitterness and depression pent-up in Tim’s soul poured out through his throat and crackled venomously in the surrounding air. Even in his dazed condition the Rev. Dr. Jordan was reminded of something. It had to do with the explosion of a gasoline stove. There had been a church supper. The good man shuddered at the memory.

“Well?” came the voice from beneath him, “isn’t it about time you were thinking about getting up? Do you like it here? Why not kneel on my body and offer up a prayer?”

The small crowd that had both seen and heard stolidly watched Dr. Jordan struggle to his feet and brush himself off diligently.

“That’s right, you big stiff,” came spitefully from the pavement. “Leave me here crushed and broken.”

Dr. Jordan looked down at the small figure and was human enough to long to kick it completely out of his sight and memory. Two women stepped forward and helped Tim to rise. Then the three of them stood looking at Dr. Jordan.

“Such language,” said one of the women.

“Never heard anything like it in all my life,” observed the other.

“And from a man of the cloth,” put in Tim. “It’s not the sort of language one would expect. Dr. Jordan, I’m shocked and surprised. You have overstepped. You have put your foot in it.”

“My dear ladies,” rumbled Dr. Jordan, his face not unlike a grinning sunset, “I assure you I did not open my mouth. Not a word of anger or condemnation passed my lips. I heard all the terrible things you heard, the unbelievably vile language, and I was shocked to the core.”

“Where is that?” inquired Tim.

“Where’s what, the core?” asked Dr. Jordan.

“Yes, the core,” replied Tim.

“Madam, it is merely an expression,” explained the badgered man.

“Well, I don’t think it’s a very nice expression, I’m sure,” replied Tim.

“I agree,” said one of the other women. “It’s a terrible thing to speak about.”

“Why, my dear madam,” pleaded Dr. Jordan. “It’s the most harmless thing in the world. Let me – —”

“We know how harmless it is,” the other woman cut in sarcastically. “You’ll be telling us next that babies are found in cabbage heads. What a man.”

“If you’ve finished insulting us, Dr. Jordan,” said Tim in his most ladylike voice, “we’ll be going. I suggest that the next time you see a young woman on the public thoroughfares you’ll make some effort to control yourself. In the privacy of one’s home I could understand, if not condone, your conduct, but an assault on the main street of the town is short-sighted, to say the least. And do try to elevate your language. It’s disgusting.”

With this Tim collected Dopey and, with a bright smile at the two ladies, sailed off down the street. Dr. Jordan, standing amid the ruins of a shattered world, looked after him with murder in his heart. As if not knowing what to do with his hands he extended them supplicatingly to the street and turned helplessly from side to side. He seemed to be looking for someone to whom he could explain the whole ghastly affair, some reasonable, fair-minded person. Then, fearing lest he should go mad in public, he hurried home and turned on the radio at full blast. And under the cover of the resulting din the Rev. Dr. Jordan gave vent to his pent-up emotion. He could not remember all of the words Tim had used while lying on the sidewalk, but those that he did recall, Dr. Jordan made do double service. He concocted words of his own. In his desperation he even resorted to those words and expressions that are usually to be found on billboards, subway posters, and lavatories. Then, having cleansed his soul and unburdened his mind, he turned off the radio, sat down at his desk, and set about preparing his Sunday sermon in almost a cheerful mood.

Tim’s last experience of the day was one he would have preferred to avoid. He would have preferred to avoid them all, he now decided, and remain in a state of blessed ignorance.

On his way home from the village, and while he was in the act of cursing Dopey bitterly for his hypocritical conduct, he glanced up to find himself looking into the clear, inquiring eyes of Claire Meadows.

“I can tell that you like that dog,” Mrs. Meadows remarked unsmilingly, “otherwise, with all you seem to have against the beast, you would not be associating with it.”

“This dog is a vice, like drugs,” replied Tim. “The animal is so darned useless I actually feel sorry for it.”

“Come home and have some tea,” said Mrs. Meadows, in a surprisingly comforting voice. “You’ve a desperate light in your eye. I’m a pretty desperate woman myself.”

She took Tim by the arm, and reluctantly he allowed himself to be led to the home of Claire Meadows.

“But I forgot,” said the woman suddenly. “You might lose your reputation if you were seen on the streets with me.”

“Listen,” Tim declared quite earnestly, “I haven’t enough reputation left to dust a fiddle with. And I don’t give a damn about this town. I’d like to blow it up.”

“That would avail you little,” said Claire Meadows. “There are oodles of other towns like this filled with almost exactly the same sort of persons. All over the world there are towns like this. You can’t escape them.”

“Then I will ignore them,” replied Tim resolutely.

“If they let you,” said Claire cryptically. “But they won’t. These towns want to know. They insist on knowing, and they generally find out sooner or later. They look for the worst.”

Over a cup of tea in Clare Meadows’s pleasant drawing room Tim broke down. Perhaps it was the dreamlike memory of another and happier occasion that did it. What it was he never quite knew, himself. He just found himself talking, and he didn’t trouble to stop.

“I’m going to have a baby,” he announced in a deep voice.

“That’s nice,” said Claire easily. “I wish I had mine.”

“Did you ever have a baby?” asked Tim with awakened interest.

Mrs. Meadows nodded slowly and looked at Tim with unseeing eyes.

“I had a baby once,” she said in a low voice. “A perfectly good baby. A little girl with sleepy eyes. She used to sigh so fatly.”

“Did the little baby die?” asked Tim gently.

“No,” she answered, with a hard note in her voice. “He took her with the divorce. She was old enough to go then. They said I was unfit. The law can say a lot of things it really doesn’t mean. But they hurt for all that.”

“Did you experience much trouble having this baby?” Tim inquired delicately.

Claire Meadows raised her eyes to heaven.

“Don’t ask,” was all she said.

The calm moderation of the woman chilled Tim’s last hope. It lay cold against his heart. It was not so much what she had said as what she had left unsaid, what she had intimated, the awful things implied. In his self-absorption he forgot about Claire Meadows’s baby and thought only of his own prospective one.

“But I’m not what I seem,” he said haltingly.

“None of us is,” replied Claire Meadows.

“I shouldn’t be having this baby by rights,” he went on. “You see, I’m a man at heart.”

At this surprising statement, Claire Meadows sat up and looked penetratingly at Tim.

“You do talk like a man,” she said at length.

“And I think like a man,” added Tim.

“But seemingly you’re not a man,” the woman replied.

“It’s a sort of yes-and-no proposition,” Tim explained. “I don’t function like a man, and now I’m in this terrible condition. Everybody says I’m going to die.” Tim’s voice grew shaky. “I haven’t written my damn book yet,” he added, “and now I guess I never will.”

“Come over here,” Claire’s voice commanded.

She took Tim in her arms and made him comfortable. After she had heard his strange story she sat back appeared quite charmed.

“I’ve always believed in magic,” she remarked at last, “but I never knew it actually happened. After what you’ve told me almost anything is possible. I might get my own baby back. Are you sure you’re not dreaming this?”

“I don’t know,” said Tim. “It seems like a dream.”

“And you simply must not pay any attention to what other women say,” continued Claire Meadows. “Childbirth is not easy under the most ideal circumstances, but it’s not nearly so bad as the majority of women make out. After all, I don’t blame them a bit. All men think that women exaggerate, so in order to give them an approximate idea of the truth women really do have to exaggerate. It’s a vicious circle.”

Presently Tim left. He was feeling greatly comforted. Claire Meadows had done it.

“You know,” she said, following him to the door, “I’ve often longed to establish contact with a man’s mind without having his body constantly interrupting the conversation. This is the first time I’ve had that pleasure.”

It was Tim’s grin that appeared on Sally’s lips.

That night he related to Sally the experiences of the day. She was especially edified by his encounter with the Rev. Dr. Jordan. Later, while Tim was writing the next day’s copy assignment, he sent her to the village to search for an avocado. He had yearnings.

“Here’s your damned alligator-pear,” she said an hour later. “I hope to God it bites you.”

“What a way to speak to a person in my condition,” replied Tim, delicately elevating his eyebrows.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

No Job for a Lady

Sally’s position in the office was becoming increasingly more difficult. There were times when she was called upon to dash off pieces of copy on the spur of the moment. She grew to dread these sudden demands on her depleted supply of inspiration. The results of her best efforts were usually quite unsatisfactory. There was no Tim in the offing to call upon for assistance. She was forced to rely on her own vast inexperience. What did she know, poor girl, about drop forges, lubricating oils, Never Flap union suits, and a number of other unsympathetic, not to say inimical, products thirsting for popularity through the medium of advertising? She was beginning to crack under the strain of the situation into which Mr. Ram had plunged her, and she, too, cursed that colorful little gentleman from the bottom of her heart. Grudgingly she admitted to herself that the business of being a good provider for a family even of two was not as easy as it had once seemed. There were times when she even wished that she could change positions with Tim and do things about having a baby. He was making an awful mess of it, getting himself all worked up and nervous.

All afternoon she had been laboring uninspiredly on one of these rush-copy assignments when a person no less than Mr. Gibber himself saved her. He summoned her to his presence and spoke with unwonted feeling.

“Willows,” he said, “Tom Burdock is in the city and we can’t get him out. He’s our best client. We have to handle him with gloves. A club would be better, but, as I say, he is our most important and profitable client. Already he has both physically and morally shattered three of our most hardened account executives. It is now your turn – your opportunity, I should say. Get Tom Burdock out of town and you are a made man here. The sky is the limit. Stick to him. Don’t let him out of your sight. Here’s two hundred dollars. Give it to him and get him to sign this slip. Draw as much money as you need yourself. It’s on the house. Now, Willows, I don’t hold with excessive drinking. Never have. But this is an exceptional case. I feel that any steps you see fit to take to get Tom Burdock on a train headed back home will be fully justified. After all, his wife and children might like to see what he looks like. Use drugs if necessary. And remember, he is our most important client. Be smooth, be tactful and – you know – be convivial. Above all, stick to your man.”

Sally may live to witness the stars go mad in their orbits, volcanoes gush forth ill-tempered jets of flame, and the Empire State Building stand jauntily on its head, but more vivid, more demoralizing than any of these manifestations will be the memory of her attempt to stick by Tom Burdock.

He was a large, jovial man with a crop of defiant red hair, a livid face, and an all-pervading thirst. She found him sitting on the bed in his hotel room in the attitude of Rodin’s Thinker. When she gave him the two hundred dollars, the great man changed his position and looked upon Sally as if she were a messenger from on high. Immediately thereafter he began to distribute largess to the hotel staff. As a result of this generous conduct numerous flasks and bottles began to make their appearance, and as a direct result of their arrival Tom Burdock was soon back where he had been on retiring the previous evening. It was in this exalted state that it occurred to him it would be a benevolently paternal act to buy a doll for his youngest daughter. As long as Tom Burdock could think he acted, and even after he had ceased to think he still continued to act. Sally found herself in the street sticking to the great man.

“Willows,” he declared, “I’m going to buy me a doll – for my youngest daughter – it will get her on my side. When I get back home I’ll need every friend I have on earth as well as many who have indubitably gone to hell.”

Cheered by this harking back to home, Sally encouraged him in his mission. When they left the department store she found herself carrying the largest and most lifelike baby doll she had ever seen. The thing even felt like a baby as she carried it along the street, Burdock, in his impatience with details, having stripped off the wrapping, which like all wrappings had untidily come undone. The doll attracted no little attention and comment on the part of passing pedestrians, and it was this that started the trouble. Mr. Burdock conceived the idea that Sally was carrying the doll all wrong.

“Here, give me that doll,” he said, looking critically at Sally. “I’ll show you how to carry a baby. Watch me.”

Not only did Sally watch him, but also everyone else on the street. Burdock’s method of carrying the doll was brutal in the extreme. With one huge hand he seized the lifelike object round its neck and dragged it along after him, its legs dangling gruesomely against the pavements. In spite of her knowledge that Mr. Tom Burdock’s burden was as inanimate as a doll could be, Sally was unable to repress a slight shudder of revulsion on seeing it thus handled. The fact that at home Tim was busily if reluctantly evolving a real baby did not help matters. Sally was sensitive about babies.

They had not progressed very far when they were accosted by an indignant but unfortunately myopic old lady who informed the genial Mr. Burdock that if he persisted in subjecting an innocent child to such inhuman treatment she would be forced to call a policeman. The situation seemed to tickle Tom Burdock. He proceeded to make it worse.

“Innocent child!” he exclaimed huskily as he grabbed the doll’s neck with two powerful hands and began to choke it before the horrified eyes of the old lady. “Innocent child!” he repeated. “I like that. Why, this child has the heart of a fiend, you old owl. It won’t go to sleep. It won’t do a damn thing. I’m bored to tears with this baby and, madam,” – Tom Burdock lowered his voice – “I’m going to strangle it to death before your very eyes. Observe.”

The old lady’s piercing scream collected a crowd with such startling swiftness that Sally gained the impression its individual members must have been rehearsed in their parts and had been merely awaiting the old lady’s signal to rush into action. In spite of Mr. Gibber’s adjurations to stick to Tom Burdock, Sally felt strongly inclined to remove herself as speedily as possible from the neighborhood of the Nationwide Advertising Agency’s most important client and to stay removed. Above the crowd Mr. Burdock towered, the doll raised aloft, its head shaking so violently that it gave every appearance of life and animation.

“I’ll murder the child,” gritted Burdock. “It’s illegitimate, anyway. Better dead than alive.”

The doll was moving so rapidly now that it was virtually impossible for the spectators to ascertain its true character. Several men covered their eyes with their hands in an endeavor to blot out the unnerving sight. The women stared as if fascinated and the old lady screamed.

“Gord,” breathed a girl to her escort. “The poor kid must be used to such treatment if it doesn’t even cry.”

“Can’t very well get used to a thing like that,” answered the man. “By the time you do you’re damn well done in.”

Sally began to fear that the most important client was beginning to lose his head, to take his part too seriously. He was laughing like a demon and his eyes were flashing wildly. The success of his acting had overstimulated him.

“Innocent child!” he cried, addressing himself to the crowd. “Ha! See what I do with it. I choke it. I twirl it. Thus.”

And Mr. Burdock began to twirl the doll above his head.

“I can stand very little more of this,” gasped a well-dressed gentleman. “I’m not very fond of children myself, but such treatment of a mere baby is going altogether too far.”

“Stick out your tongue at the lady,” said Tom Burdock. “Go on, stick it out, you black-hearted brat.”

“He’s gone mad,” ejaculated a woman. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing. For God’s sake get a policeman.”

But already several members of the crowd were beginning to suspect the true state of affairs. They smiled with tolerant amusement and waited for further developments.

“Are you a friend of this gentleman?” a man asked Sally.

“Merely a business acquaintance,” Sally replied hastily.

“He’s more than that,” cried Mr. Burdock, who had overheard the question. “He’s the father of this baby. He refuses to give it a name.”

“Then why don’t you do something about it?” the old lady demanded of Sally. “Are you willing to see your own baby murdered?”

“Yes,” replied Sally in a voice that carried conviction. “I don’t want it. Small children disturb me. And anyway, I can’t stop this madman. He might take it into his head to twirl me about. That would never do.”

“Oh!” exclaimed the old lady. “I’ve never experienced such cowardice and brutality in all my born days. Why doesn’t a policeman come? Why don’t you men do something?”

She kicked Mr. Burdock sharply on the shin, and that gentleman uttered a howl of rage.

“Stop that!” he shouted. “You’re only making matters worse for the baby. I’ll snap the thing’s head off.”

“Don’t worry, lady,” a spectator said soothingly to the old woman. “It’s not alive.”

“Do you mean to say it’s dead?” she asked. “Then that means murder. And every one of you are accessories before the fact for looking on and letting him do it.”

And with this she lifted up her voice and called piercingly for the police. Presently Patrolman Riley sweated a path through the crowd. At the sight of the policeman Tom Burdock redoubled his efforts. The doll fairly sizzled in frantic revolutions.

“What’s going on here?” demanded Riley. “What’s all the trouble?”

Apparently the members of the crowd decided to let the officer find that out for himself.

“Arrest everyone,” said the old lady. “Officer, they’re all in it. They’ve let this madman murder a baby before their very eyes. And there’s his friend, the father of the child.”

Sally stood quakingly under the accusing eyes of the policeman, but at this moment a diversion occurred. The doll detached itself from one of its legs and described a jangling arc in the air. For a moment it poised over an open manhole in which some laborers were further confusing the electric system of the city, then dropped from sight within. Officer Riley, abandoning his tactics of tolerant inquiry, sped after the doll and followed it down into the manhole. For a moment Mr. Burdock stood looking at the leg in his hand.

“Can’t do anything with that,” he said at last. “Perhaps a cannibal’s daughter might like it, but not mine. Here, old lady, you can have it as a little souvenir of your first murder.”

He thrust the leg into the hand of the shrinking old lady and, breaking through the crowd, hailed and entered a taxi. Sally stuck to him.

A few minutes later Officer Riley emerged from the manhole with a disgusted expression on his face and a disheveled doll in his arms. He approached the old lady and shook the bedraggled object under her nose.

“Here’s your murdered baby,” he snarled. “I’ve a good mind to run you in for making a fool of the law.” He looked about for Mr. Burdock. “Where’s he gone?” he demanded. “Did you let that man escape?”

“I couldn’t stop him,” the old lady faltered.

With a cry of rage the officer dashed the doll to the sidewalk and shouldered his way through the grinning crowd.

“Move on, the lot of you,” he shouted, “or I call for the patrol wagon.”

Slowly the crowd dispersed, leaving a bewildered old lady peering down at the doll lying crumpled at her feet.

Back at the hotel Sally was sitting on the bed and seriously considering Mr. Burdock, who was soothing himself with a bottle. She realized he presented a problem that would require some stiff solving. With the abandoning of the doll the man had severed the one tie he seemingly had with his home. She had an overnight job on her hands and a pregnant husband at home impatiently awaiting her return. Mr. Gibber had told her to stick to Tom Burdock. Her job depended on the success of her sticking powers. She would have to telephone to Tim.

“Willows,” said Mr. Burdock from his easy chair, “we know all about how to buy a doll, but we’re not so good at getting it home. I think I’ll have the next one sent.”

“I would,” agreed Sally. “To the Aleutian Islands, for instance.”

Disgustedly she rose from the bed and put in a call for Tim. When she heard his familiar voice coming to her over the wire she followed her natural instincts and spoke to him as a wife speaks to a husband – that is, as she speaks at times.

“Oh, Tim, darling,” she called in a soft, feminine voice. “Yes, dear, of course, this is Sally. And I won’t be home tonight. No, not tonight. Don’t use such terrible language. It’s Mr. Burdock. Yes, yes, dear. Tom Burdock, a client. What’s that? A what? Oh, Tim, he’s a perfect dear. Yes, simply sweet. You understand. Will you miss me, old thing? That’s nice. Goodbye. Take care of Baby. It’s a big thing. Of course not. I don’t mean Baby.”

When Sally turned back to Mr. Burdock he was looking at her with a very peculiar expression in his eyes, a mixture of fear and suspicion.

“I always call my husband Tim,” she said rather pointlessly, becoming confused herself for a moment.

“But I thought your name was Tim,” Tom Burdock replied.

“That’s right,” said Sally. “We call each other Tim just for the fun of the thing.”

It was Mr. Burdock’s turn to become confused. He scratched his mop of red hair and looked consideringly at Sally. He failed to see just where the fun of the thing came in.

“Well,” he said at last, “I guess the best thing for us to do would be to take a little drink.” Then he suddenly elevated his voice and looked archly at Sally. “Do you drink, dear?” the great man lisped. This was followed by a roar of drunken laughter. Tom Burdock was under the impression that at the moment he was hugely amusing. Not so Sally. Quite cheerfully and without compassion she could have poisoned the man.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Sticking to Mr. Burdock

As the evening advanced, Sally’s opinion of Mr. Burdock was not favorably revised. The man was a cosmic consumer of strong drink. Sally would not have objected to this entirely forgivable weakness had the gentleman confined his indulgence to himself. Tom Burdock was not that way. Never had been. He insisted on others drinking. He forced vile libations on Sally. What had once eaten the enamel off bathtubs now got busily to work on the linings of their respective stomachs. They attended the performance of a play the name and meaning of which neither of them was ever able to remember. They slumbered disreputably through two acts and one intermission. Finally they were escorted to an exit by a contingent of ushers who bade them godspeed as they stood in the street wearily supporting each other while they strove to accustom their smarting eyes to the kaleidoscope of Broadway. To Sally’s way of thinking, the street had gone mad. Tom Burdock seemed to be trying to return to sleep by resting the upper half of his body on her head. Unsympathetically she moved away. Mr. Burdock followed. His mind was consumed with one idea to the exclusion of all others. He must get some sleep. For sleep he would commit every crime on the calendar and if necessary think up a few new ones. Sally was of a like mind.

Even then all might have gone well for the ill-matched pair had not an unemployed baker by the name of Joe Clark allowed himself to be struck down by a taxicab. The collision looked more serious than it proved to be. By the time the ambulance arrived all that remained of the erstwhile baker was a battered hat. The man himself had washed his hands of the whole unpleasant incident. After roundly cursing the spot where Joe Clark had once lain, the ambulance surgeon hastened to a nearby cigar store while the driver returned to his seat and followed with hopeful eyes the frantic leaps of an elderly gentleman who seemed determined to make up for the delinquency of the baker by hurling his own frail body beneath the wheels of as many automobiles as would accept him.

The sight of an empty and comfortably appointed ambulance presented itself to Tom Burdock as a God-given opportunity. As has already been stated, Mr. Burdock continued to act long after he had ceased to think. He did so in this instance. With the confidence born of a fixed idea he climbed into the ambulance and disappeared from sight beneath a blanket. Realizing the futility of any attempt to remove the body of the monolithic creature, Sally did the only thing left for her to do under the unprecedented circumstances. She followed him into the ambulance and sought the protection of another blanket. In the cozy darkness of the compartment Tom Burdock was chuckling like a well-disposed percolator.

“Willows,” he said, in a subdued voice, “isn’t this great? Wonder what they’ll do when they find us in here.”

“Quite a lot,” replied Sally. “Even more than enough.”

“I guess they’ll do plenty,” Mr. Burdock agreed. “You’d never have thought of a thing like this.”

“Never,” retorted Sally. “And I wish to God you hadn’t. All I can think of is the vast quantities of dead men who have from time to time occupied the same spot in which I am now lying – probably the same blanket.”

“No doubt about it,” whispered Burdock. “I daresay this ambulance has had its fill of corpses and mangled bodies!”

“A nice place you select for a pleasant nap,” observed Sally.

“The way I feel,” replied Mr. Burdock, “I could sleep cheek and jowl with a corpse itself.”

“You almost are,” breathed Sally.

Further conversation was halted by the arrival of the surgeon. He swung himself into the back seat of the ambulance, looking back at the lights of Broadway. Gradually a peculiar sensation took possession of the man. He glanced into the body of the car and received the distinct impression that the blankets had come unrolled and were quivering as if with suppressed mirth. The possible significance of what he saw was not reassuring. Blankets that quivered of their own volition had no place in the general scheme of things. The young surgeon was not elated.

For a long minute he sat considering the blankets with apprehensive eyes, then, opening his bag, he produced a flask which he applied to his lips. Placing the flask beside him on the bench, he returned to the objects of his contemplation. This time it seemed to him that the blankets were threatening to lose control of themselves and to become wildly hysterical. Were those strange, gurgling sounds of human origin or were his eyes and ears playing tricks on him – dirty tricks, at that? He gazed down a long street and thought of other things. He thought of an old man who had died in that ambulance the previous evening because he, the surgeon, had cynically mistaken acute starvation for sordid alcoholism. True, the old man’s breath had smelled strongly of bad whiskey, but so did nine out of ten breaths along Broadway. Had the spirit of this hungry old man returned to taunt him with his neglect? The surgeon reached for his flask and was electrified to find it gone. Gurgling noises continued to issue from the blankets. Without further delay he called to the driver to stop; then he climbed up beside him. The blankets could have the entire ambulance for all he cared. Blankets that quivered were bad enough, but blankets that drank whiskey were obviously out of the question. And, anyway, the investigation of occult phenomena was none of his business. He’d leave that to the cranks before he became one himself.

“Get more fresh air up here,” he explained to the driver. “Back there the gasoline fumes from the streets are stifling.”

“Maybe that’s what gets the best of your customers, Doc,” suggested the driver. “Most of ’em seem to pass out en route.”

Having no desire to be reminded of the high rate of mortality suffered by his customers, the surgeon made no comment and the drive was finished in silence.

Four powerful attendants were awaiting the surgeon’s bidding.

“What did you catch tonight, Doc?” one of them inquired.

“Look in the back and see,” replied the surgeon with simulated indifference.

They looked in the back and saw. What they saw was in no wise startling. Since the advent of prohibition they had grown accustomed to such sights. Two well-dressed gentlemen were sleeping peacefully and comfortably on the floor of the car. Beside them was the surgeon’s flask. The surgeon, himself, unable to restrain his curiosity, and fortified by the presence of others, looked long and hatefully upon the oblivious bodies. His whiskey must have been the last straw. Both Sally and Mr. Burdock had gently passed out. A look of profound trouble clouded the driver’s eyes.

“I’ll swear to God the pair of them were born fully dressed in there,” he protested, peering over the surgeon’s shoulder. “We didn’t pick up one body, let alone two.”

Acid bitterness then entered into the young surgeon’s soul. The ethical compulsions of his high vocation vanished from his mind. To him those two still bodies were not human. They were things to be made to suffer both physical and mental anguish. He spoke confidentially and persuasively to the attendants. Those stalwart worthies nodded with unqualified approval and did all that was required.

Some hours thereafter Tom Burdock swam back to consciousness through the alcoholic waves that were beating against his brain. He found himself cold, unreasonably and clammily cold. Removing the sheet from his head, he discovered that everything else also had been removed. “Strange,” he thought numbly, “I seem to have crawled into bed mother-naked. Wonder where Willows is.” He reached for the night lamp but was unable to find it. Then he sat up and looked about him. What he saw was not reassuring. Along the opposite wall were numerous rows of large drawers. Certainly this was not his hotel bedroom. “Might have barged into the linen closet,” he reflected, “and gone to sleep there. Damn fool thing to do.” Then in the dim light he noticed a number of slablike tables upon which sheet-draped figures were apparently sleeping the unstirring sleep of the weary.

“I’ve got it now,” he decided. “We’re in some sort of a Turkish bath. They’ve taken all our clothes and now they’re freezing us to death.”

He let himself down from the table and started out to search for his friend. At that moment two gray-clad figures came swinging into the room and marched up to one of the large drawers. Mr. Burdock modestly shrank down behind a table and observed a scene that was anything but happy, although his faculties were still too atrophied to comprehend the full significance of what he saw.

The two men opened one of the drawers and snapped the body of an unpleasant-looking man into view. This they unceremoniously deposited in a basketlike arrangement.

“Well, here’s the last of this beauty,” remarked one of the men, as if the final removal of the beauty were a pleasure that had been long deferred.

“He’s still so full of slugs he’s as heavy as a graven image,” complained the other.

Laying violent hands on the basket, the two gray-clad figures half dragged and half carried it through another door.

“What a tough joint we picked out,” Mr. Burdock observed to himself. “First they make a guy sleep in a drawer, then they drag him off in a basket. Wonder what they meant by that bit about slugs. Sounded sort of bad to me.”

His growing feeling of solitude and uneasiness gave him the temerity to lift the end of the sheet from the figure on the table behind which he had been crouching. He found himself confronting a pair of large, aloof-looking feet.

“Can’t be Willows’ feet,” he decided, delicately recovering the feet and moving to another table. “I’ll try this sheet, but maybe they tucked him in a drawer.”

This effort was rewarded by a glare from two pale, malevolent blue eyes set in a dead white face decorated with a flowing beard. Mr. Burdock, after one look, hastily dropped the sheet. This Turkish bath evidently drew its customers from the very scum of society.

“I beg your pardon, brother,” he mumbled. “I was looking for my friend.”

He realized it was rather improper to be going about uncovering naked strangers, and was fully prepared to have this man snap erect and tell him to go to hell with his friend. He was not prepared, however, for the silence that greeted his apology. Perhaps the man had not heard. He’d try him again. Once more he diffidently raised a corner of the sheet and looked down. A person did not usually go to sleep with his eyes wide open, no matter how tired he felt. There was something in the very immobility of the figure that arrested Tom Burdock’s attention. Very gently, very reluctantly, he edged in a finger and touched the man’s cold face. Mr. Burdock’s hand flipped back like a frantic fish leaping from a lake. He stood there petrified, frozen to the marrow by the shock of a ghastly realization.

“Oh, my God,” he breathed at last, “I’m a dead man. We’re all dead men. That bit about the slugs. I see it all now. The ambulance. We died on the way. That stuff in the doctor’s flask did the trick. It killed us.”

In his morbid mental condition it was not at all difficult for Mr. Burdock to persuade himself that this was the only rational explanation of his predicament.

“Wonder what poor Willows looks like,” he mused as he moved to the next table.

Idly he lifted the sheet and glanced down. The grinning face of a Negro seared his eyeballs. The sheet dropped from Mr. Burdock’s nerveless fingers and blotted out the terrible sight.

“Dear me,” he quavered, in his fright forgetting how to curse. “Oh, dear, dear me. Oh, goodness. I can’t go on with this much longer. How awful everything is.”

At this inauspicious moment the sheet on the table on the other side of Mr. Burdock was seized with a sudden convulsion. Tom Burdock had often heard of a person’s jaw dropping under the stress of some terrible fright or confrontation. He had never believed it, however. People did not really go about dropping their jaws. In the whole course of his life he had never seen a single jaw drop. But now as he stood looking at that wildly thrashing sheet he had occasion to alter his opinion. His own jaw swung open like a gate that had been roughly kicked. His eyes became two glassy points of fear. What horror was he now about to witness? When Tim Willows’s head finally emerged from the sheet, Tom Burdock drew a quivering breath and snapped his jaw back into place.

“Where are we?” asked Sally, in a high tremulous voice which even in his dazed condition Mr. Burdock found somewhat incongruous.

“Take it easy, old man,” he said in a funereal voice. “Pull yourself together. I fear we’re all dead.”

“Dead?” repeated Sally. “Why, you’re not dead. You don’t even look sick.”

“I know,” replied Burdock bleakly. “It must be like that. All around us lie the dead. Some of us are in drawers.”

“You’re not in drawers,” said Sally, not looking at the great man. “Get a sheet and wrap it round you.”

Absently Mr. Burdock plucked a sheet from a nearby table. In so doing he neatly unveiled the body of an oriental ax victim. Sally took one swift look, then crumpled beneath her sheet.

“Has it gone?” came her muffled voice. “What a sight!”

“It will never go,” said Burdock hollowly. “It will be dragged away in a basket.”

“Oh, dear God,” moaned Sally, hoping to curry favor. “Do they make picnics out of us?”

“No,” continued Burdock, now thoroughly enjoying his misery. “After that comes the ground – the earth. Parts of us go in bottles, perhaps.”

“Well, we’ll make a couple of powerful quarts,” Sally could not help observing.

She ducked out from under the sheet and looked curiously about her.

“I thought it was a Turkish bath,” intoned Tom Burdock, “but it turned out to be a morgue.”

“From the frigidity of the temperature,” said Sally, “I should say we’ve missed hell by several degrees.”

“You shouldn’t talk like that, Willows,” Mr. Burdock mournfully remonstrated. “This may be merely a moment of transition – the pause before the plunge.”

So far as the plunge was concerned the words of Tom Burdock were singularly prophetic. An aged man came into the room, gave one appalled look at the two strange figures, then hurriedly withdrew.

“There’re a couple of resurrections in there,” he told the doctor, “and they’re raising hell with our morgue.”

The doctor received this startling announcement with a smile of malicious glee. A few minutes later four large attendants filed briskly into the morgue and roughly apprehended both Sally and Mr. Burdock. Then came the plunge. They were transported through leagues of space and violently deposited in two tubs of ice-cold water.

“The final plunge,” gasped Sally as the water closed over her head.

Mr. Burdock’s amazement and indignation knew no bounds. Sally had reached that stage whereat nothing really surprised her. Dead or alive, she was still sticking to her man.

The bath over, a couple of strange-looking garments were flung in their faces.

“My God,” chattered Tom Burdock, distastefully examining the article in his hands. “The things they can’t think of doing to you in a place like this! Now what do you suppose this damn thing is? It looks pretty desperate to me.”

“Put it on. Put it on,” snapped one of the attendants. “Can’t you see we’re waiting?”

“How many poor souls have met their God in mine?” demanded Sally, at which Mr. Burdock’s face went white.

“Plenty,” said the attendant.

“It’s still quite good,” replied Sally.

“I can’t do it,” gasped Mr. Burdock. “Have men actually died in these things?”

“Suffered and died,” said the attendant. “And if you don’t get into yours you’ll find yourself in a strait-jacket.”

“If it’s a new one,” observed Mr. Burdock, as he struggled into the uncouth sleeping garment, “I think I might prefer even that.”

“Now, how do we look?” asked Sally after they had slipped into the nightshirts.

“Take ’em off,” commanded the attendant disgustedly. “You’ve got ’em on backward.”

“But this way seems more logical,” suggested Mr. Burdock.

“I’m getting mighty tired of you,” said the attendant. “Are you going to do what I say?”

“Sure he is,” put in Sally. “Dress pretty for the gentleman, Tom.”

The attendant gave Sally a suspicious look. She had spoken in her natural voice, which even Mr. Burdock found difficult to tolerate.

“Don’t talk like that,” he pleaded, “or you’ll be getting us into more trouble.”

Once more they were seized upon and hurried down the hall. This time they were thrust into a long ward apparently entirely occupied by the maddest sort of madmen. Wild and alarming noises filled this ward. Some men were cursing in their sleep while others preferred to laugh. The laughing was the harder to bear. Several were singing lustily on their cots, while others troubled the air with a cacophony of hard-driven snores. It was bedlam at its weirdest.

“You don’t expect us to sleep in an animal house like this?” demanded Mr. Burdock in a voice of dignified reproof. “Why, damn it, I’m a gentleman.”

“We don’t care whether you sleep or not,” replied the communicative attendant. “You can shout and scream like the others if you feel like it. Everybody’s nuts in here.”

“What!” exclaimed Tom Burdock. “Do you mean to say you’re putting us in with insane people?”

“Why, didn’t you know?” asked the attendant. “You’re that way yourself. Hope you don’t think we’d put you in with normal patients. You’re under observation.”

“I can’t stand it,” muttered Mr. Burdock to Sally. “I know I’ll never be able to stand it. I’ll go mad myself. What humiliation! And this damn silly nightgown all split down the back. That in itself is enough to make a person look and act like a madman.”

Not only were they thrown into bed but also strapped down until only their heads could move.

“Well, I never in my life would have thought it possible,” said Mr. Burdock, cocking his massive head at Sally. “To be strapped helplessly in bed with a ward full of raving lunatics. Can you imagine it?”

“I don’t have to,” replied Sally, popping up her head. “I’m experiencing it to the hilt.”

“Next time I crawl into an ambulance,” groaned Burdock, “I hope to God they shoot me.”

“They probably will,” said Sally wearily. “They can do anything they want to you in a place like this, especially if you’re mad. Do you think you are?”

The great man strained at his bonds.

“Don’t,” he pleaded. “Don’t even suggest it.”

“Well, I think I am,” went on Sally. “I believe I’ve lost my reason. First I thought I was dead and now I’m pretty sure I’m not quite all there. I’m glad I’m strapped down or else I might do either you or myself an injury.”

Tom Burdock gave her a frightened look and shivered. Perhaps that explained the sudden shiftings of his companion’s voice. There was, now that he came to think of it, something rather odd about Tim Willows. No normal man could talk so like a woman.

“I wish we had Mr. Volstead strapped down between us,” went on Sally. “He’d make a noble experiment.”

A doctor came quietly up to Mr. Burdock’s cot and stood looking rather sadly down at its occupant. Burdock returned the man’s depressing scrutiny half timidly and half combatively. Suddenly the doctor stooped down and examined the great man’s eyes, roughly snapping back the lids.

“Don’t do that,” complained Burdock. “Damn it, man, you’re gouging.”

Slowly the doctor rose and sorrowfully he shook his head.

“It’s too bad,” was all he said.

“What’s too bad?” demanded Burdock.

“Gone, clean gone,” continued the doctor, as if speaking to himself. “The mind … a case for the mad house.”

“What do you call this?” asked Sally. “They don’t make houses any madder, Doc.”

Mr. Burdock’s eyes were starting from their sockets. His face was purple from the strain of his efforts to get at the doctor.

“Do you mean to stand there and tell me to my face I’m gaga?” he fumed.

The doctor’s face brightened.

“That’s it,” he replied soothingly. “My good man, you’re gaga. Do you like being gaga?”

“You’re crazy as a coot,” Mr. Burdock managed to get out. “You should be where I am. You’re criminally insane, yourself.”

“Another sure indication,” observed the doctor. “The persecution complex. Thinks everyone’s mad but himself. A very sad case.”

Inarticulate with rage, Tom Burdock began to whine like a dog.

“Thinks he’s a dog now,” went on the doctor, then, looking down once more at Mr. Burdock: “Playing wow-wow, old man?” he asked. “What sort of a dog are you?”

The whining turned to a howl of truly animal ferocity.

“Why don’t you examine me, too?” Sally inquired of the doctor. “I’m as mad as hell. Much madder than he is. I’m so far gone I think I’m a couple of wow-wows, not to mention a pack of wolves. If I wasn’t strapped down I’d stalk myself and then turn at bay and snarl in my own face.”

“You’re not mad,” replied the doctor. “You’re merely peculiar. An all too familiar type.”

“Now I wonder what he meant by that?” mused Sally as the doctor drifted away. “It had all the earmarks of a nasty crack.”

“Willows,” said Mr. Burdock weakly, after he had quieted down somewhat, “Julius Caesar and Napoleon and Alexander the Great and all those famous men would be just as helpless and humiliated as we are if they took away all their clothes and made them wear these silly-looking nightshirts all split down the back, wouldn’t they?”

“Sure they would,” replied Sally encouragingly. “And that goes for President Hoover, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Rudy Vallee. Mahatma Gandhi is the only possible exception. He might look quite snappy for him.”

“It’s so demeaning,” continued Mr. Burdock. “They don’t give you a ghost of a chance. They strip you of dignity and self-respect and make you look like a fool. They get the moral and physical advantage over you and you can’t do a damn thing. It’s the worst feeling in the world. No man can look competent rigged out the way we are.”

“I’ve never succeeded in looking like that even in a fur coat,” replied Sally. “But it must be hard lines for you, the head of a great concern.”

“It is, Willows. It is,” said Burdock mournfully. “I don’t think I’ll ever regain my former self-esteem.”

“My own inferiority complex,” replied Sally, “has been given a terrific boost. If a worm looked at me severely I’d break down and confess everything.”

At this juncture an interne presented himself and gave them what proved to be a sleeping potion, for presently their eyes closed and they fell into an uneasy doze.

Several hours later Mr. Burdock awoke and immediately wished he hadn’t. What he saw caused him to shrink within his bonds. He hoped he was still dreaming. He even hoped that the doctor had been right and that he had gone mad. He hoped for any other explanation except the true one. An incredibly aged creature or thing, a face remotely suggestive of a woman, an evil face framed in an unholy nimbus of straggling, gray hair, was peering down into his, peering with the glazed, fixed stare of the demented. In the hand of this apparition was a long kitchen knife. Just above Mr. Burdock’s throat the blade was suggestively poised.

“Get up, Jim,” croaked the face in a hoarse voice. “Get up at once. It’s time ye were rising, man.”

Mr. Burdock licked his dry lips and endeavored to speak. No sound came.

“Get up,” continued the terrible voice. “Get up, Jim, you hulk of a man.”

“My good woman,” Tom Burdock gasped. “Nothing would please me more. I long to get up. I’d give ten years of my life to get up, but unfortunately I can’t get up.”

“I’ll make you get up,” grated the old woman, tentatively pricking her victim with the point of the knife.

“But, madam, I’m not Jim,” Mr. Burdock protested. “You’ve made some mistake. I think that man over there calls himself Jim.”

“Oh, what a lie!” exclaimed Sally, who had been awakened by the sound of voices. “Don’t you believe him, lady. Jim went out to get a drink.”

“I’d like a drink,” observed the old woman.

“Why don’t you go and get one?” suggested Mr. Burdock. “We all want a drink.”

“No,” said the old woman, once more prodding Burdock with the knife. “You go get the drink.”

“Listen, lady,” he said very earnestly. “If I could go get a drink you don’t think I’d be lying here, do you? I couldn’t go get a drink if they were being given away in buckets. I can’t even budge.”

“I’ll make you budge,” proclaimed the old lady, growing excited. “Are you going to get that drink before I slit your throat?”

As she prodded the knife into Mr. Burdock her face was working horribly. Unable to stand the situation any longer, he lifted up his voice in one anguished cry for help.

“Pipe down in there,” called a gruff voice. “Want another cold bath?”

“Yes,” shouted Burdock. “That’s it. I want another cold bath. Quick, for God’s sake.”

“If you don’t hurry he’ll be bathed in blood,” Sally sang out. “We’ve got a wild woman in here. And she’s got the cutest knife – about twelve inches long.”

“Come out of there, Maggie,” came a bored voice. “Neither one of those guys is your husband. They’re just plain bums. Come on and give us that knife and I’ll slip you a little drink.”

“That’s a good girl, Maggie,” said Mr. Burdock. “Did you hear what he said? He promised you a little drink. Think of that!”

Evidently Maggie was thinking of that. She seemed undecided. From the knife she looked to Mr. Burdock’s unprotected throat. Maybe she could cut it and get the drink, too. A greedy look sprang up in her eyes.

“No, no,” said Sally, who had been watching the old woman closely. “No cheating, Maggie. I’ll tell.”

Mumbling furiously to herself, Maggie turned and hobbled from the alcove.

“Who in God’s name can that be?” asked Tom Burdock, the sweat standing out on his face.

“She seems to be the mascot of the troop,” observed Sally.

“Well, she certainly gave me the worst fifteen minutes of my life,” said Mr. Burdock. “This has been a most unpleasant night. Wish I could go home.”

“Do you mean that?” cried Sally.

“If I ever get out of this place alive,” replied Burdock with deadly conviction, “that’s just where I’m going – home.”

“Is that a promise?” asked Sally.

“It’s more than a promise,” said Burdock. “It’s a grim determination.”

Sally sighed deeply and let her head sink back to rest.

An orderly appeared and stood at the foot of Mr. Burdock’s bed. He was grinning rather apologetically.

“Maggie wasn’t premeditated,” he said. “We didn’t plan Maggie. It was all her own idea.”

“She’s got some mean ideas, that girl,” commented Sally. “Why don’t you keep her locked up?”

“Oh, Maggie’s perfectly harmless,” replied the orderly. “We’ve had her with us for years. She’s a sort of privileged character. She wanders from ward to ward. Nobody seems to mind.”

“I mind terribly,” said Mr. Burdock. “I most strenuously object to Maggie. She may be a privileged character, but not with my neck.”

At an early hour they were unstrapped and fed. Then Tom Burdock was given a heavy flat weight attached to a broom handle, and told to push it up and down the linoleum which ran the entire length of the ward.

“My God,” protested Burdock. “This hall is so damned long I don’t even see the end of it. I’ll drop from sheer exhaustion before I’m halfway through.”

“Better send Maggie along with him to keep him from getting lost,” suggested Sally.

Without further protest the employer of five thousand souls set off on his long trip. Sally was set to work emptying buckets, a most uncongenial task. Whenever their paths chanced to cross in the course of their humiliating occupations the two friends’ expressions were eloquent. They were weary, strained, and disgusted. Sally looked especially wan.

“Would you believe it?” demanded Mr. Burdock. “Me with this damn thing. Pushing it. And in such a get-up.”

“I suppose I look quite natural,” remarked Sally bitterly.

“You have all your life before you,” replied Tom Burdock.

“And a sweet little bit behind,” retorted Sally. “You’ve made history for me, Tom Burdock.”

By ten o’clock in the morning both of them were convinced that they had been up an entire day. An attendant flung two bags at them and told them to clear out. Neither one of them ever achieved again such speed in dressing as they did that morning. Even then the operation seemed interminable to them. Both were knotting their neckties as they marched down the hall. Once in the open air they breathed with voluptuous enjoyment. Never had life seemed quite so desirable. A taxi took them to the Grand Central. Sally was taking no chances.

“I’ll fix it up with the hotel,” she assured Mr. Burdock. “I’ll pack your bags myself and see that they’re sent along.”

“You’re a great little scout, Willows,” said the large man. “What a time we’ve had, eh?”

“I’ve enjoyed every minute of it,” Sally replied with a grin. “Every jolly old minute. Wouldn’t have missed one of them.”

“The same here, you liar,” said Mr. Burdock. “We’ve had a nice, quiet time. Going to tell my wife all about it.”

They were standing on the long platform now and Sally was watching Tom Burdock with anxious eyes. A white-jacketed porter stepped out of a Pullman and greeted Mr. Burdock with a dazzling display of even whiter teeth. Mr. Burdock returned the salutation in his large, friendly style. Evidently he was well known on this line. Sally had no desire to linger over the farewells. She wanted to see her charge disappear into the train and the doors shut against his return.

“Don’t forget America’s Sweetheart,” she told him.

“You mean Maggie?” asked Burdock, with a slight shudder.

“Herself,” replied Sally.

“Never,” said Mr. Burdock. “I’m going in now and collapse in a chair. Do I look all right?”

“Surprisingly well, considering what you’ve been through.”

So departed Mr. Burdock from the city that had so disastrously misunderstood his playful intentions. Sally stood on the platform until the train pulled out, then she hurried to the nearest telephone and made a full report to a congratulatory Mr. Gibber. An hour later she caught a local to Cliffside, hoping there to enjoy a much-needed rest. She never did. Not on this occasion, at any rate.

The excitement started when she was wearily crossing Springfield Avenue on her way home from the station. Speaking accurately, the excitement must have started elsewhere. It merely reached its highest point of activity in and around the spot where Sally was standing. It was first brought to her attention by a bitter fusillade of bullets and the sharp reports of an exceedingly loquacious revolver. As inured as she had become to the unexpected, Sally was nevertheless somewhat disturbed. She was more so when she saw Mr. Carl Bentley, clad in a dripping wet union suit, approaching her at great speed. Close behind Mr. Bentley, and covering ground much too rapidly for a prospective mother, came the metamorphosed Tim, diligently pumping an old service automatic. And close behind Tim were two leaping state troopers, their faces eloquently expressing incredulity and determination. It must have been a moment of supreme humiliation for Mr. Bentley, but the Don Juan of the suburbs seemed to have tossed all considerations of shame and modesty to the winds as being impediments to flight.

Catching sight of a person he erroneously believed to be the husband of his murderously inclined pursuer, Mr. Bentley crouched behind Sally and pleaded for protection.

“A terrible mistake,” he managed to get out between gasping breaths. “She suddenly went mad. Speak to her, Mr. Willows. I’m too young to die.”

This settled Mr. Bentley’s hash forever with Sally.

“You were never too young to die,” she told the cringing man. “You should never have been allowed to get as far along as you have.”

Tim, held firmly by the two state troopers and talking loosely about his purely hypothetical honor, was hustled up to the spot.

“I’m afraid, Mr. Willows,” said one of the troopers to Sally, “I’ll have to ask you to accompany your wife and this – this – —” The trooper seemed to be having difficulty in classifying Carl Bentley. Tim helped him out.

“Nasty-minded craven,” he supplied, then added several unladylike epithets.

“Madam!” said the trooper reprovingly.

“To hell with you,” snapped Tim. “If the two of you hadn’t butted in this bum would have been a corpse by now.”

“May I ask what all the shooting’s about?” Sally put in mildly.

“That’s what we want to know,” said the other trooper. “Come on down to the police station and we’ll try to find out.”

“If you want to know,” remarked Tim, “it’s all about this damned honor of mine.”

He slipped an arm through Sally’s and winked wickedly up at her. Sally was undecided whether she would prefer to lose her honor privately or her reputation in public. Ahead of them, held with unnecessary brutality, Carl Bentley in his dripping union suit proceeded down the street.

In, virtually, any part of the civilized world this little procession would have occasioned comment. In Cliffside it did more than that. Even to this day it is a subject of conversation that increases in dramatic intensity with the passing of the years. Carl Bentley’s dripping union suit is still as fresh in the memory of those who had been privileged to witness the incident as when that unfortunate gentleman had first sprinted grotesquely down Springfield Avenue.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Baiting of Mr. Bentley

Mr. Ram should never have done the thing he did. But, then, one never can tell about Egyptians. Especially with old Egyptians. With new Egyptians it’s different. Nobody knows just what a new Egyptian is. One can’t very well dig up a new Egyptian. Old Egyptians are much easier to get to know. They seem to have had a quaint idea of humor. Like Mr. Ram.

There was no sense in giving Tim Willows the body of a woman and leaving him the mind of a man. It was a flagrant example of perverted sorcery, and just what one would expect from an old Egyptian, an old and cynical Egyptian deeply steeped in all the more exasperating phases of the black arts.

One may say that in the case of Mr. Ram there were extenuating circumstances. Perhaps there were. No one enjoys less than an old Egyptian being forced to listen to the constant bickerings of a married couple. An occasional row is diverting, but a daily diet of recrimination and vain regrets wears on one’s nerves and saps one’s moral fibre. Even at that Mr. Ram might have tried something a little less drastic. For example, he could easily have made Sally dumb and Tim deaf or vice versa. It would not have mattered much just how he went about it. But, seemingly, Mr. Ram did not choose to act reasonably in the matter. Probably he decided that the only way to get these two unreasonable persons to understand him was to be thoroughly unreasonable himself. Either that or he suddenly lost his temper after long years of provocation, and did the first thing that popped into his head. He might have figured it out this way: Give people what they ask for and then wait and see what they make of it. Both Tim and Sally had made a mess of it. But Tim had made a bigger mess of it than Sally. Perhaps a woman is more adaptable than a man. She must be if there is any truth in the rumor that from a mere rib – an unsightly object at best – she developed into the complicated creature of curves and nerves she represents today. You would never catch a man allowing a thing like that being done to him. If the process had been reversed and the rib extracted from Eve’s side, that rib would have hemmed and hawed and argued and compromised until there was not a bone left in the poor woman’s body. Men are like that. They have a fine sense of dignity. No real man would be willing to run the risk of having his wife turn on him suddenly and cry: “Shut up, you mere rib.” A man would not stand for that, but a woman would. A woman will stand for anything so long as she gets the best of the man. Eve did not care a snap of her fig leaf about being Adam’s rib, whereas Adam would have put up an awful howl had the tables been turned or the ribs reversed. Eve knew perfectly well that as soon as she got working properly, that is, as soon as she had developed her curves and acquired her nerves Adam would forget all about the rib part of it and try to get familiar. Men are even more like that. In a paroxysm of nervous hysteria she forced the apple on Adam, saying he never liked anything she picked, then with a skillful use of her curves she got the best of him as she had all along known she would even when a mere rib. And that must have been about the way of it. Adam never had a chance. Neither had Tim Willows. Nor Carl Bentley, for that matter. Certainly the latter had no chance at all when he was so ill-advised as to call on one he mistakenly supposed to be the delectable Sally Willows on the same day when that young lady in her husband’s aching body was seeing the last of Tom Burdock.

Tim, thoroughly convinced that his condition justified a little self-indulgence, was lolling in bed with his morning paper and a cigar when Mr. Bentley, like the astute snake in the grass he was, telephoned to ascertain if the coast was clear. Tim answered the call in Sally’s most affected voice.

“Hello. Who’s speaking?” he asked.

“Sally, is that you?” came the low inquiry.

Tim’s face darkened, but his tones remained just as dulcet. He had recognized Mr. Bentley’s hateful voice.

“Oh, dear,” he said vibrantly, emitting the while a cloud of pungent cigar smoke. “It’s been ages since I’ve seen you.”

At the other end of the wire Mr. Bentley was beginning to feel better and better. He liked to keep his women feeling that way.

“You said it, baby,” he replied, in that whimsically slangy way of his that proved so effective with women. “Is it all right for me to come round now?”

“But Carl, dear,” protested Tim, smiling grimly, “baby’s still in bed.”

“Then I’ll hurry right over,” said Bentley. “Don’t trouble to get up for me.”

“What a man!” exclaimed Tim coyly as he viciously jabbed the receiver down on its hook. “I’ll make him pay for this,” he continued to himself as he sprang from the bed. “By God, I’ll make him wish he’d never been born a man. One of these birds who refuses to learn a lesson. All right, I’ll teach him. Thinks I’m at work, does he? Ha! I’ll make him sweat.”

Opening a bureau drawer he examined his automatic to see if it was properly loaded, then, dressing rapidly, he deluged himself with perfume and hurried downstairs.

When Carl Bentley arrived a few minutes later and found his prey already up and dressed, his face eloquently expressed his disappointment.

“You needn’t have gone to all that trouble for me,” he said. “I’ve often been received by ladies in bed.”

“Especially when their husbands are safely out of the way at their stupid old offices,” put in Tim with a wicked smile.

Mr. Bentley smiled back fatuously and approached Tim with carnal intent.

“I took a day off from my office just for this opportunity,” he said in a low voice. “Are you going to make it worth while, Sally?”

“What do you think?” asked Tim teasingly, then added to himself, “You low-lived louse, you’ll get more than you ever expected in your wildest dreams.”

As Bentley’s eager arms enfolded him, Tim managed to lock one foot back of that gentleman’s heel, then, as if in a frenzy of passion, he hurled himself suddenly against the opposing chest and let gravity claim its own. It did. Carl Bentley went down with a crash, landing painfully on the sharp edge of a footstool. At the same moment Dopey lumbered in from the kitchen and, seeing a man in an apparently helpless condition, immediately attacked him. Bentley emitted feeble cries of fear and suffering as Tim clumsily strove to disengage the gallant dog’s teeth from the prostrate man’s trousers. Eventually Tim succeeded, but not without leaving a nice big V-shaped rip. Everything was going splendidly. Tim had not counted on the collaboration of Dopey. He appreciated the dog’s intervention. Kneeling down by the writhing figure he proceeded to scold it playfully for being so easily thrown off its balance. Carl Bentley’s vanity was challenged. He rose weakly from the floor and hobbled over to a chair, into which he tenderly eased his injured torso.

“I know,” he complained, “but I wasn’t expecting an assault. You pretty nearly ruined me.”

“I’m that way,” murmured Tim with downcast eyes. “You make me lose my self-control and then I don’t know what I’m doing. Anything might happen. You’ll have to protect me against myself, Carl dear.”

Carl dear had no such intentions, but he did resolve to protect himself a little better against Sally in the future.

“What am I going to do about my trousers?” he asked, looking ruefully at the rip.

“I’ll sew that up after you’ve taken them off,” said Tim, then added hastily, “Oh, dear, what have I said? What could I have been thinking about? Do forgive me, Carl. Of course you don’t have to take off your trousers.”

“But I will if you think it best,” replied Mr. Bentley quite willingly.

“I think it best,” Tim said decisively.

Before Mr. Bentley had time to reply to this one Tim undulated from the room and mixed a huge cocktail composed of medicated alcohol. He had tried the stuff once himself in a moment of desperation and as a result had become violently and lingeringly ill.

“Sorry I can’t join you,” he said enviously when he had returned to Mr. Bentley. “But it’s the doctor’s orders. I’m off the stuff for a month, maybe longer. I’ll just snuggle up close to you and watch you enjoy yourself. If you don’t like that cocktail I’ll know you don’t love me and I’ll turn you out of the house.”

The doomed man tossed down the proffered cocktail, then his face became a horrid thing to see. It looked all smeared and twisted. Nevertheless, remembering Tim’s words about turning him out of the house, he contorted his lips into a grimace of a smile and tried to give the impression he had swallowed wrong. For several moments he feared he was going to strangle to death. His eyes began to rove desperately round in their sockets as he wheezily sought to entice some air down the sizzling reaches of his seared throat.

“Delicious,” he said at last in a husky voice, wiping the tears from his eyes. “What do you call the thing?”

“I call it a Rub-down Special,” was Tim’s proud reply. “It’s so soothing inside. Now you can have just one more and then you’ll have to be a good boy. I wouldn’t think of letting you make love to me if you kept on drinking.”

“As a matter of fact,” Mr. Bentley stated, “I think I’ve had about enough already. I don’t enjoy drinking alone, and” – here he made a weak attempt to smile alluringly – “I’d much rather make love to you.”

“I guess one more won’t do you any harm,” replied Tim, in a voice just a little too gruff for Sally’s. “If you don’t take it I’ll not like you one little bit.”

Once more the crippled hero of many liaisons subjected himself to the brutal punishment of a Rub-down Special, thinking as he did so that whatever favors he received at the hands of his hostess would be well earned indeed. Shortly after the consumption of this second cocktail he faintly asked to be excused for a moment to enable him to brush up a bit. When he dragged himself back to the room Tim had the satisfaction of beholding a wan and haggard Mr. Bentley. The man sank wearily into a chair and made revolting noises in his throat.

“Did the doctor tell you especially not to drink those cocktails?” he asked after he had rested for a moment.

“Yes,” replied Tim innocently. “He said the things would kill me if I kept on drinking them. He claimed I was poisoning myself.”

“Can’t see that,” declared Bentley gamely. “They seem mighty fine to me.”

“You’re a regular old darling,” cried Tim, slapping the enfeebled man so appreciatively on the back that he was forced once more hurriedly to leave the room. This time when he swayingly returned Mr. Bentley was unquestionably not in the pink. Still, he hoped against hope for better things. The fair object of his foul ends seemed to have noticed nothing. It was an odd thing, though, how everything seemed to go wrong whenever he entered the Willows house. There seemed to be a curse on the place. Again he sank into a chair and made some more queer noises, this time apologizing profusely for his little lapses.

“What you need,” proclaimed Tim, “is a little fresh air. That’s what we both need. I’m going to take my great big beautiful man for a nice walk and after that – ah-ha, what then?”

The great big beautiful man allowed himself to be bundled into his overcoat and pushed with playful vigor out of the front door. In some mysterious manner he missed his footing on the top veranda step and a moment later found himself sprawling at the bottom of the flight. Two stout matrons of Cliffside had the pleasure of witnessing Carl Bentley’s grotesque debacle. Too dejected to put up a pretense, he lay on the walk with his head cocked at an awkward angle on the bottom step and looked at the two passing matrons from out of his dim, unseeing eyes. In the back of his throbbing mind a suspicion was growing that all these things could not happen to a man without there being some directing force either human or supernatural behind them. However, the sympathy and consternation so eloquently expressed on the face that Tim was wearing as he helped the fallen man to his feet dispelled such unworthy doubts.

“We’ll go by the river path,” decided Tim as he led Mr. Bentley down a side street. “It’s so lovely there and quiet, and there are no prying eyes. We’ll be quite alone – just you and I and the river.”

For some reason the way Tim brought out the words “river” and “alone” made Carl Bentley shudder slightly. He was the sort of person who confined his reading to the most lurid passages of the current novels. Quite naturally he had never made a complete job of Dreiser’s two-deck American Tragedy, but he did recall the drowning scene, and felt no better for it. His mind had reached that stage of morbidity at which only the most unpleasant eventualities seemed probable.

The success Tim had so far achieved in subjecting Carl Bentley to pain and humiliation had put him in the best of spirits. He felt that if Sally had only been present to witness his various artful dodges his triumph would have been complete. He experienced no compunction for what he had done to Bentley, nor for what he was going to do to Bentley. In fact, he was mildly surprised he had not already murdered the man, As he summed up the score between them he concluded he held a decided advantage over this would-be home wrecker. Once he had almost put an end to his unwholesome activities for all time. Now he was about to repeat the experiment. Tim looked forward to it. Tim Willows was not really a bad man at heart, but when people were mean to him he enjoyed being just a little bit meaner.

There was still a thin coating of ice on the river. The path that ran close to its edge was narrow, slippery, and disagreeable – the last place in the world to select for a walk at that time of year. Tim pretended to enjoy it. Carl Bentley, a little revived by the fresh air, still clung to his fixed idea. He was going to have his will with Sally Willows. How else could he justify to himself the pain and indignities he had already suffered at her hands? Once more he resumed his tentative endeavor. Winding an arm round his companion’s waist he slipped and sloshed laboriously along at the side of his intended victim. In so doing he received a rather unpleasant impression. Sally Willows’s waist as he remembered it had been delightfully slim and firm. The same could not be said of it now. It was still firm but most decidedly not slim. In fact, it was almost fat. It was fat. Moodily Bentley wondered if Sally was a secret eater – a greedy woman. It would not have surprised him in the least. She was so strange, so different from other women. The truth of the matter was that Tim’s pregnancy was increasing by leaps and bounds. Unaccustomed as he was to pregnancy, especially as applied to his own person, each time he observed his mounting displacement he was freshly indignant with nature and Mr. Ram for the unfair advantage they were taking of him.

“Soon I’ll be sitting about the house like a jovial female Falstaff unable to rise without assistance,” he had recently complained to Sally.

“Well, you can’t eat your cake and have it, too,” had been that lady’s unfeeling rejoinder.

“If the situation were reversed,” Tim had observed, “and you were in my fix I’d be a damn sight more sympathetic with you than you are with me.”

“That’s because you’re not really a woman,” she had said. “A woman is rarely sympathetic with another woman for performing her natural functions. She either looks on a prospective mother with envy or considers her extremely careless.”

“Well, after all, it’s your figure that’s being enlarged,” Tim had replied.

Carl Bentley was now finding things out for himself. Sally Willows’s waist was actually gross. When he attempted to elevate his grip, Tim gave a little scream and halted.

“Let’s play clap hands!” he cried girlishly, skilfully maneuvering Mr. Bentley so that he was standing with his back to the river and perilously close to its edge. “My patties are awfully cold.”

Without much display of enthusiasm Mr. Bentley extended his large hands and allowed himself to go through the vapid passes of this exceedingly childish game. But if Mr. Bentley was deficient in enthusiasm his companion more than made up for it. The game, which at its wildest could hardly be called gripping, seemed to stimulate his fair opponent to a frenzy of excitement. So madly did Tim’s hands slap and lunge that Carl Bentley began to wonder whether the woman had mistaken boxing for a simple nursery game. At last he found himself wholly on the defensive, busily engaged in warding off blows. A sense of unreality stole over him as he strove to hold his ground. Why should he be standing there, he wondered, permitting this silly thing to go on? Unconsciously he stepped back several paces, seeking a better foothold. He never found it. At that moment Tim broke through his guard and with a cry of innocent glee gave him a violent shove. The game ended abruptly in a crash and a plop. Carl Bentley had found his foothold on the bed of the river. Only his head was visible, but that was quite enough. From the expression on the man’s face one would have been led to believe that he was seriously contemplating suicide, whether life still held sufficient promise to make a return to it desirable. Never had Tim beheld such a brooding and disgusted countenance. This was good. He laughed shrilly and hysterically.

“You know,” he cried, “you do look a sight. Just like John the Baptist with his head hygienically transferred to ice. Stop moping about and hurry out of there. I’m getting cold standing here on this freezing ground.”

“Do the misfortunes of others always strike you in a humorous light?” Bentley demanded.

“Misfortunes, nonsense!” exclaimed Tim. “You just didn’t know how to play the game, that’s all there is to it. Hurry up and let me help you. I’m simply freezing.”

“That’s too darned bad,” replied Bentley, beginning to chatter a little himself, “but please don’t try to help me. You might get all wet. I couldn’t bear that.”

But Tim insisted on being helpful. In his eagerness he kept getting in Mr. Bentley’s way and thwarting his most desperate effort to climb ashore. A dispassionate observer would have gained the impression that a very small woman was grimly endeavoring to prevent a very large man from quitting an ice-cold river. The dispassionate observer would have been quite right.

In desperation the exhausted and chilled Bentley was forced to drop to his hands and knees and literally to claw his way past the obstructing legs of his rescuer. He fell panting and shivering on the muddy bank, a spent man weary of life and of all that it had to offer.

“Hurry!” cried Tim. “I must get you home and make you strip. It’s a lucky thing I was here or you might have been standing there yet.”

“If you hadn’t been here,” replied Mr. Bentley, with the uncivil logic of the wet male, “I wouldn’t have been standing there at all.”

“Cheer up,” continued Tim. “What’s a little river between friends?”

“If the river had been between us,” declared Mr. Bentley as he struggled to his feet, “it would have been a damn sight safer for me.”

“Nonsense,” replied Tim. “Don’t go on so. You’re not the first man who ever fell in a river. Thousands drown every year. Suppose you were a lumberjack.”

“I have no intention of ever becoming a lumberjack,” retorted Mr. Bentley.

“But that doesn’t keep you from supposing you were one, does it?” asked Tim.

“No,” admitted the other, “but I can’t see how supposing I was a lumberjack is going to make me any warmer or drier.”

“It certainly won’t make you any colder or wetter, will it?” demanded Tim argumentatively.

“All right,” said Bentley desperately. “I’m a lumberjack. What happens now?”

“Very well, then,” replied Tim. “Come along. I knew it would be like this.”

“Then why did you ever start out?”

“I wanted to make sure. Thought at least we might be able to take a quiet walk without your flopping and splashing about in a river.”

Mr. Bentley could not trust himself to reply to this unreasonable observation. Instead he gave an outlet to his pent-up emotions by sneezing inartistically all over the adjacent landscape.

When Tim had hauled his visitor home he hustled the dripping creature up to the bedroom preparatory to the last act. Here he made Mr. Bentley strip to his union suit, practically dragging the clothes off the miserable man with his own two hands.

“You wear union suits, I see,” Tim remarked as he yanked off Bentley’s soaking trousers.

“Yes,” chattered Mr. Bentley. “What does Willows wear?”

“Rags,” replied Tim. “Old, unsightly rags. He picks up things about the house and tries them on.”

“Tough on you,” observed Mr. Bentley, his vanity getting the better of him. “I like to look nice this way. A man owes it to himself. Poor Willows. I’ll never forget the night when he hid behind the portière.”

It was this remark that settled Carl Bentley’s fate. Not only was this great oaf laboring under the delusion that he was going to seduce poor Willows’s wife, but also he was actually pitying the husband with horrid condescension.

“That tears it,” said Tim decisively, in his natural voice.

“Tears what?” asked Bentley, momentarily startled out of his self-satisfaction.

“You’ll soon find out,” said Tim, walking over to the bureau and producing the automatic. With this lethal weapon held carelessly in his hands he turned on Mr. Bentley and grinned unpleasantly. “Instead of ruining me,” he continued, “I’m going to pretty well ruin you. But before I start in I want to let you know that you look simply terrible in that union suit with its tricky little trap door arrangement in the back. You make me ashamed of my sex, as undecided as it is at the moment.”

Mr. Bentley’s amazement as he listened to Tim’s voice crisply issuing from Sally’s lips mounted to stupefaction. Had it not been for the blue-black automatic covering him he would have been inclined to believe that Sally was playing another trick and not a very nice one at that. The automatic, however, was altogether too convincing. Try as he would he could not find a laugh in his system sufficiently robust to do away with that disagreeable-looking object. So unnerved was Mr. Bentley that he was not even able to work up the sickest sort of a smile. Recalling his embarrassing experience on the train, he came to the conclusion that the voices of the Willows must have become interchangeable. Tim’s voice continued. He was methodically lashing himself into a fury. He fully intended to make himself madder than he had ever been in his life. It would be a fairly easy matter. One short look at Carl Bentley was enough to set him going. A long look was sure to bring on a violent rage.

“You thought I looked so funny hiding behind that portière,” he went on. “You’ll never forget it, will you?”

Mr. Bentley was far too frightened to become further confused. He made no attempt to answer, but kept his fascinated eyes on that gun.

“Well, here’s something else you’ll never forget,” continued Tim. “Something that will live with you to your dying day.” Tim’s voice changed suddenly to a note of sharp command. “Unbutton your little trap door,” he snapped.

“But,” faltered Mr. Bentley, wondering what on earth was in store for him, “that’s hardly – —”

“There’s no buts about it,” interrupted Tim. “I have a desire to see it flap as you go. I want everybody to see it flap.”

Reluctantly Carl Bentley did as he was told. He felt as if he had been deprived of his last shred of self-respect. He was not only unbuttoned, but also undone.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” observed Tim. “Now about-face and march. Go right down the stairs and directly out of this house. Don’t stop or hesitate. I’ll be close behind you with this gun. Once in the street walk rapidly but don’t try to run. If you do I’ll start shooting. Get a move on now, and don’t talk back. You can still save your useless life if you do exactly as I tell you. Off you go.”

Thus it came about that Mr. Carl Bentley, clad in a dripping union suit not properly arranged in the back, was seen walking briskly along the streets by practically the entire population of that suburban town. About ten yards behind this arresting figure came Tim Willows. In his hand was an automatic.

Carl Bentley at first endeavored to give the impression of a man walking in a trance or in sleep, but as he neared the more populous quarter of the town his frayed nerves snapped and he incontinently fled. Tim, in spite of the fact that he was running for two, did his best to keep up with the fleeing man. The sight of the flapping trap door added greatly to the pleasure of the pursuit. It was then that the shooting began, which terminated only when Mr. Bentley sought protection behind Sally.

The little party, escorted by the state troopers, proceeded down the street and entered the police station, which also served as the courthouse. As Mr. Bentley was about to go in, one of the troopers rapped him smartly with his club.

“Button that up,” said the trooper. “Have you no pride?”

Mechanically Mr. Bentley’s fingers began to grope for the button of what Tim had been pleased to call the little trap door.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Much Ado About Honor

“Well, well, well,” drawled Sergeant Devlin, letting his pleased eyes dwell ironically on the strange figure of Mr. Carl Bentley. “What have we here?”

“Damned if I rightly know,” replied one of the state troopers. “I’ve never laid violent hands on anything exactly like it since I’ve been on the force. It’s all wet and nasty.”

“I shall remember the revolting circumstances when recommending you for promotion,” observed the sergeant, returning once more to his rapt contemplation of the miserable object under discussion. “You know,” he continued, in his calm, deliberate voice, “I’ve sat here behind this desk for many a long year and during that time some mighty unpalatable-looking specimens have been dragged in off the streets, but this one is by all odds the queerest – the most difficult to classify as a member of the human race. It’s enough to unseat one’s reason.” Having delivered himself of this scholarly observation – Sergeant Devlin being an exceptionally well-educated officer – he let his eyes refresh themselves on the figure of one he mistook for a small but none the less appealingly fashioned woman. Suddenly he started and a dismayed expression appeared in his eyes. “Joe,” he said to one of the troopers, “what is the little lady doing with that large gun in her hand? That doesn’t strike me as being quite prudent. Ladies with revolvers are notoriously irregular. However, it doesn’t really matter. Everything connected with this affair seems to be somewhat irregular.” Giving the officer addressed as Joe no opportunity to reply, the sergeant resumed his dispassionate scrutiny of Carl Bentley. “Couldn’t you have arranged to put a little something on before getting yourself brought before me?” he inquired, with surprising gentleness. “Had it been the lady, now, I would have offered no word of protest, but then I suppose in my job one shouldn’t expect too much in the way of amusement.” At this point in the officer’s monologue it was on Sally’s stubble-covered face rather than on Tim’s smooth one that the blush of modesty appeared. Tim in his vulgar manner giggled rather indecently. Sergeant Devlin was quick to note the incongruity of these reactions. “Who is that man?” he demanded, inclining his head in the direction of Sally.

“Seems to be the lady’s husband,” one of the troopers replied.

“He seems to be?” repeated Devlin. “ ‘Seems’ is hardly the word. Either he is or he isn’t the lady’s husband. However, it doesn’t matter. That may be irregular, too.”

“We’re man and wife,” spoke up Sally, with truly ladylike hauteur.

“That could easily be possible,” replied Sergeant Devlin, looking more searchingly at the male owner of the female voice, “but which is the man and which is the wife is still a question in my mind. Your attributes seem to have become strangely confused.” Once more he turned his attention to Carl Bentley. “You know,” he remarked easily to that individual, “your quaint idea of a gentleman’s walking attire has placed you in a very unfortunate position, my dear sir. Even before this obviously involved situation has been made clear to me I feel strongly inclined to charge you with several disgusting offenses.”

“I had no opportunity,” Carl Bentley protested in a feeble voice. “I was fleeing for my life.”

“Was it worth it?” asked the sergeant, with the detached interest of the true skeptic. “I believe things would have worked out better for you in the long run if you had lost your life. Many persons – I don’t say all – but many nice-minded persons would rather be found dead than caught the way you are.”

“But that woman was trying to murder me,” whined the no longer statuesque Mr. Bentley, pointing an accusing finger at the cause of his degradation. “She’s a terrible woman, Sergeant. You don’t know. There’s something strange about her.”

A smothered exclamation broke from the undeniably provocative lips that circumstance had thrust on Tim.

“You horrid man!” he cried threateningly. “You just wait until I tell the nice officer all about how you tried to do in my honor. If you’d had your way with me I wouldn’t have had enough honor left to dust a fiddle with.”

As Sergeant Devlin smiled approvingly on Tim the miserable Mr. Bentley shivered with apprehension. The poor man seemed to realize he had not the ghost of a chance. The sergeant’s next remark made assurance doubly sure.

“I can see nothing strange in the lady’s conduct,” Devlin observed. “I would very much like to murder you myself. Unfortunately duty forbids.” He turned graciously to Tim. “Not that it matters much,” continued the sergeant, “but did you have any definite reason for wanting to kill this creature, madam, or were you merely trying to perform a public service? I’ve always been interested in trifles.”

“Well, this wasn’t any matter to trifle with,” said Tim promptly. “It was a good old-fashioned, free-for-all assault. Never have I been so shocked and surprised.”

“Dear me,” murmured the sergeant, looking severely upon Mr. Bentley. “At this late day and age do you still find it necessary to go about assaulting women? You must be an out-of-luck guy indeed. It’s really too bad the little lady missed her mark. Then we might have been able to hush the matter up. Instead of being buried beneath a nice, clean, protective layer of quiet earth you will now be crushed beneath the weight of public scorn and indignation.”

Sergeant Devlin was now thoroughly enjoying himself. His life as a whole was a dull one. There had not been much crime of late. He had come to look on a law-breaker as a generous gift from God. This case promised to become unusually sweet and pungent. Although it pleased him to feign ignorance he was quite well aware of the identities of his three visitors. He knew the names, residences, and social standing of each actor involved in this diverting little drama. It gave him infinite satisfaction to get his hooks into some members of the upper strata for a change. Both from report and personal observation he had formed an especially low opinion of Mr. Carl Bentley. He would make that so-called gentleman suffer for the good fortune of birth and position.

“Do I understand, then, madam,” he asked politely, “that you wish to lodge a charge of assault against this prisoner?”

“I surely do, Sergeant,” declared Tim earnestly. “Exaggerated assault. The worst sort of assault.”

Devlin scratched his head in some perplexity.

“Just what is the worst sort of assault, lady?” he asked. “Opinions might differ, you know. One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”

“Well, this man is all poison to me,” retorted Tim. “I’ve always been true to my husband, haven’t I, dear?”

This question, coming so unexpectedly upon Sally, completely shattered the pose of calm reserve she had been striving to maintain since her first break. A flutelike voice popped out surprisingly from between her lips, the upper one of which stood sadly in need of a razor. At the sound of a woman’s voice proceeding from a man’s body Sergeant Devlin looked up and scanned the speaker’s face with a mystified expression in which there was a shade of mistrust. This case, to his way of thinking, bade fair to develop some rather sensational sidelights.

“Always, darling,” Sally was saying in answer to Tim’s question. “We all of us have our faults, but misplacing or forgetting your honor is not one of yours. That I will say for you.”

“You’d have been fit to be tied today,” Tim continued volubly. “The way that man went on was nobody’s business. It was nip and tuck for a while. Didn’t look as if I was going to have any honor left at all.”

“May I ask how far this fiend succeeded?” inquired the sergeant. “Merely as a matter of record, you understand, my dear lady.”

“Well, I wouldn’t like to go into details, Sergeant,” Tim modestly replied. “No lady would, but the assault proper was a complete flop. I still have all my honor left right down to the last shred, such as it is. Still, it’s the only honor I have.”

Tim seemed to regard his honor as he would a powder puff or lipstick or any other small article women usually carry about with them in their handbags. Sergeant Devlin would not have been a bit surprised if the little lady had produced her honor and proudly displayed it for his inspection.

“Well,” he remarked after a moment of reflection, “I’m sure we’re mighty glad about that.”

“You’re not nearly so glad as I am,” said Tim. “You know, Sergeant, a girl’s honor is just about the best thing she has, and sometimes it’s not so good, at that. I always try to keep my honor spick and span, right up to the minute.”

“Up to what minute?” Devlin inquired, with justifiable curiosity.

By this time Mr. Bentley was writhing in mental as well as bodily anguish. If this terrible woman continued to make ground at her present rate of progress he would have no more chance than the proverbially proverbial snowball in a proverbially proverbial hell. It was high time that his voice was heard.

“It’s all a lie, officer,” he broke in furiously. “That woman has no honor. She’s trying deliberately to frame me. Why – —”

“What’s that?” interrupted Tim. “Do you hear what he’s saying, Sergeant? He’s actually got the nerve to stand up there and tell me to my face that I haven’t any honor – no honor at all. Why, you big, hulking stiff, I’ll have you know that I’ve got the least tarnished honor of any woman in town, which isn’t saying a great deal, now that I come to think of it.”

“Don’t you believe her, Sergeant.” Carl Bentley pleaded as a man pleads for his life. “That woman, that she-dragon masquerading behind a thin veil of virtue, actually dragged my trousers off with her two bare hands. Then, still unsatisfied by that display of female ferocity, she held me up at the point of a gun and forced me to walk through the streets in this terrible condition.”

“Oh, what a whale of a lie he told,” Tim exclaimed in righteous indignation. “I was merely protecting this confounded honor of mine I’ve been telling you about. The first thing I knew that the man was feeling that way was when he came dashing into my house and began to tear off his clothes – even his pants, Sergeant – think of it – what a sight – and then he began to make noises just like an animal. That’s no way to act. After that he started lunging – that’s what he did – he made lunges at me, and I can’t stand being lunged at. So I very quietly said to myself, ‘Sally Willows, my good woman,’ I said, ‘if you don’t do something constructive mighty quick it’s good-night for your honor.’ Then I took up my husband’s revolver that he won the war with in Fort Leavenworth, and I made this man stop his lunging. And that’s the low-down on the whole beastly affair, so help me God.”

Tim stopped for lack of breath and looked triumphantly at Carl Bentley. That gentleman’s pendulous jaw was hanging low. Above the cavity thus revealed peered the stricken eyes of a beaten man. He seemed to be seeing himself as he actually might have been – lunging. Sergeant Devlin himself appeared to be deeply moved. For some moments he did not speak, but sat as if in contemplation of the vivid picture Tim had painted of Carl Bentley in action. At last he stirred and spoke.

“Mrs. Willows,” he said, “you have been through a most trying ordeal, from which you luckily emerged – thanks to your courage – with your honor quite okay.” He paused and allowed his eyes to burn up Carl Bentley, then he spoke coldly to the man. “Do you wish me to believe,” he asked, “that this frail woman, this lady of culture and refinement, was able, in spite of all your efforts, to drag the trousers off your large, fat, repulsive-looking legs?”

“Well,” hedged Mr. Bentley, realizing too late the mistake he had made, “almost she did. She lured them off, so to speak. It was a trap – a snare. I tell you she was out to frame me and she stopped at nothing. She enticed my trousers off after she had first tried to drown me.”

“This situation becomes more involved as time goes on,” sighed the sergeant. “You now would have me believe that this lady also made an attempt to drown you. How can I believe a statement like that, I ask you? It’s impossible on the face of it. Why, this little woman couldn’t drown even a kitten, let alone a gorilla of a guy like you.”

“That’s because you don’t know her,” replied Carl Bentley, endeavoring to summon to his aid the last remnants of his depleted dignity. “If she attempts to lodge a charge of assault against me I, on my part, will prefer charges of attempted murder, defamation of character, and mental anguish against her.”

“All of those,” observed Sergeant Devlin, slightly elevating his thick eyebrows as he jotted down some notes on his record. “Well, this situation is altogether too delicate and at the same time too serious for a mere policeman to handle. I’ll have to let you both tell your troubles to Judge Clark. He should be here in about five minutes if he doesn’t get so furious at something on his way down to court that he forgets where he’s going. He’s like that, Judge Clark is. A man of sound and fury.” At this point he paused, and, after adding a few cogent sentences to his report, passed the paper to a policeman, who vanished with it through a side door. “Joe,” resumed Devlin, addressing a state trooper, “present this little party to Judge Clark with my compliments. He’ll be tickled scarlet to see them. And just slip a coat over our friend here. His Honor would have a stroke if he saw him the way he is.”

Mr. Bentley was hustled into an old police overcoat which made him look worse, if possible, than he was before, and then pushed through a door. Tim and Sally made ready to follow.

“Don’t worry about your honor any more, Mrs. Willows,” said the sergeant to Tim with a friendly smile. “But if I were in your place I would worry a little about His Honor. Judge Clark is an exceptionally irascible gentleman. Good luck to you.”

“You’ve been so sweet to me, Sergeant,” replied Tim. “And for your sake I’ll forget all about my honor. I’ve a feeling the judge and myself will get along as thick as thieves.”

“There’s no honor among thieves, Mrs. Willows,” the sergeant reminded Tim.

“What a blessed relief that must be for lady crooks,” replied Tim, pausing at the door. “I’m getting pretty well fed-up with mine. It’s a greatly overrated encumbrance, Sergeant, believe me. Always needs protection.”

At that moment Sally dug her husband in the ribs, an act which elicited a deep-throated oath, but which nevertheless made him move on. Sergeant Devlin remained seated at his desk, thoughtfully worrying his hair. “From the way that baby talks,” he said to himself, “and from the way she uses those eyes of hers I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if that poor sap didn’t have a little something on his side after all. Just the same he deserves to be hung on general principles. I must get a look at the judge’s face when he first lays eyes on him.”

Sergeant Devlin leaned back in his chair and smiled broadly.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Judge Clark
Almost Loses His Temper

When the little party was reassembled in the courtroom an exchange of unpleasantries immediately broke out between its contending factions.

“You’re a nasty little liar,” Carl Bentley flung hoarsely at Tim. “What are you trying to do, get them to hang me?”

“Yes,” replied Tim promptly. “I’m hoping to get you hung by your dirty neck. Officer, this assaulter is calling me bad names and threatening me with things.”

“If you call her a nasty little liar again, I’ll scratch your eyes out,” cried Sally in a ringing falsetto.

“Calm yourself, Mr. Willows,” urged one of the state troopers. “You’re actually losing control of your voice. And as for you, you big gazebo, if – —”

“Quiet!” commanded the other trooper. “Here comes His Honor now.”

“What’s his honor to me?” expostulated Tim. “I’ve got my own honor to take care of. Men haven’t any honor anyway. They can lose it year in and year out and still be honorable men, but just let a woman lose her honor one teeny little bit and her goose is cooked for good. She’s a gone coon, she is.”

“No doubt you’re right,” said the trooper soothingly. “I don’t know. Never went into the matter. Take it up with the judge. He’s a very highstrung gentleman and he likes everything nice and orderly.”

Tim subsided and turned his attention to the judge. He was a thin, little old judge and he gave the impression of having been hurriedly strung together on badly twisted wires. His sharp face was livid and shrunken, and a volcano of wrathful impatience flickered on the verge of eruption behind his small, beady eyes. As he slowly approached his desk he looked like a man who had already been tried too hard for one day. A long tuft of gray hair still clung to his otherwise bald head, the rest having been torn out during fits of judicial frenzy. Whenever the word went out that Judge Clark was enjoying one of his good moods the information was never accepted at its face value. His satellites had come to know through bitter experience that the rumor merely meant that the judge had not entered his chambers in a state of inarticulate rage.

As he now seated himself carefully behind his desk, it was only too apparent that he was not enjoying one of his softer moments. He favored the two troopers and their charges with a spiteful look from his smouldering eyes.

“What are all these people doing here?” he snapped. “They disgust me.”

Briefly one of the troopers endeavored to enlighten the judge. When he had finished his sordid story, His Honor’s eyes were blazing dangerously.

“Make ’em sit down,” he grated. “I’ll put the lot of ’em away as soon as I’ve cleared up these other cases.”

Tim and Sally and Carl Bentley sat down, and with a feeling of increasing uneasiness watched Judge Clark’s method of clearing up cases. Whatever his prisoners may have thought of it, Judge Clark’s method had at least the virtue of strict simplicity and rigid impartiality. Everybody received a sentence. The first prisoner up was hardly there before he was gone again, literally whisked from the eyes of man.

“Six months,” rapped out the judge. “No. Better make it seven. Next prisoner.”

Business moved so briskly that finally the spectators got the impression that they were witnessing a procession of the damned rather than the administration of justice. One prisoner, a large, lachrymose Negro with hypocritically humble eyes, on being sentenced to a year less a day, endeavored to suggest to the judge that, even accepting the word in its most casual application, what had happened to him had not even remotely resembled a trial.

“Why yo’ hain’t even tried me, Yo’ Honor,” the Negro protested. “Hain’t never axed me a question.”

The judge looked at the Negro a long, long time – much too long for the Negro’s comfort.

“Do you want me to try you?” asked the little man, in a reedy, gentle voice. “Do you want me to ask you questions?”

“Ah reckon not,” mumbled the Negro. “Ah reckon ah’s just as well satisfied to hurry right along now like you says.”

No smile could have been grimmer than the one that twisted the judge’s lips as his snappy eyes followed the back of the retreating Negro.

Although it required no little temerity to stand beneath the baleful gaze of this terrible little man perched high above her like a bird of evil omen, Sally nevertheless accompanied Tim and Bentley when they were summoned to approach the seat of justice. The judge seemed to have forgotten he had ever seen them before. When the senior state trooper respectfully started to say his little piece the judge promptly shot up a restraining hand that was shaking with indignation as he considered the weird figure of Carl Bentley.

“Don’t say one word,” he commanded. “I have eyes in my head, haven’t I? Am I a fool? A driveling idiot?”

“Yes,” replied Tim, unable to resist the insistence in the judge’s voice.

“What!” shrilled the judge. “You call me a fool and an idiot – a driveling one?”

“No,” said Tim hastily. “I was saying ‘yes’ to something else.”

“What were you saying ‘yes’ to?”

“I was merely saying ‘Yes, you have.’ ”

“Yes, I have? Speak up, you ninny. Yes, I have what?”

“Yes, you have eyes in your head.”

The judge’s face blanched with passion.

“Of course I have eyes in my head,” he snapped. “Who said I didn’t?”

“Nobody,” answered Tim. “You asked if you had.”

“Asked if I had? What did I ask if I had?”

“If you had eyes in your head.”

Tim was growing steadily more confused.

“But I know I have eyes in my head,” said the judge.

“It seemed for a moment you didn’t,” was Tim’s halting answer. “You see, you asked about them.”

“Asked about who?”

“Whom,” corrected Sally.

“What’s that?” cried the judge.

“The word is ‘whom’,” replied Sally. “You asked about who and you shouldn’t have. It’s whom, that’s what it is.”

“Hold your tongue, sir. I’ll ask about who I damn please.”

Sally shrugged indifferently.

“You were asking about your eyes, Your Honor,” Tim meekly put in.

“Damn my eyes!” howled the judge. “I’ll clear up this case right now.”

The little man leaned far over his desk and peered down at Carl Bentley, who shrank beneath the gaze.

“Don’t say a word,” he gritted. “I see it all quite clearly. One of my own policemen caught in a raid on a disorderly house – a bawdy place. What a sentence I’ll give him!” So much had Judge Clark deduced from the undressed appearance and battered condition of Mr. Carl Bentley. “I didn’t even know we had any such places conveniently at hand hereabouts,” went on the judge in an injured voice. “What’s this man doing with his buttons on? Strip ’em all off. Don’t leave him a single button. These other two ran this brothel, I suppose.”

“But Your Honor,” protested one of the troopers, “if we strip off all his buttons the man will be mother-naked.”

“Then arrest him for indecent exposure,” said the judge blandly. “And why do you say ‘mother-naked’? Why does everybody say ‘mother-naked’? Do fathers never get naked? Do I understand that they sit about the house all day long muffled up to their ears? Expressions like that exasperate me. Don’t answer. The implication is quite improper and it has nothing to do with this lecherous policeman. Hasn’t he any clothes on under his coat? And what is he doing to my floor? Officer, remove that man at once! Hasn’t he any better sense? Imagine!”

“Your Honor, he’s dripping wet,” explained the trooper.

“I can see that for myself,” cried the judge. “The man’s a regular human fountain – a gusher. Make him stop it.”

“He can’t, Your Honor,” said the trooper.

“He can’t?” gasped the judge. “What on earth is the matter with the man? Do you mean he can’t or he won’t? Where does he think he is?”

“He fell in the river, Your Honor.”

“I was pushed in the river, Your Honor,” Mr. Bentley corrected.

“Silence!” shouted the judge. “Or I’ll push you in a cell. What’s he got on under that coat?”

The other trooper pulled back the coat and Carl Bentley stood revealed. Judge Clark drew a sharp breath and blinked his eyes.

“What a sight,” he managed to whisper. “My word, what a sight to behold. And to think that after all these years of honorable service on the bench I should at last be brought face to face with a thing like that. The man deserves to be put to death by torture – slowly.”

The courtroom for some time past had been doing capacity business. It was obvious that word had gone out that the case of Sally Willows vs. Carl Bentley was being tried. The élite of the town was present – any number of women whose minds were not quite as nice as their frocks or their manners. And while Judge Clark was sitting back in his chair trying to devise a legal pretext for making Mr. Bentley pay the extreme penalty, one of the state troopers once more essayed to make the case a little clearer for the benefit of the bemused jurist. When finally it was borne in on that gentleman’s mind that the individual he had mistaken for a policeman was merely a plain citizen he became, if anything, madder.

“Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?” he demanded, snapping up in his chair and fixing his mad eyes on Mr. Bentley. “So he first attempted to assault this woman, then he tried to murder her.”

“Not quite, Your Honor,” corrected the trooper. “She tried to murder him.”

“What does it matter?” retorted His Honor impatiently. “Why quibble over mere details?”

“It was a case of my honor, Your Honor,” said Tim, smiling up disarmingly at the little man.

“It’s a lie, Judge!” cried Carl Bentley. “Look! She still has the gun in her hand.”

The judge looked as requested, and his eyes grew so wide they seemed about ready to explode.

“Are my eyes playing me false?” he asked, in a voice choked with emotion. “Do I see what I see or do I don’t, or whatever it is? As God is my judge I can’t bring myself to hear the truth.” He glared out over the courtroom as if he were trying to decide whether it would not be better to sentence everyone in sight to a life of penal servitude and then call it a day. Then he fastened his gimlet-like eyes on the two state troopers. “You’ve put me on the spot,” he said in a cold, thin voice. “You’ll be asking me to go riding next. Don’t answer. It is inconceivable to me that you have allowed this woman – the most irresponsible of all God’s less agreeable creations – to confront your own judge with a revolver in her hand. It is inconceivable, I say, yet it has come to pass. Do you know what I’d like to do? I’d like to claw off your buttons with these!”

As if to make himself thoroughly understood Judge Clark thrust out two skinny hands and wriggled their fingers horribly in the pallid faces of the two state troopers.

“That’s what she did to me,” put in Carl Bentley, thinking the moment propitious for attempting to get on the right side of the judge. “She dragged my trousers off with her own bare hands.”

“Shut up, you!” mouthed the judge.

“I wouldn’t touch that person’s trousers with a pair of tongs, Your Honor,” Tim declared scornfully.

Judge Clark looked down at the disputant out of a pair of venom-drugged eyes.

“Tongs?” he muttered in a puzzled voice. “How did tongs get into this case?”

“They’re not really in it,” answered Tim. “This case is about my honor, Your Honor. I’ve been saying so all along.”

“You haven’t a spark of honor,” retorted Carl Bentley bitterly. “You never had any honor. You lost it before you’d finished cutting your teeth.”

This was too much for Sally. After all, it was really her honor that was being thus publicly assailed. She completely lost her temper.

“Shoot him, Tim!” she cried in a high-pitched voice. “He’s insinuating things.”

“Insinuating?” laughed Tim madly. “He’s damn well making a clean breast of them. I’ll load him so full of lead he won’t even need a coffin.”

As Tim leveled the automatic, Judge Clark and Mr. Bentley emitted piercing screams, but for vastly different reasons, the latter’s being one of unadulterated terror while the judge’s was merely the cry of an infuriated soul.

“Unarm that woman!” he shrilled passionately above the tumult of the courtroom. “Am I to be forced to sit on this bench and witness a cold-blooded murder?”

“But the thing isn’t loaded, Your Honor,” one of the troopers shouted.

“What!” cried the judge. “You say it isn’t loaded? That settles it. That finishes everything. I’d like to crash you over the head with the butt of it. What do you think my court is, a nursery in which to practise Chicago? Will I be asked to join you in a game of ping-ping next?”

“Pong,” corrected Sally.

“What’s that?” asked the judge suspiciously.

“Pong,” repeated Sally.

“Pong what?” inquired the judge.

“Ping-pong,” said Sally briskly.

“Are you trying to play games with me?” the judge asked severely.

A peal of high, girlish laughter bursting from the bewhiskered lips of a full-grown male turned the anger of the small jurist to profound alarm. He looked at Sally as if she were some visitant from a remote planet.

“Have my ears gone back on me, too?” he muttered in a tremulous voice. “Surely no male creature can make a noise like that. It’s positively uncanny. I shall have to punish this person under the law prohibiting female impersonation.”

When Sally had gained control of herself the judge leaned over and spoke to her in a confidential voice.

“How did you ever manage to make a noise like that?” he asked. “It’s the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s an old family custom, Judge,” Sally replied recklessly.

“Must have been a peculiar family,” the judge observed thoughtfully. “Most confusing to live in. I daresay it was terrible for the neighbors.”

“Nobody ever spoke to us,” said Sally.

“Can’t say as I blame them,” commented Judge Clark. “Where I’m going to put you nobody will ever speak to you either.”

“Come! Come!” boomed Tim in a deep bass voice. “Let’s get on with the case.”

Judge Clark spun about in his chair and looked with horror on the fair face of the speaker.

“Something’s happened to her voice now,” he exclaimed. “Are you two prisoners trying to befuddle me? Is this whole ghastly business a deep-laid conspiracy to rob me of my reason, or has that already gone? For God’s sake don’t tell me it was a custom in your family too.”

“As a matter of fact it was,” Tim replied easily. “But that’s neither here nor there. It’s a matter of my honor against his honor, Your Honor.”

“That’s one of the most baffling utterances I’ve ever heard,” stated the judge.

“How so?” inquired Tim. “I merely said that I was counting on your honor to judge rightly between his honor and my honor, Your Honor.”

“Don’t go on and on,” barked the judge. “What has my honor got to do with it?”

“Not a thing,” replied Tim sweetly, returning to Sally’s soft accents. “Why, a man of your integrity can’t be seduc – —”

“Stop!” shrilled the judge, seizing his last lock of hair. “Clear the court! Drive ’em out! Woman, do you realize what you’re saying? Look at me. I’m a judge!”

“I wouldn’t like to be a judge,” said Tim in pitying tones. “But tell me, Your Honor. Can’t they even be seduced?”

“Madam, are you trying to debauch me?” demanded the judge. “Do you realize that every word you utter is making the case blacker against you? I can hardly believe this object here attempted to assault you. He wouldn’t have found it necessary.”

“But he did, Your Honor,” said Tim earnestly. “I swear to God he did. The first time he tried to assault me – —”

“Am I to understand that he attempted to assault you more than once?” interposed Judge Clark.

“You are, Your Honor,” replied Tim. “He was indefatigable about it. Kept it up all morning until finally I lost my patience. ‘Sally Willows,’ I said to myself, ‘if this guy keeps on trying to assault you, you’ll never get any housework done.’ You know how it is, Your Honor. A woman can’t give up her entire day to warding off assaults. And I do like to keep my home looking neat and nice. You can’t do that being assaulted, Judge, because as I was saying you don’t know anything about assaults – not those sort of assaults, you know. It’s simply impossible to try to dust and sweep with one hand and repel assaults with the other. Simply impossible. The broom gets tangled and the dust all spills and – of course you can use one foot, but that’s not very ladylike and it might prove disastrous. Have you ever been caught by the foot? Well, it doesn’t matter. So after doing everything in my power to make this person get it through his thick head that I was in no mood for assaults, and certainly not at such a time, what with my housework and all, I finally got my husband’s gun and drove him out of the house. What else was there for me to do? I ask you that.”

“Madam,” thundered the judge, “I’ve let you run on. Experience has convinced me that is the only thing one can do with a woman. Is there one tittle of truth in all the loose things you’ve been saying? I ask you that.”

“Tittle?” repeated Tim as if puzzled. “I don’t quite understand.”

At this moment Tim’s face underwent a sudden alteration in its features. He jumped as if someone had pinched him. Then he stood still as if listening, and an expression of surprise and alarm spread over his face.

“What’s the matter with you now?” demanded the judge.

“I don’t know,” answered Tim faintly. “It’s very odd. Very odd indeed. I think I’d better sit down.”

“But you must know what’s happening to you,” protested the judge. “Haven’t you the slightest idea?”

Tim merely shook his head and indulged in several small jumps and budges while the judge’s eyes grew strained with curiosity.

“Can’t you even guess?” he asked.

“I could, Your Honor, but I’m afraid you might get mad,” said Tim.

“No, I won’t,” Judge Clark promised eagerly. “Go on and tell. I won’t get mad.”

“It’s really quite the most bewildering thing I’ve ever experienced, Your Honor,” said Tim, looking the part of a thoroughly bewildered and alarmed young woman. “My appendix seems to be jumping. It’s like an assault. That’s why I was afraid to tell you. Thought it might make you mad. The fact is, Judge, I’ve been kicked often enough on the outside, but never before on the in. And that’s what’s happening to me now. Someone’s deliberately kicking me.”

“The most extraordinary story I’ve ever heard,” observed the judge. “Can’t make head or tail out of it.”

“Neither can I, Your Honor,” gasped Tim, giving another startled little jump. “I’m scared.”

“You’re making me extremely nervous,” Judge Clark complained. “Can’t you stop it?”

Sally had been observing her husband’s strange antics with a puzzled expression. Her face now cleared and she actually indulged in a series of girlish giggles. His Honor turned reproving eyes on her.

“My dear sir, I want you to know this is no laughing matter,” he snapped.

“It certainly is, Your Honor,” came the amazing reply. “He’s such an awful fool. Why, it’s only Baby stretching. She’s going to have a child.”

“What?” cried the judge. “Here – now? My word!”

“When I get my hands on that baby I’ll give it a piece of my mind,” exclaimed Tim. “A nice time it picks out to be rollicking about on its own.”

“Come! Come!” spluttered Judge Clark. “Madam, just remember this, you can’t have a baby here. It’s outrageous. Using my court as a maternity ward. It’s an imposition, I tell you. Abandon the idea.”

“It’s not my idea,” Tim shot back. “And who wants to have a baby in your old court, anyway? I’m not going to budge. I want to sit down. There it goes again. The fresh thing.”

“You may sit down,” said the judge, “but don’t lie down. Don’t try to have that baby. If you do I’ll arrest you for something.” He paused and looked distractedly about him. “I’ll arrest you for contempt of court. Mr. Willows, please speak to your wife. Prevail on her to desist. Make it clear to her that a courtroom is not the proper place in which to bear a child. Do something. Do anything.”

“Your Honor,” said Sally respectfully, “when a baby wants to get itself born nothing’s going to stop it. It goes right ahead regardless of time and place and all the laws you can pass.” Sally turned to Tim, who was sitting miserably in a chair that one of the state troopers had sympathetically provided. “Think you’re going to have your baby now?” she asked.

“How should I know?” demanded Tim. “I’m not a shark at this business. I’m merely an amateur – a rank outsider. But I feel as if I’m going to have something – a whole string of babies, perhaps.”

“Oh, this is simply terrible,” put in the judge. “Really, it is, you know. I’m very much upset. Why didn’t you tell me you were that way, madam?”

“Why should you be upset?” demanded Tim. “You’re not having this baby. I wish you were.” Judge Clark started violently and gazed with injured eyes upon the prospective mother. “Anyway,” went on Tim, “I thought all along you knew. If you’d only used your eyes you could have seen I was highly pregnant.”

Judge Clark looked at the small object of his anxiety as if it were not only highly pregnant but also highly explosive – a dangerous mine in the path of decency. Tim was growing a little calmer. The baby which by rights his wife should have been bearing had evidently decided to call it a day and had resumed its orderly repose.

“I’m feeling better now,” declared Tim. “Sorry to have caused all this disturbance, but I daresay the little monster was getting impatient at having his mother heckled and baited and assaulted and mistreated in general. He isn’t old enough to realize that suffering is a woman’s lot in life.”

“I’m sorry, madam,” said the judge, mopping his face with his handkerchief. “I can understand many things now that previously were not quite clear. I can by no means understand all.” He considered a slip of paper for a moment, then turned accusingly on Carl Bentley. “According to this paper,” rasped the judge, “you intend to prefer charges of attempted murder, defamation of character, and mental anguish against a woman who at any minute now is going to become a mother. Do you wish to withdraw those charges or would you rather hear me sentence you to twenty years of hard and humiliating labor?”

“From the way you put it,” said Bentley, still suspecting Sally of some trick, “I think it would be wiser to withdraw the charges.”

“Then I’ll call the whole thing off,” cried Tim. “And after all, Your Honor, some of you men are like that. It’s merely their idea of being clubby and entertaining. Then, of course, there are lots of women who feel slighted unless a man tries to assault them at least once each time he calls. But I’m not that way. I’m magnanimous, Judge. I might have my faults like everyone else, but my worst enemy can’t say that I’m not magnificent – I mean magnanimous.”

“Then you’re at liberty to go your separate ways,” replied Judge Clark impressively. “And I hope most devoutly they never again cross mine. I’m getting altogether too old for this sort of thing. I’d prefer to spend my closing days dealing peacefully with mere murderers and cut-throats and dope fiends and people I can understand.”

“May I have my husband’s gun back?” Tim asked one of the troopers. “He’ll be awful mad at me.”

The chivalrous trooper slipped the gun into Tim’s hand. He examined it a moment, then carelessly pressed the trigger. Immediately there was a tremendous explosion and Carl Bentley instinctively resumed his running. From under his desk came the impassioned voice of Judge Clark.

“What damn fool gave her that gun?” he shouted. “She’ll murder the lot of us. Overpower her and take that gun away.”

“It’s all right, Judge,” said Tim calmly. “No harm done, but I almost had twins that time.”

“My God, so did I,” moaned the little jurist, his lock of gray hair appearing like a flag of truce above the top of his desk.

“I just wanted to see if it was loaded,” Tim explained sweetly. “I guess it was.”

Incoherent noises issued from the lips of the judge. They left him greedily scrutinizing the buttons of the two state troopers. The little man appeared to be counting them.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

An Inspired Advertisement

Since the disorderly incidents last recorded, much bulk had been added to the girth which Tim wrathfully protested belonged to his wife. The social standing of the Willowses in the snooty community of Cliffside had utterly collapsed. It was now lying in a condition of supine indifference. Sinning in Cliffside was about as well established a practice as elsewhere – better than in many places. But a public and noisy demonstration against established convention such as the Willowses had staged on more than one occasion was not to be tolerated. Nice people objected strongly to having adultery, which they considered to be about the best-dressed of all the vices, dragged through the streets in rags and made the butt of indelicate observations. People who took their infidelities lightly – who tossed them off, so to speak – were not to be trusted and were little better than communists. And in Cliffside one had to be much better than a communist to attend even a dog fight. Furthermore, the Willowses, like the suspect Claire Meadows, made a practice of allowing other people to mind their own business, callously disregarding the fact that life in a community like Cliffside would be unbearable indeed unless everybody paid strict attention to everybody else’s affairs. The people of Cliffside took their windows seriously. They were made not so much for the purpose of light and ventilation as to enable discreetly curtained observers to keep abreast of the current dirt. For example, it was well known that Mr. Willows, when at home, could be seen at virtually any time clad only in a strange and revealing garment, and that for no apparent reason he was given to sudden bursts of high spirits signalized by grotesque and obscene dances which made his single garment even more revealing. He was suspected of being a little mad. Also, it had been duly noted and recorded that for many months past Mrs. Willows had taken up the practice of smoking her husband’s cigars and in other disgusting ways emulating his example. So careless of appearances were the Willowses that their joint existence was much more than an open book. It was a public reading in a loud voice. Consequently Tim and Sally Willows were people to be watched, rather than cultivated. They were much better seen at a distance than heard at close range. Fewer and fewer so-called friends dropped in to visit the Willowses. It was a dangerous thing to do. Some scene of violence and unmannerly conduct usually resulted. So Tim and Sally were left very much to themselves, for which they were heartily thankful. And, even handicapped as they were by their reversed positions, they began to understand, better than they had in years, that they were irrevocably bound to each other as much by their mutual hates as by the interests they shared in common, many of which were deplorably low. No married couple in Cliffside could polish off a bottle of bathtub gin with greater conviviality and enterprise. Having literally spent some time in each other’s shoes, they had gained a different perspective both of themselves and of each other, and this had been an incalculable help in the maintenance of congenial relations. The situation was still a trying one for Dopey, but then all situations were trying for that craven-spirited animal. Mr. and Mrs. Twill had philosophically reconciled themselves to a life in which the irrational was the only possible standard of normal conduct.

As for Mr. Bentley, that gentleman had rubbed himself completely off the already smudged face of the social horizon. Few young matrons, no matter how viciously disposed, were quite willing to seek romantic diversion with a gentleman who bounded along public highways in a union suit that flapped in the back. This last little detail lost Bentley many a pleasant interlude.

Claire Meadows had become an accepted influence in the lives of Tim and Sally. She instructed Tim in the rather exacting laws governing the conduct of a prospective mother, and she heartlessly put a stop to his grog. And strange to relate, Sally experienced no feeling of jealousy for what had once occurred. She was much more interested in devising means and ways for the abduction of Claire’s own baby from the brute of a husband who had carried his resentment beyond the bounds of human tolerance.

“It wasn’t his baby anyway,” Claire Meadows had naïvely explained on one occasion, “although I hardly recall the name of the little tike’s father. It was just one of those things that happen when it’s raining and you don’t feel like reading or going out, and your own husband hates children and wants you to keep your figure.”

The Willowses understood perfectly, especially Tim.

Sally and Claire were now discussing various wild projects over a couple of highball glasses, while Tim, casting them envious glances from time to time, was seated at his desk laboring over what he had come to regard as Sally’s homework. He was too large now to sit comfortably at the desk, his arms seeming to have grown shorter or the desk farther removed. He found himself unable to concentrate on the business in hand. The advertisement, strangely enough, was about a union suit, the Never Flap Union Suit to be specific, and Tim Willows could not think of union suits without thinking of Carl Bentley, and he was unable to think of that gentleman without becoming somewhat mercurial. Finally he abandoned any attempt at a reasoned presentation of the ineffable charms of Never Flap Union Suits, and wrote the advertisement he had frequently been tempted to write. This finished to his entire satisfaction, he outlined the illustration to Sally and instructed her to see that the advertisement was inserted according to schedule in a popular weekly magazine.

“Let none of the powers that be clap eyes on a proof,” he told her. “Fake the damned okays and keep everything under your hat. I want this to come as a complete surprise.”

“It will,” said Sally, when she had read the copy. “After all, it’s your job. I don’t mind losing it for you one little bit.”

She did.

Some time later she was urgently requested to make one of a party that was even at that moment awaiting her presence in the conference room. As she passed through the general office she was impressed by the unnatural hush that lay over the place. Sally could not shake off the impression that numerous stenographers and clerks were looking at her with an expression usually reserved for the contemplation of corpses and motion pictures of devastated districts.

She opened the door and was confronted by every important member of the Nationwide Advertising Agency, Inc. And at the head of the table was Mr. Gibber himself, although he hardly looked it. The man had become the personification of retribution, beside whom an avenging angel would have looked like the very soul of lax indulgence. Sally noticed that among all the faces turned on him, those of Dolly Meades and Steve Jones alone expressed feelings of friendship and admiration. The others looked too scared to register any other emotion.

“This is going to be flower pots,” Sally decided, as she closed the door behind her husband’s back. “A nice wide-open break.” Then she added aloud, also in her husband’s voice, “You wanted to see me, Mr. Gibber?”

“Yes,” replied that gentleman. “I do. And for the last time.”

After such an inhospitable reception, Sally saw no reason for further disguising her own feelings.

“You almost took the words out of my mouth,” she remarked, dropping to a vacant chair. “I have long thought that a world without a Gibber in it would be a far, far better place.”

Disregarding this open insult, Mr. Gibber thrust out a trembling hand in which was clutched the current issue of the popular weekly containing among others the Never Flap advertisement. It occupied a full page.

“Willows,” thundered the man, “I hold you and you alone directly responsible for this crime against our high calling. You, like a snake in the grass, have fouled your own nest.”

“I was always under the impression that snakes were rather nice about such things,” replied Sally. “However – —”

She did not finish her sentence, but rose and considered the advertisement with a critical eye. Mr. Gibber, as if hypnotized, held it out for her inspection until she had finished reading the copy and had resumed her seat.

“First time I’ve seen it inserted,” she continued easily. “Rather good position, I think. Very arresting illustration, also. I am pleased.”

Mr. Gibber shrank back as if in the presence of some loathsome object. His fingers drummed on the long table as he strove to master his indignation. Sally reached out and drew the magazine to her, then, holding it at arm’s length, she studied the illustration with her head slightly tilted to one side. It was, as she had said, an arresting illustration. The artist had caught the spirit of the thing splendidly.

In the foreground an aged and enfeebled gentleman was seated on a piano stool. On his meager body hung, in limp, dispirited folds, a garment remotely suggestive of a union suit. In an attempt to relieve the feeling of depression created by this obviously world-weary individual, a top hat had been tilted at a rakish angle over his dim right eye. The other one, unobstructed, looked bleakly out on life. An exceedingly decrepit and revolting-looking woman, presumably his wife or mistress, for her shrunken figure was also draped in an ill-fitting union suit, was standing near him, with one arm raised as if it were beating time to a tirade of vile and abusive language. The old gentleman appeared to be already too low in his mind to pay much attention to what she was saying. Somehow he gave the impression that this sort of thing had been going on for years and years. The progeny of this unlovely couple, three boys and two girls, had been no better endowed by nature than their parents. But this was only to be expected. The observer could not conceive of those two human wrecks begetting a normal child. These children, the oldest being no older than fourteen, were pale, emaciated, and ill-tempered, and were clad in oversized union suits. They seemed to be enjoying the worst of bad health and dispositions. The two girls were coughing lustily while the boys stood about in attitudes of pain and dejection. They seemed more capable of raising rickets than rackets like most normal boys. Yet one also gained the impression that very little would be required to precipitate a general row. Taking it all in all, it was a singularly realistic illustration of contemporary home life. Sally admired it immensely. She felt that Tim had struck a new note in advertising.

“I am proud to assume complete responsibility for this,” she remarked. “Of course, I didn’t draw the illustration, but I suggested the idea. As you would say, Mr. Gibber, it’s mine, all mine.”

Mr. Gibber choked and snatched the offending magazine from Sally’s hand.

“Mr. Gibber!” she said reprovingly. “Don’t be rude.”

Once more Mr. Gibber choked, then cleared his throat of the vile words he was craving to utter. Like a man convalescing after a long and debilitating illness, he smiled weakly round the table.

“Mr. Willows,” he said, “I have no desire to cause you undue humiliation, but I feel that the least you deserve is to hear this advertisement read aloud in the presence of your erstwhile fellow workers.”

“Go right ahead,” Sally good-naturedly replied. “It will do them no end of good. That piece of copy, Gibber, together with its illustration will start a new school of advertising, most likely.”

“Most likely,” repeated Mr. Gibber bitterly. “A school of blithering idiots.”

Under the stress of his emotions Mr. Gibber was growing almost human. He cleared his throat, elevated the magazine, took a deep breath and started to read. His voice failed and he broke down completely.

“You read it, Mr. Graham,” he muttered in a husky voice. “It’s too much for me. This incident has made me begin to feel my age at last.”

Mr. Graham, a serious youth who eschewed all forms of healthy dissipation in favor of the “Message to Garcia” and “Acres of Diamonds” and other such literature, considered himself highly honored at having been selected to play such a prominent part on this historic occasion. Gratefully he accepted the magazine and began to read in a clear voice and with great determination. Nothing short of death was going to stop him now.

The copy that Tim had prepared for Sally was to this demoralizing effect:

“A MESSAGE TO THE MISSHAPEN

“BE OF GOOD CHEER

“If your physical development is ’way below par take heart, because now your worst defects can be comfortably covered and no one will be the wiser”

“My God,” came the whispered voice of Mr. Gibber, “what disreputable things was the man hinting at there?”

“I think I understand, Mr. Gibber,” Dolly Meades replied.

“Don’t explain,” said Mr. Gibber hastily. “Hurry on, Mr. Graham.”

Mr. Graham read:

“Men who are far from super and women who are perfect frights, attend. In the past you have been shamefully misled by underwear advertisements. You have been given to understand that in order to conceal your nakedness you must belong to clubs, know how to play games including hoop-jumping, riding innumerable horses at once, and mounting on poles to dizzy, not to say dangerous, heights. Stamp these deceptions under your feet whether they be flat or slew.”

“Imagine,” murmured Mr. Gibber. “Flat or slew. Could anything be more revolting? But go on, my boy, go on. Finish this sacrilege.”

The boy went on:

“In the past you have been deluded into believing that you were cut off from the comforts of underwear unless you maintained at least one maid or a gentleman’s gentleman.

“A vile deception!

“As a matter of actual fact you neither have to be nor to possess anything in particular save a modest piece of change to be qualified with the best to drape your unsightliness in

Never Flap

Indomitable Union Suits

“Unprepossessing under the most ideal circumstances, these union suits nevertheless make you look no sillier than those of another make.

“Once in a Never Flap outfit you can be as old and ugly, as broken in mind, body, and estate, as pot-bellied, sunken-chested, bald-headed, evil-minded or short-winded as you jolly well please, and not give a rap.

“You can be a maniac or a master mind, a physical wreck or a perfect specimen, a croucher in dark places or a strutter in the public eye, and still look equally at a disadvantage in these ridiculous yet somewhat necessary garments. They possess the one feature that all mankind in common has long craved – they

Never Flap.

“If you must look silly in something why not look silly in these?”

Long before the finish of this example of sheer lunacy young Graham’s voice had taken on a hushed and frightened note. At the end it had trailed away to an appalled whisper. The majority of the faces round the table were grave with consternation. Steve Jones’s and Dolly Meades’s registered profound approval.

“Were you quite yourself when you wrote that?” Mr. Gibber asked at last. “Quite sober?”

“Quite,” replied Sally mildly. “Never more so in my life.”

“It can’t be true,” protested Mr. Gibber. “I am still unable to bring myself to believe that all this is not a terrible dream and that soon I shall wake up and find everything as it was before. Why did you not let someone see a proof?”

“I wanted it to come as a surprise,” said Sally innocently.

“Oh, my God!” gasped Mr. Gibber. “Imagine that! He wanted to surprise me. Did you hear what he said? Ha, ha! No, a thousand times, no. He wanted to ruin me. To demolish me. That’s what he did.”

The eyes that he turned on Sally were pained, heavy, and pleading. For the first time she began to feel a little bit sorry for the man. Mr. Gibber was really suffering.

“Why did you do it?” he asked, almost humbly. “Why did you do this thing? We have been good to you here – given you latitude – excused things. Before you go for good tell me what prompted you to do this mad act?”

“Mr. Gibber,” replied Sally, quite seriously, “that advertisement is the inevitable reaction of an experienced copy writer against the school of romance, idealism, and optimism that has emasculated the profession for many years. It is the expression of a fundamental craving for the realities of life. Until recently I could not refer even to such a common article as a fork without calling it the glittering servant of cultured lips or some other such balderdash. It was getting unbearable for my friends.” Sally paused and took a deep breath. “Then this reaction set in,” she continued. “I made no effort to encourage it. The thing was stronger than I was. That’s why I still feel the advertisement we have just been privileged to hear is an inspired piece of work. You see, I suddenly realized that things were things, that a chair, for instance, was in reality a chair and not the comfortable companion of one’s leisure hours; that a piano was actually a piano and not the inspired creation of singing souls; that a union suit, whether it flaps or remains discreetly closed, is, after everything has been said and done, merely a union suit instead of the ideal garment for men and women who appreciate the artistry of master weavers.” Once more Sally paused and looked hopefully at Mr. Gibber. “Then, sir,” she continued, “I had a vision. Suddenly I seemed to be seeing the whole world stripped to its union suit. Mr. Gibber, I saw literally millions of mortals clad only in union suits, some of which flapped coyly while others didn’t. But that doesn’t matter, although I will say that those whose union suits didn’t flap looked much nicer – not quite so helpless and unprotected, if you get what I mean. The lame, the halt, and the blind, the physical wreck and the perfect example of manhood and womanhood passed before my eyes. There were kings in that great procession as well as crooks. There were bishops as well as bouncers, athletes as well as scholars. And, my dear, good sir, every mother soul of them was clad simply in a union suit. It was a horrifying vision of democracy, of stupendous and compelling magnitude. Spellbound, I gazed. And what was my delight and surprise, my dear sir, when who should come, puffing and panting up well along toward the rear but you yourself, Mr. Gibber. You were an amazing sight, Mr. Gibber – immense! A figure to give one pause. And I am glad to say your union suit did not flap. Let me describe – —”

“Enough!” screamed Mr. Gibber. “Enough! Take this madman from my sight and give him two weeks’ extra pay. Give him anything he wants so long as he goes away and never comes back again.”

Steve Jones and Dolly Meades escaped from the conference room on the pretext of following Mr. Gibber’s instructions. Some minutes later Sally kissed the reception clerk for the last time and departed homeward. Tim, now very far gone, sat, as he had once prophesied, like a jovial Madam Falstaff and listened enthralled to his wife’s story.

“That’s the first job I ever lost,” he observed at last, “and I’m glad of it.”

“It’s the first one I ever had,” replied Sally, “and I hope to God it’s the last. It was like dwelling in a world of make-believe – a regular fairy-tale world.”

“We’ve pretty well shattered it, anyway,” said Tim. “And you know, Sally, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that advertisement pulled big in spite of Mr. Gibber.”

Tim was right again. It did.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Two Letters and a Crisis

It is difficult to say whether or not his past association with Mr. Ram influenced Richard Willows, Tim’s uncle, to intervene at this critical moment in the affairs of his terrifically metamorphosed young nephew. The fact remains that this staunch defender of the unfaithful and protector of women’s more intimate rights did intervene most effectively and in so doing radically altered the course of the Willowses’ misdirected days. Dopey was also affected by this sudden change no less than were the Twills themselves, the craven beast’s last hope in the immutable order of things.

The sad truth is that since Sally had been discharged from Tim’s job these two irresponsible young persons had found themselves in water of an alarmingly rising temperature. They were very much with child – at least Tim was – but depressingly without work.

“We have an overabundance of the one and not nearly enough of the other,” remarked Tim, ruefully surveying his vast proportions in the mirror. “Something tells me on good authority that it won’t be long now.”

“Too much baby has made Daddy a big girl,” replied Sally, looking up from her sewing. She was making baby things and finding it rough sledding with Tim’s fingers. “A conservative estimate would place it somewhere in the neighborhood of a quartet.”

“Why not make it a glee club and be done with it?” was Tim’s morose response to this.

What money remained to them in the bank did not overtax their mutual inability to add, or rather, in this case, to subtract. The answer to their problem was rapidly approaching zero. For once they found arithmetic too simple for their comfort.

“If I wasn’t so confounded large,” observed Tim, “I’d try the badger game, but no man would let himself be lured by this figure.”

“You might tell your victim you were concealing a jug of wine,” suggested Sally, seriously considering the possibilities of working the badger game on the local banker.

While this unholy session was in progress Mr. Ram from his perch on the bookcase sorrowfully regarded Tim and Sally and racked his brain for some solution of their problem. He did not approve of the badger game. Never had. He had always considered it a particularly dirty trick. It had been played on several prominent members of his family in centuries past and had set all Egypt chuckling. Why was it, he wondered, that these two young persons always thought of low devices? There was no pleasure to be had in losing one’s moral values if the values themselves were negligible. What Mr. Ram liked was the gradual dissolution of a person’s moral structure over a period of years. It should be done artistically so that a few untried vices were left to comfort one’s declining years.

The little idol was in a quandary. The situation for which he was responsible had become more complicated than he had anticipated. It had contrived to get itself out of even his fine Egyptian hand. When he had first become aware of Tim’s pregnancy he had been highly amused, but as the months passed and Tim gave no indication that he was ever going to stop getting larger Mr. Ram’s feelings underwent a gradual change. He began to regard his victim’s bulk with a shocked and sympathetic eye. After all, was not he, Mr. Ram, a man at heart? Did he not entertain himself all of man’s narrow prejudices against bearing children? Mr. Ram was sincerely sorry for what he had done. Not only had he established a dangerous precedent, but also let Tim in for what at best was a most disconcerting ordeal. However, too many inches had already been added to Tim’s girth for Mr. Ram to take any definite action. Therefore, Mr. Ram was no less delighted than were Tim and Sally when the letter that follows was received from the former’s uncle and the little idol’s best friend. Sally brought the letter up from the dining room and gave it to Tim. He read it aloud to her to prevent her from leaning too heavily on his shoulder, or rather, on her own shoulder.

“My dear boy [the letter began]:

“According to my last information from you some member of your household was going to have a baby. Whether it was you or Sally or your dog or one of the Twills I was unable to decide. If it is you, all I will say is that I am not a bit surprised. America has been responsible for some remarkable innovations. I have long suspected that this would happen. Once begin to share your rights with a woman and you’ll very speedily find yourself left without any rights to share.”

“True talk, that,” remarked Tim, looking up from the letter. “My uncle is a man of great merit and wisdom.”

“True talk, me eye,” said Sally, inelegantly. “That uncle of yours is a libidinous old associate of scarlet women.”

Tim looked pained and resumed reading.

“As your inordinately nosey wife has probably already noted the postmark [continued the letter] I have at last brought my aged bones and depleted seraglio to rest on the meretricious shores of the Mediterranean, the happy expiring ground of expatriated physical wrecks and moral lepers, to both of which classes I now definitely belong.

“It has taken me years of the most exacting debauchery to achieve my present rank of distinction. Yet even while I am being almost literally carried along on my daily walks by two of my most indomitable mistresses, I feel that the sacrifices I have made for women have not been made in vain.

“The trouble is that these two Jezebels detest each other so thoroughly that at times I become a little nervous lest they drop me in order to indulge in violence. Once I attempted a wheel chair. Never again. The two ladies fought so actively for the privilege of pushing me over a cliff that the chair itself was spun like a top and all of the cocktails I had ever taken seemed to wake up and confront my already weakened system.

“It is not nice. I am still filled with awe and wonder whenever I think of Solomon and all the mistresses he had and the honorable years he attained. Compared with his, my life has been a failure. I have merely skimmed the surface. However, I have done my best, than which I am told angels can do no more, although there is no evidence that they ever tried. But then, I know little about angels save that they seem to have spent most of their time singing, attending, and avenging, one of their number having originated the business of professional bouncing.

“But I run on and already I hear the sounds of female voices raised in high discord in the next room. Among these unpleasant voices by all odds the highest and most furious is that of a Russian countess who unfortunately escaped the firing squad of the usually painstaking Bolsheviks, the only fault I have to find with the Soviet regime. Why should it expect me to shoot its confounded countesses?

“I have another mistress whom I suspect not only of having poisoned an English army officer in India, but also of entertaining the most fantastic hopes of being able to play the same low trick on me.

“Both of these ladies fight so violently with each other all day long that at night they are so spent with fury I am forced to put the poor old things to bed. This is no way. They are mistresses in name only.

“There is another lady attached to my establishment who has recently become paralyzed in every limb. So you see, my boy, I am really defeating my own ends. What was once an active and flourishing harem has become an old ladies’ home. I often think of chucking the lot of them out and treating myself to a new deal, but somehow I never get round to it. Some of these women have been with me for years. We’ve become used to each other and we understand our various little likes and dislikes, only with the women it seems to be mostly dislikes. Anyway, I figure it out that it’s better to be poisoned by an old and tried mistress than ruined by a new one.

“As a matter of fact I have a feeling that everything would be quite comfortable if they would only give up their eternal battling and quit stealing my grog. There is no logical excuse whatsoever for this last failing. With an abundance of wine and spirits on all sides of them they nevertheless have the puerile idea that mine might be just a little bit better or stronger or something. Perhaps they do it for the malicious joy they take in irritating me, or because they hope to get each other into trouble. I don’t know.

“We see a good many tourists here – trippers, I believe they are called by superior persons who have been for a week on the Continent. You may be surprised to learn that I am not at all unfavorably impressed by the American contingent. True enough, they manage to get themselves remarkably drunk, but I see no reason to blame them for putting into practice what Europeans defend in theory. Then again, they buy an alarming quantity of useless things quite cheerfully, although no one realizes more keenly than they that they are being thrice cheated as well as despised by the sycophantic, franc-frenzied vendors, who fawn in their faces and sneer behind their backs. And I find American women entirely charming. They have lovely feet and legs as a rule and a refreshing capacity for enjoyment. Which reminds me I should be doing a little something about attaching an American example to my international collection of female ruins. Perhaps you might bring one over with you when you come. There I go forgetting again. I overlooked telling you that as soon as whoever’s going to have that baby has it, I want you to transfer your entire household to this address. Don’t forget Mr. Ram. There are some matters I would like to take up with him.

“One of the reasons for this summons is that I’m seriously considering getting out a book – Miserable Mistresses, or some such title – and I am depending on you to do the writing. It will be an education in itself. In return for this service I will support both you and yours in relative luxury, and when I die I shall leave you not only lots of money but also all of my mistresses who have not already preceded me to the grave.

“How is that for a generous uncle? On second thought you can burn the residuary mistresses with my body. This, I think, would by far be the wiser thing to do. They are very noisy.

“I am, my dear boy, your expectant uncle, or to make it clearer, your mother’s husband’s brother,

“Richard Willows.”

And in this letter there was wealth – wealth enough to maintain the Willows establishment, including its bootlegger, for a couple of years. This wealth was in the form of a draft, one of the handsomest bits of paper Tim had ever been privileged to behold. Uncle Dick, true to his prodigal nature, had been more than lavish. Tim passed the draft to Sally.

“That,” he observed, “is sufficient to take the whole lot of us round the world.”

“Without the necessity of drawing a sober breath,” replied Sally. “Wish you’d hurry up and do that baby into English.”

“Well,” said Tim, “this gives me something to work on. It almost reconciles me to my unfortunate position. What’s that other letter?”

“Oh, this,” answered Sally. “It’s nothing. Some old letter from our one-time job.”

Tim opened the envelope, looked dumbly at another scrap of paper, unfolded the letter and read:

“My dear Willows:

“I am enclosing your regular salary check for the past few weeks just as if nothing had ever happened to interrupt our mutually pleasant and profitable relations.

“You had hardly left the office before I realized the true significance of your advertisement. However, I kept this knowledge to myself and awaited results.

“True enough, my perspicacity once more justified my patience. Our advertisement, Willows, has proved a huge success. You may think this remarkable, but then, of course, your experience is not nearly so vast as mine. I can say with truth that I suspected what would happen all the time. However, as I have already said, I kept this knowledge to myself.

“I am now prepared to share the honors of success with you. Of course, you were hardly aware of the true value of this advertisement, but you were in a sense responsible for its creation. I wish to be entirely fair. Therefore, I suggest that you report to this office at the earliest possible moment. We shall have a conference then with a view to creating an entire campaign along the same lines. I shall be glad to incorporate your ideas with mine should they prove of any value.

“I am sure we should both of us feel highly gratified at the results of our mutual efforts.

“Sincerely yours,

“Horace Gibber, President.

“P.S. For some reason the staff has gotten the idea that you have asked to be reinstated. To avoid confusion I have made no effort to alter this impression, which in a sense is nearly the correct one. However, it makes no difference.

“H. G.”

“Well, for heaven’s sweet sake,” said Tim. “That tears it. I’m going to have a baby. I’m so damn mad I can’t think of anything else to do. The old son of a mother who never rejected an improper suggestion. I’m going to have that baby. I’m going to have it almost immediately.”

He rushed to a table and, seizing a pen, wrote on a piece of paper, “To hell with you, Gibber.” After this he signed his name and thrust the sheet into an envelope, which he addressed to Horace Gibber at the Nationwide Advertising Agency, Inc.

“Post this as soon as you can,” he told Sally, “but not before you have cashed his check. Remember that. Get the money first, then send the letter. Now for that baby. Hurry, Sally. For God’s sake, do something. I am brought to bed with child. I am accouching. Take me somewhere. Quick.”

“Where do you want to go?” asked Sally, becoming excited herself.

“Where?” repeated Tim indignantly. “In the middle of Times Square, of course, or some other equally appropriate spot. Take me anywhere you feel like. I’ve got to lie-in.”

“Now don’t get all flustered,” pleaded Sally. “Be calm about this matter. Where would you like to lie-in? We have the money now.”

“In the Bide-a-Wee Home, of course,” chattered Tim bitterly. “With the rest of the dogs. Be a little more helpful. I daresay you won’t actually believe I’m going to have this baby until I hand it to you all tied up in a nice, neat package.”

“You run on so,” complained Sally. “What makes you think you are going to have this baby, anyway?”

“There are certain things, Sally,” said Tim, with great dignity, “that are revealed only to a prospective father. That baby is on the way. Don’t ask me why.”

Suddenly Sally had a bright idea. She hurried to the telephone and buzzed the operator.

“Where’s a good place to go when you want to have a baby?” asked Sally when she had succeeded in attracting that young lady’s straying ear.

Tim emitted a groan of disgust.

“I don’t want to have a baby,” said the operator. “But if I was in your place I’d go into hiding. Shall I give you Information?”

Sally hung up and looked fearfully at Tim.

“The operator doesn’t seem to know,” she said.

“Then call up a preacher or a druggist,” suggested Tim. “Maybe the police station could give us a hint.”

“We’ve had enough to do with the police,” said Sally resolutely. “They’d probably lock the both of us up for disorderly conduct. Be calm, Tim. I’m thinking.”

“And in the meantime I’m childbearing,” her husband shouted. “Do you want me to whelp my young single-handed like a wolf of the fields?”

“God helps those who whelp themselves,” Sally observed briskly as she once more hurried to the telephone.

“Think you’re funny, don’t you?” cried Tim. “I swear to God if you don’t do something I’ll have this child right here on your hands.”

This time Sally called up the nearest hospital and made all the necessary arrangements.

“Why didn’t you do that in the first place?” Tim demanded.

“Didn’t occur to me,” she answered, “but I’ll remember it the next time.”

“The next time?” cried Tim, grabbing up a handful of cigars and making for the door. “Don’t be foolish. The next time I have a baby you can …”

The end of this declaration was muffled by the clatter he made on the stairs, but Sally did not need to be told. Motherhood had done little to elevate Tim’s choice of expressions.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

False Alarm

By the time Sally had driven her chattering husband to the hospital she herself was a nervous wreck, while he had abandoned words in favor of weird noises. Forgetting utterly the rôle of prospective father she should have been playing on this occasion, she left Tim in the car and rushed through the entrance and addressed the reception clerk. That gentleman was busily engaged in sorting a seemingly endless stack of cards, from which he refused to lift his eyes when Sally spoke to him in the high, flurried tones of a hard-pressed woman.

“My husband wants to have a baby,” she told the clerk.

“If he succeeds I’ll give him an apple,” the clerk answered, selecting a fresh card and scrutinizing it closely. “It’s quite out of the usual. In fact it seems silly. Your husband should be on the receiving end of the line. Now, if it were you, madam, I might be able to do a little something.”

“No,” protested Sally. “It’s urgent. You don’t understand.”

“It’s you who don’t understand,” put in the clerk. “If your husband is old enough to be married he should certainly know by this time that he can’t have a baby. Perhaps you’d like his mind looked into. We have several fine alienists here, but, unfortunately, no paternity ward.”

“But he’s going to have a baby,” said Sally helplessly. “I know it.”

“Go back, lady,” replied the clerk in a bored voice, “and tell him not to be so stupid. He can’t steal your stuff and he should have better sense than to try it. He’ll just be wasting a lot of time and it will all come to nothing.”

“But he’s having it out there in the automobile,” protested Sally.

“Come, come,” murmured the clerk. “This is going too far. I’d go away if I were in your place, or somebody’ll come along and stick you in the psychopathic ward.”

In the face of this possibility Sally remained silent. And all the time Tim was probably having his baby alone in the automobile. She was afraid to go back. Presently the clerk looked up and started slightly.

“Where did that woman get to?” he demanded. “Are you the gentleman who wanted to have a baby?”

“Are you mad, sir?” replied Sally in Tim’s voice.

“I’m afraid so,” answered the clerk. “What do you want?”

“My wife wants to have a baby,” said Sally.

“Well, thank God for that, at any rate,” remarked the clerk. “Had a woman in here just now whose husband was insisting on having a baby. Wouldn’t take no for an answer. Fancy that. Poor sap doesn’t know when he’s well off. If men had to have babies there wouldn’t be any sex life left.”

“Perhaps Mr. Volstead would introduce an amendment for birth prohibition,” Sally suggested.

“It would be a damn sight more popular than his other one,” remarked the clerk. “But what about this wife of yours? How does she want to have this baby?”

“I didn’t know there was a choice,” said Sally, a little timidly.

“No, no,” replied the clerk impatiently. “You don’t seem to understand. I mean, does she want to have it in the ward, in a semi-private room, or do you want a special room for her?”

“Oh, I’ve already made all arrangements,” said Sally. “Just telephoned them in. My name’s Willows. Wife’s Mrs. Sally Willows. Private room and all.”

At this moment Tim came struggling up the stairs.

“Say, Buddy,” he called out. “Where’s a good place to have a baby around here?” Then he spied Sally. “Oh, there you are,” he continued irritably. “I could have had the whole Grand Army of the Republic out there in that damned car for all you cared.”

“Is this your wife?” asked the clerk.

“It is,” replied Sally, without any show of pride.

“Then ask her to stop smoking that cigar in the hallway, will you. It’s against the rules.”

Tim disgustedly tossed the cigar stub away and substituted a new one for it.

“Any objections to my chewing on the end of this thing?” he demanded.

The clerk looked slightly dazed. This Willows outfit struck him as being somewhat hard-boiled.

“No,” he replied politely. “If your husband can stand for it I guess I can.”

“He’ll damn well have to stand for it,” rasped Tim. “Think of what I have to stand for. Bet you wouldn’t go through with it. All you have to do is to sit pretty and make a lot of poor women have a lot of poor babies. You’re virtually a murderer, you are.”

“Calm yourself, madam,” said the clerk hastily. “I assure you I’m not responsible for all those babies.”

“There you go,” snapped Tim. “What did I tell you? You wash your hands of the whole business. You just sit pretty and – —”

A woman, howling for “mommer,” was dragged by at this moment between two sweating relatives. Tim forgot what he was saying and began to mop his forehead.

“My God!” he gasped. “This is worse than capital punishment. The Last Mile isn’t in it with this charnel house.”

The reception clerk summoned a nurse and Tim, with Sally in attendance, was led to an elevator and thence to his private room. Sally was told to wait about in the hall until called for. She withdrew somewhat timidly and stood outside Tim’s door, studying her strange surroundings. She felt very excited and at the same time low in her mind. Something fundamental in her nature kept telling her that by rights she should be having this baby. In a sort of dim way she seemed to realize that she was better equipped to go through with this thing than was Tim. In addition to this she felt that she really would like to bear Tim a child if only to be able to tell him he didn’t know what pain and suffering really meant. She would have gotten a lot of presents and petting if she’d had this baby. And Sally wanted presents and petting. She didn’t like being a father. She wanted to be a woman – herself – as nature had intended her to be. Talk about the “Well of Loneliness,” she herself was in a bottomless pit. And she felt terribly afraid for Tim. She was actually suffering for him. If she could only change places now with the stupid old thing. It was terrible for him to have a baby. He was much too nervous and fastidious. Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of Tim’s deep voice raised in bitter protest.

“For God’s sake,” she heard him saying, “you’re not going to do a thing like that to me, are you?”

“But I have to,” replied the nurse impatiently. “Don’t be so stupid, Mrs. Willows.”

“Perhaps I am,” said Tim, “but if I had even so much as suspected you were going to subject me to this crowning humiliation you’d never have dragged me within a mile of this hospital. Who thought up this little indignity?”

“It has to be done, Mrs. Willows.”

“Well, go ahead and do it, but please watch your step. This isn’t a bit funny. What are you laughing at?”

“You’re the silliest patient I’ve ever had,” came the nurse’s voice. “You don’t seem to know a thing about this business.”

“I know much more than I ever thought I would,” replied Tim. “I could write a whole book about it and if I did I would strongly advise all women to leave their husbands at the altar, to have nothing whatever to do with them.”

“Don’t make me laugh, Mrs. Willows, and do hold still. I’d hate to hurt you.”

“I believe I’d die if you did. Do you think I’m going to die? I wouldn’t like to die, but I think I am. I think I’m going to die like a dog – like a dirty dog.”

“You won’t die, Mrs. Willows. They seldom do.”

The woman who had entered the hospital calling lustily for “mommer” now began to summon the entire family at the top of her voice. It was a hair-raising sound. Even Sally shivered.

“That poor woman is most certainly dying like a dog,” she heard Tim saying. “Don’t tell me she can possibly live after making such sounds as those.”

“Oh, she’s all right,” said the nurse reassuringly. “That woman will have her baby like an old veteran. We have her here almost every spring. Yelling like that is a tradition in her family. It’s a good sign.”

“Do you think I ought to yell a bit?” asked Tim.

“Not unless you feel like it,” replied the nurse.

“I want to do what’s right, you know,” went on Tim. “You see, I shouldn’t be having this baby at all.”

“No?” said the nurse politely.

“Oh, no,” replied Tim. “It’s not in my line. I’m really a man.”

“What!”

“Yes indeed, nurse. I really am a man all except my body and that belongs to my wife. It’s all very confusing.”

“You’ll feel lots better in a little while, Mrs. Willows. Such ideas will pass away. There. I’m all finished. I’ll have you ready in a couple of shakes.”

Doctors, internes, and nurses. Nurses of various types and classes. Scared faces waiting on the dictates of inexorable nature. Adventure, expectancy, and stark primitive anguish. Triumph and safety. Shattered hopes and muffled hearts. Life and Death impatiently brushed elbows along the corridor of that ward. And men, like poor dumb beasts, waited guiltily wherever they were put, and vowed to themselves that if their wives only came safely through, they’d be much better husbands and try to understand the talkies. Then a quick change. With mother and child doing well, off go those poor dumb beasts to receive grog and congratulations. Many a fearful hangover has been the result of a successful birth. Sally began to feel that every nurse that passed her was looking at her with scornfully accusing eyes. It wasn’t fair. Women wanted to have babies just as much as men. As a matter of fact no end of women looked upon a baby as the ball to the chain – an anchor to keep the irresponsible old hulk from drifting into forbidden ports. And who could blame them? mused Sally. Men and women were merely animals that put their fur coats in storage or pawn instead of shedding them all over laps and landscapes.

Tim was being wheeled out on a table. A half-smoked cigar was clenched between his teeth. When he saw Sally he held out a hand and took hers.

“Just like an hors-d’oeuvres wagon,” he observed. “Only I’m more like a high tea. This is Baby’s first ride.”

“Pretty soft,” said Sally, stooping down to kiss him.

“Yes?” drawled Tim, looking at his wife vindictively. “I’m glad you think so. You and Mr. Ram have gotten me in a nice fix. A pretty pair, the both of you. Like hell. And don’t be too set up. How do you know you’re the father of this child? Did you ever see our ice man? He has the loveliest mustache. Like the horns of a dilemma. One end points to heaven, the other goes to hell. I chose the low road and I hope you’re satisfied. Tell my chauffeur to shove off for the delivery department or I’ll begin to bawl for mommer.”

Sally kissed the loquacious man again, but said nothing. As if fascinated she followed the table down the long hall. Tim kept telling anyone who would listen that these damn doctors and nurses were putting him on the spot as well as taking him for a ride. “Don’t ever get with child,” he warned a venerable gentleman with a flowing beard. “They’d cut Niagara Falls off as quick as a wink.” The old gentleman shuddered and repeated a few lines from the Talmud.

At the doors of the operating room Tim rose on one elbow and looked spitefully back at Sally.

“Don’t think I’m reconciled to this, my fine lady,” he sang out. “Don’t think I bear child willingly. No, I tell you. A thousand times, no. Never will I be satisfied until I see you on one of these damn things. Shove off, nurse. California, here I come.”

The doors closed on the still vociferating Tim, and Sally, feeling a trifle embarrassed, stood as close to them as possible.

“Hello, boys,” she heard him saying to the doctors. “Stand and deliver! Snap to it.”

There were a murmur of voices and the sound of swiftly moving feet, then Tim was speaking again.

“Look out there!” she heard him exclaim. “Quit mawling and hauling me about or I’ll call this whole business off. What on earth are you doing with my feet? Leave those feet alone. You don’t bear child with your feet. And I don’t want to go bicycle riding, anyway. I suppose you’ll be putting me on an electric horse next. Ouch! What you doing now? Well, of all the damn things. Have a heart, Doc.”

“Would you be satisfied with two very small babies or would you rather have one fairly large one?” Tim demanded.

“Madam,” replied the doctor, exasperated beyond measure, “I don’t care if you have a yak so long as you have something.”

“What!” Sally heard Tim shout. “A yak? What a queer mind you have, Doctor. Fancy having a yak. Is there any possibility of that? By God, there is. That devil, Ram, is capable of anything. Get me out of here, nurse. Quick. I don’t feel at all like having a yak today.”

“Calm down, Mrs. Willows,” came the doctor’s voice. “I was merely fooling.”

“Sure,” replied Tim. “I know you guys. You’ve got a swell sense of humor. You keep on asking me to do something down all the time. First it’s bear down and then it’s calm down. Next thing I know you’ll be asking me to jump down. I’m not going to have that yak, that’s all there is to it. Another day, perhaps. Might as well take me back now. Just what is a yak? I don’t feel in the mood, anyway. I’ve changed my mind. That’s a woman’s privilege. Shove off, nurse. Are there any books in this dump?”

“Well, Mrs. Willows,” said the doctor, “I can’t very well make you have a baby.”

“I’m afraid not, Doc,” replied Tim.

“Madam,” came the voice of the doctor, “you’re the hardest case that has ever come into my hands. Nurse, you should never have brought her in here in the first place. She isn’t ready yet. Take her out and don’t bring her back until you can get some sense into her head.”

“Come on, nurse,” said Tim. “Let’s get ourselves out of his hands. I don’t like the looks of this place. This obstetrician might get obstreperous. Try that when you’re stewed, Doc.”

Tim was wheeled back to his room and it was a matter of three days before he had his child. Those three days will never be forgotten by the staff of the maternity ward. Tim almost succeeded in disrupting the entire hospital. When Sally called on the morning of the third day she was met by the head nurse. Tim was not in his room.

“Where’s the patient?” Sally demanded.

“Search me,” the head nurse replied with a helpless toss of her hands. “We can’t keep track of her, Mr. Willows. She might be anywhere in the hospital, for all we know. Last time I saw her she was playing pinochle with a couple of internes and smoking a big black cigar. She’s a strange woman, your wife, Mr. Willows. We can’t make her out. Seems to have absolutely no feminine instincts. Can’t understand how she ever came to be having a baby. You’ll have to say something to her. Indeed you will, sir. She’s upsetting our hospital. We have to keep an eye on her all the time to see that she doesn’t go lugging somebody else’s baby off to her own room. Says she’s practising up. Yesterday she had three of them at once. For a moment it looked as if she were trying to juggle them. And last night she stole some whiskey from one of the laboratories and kept singing about someone who had made her what she was and who she hoped was satisfied. It’s too bad, Mr. Willows, the way she goes on. Really it is.”

Sally left the head nurse still talking and went in search of Tim. She found him at last, seated in a pantry-like arrangement, arguing passionately with two internes. In his hand were clutched some bills.

“What?” he snapped, glancing up from the table. “You back again?”

At the sight of Sally both of the internes rose.

“Mr. Willows,” one of them began excitedly, “your wife is deliberately cheating us. She’s gotten all our money and now she wants to play for our pants. When we tell her she’s cheating she flies into a rage and tells us we’re retarding her pregnancy. It’s not fair. Look at all the money she has.”

“It is fair,” cried Tim. “You’re not having a baby. I got to get something out of it, don’t I?”

“We didn’t ask you to have a baby, did we?” the interne shot back.

“Ask me to have a baby?” Tim laughed scornfully. “You’d have to chase me over seven counties to have a baby.”

“And she keeps on changing her voice so rapidly that we don’t know how many players are sitting in on the game,” the other interne complained. “She gets us all rattled, Mr. Willows. Make her play fair.”

Sally smiled in spite of herself and promised to make Tim behave. The upshot of it was that Tim grudgingly gave back to the internes a small percentage of his winnings and Sally got permission to take him out for a little walk.

“Take her for a long walk,” urged the doctor. “In fact, Mr. Willows, we don’t care how far you take her. If she wasn’t your wife I’d suggest taking her down to the river and pushing her in. The other night she came barging into the operating room when a woman was having twins, and asked me if I had a nail file. Can you imagine that? And when I told her I hadn’t she said I was a hell of a doctor. Last night she got one of our finest surgeons up at four o’clock in the morning just to find out whether she had a corn or an ingrowing toenail. A woman about to be a mother not knowing a simple thing like that …”

Sally also left this person still talking and took the cause of dissension for a walk. The cause insisted on being taken to a movie and then complained loudly and bitterly because there was not sufficient room between the rows of seats.

“Don’t they expect maternity cases ever to go to the movies?” Tim demanded. “There ought to be a law.”

The picture was one of those charming underworld idyls in which everyone stood on the wrong spot and went riding in the wrong car. It was tastefully decorated with machine guns and dead bodies. In the midst of a particularly optimistic fusillade Tim emitted a gasp.

“That does it,” he said. “Here comes baby. Oh, dear, what shall I do? Get me out of here quick. Will you pardon me, mister? I’m going to have a baby. No. No. You’ll have to do better than that. Get clean out into the aisle or I’ll be having this baby in your lap. Hurry up, you lug.”

It was like a bad dream for Sally. All Tim would do was to take frightened little hops and declare to the audience that he was going to have a baby. Somehow she managed to get him out of the place and into the automobile.

“A typical American birth,” groaned Tim. “Bearing a baby to the music of machine guns. I suppose it will sleep on a sandbag and cut its teeth on a gat.”

“Yes,” agreed Sally, “and no doubt its favorite candy will be a nice box of bomb-bombs.”

“Put your foot on it,” pleaded Tim.

Ten minutes later they were back in the hospital and twenty minutes after that, to the relief of the entire organization, Tim was delivered of his child and became by virtue of the achievement the first male mother on record.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Mystery
of the Maternity Ward

The nurse decided it was high time for the pseudo-Mrs. Willows to favor her baby with its first nursing. The baby, from the noises it was making, was evidently of the same opinion. Together they entered Tim’s room. It was still quite early in the morning. Tim was sound asleep.

With the baby in her arms the nurse approached the bed and looked down. Then every vestige of color and intelligence left her face. Even the baby stopped his bawling and looked a little shocked as well as disappointed. The nurse drew a scandalized breath and passed a hand across her forehead.

“Am I mad?” she asked herself. “Have I qualified as a full-fledged nurse after years of grim, grubby effort only to be deprived of my reason? I had better sit down on something quite safe and solid and pull myself compactly together.”

She quietly left the bed, carefully sat down in a comfortable chair, and went into a huddle with the baby. This thing had to be thought out, and perhaps in this crisis two heads would be better than one. With fingers that trembled slightly she undid the infant’s swaddling clothes and examined every inch of its body. Feeling somewhat reassured she proceeded to redress the baby. She had made no mistake regarding the child’s sex. She was still capable of differentiating between the two. This was something. This was a lot. The nurse felt encouraged, but in no sense optimistic. She was still quite mad so far as the parentage of this child was concerned.

What the nurse had seen when she had looked down on that bed had been more than enough to make an entire hospital staff doubt its sanity. To state it baldly, what the nurse had seen was a man, a gross, self-satisfied man badly in need of a shave, sleeping luxuriously in a bed in which a wife and mother should have been. In fact, where a wife and mother must still be or else the entire universe was terribly, terribly wrong, and there was hope in neither science nor religion, and this baby was probably not a baby at all but a snake in the grass or the man in the moon or a couple of other guys. The nurse began to giggle nervously, bouncing the baby the while with increasing vigor. Why shouldn’t she sing and dance and make a morning of it? Perhaps it would be amusing to find the head nurse and tear off all her clothes. It might be still funnier, though, to set fire to all the beds and squirt the extinguisher in the house doctor’s eyes. The nurse was not sure. She was convinced, though, that she was getting worse, getting madder and madder by the minute. With a violent mental effort she pulled herself together and tried to fix her mind on the problem. To her eternal undoing the problem was sitting up in bed. Tim, wild-eyed and incredulous, was frantically examining his person.

“My God!” he cried, with a delighted smile. “I’m a man again. Fancy that, nurse.”

“I don’t care what you are,” the nurse replied aggressively, “this baby’s got to be nursed.”

“I hope you don’t think I’m going to nurse it?”

“You certainly are,” replied the nurse. “You bore this child and now you’re going to nurse it.”

“What with?” asked Tim triumphantly.

The nurse paid no attention. She had lost her belief in everything. She clung tenaciously to one fact: this object in that bed, whether it was fish, flesh, or fowl, had given birth to a baby, and she, the nurse, was going to see that it suckled its baby or died in the attempt. Resolutely she approached the bed and thrust out the baby at Tim.

“Suckle this young,” she said fiercely, “and make it snappy.”

“What do you mean, suckle this young?” demanded Tim. “Have some sense, nurse.”

“No,” said the nurse, “I won’t. I once had a little sense and this is what happened. It’s much nicer being mad.”

“Couldn’t you get one of these mothers round here to lend the little chap some breakfast?” asked Tim. “Why not nurse it yourself?”

The nurse laughed sarcastically at this irregular suggestion.

“You must be a man,” she replied. “You’re so dull about such matters. Even if I could nurse that baby I wouldn’t.”

“Why not?” inquired Tim, shocked by the woman’s bitterness. “I take that as very unfriendly, nurse.”

“How do I know the thing is a baby?” she demanded. “It might be a lion or a tiger. It might suddenly turn into you.”

“You embarrass me,” replied Tim. “Let’s change the subject.”

“The subject doesn’t need changing,” said the nurse, beginning to laugh wildly. “I just changed the subject. See!” And she thrust the baby into Tim’s face.

“Nurse, you’re getting positively common,” asserted Tim in a reproving voice. “What are we going to do about all this?”

“Want to know what I’m going to do?” demanded the nurse. “I’m going to take this child and chuck it out the window.”

“My God! Don’t do that!” cried Tim, springing from the bed.

He presented an appalling figure in his short hospital nightgown. The nurse took one look at him and then blinked rapidly as if trying to clear her eyes of some painful object that had lodged there.

“Why shouldn’t I throw the child out of the window?” she asked. “You’re not its mother.”

“I know,” retorted Tim, “but if you went about chucking through windows every child I didn’t bear, the world would be littered with babies.”

“Why should you care?” asked the nurse.

“I don’t want to be a party to a murder,” protested Tim.

“What you’ve done to me this morning,” said the nurse, “is a whole lot worse than murder. Once I was a sane woman and an efficient nurse. Now I’m a gibbering idiot. I wish you could take a look at yourself. A regular scarecrow you are – a scarecrow with long, skinny toes.”

Even at that tense moment Tim could not help wondering why his toes should always be singled out for criticism.

“What’s the matter with the toes?” he demanded, turning them up for inspection.

“Everything,” replied the nurse. “They should have been fingers. They look like withered asparagus.”

“God!” gasped Tim. “How revolting. Try to be a little nicer.”

She thrust the child into Tim’s arms and left the room. While she was gone Sally came rushing in. She was every inch a woman. She took one long look at her husband, then snatched the baby from him.

“You certainly look a sight,” was all she said. “Those toes.”

“A hell of a lot of gratitude you show me for bearing your baby for you,” he retorted.

“Ram is responsible for all,” replied Sally, busily preparing to nurse the baby. “He’s changed us back.”

Tim disappeared behind the screen as the nurse entered the room. She was carrying a suitcase.

“Your wife must have sent this over,” she began, then took one look at Sally. A piercing shriek followed.

“Oh, God, how did you get that way?” she shouted. “He’s switched on me again.”

She ran out of the room and fled screaming down the hall. Within a very few minutes the head nurse and the house surgeon arrived. Sally ducked behind the screen and pushed Tim into view.

“How did you manage it?” asked the surgeon.

“What?” asked the startled Tim.

“How did you manage to sneak into this hospital?” continued the surgeon, keeping a strong grip on himself.

“I didn’t,” replied Tim. “I’ve been here all the time.”

“Then you must be a woman,” said the surgeon.

“I am not,” said Tim.

“You are so,” snapped the surgeon. “Didn’t you bear a child?”

“I did,” replied Tim. “But I’ve just recently had a change of sex.”

“I’ll have to look into this,” asserted the surgeon.

“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” snapped Tim.

“But you must be examined.”

“I think you can trust me in this matter,” replied Tim, with some show of dignity.

“But I’d like to see for myself.” The surgeon’s voice sounded somewhat wistful.

“Sir,” replied Tim, “you don’t know what you’re asking. I’m afraid your interest is more personal than professional.”

The surgeon left the room.

“This will all have to be hushed up,” said the head nurse. “If you wanted to go gallivanting about I can’t understand why you picked out a maternity ward. There’s more here than meets the eye, I’m afraid.”

“Lots,” replied Tim. “And if you don’t hurry up and leave this room you’ll see it all. I’m going to get dressed.”

The head nurse left the room and Sally reappeared. She put the baby down on the bed and took Tim into her arms. His own arms went round her.

“It’s good to get you back,” Sally murmured. “You horrid old thing.”

“I’ve been through a lot,” said Tim.

“I know you have,” replied Sally, “but I’ll make it up to you. I’ll bear you a set of twins.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Dopey All at Sea

Dopey thrust an inquiring nose from his box and sniffed delicately at the small bundle. The small bundle made noises and endeavored to snatch at the nose. The nose, as if insulted, promptly withdrew. Presently it emerged again. Two eyes studied the bundle with growing alarm. The thing was actually alive. It might even be capable of inflicting pain. Down went the nose while the body attached to it shivered nervously. The bundle failed to attack. Dopey opened his lids and tried to look up without lifting his head. If he remained quite still, perhaps the bundle might mistake him for a chair or a table or, at least, a dead dog. The bundle was looking at him steadily and intently, but not hostilely. For a few moments the bundle and the dog took stock of each other, then Dopey transferred his attention to Tim and Sally. They seemed to be all right. The bundle had not molested them. In fact, it was allowing itself to be carried in Tim’s arms. That suggested helplessness. Helplessness suggested safety. Dopey raised his head, boldly sniffed the bundle, and allowed his nose to be handled. It was rather pleasant. Such small paws could not be dangerous. Then Dopey did a remarkable thing. He crawled out of his box, seated himself beside it, then glanced significantly first at Tim, then at the bundle, and finally into the box. Although it made him look rather ridiculous the great dog repeated this eye-rolling operation several times.

“Why, the sweet old thing is actually offering his box to the infant,” exclaimed Sally.

She found a clean towel and placed it on the floor of the box. Tim carefully laid the baby on the towel. Dopey settled himself grimly by the box and prepared to guard its contents. There was a proud light in his eyes, although his sensitive spirit was slightly dashed by the reflection cast on his person by the placing of the towel. They might have spared him that. A little delicacy would have been more fitting in the presence of a stranger.

Leaving the baby with Dopey, the parents withdrew to the front room.

“He’s so maternal,” observed Sally, “he might try to crawl in with the baby.”

“Dopey has the instincts of a gentleman,” said Tim.

“That’s more than his master has,” replied his wife.

In the front room Claire Meadows was waiting for them. At their appearance she threw several pillows off the divan and disclosed a large baby. This infant was possessed of teeth. It was two years old – almost a hag.

“Listen,” began Claire hurriedly. “This baby is mine. I’ve just succeeded in stealing her back. I’ve got a splendid idea. You’re to pretend it’s your baby. Everyone knows you’ve had one. If anyone wants to look at her, squdge her up a lot and say she’s yours.”

“Rather tough on the baby,” observed Tim.

“It’s only for a short time,” replied Claire.

“That’s good,” said Tim. “The baby might not last.”

“But, Claire,” protested Sally, “we can’t very well show a baby with a full set of teeth.”

“Show the other end,” said Claire. “That’s easy.”

“You seem to have an answer for everything,” remarked Tim.

“I suppose changing our child’s sex is also a simple matter?” inquired Sally.

“It seemed to be for you,” retorted Mrs. Meadows.

“But, Claire dear,” protested Sally, “we’re sailing in a few days.”

“Then I’ll sail with you,” cried the resourceful Claire Meadows.

“That’s a good idea, too,” put in Tim.

“I’m not so sure about that,” replied Sally. “Do you contemplate establishing a sort of ménage à trois?”

“Why not?” asked Tim lightly. “I feel like sowing some almost frantic oats.”

“Is that so?” replied his wife. “Then I’ll look round and see if I can’t dig me up a serviceable old quatre.”

“Two’s company, three’s a crowd, and four make a vice ring,” remarked her husband. “That will be swell.”

“Oh, I can dig up the quatre,” cried Claire Meadows brightly. “I remembered the name of this baby’s father and called him up. He was very sweet about it. He’s willing to do anything. We’ll take him along.”

“That’s better,” declared Sally. “And if he leaves you stranded, there’s always Uncle Dick. He’s looking for an American representative.”

“Then it’s all settled,” said Claire. “I’m terribly relieved.”

“We’re so glad you are,” smiled Sally, “but I foresee unseemly if diverting complications.”

•   •   •   •   •

The sun gleamed down on the boat deck. In a secluded corner three dogs, three high-bred dogs sat before their respective dog houses. One glance at those dogs was enough to show that this was not their first crossing. By no means. Those dogs were bored. There was a fourth house, but no dog sat in front of it. Presently a nose appeared, then two timid eyes. They looked fearfully at the high-bred dogs, then turned away. Those dogs looked sinister to the eyes. Have nothing to do with them. Then the eyes rested on the broad Atlantic and watched with great anxiety the approach of a fat wave. This would be the end.

“Oh, my God,” breathed Dopey, “is all that water there yet?”

But God did not answer.

The dog scrabbled round in his house and exposed his gnarled rump not only to all who might care to behold, but also to the tumbling reaches of that disconcerting ocean.

Once there had been a certain box on a floor that did not heave … ah, well … a dog’s life was like that.

Dopey sighed and slept, shivering slightly in his sleep as he dreamed of an endless ocean alive with a drove of waves.

— THE END —

SKIN AND BONES

DESCRIPTION

A photographer’s freak accident in the darkroom produces a chemical concoction causing him and his dog to randomly switch back and forth between normal and X-ray (skeleton) versions of themselves. Drinking and cavorting ensues as he finds people able to see beyond his appearance and appreciate him for who he is, while inadvertently terrifying those who cannot.

Dedication

FOR
Horrid and his Wife
euphemistically known as
Frank R. and Lorna Adams
in fond recollection of numerous festive occasions, such as earthquakes, bank holidays and Hollywood on half pay.

CHAPTER ONE

Bland In The Flesh

When Quintus Bland set out to enjoy the evening he had not the vaguest idea he was destined to become a skeleton. Yet that is exactly what he did become – an impressive structure composed entirely of bone as far as the eye could reach.

Had fate vouchsafed the man some small warning of the radical departure from his customary appearance, there is no doubt he would have stopped where he was and become a skeleton comfortably in the privacy of his own home, assuming for the moment one can comfortably become a skeleton while still alive and active.

There were many persons who wished he had pursued this course and remained at home. Life for them would have still retained a little of its zest.

Indubitably this would have been the more agreeable course not only for Mr. Bland and his friends, but also for a number of unfortunate individuals who through no fault of their own were forced to undergo the ordeal of gazing on Quintus Bland in far less than the nude – in, perhaps, the most disturbing form a man can present to his fellow men.

Although to become a skeleton is a noteworthy achievement it is not an admirable one. If a man must so disport himself he would show far more consideration by enjoying his horror in solitude instead of in the heart of a populous city. The metamorphosis from flesh to bone is not one especially designed to be regarded affectionately by the average observer.

In extenuation of Mr. Bland’s slight lapse it must be recorded that he had neither the intention nor the inclination to become a skeleton. Such an ambitious undertaking never entered his mind. Bones, in appalling number, were thrust upon him, so to speak. Or, inversely, flesh was removed. In the long run it made little difference how the change occurred. Bland suddenly and confoundingly discovered he had turned to a skeleton. He discovered also that it is the rare individual indeed who regards a skeleton either as a social equal or a desirable companion.

By way of explanation it should be known that Quintus Bland literally sniffed himself into his skeletonhood. For long hours at a time he had been inhaling the potent fumes of a secret chemical fluid with which he had been experimenting for some months past. It was his somewhat revolting hope that someday by means of this fluid he would be able to produce a fluoroscopic camera film. Why any normal man should wish to create such an intimately revealing commodity is difficult to conceive. Possibly Quintus Bland was not quite normal.

But before we take the man in his bony structure it would perhaps be a gentler approach and show better taste to consider him first in the flesh.

Quintus Bland was the sole owner and active head of one of the largest and most successful photographic studios in the city of New York. Like a versatile undertaking establishment the Bland Studios, Inc., could handle any job no matter how unappetizing. No face, not even the most murderous in character, ever took itself off the premises without feeling that it was quite a good face to look at.

As a small boy Quintus had made clicks with his camera while his companions were making pops with their guns. He was an essentially gentle little boy, and consequently was known as a queer duck, a mamma’s boy, and a ’fraid cat. Eventually when he fell upon his tormentors and inflicted upon their quick healing bodies severe and humiliating punishment he gained the local reputation of being an embryonic homicidal maniac.

The truth of the matter was that these violent reprisals of the youthful Bland had not been undertaken in his own behalf, but rather in the best interests of a besieged turtle the other boys were attempting to open with the same ruthless enterprise they applied to clocks, watches, and other diverting bits of mechanism. Doubtless the boys considered the turtle as being nearly if not equally inanimate. Not only did young Quintus save the life of the turtle, but he also won the lasting admiration of a small female child with long golden hair who had witnessed the rescue. Later he married the girl.

At the moment when we take up Mr. Bland actively he had just turned thirty-seven years of age. There were days when he looked every bit of that, and others when in some surprising manner he appeared to have recaptured the breath and body of his youth. One could never be sure about Quintus Bland. He was never quite sure about himself. His age fluctuated most bewilderingly. If the conversation bored him he gradually became haggard and enfeebled, to the intense irritation of his wife. Should the talk turn to more diverting matters, he made a rapid recovery and attacked the subject with vigor and animation. His eyes had always been old, very old and wise. And there was a far-away quality in his smile that gave one the impression of mental reservations. It was a disturbing but not an uninteresting effect. He was a tall man and a dark man. Like the rest of him his hair was straight and dark. The word “lank” well covered the impression Mr. Bland created. And he made a lanky skeleton, which is, of course, one of the most demoralizing types of skeletons to encounter. He had a surprisingly snappy pair of dark eyes. Occasionally they glittered wickedly. At other times they smoldered morbidly into vacancy. His wife found it difficult to decide whether her husband’s eyes were more annoying when they saw nothing at all or when they saw everything. He had a way of regarding her darkly for an interminable moment, then grunting suddenly as if from sheer disgust. She found this most disturbing.

At present he was having his full share of wife trouble. On her part the little blonde girl of years ago had come to rue the day she had ever witnessed the dark youth rescue the turtle from the grubby talons of the village boys. She blamed that turtle with all the blind unreason of her sex. She wished she could find the slow-witted creature and give it a piece of her mind. She would have liked to point out to it in terms of passionate reproach that if he had only kept on turtling instead of parking provocatively in the exact middle of a dirt road she, Lorna Bland, sometimes called Blondie because of the inevitable alliteration, would not now be married to a long-legged, grunting maniac, capable of seeing life only through the lens of a camera. Yes, that turtle had plenty to answer for when presently he stood in the presence of his God. That would be a long time off, she speculated gloomily. Turtles, she had been given to understand, lived practically forever, provided that they escaped the attentions of small boys.

Blondie Bland was about as pretty as any reasonable man should require a woman to be. Pretty of face and pretty of figure, with a quantity of unlived hell still flickering near the surface of her great blue eyes. She was all that a woman should be and much that one should not. But the worst that could be said of her was that she was tarrying a little overlong on that stage of her development in which the capture of men through partial surrender seemed a matter of prime importance. Quintus was a most satisfyingly jealous husband. Lorna did not endeavor to make things any easier for him. His long legs done into joints frequently made her unreasonably furious. There were times when she wished she could kick his shins, but remembering the fury of the dark youth in action she suppressed this dangerous impulse.

When they were first married, Lorna Bland had been seven years younger than her husband. Gradually the years separating them had increased until by now they had become ten. At the present rate of speed, Quintus Bland reflected sardonically, theirs would soon assume the aspect of an April-October union. This set him to wondering why Lorna loved youth instead of life, why she wallowed in repetitive experience instead of questing fresh adventure. In a sense she was older than he was, more settled in her ways, more reconciled with the set routine of her existence. The lovely but benighted creature still approached a tea, flirtation, or dinner party with the same eager anticipation of her first year out. He hated to believe that women were instruments of torture or pleasure according to the occasion. Yet Lorna did much to further this belief. He often wished he had the courage to shake her blonde head off her smooth, firm shoulders.

In much the same state of unsatisfied hostility couples drag themselves along to regret their golden anniversaries. Neighbors call with congratulatory words. A festive to-do is made. The venerable couple, cynically despising the whole affair, have their picture taken together, the nearest physical contact they have had in years. In the local paper a paragraph appears. Then the neighbors, after singing “Auld Lang Syne,” depart, vowing they will presently return to celebrate with equal gusto the diamond anniversary. Sometimes the old battlers are actually fooled by public approval into believing they really care for one another, but this mood is speedily dissipated when presently they retire to bed to lie in the darkness, wondering why they had not given each other pulverized glass somewhere between the paper and the wooden, when they still had a chance to carry on with a mate who would have understood them.

In the majority of cases a golden anniversary is in reality a gathering of friends to celebrate the fact that a man and a woman have miraculously succeeded in living together for fifty years without committing murder. There are not many such occasions. There was little likelihood that Quintus and Lorna Bland would ever celebrate theirs. Long before that time one or the other of them would have succeeded in escorting his or her mate to the grave. Already much of the man’s innate gentleness was being replaced by strong homicidal impulses. Frequently now he found himself contemplating his wife and thinking how pleasant it would be to drag her about the house by her hair. He even speculated whether it was long enough to afford a good grip. So far, however, physical conflict had been avoided.

The highly desirable Blondie consistently feigned a vast contempt for cameras, their works, and those who worked them. To irritate her husband still further she was frequently seen at art exhibits, where she bored herself insufferably by looking at paintings she neither understood nor appreciated. It must be said for her that she took her punishment with fortitude worthy of a better cause.

On the evening when Mr. Bland set forth in search of enjoyment his wife returned to their fashionable suburban home with a painting she had acquired at no small expense. As far as she could judge, it was a picture of a cow in convulsions. In her mind’s eye she had already selected the exact spot on the library wall where this atrocity would do the most harm, that is, where her husband’s eyes would be forced to fall on it most frequently. Having hung the daub to her infinite satisfaction, she fluffed out her golden hair, sighed happily, flexed her supple torso like a cat preparing to pounce, then curled herself up in a chair with a book which she did not read. Presently Quintus Bland arrived from the city with a bundle under his arm.

“Ah, there,” said Mr. Bland, defensively flinging the words in the general direction of his wife. “I’ve brought home a new study – wheels, all wheels.”

“Ah,” welcomed Lorna Bland, “an X-ray of your negroid head, I take it.”

“What?” asked Mr. Bland in a preoccupied voice as he busily unwrapped the bundle. “You were saying?”

“Never mind,” his wife replied, feeling that under the circumstances minor insults were superfluous. “It really doesn’t matter.”

Humming under his breath in a peculiarly irritating manner, Quintus, with his new study of wheels, approached the exact spot on the library wall on which the cow was having her convulsions. Blondie, not missing a move, decided that this little affair was going to turn out even better than she had anticipated.

Bland raised his eyes to the wall and met the cow face to face. Both faces expressed acute agony. The man looked as if the cow had gored him in some vital spot. He, too, seemed seized with convulsions. Then, as if suddenly realizing that the eyes of his wife were hatefully studying his reactions, Bland rallied gamely. Once more he endeavored to hum as if his mind was quite serene, but this time there was a noticeable quaver in his voice.

As if he had grown up in daily association with the stricken cow, he removed her from the wall and carelessly scaled her across the room. By this action his humming was definitely improved. It swelled to a note of triumph. From her coiled position in the chair Lorna shot like a maddened spring. She grabbed the cow from the floor, pressing it to her heart. In her eye flashed the light of battle.

“You beast,” she said in a tragic voice. “You long-legged butcher.”

“Why shouldn’t a butcher have long legs?” her husband inquired mildly.

“I don’t care whether a butcher has any legs at all,” Mrs. Bland heatedly flung back.

“A butcher would hardly chop off his own legs,” the man pursued thoughtfully. “That wouldn’t make any sense.”

“What do I care about butchers?” cried Mrs. Bland.

“I don’t know,” replied Mr. Bland. “What do you care about butchers?”

“Nothing!” snapped the lady. “I don’t care a damn about butchers.”

“I’m glad to learn,” said Quintus Bland, “that there is one class of male that fails to attract you. Is it because they hide their trousers beneath their aprons?”

Mrs. Bland blinked.

“You’re a vulgarian,” she told him.

“Admittedly,” agreed Quintus Bland. “But I’m not a butcher. Were I one, I would have hacked that obscene beast to bits.”

“If you keep going on about butchers,” Lorna Bland assured her husband, “I’ll do something desperate.”

“You’ll be sorry when you’re hungry,” Mr. Bland warned her. “For my part I am very fond of butchers. I fully appreciate the dignity and importance of their calling.”

With this observation he hung his study of wheels in the space recently occupied by the convulsive cow.

“And besides,” said Mrs. Bland, hovering round the spot, “that isn’t an obscene beast. It’s a cow – a swell cow.”

“I hope she swells until she bursts,” remarked Mr. Bland. “If you hadn’t told me I would have carried away the impression it was a composite picture of all the most objectionable features of the animal kingdom.”

With his head cocked on one side he stepped back and stood admiring his weird study of wheels.

“Do you imagine that horror is going to remain there on the wall?” asked Lorna Bland in a low voice.

“Of course it is, my dear,” replied her husband. “Can’t you almost see those wheels turn, hear the purr of the dynamos, feel the reverberations of – —”

His sentence was never finished. Already there had been too much of it for Blondie Bland. The man’s complacency had completely unbalanced her mind. Snatching the picture from the wall, she sprang to a footstool and brought the framed photograph down on the cocked head of Quintus Bland. In less time than it takes to think of it, the head protruded through the wheels with the frame around its neck. Across the face there flickered momentarily an expression of surprise, then the features became impassive. In silence they confronted each other; then Mr. Bland, with a polite smile, helped his wife to step down from the footstool. With elaborate courtesy he removed the convulsive cow from her possession, raised it aloft, then brought it down with great force and deliberation upon the sleek blonde head. Being stretched on canvas, the convulsive cow bounced up with a snap, but not so Mrs. Bland. With a gasp of astonishment she found herself squatting on the floor, literally driven into that position in which she remained, all thought of dignity forgotten.

“Go on,” she said at last in a dull voice. “Finish me with the frame. It’s the only thing left to do.”

“There was glass in yours,” observed her husband. “You might have cut my throat.”

“I wanted to cut your throat,” Mrs. Bland retorted. “I still do. From ear to ear,” she added.

“Indeed,” sneered Mr. Bland. “Well, just observe this cutting.”

Lorna Bland, still squatting, looked up with sudden interest. Her husband had taken a knife from the long library table. With this weapon in one hand and the convulsive cow in the other he placed himself before her so that she could enjoy a clear and unobstructed view of his actions. Even at that tense moment the squatting wife could not refrain from dwelling on what a fantastic picture her husband presented, standing ceremoniously before her, his framed head protruding through a mass of wheels, a knife poised dramatically above a picture of a cow. It would be a crisp moment for the entrance of a neighbor. The dramatic solemnity of the man suggested a priest of some ancient religion on the point of making vicarious sacrifice to his bloodthirsty gods.

“You wouldn’t dare,” breathed Mrs. Bland. “That cow cost one hundred dollars.”

“I’d pay twice that amount to cut her to ribbons,” Mr. Bland informed her. “Watch. See, I slit the creature’s throat from ear to ear as you would have slit mine.” This he proceeded to do with one deft stroke of the knife. “Next,” he continued, “I swish off her hind legs, or quarters.” The legs were neatly severed from the body. “And not content with that,” he added grimly, “I disembowel the beast like this. Observe!” Mrs. Bland observed and saw exactly how it was done. “And now, my dear,” resumed her husband politely, “here is your hundred-dollar cow. Have you any more funny pictures?”

“Thank you a lot,” replied Lorna sweetly, rising from the floor and accepting the tattered ruin. “I think I’ll hang it back where it was. When callers want to know what has happened to the picture I’ll explain in full detail.”

“Very well,” said Mr. Bland, delicately removing his head from the frame. “If you are going to do that, I am going to do this, and when callers inquire about the jagged state of this photograph I’ll simply tell them you tried to cut my throat with it – from ear to ear.”

Thus speaking, he placed the shattered study of wheels in the center of the mantelpiece.

“They’ll be sorry I didn’t succeed,” said his wife, eying the picture critically. “It certainly looks like hell up there.”

“Your cow scarcely adds to the attractiveness of the room,” Mr. Bland reminded her.

“In trying to dash my brains out,” said Lorna Bland, “you succeeded in giving me a terrible headache. I must take some aspirin.”

“It’s merely good luck I’m not standing in a pool of blood,” observed Mr. Bland. “As it is, I, too, have a headache.”

“I wish to God you were standing in two pools of blood,” commented Mrs. Bland. “One foot in each.”

Having voiced this pious wish, Lorna Bland rang for the maid, Fanny, a small, desperately passionate-looking girl, slightly oversized in the right places.

“Aspirins, Fanny,” said Lorna. “It may interest you to know that your master has just beaten me over the head in an attempt to dash my brains out. Tell the cook.”

“And it may further interest you to know, Fanny,” put in Mr. Bland calmly, “that your mistress has just attempted to slit my throat. Tell that to the cook. It would have been from ear to ear,” he added, drawing a long finger across his throat to make himself clearly understood.

There was no doubt that Fanny was deeply impressed. She looked first at Mrs. Bland’s head, then transferred her dark gaze to Mr. Bland’s throat. There was such a lot of Mr. Bland’s throat. Fanny was just as well pleased it was not slit. Fanny took care of the rugs.

“I’m sorry, madam,” she said respectfully. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Yes,” replied Madam bitterly. “You might get a gun and shoot me and get it over with.”

“Or,” suggested her husband, “you might ask the cook to step in for a moment with the carving knife and cut my throat for the edification of Mrs. Bland. I’ll endeavor to bleed in two separate pools, my dear, and place a failing foot in each.”

Mentally confronted by this ghastly picture, Fanny hurried from the room.

“Have you no pride?” asked Quintus Bland when the passionate maid had gone.

“None whatsoever,” his wife coolly replied. “In the presence of a stalking murderer there is no room for pride.”

Fanny returned with aspirin and water. Lorna took one tablet and washed it down with a small gulp.

“Will you have one?” she asked the stalking murderer.

“Thanks,” he replied. “Two.”

“Your headache is no worse than mine,” said his wife. “I’ll take three.”

“How petty,” remarked Mr. Bland, enjoying Lorna’s efforts to get the tablets down. “How, how petty.”

“You started it,” said his wife, passing him the box.

“Might as well finish them off,” he said, glancing at the contents. “There are only four left.”

Even for his long throat the swallowing of four aspirins presented some difficulty. Nevertheless he succeeded in flexing them down. With thwarted eyes his wife watched her husband’s neck until the last spasmodic ripple had subsided.

“You should have been a sword swallower,” she commented; then, turning to Fanny, “Are there any more aspirins in the house?”

“No, Mrs. Bland,” said Fanny. “Shall I send for some?”

“Do,” replied Mrs. Bland. “A large box.”

“How petty,” murmured Mr. Bland. “How very, very petty.”

“I hope your heart stops beating,” snapped his wife.

“Fanny,” said Mr. Bland, disregarding this hope, “where is my dog? A man must have some companionship.”

“If that dog shows his stupid face in here,” Mrs. Bland announced in a voice of cool determination, “I’ll pull his tail out by the roots.”

“I think you mean off,” corrected her husband.

“Off or out,” cried Lorna Bland, “it doesn’t matter which. If that dog comes in here he’ll leave the room with his tail in my hands.”

“So you would carry the warfare to dumb animals,” said Mr. Bland with a sneer in his voice.

“I started it with one,” Mrs. Bland replied with evident satisfaction.

At this moment the dog whose tail had been under discussion, and whose correct name was Busy, came on little bounces into the room. Busy was about a foot high, a trifle less than a foot wide, and a little more than a foot long. It was quite obvious the dog had made a brave attempt to make himself as nearly a cube as possible. He was all white and woolly. Two black eyes like washed grapes danced vividly in a large square head. Such was Busy. Both Quintus and Lorna Bland were always on the point of looking up in a book to find out just what sort of dog he was, but what with one thing and another they had never quite got round to it. Nominally Busy was the property of Mr. Bland, although his wife was equally fond of the dog. Now, however, it pleased her to consider the animal entirely his, realizing that the best way to attack her husband was through this odd-looking beast.

Therefore, the moment the blonde woman’s eyes fell upon the unsuspecting dog she swooped down upon him and began to tug lustily at his tail. Busy gave tongue to a sharp yelp of indignation. This was quite enough for Quintus Bland. He rushed across the room and seized his crouching wife by the hair.

“Let go of that dog’s tail,” he threatened, “or I’ll drag you about by the hair.”

“See,” said Lorna Bland triumphantly, as she went over backwards, dragging the dog with her. “What did I tell you, Fanny? The man’s a stalking murderer. This probably will be the end. Run for your life.”

For a moment the situation remained static. Mr. Bland had his wife by the hair while she had his dog by the tail. Fanny could not recall ever having seen anything quite like it. Neither seemed willing to let go first, although Busy would have been only too happy to wash his hands of the whole affair. The ring of the doorbell broke the deadlock. Quintus Bland released his wife, who in turn released his dog. Struggling to her feet, she began to fluff out her hair. As Fanny with a backward glance hurried to the door, the master of the house assumed a dignified attitude while his consort fixed a smile of greeting on her lips.

“Will you help me to get through college,” hopefully inquired a voice, “by subscribing to one of these popular magazines?”

“Certainly not!” shouted Mr. Bland to the unseen aspirant.

“No!” passionately elaborated his wife. “Not if you remain ignorant to the end of your days, which I hope are numbered.”

Feeling definitely certain that this was a poor portal indeed through which to enter into the realms of higher education, the youth withdrew, and Fanny hurried back to the room, hoping to witness the resumption of hostilities. But for that day active hostilities were at an end. Mrs. Bland was busy with the telephone. Her husband was watching her with a pair of brooding eyes.

“Is that you, Phil?” said Lorna Bland after a short pause. “Yes, of course, it is. Certainly this is Blondie. I simply wanted to let you know that my husband has just attempted to dash my brains out, then drag me round by my hair. Pretty, isn’t it?”

“She brutally assaulted my dog,” thundered Quintus Bland over his wife’s shoulder, “and tried to pull his tail off.”

“That was the voice of the murderer,” said Lorna into the telephone. “No, no, not mine. He was referring to the dog’s. [Pause.] Listen, Phil, I want you to take me out to dinner. I’ll pick you up in the car. [Pause.] How sweet of you. Yes, yes, yes. [Another pause.] And after? Oh, I don’t care what happens after. Better that than death.”

She replaced the instrument and glanced significantly at her husband.

“Better that by far,” she said as if to herself.

“What do you mean by that?” he demanded.

“Don’t tell me you were born yesterday,” she retorted.

“So that’s how the crow flies,” said Mr. Bland, nastily.

“I don’t care whether the crow flies or crawls along on the flat of his belly,” was his wife’s indelicate rejoinder. “You look like a crow yourself. How do you fly?”

“If I fly into a rage,” said Quintus Bland, “you’ll be sorry you were ever born.”

“I’m sorry you ever were,” Mrs. Bland flung back at him as she rose to quit the room. “And if I could lay my hands on that turtle I’d wring his horrid neck off.”

“Animal baiter,” muttered Quintus.

“Fanny,” called Mrs. Bland from the stairway, “come up here and help me find my black underwear with the lace.”

A look of consternation took possession of Mr. Bland’s features. He gathered the assaulted dog in his arms and sat down with him on the sofa. In a surprisingly short time Lorna Bland was down again.

“Goodbye,” she said, looking in at the door. “I have it on, the black underwear with – —”

“I know,” Mr. Bland interrupted. “With the lace.”

For a moment the small blonde creature lingered undecidedly in the door. She was sorry she had said he looked like a crow. It was too close to home. And she had lied about the black underwear, what little there was of it. Phil Harkens was not worth black underwear, especially with lace. Sitting there in the shadows, her black long-legged husband did look for all the world like a dark bird of ill omen – an old crow huddled on a sofa with a square dog on his lap. Still, he might say something friendly. She wanted only a word or so to call the battle off. But no word was forthcoming. Feeling a little hollow inside, she closed the front door slowly behind her. Shortly after, the man on the sofa heard the expostulations of her motor. He listened until the spluttering had turned to an ingratiating purr which grew fainter and died away. So she really had taken herself off with her black underwear with the lace. Now he had the house to himself, and he did not want it. Damn her, anyway, and damn her black underwear. Damn the lace, too. He removed a strand of blonde hair from his vest. Yes, damn her blonde hair.

For a long time he sat there quite motionless with the square dog. The battle had left him deflated. Idly he examined the tail of Busy. It was an odd hook of a tail not unlike a jigsaw piece with hair on it. It seemed to have escaped injury. Its permanent hook was undamaged. Mr. Bland decided it would be difficult to pull off a tail as strongly affixed as Busy’s.

Darkness drifted into the room and piled up in the corners. Bland was too listless to switch on the lights. The far-away drumming of a scooting express train throbbed across the gloom. The sound made him think of the city. Lorna in her black underwear was spending the evening with that rotter, Phil Harkens. Why should not he, Quintus Bland, make a night of it also? The city was congested with good-looking women. His acquaintance among models was extensive.

“Busy,” said the man to the square dog, “I feel very much like hell. All washed out, you know. Should I or should I not go to the city?”

The dog was far above the battle. He slumbered heavily on his master’s lap and made gross noises about it.

Fanny’s dark eyes glittered in the doorway.

“I’m going out, Fanny,” said Quintus Bland from the sofa. “Pass the word to the kitchen. There will be no dinner.”

Fanny’s expression revealed the fact that she was sorry her master was going out. She had certain ideas of her own in which he was rather intimately involved. She wished she had the courage to tell him there was no need for him to stir farther afield in search of amorous diversion.

“Will you be back late, Mr. Bland?” she asked.

“If at all,” Mr. Bland replied.

He removed the dog from his knees and placed him gently on the sofa. The square animal snored peacefully through the transition. Accepting his hat and stick from a reluctant Fanny, he moved out into the dusk, quitting the comforts of his suburban home in favor of the city, where he later became a skeleton, which was even worse than wearing black underwear with lace on it.

CHAPTER TWO

Bland in the Bone

Quintus Bland became a skeleton at exactly eleven forty-five that same evening. After the consumption of much bad alcohol he was endeavoring with the aid of a female companion to pull himself together in a private room of a popular speakeasy situated just off Washington Square.

In an adjoining room two other couples belonging to his party were carrying on in a manner which, to put it mildly, was not quite becoming. Having been deprived of amusement by the poor quality of the play they had attended earlier in the evening, they were now endeavoring to find diversion in various other questionable directions.

It will never be known definitely what chemical combination wrought the amazing change in Mr. Bland’s physical composition. Quite possibly the fumes of his strange concoction, together with an overdose of aspirin invigorated by the reaction of much raw liquor, were sufficient to create a fluoroscopic man instead of a fluoroscopic film. The explanation is really not important. Mr. Bland was far more concerned with the social aspects of his predicament than with the scientific ones. He regretted that like Mr. H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man he had not made a good job of it and disappeared entirely. There is no place in the social scale for an animated structure composed wholly of bones. No matter how convivial and responsive strong drink makes individuals, they still remain unreconciled to skeletons who carry on quite as if nothing untoward had occurred. And Quintus Bland became the most disconcerting sort of skeleton a man could become. He became a recurring or sporadic skeleton. He became a skeleton in fits and starts. One could never be sure where one had him. At one moment he would find himself devastatingly deprived of his flesh only to discover a few minutes later that he was once more a complete man down to the last detail. This fluctuating condition of being made any continuous line of conduct almost impossible. Even when he was completely himself, his friends could not refrain from regarding him with fear and suspicion. And there were some who looked upon him with loathing not unmixed with awe.

Lulu Summers, a luscious hose-and-underwear model whom Mr. Bland had occasionally employed as a subject for his camera, was the first to discover that her present partner was not all or even a part of what a perfect gentleman should be.

It was regrettable in the extreme that Lulu, in order to further her partner’s interests, had found it necessary to remove nearly all of a not overburdening attire. Being a model and at the same time thrifty might possibly be advanced as an excuse for her conduct by charitably minded persons, of whom there are too few.

She, together with a somewhat comatose Quintus, was reclining on a large divan when stark tragedy entered her young if not innocent life. In an attempt to ameliorate the discomfort of her occasional employer, she was stroking his long black hair when gradually it was borne in on her consciousness that, instead of ministering to a head with hair on it, her hand was caressing a smooth, round surface. Interested but not yet alarmed, she glanced at the head to discover the reason for the change. Luckily for the girl, Mr. Bland was lying with his face turned to the wall. At first glance Lulu’s eyes encountered what they mistook for an extremely bald head. That alone would have been enough to revolt the average beholder, but Lulu was made of ruggeder stuff.

“Quinnie,” she said in a reproachful voice, “why didn’t you tell me you wore a wig? I’ve been rubbing your head for ages.”

“Don’t call me Quinnie,” grumbled Mr. Bland, happily unaware of the change that had come over him. “I don’t like it at all. What’s that you said about a wig?”

“You’re as bald as a bat,” the lady replied. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Your wig has fallen off.”

“What!” exclaimed Quintus Bland, placing a fleshless hand on his skull. “My God, you’re right! No hair at all. What’s happened to my head?”

Nervously his fingers drummed upon the bony surface, producing a hollow tapping sound most unpleasant to the ear.

“What’s that?” he asked with increasing alarm. “Am I making that noise?”

The shriek that greeted this question made him turn suddenly round on the divan. In the middle of the room Lulu was trembling in all of her beautiful limbs. Upon looking at his face the shriek was automatically repeated. Resting a bony hand on what used to be a cheek, he gazed at the girl in astonishment.

“For heaven’s sake, stop that screaming,” he commanded. “People will think I’m murdering you.”

“You are,” declared the girl. “You’re doing worse than that. You’re scaring me to death. Please don’t be like that. It’s not at all funny.”

“Like what?” asked Mr. Bland, his mystification increasing.

“The way you are,” said the girl. “How can you bear to do it?”

Thoughtfully Quintus Bland stroked his face. The peculiar scraping sound accompanying this gesture was not reassuring. Once more Lulu gave a cry of distress. Mr. Bland glanced hastily at his long bony fingers, then looked at the rest of himself. He was unable to recognize anything familiar. As he snapped up in the divan, he, too, began to tremble, but his limbs were far from lovely.

“By God,” he said, “I’m a skeleton.”

“You certainly are,” fervently agreed Miss Summers. “And I’m clearing out. I might have my moments of weakness, but I draw the line at fleshless men.”

“Come on back,” called Mr. Bland as the girl made for the door to the adjoining room.

“Like fun,” said Lulu. “What for?”

“I might get my body back,” he suggested.

“Yeah?” she replied, skeptically. “While I lose my mind watching those bones turn to flesh? Nothing doing.”

Rising from the divan, Quintus Bland strode across the room. This was too much for Lulu. With a wild shriek she disappeared through the door. The man stopped in his tracks and glanced at himself in a long mirror; then, unleashing a shriek of his own, he, too, disappeared into the next room, where a chorus of shrieks greeted his arrival.

“Give me a drink,” he cried desperately. “Somebody give me a drink.”

“What would you do with it?” Chunk Walling managed to get out. “What you need is a coffin.”

“Or a closet,” put in Sam Crawford. “Isn’t that where skeletons belong?”

“Don’t ask me,” replied one of the young ladies, “but I wish to God he’d hide himself somewhere.”

“If you ask me,” faltered the other young lady, “a sight like that just doesn’t belong anywhere.”

“And to think that I was in bed with the thing,” Lulu Summers murmured.

“U-o-o,” breathed the first young lady, known in the trade as Elaine. “How disappointing!”

“If I wasn’t in such a shocking condition,” said the other girl, who operated under the name of Flora, “I’d be almost home by now. Look! It’s actually drinking.”

Mr. Quintus Bland removed the bottle from his lipless mouth.

“Don’t call me It,” he said reprovingly. “I am still Quintus Bland even if my flesh is gone.”

“If I were you I wouldn’t admit it, old chap,” Sam Crawford told him. “A performance like this isn’t going to do you a bit of good.”

“Do you imagine I’m doing it for fun?” asked the indignant Mr. Bland.

“Fun for who?” demanded the girl called Flora. “It’s certainly no fun for us. Why didn’t it splash all over your ribs?”

“Why didn’t what splash?” asked Mr. Bland.

“That hooker of gin you just drank,” said the girl.

“Oh, that,” Mr. Bland replied. “I’m sure I don’t know. As a matter of fact I know less about myself than you do.”

“I know more than enough,” said Flora.

“There’s nothing like a skeleton to break down maidenly reserve,” Mr. Walling remarked.

“I find this conversation most objectionable,” declared Mr. Bland.

“I object to the whole damned business,” expostulated Chunk Walling. “You’re positively indecent.”

Mr. Bland sat down and crossed his legs with a click.

“Gord,” breathed Flora. “Did you hear that? My blood is just one curdle.”

“Do you think I like it?” snapped Mr. Bland, making another click, this time with his teeth.

“I don’t see how you can,” replied Sam Crawford. “We actually hate it. Can’t you go back?”

“How do you mean?” asked Quintus Bland. “Go back where?”

“Go back to your flesh,” explained Sam. “Be yourself for a change.”

Mr. Bland laughed suddenly and bitterly. It was not a nice sound. The two couples and Lulu moved to the other side of the room, where they huddled together for comfort.

“Don’t do that,” pleaded Lulu. “Make some other noise. I can’t stand that one.”

“Someone will have to send for a doctor,” said the young lady called Elaine. “That’s all there is to it. I must have either a hypodermic or a bottle of whisky or something.”

“Think of me,” commented Quintus Bland. “Imagine how I feel.”

“You’re asking too much of flesh and blood,” replied Flora. “No one wants to imagine how you feel.”

“Well, don’t stand over there all huddled up,” said what remained of Mr. Bland. “I’m not going to do anything to you.”

“You’ve already done it,” put in Lulu. “I’ll never be the same woman. When I think of what might have happened my blood runs cold.”

Mr. Bland rose from the chair and, lifting his arms above his head, stretched himself and yawned. Had he deliberately set out to torture his companions he could not have proceeded more effectively. A gasp of sheer horror came simultaneously from five pairs of lips.

“What is he going to do?” quavered Elaine. “Attack us?”

The framework of Bland moved shockingly across the room. One bony hand clutched the gin bottle, which emitted a clanking sound. Placing the bottle where his lips should have been, he polished off its contents, then unconsciously wiped his teeth with a fleshless arm. The grating noise this made caused even the skeleton to shudder.

“Horror upon horror,” murmured Flora. “And he’s drunk up all the gin.”

“Why his backbone isn’t even moist,” observed Sam, “is still a mystery to me.”

“I’m not at all interested to find out,” Chunk Walling replied. “The details of that skeleton are overshadowed by the whole.”

“And we were going to have such a jolly evening,” Lulu regretfully observed.

“It’s not too late,” said Mr. Bland, reseating himself on the chair. “We can still have a jolly evening. Come over here, Lulu, and sit on my lap.”

Lulu gave vent to a slight scream.

“Did you hear that?” she asked in a shocked voice. “Did you hear what he wants me to do?”

“I’d rather sit on a nest of hornets,” said Elaine.

“Much,” added Flora, with conviction.

Quintus Bland, in spite of the critical condition of his anatomy, found himself growing pleasantly drunk. He had consumed nearly a whole bottle of gin and felt a great deal better for it. He began to feel that his fleshless condition lent him a touch of distinction. After all, what was a skeleton among friends?

“Come on over,” he said to Lulu. “I’m not going to do anything to you.”

“What do you mean by anything?” asked Lulu. “You’ve already done enough.”

“Go on, sit on his lap,” urged Sam. “He might get mad if you don’t. I’d hate that.”

“Yeah?” retorted Lulu, sarcastically. “And I’d go mad if I did.”

“But what can a skeleton do?” said Chunk Walling.

“He might try to kiss me,” Lulu replied, “and twine me in those arms.”

The other two women made noises of distress.

“All right. All right,” said the skeleton of Mr. Bland in a disgusted voice. “Order a couple of bottles and I’ll stand the treat.”

“That’s far more reasonable,” put in Flora. “I’m beginning to like that skeleton.”

“You’re even more depraved than I thought,” said Elaine.

“Is that so?” snapped Flora. “Well, I’d rather have a skeleton for a boy friend than some of those fat swine you lug about.”

“Okay, sister,” replied Elaine. “There’s your skeleton. He’s all yours.”

“Please stop discussing me as if I were not present,” protested Mr. Bland.

“You’re only partly present,” said Chunk Walling.

“Yes,” agreed Lulu. “And the least desirable part, at that. The man is virtually speaking from the grave.”

“Don’t you feel at all dead?” inquired Chunk Walling.

“Not at all,” Quintus Bland replied. “I feel very much alive – raring to go.”

“Why don’t you go?” suggested Elaine. “I, for one, won’t bar your way.”

“Is that nice?” asked Mr. Bland.

“Perhaps not,” the girl replied, “but you don’t seem to realize that you’re a total skeleton – a fleshless man – an animated boneyard.”

“Someday,” said Mr. Bland, maliciously, “you’ll be just like me.”

“Oh, no, I won’t,” Elaine assured him. “When I get in your terrible condition I’m going to cut out night clubs and all other social contacts.”

“The grog will be right up,” Sam Crawford announced, turning from the telephone.

“Those are the first agreeable words I’ve heard today,” said Quintus Bland. “Now we can settle down and take life easy.”

His five companions received this remark in skeptical silence. They were all wondering how life could be taken easily in the presence of a skeleton.

“I long to get drunk,” observed Lulu, “but I’m almost afraid to do it. Wouldn’t it be just awful to forget one’s self with a skeleton?”

“I’d call it impossible,” said Flora, running a critical eye over the uninviting frame of Quintus Bland.

“Is this discussion quite necessary?” he asked in a pained voice.

“If you were a lady you’d say it was,” Elaine replied with a slight tilt of her fine eyebrows.

“The fact that you can envisage such a contingency,” remarked Mr. Bland, “hardly qualifies you to consider yourself a lady.”

“I’m more of a lady than you are a gentleman,” Elaine replied. “You’re merely a beastly old stack of bones.”

“Admitted,” said Mr. Bland, complacently. “I don’t have to be a gentleman. I’m just a drunken skeleton with no moral obligations.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” declared Lulu. “If old Mr. Bones over there gets amorously binged and starts making passes at me you’re going to have a dead model on your hands.”

Mr. Bland’s indignant rejoinder was interrupted by a knock on the door.

“Come in!” Sam Crawford thoughtlessly called out.

A chorus of squeals from the girls and a smothered exclamation from Bland greeted this invitation. Leaping across the room, he hurled himself clatteringly against the door.

“Oh, momma,” breathed Flora, her eyes popping wildly, “modesty isn’t worth it. Did you see that nightmare move?”

“Yes,” murmured Lulu. “And I heard him dash. I’m not going to be able to stand much more of this sort of thing.”

In the meantime Quintus Bland had partially opened the door and thrust out a bony hand and arm, hoping that in the half-light of the hall the waiter would not notice their fleshless condition.

“You can give me the bottles,” he said. “We’ll settle up later. I haven’t any clothes on.”

The statement concerning Bland’s lack of attire was not at all a novel one to the waiter, but the appearance of that ghastly hand with its long clutching fingers was something altogether new and unexpected.

“What sort of a hand is that?” the waiter wanted to know. “I don’t like the looks of it.”

“It’s a trick,” replied Mr. Bland, not knowing what else to say. “A simple trick.”

“It’s a damned dirty trick,” retorted the waiter. “I wouldn’t play it on a dog.”

“Well, I haven’t played it on a dog,” Bland declared. “Give me those bottles and go away.”

“I’ll go away fast enough,” said the waiter, “but it will be a long time before you’ll get me back. Nor will I hand you the bottles. Pick ’em up yourself.”

Placing the bottles at a safe distance from the door, the waiter hurried away. He did not look back to see a long skeleton arm slide through the slit in the door and gather in the bottles. It was just as well for him he missed this petrifying experience.

Quintus Bland closed the door and confronted his five companions. There was a bottle in either hand.

“I’m not getting used to you,” Lulu Summers told him. “No matter how hard I try, you remain just as awful.”

“If you want any of this grog,” he answered with a grim click of his teeth, “you’ll have to make the best of it.”

“What I want to know,” said Chunk Walling, “is how did you get that way. It’s incredible to me. I’d suspect my own eyesight were it not for the fact that four other persons are seeing the same thing.”

“I’m not sure,” replied Mr. Bland, removing a cork from one of the bottles. “I’ve been experimenting with some rare and exceptionally potent chemicals lately. Perhaps they turned the trick.”

“Well,” observed Elaine, “like that waiter said, it certainly is a dirty one.”

“But where are all your organs?” Flora wanted to know. “You must have something or you’d be a dead skeleton.”

“As he should be,” put in Elaine. “Even in times of depression a girl shouldn’t be expected to associate with skeletons with or without organs.”

“I say don’t let’s talk about his organs,” suggested Lulu. “What we can see of him is bad enough.”

“I know,” declared Flora, “but he must have a stomach or else he wouldn’t be able to gulp down liquor the way he’s doing.”

“Maybe he has invisible organs,” said Sam Crawford. “You know, they’re there but we can’t see them.”

“Who wants to see them?” Elaine demanded.

“I would, for one,” replied Mr. Bland. “Being a skeleton is damn’ lonely business.”

“You’re not lonely enough to suit me,” declared Elaine. “You should be dead and buried.”

“I’d like to wring your neck,” said Quintus Bland, dispassionately.

“I’m surprised he hasn’t wrung all our necks,” remarked Lulu, “and left us strewn about the room. He looks mean enough to do it.”

“Do you realize that I’m paying for your night’s enjoyment?” asked Mr. Bland, who had lost most of his gentlemanly instincts together with his flesh.

“Enjoyment!” cried Lulu with a wild laugh. “That’s a hot number. Why, if you kept me to the end of my days you’d never be able to repay me for that moment on the divan.”

“Sure,” agreed Elaine. “He turned a skeleton on you. I’d sue him for mental anguish, and make him pay through the nose, or where it used to be,” she added, glancing with a shudder at the skull of Mr. Bland.

“Look here,” said Sam Crawford. “Stop panning our friend, even if he is a skeleton.”

But Mr. Bland at that moment was beyond panning. Having consumed nearly all of one of the new bottles, he now found himself overcome with a desire to sleep. Accordingly he staggered over to the studio couch and collapsed clatteringly upon it.

“Is he dead or just asleep?” asked Flora.

“That’s difficult to say,” replied Chunk Walling. “You can’t very well feel a skeleton’s pulse.”

“I don’t want to feel any part of him,” said Lulu.

“Let’s get dressed and go downstairs,” Elaine suggested. “Can’t have any fun with a dead or drunken skeleton at one’s elbow.”

“The couch is all his,” agreed Lulu. “I hope he never wakes up.”

“All right,” said Crawford. “We’ll blow for the time being.”

A few minutes later Mr. Bland’s five companions slipped noiselessly from the room. Flora was thoughtful enough to place the remaining bottle within easy reach of the couch.

“Now,” she said, “if he happens to wake up he won’t come barging downstairs in search of a drink.”

Then she switched off the light and quietly left the room.

“God protect us,” she informed the others in a low voice. “I think he’s snoring a little.”

CHAPTER THREE

The Whittles
Are Not Alarmed

Nearly an hour later Mr. Bland awoke. Sleep had neither improved his appearance nor refreshed his soul, if a skeleton can be said to possess a soul. From the adjoining room a shaft of light streamed in through the half-opened door. His companions, Mr. Bland decided, were in there enjoying themselves. A sleeping skeleton had probably cramped their style. Accordingly, they had shifted the scene of their unhallowed operations, leaving him quite alone and in comparative darkness.

Sitting on the edge of the couch, Quintus Bland began to feel no end sorry for himself. He was cut off from all human contacts. He was one man against the world. He was not even that. He was an unsightly structure of bones unfit for any strata of society this side of the grave. Also, he was far from sober. He tried to rest his elbows on his knees. The result was not satisfactory. His elbows kept sliding off the bony ridges. When he attempted to clutch his distracted head in his hands, the hollow sound his skull gave forth made him shiver in every bone.

“Firecrackers,” he muttered. “My skull is full of firecrackers. I hate myself from head to foot.”

Perhaps, he mused, if he put on some clothes he might appear more acceptable in the eyes of his fellow men. This might even apply to women, which was much more important. He desperately desired female companionship. He desperately desired his wife, Lorna, but she, the jade, was out somewhere disporting herself licentiously in her black underwear with the lace on it.

This disturbing reflection drove him up from the couch. Women were never able to keep a good thing to themselves. Buy them lovely underthings and they promptly tuck them away for an occasion more interesting than a mere husband. Engaged in these profitless reflections, he passed into the next room. This he found deserted save for a huddled bundle of bedclothing which looked as if it might be concealing an equally huddled body.

Mr. Bland refrained from investigating. In his present condition he felt a little delicate about arousing a slumbering person. The shock might prove too great for an alcoholic heart. Instead he set about searching for his hastily abandoned garments. How terribly things had turned out. Just as he had been about to find consolation in the arms of a beautiful woman this thing had happened. In the twinkling of an eye the beautiful woman had been equally in need of consolation herself. In spite of his unalluring appearance Bland could not help being slightly amused by the memory. What a trying situation. Lulu had accused him of wearing a wig. A wig indeed. For once a woman had been guilty of understatement. No doubt the recollection of her close shave would cure the wench forever of interest in light alliance. But women were hard to discourage. He hoped so.

In the act of dragging his drawers from beneath a pile of clothes Mr. Bland was arrested by the sound of a voice. Considering the circumstances, it was a surprisingly mild voice. It addressed Mr. Bland with the casualness of a boon companion. Even as he listened, the thought flashed through his mind that the speaker must have lived for years in close association with skeletons.

“I beg your pardon,” said the voice. “Would you mind telling me if I am having the disagreeable distinction of watching a skeleton holding a pair of drawers?”

Quintus Bland turned and gazed on the large pale face of a perfect stranger. Written on this innocent countenance was an expression of intense concentration from which all traces of fear were amazingly absent.

“Yes,” replied Mr. Bland. “I’m afraid you are. Why do you ask?”

“Why do I ask?” repeated the man on the bed. “Wouldn’t you ask? Isn’t some small scrap of explanation due me? What, my dear sir, would you do if you were suddenly confronted by a skeleton holding a pair of drawers?”

“I don’t know,” faltered Mr. Bland, “but I don’t think I’d stop long enough to ask many questions.”

“Probably not,” reflected the stranger, “but I’m locked in, and you’re standing between me and that other door.”

“Would you like to leave?” asked Mr. Bland.

“Not if you remain calm,” replied the man. “Not if you act within reason. Of course,” he continued, thoughtfully, “a man in my position doesn’t often run into this sort of thing.”

“Of course not,” agreed Mr. Bland. “There are few positions in which a man does run into this sort of thing.”

“I can’t think of any,” said the stranger. “Not that I haven’t seen lots of bones in my time – a skull here and a thigh there. Once while visiting a museum I was far from pleased by the skeleton of a dinosaur, but he had been extinct for some time, and, I suspect, part of him had been filled in – like a broken fence.”

“I don’t follow you,” remarked Mr. Bland.

“Neither do I,” replied the man. “I rarely if ever do. But please remain reasonable. You are the first real skeleton I’ve ever had any dealings with.”

“Do you mind?” asked Mr. Bland.

“Not at all,” replied the man. “I’m relieved you’re not a pink monkey or a blue dragon or a flock of loathsome reptiles. I’ve seen all of those things in my time, but I like the last least. They upset me terribly.”

“They do me, too,” Mr. Bland agreed. “I think they’re even harder to bear than skeletons, don’t you?”

“Far,” said the stranger. “Much. But you’re not any cinch. Are you a domesticated apparition or do you stalk by night?”

“Tell me,” asked Mr. Bland, “aren’t you more than a little drunk?”

“I am,” admitted the man. “But I don’t know how much more. I’d like to get lots.”

“So would I,” agreed Quintus Bland, and there was no mistaking his sincerity. “I haven’t been a skeleton long, you know.”

“You’ve been one long enough,” declared the stranger. “A little of a skeleton goes a long way with me.”

“You know,” Mr. Bland suggested, “I might look more like myself if I put on some clothes. What do you think?”

“Not knowing what you looked like to begin with,” said the stranger, “it would be hard for me to say.”

“I wasn’t so bad,” Mr. Bland observed rather wistfully.

“You mean, so bad as you are now?” asked the man. “That would hardly be possible. However, if you wear clothes they’d have to be perfectly tailored. And then again you’d have to catch the tailor. Even if you succeeded in cornering him – getting him at bay, so to speak – his hands would be shaking so he’d be quite unable to measure your bones with any degree of accuracy.”

“You do love to run on,” remarked Quintus Bland. “Do you think my old clothes would bag on me?”

“They wouldn’t look smart,” the other replied. “And a man in your position can’t afford to make a bad impression.”

“No,” agreed Mr. Bland. “I should try to look my best. Anything would look better than a skeleton, though.”

“Almost,” admitted the stranger. “Except loathsome reptiles.”

“I daresay my old clothes would fall off my body,” Mr. Bland reflected aloud.

“Your bones,” corrected the man, who was evidently a stickler for accuracy. “You might tie ’em on with bits of string, though. You wouldn’t look exactly natty, but you might succeed through sheer charm. You might even become the vogue.”

“You’re too optimistic,” declared Mr. Bland. “A man in my condition gets scant opportunity to exercise his charm. People don’t wait long enough.”

“I can well understand that,” said the other. “I’m only standing you myself because I might easily be seeing much worse sights – loathsome reptiles, for instance. They always get the best of me.”

“By the way,” Mr. Bland inquired, “speaking of reptiles, have you seen anything of my friends?”

“Have you any friends?” asked the stranger in a surprised voice. “It seems hardly possible.”

“I guess I haven’t,” Bland said, bitterly. “When a man loses his flesh his friends disappear with it.”

“When a man loses as much flesh as you have,” observed the stranger, “more things disappear than friends.”

For a few moments the skeleton and the man considered in silence the various losses sustained by the former. At last the stranger looked up.

“Skeleton,” he asked, “is there a drink in that next room? A little something might do us both a world of good.”

“Don’t call me skeleton,” protested Quintus Bland. “It sounds so bald.”

“But you are bald, skeleton,” the stranger insisted. “You’re about the baldest object I’ve ever seen. There’s not a hair left anywhere. How did you come to die?”

“What!” exclaimed Quintus Bland. “Good God, man, I’m not dead.”

“Oh, aren’t you?” replied the stranger. “I wouldn’t mind if you were, you know. Even that would be better than loathsome reptiles, the appalling creatures. But if you’re not dead, this situation is even odder than I thought. You should be, you know.”

“I almost wish I were,” muttered Mr. Bland.

The stranger on the bed pondered over this for a while.

“Skeleton,” he said at last, “to return once more to that drink: is there any in that next room?”

“I’ll look,” Bland answered, impatiently, “but I do wish you’d stop calling me just simply skeleton like that. It makes me feel so – so removed.”

“Then what shall I call you?” the stranger asked equably.

“My correct name is Bland,” Mr. Bland replied. “Quintus Bland. Possibly you may have heard of me.”

“I have,” declared the stranger. “You’re the photographer chap. Your people took a picture of my wife once. It gave her young ideas.”

“Did it do her justice?” asked Quintus Bland, his professional interest overcoming his low spirits for the moment.

“More than,” said the stranger, briefly. “Much. That picture ruined her morals – not that she ever had any.”

“Sorry,” remarked Mr. Bland. “My wife has young ideas, too.”

“They’re not so good when they get that way,” the man on the bed confided. “And they never seem to realize how silly they’re making themselves as well as their husbands.” He paused to scratch his thin, rather washed-out-looking hair. “Wives are awful, anyway,” he resumed. “I suspect mine is having me incarcerated in here simply because I got too drunk to sit on my chair.”

“It wasn’t a bad idea,” observed Mr. Bland.

“But poorly executed,” replied the stranger. “She should have stood by to keep me company. How do I know what she’s doing?”

“I hate to think of what mine’s doing,” said Mr. Bland somberly. “She left me flat for another man.”

“Is that why you turned to a skeleton?” asked the stranger. “Or did she leave you flat because you had turned to one already?”

“A person can’t turn to a skeleton,” Bland retorted, “just because his wife leaves him flat.”

“I can’t,” admitted the stranger, “but I thought maybe you could – just to spite her, you know.”

“That,” declared Quintus Bland, “would be as bad as cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

“It would be even worse,” commented the stranger. “You’ve cut off lots more than your nose.”

“I’ll look for some drink,” said Mr. Bland a little coldly.

“Do, skeleton, do,” urged the stranger. “If you bring old Whittle a drink he’ll never forget you – not that he ever could.”

“Is that your name?” asked Mr. Bland, pausing in the door to the next room. “Is it Whittle?”

“It is,” admitted the gentleman on the bed. “That’s actually my name, and I think it’s quite a funny one. The first part is Claude, but that’s not so funny. In fact, it’s very disgusting.”

“They’re both funny,” observed Mr. Bland, switching on the light in the adjoining room. “Mine are funny, too. Quintus is a very poor name even for a skeleton.” His voice trailed away as he glanced about the room. “Whittle,” he called out in a happier voice than he had used for some time, “I’ve discovered a whole bottle. We seem to be in luck.”

“We seem to be,” said Mr. Whittle when Bland appeared with the bottle, “but I’m not at all sure. There seems to be someone at that door. Will you see to it?”

Mr. Bland cast a look of pitying contempt at the man on the bed.

“How would you like to open a door in the face of a grinning skull?” he coldly inquired.

“Are you grinning?” asked Mr. Whittle, greatly interested. “Your skull looks awful but expressionless to me.”

“Does it matter?” demanded Bland. “Would you like to have this skull thrust in your face?”

“A thousand times no,” declared Mr. Whittle. “Better that, however, than the skull of a loathsome reptile.”

“To hell with your loathsome reptiles,” clicked Mr. Bland.

“All right,” retorted the man on the bed, childishly annoyed. “I hope yours burn to a crisp.”

The sound of a key turning in the lock took the two gentlemen’s minds off their respective loathsome reptiles. Mr. Bland turned and gazed into the eyes of a strikingly good-looking woman. She was tall and reasonably slim. Studying her somewhat avid lips, Mr. Bland received the impression that there were few experiences of the pleasanter nature that this fair creature had not tried at least once.

“Gracious goodness,” murmured Mr. Whittle, observing the woman’s bellicose expression. “This is much worse than a loathsome reptile, skeleton.”

After glancing chillily for a moment at the two men, the woman advanced into the room, slamming the door behind her.

“Whittle,” she said in a hard flat voice which seems to be automatically endowed upon all wives the moment the ring is on their finger, “Whittle,” she repeated, “what are you doing with this repellent-looking object in your room?”

“Nothing at all, my dear,” mildly replied Mr. Whittle. “Nothing at all. Simply chatting, you know. Don’t you notice anything odd about him – different?”

“Everything’s odd about him,” said the woman. “It’s disgraceful. Can’t I leave you alone for a moment without your taking up with some abominable freak of nature?”

“But,” pursued her husband, hopefully, “aren’t you a little bit scared? He’s a real skeleton, you know – fresh from the grave.”

“Whittle,” said the woman, “you should know me better. Why should I be scared by a measly collection of bones? How did he get in here to begin with?”

“Quite casually,” replied Mr. Whittle. “Just dropped in, you know.”

“You’re incoherent,” she said, briefly; then, turning on Mr. Bland, “Well, sir, what have you to say for yourself?”

“What would you like me to say?” he asked.

“As little as possible,” replied the woman. “I don’t care for the way your teeth click. Is it necessary?”

“Always with skeletons,” said Mr. Bland.

“Then why don’t you return to the morgue,” she demanded, “and pick up some more suitable companions? I can’t have my husband associating with a thing like you – not while he’s still alive, at least, which I hope will not be long.”

“But I’m not dead myself,” objected Quintus Bland. “I’m quite as alive as he is.”

“Which isn’t saying a lot,” she observed. “What have you got in that bottle?”

“Drink,” said Mr. Bland.

“That’s something, at any rate,” the woman conceded. “It would be better if we drank. You’ve nullified the libations of an entire evening.”

“By the way,” interposed the man on the bed, “you two haven’t been properly introduced yet. Mr. Bland, this is Pauline, my wife. Pauline, this is what is left of Mr. Bland, Mr. Quintus Bland. He’s the swagger photographer chappie.”

“He should have a picture of himself now,” observed Pauline Whittle. “If he could induce anybody to take one.”

“I don’t want a picture of myself,” retorted Mr. Bland. “I’d tear it up. However,” he added gallantly, “when I see such a beautiful woman as you I greatly regret so much of my former self is absent.”

“What do you suppose he means by that?” Whittle inquired, uneasily.

“I’d hate to explain,” his wife replied, “but I gather Mr. Bland is not quite as dead as he looks.”

This time she turned with more favor on the skeleton and accepted a drink from the clawlike hand.

“Here’s to the speedy return of my flesh,” proclaimed Mr. Bland, raising his glass aloft.

“What for?” asked Whittle, suspiciously. “Are you by any chance making passes at my wife?”

“Whittle,” said Pauline Whittle, “don’t be jealous of a skeleton. I assure you it’s quite impossible even if I were interested. Mr. Bland is as sexless as a retired madam.”

“I don’t understand how he even sees,” Mr. Whittle replied. “He hasn’t any eyes, yet he doesn’t miss a trick.”

“What do you use for eyes, Mr. Bland?” asked Pauline. “There isn’t one in your head.”

“Search me,” replied Mr. Bland.

“That wouldn’t be hard,” put in Whittle, “but it would be damned unpleasant.”

“I know,” thoughtfully agreed Pauline, “if this skeleton has invisible eyes he may all be present though unseen.”

“Are you interested?” asked her husband, coldly.

“Not greatly,” retorted his wife. “I was merely wondering about it, that’s all.”

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” replied Whittle. “It’s hardly a proper line of speculation for a married woman, or a single one, for that matter.”

“Well, one would like to know where one has one’s skeleton,” remarked Pauline Whittle.

“You don’t need to have him by anything,” snapped her husband. “Leave him entirely alone.”

“Let’s have another drink,” Quintus Bland suggested. “I object to this conversation.”

“So do I,” agreed Mr. Whittle. “Isn’t it just like a woman? Never willing to let well enough alone.”

“But I don’t see what’s so well enough about him,” Pauline objected. “As far as I can see he’s a sheer waste of time.”

“Your wife appears to possess a romantic disposition,” Mr. Bland observed dryly.

“The correct word is ‘bawdy,’ ” replied Mr. Whittle. “Romance to her is strictly horizontal.”

“How would you have it?” asked Mr. Bland.

“Oh, don’t ask me,” snapped the man on the bed irritably. “You’re both lewd persons. Don’t go on about it.”

“I’m not usually lewd,” observed Mr. Bland, “but being a skeleton seems to bring out the worst that’s in me.”

“What’s in you?” Pauline Whittle asked quickly.

“Mr. Bland,” interposed her husband, “she’s lower than a loathsome reptile. Will you please pull some trousers over those fleshless legs of yours? They seem to be exerting some obscene influence over this bestial wife of mine. I’m so glad I’m sober.”

Pauline Whittle laughed coarsely.

“None of us is sober,” she cried, taking another drink. “Let’s jump in bed with Blandie.”

“You must be drunk,” said her husband, “if you can even entertain the idea of jumping into bed with that.”

“I mean you, too,” Pauline explained. “En masse like – you know – loathsome reptiles together.”

“Oh, you’re very drunk,” declared Mr. Whittle. “Very drunk indeed. What difference would that make?”

“That’s up to you,” said Pauline. “Couldn’t we huddle up together and leave the world behind?”

“Hear me,” declared Mr. Whittle in a decided tone of voice. “If I huddle up with that skeleton I’d leave more than the world behind.”

At this the skeleton giggled. It was a peculiar sound.

“Then let’s yank on his trousers,” suggested Mrs. Whittle.

“They wouldn’t stay on,” said Mr. Bland.

“Then a necktie would,” put in Pauline. “It would dangle from his spine.”

“Wouldn’t that spoil the effect?” asked her husband.

“Not as much as trousers,” observed his wife. “If you yank trousers on that skeleton you’ll be spoiling one of the most astonishing effects I’ve ever witnessed.”

“But I fully intend to get dressed all over,” Quintus Bland assured them. “From head to foot.”

“What about your face?” asked Mr. Whittle. “No matter how smartly dressed you are, that face will cause a panic.”

“Why not put a mask over it?” suggested his wife.

“A pillowcase would be better,” said Mr. Whittle. “A pillowcase with slits for his funny eyes.”

“It would cover his lower jaw,” agreed Pauline, “and, God knows, that jaw needs covering.”

“Sometimes when it wags at me,” solemnly observed Mr. Whittle, “I feel too discouraged to answer.”

“It’s good we don’t mind this skeleton,” declared his wife. “I mean not much. I like him because he’s so unattainable.”

The whisky which Mr. Bland had been drinking so copiously now began to manifest itself in tears. He was deeply touched by the friendship of these two strangers. At the same time he was sorry for himself. Silently the tears streamed down his bony face. With intense interest his two companions concentrated their blunted faculties on the sobbing skeleton. Even in this fuddled condition this phenomenon was somewhat baffling.

“Where do they come from,” Pauline asked in a hushed voice, “all those tears? I don’t see any ducts.”

“Ducks?” inquired her husband, stupidly. “What’s all this about ducks?”

“There’s nothing at all about ducks,” said his wife. “There are no ducks.”

“I didn’t ask for any ducks in the first place,” Mr. Whittle replied in a hurt voice. “A tearful skeleton is quite enough to bear.”

“I said ducts, not ducks,” Pauline Whittle retorted.

“Oh,” exclaimed Mr. Whittle. “You mean tear ducts. They haven’t any feathers.” For a moment he considered Mr. Bland. “You know,” he resumed, “this skeleton is more versatile than I thought. If he has hidden ducts – I mean, if tears can come out of his eyes – he might have other ducts and things concealed about his person. He might even – —”

“Please,” protested Mr. Bland. “For goodness’ sake, don’t go on.”

Having thus rebuked Mr. Whittle’s sordid curiosity, Quintus Bland arose and walked with a certain show of dignity from the room. The man on the bed looked significantly at his wife.

After an interval, Mr. Bland, swaying slightly in his gait, returned to the room.

“Well?” inquired Mr. Whittle.

The skeleton nodded briefly.

“I must have,” was all he said, “or something.”

“How intriguing,” murmured Pauline Whittle.

“It shouldn’t be to you,” snapped Mr. Whittle. “Don’t think about it.”

“I can’t help myself,” said Pauline, simply.

“Please pass that bottle and stop discussing my probable parts,” Mr. Bland cut in, reprovingly. “I find it most disconcerting.”

“Then tell me,” asked Mrs. Whittle, “do you like to dance?”

“In my present mood I’d like to do anything,” he told her.

“Well, see that you stop at dancing,” said Mr. Whittle.

“For the present, at least,” agreed Pauline. “One must grow acclimated to a skeleton; even to such a gifted one as Mr. Bland. Would one call him a skeleton of parts?”

“I wouldn’t,” replied Mr. Whittle, “but I daresay you would, and consider yourself amusing.”

“Shall I get dressed now?” asked Mr. Bland.

“We’ll help you,” replied Pauline.

“He’ll need it,” said Mr. Whittle, rising from the bed.

They put shoes on Mr. Bland’s feet and stuffed them to fit with old pieces of paper.

Mr. Whittle was busy strapping the trousers round Mr. Bland’s thighbones.

“I think they call this the pelvis,” observed Whittle. “It looks like a pelvis.”

“Don’t waste any more time naming me,” protested Mr. Bland. “You’re not giving a lecture on the bony structure of man.”

Next came the shirt and collar. The coat was held sketchily in place by bits of string. Finally a pillowcase with slits in it was dropped over his head.

“There,” exclaimed Pauline, stepping back to observe the results of their joint efforts. “You don’t look much like a man, I’ll confess, but no one would know you were a skeleton unless some woman gets too friendly.”

Whittle dubiously shook his head.

“That hardly seems possible,” he said.

“You can’t be sure,” replied his wife. “Some women are morbidly attracted by sheer horror.”

“Thank you both so much,” cut in Quintus Bland, acidly. “After all your kind words I won’t even trouble about looking at myself in the glass. Is the bottle empty?”

“It is,” replied Pauline.

“And you emptied it,” said her husband. “Let’s go.”

Taking the weird figure by either arm, they proceeded unsteadily towards the door. Here Mr. Bland halted.

“I haven’t any drawers on,” he said.

“Neither have I,” Pauline informed him, “and you don’t hear me complaining.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Panic in a Night Club

To think,” breathed Mr. Whittle in the hallway, his mild eyes growing round with realization, “to think,” he continued, “that we’re actually going to sit at a table with a real live skeleton. It should be enough, my dear, to make us forget our differences. It should draw us together – sort of, what?”

“I don’t know about that,” vouchsafed Pauline, “but if Quinnie falls down that flight of stairs nothing will draw him together. He’ll resemble a jigsaw puzzle.”

Mr. Bland shuddered at this and pictured himself in fragments. It was not inspiriting. His clutch tightened on the banister.

“And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men,” cheerfully quoted Mr. Whittle.

“Wouldn’t dare approach him,” announced Pauline. “Quinnie is the very antithesis of Humpty Dumpty. More awful.”

“Yet equally fragile,” commented Mr. Whittle.

“I can’t understand how some persons can be so callous,” observed Mr. Bland, “so utterly blind to the misery of others. In fact, they seem to enjoy it.”

“We’re not enjoying you,” Pauline Whittle answered him. “We’re doing our darnedest to tolerate you. And that takes some doing.”

Suddenly Mr. Bland stopped and stood swaying perilously on the stairs as he held up for their inspection a pair of bony hands.

“My poor hands,” he muttered brokenly. “My poor, poor hands. Look at them.”

“They’re awful,” admitted Mr. Whittle. “Don’t rattle them under my nose.”

“And my trousers,” continued Bland. “They feel as if they were going to drop off at every step. What if they did?”

“What if they do?” replied Pauline. “It would take an expert to establish your sex.”

“It’s his pelvis,” explained Mr. Whittle. “In life he must have been able to whirl on a dime.”

“In life!” exclaimed Quintus Bland. “Hang it all, man, I keep telling you I’m far from dead.”

“Perhaps you’re not as far as you think,” Mrs. Whittle remarked enigmatically. “You’ve merely anticipated the worm.”

Once more Mr. Bland shuddered.

“And,” he said, bitterly, turning on the woman, “as far as my sex is concerned, I wish you’d leave it entirely alone.”

“I don’t want any part of it,” Pauline emphatically assured him.

“Oh, very well,” replied Mr. Bland, a trifle tiffed by this unflattering announcement. “If that’s the way you feel about it, we’ll let my sex drop.”

“Can’t you two ever stop bickering about sex?” Mr. Whittle complained, wearily. “Let’s get on with it. I’m parched for a drink.”

“So am I,” agreed his wife. “Perhaps if we feed this skeleton he might begin to grow some flesh.”

“But what about my hands and trousers?” persisted Quintus Bland.

“I have it!” exclaimed Mr. Whittle. “If he put his hands in his pockets and sort of sauntered carelessly – you know, lounged along – he’d be able to hold up his pants and at the same time hide his hands. Two birds with one stone.”

“Whittle,” said his wife, an unfamiliar note of approval in her voice, “I never suspected I’d accept any suggestion coming from you, but that one is almost inspired. Try it, Mr. Bland.”

The fleshless photographer balanced himself carefully against the banister and thrust his hands in the pockets of his trousers.

“How’s that?” he asked, a little self-consciously.

“Terrible,” replied Pauline Whittle. “Simply awful. It won’t work at all. The absence of your stomach becomes much too apparent.” She snapped open her handbag and produced a pair of white wash gloves. “Here,” she continued. “Try these on. You look so unusual already, it really doesn’t matter what you wear.”

“Women’s gloves,” muttered Bland, unhappily, as he slipped them over his fleshless fingers. “To think I have come to this. How do the damned things look?”

Once more he held up his hands for their inspection.

“It’s the final touch,” said Mr. Whittle. “It makes the whole world mad. Let’s proceed.”

By careful if critical stages they descended the stairs and stood in the door of the dining room. At one end was a long bar in full blast. In the middle of the room lay a small polished surface upon which a number of men and women were engaged in making a public demonstration of a strictly private operation. Shrill, meaningless laughter cut through a hanging pall of smoke. The ceiling was low and the voices were high. The results of the Noble Experiment were being consumed openly and in great gulps.

“You know,” said Mr. Bland in a low voice, “when I watch all those people swigging down that poison I understand why this country is called the land of the free and the home of the brave. It takes guts to do it.”

“That’s what puzzles me about you,” replied Pauline. “I don’t see where you put it. You haven’t any – —”

“Don’t go on,” Mr. Bland interrupted with dignity. “We’ll let them drop, too, together with my sex.”

The entrance of the Whittles, flanking the extraordinary figure of Mr. Bland, did not pass unnoticed. In their vicinity conversation died down. The diners at the tables became all eyes. At a table in the far corner of the room Mr. Bland’s previous companions sat up and considered the figure apprehensively.

“Gord,” breathed Lulu, penetrating Mr. Bland’s disguise. “It’s his nibs. If he happens to catch sight of us he might try to pull some funny stuff.”

“That guy,” declared Flora, “couldn’t pull anything funny if he tried, but he might pull something very, very nasty.”

“That’s what I mean,” said Lulu. “It wouldn’t take much from him to make me throw a fit. Wonder who his playmates are?”

“Don’t know,” replied Crawford, moodily, “but they’ve shown more courage than we did. After all, old Quintus is a friend of ours, with or without flesh. We should have stuck by him.”

In the meantime, while the ethics of their treatment of Mr. Bland was under discussion, Bland himself was busy with his trousers, which were showing an alarming inclination to make startling revelations. Fortunately this difficulty so occupied his thoughts that he was momentarily unaware of his surroundings and the unpleasant impression he was making on all beholders. While Pauline was regarded with admiration, the glances directed at him were eloquent with astonishment and disgust. Mr. Whittle was scarcely observed at all. He was merely another male of indifferent aspect.

However, he appeared to have a way with head waiters, an irreproachable specimen of which immaculate clan imperturbably escorted them to a highly desirable table on the border of the gleaming dance floor. Mr. Bland tenderly lowered himself into a chair and peered unhappily at life through his pillowcase.

“Why didn’t he put us out there right in the middle of the floor?” he asked ungraciously. “Then everyone could have had a look.”

“Don’t mind him,” Pauline explained smoothly to Charles, the head waiter. “He’s paying off an election bet, and I, for one, think he’s showing a very mean spirit about it.”

“He could be showing much worse,” observed her husband.

The head waiter smiled sympathetically.

“If you’ll pardon me,” he murmured, “I can hardly blame the gentleman. I have never seen anything quite equal to it before. His costume is most impressive.”

“The man means revolting,” snapped Quintus Bland. “I know how I look.”

“I doubt if his mother would know him,” said Mr. Whittle.

“I doubt if she’d care to,” said his wife, Pauline.

“Not even his wife would know him,” continued Mr. Whittle.

“In a place like this,” remarked Charles, “there are certain advantages in that.”

Pauline let her gaze drift round the tables circling the dance floor. Finally it rested on a couple occupying a table directly opposite them.

“Charles,” she said to the head waiter, “who is that small good-looking blonde on the other side of the floor?”

But Charles was never given the opportunity to answer. Mr. Bland, having followed the direction of Pauline’s casual gaze, had half risen from his chair. In his need for emotional expression his teeth were clicking together like a sewing machine in full cry. It was a terrible exhibition. Even Charles, as accustomed as he was to terrible exhibitions, felt himself deeply moved. Mr. Bland, apparently stifling for lack of breath, was clutching frantically at the pillowcase in a mad endeavor to bare his skull to the world. Equally determined that no such horrifying revelation should be made, Pauline Whittle and her husband were clinging grimly to the edges of the pillowcase, and so successful were their joint efforts that, by the sheer weight of their bodies, Quintus Bland was borne off center and crumpled clatteringly back in his chair. There he sat puffing, panting, and chattering so vigorously that the pillowcase billowed and surged like a sail flapping in a stiff breeze.

“By God,” he gibbered at last, “that woman’s my wife, and she’s wearing black underwear with lace on it.”

“Look here,” said Pauline, “in addition to your other quaint ways, have you also X-ray eyes? How do you know she’s wearing black underwear with lace on it?”

“She told me so herself,” muttered Mr. Bland.

“But couldn’t she have changed her underwear?” Mr. Whittle inquired mildly. “People do, you know.”

“Don’t quibble,” snapped Mr. Bland. “I’m going to polish off that chap with her. His name is Phil Harkens.”

“Remember your pelvis,” warned Mr. Whittle. “You don’t want to lose your pants.”

“To hell with my pants and my pelvis,” retorted Mr. Bland.

“Do you feel that way about them when you’re a whole man?” asked Pauline Whittle.

“What’s that to you?” was the discourteous reply.

“Is there anything I can do?” put in Charles in a polished but puzzled voice.

“Yes,” said Mr. Whittle. “Six double brandies, Charles. My friend has a bit of a chill.”

“Has he also a cold in his head?” asked Charles, looking thoughtfully at the pillowcase.

“Yes,” replied Pauline, “and the poor thing is as bald as a bat. We have to keep him out of drafts.”

“By rights,” said Mr. Whittle, “he should be home and in bed.”

“By rights,” amended his wife in a low voice, “he should be moldering in his grave.”

“Enough of that,” clicked Mr. Bland. “I’ll murder the whole room – everybody!”

“What a man,” said Whittle feebly. “I fear for the success of our evening.”

“As long as that sheik of the suburbs is with my wife,” asserted Mr. Bland, “the evening is busted wide open.”

With a clever, appraising scrutiny, Pauline Whittle considered the gentleman under discussion.

“Can’t say that I blame you,” she commented at last. “I know the type. He’s one of those strong, confident men, the overpowering sort. If there’s a springboard handy he’ll swan-dive and jackknife for you ad nauseam. I hate their guts, myself.”

“Pauline,” interposed her husband, “are you deliberately trying to egg our friend on?”

“No,” replied Pauline, “but I wouldn’t much mind.”

“He owns an airplane,” said Quintus, moodily. “I haven’t any airplanes.”

“Neither have we,” Pauline told him, soothingly. “But, of course, he would have one – the rugged bum.”

“Pauline,” protested her husband, “your language – it’s lousy.”

“I’ll endeavor to model it after yours,” said Pauline, sweetly.

While this marital exchange was in progress, Quintus Bland relaxed a little in his chair, but his gaze still remained fixed on his wife and her hateful companion. She was the prettiest woman in the room, he decided. There was no doubt about that. Why did they always have to quarrel so? he wondered. And why did she have to bring home that objectionable daub of a cow in convulsions? That painting had started all the fireworks. Had it not been for that shocking example of bad taste they might still be at home together, enjoying a pleasant evening. For his part, he did not want any other woman. He was perfectly satisfied with her, provided that she revised both her habits and her temperament a little. Then he suddenly remembered his condition. A feeling of utter hopelessness overcame him. He would have to revise himself more than a little to be acceptable in the eyes of Lorna. Even his dog would object to him, not to mention that passionate maid, Fanny. As he watched his wife through the pillowcase, the conviction was gradually borne in on him that she was not having the jolliest of evenings. Even a stranger could tell that the couple were not hitting it off any too well together. Phil Harkens, a splendidly proportioned he-man with glossy dark brown hair, was talking to Lorna with the confidence and complacency begotten of his awareness of his strength and beauty. Lorna was doing her best to look as if she were listening while thinking of other things. From her politely bored expression it was not difficult to gather she was finding the deception irksome. Of course, had the lady been aware of the fact that her husband was observing her from across the way, she would have fawned upon her companion, hung on his slightest word; but believing, as she did, that she was no longer able to torment her long-legged mate, the situation was robbed of its spice. After an evening spent in the company of Phil Harkens she was beginning to realize that he was God’s own gift to hard-pressed matrons who were themselves overanxious to give. Lorna was growing up. She longed to return home and have even a better fight with her husband. In spite of his faults, there was something different about him, something that set him apart from other men. She suspected it was an inherited streak of madness. A reminiscent smile momentarily touched her lips. She was hearing her husband saying, “And not content with that, I disembowel the beast …” What a fool. The smile faded. She was sorry she had left him flat. In walking out on him she had taken an unfair advantage. It would have been more loyal to stay at home and fight it out to a finish. She would have won anyway. She always did. He was such a simple-minded dolt she could always confuse the issue without his realizing the fact.

“Pardon me,” she said sweetly to Harkens, “it’s so noisy here. What were you saying?”

“I was saying,” replied Harkens, “that a husband is a fool to expect a beautiful woman to confine herself entirely to him. It just isn’t being done. Wives are waking up.”

“How true. How true,” murmured Lorna. “All over the world wives are waking up. Some of them are even getting up, don’t you think?”

“And returning home to virtuous couches,” said Harkens with a nasty grin.

Observing this grin, Mr. Bland grunted unpleasantly in his pillowcase.

“She’s having tough sledding,” he said to his companions. “The trouble with that woman is, she doesn’t realize she adores me.”

“That’s the trouble with all wives after the first few months,” Mr. Whittle heavily asserted. “Take Pauline here. She’s mad about me, simply mad. If I died, I doubt if she’d every marry again. It would be a terrible blow to her. As it is, though, the poor creature isn’t intelligent enough to analyze her own emotions.”

With pitying contempt in her eyes, Pauline regarded the speaker.

“Not excluding this ass of a skeleton,” she said with great clarity, “I have the most repellent and all-around worthless husband yet unpoisoned. An error,” she added, “I hope to rectify at the earliest possible moment.”

“Don’t trouble yourself, my dear,” declared Whittle with a bland smile as he reached for a double brandy. “I’ll poison myself for you – pleasantly. Here’s to your weeds.”

One gulp and the brandy was gone. Pauline followed his example. Before they were able to stop him, Mr. Bland had raised his pillowcase and tossed a drink through his fleshless lips. A girl at the next table emitted a low, gurgling gasp of horror, then slid from her chair to the floor.

Mr. Bland cocked his pillowcase in the direction of the crumpled body and peered at it through the slits.

“What did she want to pop off like that for?” he asked the Whittles. “Makes me nervous to have women popping off. Wonder what’s the matter with the poor creature.”

“You are,” said Pauline coldly.

“What do you mean?” Mr. Bland demanded.

“The next time you take a drink,” the lady explained rather wearily, “please be so good as to slip it up under the pillowcase instead of disclosing to the world that shocking object that serves for a head.”

“Oh,” muttered Quintus Bland, a trifle taken back, “was that what did it? I didn’t realize.”

This time, when he took his brandy, he followed Pauline’s advice. His white-gloved hand, clutching the glass, disappeared under the pillowcase, which for a moment became a thing of life, then the hand and glass reappeared. From the pillowcase came the muffled sound of lips being smacked as if in satisfaction.

“That’s good,” grunted Quintus Bland. “Get some more.”

“What I’d like to know,” said Mr. Whittle, addressing himself to his wife, “is how he can smack his lips when he hasn’t any lips to smack?”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you there,” Mrs. Whittle told her husband, “but I wish he wouldn’t do it.”

“Don’t know how I did it myself,” Mr. Bland informed them. “Just felt like smacking my lips and there you are. That’s all there is to it. They smacked.”

“We heard them,” said Pauline Whittle, briefly.

The young lady who had been privileged to catch a glimpse of Mr. Bland’s skull had by this time been restored to her chair. She was now reclining limply in it, her eyes studiously averted from the hooded figure at the next table. She told things to her escort in a low strained voice which, nevertheless, conveyed conviction. When this gentleman had heard the reason for her sudden collapse, he drank deeply, then drank again. With an expression of resolution, he turned to Mr. Whittle.

“Pardon me,” said the gentleman, “but may I ask if that – er – synthetic-looking object under the pillowcase is real or just fun? What I mean to say, is it alive?”

“Unfortunately it is,” replied Mr. Whittle, “and it’s no fun. But why do you ask?”

“Well,” continued the gentleman in a troubled voice, “this young lady says there’s a skull under that pillowcase. That’s why she fainted, she claims. It grinned at her – horribly.”

The pillowcase suddenly became agitated, and a voice issued therefrom.

“It’s a lie,” said the voice. “A lie. I couldn’t grin if I tried. I can’t even smirk.”

“How much has the lady been drinking?” asked Mr. Whittle, with an uncalled-for lack of tact.

Naturally this remark was not well received by the lady’s companion. His troubled expression was replaced by one of intense hostility.

“Do you mean to imply that this young lady has been drinking too much?” he demanded.

“That would be the more charitable view to take of her astonishing allegation,” replied Mr. Whittle with the courage of two double brandies. “Otherwise she must be insane – plain crazy.”

The young lady’s defender stiffened in his chair. His eyes began to boggle with anger. Chivalry was gripped tightly in his large fists. Mr. Whittle watched these warlike manifestations with a kindling eye.

“Come on. Come on,” he challenged. “Hit me a crack. I’d love it.”

At this stage in the controversy Quintus Bland deemed it necessary to intervene. Leaning over to the unreasonably enraged Whittle, he rapped him sharply on the shoulder.

“Ugh,” came from Mr. Whittle as he shrank back. “Don’t do that. Don’t do it. Your fingers are like rivets.”

“I’ll handle this little matter,” Bland told him with great composure. “That person will have to answer to me for his unwarranted conduct. Observe.”

Both Pauline Whittle and her husband did observe. They were well rewarded for the restraint they placed on their own actions. Yet what Mr. Bland did was in no way spectacular. He merely removed his gloves and shook his fleshless fingers in the face of the gentleman at the next table. From beneath the pillowcase issued a succession of low, hollow groans mingling with the chattering of teeth. Even the imperturbable Pauline admitted later that she had never heard a more depressing sound.

On this occasion it was the young lady’s escort who slid from his chair to the floor, but he didn’t even want to gurgle. One shocked, petrified look at those crazily shaking hands had started him on his downward course. The groan had finished him off. As he slid from his chair his girl friend with a choking gasp tossed the tablecloth over her head and followed him to the floor, upon which both bodies lay inert. Having more than achieved his purpose, Mr. Bland delicately adjusted the gloves on his talon-like fingers, then dashed off another brandy.

“How’s that for a mere skeleton?” he asked, unable to repress a note of pride.

“Pretty darned good, I’d say,” replied Mr. Whittle. “I’m glad you’re on our side, because if you’d done that to me I’d be on the floor, too.”

Naturally, this little diversion did not pass unnoticed. A score of guests were peering stupidly at the fallen couple. Charles, the head waiter, was doing his stuff in another corner of the room. Even from the back of his neck one could tell he was smiling ingratiatingly and suggesting champagne. However, when he faced about at the whispered summons of a waiter, perturbation had replaced the smile. Swiftly he moved to the center of interest, where he stood looking down at the prostrate figures, a puzzled expression in his eyes. He had a dim suspicion that this unfortunate incident was in some way associated with that weird hooded figure at the next table. For a moment Charles was rattled. Seldom if ever had he seen a couple pass out simultaneously. Could it be a suicide pact? He glanced at the Whittles’ table, to discover that Mr. Whittle was alone in his glory. His wife and the hooded figure were behaving queerly on the dance floor. Before Charles could think of anything useful to say, Mr. Whittle spoke impressively.

“Charles,” he said, “isn’t it about time you removed those objectionable persons? They have done their best to make our evening decidedly uncomfortable. Why don’t you drag ’em out?”

“Sorry, Mr. Whittle,” replied Charles, deferentially, “I had no idea they were getting that way. I’ll have the bodies removed at once. Are they alive?”

The bodies themselves answered the question. The man sat up and looked fearfully about him, then, extending a shaking hand, violently shook the young lady.

“It’s gone,” he said in an unsteady voice. “Come on. Let’s hurry.”

The girl opened her eyes, uttered a piercing shriek, then flung herself on the man who, in his weakened and nervous condition, fell back on the floor with a gasp.

“What’s gone?” asked the distracted Charles.

“Is this any time to ask questions?” the man managed to get out as he floundered on the floor. “Take this woman off me. She’s trying to crawl into one of my pockets.”

With the aid of several waiters the two struggling bodies were lifted from the floor and placed on the perpendicular, which they maintained with the utmost difficulty.

“Where is he?” asked the young lady. “Or whatever it was. Where is it?”

“Will you kindly explain, madam?” Charles almost pleaded.

“The man with the skeleton hands,” said the girl. “He moaned and chattered his teeth.”

At this moment a wild cry from the dance floor turned all eyes in that direction. Incredulously, they beheld the rear view of the hooded figure frantically endeavoring to pull a pair of trousers up over a bony structure which Mr. Whittle had dubbed a pelvis.

“It has more than skeleton hands,” one onlooker remarked with a crude chuckle. “That object has a skeleton – —”

The end of his observation was drowned in a babble of voices, which was just as well for those who objected to calling a spade a spade.

“What is it, Charles?” asked the lady. “What can it be?”

“Madam,” he replied, wearily, “how should I know? I have never seen anything like it before.”

“I hope never to see anything like it again,” another voice declared emphatically, “as God is my judge.”

In the meantime Quintus Bland was having troubles of his own. So was Pauline Whittle. She was vainly struggling to drag her partner from the glaring publicity of the dance floor.

“Don’t pull me like that,” Mr. Bland was pleading. “If these trousers trip me up I’ll smash to powder.”

“I wish to God you would,” Pauline assured him. “I’d love to blow you into oblivion.”

Even in his dire circumstances Mr. Bland felt a thrill of horror. The possibility was by no means remote. How could this woman think of such things at a time like this?

“It’s the knot,” he explained. “Can’t you see? We can’t yank the trousers up without untying the knot.”

“How do you mean we?” Pauline demanded. “I wouldn’t drag my husband’s trousers up, let alone a relative stranger’s, and a skeleton’s, at that.”

“You don’t have to go into it so,” protested Mr. Bland. “Just untie the knot. I’ll drag them up.”

With hands that trembled, Pauline Whittle grimly attempted to loosen the knot which was located just below her partner’s pelvis.

“I mustn’t go mad,” she muttered. “I must remember to keep calm. Do stop clicking your kneebones together.”

“I can’t,” replied Mr. Bland. “Never have I been so nervous.”

“Whee!” said Pauline Whittle as another thought struck her. “Wouldn’t it be shocking if you got your body back now?”

Mr. Bland stepped backward and snatched at his trousers.

“Don’t come near me,” he pleaded. “Keep your hands to yourself. I won’t have you fumbling about with such depraved ideas in your mind.”

With a convulsive wriggle of his pelvis, which brought a gasp from the spectators, Mr. Bland succeeded in shifting his trousers back into place. Holding himself rather girlishly by the waist, he walked towards his table with as much dignity as he could muster under the circumstances. Mrs. Whittle trailed behind. No one attempted to interrupt Mr. Bland’s progress. He seated himself in his chair, and Pauline followed his example.

“Rather a lively dance,” commented her husband. “When he wriggled his pelvis into his pants I thought he was doing the rumba.”

It was at this moment that heaven-sent inspiration descended upon Charles, the prince of head waiters.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “let me introduce to you Señor Toledo, the world’s most baffling magician.”

With a graceful sweep of his arm, he bowed to Quintus Bland, sitting dumbfounded in his chair.

There was general handclapping throughout the room, mingled with cries of approval.

“Don’t let me down,” Charles whispered. “Would you mind giving them a bow?”

“Clever of you, Charles,” murmured Pauline; then, turning to her recent partner, she added, “That will explain everything. Go on, Quinnie, and make a nice bow.”

Snapping down another brandy, Mr. Bland rose with reluctance and bowed to his admiring audience. Unfortunately the knot that Pauline had loosened took this opportunity to become untied entirely, with the result that Mr. Bland’s pelvis was once more on public view. He sat down abruptly and busied himself with the string. The spectators, thinking it was all a part of the show, cheered enthusiastically.

“Why does Señor Toledo show only his middle section?” a voice called out.

“Oh,” replied Charles suavely, “the Señor thought it would be more convincing.”

“You mean more indecent,” another voice rang out.

“Señor Toledo should be ashamed of himself,” announced a lady. “What a way for a magician.”

“But what has the Señor to be ashamed of, madam?” Charles inquired, with a significant tilt to his shoulders.

“That’s just the point,” contributed the lady’s escort. “This young lady means that Señor Toledo should be ashamed because – —”

“I meant nothing of the kind,” retorted the young lady, indignantly.

“Well,” replied Charles, a trifle disconcerted as he observed Señor Toledo writhing in his chair, “it would be better not to go too deeply into all that. Later, perhaps, the good Señor will show us even more.”

“I’ve seen quite enough already,” a gentleman declared. “That’s no way for a world-famous magician to act. He might get away with it in Spain but not in the U. S. A.”

Charles turned gratefully to Mr. Bland, slapped him heartily upon the shoulder, then, uttering a low cry of pain, examined his tingling fingers. With a startled look at the hooded figure, he made a formal bow, hurried down the long room, and disappeared through the service doorway. There was certainly something radically wrong with the physical composition of Señor Toledo. He fervently hoped that his strange guest would not attempt any further and more elaborate exhibitions. In this Charles was doomed to disappointment, for even while he was breathing this hope to the patron saint of all well-deserving head waiters, trouble was brewing at the Whittles’ table. To be strictly accurate, trouble had already brewed. This trouble was caused by a resounding slap administered by Lorna Bland upon the beautiful burnished face of Mr. Phil Harkens. She was about to deliver another one when Harkens, smiling tolerantly, caught Lorna’s wrist, twisting it so deftly that she was rendered impotent with pain and anger. A sharp little cry escaped her lips as she helplessly looked about her.

Quintus Bland, who had been jumping spasmodically in his chair during the first part of this engagement, sprang to his feet at the sound of his wife’s cry and instinctively tossed off his coat. Not content with ridding himself of this encumbrance, he violently discarded his pillowcase and trousers, thus disclosing himself to the world for what he was, a skeleton in ill-fitting shoes and gloves.

Quintus Bland was truly a heart-chilling object. His bones seemed to snap and crackle with the venom and potency of his fury. For the first time since the change had occurred he gloried in the fact that he was a horrible-looking skeleton. Even the Whittles, who up to that moment had thought they had seen him at his worst, pushed back their chairs from the table and regarded their friend in alarm. Here was a force more difficult to deal with than a tidal wave or an earthquake. Once more the young lady and her escort at the next table slid unprotestingly to the floor. Cries of horror and astonishment rose from all parts of the room. Various inebriated gentlemen stamped on the floor vigorously and shouted words of drunken encouragement to Señor Toledo, the world’s most famous magician.

Heedless of the panic he was creating, the Señor clumped recklessly across the dance floor. That he was far gone in double brandies in no way impeded his progress. If anything, the brandies had given him confidence. He no longer cared whether or not he dashed himself to fragments. His sole purpose in life was to destroy utterly and forever the body and person of Phil Harkens. As he hurried across the floor, couples preparing to dance scattered before him, the orchestra found itself unable to draw an effective breath and stopped on a series of shuddering wails. Diners rose from their tables and huddled against the walls of the room. Several women fainted and lay forgotten on the floor. Their escorts had troubles of their own.

Quintus Bland, however, was blind to all this. The smug, tolerant smile on Phil Harkens’s lips alone attracted his gaze. And even though the smile became glazed and fixed with horror as the skeleton neared the table, it was just as hateful to Quintus Bland. Luckily for Lorna’s nerves as well as for her reason, she was far too angry with her escort to be bothered much by the sudden and infuriated appearance of a mere skeleton. She was interested but not alarmed. Having lived for years with a long, gangling structure of skin and bones, she saw little to choose between her husband and Señor Toledo. The difference was merely one of degree – a matter of a few pounds.

Mr. Bland now stood towering over the unhappy Mr. Harkens, who had half risen from his chair. He was still clinging to Lorna’s wrist, but now he was clinging to it for comfort and protection. Stretching his bones to the limit of their expansion, Mr. Bland drew the glove from his left hand and slapped Phil Harkens with it across his mouth. As the man collapsed in his chair, a fleshless hand grasped him by the throat, and five relentless talons dug into his flesh.

“Take your hand from that woman’s wrist,” Bland commanded, grinding his teeth to add effectiveness to his words. “Down to the grave you come with me to molder with the worms.”

There had been wild cries before in the room that night, but none to equal in earnestness and volume the cry that tore itself from Mr. Harkens’s tortured throat when he heard about moldering with the worms. He could not conceive of a more unalluring prospect. In his anxiety to escape the talons clawing at his neck, his chair toppled over backwards with a crash and he found himself floundering on the floor with a gibbering skeleton on top of him. With a desperate effort he wriggled free from the clutches of the skeleton, scrambled sobbing to his feet, and staggered to the nearest door. This led to the kitchens of the establishment, in which pandemonium broke out immediately upon the devastating arrival of Mr. Bland.

“Mon Dieu!” shrilled Henri, the chef. “Señor Toledo outdoes himself. I part for my life.”

And that was exactly what everyone else proceeded to do in various directions. Trays were dropped by waiters, and pots by underchefs. There was the sound of crashing dishes and the babble of foreign tongues.

In the midst of this confusion, Mr. Bland paused and looked about for Harkens. That worthy gentleman was nowhere in sight.

“Where is he?” cried Bland. “Somebody tell me where he is.”

“He parted through the porte,” came the voice of Henri from behind an overturned table, “also as if for his life.”

Snatching up a carving knife, Quintus Bland ran jerkily to a door that gave to a backyard from which an alley ran out to the street. Down this alley Phil Harkens was speeding as if pursued by all the demons in hell. Mr. Bland halted his impassioned pursuit and stood watching the fleeing figure until it had disappeared from view, then he turned slowly back into the yard. Finding a rude bench he sat down and gazing up at the dark sky, rested after his labors. He felt coldly indifferent now about the fate of Phil Harkens. After all, it had not been the man’s fault so much as Lorna’s. Harkens had merely answered her summons. Any man would be a fool to overlook such an opportunity. Bland felt almost sorry he had been so rude to Harkens, but then again he should not have manhandled Lorna. Quintus Bland felt sick, tired and disgusted. His head was dizzy, the roof of his mouth parched. It had been the worst evening in his life. Had he not turned to a skeleton in the nick of time, he might be sitting there now, an unfaithful husband. He almost wished he were one. Lorna deserved to be taught a lesson. She was too damned headstrong. He very much wanted a drink, but he had no desire to return to the restaurant.

“Somebody bring me a bottle of brandy,” he shouted.

Henri, who had emerged from behind his barricade, promptly produced a bottle and handed it to the nearest waiter.

“Convey this with my compliments to Señor Toledo,” he said. “He is pushing screams for it in the yard.”

“Oh, yeah,” replied the waiter, who had been crudely born and bred in the Bronx. “And if I came face to face with that bone-naked bozo, I’d be doing more than pushing screams. I’d be fairly flinging them about.”

“Is it that you lack in courage?” demanded Henri.

“It certainly is,” admitted the waiter, almost proudly.

“But so do I,” said Henri. “Me, I am a nervous collapse.”

In the midst of this perplexity a small blonde woman, whose lovely figure immediately restored the nervous collapse to the pink of condition, took the bottle from the waiter’s hand and disappeared through the back door.

“Señor Toledo,” said a small voice in the darkness, “I have brought you a bottle of brandy.”

Mr. Bland started and looked nervously up at his wife.

“Thanks,” he said shortly, reaching out for the bottle. “Sit down, if you don’t mind skeletons.”

“I don’t mind some,” Lorna Bland answered demurely as she seated herself by her husband.

“Have a drink,” he said, passing her the bottle.

CHAPTER FIVE

On a Backyard Bench

In life,” observed Lorna Bland, after several reflective pulls on the bottle, “you must have been a very gallant gentleman.”

“What do you mean – in life?” the bogus Toledo demanded, removing the bottle from his wife’s hand.

“When you were,” explained Lorna.

“But I still am,” Mr. Bland assured her.

“You still are what?” asked Lorna innocently.

“In life,” replied Quintus Bland.

Lorna laughed tolerantly, then reached for the bottle.

“You’re dead,” she told him, simply. “Part and parcel of the grave. Don’t tell me. I know.”

“But I do tell you,” Mr. Bland insisted. “I’m very much alive.”

“Oh, you’re active enough,” his wife admitted, “but they get that way, you know. They always do.”

“What are you talking about?” her husband roughly demanded.

“Psychic phenomena,” she retorted calmly. “You’re a psychic phenomenon, you know – a manifestation – a – a – a phantasmagoria.” She paused to tilt the bottle, then smacked her pretty lips. “They’re always active,” she added.

“Madam,” said Bland coldly, “I am none of those things. Let me once more assure you I’m just as alive as you are.”

“Married?” asked Lorna, briefly.

Mr. Bland nodded.

“And is she a skeleton, too?” she asked, then continued without waiting for an answer: “Naturally she must be. The children must be cute – a lot of little baby skeletons crawling about the floor. Think of it. You all must be no end careful not to chip and crack each other. And all your chairs must be padded – heavily padded. I – —”

“Please don’t go on,” Mr. Bland broke in on his wife’s musings. “That bottle is getting the better of you. We have no children.”

“Perhaps it is just as well,” sighed Lorna Bland.

“Why?” demanded Quintus. “I’ve always wanted a child.”

“But,” Lorna reasonably pointed out, “think of introducing a perfectly normal doctor into a household of skeletons. Why, the poor man would be a mental case before he could open his bag.”

“You’re either drunk or mad,” said Quintus Bland disgustedly.

“Perhaps a little of both,” his wife admitted. “Were it not for this bottle I might find you a trifle difficult – macabre, I think, is the word. Some people call it horrid.”

From the window of the kitchen the chef’s eloquent eyes peered at the pair on the bench.

“Mon Dieu,” he observed in wonderment, “the chic madam still sits en tête-à-tête with the fleshless Señor Toledo. Me, I could not do it.”

“No,” observed a waiter, sarcastically. “You would push plenty cries.”

“I am a man of courage,” declared the chef. “A lion in the fight, but I do not converse with bones. Far better to sit en tête-à-tête with a soiled camel.”

“Well,” said the waiter, “I’d just as soon not sit en tête-à-tête with either, although a soiled camel wouldn’t upset me much. Far better to push cries and run like hell, say I.”

“In that there is wisdom,” agreed the chef. “The mere knowledge that out there on that bench sits an object so incredibly horrifying makes it difficult for me to turn my back on the door. We must drink of wine.”

“No,” declared the waiter. “We must drink of whisky. Wine is far too weak to get me used to that bony party out there.”

“In that also there is wisdom,” said the chef, turning from the window. “Let it be of whisky.”

Meantime Mr. Bland and Lorna were doing their best with the bottle, and their best was not so bad.

“You know,” said Lorna, confidingly, “if you had about ten pounds of flesh distributed about those bones of yours I fancy you wouldn’t look unlike my husband.”

“Ha!” said Mr. Bland. “Your husband.”

“Yes,” went on Lorna. “You even sound like him, only more hollow, of course.”

“Naturally,” agreed Mr. Bland. “Your husband must be thin, I take it.”

“No, it’s my turn to take it,” protested Lorna, reaching for the bottle. “You’ve just had it.” After a delicate gurgle she once more smacked her lips and resumed. “Is my husband thin?” she asked, rhetorically. “Señor, you’re the only man that’s got him licked. Why, he’s so thin people pity him in the streets.”

“They do, eh?” said Quintus Bland. “I almost pity him myself, but I daresay he’s a nice man.”

“He’s a dirty man,” said Lorna.

“What!” exclaimed the skeleton. “A dirty man?”

“Yes,” said Lorna, simply. “My husband is a dirty man.”

Quintus Bland was thoroughly outraged.

“How dirty?” he asked in a low voice.

“Oh, very dirty,” replied Lorna, warming to the subject. “And he has a dirty dog. In fact, they’re both dirty dogs. I tried to pull his tail out.”

“Any luck?” asked Mr. Bland.

“No luck,” said Lorna, moodily. “No luck at all. Did you ever try to pull a dog’s tail out – or off?”

“No,” admitted her husband. “Why?”

“It’s impossible,” said Lorna bitterly. “Can’t pull a dog’s tail out. They’re like that with their tails.” Here she held up two fingers closely pressed together.

“I didn’t know,” murmured Mr. Bland. “But I’m sorry your husband’s so dirty.”

“Oh, yes,” replied Lorna, eagerly reverting to the subject. “He’s a very dirty man. Just like his dog. My husband’s a dirty dog.”

“And thin,” added Quintus.

“And thin,” agreed Lorna. “He’s a thin dirty man or a dirty thin man, whichever way it goes.”

She lapsed into silence, as if brooding over the lamentable dirtiness of the emaciated Mr. Bland. Her husband, morbidly moved by an impulse to learn the worst, broke in upon her thoughts.

“Would you say he was a filthy man?” he asked with an attempt at diffidence.

“Sure, I’d say he was a filthy man,” she replied without a moment’s hesitation. “My husband is a filthy man.” Something caused her to glance up at the object beside her. “What’s the matter with you, Señor Toledo?” she inquired. “Got a chill?”

Señor Toledo’s actions fully justified the question. He looked as if he had been seized by a violent ague. He had stood more than flesh, and much more than bone, could bear. To be called a filthy man in the third person by one’s own wife was truly a devastating experience. With an effort he pulled his bones together.

“I’m all right,” he said huskily. “Guess I need a drink.”

“That’s better,” commented Lorna, passing him the bottle. “You were rattling something awful.”

“I’ll try to do better,” he promised. “It’s a shame about your husband.”

“No, it isn’t,” she answered surprisingly. “I like him as filthy and as thin as he is. He’s such an awful fool. I can twist him about my finger and get him angry whenever I like.”

“Do you think that’s so nice?” asked Mr. Bland.

“Oh, no,” she answered promptly. “I’m a dirty dog, too, only I’m a small dirty dog and not at all thin. At that, neither of us is as dirty as Phil Harkens.”

“The chap I scared from the scene?”

“The same,” replied Lorna, nodding. “He’s dirty in the worst sense of the word. Only went out with him to get my husband mad.” She laughed a little ruefully. “I guess we’re both a little mad,” she continued. “I pretended I was going to put on my black underwear with the lace on it. You should have seen the poor man’s face. It was nearly as bad as yours. What a face!”

“Hey, in there!” shouted Mr. Bland with sudden violence. “Bring me another bottle.”

“Name of God!” exclaimed the chef. “One thousand thunders. Did you attend? Not only does he demand a bottle but also he wants it brought to him.”

“I’m pushing cries right now,” said the waiter, hurrying with his tray from the kitchen.

“My brave,” pleaded the chef, turning to another waiter, “Señor Toledo calls for a bottle. He is a man of distinction of the utmost. He is also an amiable man. To him you will carry the bottle, is it not so?”

“It certainly is not so,” said my brave with the calm of a mind in which lurked no indecision. “The distinguished and amiable Señor Toledo is wasting his breath on me. Did you hear that whoop he let out?”

“It came as if pushed from the grave,” breathed the chef.

“If you ask me,” asserted the waiter, “that voice was shoved clear up from hell.”

At this moment Señor Toledo himself bounded into the kitchen. With no less agility everyone else bounded out. The chef alone was unable to make the grade, being spiritually as well as professionally linked to his cauldrons. To that extent he was a man of courage, as he had claimed.

“Do I get that bottle or don’t I?” clattered Mr. Bland.

“Remain tranquil,” pleaded the chef. “You do, Señor, you do. That bottle is virtually in your hands. May you enjoy it to the full.”

“Snap to it,” said Mr. Bland.

The chef snapped. Like a magician he produced a bottle, which he placed on a table within easy reach of the terrible figure in the doorway.

“Señor,” said the chef, “it is I who present the bottle.”

“Thanks,” replied the Señor, tartly. “Shall I bite the cork out?”

“Would you like to?” asked the chef, endeavoring to be agreeable. “I should consider it an honor to watch the magnificent feat. I shall form myself into an audience of one.”

“Bah!” exclaimed the skeleton, explosively. “Pull out that cork.”

In his anxiety to comply, the chef almost wrung the neck off the bottle. Quintus Bland snatched the brandy and retired to the bench.

“Got it,” he said to the small figure sitting in the semidarkness.

“Good,” returned Lorna is a subdued voice. “It’s hard to wait for liquor.”

“One of the hardest things I know,” replied Bland, “but see here, you’ve been drinking too much tonight.”

“It’s remorse,” said the woman.

“What are you sorry about?”

“I’m sorry I left him home, sitting in the shadows.”

“You mean the dirty dog?”

“Yes, the dirty dog. I called him an old crow or something.”

“Why didn’t you call him a buzzard?”

“Didn’t think of it,” she replied truthfully.

“Make a note of it for further reference,” Mr. Bland suggested sardonically. “Maybe he stepped out himself.”

“He would never do a thing like that. He’s the straightest man I know – straight but thin.”

Quintus Bland reflected that she little realized how appallingly thin her husband was.

“You can never tell,” he remarked. “Even the dirtiest dog will have his day.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” said Lorna. “He deserves some sort of a day.” For a moment she fell silent over the new bottle. Then: “Tell me, Señor Toledo, are passion and romance one and the same thing?”

Mr. Bland pondered, not because he did not know the answer, but more because of the established inhibitions existing between him and his wife. At last he spoke.

“The only honest reply would be, Yes,” he said. “By that I mean you couldn’t have one without the other.”

“Then,” declared Lorna, “there should be some device to stimulate passion in the home.”

“I think,” replied Mr. Bland a little pointedly, “that there should be one to confine it to the home.”

“But the American woman does not like to confine her charms to a mere husband,” Lorna asserted. “I know because I’m an American woman. We all crave to be desired by other men. Especially if there are other women around. Bad, isn’t it? And so small. When I was engaged to Quintus – that’s my husband’s depressing name – I thought only of him. I dressed for him, did my hair for him, and perfumed myself for him. Other men were not in it – they had no place. That kept up even after we were married – for a while. I wanted to look intriguing for him at all times. Lovely underthings and all that. Then gradually I found myself tucking my most abandoned garments away and not caring so much how desirable I appeared in his eyes. Of course, he always looked like hell, but funny. I liked him.”

She paused and gazed into the shadows, then continued: “Romance or passion were already packing up, and for no apparent reason. Now for whom do you suppose I was saving all of my pretty things? I had no definite man in mind. Just men. Women always have the consciousness of men in their minds. If you have a decent husband you know he’s safe. Then some devilish impulse prompts you to play with a man who is not quite so safe, and that almost nearly always leads to trouble, unless you’re both lucky and clever. A woman constantly needs reassurance that she is desirable. She is willing to risk and pay a lot for that. You see, Señor,” she broke off, “it’s not only a matter of passion. It’s some inner need or craving a woman requires to hold her to her youth, to keep her from slipping over the borderline of romance into the placid, unexciting backwaters of domesticity. Some women are built for that. I envy them in a way.”

“Children help,” suggested Mr. Bland in a rather strained voice.

“Not today they don’t,” asserted Lorna, with a scoffing little laugh. “You should see some of the mothers I know. Why, the very knowledge that they are mothers seems to drive them to more frantic and disgusting endeavors. They’d mix it up with almost any man who shows them a little attention, especially after a couple of snifters.”

“Pretty tough on their husbands,” observed Mr. Bland.

“Sure,” agreed Lorna. “They can’t be fist-fighting all the time, and a gun is a trifle too drastic.”

“Then why don’t they beat their wives?”

“Half the time they can’t get anything concrete on them. They know but they can’t prove. It’s quite a mess, this modern mix-up.”

“You don’t seem to hold your sex in high regard,” remarked Quintus Bland.

“I don’t hold this member of it in any regard at all,” replied Lorna. “Just a creature of impulse, of low impulse, at that.”

“There is such a thing as tenderness,” said Mr. Bland.

“I’ve shown the dirty dog very little of that,” replied Lorna. “Wouldn’t know how to begin now. He’d become suspicious.”

“Well, let’s not worry too much about all these things,” her husband said in a heartier voice. “As I see it, the woman is not wholly to blame. Believe me, when a woman gets out of hand some of the fault can be traced to the husband. Then, again, it might be the weather.”

He laughed a little falsely and elevated the bottle.

“Is Mrs. Toledo very fond of you?” Lorna asked somewhat haltingly. “Do you have a happy love life?”

“You’d have to ask my wife about that,” answered Mr. Bland. “A man only knows how his wife is acting, never how she is thinking. God has spared him that final humiliation.”

“I’d love to have a long talk with Mrs. Toledo,” declared Lorna musingly. “I suppose she’s much like you, only smaller?”

“She’s smaller,” admitted Quintus.

“Well, if I can stand you,” she observed, “I should be able to stand her, but I doubt it I’d be quite comfortable with both of you together – on either side of me, so to speak.”

“Not to mention a lot of little skeletons squirming about the floor,” offered Mr. Bland.

“That would be bad,” admitted Lorna. “Pass me the bottle, Toledo. I’ve been too long depressed.”

“Do you intend to drive home tonight?” asked the skeleton.

“Sure,” she said, then stopped. “How did you know I had a car?” she asked him.

“Señor Toledo knows many things,” quoth Mr. Bland enigmatically.

“For some reason you keep on reminding me of my husband,” his wife said in a puzzled voice. “We had such a devil of a row. He must be feeling rotten about it.”

“He is,” remarked Bland without thinking.

“How do you know?” she asked him.

“I have ways of knowing things,” fenced Mr. Bland. “But suppose you don’t find him home?”

“Oh, he’ll be there,” she answered confidently. “He never steps out unless I’m along.”

“But still,” persisted her husband, “he might not be. You drove him pretty far, you know.”

“Then I’ll go to bed alone,” declared his wife.

“That would be a pity,” he observed.

“Señor Toledo,” said Lorna, “not only are you a skeleton, but you’re a dirty skeleton, at that. No wonder you remind me of my husband. I’m going now.”

She rose and handed Mr. Bland the bottle, while she stood a little unsteadily, testing her appearance in various quarters, as women have a right to do.

“Will you be good to the dirty dog if you ever get him back?” Mr. Bland asked in a hesitant voice.

“How do you know I’ve lost him?” she demanded.

“Somehow I’ve a feeling you have,” said Bland, slowly, “but I don’t know for how long.”

“Do you mean to say that dirty dog has left me?” Lorna asked furiously.

“Not of his own accord, perhaps,” Bland replied in a mollifying voice. “Wherever he is, he is probably wishing he were home with you.”

“Señor Toledo, you’re getting me frightened,” breathed Lorna. “I like that dirty dog, but if he’s done a bunk I’ll claw him to shreds when he gets back home.”

“He might find even that diverting,” said the skeleton of Bland. “I wish I had some shreds to be clawed. It’s not much fun being like this, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” replied Lorna. “It hadn’t occurred to me. You seemed to be such a natural-born skeleton, so self-possessed and competent. It must have its difficult moments.”

She swayed a little and clutched his hand and bony arm for support.

“Bur-r-r,” she gasped, hastily withdrawing her hand. “Wow! Oh, dear me. What an excruciating sensation. I’m almost shocked sober.” She regarded Mr. Bland with new interest. “You know, I’ve been sitting here in an alcoholic haze not caring much whether you were a skeleton or not. At any moment I expected my brain would clear and I’d wake up to find you a real person. But that arm! It’s real and it’s all bone. No flesh at all.”

“Would you like me to go away?” asked Mr. Bland humbly.

“Where would you go?” asked Lorna.

“I – I scarcely know, myself,” admitted Mr. Bland. “I’d forgotten about that. There doesn’t seem to be any place for me to go, does there?”

“Yes,” replied Lorna, decisively. “You’ve been decent to me, decenter than a flesh-and-blood man. Now I’m going to bring you home to my husband. You can stay there for the night, then we’ll think of something.”

“Oh, no,” Bland protested. “I could never do a thing like that. I might frighten your husband to death if he’s so thin.”

“Nonsense,” snapped Lorna, now all efficiency and determination. “He’ll merely think he’s found a long-lost brother who needs a bit of feeding. Where are those things you were wearing?”

“Distributed about the dining room, I daresay,” replied Mr. Bland.

“Wait here and take a drink,” she commanded. “I’ll be right back.”

And strangely enough she was right back with all of Mr. Bland’s clothes, which in her haste she failed to recognize.

“There’s a cap in the car and glasses,” she said when Bland had covered himself as well as possible, considering the circumstances. “If you slump down in the seat you’ll be able to get away with it easily. The car is at the end of this passage. We won’t have to go back through the speak.”

“But the bill and all that?” protested Mr. Bland.

“Charles assured me everything would be okay with him,” said Lorna, “so long as you refrained from mingling with his patrons.”

“A generous and resourceful man,” remarked Mr. Bland.

“Bring the bottle along,” commanded Lorna. “We’ll need it on the way, although there’s lots more at home, thank God.”

From behind his window the chef was witnessing these preparations with no small show of interest. As he saw the couple head for the alley, he breathed a sigh of relief.

“Señor Toledo parts,” he observed, “in company with that chic madam.” He paused, thought deeply, then eloquently shrugged his shoulders. “Señor Toledo is a man of many parts, but still I don’t quite see … no, I should have thought … eh bien, why puzzle one’s self about such baffling amours?”

Señor Toledo had parted. That was good. That was to be desired. Nevertheless, as the chef busied himself over his various recondite rituals he found himself still perplexed by the apparently pointless choice of the chic, petite madam. The most distinguished of skeletons could hardly be a satisfactory lover. Again the Gallic shrug.

CHAPTER SIX

The Intermittent Skeleton

Quintus Bland had only the most fragmentary memory of that mad drive home through the night. Yet even as he slumbered beside the small figure at the wheel he had a vague consciousness of a vast and steady beat of wind, of heavy darkness occasionally interrupted by onrushing rivers of light, and of terrible, terrible speed. He wanted to make some remark about this unnecessary hurtling through space, to interpose a mild objection, but found the effort altogether too much for him. In a single night he had taken aboard more liquor than he had consumed in the course of a whole year. Also, he had lost, perhaps forever, all of the little flesh he had possessed. The double shock had numbed his faculties. He was no longer able to carry on as Señor Toledo. Let Lorna take charge. Even if she was two thirds binged herself she at least had all of her flesh.

One fact he realized vividly. He was going home. He was withdrawing from the public eye, finding sanctuary beneath his own roof. For the moment he had forgotten that he was playing the part of Señor Toledo, presumably a mere visitor to his own home. He was simply a fleshless Quintus Bland, and he was sitting by his wife. That thought comforted his slumbers. He was no longer in the hands of libidinous friends and strangers.

At the New York entrance to the Holland Tunnel he nearly dragged his trousers from his much-discussed pelvis in a polite endeavor to procure change with which to pay for the ticket. The man at the booth accepted the money, slipped the ticket into the skeleton fingers, paused and stared in stupefaction at those fingers, then followed them up until his dilated eyes rested on the weird face confronting him. With an incoherent exclamation he jumped back into his little house, the change rattling over the floor.

“Look,” he managed to say to the agent directly behind him. “That lady’s driving a skeleton through our tunnel.”

“Wish they were all skeletons,” commented the man, “and deep down in their graves.” He paused to sell a ticket, then continued passionately, “I hate all motorists. How do you know she was a lady? Sounds more like a ghoul to me.”

“What’s a ghoul?” asked the other.

“Something horrid,” said his colleague, a trifle misty himself.

“I know,” declared the other brightly. “I’ve heard of them – ghoul birds they’re called.”

“That shows how much you know,” said the second man. “You’re thinking of jailbirds. There ain’t no such thing as a ghoul bird.”

“Well,” replied the first ticket vendor, not to be wholly squelched, “when I played basketball at the settlement house I used to make ghoul after ghoul, if that’s what you mean.”

“You poor lug,” said the other. “A ghoul is a body snatcher.”

“A ghoul didn’t have to snatch this body,” the first man replied. “This body could snatch for itself. There wasn’t no flesh on it at all. I saw its bony fingers wiggle. Gord, I even touched the awful things. And its head was just a skull.”

“If you’re going to talk like that,” said the second man, “I’m clearing out. Motorists are nutty enough for me. I don’t want to be cooped up with no madman.”

The first man relapsed into silence. He realized the utter futility of attempting to make himself understood. The more he tried, the madder people would think him. No one would ever believe. Nevertheless deep within him the man felt fundamental craving to find at least one person somewhere in all the world who would credit his incredible story. Furthermore he was dead certain he had made ghoul after ghoul in basketball.

Mr. Bland next remembered being awakened by the stabbing beams of a flashlight. From the darkness behind the light came an awed ejaculation.

“Holy Mother preserve us,” said the voice. “What a sight on a lonely beat. Lady, you’ve got a grinning corpse beside you.”

“He’s not grinning, officer,” came the cool voice of Lorna. “He’s grimacing.”

“Whatever it is,” said the officer, “I wish he’d give it up.”

“That’s why I was driving so fast,” explained Lorna. “He’s desperately ill. I’ve got to get him home.”

“Mean to say you’re going to take that thing into your own house?” demanded the officer.

“Certainly,” answered Lorna. “He’s a sick man.”

“I’ll say he is,” agreed the officer. “He’s wasted away something shocking. You can drive on, lady. You’ve got me all upset.”

So they left the officer to his thoughts and drove on to the open country. Here by the roadside they drew up to take a drink. This was one of Mr. Bland’s pleasanter memories. A car was parked directly ahead of them. The car was dark but not quiet. There were certain sounds. Mr. Bland and his wife exchanged significant glances, then Lorna raised the bottle. As she did so the door of the other car slammed and a man came aggressively up to them.

“Say,” he began, “what’s the big idea in parking your car next to mine? Ain’t this road long enough?”

Slipping off his coat, Mr. Bland half rose and extended two long, deathlike arms towards the aggressive gentleman.

“Not long enough for you,” he croaked. “Not long enough for you, old boy, old boy.”

The man did not run. He was incapable of coördinated action. Jerkily, as if motivated by clockwork, he swayed back to his car. No sound had escaped his lips. For the moment his lungs had ceased to function. Whatever had been taking place in that car was indefinitely postponed. The man threw the motor into action and resigned his soul to God. The poignant disappointment of the girl beside him was swallowed up by her anxiety for the safety of her life and limbs, especially for her limbs, for without those attractive members there would be no life at all worth speaking about.

Quintus Bland expanded his ribs and emitted a howl like a drunken Tarzan, then drank deep of the bottle. A moment later he was once more slumbering peacefully beside his wife.

He was still slumbering when the little roadster hunched itself through the doors of the garage directly behind his home.

“Señor Toledo,” Lorna sang out, “we are here! Wake up and stir your stumps.”

“Eh?” muttered Mr. Bland. “What’s this about my stumps?”

“Shake a leg. Get a move on,” she told him. “Come in and meet the dirty dog. We’ll yank him out of bed.”

But when they looked for the dirty dog all they found was a wriggling Busy who was not at all the right sort of dirty dog. Lorna was crestfallen. Her high spirits plunged without brakes and splashed in a puddle of disappointment. She tried to become very angry, to work herself up to a rage, but her heart would not respond. She had planned to show her husband that she was not wearing the black underwear with the lace. And her plans had not stopped there. They were much more elaborate. But now – what? The dirty dog was gone. He had done a bunk on her, and she was left in the house with a male skeleton she had met that night for the first time.

They turned away from the door of the empty bedroom and went downstairs. At any rate, she thought as they descended the stairs, she could not be compromised by a skeleton. How fortunate it was that she had not brought a real man home. That would have been difficult at this hour of the night, or rather, morning.

After a few drinks in the living room she suggested they retire to bed. Her husband, who amid familiar surroundings had forgotten he was supposed to be Señor Toledo, readily agreed. Not only did he follow Lorna upstairs but also into her bedroom. Once there the routine of years swam through the fumes of alcohol. Automatically he began to prepare himself for bed. The first indication Lorna received of her guest’s clubby intentions was when she saw him sink into an easy chair and wearily remove his shoes from which fell several wads of paper.

“Had to stuff my shoes to keep them on,” he explained casually to his wife. “The Whittles thought of that.”

He rose, went to his closet, and produced a pair of slippers, then he began to attack his trousers.

“Just a moment,” said Lorna in a crisp voice. “What is the big idea?”

“We’re going to bed, aren’t we?” asked Quintus Bland.

“Certainly,” replied Lorna, “but not together.”

“Why not?” inquired Bland.

“Your wife is one reason and my husband is another. Added to those I have various reasons of my own. Those are my husband’s slippers, by the way.”

“Nonsense,” scoffed Mr. Bland. “Don’t tell me. I know whose slippers they are.” He moved to a chest-of-drawers and extracted a pair of pajamas therefrom. “I suppose,” he challenged, dangling the objects before his wife’s puzzled eyes, “you’re going to say these aren’t mine.”

“Of course they’re not yours,” declared Lorna.

“Ha!” laughed Bland, sarcastically. “I suppose I have no rights in this house at all.”

Lorna’s hands moved ominously to her hips. One small foot was steadily tapping the rug.

“Listen,” she said, her voice gone frosty. “Listen, Señor Toledo. I let you take your shoes off in this room because I couldn’t stop you. It was a horrid sight. I’ll even go so far as to allow you to borrow my husband’s slippers. If you insist you can have a pair of his pajamas. But I’ll be damned from here to Harlem if you’re going to take your pants off in my presence. Don’t interrupt. I know it wouldn’t mean anything if you did, but just the same, the idea is repellent.”

“But where shall I take them off?” asked Mr. Bland desperately.

“Anywhere but in front of me,” said Lorna. “We’ve a perfectly good guest room.”

“Damned if I’ll sleep in the guest room,” said Bland.

“Damned if you’ll sleep in here,” said Lorna.

Mr. Bland was once more fiddling with his trousers, this time with an air of grim determination.

“Stop that this minute,” cried Lorna. “Señor Toledo, keep those trousers on.”

“See here,” replied Mr. Bland, “you get along with your own undressing and let me take care of mine.”

“Do you expect me to undress with you in the room?” his wife demanded.

“I hope you don’t want to sleep with your clothes on,” said Bland.

“You get out of here, Toledo,” said Lorna in a dangerous voice. “Apart from all considerations of morality I am not going to sleep with a skeleton, and that’s that.”

“But didn’t you say,” Mr. Bland demanded, “that your husband was nearly a skeleton?”

“Toledo,” said Lorna, primly, “there’s a world of difference between a skeleton and a thin husband.”

“Don’t know what you’re getting at,” Mr. Bland grumbled.

“It’s just as well you don’t,” said Lorna. “Leave those trousers alone and get on out of here. I want to go to sleep.”

“You’ve got nothing on me,” her husband replied, dragging his trousers down over his pelvis. “And sleep it’s going to be.”

Lorna gasped, gathered up a few garments of her own, and hastened to the door.

“You’ve forced me to watch you taking your trousers off,” she said with great dignity, “but I won’t remain to see you put those pajamas on. I’ll sleep in the guest room.” She slammed the door behind her, then promptly opened it again, struck by a new thought. “Toledo,” she said, “I thought you were a gentleman, but you’ve proved yourself to be merely a filthy skeleton. I hope you fall out of bed and break every bone in your body.”

“Sweet lady,” Bland retorted bitterly, “your husband’s a filthy skeleton himself.”

“Is that so!” said Lorna. “Well, if my husband comes home and finds you in here you won’t have to fall out of bed to break every bone in your body. He’ll do it for you.”

Bland laughed nastily as she again slammed the door and betook herself to the guest room. When she fell asleep a short time later it was with a sense of solitude and separation. Also, she was exceedingly put out with Señor Toledo, who by this time was slumbering vociferously where she by rights should have been.

In the morning she was up just in time to catch Fanny, the passionate maid, on the point of entering the marital bedchamber with two cups of coffee and the morning papers. Lorna, still a trifle fuddled, emitted a small scream.

“Oh, no,” she called to Fanny. “Don’t do that. There’s a skeleton in that room.”

A little startled, but more curious, Fanny cautiously opened the door and peered in at the still form in the bed. Then she closed the door and came up to her mistress.

“He doesn’t look any thinner than usual,” said Fanny. “He’s sleeping like a babe.”

“What!” exclaimed Lorna. “Like a babe, did you say?”

Fanny nodded her dark head.

“Yes, ma’am,” she replied quite seriously. “Like a babe.”

“Where’s the skeleton?” asked Lorna. “Didn’t you see a skeleton? A skeleton by the name of Toledo?”

Fanny considered her mistress suspiciously. Had Mr. Bland at last succeeded in driving his wife mad?

“Could I bring you some aspirin?” she asked solicitously.

“Yes, Fanny,” said Lorna in a preoccupied manner. “Lots.”

Still carrying the coffee, Fanny departed on her errand. The moment the maid was gone, Lorna approached the door behind which she had left a skeleton putting on her husband’s pajamas. There was no doubt about that. One could not be mistaken about a skeleton, no matter how much brandy one had consumed. Nevertheless something was radically wrong. Fanny had said that her husband was sleeping in there like a babe. Lorna found it difficult to conceive of either her husband or Señor Toledo sleeping like a babe. They might sleep like a beast, but certainly not like a babe.

Quietly she opened the door and looked in and caught her breath with a little gasp. There lay her husband sleeping, if not like a babe, at least like a log. Unconscious of the change that had taken place in his anatomy, Quintus Bland in the flesh lay inertly in his bed. In some mysterious way the potent fumes of the chemical mixture he had created had become dormant during his slumbers, with the result that Bland’s flesh had once more reappeared. He was no longer a fluoroscopic man.

Having satisfied herself that her husband had returned, Lorna closed the door and retreated to the guest room to think things over. She had seen no broken bones about the room, yet quite obviously something had happened to Señor Toledo. She wondered if her husband had chased him from the house.

While she was pondering over this mystery, Bland himself awoke and sprang from the bed. He had a confused but strong impression that he had turned to a skeleton. And even as he stood by the bed struggling to collect memories of the previous night, his body began to fade until he was once more a fleshless man. His pajamas slipped from him as he moved across the room to a long mirror. Mr. Bland did not care. What good were pajamas to a skeleton? What good was anything to a skeleton? A drink, Mr. Bland decided.

Fanny, having provided her mistress with aspirins, was moved to take another look at Mr. Bland. Accordingly she armed herself with fresh coffee and the paper, then quietly approached the door. This she opened and looked into the room. The next moment Lorna was summoned to the hall by a series of screams. Her own nerves were so jumpy she was screaming a little herself. The sight of Fanny served to calm her. The maid was in a bad way. Never had she looked less passionate or felt less so.

“What is it?” demanded Lorna.

“It’s Toledo,” gasped Fanny.

“Is he back again?” exclaimed Lorna.

“I don’t know about that,” said Fanny, “but there’s a skeleton in there and he’s looking at himself in the mirror.”

“Why shouldn’t he look at himself in the mirror, Fanny?” said Lorna. “Do try to be reasonable.”

Fanny laughed hysterically.

“Reasonable?” she retorted. “I don’t think it’s reasonable for a skeleton to look at himself in the mirror. If I was a skeleton I’d want to see as little of myself as possible.”

“Did you see anything of Mr. Bland?” asked Lorna.

“No, ma’am,” replied Fanny. “Perhaps Toledo, the skeleton, has destroyed him.”

Without further words Lorna hurried to the door and rapped sharply upon it.

“Toledo,” she called, “where is my husband?”

“Search me,” was the indifferent reply.

“Oh,” breathed Fanny, “I’d hate to do that.”

“Toledo,” repeated Lorna, “tell me this instant what you have done with my husband.”

“He’s gone,” said Mr. Bland. “He took one good look at me and then he went away.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“He didn’t even say how-do-you-do,” complained Mr. Bland. “He just went away – fast.”

Exasperated, Lorna threw open the door. The skeleton of Bland stepped out into the hall. Once more curiosity overcame Fanny’s fear. She placed herself behind her mistress and awaited further developments.

“Don’t be afraid,” Lorna reassured her. “Señor Toledo can be most annoying, but he is quite harmless.”

“I wouldn’t touch a hair of your head,” Mr. Bland told Fanny, “except for amusement.”

“It wouldn’t amuse me,” said Fanny. “Think of something else to do.”

“I wonder,” said Lorna, “why my husband left the house without saying a word to anyone.”

“Perhaps,” Mr. Bland suggested, “he didn’t want to become involved. Look at his situation. He comes home late at night and finds a skeleton in his bed. Quite naturally he concluded that you had gone in for skeletons and brought one home with you to take his place. Knowing you as he does, he doesn’t put anything past you. From Phil Harkens to a skeleton is merely a – —”

“That will do, Toledo,” Lorna hastily broke in. “Go downstairs and get yourself a drink. Fanny will bring you some coffee. And do stop gossiping like an old woman.”

Fanny, who delighted in gossip, felt a little more favorably disposed toward this amazing freak of nature. Perhaps from him she might be able to learn all sorts of interesting things about the events of last night. With a queer, uneasy sensation at her back she allowed Señor Toledo to follow her downstairs. A short time later Lorna appeared dressed for the street. She found the skeleton of her husband sitting in an easy chair. He was contentedly sipping a highball.

“Hope you don’t mind my not dressing,” said Mr. Bland politely, laying aside the paper.

“Not at all,” replied Lorna, taking a drink herself. “I don’t believe in half-measures, Toledo. If you’re going to be a skeleton, I say whole hog or nothing. You either should be seen not at all or seen at your best, or rather, your worst. I’m going out to think things over. Make yourself at home.”

As Lorna left the house, Mr. Bland poured himself another drink. He continued to repeat this operation until finally he fell asleep in the chair, the newspaper abandoned on his lap.

Some time later Mr. Bland was awakened by a small, quickly smothered cry. Whether it was a cry of fear or appreciation, he was unable to decide, so confused was his state of mind. Fanny, the maid, was standing before him. Fear could hardly account for the expression on her face. Her eyes were large and wild-looking, and when Mr. Bland discovered he had regained his flesh his eyes looked as wild as Fanny’s.

“Why, Mr. Bland,” she said in a hushed voice, “you’re all naked.”

“Not quite,” replied Mr. Bland, taking a firm grip on the newspaper on his lap.

To his great consternation Fanny leaned over and scanned an advertisement.

“My,” she sighed wistfully, “they’re having such a lovely sale at Macy’s. Have you finished with the paper, Mr. Bland?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Things Get No Better

Taking an even firmer grip on the newspaper, Quintus Bland looked defiantly at the passionate maid.

“Fanny,” he said, “I have long suspected there was little good in you. Now I know it. Clear out, you trull.”

“Half a moment,” said Fanny. “I want to take just one more look at those cute little scanties in that advertisement.”

“Wish I had a pair on myself,” muttered Mr. Bland.

Fanny laughed merrily.

“Wouldn’t you look funny?” she said, bending over the newspaper.

“Are you nearsighted?” asked Mr. Bland, pressing back against the chair. “Don’t come an inch nearer.”

It was in this somewhat unconventional position that Lorna Bland found the two of them when she quietly entered the room on her return from her walk. To make matters even worse, she had also heard Fanny’s merry laughter. Busy, the square dog, added to the complications. On seeing his naked master he emitted an excited yelp and, with one of his most springy pounces, landed heavily upon the newspaper. As the dog established contact Mr. Bland gave a grunt of dismay.

“Take him away,” he called to his wife. “Yank him off me. Can’t you see this fool dog is destroying my last shred of decency?”

“I don’t care if he claws it to pieces,” declared Lorna, sounding as if she meant every word she had said.

“But I do,” protested her husband. “I’m in a hell of a fix.”

“I suppose,” observed Lorna, “there’s no need to ask the meaning of this lovely little tableau I so thoughtlessly interrupted? Had I waited a bit longer it would have broken into frantic action, no doubt.”

“Honest, Mrs. Bland,” said the now no longer passionate maid, “it wasn’t that. It wasn’t what you mean.”

“What minds you women have,” said Bland in a despairing voice. “All the time evil.”

“Shut up, you senile wreck,” snapped Lorna, then added, turning on Fanny, “What was it, then, you trollop?”

“I was just taking a look at an advertisement,” was the trollop’s lame reply.

Lorna gave a little snort of disgust.

“It’s a sweet and pungent way to be looking at an advertisement,” she said. “And that’s about one of the stupidest lies I’ve ever been told.”

“I tell you,” Mr. Bland put in desperately, “we’ll all be sorry if Busy digs a hole through this paper.”

Lorna laughed mirthlessly.

“I should worry,” she flung at her husband. “It doesn’t matter to me if he claws all the skin off your bones.” She stopped abruptly, then turned to Fanny with a glittering eye. “And that reminds me,” she continued. “Where’s that skeleton got himself to? What’s become of Señor Toledo?”

“I don’t know, ma’am,” the maid replied. “After you left he fell asleep over his drink. Later, when I came to ask if he wanted a cup of coffee, there sat Mr. Bland as naked as a babe.”

Lorna looked at Mr. Bland and shivered.

“So instead of withdrawing like a modest, self-respecting woman,” she said, “you just ambled up to the naked babe and began to read advertisements off him, laughing merrily the while.” She turned furiously on her squirming husband. “Speak up, you dirty dog,” she snapped.

“Then call off this other dirty dog,” Bland pleaded. “I can’t use my hands.”

Lorna collected Busy and stood looking down at her husband.

“Well?” she said. “Go on.”

“When I got to the station,” he began, “I suddenly came over sick, as they say, so I returned home and went directly to bed.”

“Then what did you come down here for?” asked Lorna.

“To get my pipe,” said Bland at random.

“You don’t smoke a pipe,” said Lorna.

“Eh!” exclaimed Mr. Bland. “What? I don’t smoke a pipe? By jove, so I don’t. Now isn’t that odd?”

“Yes,” answered Lorna. “It’s impossible. Did you see a sleeping skeleton in this chair?”

“Sure,” lied Quintus Bland. “He was just leaving. He sent you his regards. And I saw him when I first got up. That’s why I went away. I’m not so used to skeletons.” Here he laughed falsely. “Funny things, skeletons. This one called himself Toledo.”

“It’s strange,” observed Lorna, looking thoughtfully at her husband, “I can never get you two together. There’s some funny business going on.”

“You’re right, there is,” agreed Quintus Bland, taking the offensive. “The minute my back is turned, you pop a skeleton into my bed. What’s the meaning of that? What does this Spanish atrocity mean to you? Where did you dig him up?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” put in Fanny, following close on Mr. Bland’s lead. “Whoever heard of a real live skeleton? It’s against nature, say I.”

“Fanny,” said Lorna in a quiet voice, “the next time you want to seduce my husband I’ll appreciate it if you don’t pick out the most public room in the house.”

“Didn’t try to seduce your husband,” retorted Fanny. “I’ve got all my clothes on.”

“That isn’t saying much,” replied Lorna, “if you wear as little as I do.”

“But it’s your husband that’s naked,” protested the girl.

“He’s more thorough about it than you are, Fanny,” Lorna told her. “That’s the only difference. I suppose he chased you downstairs?”

“That’s just what he did,” lied Fanny. “He ran after me making noises.”

“What sort of noises?” asked Lorna.

“You know,” said Fanny significantly. “Those sort of noises.”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” replied Lorna. “You’d better explain.”

“Passionate whoops,” said Fanny. “You know, passionate whoops.”

Lorna looked mildly surprised.

“Mr. Bland has never whooped passionately at me,” she said. “I should think it would be most disconcerting.”

“She’s lying,” broke in Quintus Bland. “I was too sick to whoop passionately at anybody. Besides, I don’t know how to whoop that way. It never occurred to me to try.”

“I hope it never does,” said Lorna. “I’d forget what it was all about.”

“And along the hall he came bounding and pounding,” Fanny continued, elaborating her story. “His great arms were thrashing about. Oh, Mrs. Bland, it was terrible.”

“And when he had chased you downstairs,” said Lorna, “he promptly forgot what he was chasing you for, so he sat down and began quietly to read the paper. Is that it?”

“Yes, ma’am,” replied Fanny. “He came over sick like and collapsed in that chair.”

“She’s a liar,” said Mr. Bland.

“Of course she is,” said Lorna. “You’re both liars.”

“Am I to sit here all day naked?” her husband demanded, “or will you send that Jezebel away and let me get upstairs? She’s feasted her eyes quite enough.”

“I’d like to know what on,” said Fanny, coolly surveying the naked man. “It would take some eye to pick a feast off you.”

With this parting shot she flounced away to the door.

“Is that so?” Mr. Bland called after her. “Why don’t you tell your mistress you wanted me to give you the newspaper?”

The maid did not deign to answer as she sailed out of the room.

“Well,” said Lorna with a philosophical shrug, “what with lecherous husbands, disappearing skeletons, and numpholeptic maids it’s a charming little household.”

“You’d better include yourself in the picture,” Mr. Bland retorted. “You and your black underwear with the lace.”

Lorna studied him darkly.

“Get upstairs, you passionate whooper,” she said. “I’m through with you for good.”

And she too sailed from the room.

“Nice women,” Mr. Bland muttered moodily to space. “Charming creatures, the both of them.”

For a few minutes he sat brooding over the respective exits of Fanny, the passionate maid, and Lorna, his incensed wife. Then he did the best thing a man could do under the circumstances. He took a drink. Feeling somewhat better, he relaxed in his chair and considered the situation. Here he was back in the flesh again. But how long would he stay that way? Mr. Bland had lost all confidence in his body. It seemed to be in a constant state of flux. This made any consistent line of conduct well-nigh impossible. He was either coming or going. At one moment he might be Señor Toledo, an animated skeleton, at the next Quintus Bland, a naked photographer. In either form he was equally embarrassing to himself and disconcerting to others. One ray of hope – perhaps these rapid changes in his physical composition were due to a gradual diminishing of the potency of the fumes he had inhaled. Mr. Bland heartily hoped so. He took another drink. He got up and surveyed his body to make sure it was still there. It was. He went upstairs and covered it with garments. Then he returned to the bottle.

By the time he had finished with this he did not much care whether he was Quintus Bland in the flesh or Señor Toledo in the bone. He even found himself missing Toledo a little. A skeleton had its points, although Bland could not think of any good ones at the moment. Feeling more cheerfully disposed towards life than he had in the last twenty-four hours, he collected his hat and stick, then quietly left the house with Busy at his heels. Mr. Bland had decided to walk to the village for the purpose of getting a shave, his own hand being too unsteady to attempt that delicate operation. From an upper window Lorna watched the lank figure of her husband as he walked down the drive. What was he up to now? she wondered. Strange things were going on in the house. She strongly suspected Mr. Bland of being at the bottom of them. Stripped of flesh, he would look exactly like Señor Toledo, she decided, yet did not all skeletons look almost exactly alike? Lorna found herself sorely perplexed in mind as well as physically jaded. Accordingly she did the best thing a woman could do under the circumstances. She went downstairs, called for a fresh bottle, and took a drink. It did her a world of good.

In the meantime Quintus Bland had pursued his way to the village. He was now reclining in a barber’s chair with a steaming towel covering his face. Busy, having growled defiantly at a glittering boiler containing more steaming towels, had curled himself up in a corner with an eye cocked on this object lest it should attack him unawares.

The shop was owned by a small, dark, emotional Italian known as Tony – perhaps the only Tony in existence outside of a speakeasy. Mr. Bland had known him a long time. He was fond of Tony. And Tony was fond of Mr. Bland. Mr. Bland was a very fine gentleman. Tony would shave him well, as if his skin were made of the most perishable fabric. Little did the Italian realize how perishable Mr. Bland’s skin really was.

In the next chair the local mortician was having his cheerful face shaved. The local mortician’s name was Brown. In the lives of the families thereabouts Mr. Brown played rather an intimate part. He was literally with them from the cradle to the grave. When they were alive he sold them beds, and when they were ready for more permanent repose he provided them with coffins. Consequently he had come to regard births and deaths in the light of dollars and cents. An old gentleman with a bad cough or a young matron in an interesting condition were equally dear to his heart. Both were prospective clients. As a matter of business expediency Mr. Brown had developed two totally different personalities. The Brown who sold a crib was not at all the Brown who sold a coffin. The Brown of cribs and furniture was a jovial, amusingly insinuating man of the world. The Brown of coffins was as lachrymose and gently morbid as the most bereaved widow could wish to encounter.

Although Mr. Bland had never purchased either a crib or a coffin from Mr. Brown, they had known each other for years, having gone to school together. For some time past Mr. Brown had been looking on Mr. Bland with growing disappointment. Quintus Bland would neither die nor propagate the race. It was Mr. Brown’s belief that a good citizen should constantly be doing either one thing or the other. To his way of thinking, Quintus Bland was a sheer waste of time.

After having exchanged greetings with Tony and Mr. Brown, Mr. Bland, what with the liquor he had consumed already that morning plus the residue of the previous night, relaxed in the chair and promptly fell into a doze. A portly, florid-faced stranger arrived and seated himself in a chair. Later a second customer came in and seated himself in another chair. Tony beamed happily upon the toweled face of Mr. Bland. Business was picking up. Tony was pleased. He removed the towel from Bland’s face and proceeded to cover it with lather. With deft, solicitous strokes he then shaved off Mr. Bland’s current crop of whiskers. So far so good. A fresh towel and a gentle massage. Tony began to look puzzled. Gradually his fingers slowed down their action until they remained motionless on Mr. Bland’s chin. Here they made a final convulsive effort and stopped. Tony looked down. His fingers, stiff with horror, leaped from the chin. He had the remarkable presence of mind to hide what he saw with a fresh towel. He covered Mr. Bland’s face gently and with reverent fingers which trembled a little. Then he approached Mr. Brown as that gentleman was just heaving himself out of his chair.

“Come,” said Tony mysteriously, taking the mortician by the arm, “I have a little business for you. Mr. Bland, our very good friend, he’s dead in that chair. You must take him away and bury him. That fat-faced man is waiting.”

Fully believing that Tony’s fine Italian mind had suddenly gone bad, Mr. Brown moved over to the other chair and considered the motionless figure stretched out in it.

“Watch,” commanded Tony with the air of a magician. “Gaze upon the face of our very old and very dead friend.”

With a slight flourish he flipped the towel from Mr. Bland’s face. The mortician found himself looking down upon a naked skull. In spite of his long association with all sorts and conditions of corpses, Mr. Brown was not prepared to meet a skeleton face to face. For a moment he stood blinking at the skull, then he transferred his blinking to Tony. The Italian, under the impression that blinking in the presence of a skeleton was an old American custom, followed the mortician’s example. He blinked down at the skull of his erstwhile customer, then blinked upon Mr. Brown.

“There is no doubt, I suppose?” said Tony with a rising inflection. “This is a dead?”

“That is a dead,” replied Mr. Brown. “By the looks of him a very old dead.”

“But,” protested Tony, “he was all alive when he sat down in that chair. You spoke to him yourself. ‘Good-morning, Tony,’ he said to me. ‘How are all the little Wops?’ he said.”

“All I can say,” said Mr. Brown, “is that he’s thoroughly dead now – at least, I hope so. As a matter of fact, I never saw a man become so completely dead in such a short space of time. That’s what baffles me. Sure you didn’t smother him with all those towels?”

“So!” said Tony explosively. “So! Then I took away his flesh, hey? Poof to you.”

“Don’t say ‘poof’ to me, Tony,” reproved Mr. Brown. “You might have hacked it off with your razor, you know.”

Tony with eyes ablaze ran round the chair and seized one of Mr. Bland’s talon-like hands.

“For why should I shave his hands?” he demanded.

Mr. Bland woke up and looked at Tony in mild surprise.

“Why are you holding my hand, Tony?” he asked.

Tony got rid of Mr. Bland’s hand as speedily as if it had been one of Mr. Whittle’s loathsome reptiles.

“The dead is back,” he told Mr. Brown. “This is against God. Take him away and bury him. He is not good for business.”

Mr. Brown was torn between incredulity and professional interest. The latter of the two emotions proved to be the stronger.

“Pardon me,” said Mr. Brown, “but are you my old friend, Quintus Bland?”

“I am that,” snapped Mr. Bland. “Who did you take me for – Napoleon?”

“You’re a trifle long for Napoleon,” said Mr. Brown, “but you might easily be any one of thousands of dead persons.”

Mr. Bland struggled up in the chair and regarded himself in the mirror.

“I daresay you’re right,” he observed with surprising mildness for an object so repugnant. “Why not go over to your place and consider the situation? I think I should buy a coffin.”

Mr. Brown’s establishment was situated next to Tony’s barber shop. It was divided into two separate and distinct units, the funeral parlor lying in the rear of the shop.

“Very well,” agreed Mr. Brown, sensing a possible sale. “Come on over.” He turned to the dumbfounded Italian. “Tony,” he said, “don’t stand there boggling at Mr. Bland. Help him out of the chair.”

With obvious reluctance Tony righted the chair, and Mr. Bland descended to the floor. The florid-faced gentleman, his robust color momentarily hidden by a coating of lather, gave the skeleton an appalled look. Unlike Mr. Bland, he did not need to be assisted from his chair. He was out of it with surprising agility and making for the door.

“Your face!” cried Tony’s assistant. “It is full of soap.”

“It is full of horror,” replied the man. “Take a look at that face behind you.”

The assistant looked over his shoulder at Mr. Bland, then automatically followed his customer through the door. He was fully convinced that Mr. Brown had carried one of his dead bodies over to be shaved.

“Next,” announced Tony mechanically to the remaining customer, patiently waiting behind the morning paper. The man lowered the paper and half rose in his chair, then his eyes fell on Mr. Bland, and he remained as if frozen in that difficult posture.

“What sort of a man is that?” he managed to mutter.

“He’s all right,” Tony assured the man. “He’s one of my oldest customers.”

“He may be one of your oldest customers,” said the man, sinking weakly back in the chair, “but I’ll be damned if he’s all right. That man’s been dead for years.”

“Not at all,” put in Mr. Bland. “I’ve merely had a close shave, that’s all there is to it.”

“If you don’t mind,” said the man, “I’d rather not speak to you. As soon as I get my strength back I’m going to get out of here.”

“Suit yourself,” replied Mr. Bland, slipping Tony a five-dollar bill to repay him for his loss of trade. “I’m leaving right now myself.”

“Going back to your grave?” asked the man, interested in spite of himself. “Or do you happen to live in a vault?”

“Looking for trouble?” asked Mr. Bland in a nasty tone of voice. “Getting smart, perhaps?”

“Oh, no,” hastily disavowed the gentleman. “I’ve got trouble enough already, and you’re all of it.”

“Come,” said Quintus Bland to Mr. Brown. “Let’s go over to your place. I must buy myself a coffin.”

This casual remark was a little too much for the waiting customer. Apparently it gave him the strength he required, or at least a part of it.

“Wait,” he pleaded, straightening himself unsteadily. “I’m going. Give me three minutes’ start.”

Mechanically he took his hat from a peg, then slowly left the store, walking like a man in a dream. The mortician turned to the skeleton.

“As much as I’d like to sell you a coffin,” he said to Mr. Bland, “I’d hate to be seen on the street with you in your present condition. Isn’t there something we can do? You’d be a panic in public, Mr. Bland.”

“I have the thing,” cried Tony, hurrying to a cabinet. “An artificial beard. It is a clever thing. You hook him over the ears.”

“But, Tony,” said Mr. Brown, examining the large, white, bushy mop the barber had placed in his hands, “Mr. Bland hasn’t got any ears.”

“Then hook him over the head,” explained Tony. “It works both ways.”

“Would you mind hooking this over your head?” asked Mr. Brown, passing the beard to Quintus Bland. “I’ll be more used to you in a minute.”

With shrinking fingers the skeleton accepted the beard and considered it distastefully.

“Why, Tony,” he said, “this is a horrid beard. I’ve never seen a worse one. Where in the world did you get it?”

“A customer owed me a sum,” replied Tony. “So he gave me his beard instead.”

“Instead of what?” asked Mr. Brown.

“The sum,” said Tony proudly.

“You lost on the deal, Tony,” observed Mr. Bland.

“Your customer should have been indebted to you for life. He must have looked a sight behind this beard.”

“But consider all the hair,” Tony protested weakly.

“I am,” said Mr. Bland, turning to the mirror. “Oh, well, here goes. I can’t look much worse than I do already.”

He adjusted the beard round his head, then turned on the two men. Both Tony and Mr. Brown took a startled step backward.

“I didn’t think anything could look like that,” said Tony in a hushed voice.

“What did you think I was going to look like?” Mr. Bland asked bitterly. “Apollo Belvedere?”

“I have seen that one,” replied the Italian. “You are far from him. He has no beard.”

“Your hat,” suggested Mr. Brown. “Perhaps if you put it on and pulled the brim down – ’way down – you might look a little less extraordinary.”

“Bah!” muttered Mr. Bland, following this suggestion. “I’m sick of the whole damn’ business. The sooner I’m in my coffin the better I’ll be pleased.”

“So will I,” said Tony with feeling.

“Shut up,” snapped Mr. Bland. “Tell me how I look.”

“I can’t,” replied Tony, looking helplessly at the mortician. “Mr. Brown, you tell him for me, then tuck him in his coffin, beard and all. He’s welcome to it.”

“I won’t be buried in this beard,” said Mr. Bland.

“All right,” Mr. Brown soothingly agreed, fearing he might lose a customer. “You don’t have to be buried in that beard. Come along with me.”

Tony heaved a sigh of relief when he saw the last of Mr. Bland, but not so Officer Donovan when he caught a glimpse of the bearded skeleton for the first time. Donovan, who was directing traffic at a busy corner, for a moment forgot his duty and devoted himself to a thorough scratching of his head.

“Look,” he said, seizing a passing pedestrian by the arm and pointing to Mr. Bland. “What do you make of that?”

A little surprised, the pedestrian looked in the direction indicated and immediately became more than surprised. The man was visibly shocked.

“Hanged if I know,” he said. “He doesn’t look alive, yet he can’t be dead. He’s the queerest-looking customer I ever saw.”

“If the thing wasn’t walking so natural-like,” declared Donovan, “I’d swear Mr. Brown was dragging a corpse in off the street.”

“Maybe he’s got one trained,” the pedestrian suggested feebly.

“Who ever heard of a trained corpse?” Donovan retorted scornfully.

“I don’t know,” admitted the other, “but who ever heard of a corpse with a beard like that?”

“A corpse can have a beard,” Officer Donovan said with confidence. “My uncle was a corpse, and he had a beard something like that.”

“Didn’t he ever shave?” asked the pedestrian.

“No,” replied Donovan simply. “He was a corpse.”

“He wasn’t a corpse all his life, was he?” the pedestrian demanded.

“Not all of it,” said Donovan. “Just toward the end.”

“It wouldn’t matter to me,” declared the other, “whether I was a corpse or not. If I had a beard like that I’d shave the damn’ thing off.”

“Maybe that’s why this one came back,” said Donovan. “He couldn’t rest in his grave knowing he had that beard on.”

“You mean he came back to get a shave?” asked the other.

“Sure,” said Officer Donovan. “He was coming out of Tony’s when I saw him first.”

“Tony must have refused to shave him,” said the pedestrian.

“Would you shave a corpse?” Donovan wanted to know.

“God, no!” exclaimed the pedestrian. “I wouldn’t even comb his hair.”

At this moment the front mudguard of a quickly arrested automobile struck Officer Donovan from the rear and sent him sprawling on his face.

“I’m so sorry, officer,” said the frightened voice of a woman as the outraged policeman came thunderously up to the car. “I’ve just seen the most terrible sight. For a moment I lost control.”

“Did it have a beard on?” asked Donovan.

“Did it have a beard on?” repeated the woman wildly. “Did it have a beard on?” She leaned over the side of the car, her eyes wide with suppressed emotion. “Why, officer, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. You never saw such a beard in all your life.”

A persistent hooting of horns and a general confusion of traffic brought Donovan back to an awareness of his duty.

“I’m just after seeing that beard myself, lady,” he said. “You’d better drive on.”

“Then you’re not going to give me a ticket?” asked the woman.

“No, lady,” replied Donovan. “You deserve a medal for not having run over me entirely.”

The woman started her engine, then once more leaned over the side of the car.

“What did you think of that for a beard?” she asked. “And the rest of it – wasn’t it awful?”

“Now don’t you begin, lady,” Donovan replied wearily. “If I hear any more about that beard and its owner I’ll go off my nut and tie this traffic up in knots.”

“Somebody should do that to the beard,” said the woman as she drove slowly away.

Donovan turned and encountered the wild gaze of the pedestrian.

“Are you still here?” asked the policeman.

“Sure,” replied the pedestrian. “Where had we got to about that beard?”

Like a soul in anguish, Officer Donovan shrilled on his whistle, his arms waving wildly. From four directions traffic rolled at him.

“You and your everlasting beard,” he flung at the pedestrian.

“It’s not my beard,” the other protested. “If you hadn’t called my attention to it I might never have seen that beard.”

“Well,” retorted Donovan, “wasn’t it something to see?”

“It was too much to see,” said the pedestrian. “I don’t owe you a thing. The next time you want to show me something pick out a good shaft.”

“Do you mean a leg?” asked Donovan.

“I do,” replied the other.

“Then you ought to be ashamed.”

The pedestrian laughed sarcastically.

“I’d a damned sight rather feel ashamed,” he said, “than be upset for the rest of the day.”

“So would I,” agreed Donovan. “That’s just the way I feel – all upset.”

His subsequent handling of traffic fully proved the truth of his words. By the time he was relieved for his luncheon there had been four minor accidents and one major. In justice to Officer Donovan it should be mentioned that he gave no offender a ticket, ascribing everything that happened to the bearded corpse that had come back to get a shave.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Convivial Corpse

In the midst of death and appurtenances pertaining to death the skeleton of Mr. Bland was taking life easy. It was quiet and restful in the decorously subdued atmosphere of Mr. Brown’s funeral parlor. It made one feel good to be alive. Seated in a comfortable armchair in front of a large, imposing coffin, Quintus Bland was mildly amused by the thought that he could be just as much at home in the one as in the other. He could sprawl sociably in the armchair or take a turn in that splendid coffin according to his inclinations.

Appreciating the fact that he was dealing with no ordinary, commonplace corpse, Mr. Brown was extending himself to be bright and entertaining. He spoke glowingly of death and interment as if both were ends in themselves greatly to be desired. One of the reasons for the mortician’s enthusiasm was a formidable jug of applejack attractively placed on the coffin. Between the jug and the coffin were several thicknesses of last Sunday’s newspaper, the thrifty mortician not being so sure as to the quality of the applejack. Both the skeleton and the man who hoped to bury him had copiously partaken of the contents of the jug. Mr. Brown was speaking, and in his present expansive mood he was definitely convinced he meant every word he said.

“It’s a fact,” he was saying with robust earnestness. “It’s God’s own truth. It actually hurts me to sell some of these coffins, I’ve grown so fond of them. Know what I mean?”

“Sort of,” hedged Mr. Bland. “You’ve got some swell-looking coffins here – lovely things.”

“Bang up,” said the gratified mortician. “Couldn’t find a slicker line of coffins even in the city. Take model 1007-A there – that’s your coffin, my boy – when I think of you stretched out in that I’m actually burned up with envy. I’d like that coffin myself. I’d nip into it right now if I only felt sick enough.”

“If you feel as strongly as that about it,” suggested Quintus Bland, “we might get buried together.”

“It’s an idea,” agreed Mr. Brown, taking a hasty gulp from his glass. “There’s something in it. We went to school together. Why should we be separated by death?”

“Why indeed?” said Mr. Bland.

“Death is a splendid institution,” continued Mr. Brown. “I don’t blame you at all for wanting to go to earth, so to speak.” He rose and refilled the glasses. “In death man recaptures the dignity life has taken from him. You’ll make a most impressive corpse, my dear Bland.”

“Think so?” said Mr. Bland, greatly pleased.

“Know it,” replied the mortician. “There’s little I don’t know about corpses. And when I say a corpse is good that corpse is good, believe me, Charon.”

“Believe you who?” asked Mr. Bland.

“Charon,” repeated Brown. “A mythical reference. He ferried corpses across the river Styx.”

“Guess they have a tunnel nowadays,” said Mr. Bland.

“No doubt,” replied Mr. Brown. “One-way traffic.”

“Tell me this,” said Mr. Bland, as if struck by a new problem. “Can a skeleton like me rightly be called a corpse?”

“Sure as you’re alive,” the mortician hastened to assure him. “You rate a coffin as much as any other stiff. Of course, if you wear that beard I’ll have to be careful it doesn’t get tangled up in your ribs.”

This time it was Mr. Bland who took a hasty gulp from his glass.

“Many wise and comforting things have been said about death,” he observed, “but in spite of them all, Brown, we don’t seem to like it.”

“Prejudice,” said Mr. Brown with an explosive snap of his fingers. “Sheer, unenlightened prejudice, my dear Bland. That’s what we morticians are up against all the time. We can’t sell the idea of death as a thing to do, such as going to Europe or Bermuda or spending the winter in glorious Southern California.”

“I know,” said Mr. Bland. “But you can come back from these places.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Mr. Brown. “My boy, there I have you. People always come back from those places, as you say, but who ever heard of a corpse coming back? Obviously corpses are satisfied to stay where they are – they like it.” He paused to replenish the glasses. “Oh, dear me, yes,” he continued. “They love it. These people who object to dying haven’t a leg to stand on. If more of them popped off in this town I’d go to Bermuda myself.”

Too bemused by applejack to notice the inconsistency of this remark, Mr. Bland accepted it at its face value.

“We could both nip into a couple of coffins,” he suggested, “and be shipped to Bermuda.”

“There’s an idea in that,” agreed Brown. “The only trouble is, it’s mighty hard to go swimming in a coffin.”

“Couldn’t we float about?” asked Mr. Bland. “With paddles?”

The mortician shook his head.

“No,” he said moodily. “We’d sink like a couple of rocks. And then we’d drown. That wouldn’t be any fun.”

“But I thought you wanted to be a corpse,” said Mr. Bland.

“Not in Bermuda I don’t,” replied Mr. Brown. “A corpse should stick to his own country and not go barging about in foreign lands. And besides,” added Brown irrelevantly, “I’m very fond of swimming. A coffin makes it harder than a bathing suit or a pair of trunks.”

“I guess you’re right,” Mr. Bland admitted. “Do you wear trunks or a bathing suit?”

“I usually wear trunks,” replied Mr. Brown. “There’s nothing like sunlight to keep a man alive.”

“So do I,” said Mr. Bland. “Would it be all right to be buried in a pair of trunks?”

“Sure it would,” declared the mortician. “Just the beard and a pair of trunks. Then your wife could sell your best suit or save it for your successor.”

“God!” exclaimed Mr. Bland. “You think of everything.”

Mr. Brown laughed merrily at the discomfited skeleton.

“Must have my little joke,” he said. “Don’t mind me. Drink up and have a fresh one.”

“That woman would sell my best suit,” reflected Mr. Bland, relinquishing his glass. “If I know her at all, she’d sell everything I owned and make my successor buy his own clothes. She’s a hard, violent woman, that wife of mine.”

“Then she won’t miss you so much,” the mortician observed consolingly. “That’s something for which to be thankful.”

“But not much,” replied Mr. Bland. “My dog will miss me a lot.” He stopped and thought of his dog, remembering that enterprising beast for the first time since he had left the barber shop. “My dog,” he continued. “I had him at Tony’s. Did you see anything of a dog called Busy?”

“If you mean,” said Mr. Brown, “a square object consisting almost entirely of white wool, then your dog is well named. I caught one glimpse of him, and he was the busiest animal I ever saw.”

“What was he busy doing?” asked Mr. Bland.

“He was busy getting out of the store,” said Brown. “He had his tail between his legs, and there was a wild look about his eyes.”

“Never thought that dog was able to get his tail between his legs,” muttered Mr. Bland. “He must have been scared silly.”

“He looked silly enough,” said the mortician, “but that didn’t interfere with his running after he’d taken a look at you.”

“Before or after the beard?” asked Quintus Bland.

“Before,” replied Mr. Brown. “He didn’t wait for the beard.”

“Perhaps it’s just as well,” said Mr. Bland reflectively. “The shock might have proved too much for the poor animal. He might have gone mad or collapsed.”

“I almost did myself,” Mr. Brown admitted in a confidential voice. “Even now I don’t know how you do it, but I’m not asking any questions. It’s your own damn’ business. However, there’s no getting away from the fact that you should be buried either with or without that beard. And,” concluded Mr. Brown with an air of deep satisfaction, “I’m the man to handle the job from soup to nuts. You’re in luck. Model 1007-A is the ideal box for you, my boy. How would you like to try it?”

“Suppose you try it first,” said Mr. Bland. “Then I’d be able to get some idea.”

“Okay,” agreed Mr. Brown, rising and putting his empty glass on the vacated chair. “Anything to please a customer. Here goes for a shot at good old 1007-A.”

He took the jug from the coffin and with the help of Mr. Bland removed the lid. Then, stepping on a chair, he crawled into model 1007-A and sat in it with a pleased expression on his somewhat flushed face.

“My boy,” he declared, “this is the first time I’ve ever tried a coffin on for a corpse, and let me tell you it’s worth all the trouble. This is a magnificent coffin. I couldn’t be better pleased if I were being buried in it myself.”

Something of the mortician’s enthusiasm was communicated to Mr. Bland.

“Lie down in the thing,” he said, “and put on the beard. That will give me a good idea of how I will look to Lorna.”

“Mark my words,” replied the mortician, “you’ll look so nice she’ll never want to let you go.”

“Oh, I’ve got to be buried,” insisted Mr. Bland.

“Certainly you have,” replied the other. “If only for my sake. Anyway, you deserve to be buried, and I’m going to see you get what you deserve.”

“You’re awfully good to me, Brown,” said Quintus Bland. “One of the best friends I have, if not the best. Now just lie down in my coffin and try on this beard.”

Mr. Brown took the proffered beard, adjusted it over his ears, then stretched himself in the coffin.

“How do I look?” he asked.

“If I look half as well,” said Mr. Bland, peering down at his friend, “I’ll be more than satisfied. You were made for that coffin, Brown, simply made for it. Climb out and let me have a go at good old 1007-A.”

Charlie, Mr. Brown’s assistant, had not witnessed the arrival of his employer and Mr. Bland. As he quietly came into the funeral parlor now, however, he was privileged to see them both, but in the dim light of the place he did not at first appreciate the full horror of the scene he was witnessing. Gradually, as his eyes grew accustomed to the modified light, it was borne in on him that he was seeing a strange corpse assisting his boss either in or out of a coffin. And as if to make the whole ghastly affair more difficult of comprehension, his boss had grown a long beard in a remarkably short time. This quaint reversal of procedure Charlie found strangely depressing. Had it not been for his loyalty to the establishment the young man would have withdrawn at once and in great disorder. However, there were a couple of customers waiting, and to lose a possible sale was to Charlie even worse than watching Mr. Brown being prematurely put in a coffin by one of his own corpses. Repressing a natural impulse to rush screaming from the room, Charlie stood in the shadows and awaited further developments. Those were not at all pleasant.

He saw the corpse divest himself of practically all his garments. He saw his newly bearded employer scramble from the coffin to the floor. He saw both his boss and what could be nothing other than a skeleton drink long and deep from a jug, and Charlie wished he could do the same. Finally he saw the skeleton crawl into the coffin where he properly belonged. Although to Charlie’s way of thinking the situation in the funeral parlor was still far from normal, a step in the right direction had been taken when the shocking figure of the skeleton had disappeared into model 1007-A, the smartest coffin in the shop. He decided it was comparatively safe to make his mission known. Accordingly he addressed Mr. Brown in a voice that struck even Charlie as being far from normal.

“What sort of a corpse is that, Mr. Brown?” Charlie wanted to know.

Momentarily startled by this unexpected question, Mr. Brown took an extra swig from the bottle, then rallied with reassuring casualness.

“Charlie,” he said thickly, but quite naturally, “damned if I know myself, but you need have no fear. Mr. Bland is one of the most entertaining corpses I’ve ever met, which of course isn’t saying a lot. Moreover, he is going to purchase the most expensive coffin in the shop. Charlie, my boy, it is our business to provide corpses with coffins, not to inquire into their conduct.”

“Yes, sir,” replied Charlie. “What I wanted to say was that Mr. and Mrs. Wilks are out there. They want to select a coffin.”

“Show them in, my boy, show them in,” said Mr. Brown. “The more the merrier, say I. It must be for their uncle. I’ve had my eyes on the old fellow for some time. I’m delighted he made up his mind to shove off at last.”

When Mr. and Mrs. Wilks were ushered into the room, both were visibly shocked by the beard which Mr. Brown had forgotten to remove.

“Why, Mr. Brown,” exclaimed Mrs. Wilks, “I didn’t know you had grown a beard.”

“I haven’t, Mrs. Wilks,” replied the mortician. “This belongs to one of my most prominent corpses. I’m just wearing it around so that it won’t get misplaced.”

“What’s that?” demanded Wilks, a powerful and aggressive creature. “What are you doing that for?”

“Well, Mr. Wilts,” explained Mr. Brown with admirable sang-froid, “there’s so much sorrow in this vale of tears that I thought it would be a good idea to make myself look a bit funny. Comic relief, you know.”

“You don’t see either of us laughing,” rumbled Mr. Wilks. “You look anything but funny to me.”

“Then I’ve failed,” said the mortician regretfully. “I’ll remove the beard and return it to its rightful owner. He is right over there in his coffin. You must inspect the model. It would be just the thing for your husband or your uncle, Mrs. Wilks, although at the moment your husband doesn’t need one. However, tomorrow or the next day – who can tell?”

Supporting himself cleverly between his two clients, he led them unresistingly over to Mr. Bland, lying completely relaxed in his coffin. As if the sight of skeleton dressed only in a pair of orange-striped shorts were not sufficiently arresting, Mr. Brown removed the beard from his own chin and deftly affixed it to that of Mr. Bland who, as a result of the tickling hairs, sneezed loudly and began to giggle as drunkards occasionally do and always at the wrong time.

“I forgot to mention,” said Mr. Brown quickly, “that this is rather an unusual corpse. Do you think he looks better with or without beard? I’ll leave the choice entirely to you.”

Slowly Mrs. Wilks sank to the floor, dragging Mr. Brown with her. Finding it impossible to regain his feet without disclosing his condition, Mr. Brown decided to remain where he was.

“Keep your seat, Mrs. Wilks,” he said cordially to the lady, patting the thick carpet beside him. “I’ll give your husband a drink if you can persuade him to join us.”

Rather shamefacedly Mr. Wilks emerged from a closet in which he had taken refuge. In his present state of nerves the man would have joined anything for the solace of a drink. He sank down by his wife and accepted a glass of applejack from Mr. Brown’s hand.

“Pass me the jug,” said a voice from the coffin, “or I’ll snap down there and get it myself.”

The three persons seated on the floor glanced up and beheld the bearded skull of Mr. Bland peering down at them over the edge of the coffin.

“Why don’t you behave like a decent, self-respecting corpse?” Mr. Brown demanded in a bored voice. “Lie down like a good fellow and stop showing off in front of my customers. It’s most annoying.”

“Take a look at your customers now,” chuckled the skull, one bony finger pointing.

Mr. and Mrs. Wilks, as if endeavoring to recapture the old, lost thrill of their nursery days, were crawling ponderously towards the door on their hands and knees. Upon seeing the efforts of his customers to escape, Mr. Brown emulated their example and began to crawl resolutely after them. Thus, like the Three Bears of happy memory, they lumbered over the carpet. The Rev. T. Whittier Watts, accompanied by a parishioner, stepped quietly into the room and stood regarding this playful little procession with cold, studious eyes, his long cold nose sniffing the while the applejack-tainted air. Finally the Rev. T. Whittier Watts, finding that his presence alone was not sufficient to arrest this exceedingly puerile performance, gave utterance to words in a voice as cold as the rest of his person.

“Mr. Brown,” he said, “have you taken leave of your senses?”

“No,” replied Brown thickly, “but Wilks and his wife are about to take leave of my shop, and they haven’t picked out their coffin yet. Stand in front of the door and don’t let them pass.”

“I’ll do nothing of the sort,” said heaven’s gift to a wicked world. “Stand up, sir, and explain your extraordinary conduct.”

Totally disregarding the minister, Mr. Brown threw his limbs into high and succeeded in decreasing the distance separating him from Mrs. Wilks. With a desperate lunge he threw himself forward and seized the fleeing lady by the leg. The lady uttered a shriek and fell on her face, her free leg waving wildly.

“He’s got me by the leg,” she managed to inform her husband. “And he’s hanging on like grim death.”

“Which one?” asked Mr. Wilks, accelerating his pace. “The corpse or Mr. Brown?”

“I don’t know,” gasped the woman. “I’m afraid to look back.”

“So am I,” admitted her husband. “But you’d better find out, because if it’s the corpse he can have you, leg and all.”

“Mrs. Wilks,” cried the Rev. Watts, “your skirt is around your neck. Kindly cover your limbs.”

“If my skirt is around my neck,” declared the floundering woman, “there’s lots more to be covered than my limbs.”

“Madam, that will do,” commanded the Rev. Watts. “This is no place for vulgarity.”

“It’s no place for man or corpse to be holding me by the leg, either,” retorted Mrs. Wilks.

“Mr. Brown,” said the minister in his sternest manner, “I order you to remove your hand from that woman’s leg.”

“Oh,” exclaimed Mr. Wilks, “so it’s Brown who’s after my wife’s leg, is it? That’s different.”

“I’m not after your wife’s leg,” Mr. Brown disclaimed. “I’m after your wife’s business.”

“What!” cried Mr. Wilks, twisting his head over one powerful shoulder. “What do you mean by my wife’s business?”

“She hasn’t selected her coffin yet,” said Mr. Brown.

“I’ll take any old coffin,” moaned Mrs. Wilks, “if you’ll only let me out of here.”

“Will the three of you get up from the floor,” demanded the Rev. Watts, “and stand erect like God-fearing human beings?”

“If he doesn’t take his hand from my wife’s leg,” said Mr. Wilks in an ugly voice, “he’ll never stand erect again.”

Realizing the utter futility of further effort, Mr. Brown got unsteadily to his feet, philosophically thanking heaven that the situation was not further complicated by the presence of that beard on his chin. He glanced nervously over his shoulder in the direction of model 1007-A. Quiet seemed to reign within the coffin. Mr. Brown fervently hoped that its demoralizing inmate had fallen asleep.

“A pretty way for a mortician to act,” Mrs. Wilks was saying indignantly to the Rev. Watts, who did not want to hear her. “Not content with holding my leg, he was actually going after my business, whatever that may be.”

“I’m sure he meant no harm,” said the Rev. Watts.

“I’m sure he meant no good,” the lady retorted with a sniff of feminine scorn.

“What do you mean by that?” came a hollow voice from 1007-A.

All eyes were turned in that direction. Under the concerted scrutiny of so many spectators Mr. Bland snapped back in the coffin with such celerity that all the eyes blinked.

“What’s that?” cried the Rev. Watts, his sallow face now paper white. “Am I going mad or did I see a terrible beard on an even more terrible face?”

“You must be going mad,” lied Mr. Brown. “I looked and I didn’t see a thing.”

The minister turned to his companion for further confirmation of his suspicions, but that silent gentleman had beaten both Mr. and Mrs. Wilks to the door by at least three feet and was now increasing the distance as he sped through the outer shop.

Pressing a cold white hand wearily to his temples, the Rev. Watts strove to collect his scattered faculties.

“I have come,” he said at last, “to view the remains.”

“What remains?” asked Brown stupidly.

“The remains of Mr. Jessup,” said the minister. “You should know at least that much.”

“Jessup,” repeated the mortician. “Jessup. Don’t seem to place that corpse, but I guess he’s knocking about somewhere or other.”

“Mr. Jessup knocking about?” cried the scandalized man of God. “Is that the way you treat the bodies entrusted to your keeping?”

“Sure,” said the drunken mortician, growing a little tired of the Rev. Watts. “We give them the run of the house.”

He was about to raise his voice in an impassioned cry for Charlie when a wilder cry than any he could utter issued from coffin 1007-A.

“Calling Mr. Jessup!” came the hollow voice of Mr. Bland, who had arrived at a facetious stage of inebriety. “Paging Mr. Jessup!”

“Charlie,” roared Mr. Brown, endeavoring to drown out the sound of Bland’s voice. “I say there, Charlie, my boy.”

His boy, looking unusually pale and wan, appeared from the outer shop.

“What is it, Mr. Brown?” he asked.

“Ah, there you are, Charlie!” cried the relieved mortician. “What did we do with Jessup? The Rev. Watts here wants to view his remains, but damn me – begging your pardon, sir – if I can remember what we did with the jolly old corpse.”

“We shipped a Jessup out to Chicago the first thing this morning,” Charlie said, hoping to impress the Rev. Watts favorably by his alertness.

“Dear me!” exclaimed the Rev. Watts, now looking thoroughly startled. “What in the world did you do that for?”

“He insisted on seeing the World’s Fair,” sang out the coffin. “You know, the Century of Progress.”

“Shouldn’t Mr. Jessup’s remains have gone to the World’s Fair?” asked the confused mortician. “I don’t mean that, either.” Here Mr. Brown raised his voice significantly. “I hope someone,” he said, “will learn to mind his own business.” Then, addressing the dazed minister, once more he asked, “Shouldn’t we have shipped Mr. Jessup to Chicago?”

“No, you shouldn’t have shipped Mr. Jessup to Chicago,” retorted the minister, who was rapidly losing both his temper and his dignity. “Mr. Jessup was to be buried right here at home. He has never been to Chicago.”

“Then it’s high time he went,” asserted the coffin. “It will do the poor stiff a world of good.”

“Who is the godless person speaking from that coffin?” demanded the Rev. Watts in a shaken voice.

“He’s a new arrival,” answered Mr. Brown. “Guess he hasn’t got used to the place yet. He’s always gabbing and chattering away just as if he were at a party.”

Once more the Rev. Watts pressed a hand to his temple.

“There is something decidedly wrong here,” he said in his coldest voice. “And there’s something decidedly wrong with you, Mr. Brown. Also, there is something most irregular in the conduct of that coffin.”

“Bah!” shrilled the coffin. “One thousand thunders! There’s nothing wrong with either of us.” The voice broke into a high-pitched, quavering song. “Pals, always pals,” it wailed, then stopped abruptly. “It’s too good for him,” it concluded. “Far too good.”

“Who’s in that coffin?” demanded the Rev. Watts.

“I’m not sure,” said Mr. Brown. “I’m not sure.”

“No wonder you shipped poor Jessup to Chicago,” the minister observed with a nasty smile. “Not only are you intoxicated yourself, but also you’ve managed in some way to get one of your inebriated friends into that coffin. I’m going to investigate this and then take steps to see that your license is revoked, Mr. Brown.”

Thus speaking, the minister squared his narrow shoulders and walked over to the coffin. Interested Mr. Brown followed him. Charlie contented himself with waiting in the background. As the Rev. Watts peered down at the skeleton of Mr. Bland, partially concealed behind his formidable beard, one fleshless hand shot up and seized the minister by the lapel of his coat. With a sharp intake of breath the Rev. Watts leaped back and collapsed into a chair.

“Be calm,” said the skeleton, sitting up in the coffin. “Pull yourself together. Mr. Brown, give the parson a drink.”

Scarcely realizing what he was doing, the Rev. Watts accepted a stiff shot of applejack, which he poured into his shaken and still quivering body.

“Have another?” asked Mr. Brown.

“Pour it out,” gasped the Rev. Watts, wiping the tears from his eyes. “I’ll take it when I stop burning. What is it, embalming fluid?”

Mr. Brown nodded.

“My own preparation,” he said.

“Did it bring that skeleton back from hell?” the minister inquired.

“Listen to me, Watts,” the skeleton began furiously. “You’ve got away with that stuff about hell altogether too long. I’ve looked all over for such a place, and damn me if I can find it.”

With a hand that trembled, the minister raised the glass to his lips and drained his second drink. Fortified by this, he addressed himself to the skeleton.

“I don’t know who you are,” he said. “I don’t even know what you are, but would you mind telling me how you expect anyone to give you a Christian burial if you keep on talking and singing and popping out of your coffin like a veritable jack-in-the-box?”

“I’m going to bury myself,” declared Mr. Bland. “I’m perfectly competent to do so, and it will be much less expensive.”

“Perhaps that would be wiser after all,” said the minister, holding his glass to Mr. Brown. “I’m sure I could never bury you if you kept interrupting the service and joining in the hymns. Would you mind telling me what you have found on the other side?”

“On the other side of what?” asked Mr. Bland.

“On the other side of the grave,” replied the minister.

“I haven’t even been buried yet,” said Mr. Bland, “but after I’m once planted I’ll come back and slip you the dope.”

“Don’t trouble yourself,” the Rev. Watts said hurriedly. “I’m not as anxious to know as all that.” He turned to Mr. Brown. “This embalming fluid is excellent stuff. It’s far too good for your patrons. Ha, ha! Must have my little quip even in the face of that god-forsaken-looking object. Just a dash this time.”

“Then you don’t think I’m drunk?” asked the mortician.

“Far from it,” replied the minister. “You’re mad. We’re both mad. That creature in there cannot be real. It’s a figment of our crazed imaginations. I hope the seizure passes, or we’ll have to be put away. Oh, look!”

The figment of their imaginations was crawling out of its coffin. When it reached the floor it walked noiselessly to the jug and helped itself to a long drink, then calmly sat down in the other chair.

“Why,” asked the Rev. Watts, “are you clad only in your drawers? That’s no way to get buried. I can understand the drawers, of course, and I’m gratified you still have some sense of decency left.”

“A man is born naked into this world,” replied Mr. Bland. “I see no reason why he shouldn’t leave it in much the same condition.”

“Then why don’t you shave that beard off?” the Rev. Watts asked on a note of drunken triumph. “I hope for your mother’s sake you weren’t born into the world with that.”

“If you don’t like my beard,” said Mr. Bland, “I’ll take the damn’ thing off.”

To the horror of the Rev. Watts the skeleton tugged at his beard and passed it to Mr. Brown, who playfully affixed it to his own chin and stood frowning down at the minister.

“I can’t stand it,” gasped that gentleman. “Already I’ve stood too much.”

Rising feebly from his chair, he made a zigzag passage for the door. Here he halted and looked back.

“When a mortician and a skeleton start wearing one and the same beard,” he said, “it’s high time for a mere minister to make himself scarce.”

“How about another drink?” asked Mr. Brown.

“Not while you have that beard on,” said the Rev. Watts. “Take it off like a good chap and bring me just a dash. My legs are acting in the strangest manner.”

A few minutes later Officer Donovan, who was still misdirecting traffic, was the recipient of another shock.

“Holy mackerel,” he muttered to himself. “What’s come over this burg, anyway? There goes the Rev. Watts, and he’s crocked to the eyes.”

Although crocked to the eyes, as Donovan had expressed it, the Rev. Watts was feeling better than he had felt in years.

“Want to know what they did with old Jessup?” he asked a passing stranger, clutching the man by the arm. “They shipped old Jessup to the World’s Fair, remains and all. Extraordinary piece of carelessness. Has its amusing side, however. Old Jessup at the World’s Fair – think of it! What a way to be.”

Dismissing the man with a wave of his hand, the Rev. Watts continued on his way. As he lurched round the corner he lifted his hoarse voice in a plaintive song having to do with the continuous loyalty of pals. Those who were privileged to hear the singing of the Rev. Watts were more astonished than entertained.

CHAPTER NINE

1007-A Pays a Social Call

When the wide front door of the Bland residence moved ominously open, Lorna was rising from a solitary luncheon. Solitary, that is, save for the unresponsive presence of a collapsed and deflated Busy who, an hour or so earlier, like a singed bat out of hell, had come streaking up the drive in a high state of nerves.

For a while thereafter the square dog had conducted himself in a suspicious and alarming manner. With mounting anxiety his mistress had watched him alternately staggering and creeping about the house, carefully avoiding dark corners and glancing over his shoulder as if some unseen and unwanted presence were silently stalking his tracks.

Finally Lorna found herself becoming as nervous as the dog. She began to wonder why the animal had returned home unescorted by his drunken and lecherous master. Also, she began to wonder about that fine fellow himself.

She was not long in finding out.

Through the front door four dark-clad gentlemen entered with a certain air of subdued briskness, bearing with them good old model 1007-A. Following close upon the heels of his cherished coffin appeared a flushed, disheveled, yet happily beaming Mr. Brown. The business in hand was dispatched quickly and quietly, yet not without a somewhat decently festive air. Before Lorna had had time to appreciate fully the inwardness of the events taking place in her home, she found herself in possession of one large and imposing coffin and one obviously drunken Mr. Brown, neither of which she wanted with any great degree of yearning.

Nevertheless she was interested if not gratified.

Hovering curiously in the door of the living room, Lorna looked first upon the mortician and then upon the coffin. The coffin, she decided, was in far better condition. After industriously mopping his brow with a deep-bordered mourning handkerchief, Mr. Brown turned suddenly upon the lady of the house and held up a protesting hand.

“Now don’t be morbid,” he told her. “You couldn’t get a better coffin if you tried, and besides, I’m sweating like a bull.”

“Just how does a bull sweat?” asked Lorna coolly.

“How should I know?” replied Mr. Brown a little impatiently. “Like anyone else, I suppose. Only on a larger scale.”

“I’ve never seen a bull sweat on any scale at all,” observed the woman.

“Then you haven’t missed much,” said Mr. Brown. “Although it might be worth watching, but don’t tax me with it. Maybe bulls are sweatless for all I know, or maybe they sweat like – like – —”

“A drunken mortician,” suggested Lorna sweetly.

“Eh, what’s that?” he exclaimed. “Who’s a drunken mortician?”

“You are,” Lorna told him.

“I didn’t come here to quarrel,” said Mr. Brown with dignity. “So don’t go on about it.”

“You know,” continued Lorna, her voice unpleasantly calm, “no matter how much I may crave and admire that coffin, Mr. Brown, you can’t come swooping into my house and forcing the thing on me without any previous warning. I might die from the shock, and that coffin is far too large for me. I’d rattle around in the thing like a pea in a pod.”

“Do you always run on like that?” asked Mr. Brown, not insultingly, but from an honest desire to know.

“More or less,” said Lorna.

“More,” contributed the coffin in a decided but muffled voice. “Never, never less. She always goes on and on and on – endlessly and tiresomely – fiendishly!”

Sleepily the voice droned itself into silence.

“Who said that?” demanded Mr. Brown before Lorna had time to put the same question to him.

“I don’t know,” she replied, “but whoever it was I’d like to wring his lying neck.”

She advanced into the room and held a clenched fist directly over the coffin.

“Why his lying neck, madam?” Brown asked quickly to distract her attention.

“Why not his lying neck?” she snapped. “What else should I wring?”

“Far be it from me to say,” said Mr. Brown, “but I might suggest his teeth – people lie through their teeth, you know.”

“But people don’t always have teeth,” she retorted, “and they always have necks.”

“Why not wring his hand?” he asked her.

“I don’t know who he is,” she said.

“You don’t know who who is?” inquired Mr. Brown.

“You’re very drunk,” she assured him.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he admitted. “Is there anything in the house?”

“It’s over there on the table,” she said. “Help yourself and pour me one, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” said Mr. Brown, simply. “In fact, I’d rather like it.”

He poured two drinks, gave one to Lorna. Then both sat down and thoughtfully surveyed the coffin.

“It’s a lovely thing,” she said at last. “Lovely.”

“Exquisite,” agreed Brown. “Would you care for one just like it, only smaller?”

“It would make the room too crowded,” she said. “And besides, I couldn’t afford it unless on partial payments.”

“That might be arranged,” said Mr. Brown. “You could sell the sofa to begin with.”

Lorna considered this, then suggested another drink.

“Tell me,” she said when she was given one. “Who is really going to get this coffin?”

“Eh!” Brown exclaimed. “I don’t quite understand.”

“I mean,” she said, “that you’ve made a mistake, Mr. Brown.”

“Of course, I have,” he admitted. “I shipped Mr. Jessup to the World’s Fair. That was an amusing blunder.”

“Who’s Mr. Jessup?” Lorna asked.

“I don’t quite know myself,” said Brown, in some perplexity, “but I’m given to understand he was one of my transient corpses.”

“Do any of them stay with you permanently?”

“No corpse stays with me permanently,” Brown declared with emphasis. “Not if I know it.”

“I guess you’d know it,” said Lorna.

“ ’Most anybody would,” said Mr. Brown.

“Is this one going to stay permanently with me?” she asked him.

“That’s up to you,” he told her.

“Then I say no,” she declared. “There are enough queer things in this house already.”

“There’s nothing queer about a corpse,” said Mr. Brown.

“Not when it stays in its proper place,” she answered. “But the middle of my best room is no proper place for a corpse. People would begin to talk.”

“Let ’em,” said Mr. Brown largely. “Let ’em talk their blasted tongues off. If you want a corpse in your home there’s no reason in the world why you shouldn’t have your corpse – or a baker’s dozen of corpses, if you care for so many.”

“But I don’t want one corpse in my home,” she protested, “let alone a baker’s dozen of them. By the way,” she added, “just how could you make up a baker’s dozen of corpses, Mr. Brown?”

“Quite simply,” said Mr. Brown. “Just toss in an extra arm, or leg, or, for full measure, a good torso.”

“Gr-r-r,” came from the coffin. “How can they do it?”

“Did you hear that?” asked Lorna.

“No,” lied Mr. Brown. “Is there a dog in the house?”

“Yes,” replied Lorna.

“Then that explains it,” said Brown.

“A baker’s dozen of dogs wouldn’t explain it to me,” she declared. “There’s something funny about that coffin. Who really owns it?”

“Your husband bought that coffin,” said Mr. Brown.

“Then where is my husband?”

“Why, he’s in the coffin,” Brown told her. “I thought you knew that.”

“Why in the world does he want to be in a stuffy old coffin?” asked Lorna.

“Why does anyone want to be in a coffin?” countered Mr. Brown.

“Damned if I know,” said Lorna frankly. “Do you, Mr. Brown?”

“All of my clients want to be in coffins,” he replied.

Lorna laughed scornfully.

“They can’t help themselves,” she answered. “They have to be in coffins.”

“Well,” said Mr. Brown, “your husband is one of my clients.”

“You mean to say,” asked Lorna, “that my husband actually wanted to be in that coffin?”

“Couldn’t keep him out of it,” Brown declared proudly. “He’s crazy about that coffin – admires it quite sincerely.”

“It’s one thing to admire a coffin,” said Lorna, “and quite another to crawl into one. Take me, for example. I admire that coffin, but I’d go to the most extreme lengths to keep myself out of it.”

“You could be in far worse places,” observed Mr. Brown defensively.

“Perhaps,” she admitted, “but in comparison with that coffin the foulest gutter would be a bed of roses to me.”

“Yes?” said Mr. Brown, now thoroughly aroused. “And if you lay long in a foul gutter you’d jolly well need a coffin. What do you think of that?”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” she answered. “It takes a strong constitution to lie in a foul gutter.”

“I never lay in a foul gutter,” said Mr. Brown.

“What sort of gutters do you lie in?”

“I’ve never lain in any gutter at all,” he answered.

“Then,” said Lorna, crushingly, “you don’t know life.”

“Life is not my business,” remarked Mr. Brown. “I deal exclusively with death.”

“Not when it comes to drinking,” she retorted.

“I have my lighter moments,” replied Brown. “For example, madam, I’d like to sell you a crib or a baby carriage.”

“With my husband lying dead in that coffin?”

“That coffin,” said Mr. Brown, “contains only one husband. There are lots of others knocking about.”

“Your calling has corrupted your morals,” declared Lorna. “If I thought for one moment you were making improper advances I’d be very much pleased.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” said Mr. Brown. “Not with your husband lurking in that coffin. The lid isn’t screwed down.”

“Do you mean,” she demanded, “my husband isn’t quite dead?”

“He’s a little more than dead,” Mr. Brown assured her. “Your husband is already a skeleton.”

“Then it isn’t my husband at all,” said Lorna. “That’s Señor Toledo.”

“My God!” cried Mr. Brown. “Have I made another mistake?”

“Let’s go and see,” she suggested. “Perhaps it is my husband after all.”

“I hope to heaven it is,” Brown declared earnestly.

“Thanks for your kind wishes,” was Lorna’s tart reply. “Just for that I do hope it’s Señor Toledo and that he died without a cent to pay for your old coffin.”

“If it is that Toledo person,” retorted Mr. Brown, “I’ll yank him out of that coffin a darned sight faster than he ever got in it, mark my words.”

“And I’d have you run in for body-snatching,” Lorna calmly stated.

“How can you snatch a body,” Mr. Brown wanted to know, “when this one consists entirely of bones?”

“That,” said Lorna, “strikes me as taking an even unfairer advantage of the dead. A skeleton must be about the easiest type of body to snatch. The judge would want to know why you didn’t pick on a body your size.”

“Will you two please stop bickering about snatching my body?” demanded the coffin, and this time the voice though thick was by no means muffled.

Both Lorna and Mr. Brown looked up from their glasses to encounter a rare and awesome resurrection. Quintus Bland, clad in a flowing beard, was sitting up in his coffin and peering at them dimly out of sleep-laden eyes.

“Want a drink,” announced Quintus Bland.

“I thought you said you put a skeleton in that coffin,” said Lorna, turning on the dazed Mr. Brown.

“I didn’t say I put one in,” protested that worthy mortician. “I said a skeleton crawled in unaided, and I stand by that statement.”

“Was he wearing that astonishing beard at the time?” she demanded.

“Am I not a skeleton any more?” Bland mildly inquired.

“I should say not,” replied Lorna. “You’re as naked as a coot, aside from that offensive bush.”

“That being the case,” reflected Mr. Bland aloud, “the beard should be a couple of feet longer, estimating conservatively.”

“Get out of that coffin at once,” snapped Lorna, “and remove that silly beard.”

“That,” observed her husband, “is an indecent suggestion.”

“Indecent suggestions are the only kind you like or understand.”

“I like them when it is the other party who does the suggesting,” he replied, “or when it’s mutual. If you, my love, will remove your frock I will gladly yank off my beard. The only thing that will get me out of this exceedingly comfortable coffin is the refusal of a drink.”

Gratified by this glowing testimonial to 1007-A, Mr. Brown arose and presented Mr. Bland with the entire bottle.

“You look even better in it the way you are,” said Brown, “than when you were a skeleton.”

“That’s saying a lot,” replied Bland, eagerly plucking the bottle from the mortician’s hand. “I’ve had a most refreshing little nap in this fascinating crib. If my wife were not so snooty, I’d take up the matter of removing our antiquated nuptial couch and substituting twin coffins instead.”

“There’s an idea in that,” observed Mr. Brown. “Only it might be bad for my furniture business.”

“I fully appreciate the point,” said Mr. Bland. “People can hardly be buried in their beds, whereas they can be in their coffins. I withdraw the suggestion, old boy. At this stage in our so-called national recovery we must stimulate sales rather than retard them.”

“Exactly,” agreed Mr. Brown. “More people should go to bed, and many more should die.”

“I suggest that both of you die,” said Lorna. “Your loss would be a gain to the nation.”

“Silence, woman!” commanded Mr. Bland, peering fiercely at her over his terrible beard. “If economists practised what they preached, there would be damned few economists, and I, for one, would be just as well pleased.”

“Listen,” said Lorna. “You’ve got me licked. I can’t talk to you if you’re going to keep wearing that homicidal-looking beard.”

“Madam,” Bland told her calmly, “this beard and coffin are indispensable to my happiness.”

“They are most detrimental to mine,” said Lorna. “That, together with the knowledge that I have an occasional skeleton for a husband.”

“Would you prefer a skeleton to a dirty dog?” asked Mr. Bland significantly.

“Both are equally objectionable,” said Lorna.

“Yes, but if Señor Toledo had not gallantly saved you from your folly,” Bland retorted, “you’d have been in a pretty fix, my dear young wench.”

“You did it for your own selfish interests,” Lorna replied. “You saved me for yourself.”

“At the risk of breaking every bone in my body,” supplied Mr. Bland. “Which reminds me, has your dear Phil fully recovered from his fright?”

“Why wash your dirty linen in public?” Lorna asked evasively.

“As you can see,” said Mr. Bland, “I haven’t a scrap of linen about me, either clean or dirty. An old dishrag would do me a world of good.”

“What did you do with your clothes?”

“My apprentice embalmer,” said Mr. Brown, “was trying them on a client when we left. A conscientious young man.”

“I did have a pair of drawers,” Bland wistfully observed, “but they must have got jolted off during the drive.”

“I don’t know what we’re going to do about all this,” lamented Lorna. “Here I find myself conversing with a drunken mortician and a naked and falsely bearded husband seated in a huge coffin in the middle of my best room. You can see for yourself it’s unnatural. Suppose somebody should call?”

And that was precisely what somebody did at that inauspicious moment. Somebody called – two, in fact. They called to give Lorna a pleasant little surprise and were all brimming over with well-being and merriment. The surprise they gave was returned in full measure, but it was far from pleasant.

Finding the front door off the lock, Mr. and Mrs. Tucker, Lorna’s brother-in-law and sister, crept into the house and continued creeping until they arrived at the door of the living room. Here they stopped creeping. Had they possessed the power they probably would have crept backwards and as silently left the house. But the scene that confronted them robbed them of all powers for the moment. However, it could not stop Mrs. Tucker’s set greeting. Not knowing what she was saying, she cried out in a dead voice: “Hello, everybody!”

“Who’s that?” shouted Quintus Bland.

“How do I know?” said Mr. Brown.

“Dear God,” quavered Lorna.

Then the scene became one of frenzied action.

CHAPTER TEN

The Body Is Viewed
Without Favor

It was Brown who shot fire through the frozen tableau. As drunk as he was, his brain and body functioned with startling rapidity. Like a seasoned football player he flung himself upon the body of a shocked and protesting Bland and bore him down into the depths of 1007-A. Even then Mr. Bland did not abandon the battle or, better still, the bottle. For a brief moment it was flourished aloft like the sword of a fallen chieftain, then it was deftly snatched from view by an extremely busy mortician. The next moment an amazing change came over the man. His still flushed face grew calm and assumed an expression of sorrow controlled by resignation. He clasped his hands in front of him in an attitude of silent prayer. He bowed his head slightly in humility and sorrow. In this posture he stood by the coffin and gazed down at its shocking contents with spellbound reverence.

What he actually contemplated was the entirely naked figure of a long, lank Quintus Bland, stretched out at full length with his horrid beard far off center and completely concealing his mouth. While the eyes of Mr. Bland glared up malevolently at Mr. Brown, the beard puffed and bellowed wickedly as the hot breath of its wearer surged indignantly through its strands.

Looking down on this weird yet formidable figure, Mr. Brown could not help thinking how much more colorful his life would be if the corpses he did business with had only one tenth of the spunk and animation of the unlovely body now stretched out before him. Also, the distressing thought occurred to him that if that alarmingly active beard crept up a little higher Mr. Bland stood in imminent danger of becoming a corpse in reality through the simple process of suffocation.

While Mr. Brown was occupied with his varied reflections, Lorna was doing her bit in another direction. Flying to her sister, the stunned Mrs. Tucker, she fell so heavily on that lady’s neck that both of them nearly collapsed to the floor. Lorna’s breath alone would have floored a much stronger woman than the one now staggering under her sudden assault.

Meanwhile Mr. Tucker, a man of an observant eye and an inquiring disposition, having rallied from the first shock, was about to advance into the room to investigate the situation. Surely, he decided, if any situation deserved investigation this one did.

Lorna was quick to sense his intentions. Immediately she took steps. She gave her sister a violent push backwards, thus further removing her from the coffin and its inmate, then hurled herself into the arms of her brother-in-law. The man had no other choice than to catch hold of her. Otherwise she would have crashed to his feet.

For a moment, at least, the advance of the Tuckers was checked. Lorna needed time to parley with them. In the back of her mind she wondered if the drunken mortician possessed sufficient sense to throw something over the naked reaches of her equally drunken husband. If not, she hoped he had flipped Mr. Bland over on his stomach. An unconventional posture for a corpse, perhaps, but one which would cover a multitude of sins, including that desperate beard. She could tell the Tuckers that it was being done in Hollywood, or that it had been her husband’s last request.

“Lorna,” he had said, “bury me on my stomach. I’ve always slept that way.”

Such mad thoughts flashed through her distracted mind before she regained the ability to express herself in words. When she did they came in great quantities.

To her surprising expressions of sorrow Dolly, who had always been dumb, could find no adequate reply. Also, she was too deeply engrossed in adjusting the disarranged garments which her emotional sister had half dragged off her body. Not so Mr. Tucker. He was smelling rats in ever-increasing numbers.

“I say, old girl,” he said, “this is a terrible shock. Is it – is it – —”

“Yes, Frank,” Lorna broke in, “it’s Quintie. Little Quintie – the dirty old dog.”

Frank considered this information while delicately sniffing a familiar odor on the air.

“Was it sudden, old girl?” he asked.

“Was it sudden?” repeated Lorna enthusiastically, snapping her fingers. “Like that. Just like a snowball in hell. The mortician is adjusting him now. What a man!”

“Adjusting him?” said Frank. “Looked more to me as if he were wrestling with him when we came in.”

“No, Frank, you’re wrong,” declared Lorna. “Quintie was a punk wrestler.”

Deep in 1007-A, Quintie was chewing his beard in rage while Mr. Brown pressed two reverent hands heavily down on his chest.

“Are you burying him with a bottle?” asked Frank. “I could have sworn I saw him holding one in his hand.”

“We were thinking of it, Frank dear,” said Lorna. “He was such a lovable sot. Seldom did he have a bottle out of his hand or two inches from his mouth. And what a mouth! Just like a split watermelon.”

At this, Mr. Bland’s mouth did split just like a watermelon as he fairly devoured his beard. From the depth of the coffin issued low, gurgling sounds, horrible to hear.

“That’s the mortician,” said Lorna, quickly. “He’s intoning a prayer for the drunk, or the dead, it doesn’t matter which. Both are helpless. If the mortician couldn’t intone he couldn’t mort. He doesn’t do it so well, does he? I think he’s a little mad.”

Upon hearing this, Mr. Brown felt inclined to allow the demented occupant of 1007-A to escape with his beard and his nakedness. “After all,” thought Brown, “this is none of my affair.” However, he still pressed down for the simple reason that he was not so sure that he himself would not be the first object of Mr. Bland’s attack.

“What’s that fellow doing?” Frank Tucker suddenly asked. “Looks like he’s kneading the body of good old Blandie.”

Dolly Tucker gave a little scream at this. She was still too shocked to speak.

“Needing him?” asked Lorna, puzzled. “Oh, yes, he needs the body. He needs it for his business. Money in the pocket, you know.”

“But, Lorna dear,” said Dolly, made vocal by weariness from having stood so long in the hall, “won’t you even allow us to view the remains and then sit quietly down somewhere? You act and talk so strangely. I’m sure you need a little comfort and consolation.”

“I’d rather have a drink,” replied Lorna. “That’s all I’ve lived on since the world’s worst photographer passed out.”

Part of the statement was true. Lorna was so deep in her cups and so angry with her husband that she had deliberately set out to torture him. She was succeeding far beyond her fondest expectations. Her only regret was that she could not peer down into 1007-A and enjoy his reactions. What right had he to bring a great, hulking coffin into her house and reveal himself naked in that beard? If he thought he was funny, well, she would be funny, too.

On his part Frank Tucker now knew that something was definitely wrong with the whole queer business. The one thing that gave him pause was the presence of that huge and obviously expensive coffin. The situation amused as well as puzzled him. And he knew that the wild ravings of his sister-in-law sprang more from a bottle than from a grief-stricken heart.

In the living room Mr. Brown had developed a new and improved line of strategy. Instead of holding Mr. Bland down by brute force, he was now letting a bottle do it for him.

“Will you stay here quietly and take off that beard if I give you a bottle?” he had asked Mr. Bland.

“I’ll lie here quietly,” that gentleman had replied, “but I won’t take off the beard.”

“Why won’t you take off the beard?” Mr. Brown had whispered.

“I don’t know myself,” Mr. Bland had whispered back. “I’ve an odd feeling the thing has taken root and become a part of my chin. Anyway, most of it is in my mouth, and I can’t get it out.”

“Very well, then,” Mr. Brown had replied passionately. “Keep your damned beard, but for God’s sake don’t pop up.”

Mr. Bland had kept his beard and had not popped up. Now he was incapable of popping, except of popping the bottle through the beard whenever he found the strength. All signs pointed to a speedy return to slumber.

With so much freedom on his tired hands Mr. Brown, having found the residence of the bottles, was doing a little popping on his own account. This he did by stealth in an obscure corner of the room.

Lorna had at last allowed Dolly and Frank to sit down. They were now in the dining room, where they were having a little something wet, wetness being Lorna’s one and only idea of hospitality. Beyond this her mind could not penetrate. It made entertaining simpler and happier.

“When are you going to bury him?” Dolly was asking.

Lorna gulped.

“At the full of the moon,” she said.

“My God!” exclaimed Frank. “The moon won’t be full for two weeks.”

“Well,” replied Lorna, “you know how time flies. I was never one for rushing things myself.”

Fanny, the passionate maid, appeared with Busy.

“Oh, Fanny,” said Lorna, “did the dog howl just before?”

“Before what, madam?” asked the puzzled Fanny.

“Don’t be dull, girl,” said Lorna. “Before his master passed out?”

“Why, no, madam,” replied the startled Fanny, who had been absent from the house during most of the afternoon.

“Then he’s no sort of dog at all,” said Lorna. “All decent dogs howl just before and frequently during. And Fanny, keep him away from the body. He might try to play with it. I wouldn’t mind if the beast wasn’t so rough. It’s a bother to have to keep doing a body over and over again. Mr. Brown, the mortician, is a charming man, but they tell me he does get impatient with his bodies. He might give this body the gate.”

Fanny looked completely dazed. For once her arrogant pride of sex seemed to desert her.

“When did the master die, Mrs. Bland?” she managed to get out.

“About an hour after he had chased you downstairs,” Lorna maliciously informed the maid. “Remember, Fanny? He was all naked and howling. Perhaps that’s why that square dog didn’t howl. He probably thought there’d been enough howling in the house for one day. The doctor said the poor man died from thwarted passion, and you know what that means. But I don’t hold it against you, Fanny. You had your housework to do and you very creditably thought of duty first. However, I hope it teaches you a lesson, my girl. I hope it does. Never keep a man waiting. He might die on your hands. And then where would you be? I ask you. You’d be without a man, and that is just no place. We must have our men, my girl, in spite of the fact that they’re all scum, including Frank Tucker. Oh, my heart is breaking. That’s all, Fanny. I’ll be seeing you. Where are you going, Dolly?”

Dolly turned on her sister indignantly.

“I’m going in to poor Quintus,” she said. “Someone should be with him for the sake of decency. And then I’m going home. Lorna, I hate to say it, but you’re either out of your mind or you’re a very, very wicked woman. Come, Frank. I won’t permit her to call you names.”

Frank rose and looked down at Lorna, who solemnly winked up at him. Frank grinned and followed his wife from the room, as husbands have been doing ever since doors were invented.

“You can have the last word,” Lorna called after Dolly. “Mine would raise the roof. But mark me well, sister. If you’re going to look at Quintus for the sake of decency, I shudder to think of what you’d look at for the sake of fun.”

“Now, I wonder, Frank,” said Dolly, “just what she meant by that?”

Dolly soon found out.

Mr. Brown had continued his popping until he could pop no longer. He now sat slumbering gently beside the glistening flank of his well-loved 1007-A. Within the coffin its temporary resident had popped himself into even deeper oblivion. Momentarily he was, to all intents and purposes, as nearly dead as a man can well afford to be. Fortunately, before his final collapse, Mr. Brown had exhibited the decency if not the good taste to find Mr. Bland’s drawers and to help him to put them on.

Upon the entrance of Frank and Dolly Tucker, Mr. Brown awoke and made a feeble attempt to rise. This effort failing, he made the best of a bad situation and waved a welcoming hand to his visitors.

“May we view the body now?” asked Dolly in a hushed voice.

“Whose body?” asked Mr. Brown.

“Why, the deceased’s, of course,” replied Dolly.

“Well, I’m nearly dead myself,” Mr. Brown affably informed her. “I didn’t know. One body to me is about as bad as another.”

In spite of himself Frank Tucker could not suppress a low laugh. Dolly was shocked. She was even a little frightened.

“Frank,” she murmured, “I’m ashamed. You’re as bad as Lorna.”

“Sorry, dear,” he said. “It’s nerves. Death always makes me giddy.”

Turning icily from her husband, Dolly made another try at Mr. Brown, who by this time had managed to get himself back to sleep.

“Mr. Brown,” she began.

“What’s that? What’s that?” he said in a startled voice. “Has the prisoner escaped?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dolly replied desperately.

“Doubt if I do myself,” said Brown. “Please state your business, madam. Do you want a baby carriage?”

“No, Mr. Brown,” said Dolly with sweet patience. “Have you finished with Mr. Bland?”

“My God, yes,” Mr. Brown replied with more vigor than he had yet shown. “He’s nearly ruined me. It’s been the toughest job I’ve ever tackled.”

“Then may we look at him?” continued Dolly, striving to hide her horror of the man.

“If you want a good laugh, yes,” said Brown. “I can’t stand the sight of him myself.”

Once more Mr. Brown drifted off to sleep. With a shudder Dolly turned away and approached the coffin. Taking her husband’s arm and assuming a sort of hushed, tense expression, she gazed down upon Mr. Bland. Then her expression stiffened and solidified. She looked as if she would never lose it. A small, fluttering cry escaped her lips.

“The beard makes up for a lot,” murmured Frank. “Have you noticed it?”

“But, Frank,” breathed Dolly, “it’s growing all wrong. It’s – it’s – it’s a frightful beard. That man should be a butcher instead of a mortician.”

“Do you smell anything, Dolly?” asked Frank.

“Whisky,” gasped Dolly. “He reeks of it.”

“And he still has some left,” said Frank, pointing to a bottle clutched in the hand of the corpse.

“I just won’t permit that,” declared Dolly. “Even if it isn’t any of my business.”

“His beard still seems to have a spark of life left in it,” observed her husband. “Notice how it sways gently as if fanned by a light breeze.”

“Do you think – —” said Dolly as she reached for the bottle. “Can it be – —” she continued, taking a firm grip on the bottle itself.

While she was thus engaged, Frank Tucker placed his forefinger experimentally on the tip of Mr. Bland’s nose. This action, together with the threatened loss of his property, produced a startling manifestation in the corpse. With a loud sneeze he blew his beard down to his chin. At the same moment he half rose in his coffin.

“What the hell!” said Mr. Bland.

It was the most awful moment in Dolly’s life. With a shriek that frightened Mr. Bland still further out of the coffin and Mr. Brown completely out of his chair, Dolly fled from the room and from the house. She was followed reluctantly by her husband, as husbands often, if not always, do.

“Would you mind telling me,” said Mr. Bland, addressing himself to a startled Brown, “just what the hell all this is about?”

“I’m not sure,” said Brown, “but I think you’ve just had callers.”

“Thank God they’re gone,” Lorna remarked coolly, strolling into the room with a glass in her hand.

“That’s the only point upon which we agree, you little viper,” retorted her husband.

“Go on, be a skeleton for us, Quintie,” she amiably jeered back. “We need some fun.”

Even Mr. Brown disapproved a little of some of Mr. Bland’s subsequent remarks to his wife.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A Dirty Man
Digs His Grave

Had Quintus Bland been a horse or even a rabbit, it would have been an easy matter to lure him from his coffin through the trifling inducement of carrots. And it would have been a better thing for Mr. Bland, because carrots are good for one’s health, whereas, we are told, whisky is not. On the other hand, it has never been successfully established that carrots elevate the soul. Incontrovertibly whisky does, assuming the subject has a soul to elevate. One cannot eat a carrot, then almost immediately burst into loud song, or dance with rugged abandon. Yet if one but consumes an equal displacement of whisky one can achieve both of these feats even though one has never attempted them before.

The suggestion of carrots to Mr. Bland, reclining in 1007-A, and clad in the tightest of raiment, would have been revolting. It might have driven the man mad or broken his heart. The mere hope of a drink of whisky caused him to scramble out of what threatened to become his permanent habitation with even greater alacrity than he had shown on entering it. This came to pass only after he was convinced that he possessed within himself the last drop in his bottle.

It was not a pretty sight nor an edifying one to see Quintus Bland draping his long naked body over the side of the coffin, yet it did show perseverance.

“I’m not sure that you did him a favor, Mr. Brown, when you dragged on those drawers,” observed a critical Lorna as she and the mortician sat watching Mr. Bland’s heroic efforts. “No,” she continued, “I’m sure you didn’t. There might have been something primitively appealing had you left him entirely naked, but those drawers deprive the man of his last shred of dignity. Regard how they hang askew.”

“Will you please go to hell?” Mr. Bland mildly asked his wife as soon as his feet touched the floor. “But before going be so good as to give me a drink.”

“Not,” she told him, “until you’ve removed that lovely little beard. It’s dangling from your left ear. If you strapped it about your waist you’d look like a Scotch highlander.”

“Must I go through all this for the sake of a mere drink?” inquired Mr. Bland.

“Men have gone through more,” said Lorna and gave him a drink.

He drank the drink, returned the glass, and wanted to know if that was all. Deep in her eyes as Lorna looked up at her husband was a veiled glow of affection. She handed him a fresh bottle.

“Fanny,” she said, “has telephoned for a carload.”

Mr. Brown swayed over to the coffin and peered into its depth. Then he extracted an empty bottle therefrom and returned to his chair. He appeared to be in a thoughtful mood.

“What I’d like to settle,” he said after a moment’s reflection, “is just this: is that your coffin or is it my coffin?”

“An interesting point,” said Mr. Bland. “Tell me, Brown, is the coffin greatly damaged?”

“Somewhat crushed,” Mr. Brown admitted. “Sort of thumbed and fingered here and there, and then it is stained with whisky in spots, but fairly speaking, it is still a top-notch article.”

“I loved it,” said Mr. Bland wistfully.

“Couldn’t it be sold as a second-hand coffin?” asked Lorna.

“Who ever heard of a second-hand coffin?” Mr. Brown wanted to know.

“That’s just the point,” replied Lorna. “If nobody has ever heard of a second-hand coffin, that fact might make it easier to sell one.”

“Even to me,” declared Mr. Brown, “the idea is unpleasant. Imagine. A second-hand coffin. Gracious.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Lorna admitted. “It would be hard to find a second-hand body to fill it.”

“All bodies are second-hand after they’ve once been used,” observed Mr. Bland. “Just like automobiles.”

“That’s ridiculous,” protested Lorna. “My body is better today than it ever was.”

“Did you ever try to sell it?” asked Mr. Brown crudely.

“I’d like to kick a hole in your damned old coffin,” Lorna retorted viciously.

“I defy you to kick a hole in that coffin,” said Mr. Brown quite blandly. “The thing is practically bulletproof, and besides that, who said it was my coffin?”

“Well, it isn’t our coffin,” declared Lorna. “I wouldn’t let Quintus get buried in it, as much as I’d like to see the last of him.”

“Have you definitely decided not to die?” the mortician asked, turning to Mr. Bland.

“Sorry, old man,” said Mr. Bland. “I think it would be better if I didn’t.”

“Then don’t let’s think about it for the present,” Mr. Brown suggested wearily. “The problem bewilders me.”

“Right is right,” put in Lorna, for no particular reason.

“I find that vague,” said Brown. “Let’s change the subject.”

Fanny changed it for them. She entered the room on tiptoe, then uttered a little scream upon seeing Mr. Bland. Since the removal of his beard he had taken a fancy to a Paisley shawl which he was now wearing toga fashion like some lean and debauched Roman emperor.

“I thought he was in that,” said Fanny, motioning to the coffin.

“He was,” Mr. Brown replied calmly, “but he’s back again.”

“Should he remove the shawl, Fanny?” Lorna asked darkly. “Has he got too much on?”

“Goodness, no, Mrs. Bland,” replied the passionate maid. “I’ve seen enough of him.”

“I should say so,” agreed Lorna. “You couldn’t have seen any more of a man unless you encountered a freak with three legs, or a double stomach, or an extra toe here and there.”

“I don’t like that kind, Mrs. Bland,” confessed Fanny with the utmost simplicity.

“I’m glad you’re not greedy,” observed Mrs. Bland. “Did you come in here to view the old familiar body, or what?”

“I might have taken a squint at it,” the maid admitted, “but that’s not why I came.”

“Are we supposed to guess,” asked Mr. Bland, “or would you like to tell us?”

Fanny regarded her master with a pair of smoldering eyes which fairly tore off the Paisley shawl and flung it in a corner, then she turned back to Lorna.

“The stuff has come, Mrs. Bland,” she said. “I thought you might be needing it for your little celebration, but now I see you’ve no occasion to celebrate.”

“All women are wenches,” observed Mr. Bland, tossing his remark somewhere in the general direction of 1007-A.

“All this bickering is making me feel decidedly uncomfortable,” Mr. Brown complained. “Why not send this lush young filly for another bottle? She’s doing me no good as she is.”

“Fanny,” said Lorna, “bring the gentleman a bottle. We must handle our leading mortician with kid gloves. Personally, I wouldn’t touch him with tongs.”

Alarming chemical changes were taking place beneath the Paisley shawl. Fanny, glancing in that direction, unleashed a series of short, sharp shrieks. They ended abruptly in speech.

“He’s back!” she cried. “The skeleton – Señor Toledo. Oh, look! How did he do it? I’ll go for the bottles.”

“Bring ’em all in,” Mr. Brown shouted after the speeding maid, then turning to look at the horror lurking beneath the Paisley shawl, he said severely: “For God’s sake, man, why don’t you ring a bell or blow a horn before you do a thing like that?”

“It’s positively indecent the way that man sneaks into a skeleton,” complained Lorna. “If I were going to be a skeleton I’d writhe and gnash and make noises of a distinctly unpopular nature. Now I do need a drink.”

“Oh, damn,” said Mr. Bland. “Oh, damn, damn, damn. How I hate it all. And just as we were getting on so well together.”

There was a note of real tragedy in his voice. Lorna glanced at him quickly and for no reason at all felt a catch at her throat.

“If we can stand you, old comrade,” she said, “you should make an effort to stand yourself.”

“But can’t you see,” he explained in a low voice. “I’m so damned different from you all, so cut off and useless.”

“Oh, look,” said Lorna, pointing. “Enter totteringly: the world’s most passionate maid, bearing an armful of pretty bottles.”

“Give me a pretty bottle,” muttered the Paisley shawl.

When Mr. Bland rose to find the corkscrew the effect was immense. The shawl dropped from him, and he stood in all his bony structure, clad only in his drawers. Fanny hastily put down the bottles, so poignant were her emotions. Mr. Brown was fascinated beyond speech. He merely stared at Mr. Bland and gulped. The wife of the skeleton was prey to mingled emotions. On the whole she decided she would rather not look at him for a moment.

“If you have any pity in your ribs,” she said at last, “you’ll remove those drawers without further delay.”

“They’re coming off unassisted,” Mr. Bland informed her. “They invariably do when I am in this condition.”

“And I for one don’t blame them,” observed Mr. Brown with feeling.

“But suppose I should suddenly turn back?” asked Mr. Bland.

“Then we’ll turn ours,” said Lorna. “Any sight is preferable to a skeleton in drawers. Just be yourself for a while. We’ve all been through such a lot.”

“Is eating an exploded theory in this house?” asked Mr. Brown. “If we keep drinking on empty stomachs we will soon be unable to drink at all, and that would be just too bad.”

“Oh, yes,” said Lorna vaguely, “we occasionally glimpse food. That is to say, we used to before this binge started years and years ago. When did it start, anyway?”

“When you brought home a badly painted picture of a cow,” Mr. Bland told his wife. “Before that cow we were fairly respectable, or seemed to be on the surface.”

“And now you haven’t any surface,” said Mr. Brown, “and I’m no longer respectable. Let’s eat.”

“Oh, yes,” said Lorna, returning suddenly from a fit of abstraction. “Fanny, please tell cook to prepare a few solids. It doesn’t matter much what they are as long as they’re composed of food.”

“Is Fanny a servant in this house,” asked Mr. Brown when the passionate maid had departed, “or is she a sort of unofficial observer? At one time you treat her like a servant, at another like a hated rival.”

“She’s a misplaced harlot, if you want my opinion,” declared Lorna, “but I’ve a yen for the wench. She’s so refreshingly depraved she keeps me from growing stale. A respectable servant in this house would soon give notice. Cook drinks and steals and tells dirty stories. Whenever I get lonely I go out to the kitchen and she tells me a new one. She gets them from the iceman, the milkman, and such like. When she has stolen so much of our silver we can’t set the table she gradually gives it back, or rather lends it to us for a while. Name of Blunt. Our occasional gardener is a self-confessed hop-head. Sometimes his hands shake so violently he can dig and weed in half the time it would take a normal man. When he’s full of snow he’s no good at all. Spends his time leaping hedges and playing he’s a butterfly. Want to know his name?”

“What shall I do with these drawers?” asked Mr. Bland, holding the unlovely article up before his wife.

“What’s that?” said Lorna, snapping out of her lyrical outburst.

“Drawers,” replied Mr. Bland.

“I didn’t say they weren’t,” said Lorna. “Do you want me to put them on?”

“No. What shall I do with them?”

Lorna thought deeply.

“I’ve got it,” she said at last. “Get the beard and wrap it up in the drawers, then take the little bundle and tuck it away somewhere where it will be handy. One can never tell when one will need a beard or a pair of drawers. Personally, I never wear either.”

Mr. Bland looked at Mr. Brown. Both men nodded comprehendingly. The lady of the house was bottle dizzy. It was a good way to be. Both drank deeply, then silence settled over the room. Fanny came in with the solids, which were dispatched in a somewhat impromptu and casual manner.

“Does coffee make you sober?” Lorna wanted to know.

“Nothing makes you sober,” said Mr. Brown, “after you’ve drunk as much as we have.”

“Then I’ll drink mine,” she declared. “What hour is it?”

“It’s been late for a long time,” said Mr. Brown.

“How late?”

“Varying stages.”

“Can’t I pin you down?”

“It’s eleven now,” said Mr. Brown, struggling with his watch.

“Do you come with the coffin?” Lorna inquired. “I mean, if we decide to keep the coffin do we have to take you with it?”

“No,” replied Mr. Brown. “But I’ll come and visit it often.”

Suddenly the skeleton of Bland rose with an air of tragic resolution.

“I’ve had enough of this,” came hollowly from the skull. “I might as well be dead. I’m going out and bury myself in the backyard.”

“Great!” cried Lorna. “A swell idea. Let’s all go out to the backyard and dig a big grave.”

“I know a lot about graves,” said Mr. Brown. “I’ll be head digger.”

“Then come along,” commanded Mr. Bland. “The sooner I’m underground the better it will be for all concerned. Things can’t go on like this. Snap out the lights and bring some bottles. There are picks, shovels, crowbars, spades, clippers, a lawn mower, and a very nice garden hose, not to mention various other useful and instructive implements, in the tool shed.”

“Can’t very well dig a grave with a garden hose,” said the experienced Mr. Brown.

“I’m aware of that,” Mr. Bland replied. “I was merely thinking of all the things I’m going to leave behind me.”

“We can chuck a few in with you,” Lorna suggested happily.

“Why not on me?” asked Mr. Bland.

“Don’t worry,” Lorna assured him. “We’ll dig you a swell grave. Funny thing, I never thought of digging a grave before. Think of all the graves I’ve left undug. Never be able to catch up now, but I’ll do my best with this one. I’ll dig and I’ll dig and I’ll – —”

“For the love of God,” cried Mr. Bland, “don’t go on about it. Isn’t there any pity in you? Aren’t you at all sorry I’m going underground?”

“Naturally, my little subway,” said Lorna, taking a swig from the nearest bottle. “Terribly. But the thrill of digging a grave at night is almost adequate compensation for the loss of a husband who is two thirds gone already.”

The skeleton of Mr. Bland stalked with dignity from the room.

By the light of a lantern they opened operations. Mr. Brown stepped back and measured Mr. Bland with a sharp, appraising eye, humming softly the while.

“About six foot one and a half,” he murmured. “Better make it about seven. Give him plenty of room.”

“Oh, I must have plenty of room,” said Mr. Bland. “If there’s anything I detest it’s a skimpy grave.”

“Are we going to bury him head down or feet first?” Lorna wanted to be told.

“What do you mean?” asked Mr. Bland, shrinking a little from her.

“Well,” she explained. “I was thinking of digging a sort of hole so we wouldn’t spoil so much garden.”

“God! Did you hear that?” exclaimed Mr. Bland, turning to the mortician. “Even if I am a skeleton I deserve some consideration. Think of it! Head down.”

“It was just an idea,” said Lorna.

“A shocking idea,” said her husband. “Horrible.”

After half an hour’s steady digging considerable work had been done and considerable liquor consumed. Lorna insisted the grave was quite deep enough.

“You wouldn’t want Busy to be scratching me up every other day, would you?” Mr. Bland demanded.

“No,” admitted Lorna. “Although I wouldn’t mind seeing you, or parts of you, from time to time, knocking about the lawn.”

“Damn me if I’m going to talk to you any more,” said Mr. Bland. “Every time you speak you say something more repulsive.”

“I don’t mean to,” replied Lorna.

“That’s just the trouble. That makes it worse.”

“Well, we could put a lot of stones on top. How would that do?”

“Rotten. I want a regular grave or no grave at all.”

“Okay,” said Lorna. “One more drink, then we’ll all set to work.”

“I would like the subject to lie down in there, if he would be so good,” came the highly professional voice of Mr. Brown. “It would be just as well to see that the dimensions are correct before we proceed further.”

“A good idea,” declared Lorna. “I’d like to try on that grave myself, I can throw in that old piece of canvas to keep my dress clean.”

That was the first sight that smote Officer Kelley’s eyes as he sneaked round a corner of the house and stood watching in the shadows. And it was almost the last sight, for Kelley, in spite of his stout heart, did not hold with graves and skeletons and burials by night.

“Mother of God,” he murmured, piously crossing himself. “A skeleton, no less. Now, are they putting him in the ground or taking the poor soul out, I wonder?”

He momentarily turned away to see that a retreat was open. When he turned back again he received even a greater shock. A young and beautiful woman was lying in the grave, while the skeleton, bottle in hand, was standing in a nonchalant attitude, conversing with the town’s leading mortician.

“I was never born to look on sights the likes of this,” moaned Kelley under what little breath he had. “First the skeleton gets into the grave, then the photographer’s wife – ’twill be the undertaker’s turn next. A bad black game it is they’re playing this night.”

“It’s nice down here,” said Lorna. “I love it.”

“Golly,” muttered Kelley. “She loves it, no less.”

“When I go down,” said Mr. Bland, “I’m going to take you with me.”

Kelley began to sweat frankly and freely. He was facing a terrific problem. If the photographer’s wife wanted to get herself buried alive with a long, lanky skeleton, did he, Kelley, have any right to stop her? On the other hand, if he let that black-hearted undertaker cover up the woman, he, Kelley, would be allowing murder to be done before his very eyes. Of one thing alone Officer Kelley was sure: the sooner that skeleton was buried the better he would feel.

Then things started to happen. The skeleton, still holding the bottle, climbed down into the grave. He gave the photographer’s wife a drink, then took one himself.

“For the last time,” Kelley heard the skeleton say, and every bead of sweat on Kelley’s body paused on its way to listen. “One more drink, Brown,” continued the skeleton, “then let the clods fly.”

This was too much for Kelley. With a cry more of horror than command he lumbered towards the grave.

“No more funny business,” he shouted. “In the name of the law.”

In the tail end of one of those well-known split seconds the backyard became the scene of kaleidoscopic activity. The sudden appearance of Officer Kelley together with the great, unfriendly noises he made completely unnerved Mr. Bland. He sprang from the grave, and with him sprang his wife, no less impressed by Officer Kelley and the things he was going to do, for Kelley, when once in action, was a man of vocal as well as physical fury.

No sooner had the four feet of the two Blands touched the brink of the grave than they started in to show Officer Kelley what feet could do when thoroughly alarmed. Finding himself confronting either one of two disagreeable prospects – solitude or Officer Kelley – mortician Brown dropped his spade and made all possible speed to overtake, if not pass, the flying couple ahead. In the rear, but not far enough to satisfy Mr. Brown, plunged the bellowing Kelley himself.

“If he keeps up making that noise,” thought the speeding Brown, “he’ll soon drop in his tracks.”

With faith rather than confidence the mortician followed the Blands. They rounded a corner on even terms and continued along the side of the house. In the heart of Mr. Bland beat a frantic prayer to the gods of all dead and active religions that he should not fall. Fear for the safety of his brittle structure caused him to exert caution, which enabled Mr. Brown to overtake him.

“He may have a gun,” panted Mr. Bland.

“He damn’ well has,” wheezed Brown.

The three flying grave diggers rounded another corner and sped across the front lawn.

“This is no place to be,” Mr. Bland explained.

“For neither of us,” said Mr. Brown.

As they rounded the next turn, they almost ran into Lorna.

“Where have you been?” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Well, wait no longer,” gasped her husband. “There’s a man with a gun behind us.”

“Bullets would pass clean through your ribs,” said Mr. Brown enviously.

“I wish I were sure of that,” replied Mr. Bland. “If a bullet hits my pelvis I’ll shatter like a flower pot.”

On through the night zoomed the slow-footed Kelley.

“Think of me chasing a skeleton,” he thought proudly. “If the damn’ fool only knew it I’d fall over backwards if he even so much as turned about.”

In the meantime those he sought had returned to their original point of departure.

“Don’t think I can make another lap,” Mr. Brown informed them.

“Damned if I’m going to be circling my own house the whole night long,” declared Mr. Bland.

“Let’s all jump in the grave,” suggested Lorna. “He might not think of looking there.”

At that critical moment the slanting door to the cellar miraculously opened.

“In here,” came the voice of Fanny. “Quickly!”

And in there they went so very, very quietly that they failed to close the door behind them.

When Kelley had completed the circuit he looked about him in mystification; then, spying the open door, he, too, descended into utter darkness.

For a full minute the room was filled with the sound of heavy breathing, but no movement was made, owing to the fact that both pursuer and pursued were incapable of making any. Nor did it at all appeal to Officer Kelley to pass the remainder of the night in a dark cellar with an active if timid skeleton. The thing might suddenly show a change of front and start in searching for him with those long, bony arms. In spite of this gloomy outlook Kelley was reluctant to give up the pursuit. He had worked too hard in his circuit of the house to abandon the field now.

While the officer was having his bad time in the darkness, Fanny, with great presence of mind, guided Lorna and Mr. Brown to the stairs leading up to the kitchen.

“Hide in the living room,” she whispered. “He’ll be afraid of the coffin.”

“Like hell,” mumbled Mr. Brown. “If a skeleton doesn’t feaze him he’ll probably cut his initials in the sides of 1007-A.”

When Fanny returned to fetch the skeleton, her groping hands encountered bare flesh. With a supreme effort Mr. Bland stifled a shocked scream. Not so Fanny. Hers fled through the cellar and did terrible things to Officer Kelley’s spine.

“Oh, my,” said Fanny. “Are you all naked?”

“What’s that?” demanded Kelley, outraged in spite of his fear. “I was never naked.”

“How do you do it?” called Fanny. “Are your clothes sewed on?”

“You brazen-mouthed baggage,” Kelley retorted. “I’d like to run you in.”

A third voice was heard.

“If you don’t take your hands away,” said Mr. Bland, “I’ll give myself up to the officer.”

“What’s that?” demanded Kelley. “Who’s talking now?”

“It is I, the skeleton, who speaks,” said Mr. Bland.

“Then don’t give yourself up to me,” said Kelley. “I don’t want any part of you.”

“How did you get that way?” Fanny asked Mr. Bland.

“What way?” he parried.

“You know – the way you are.”

“What way is he, lady?” Kelley wanted to know.

“Oh, you’re fired!” came the explosive voice of Mr. Bland. “Don’t do that again.”

“I’m going to run in the lot of you,” said Kelley suddenly, but without enthusiasm.

“You can begin with me,” said Mr. Bland.

“Go back to your grave,” urged Kelley. “That’s where you belong.”

For some minutes he had been fingering his flashlight, wondering whether or not it would be wise to use it. He was frankly afraid of what he might see. Now he decided to take a chance. Its beam revealed a naked man struggling to escape from a strange woman.

“For shame,” cried Officer Kelley. “Where did the both of you come from?”

“Does it matter?” cried Mr. Bland in desperation. “Can’t you see I’m busy? Turn off that damned light.”

Officer Kelley did so for the good of his own soul. The moment the light went out Mr. Bland made a dash for the kitchen stairs, Fanny crowding him for first place. He quickly achieved the top and ran through the kitchen, snatching up a dish towel on the way. It was dark in the living room, and Bland was glad of that. He crept in quietly and concealed his new-found nakedness behind a large chair. Fanny tried to follow him, but he gave her a ruthless push. So Fanny crept somewhere else. Silence reigned in the room, yet there was a feeling of other hidden, breathless figures crouching in odd corners.

Presently in crept Kelley according to that stout officer’s idea of creeping, which was, in reality, a ponderous shuffling of weary and heavy feet.

It was then an incident occurred that horrified not only Kelley but also everyone else in that silently crowded room. As he turned the beam of the torch upon the coffin, a pallid, inhuman head popped up over its side and two terrible eyes blazed in the darkness. The gasps and groans that filled the room served only to heighten the officer’s demoralization.

Dropping the torch with a cry of stark anguish, Kelley staggered stiffly from the room and slid through the front door with as much determination as Dolly Tucker had displayed several hours before him. No sooner had Kelley made his final exit than the thing in the coffin rose up still higher, then dropped with a thud to the floor.

“God! What is it?” cried Lorna. “I’m going into convulsions.”

“Now I lay me down to sleep,” came the pious voice of Fanny from a corner.

“All we can do is wait,” mournfully said Mr. Brown. “Which one of us does it want, I wonder?”

“All,” quoth Lorna hopelessly.

Then came a sudden volley of short, sharp barks, followed by a series of playful bounds and pounces.

“Damn,” said Mr. Bland. “The poor fish has got my towel.” He rose and switched on the lights. “Will somebody kindly pass me my Paisley shawl? I’ve got my body back.”

This announcement broke the tension. Lorna, Fanny, and Mr. Brown arose and stretched their cramped limbs. Lorna looked about her.

“If cook were only here,” she said, “we’d have a full cast. Get us a drink, Fanny.”

“What a hell of a place for a dog to sleep,” Mr. Bland complained.

Busy was rushing from one to the other, giving each a frantic greeting.

“One dirty dog after another,” Lorna told her husband. “They sleep in the same kennel.”

“Now you’ll have to buy that coffin,” said Mr. Brown. “I might have overlooked his master, but I’ll be damned if I will his dog, especially when the block-headed monster scares me nearly silly.”

“We’ll take that up later,” replied Mr. Bland. “I’ve too much on my mind and too little on my body.”

Lorna gave him the Paisley shawl. Fanny passed the drinks. Everyone felt much improved but too jaded to become convivial. Lorna was considering her husband through enigmatic eyes.

“You’re the most volatile creature I’ve ever met,” she said to Mr. Bland, “but now that you’ve got your body back we’d better hurry to bed.” She paused to look at Fanny, then turned to Mr. Brown. “You,” she went on, “can go to sleep on the sofa.”

“Go to sleep on the sofa,” Mr. Brown repeated bitterly. “I’m going to die on the sofa. Nothing less will satisfy me.”

“And you, Fanny,” said Lorna. “Where are you going to sleep?”

“Alone,” said the desolate Fanny. “Unless – —”

Her mad eyes strayed appraisingly to Mr. Brown.

“Don’t look at me that way,” said that gentleman. “I tell you I’m going to die.”

“Why don’t you?” Fanny asked him. “You’re long overdue.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Square Dog Is Stricken

Busy had slept badly, and he was worried about it. He had always been such a sound sleeper. When all other pursuits failed and time hung heavy on his paws, even in the face of hunger and disparagement he had hitherto been able to depend on sleep. But last night had been a bad one. As a matter of fact, the square dog had so little of importance on his mind he was becoming neurotic about it, which is one of the troubles with so many modern dogs. They have neither to think nor shift for themselves.

Consumed with self-pity he bleakly sniffed his way about the house in the early-morning hours. Nothing smelled right, and when nothing smells right to a dog he is out of luck indeed. He found himself wondering how he was ever going to get through the long day confronting him. What a night it had been! He felt that if he did not bite something or somebody almost immediately his nerves would snap.

After he had been so rudely awakened from his slumber in the snug coffin the game had been up. No dog could sleep in the same room with that man Brown whistling and rasping in the darkness. Every time the mortician snored, which was steadily, Busy had thought he was being either called or vilified. Of course, there was no putting up with that. In one corner after another the dog had searched for sleep only to find them empty. He had even tried his own private quarters in the kitchen, but to no avail.

He wondered now if it would do any good to go in and bite the mortician. Busy decided against the idea. It would take a lion to disturb that horrid man. In his heart Busy envied him his repose.

He padded upstairs in search of absolutely nothing. There were the stairs – one might just as well go up them. Somebody had to go up those stairs. He would do it. An open window in the hall gave onto a balcony that ran the breadth of the house. Busy lugged himself through this window and regarded the day with a dubious eye. It did not smell right. Too bad he couldn’t bite it. Any other dog was welcome to this day. He did not want it.

Glancing along the balcony, he remarked that the French windows of the master’s and mistress’s room were open. He would go in there and barge about, knock something over if he could – wake them both up. He felt he would risk almost anything to relieve the depressing solitude. After all, a dog had to have some companionship. He wondered if they thought he was a bird in a gilded cage, a mere thing with no needs or life of his own.

All of which goes to show that Busy, usually the best of dogs, could become a very bad one merely through the loss of sleep.

He padded through the French windows, then squatted squarely down and stared fixedly at his master. There would be a really nice man if he only understood more about dogs. Busy transferred his gaze to Lorna. That one would never suffer from lack of sleep. She was burrowed in like a squirrel. One small hand hung limply over the side of the bed. Busy could not resist sniffing it a little. It was a good sniff, the first agreeable sniff of the day, but then, his mistress always smelled pleasantly. He tried the hand delicately with the tip of his tongue. Automatically the hand moved and made a feeble attempt to pat the dog’s square head. Well, that was a little something, at any rate, some slight recognition.

Then Busy discovered something that aroused his worst instincts. The door to his master’s sacredly private dark room was half open. Never had he been allowed in that room, and it seemed unfair. He would go in there now and find out what it was all about. Certainly it must be a matter of food. People were always barring his path to food. They conspired to keep him hungry.

The moment Busy entered the dark room his nose was assailed by a symphony of smells it had never dealt with before. The multitude of smells in that room gave the dog a momentary glimpse of a larger and busier life. Here was a new world of smells from which his master had selfishly excluded him. Might as well make the most of his present opportunity. It might never come again.

Springing to a long bench, the square dog began a methodical sniffing of the individual bottles, lingering long over some and withdrawing with repugnance from others. Two flat, moplike paws were pressed against the shelf on which the bottles stood, and in his eagerness to get in as much sniffing as possible before retribution fell, Busy allowed one of these paws to brush a bottle to the floor. There was a small noise of shattering glass, and then the room was filled with the most difficult smell the dog had ever tried to study. Busy caught his breath and kept his eyes on the door. Soon it would be all over with him, and he did not much care. As time passed and nobody came, Busy began to take heart. He was glad now that his master and his mistress could sleep so deeply. Probably he could knock all those bottles off the shelf and still not disturb their slumbers. He felt almost inclined to try it, but decided instead to investigate this mystifying smell. Accordingly, he jumped to the floor and approached an experienced nose to the fluid. For a long time he sniffed, then thrust out his tongue. Not nice. It tasted like a sneeze. Busy tried again just to make certain, then he decided to get himself the hell out of there. If his master kept such stuff in that room it was no place for a dog.

Mr. Bland had heard the noise made by the smashed bottle. He had opened one eye and kept it open. Further than that he had not acted. Now he saw the square dog issue from the dark room and disappear through the French windows.

“You dirty, white, square-headed bum,” Mr. Bland inelegantly muttered, then closed his eye in sleep.

Some hours later, while they were dressing, Lorna decided to take her husband to the doctor. His case needed investigation. When he had fully awakened he had shaken his own hand to discover whether he was a skeleton or a man in the flesh. He had been happy to find he was still in the flesh. Perhaps he might remain so permanently. He did not have much hope, however. When Lorna suggested the doctor, Mr. Bland had at first rebelled. Eventually he had capitulated, as, eventually, all husbands do.

It was a bright, fair day, one of those portions of weather that bring householders out of their snug little houses in snug little suburban towns. Husbands do things to their lawns, and wives do things to their baby carriages. People get themselves onto the streets, where they do nothing at all save block the way for others who have something to do. Taken all in all, it is an exhibition of man at his worst – a futile and fatuous reaction of a community to sunlight and blue sky.

Into this brave day Lorna introduced her husband. On a leash he was leading Busy, the leash being a precaution against numerous delays caused by the dog’s insistence on investigating the neighbors’ pets, premises, and other private property.

Behind them in the house Mr. Brown still lay slumbering. They had left a note for him strongly suggesting that for his own sake he should go back to work and that for theirs he should take his coffin with him. They asked him to call again, but not accompanied by good old 1007-A.

As they walked along the street Mr. Bland became faintly conscious of a slight tapping sound behind him, as if someone were doing silly things with a cane. However, at first the sounds were not sufficiently arresting to capture his entire attention. He was much more interested in Lorna, who seemed to be in one of her less harsh and caustic moods. This, perhaps, was due to the fact that she was happily telling him what he in turn should tell the doctor.

“Listen, Quint,” she was saying, “make no bones about it.”

“I hope not,” replied her husband. “I’ve had enough of that.”

“Don’t be funny,” said Lorna briefly. “It doesn’t become you. As I was saying, don’t be delicate about it. Just walk up to this doctor person and tell him the whole story. That’s why I’m taking you to a new doctor instead of to old Freeman. He won’t know a thing about you, so he may believe your story. Old Freeman, knowing you as he does, would naturally put you down for a liar.”

“How you do love to go into everything,” observed Mr. Bland. “Do you hear some damn’ fool following us with a cane?”

“I’ve been hearing it for some minutes,” replied Lorna, “and it’s making me nervous.”

“I wish he would get ahead of us,” said Mr. Bland, glancing back over his shoulder. Then suddenly he stopped. “Oh, look,” he spluttered. “For goodness’ sakes. Dear, dear, what a pity. Lorna, this is too bad.”

“What’s the matter?” asked Lorna, not wishing to look around. “Is the poor man blind?”

“Hell, no,” said Mr. Bland. “I’ve got my own flesh back, but my dog’s lost his.”

“What!” gasped Lorna. “Mean to tell me—Oh, this is quite impossible.”

“I just wish you’d take a look.”

“I’m afraid I’ll be forced to,” she said, turning round and confronting the dog.

Now the skeleton of a dog is an altogether different proposition from that of a man. Strangely enough, it is even less palatable and far more conspicuous. When thinking of skeletons the average person, for no definite reason, almost invariably visualizes a human skeleton instead of that of a horse or a cow or a dog. For this reason the human skeleton if not altogether acceptable is at least a familiar concept. About the skeleton of a dog there is something exceptionally unalluring, especially when that skeleton is jauntily animated. There is a suggestion of great speed and mobility and of a wide striking radius. In a pinch one might run or hide from a human skeleton, but not from a dog’s. It would either overtake one or smell one out.

Busy in the bone was one of those things no normal person would ever want to see again. When Mr. Bland and Lorna stopped he stopped, too, and sat down with a pronounced tap.

“He’ll chip himself to splinters,” said Lorna, “if he carries on like that.”

“The poor sap was in my dark room early this morning,” said Mr. Bland, “and he knocked over a bottle of that formula I had brought from the office. That’s what did it.”

Suddenly the once square dog was seized with a desire to scratch. One of his hind legs got into action and rattled across his ribs like a stick across fence palings. This was too much for even the dog. He uttered a sharp yelp and looked up at his owners; then, lifting a front paw, he studied it searchingly.

“I never thought I’d live to be present on such a ghastly occasion,” murmured Lorna. “Come on, we can’t stand here like this. We’ll have to make the best of a bad situation.”

She took her husband’s arm, and they continued on down the street, Busy tapping behind them.

“I can’t stand that,” said Lorna at last. “You’ll have to make him walk on the grass.”

So Busy was made to walk on the grass bordering either side of the street. A nearsighted gentleman coming down his front walk almost stepped on the dog.

“Great Scott!” he exclaimed. “What in hell is that?”

Both Lorna and Mr. Bland pretended they had not heard and continued on their way. The gentleman took out his glasses and fixed them firmly on his nose. Then, bending far over, he followed the skeleton of Busy. Disliking such a prolonged scrutiny from a stranger, the dog cocked his head on his vertebrae and made a bad sound at him.

“Great God!” exclaimed the gentleman this time, considering the substitution of the Deity permissible under the circumstances. “The thing can also make sounds. Decidedly unpleasant sounds.” The gentleman was either a complete fool or else bereft of fear, for he thrust out a gloved hand and actually touched the dog on the tip of his tail. This time Busy’s teeth clicked like a trap.

“God bless and keep me!” muttered the gentleman, invoking divine protection. “What a thing it is. My goodness! What a thing it is.”

Leaving Busy to his own devices, the gentleman overtook Mr. Bland and tapped him politely on the shoulder.

“Pardon the intrusion,” apologized the gentleman, “but do you know there’s something following you?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Bland imperturbably. “Yes, I do. It’s my dog.”

“Your dog!” repeated the gentleman, vastly surprised. “What sort of a dog is it, may I ask?”

“Oh, just the usual sort of dog,” Mr. Bland told him.

The gentleman removed his glasses and wiped them meticulously. Then he looked back at the skeleton of Busy.

“I find it a most unusual sort of a dog,” he said at last. “It hasn’t got any skin on and no hair at all. Dogs usually have one or the other, most times both.”

“This dog has been intensively inbred,” said Mr. Bland, wishing the gentleman would go away.

“Have you seen your dog recently?” asked the gentleman.

“Not within the last ten minutes,” said Mr. Bland. “Why do you ask?”

“Well,” replied the gentleman, “I don’t want to alarm you, but I’m afraid you’ll find most of your dog gone. I mean to say, what’s left of it isn’t a dog, properly speaking. It’s merely the framework of a dog. Look for yourself.”

Against his will, Mr. Bland looked back at Busy, then uttered a short laugh.

“Why, that isn’t the dog I meant,” he said. “That’s just a toy.”

“We bought it last year in Germany,” put in Lorna. “They’re clever that way.”

“I should say so,” said the gentleman. “I looked through this one’s ribs and I couldn’t see a cog of clockwork.”

“You wind him up by the tail,” explained Lorna.

“You do!” exclaimed the gentleman. “Fancy that. I just touched it on the tip of its tail and your toy fairly snapped at me.”

“That’s one of its amusing tricks,” said Mr. Bland.

“Amusing for whom?” asked the gentleman. “I was greatly startled, but your toy seemed to enjoy it.” He glanced back, then once more tapped Mr. Bland on the shoulder. “I thought you might like to know,” he said in a low voice. “There are lots of people following us.”

Lorna could not resist casting a glance over her shoulder.

“About half of the village,” she muttered, “including a cop. What are we going to do with the damn’ dog?”

“Carry it in your arms.”

“My arms!” she exclaimed. “Carry that horror in my arms? Don’t be silly.”

“We’ll both be silly if this keeps up,” said Mr. Bland. “One more person added to that throng and it will look like a parade.”

“Then pick him up and carry him in your own arms,” suggested Lorna.

“For some reason I feel disinclined,” said Mr. Bland. “Maybe this gentleman would carry him. He seems to be almost frantically interested.”

“Want to carry the funny toy?” Lorna asked him as if addressing a child.

“Dear me, no,” said the man. “I’m sorry to admit it, but I’m afraid of that funny toy.”

At this moment the funny toy in question suddenly faced about and in no uncertain terms began to curse at the interested spectators behind him.

“That toy barks just like a dog,” the gentleman informed them. “If I shut my eyes I’d think it was a dog.”

“Damn,” muttered Mr. Bland. “It’s tragic enough being a skeleton one’s self without one’s dog getting that way.”

The policeman detached himself from the crowd and hurried up to the smaller group. Before he arrived Mr. Bland carefully picked up Busy and held him in his arms.

“Be still,” he whispered. “Be a dead dog, Busy.” At this command the scaffolding of Busy obediently collapsed.

“That toy absolutely mystifies me,” said the nearsighted gentleman. “If I didn’t know it was impossible I’d say the thing was alive. Dear me, here’s a policeman. Fancy that. I think I know this fellow. Morning, Officer Burke. Want to see a funny toy?”

“I want to see what this gentleman is holding in his arms,” said Officer Burke, looking closely at the relaxed skeleton of Busy. “It’s causing a public disturbance.”

“Sorry, officer,” said Mr. Bland. “I’m taking it to be stuffed.”

“Stuffed?” said Officer Burke. “Stuffed where?”

“Now, officer, that’s difficult,” admitted Mr. Bland. “You know, just all over the way they do. And anyway, what does it matter?”

Officer Burke seemed to think it important.

“Stuffed,” he repeated, as if trying to convince himself he had heard correctly. “What are you going to stuff it with?”

“God, officer, how should I know? What do they stuff things with?” asked the exasperated Mr. Bland. “I’m not a taxidermist.”

“Meaning that I am?” said the officer threateningly. “Better be careful who you call names.”

“No harm intended,” replied Mr. Bland. “A taxidermist is quite all right, you know.”

“Yeah,” sneered Officer Burke. “Well, you can be a taxi whatever you call it. I don’t like the word. And another thing, that skeleton can’t be stuffed. There ain’t any place for stuffing.”

“All right,” said Mr. Bland. “If it will make you any happier I’ll give up the whole idea. I won’t get it stuffed. What do we do next?”

“That skeleton of a beast,” said Officer Burke, “was jogging along the streets and barking at people, and you can’t tell me anything different. I saw it with my own eyes.”

“It’s a toy, officer,” explained the nearsighted gentleman. “This lady bought it in Germany.”

“Yes, officer,” said Lorna sweetly. “It’s just a little toy. You wind it up by its tail.”

At this point in the discussion Busy grew tired of being a dead dog and made that fact known by an expansive yawn. Then he stuck out his head and took a sniff of Officer Burke, after which he began to wriggle vigorously to be put down.

“I can’t hold him,” cried Mr. Bland.

“For God’s sake do,” said Officer Burke. “That damn’ thing is alive.”

“What?” asked the nearsighted gentleman. “Then it isn’t a German toy after all.”

“Put the dog down,” Lorna commanded. “He might twist himself in two.”

As Mr. Bland placed the wriggling skeleton of Busy on its feet, Officer Burke drew his revolver. Both Lorna and Mr. Bland threw themselves in front of the gun. A brief struggle ensued, which was interrupted by the mild voice of the nearsighted gentleman.

“Oh, look,” he said. “Now, that is strange.”

The three contestants paused to look. Seated on the pavement was a whole and complete Busy. From the crowd behind came exclamations of awe and wonderment. Officer Burke blinked stupidly, which was the only way Officer Burke could blink.

“Come,” said Lorna to her husband. “They certainly do have the most peculiar policemen in this town. Come along, Busy. That nice man was going to shoot you.”

They strolled off down the street, leaving the nearsighted gentleman and Officer Burke in a state of mental turmoil. Finally the policeman found it essential to express himself in action. Luckily for him there was a job close at hand. As he looked at the crowd his anger mounted. Then, when his rage had been satisfactorily worked up, he charged down upon the peaceful but naturally curious citizens of that community.

“Clear out of this,” he shouted, “or I’ll back up the wagon.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Dr. MacQuirk Is Convinced

Like Busy, Dr. MacQuirk had had a bad night. He had lost a lot of sleep. Naturally, this offended his Scotch sense of thrift, which was offended by losing anything. Also, Dr. MacQuirk was, under the best conditions, a high-strung and nervous man. Loss of sleep increased these natural tendencies to such an extent that, had his patients known it, they would have avoided him today as they would have avoided a man on the borderline of madness.

Nevertheless Dr. MacQuirk was a profound believer in the power of mind over matter. Emotional exhibitions of any nature rubbed him the wrong way. His set introductory injunctions at almost any consultation were designed, according to his own lights, to create an atmosphere of perfect calm.

“Come in, madam,” he would say, “and pull yourself together. There is nothing to fear. Everything is going to be quite all right. Just be calm and relax. Don’t let yourself go. Let’s have no excitement, please.”

Dr. MacQuirk was usually too upset himself to notice that this little speech frequently served only to enrage his patients, especially those of a placid, nerveless disposition who needed far less pulling together than did the good doctor himself.

This morning he arrived at his office late, a circumstance which did not increase his good nature. His waiting room was crowded with patients, who by this time were far from cheerful themselves.

“Why can’t they come in and leave their fees in a plate on the table?” MacQuirk irritably inquired of himself. “In turn they could select a handful of pills I would set out in a big bowl. I don’t want to see them and they certainly shouldn’t see me this morning. How I hate them all.”

When Lorna, Busy, and Mr. Bland arrived, after an already trying experience, the waiting room was not so crowded, but there were still enough members of both sexes present to make Lorna feel decidedly uncomfortable.

Sobered somewhat by his recent experience, Busy sat down on one side of her and Mr. Bland on the other. Busy considered his hairy body with every indication of relief and satisfaction. Mr. Bland self-consciously considered his boots. Lorna considered her husband and his dog with a prayer in her heart that they would remain in their present state of flesh.

“Here I sit,” she thought a little wildly, “between man and beast, and for the life of me I don’t know which one is going to turn to a skeleton first.”

She was surprised to find herself feeling a little sorry for them both, especially for her husband. He looked so miserable and utterly out of place in a doctor’s waiting room. He was much too long and rangy to be sitting on that small chair like a morbid Abraham Lincoln. He probably felt lonely and shamed in his heart. She wanted to say something comforting to him, something slightly affectionate, but discovered with a sense of inadequacy that she did not know how to talk that way. She wondered how other wives gushed over their husbands. Most of the wives she knew were usually gushing over other women’s husbands. She, Lorna, was unable to gush over anything. She was a hard-bitten little woman who thrived on battle and opposition. Yet she knew that somewhere within her was a capacity to love this long man, although she would never give him the satisfaction of knowing it. He was much too disagreeable himself.

A nurse appeared and suggested that Mr. Bland should follow her. Busy promptly decided that he should follow Mr. Bland. This was the first contretemps, and it created no little disturbance in the waiting room. In the midst of the struggle a mental case called out excitedly: “Spinach! Spinach! Spinach!”

For a moment the struggle ceased. Even Busy looked at the mental case in some perplexity. Apparently having forgotten all about spinach, the mental case was now reading a hunters’ and anglers’ magazine with stony indifference to her surroundings.

“What does she want with spinach?” Mr. Bland asked the nurse.

“She doesn’t want anything with spinach,” said the nurse. “She was kept waiting so long for an order of spinach in a restaurant last year that she had a nervous breakdown. She’s much better now.”

“Thank God for that,” returned Mr. Bland. “She’s made me feel much worse.”

With a backward look at Lorna, who was still struggling with Busy, Mr. Bland followed the nurse into the presence of Dr. MacQuirk. For a moment the two men regarded each other with all the hostility of ancient enemies.

“Sit down, Mr. Bland,” said MacQuirk at last, “and for heaven’s sake let’s have no more nonsense. There’s nothing to get excited about, absolutely nothing.”

“Am I excited?” asked Mr. Bland, who had a disposition to place implicit trust in doctors.

“Don’t you know whether or not you’re excited?” demanded the doctor. “If not you’re in a bad way, a very bad way indeed. Do you sleep well?”

“Always,” said Mr. Bland.

“I don’t,” muttered MacQuirk, enviously regarding his lanky patient. “Why don’t you sit down? I’m getting a pain in my neck trying to look up at you.”

“Sorry,” said Mr. Bland, looking about for a chair.

His selection was an unfortunate one, but perfectly logical, for it looked like the most comfortable chair in the room. As he folded himself into it he was startled by a piercing cry from Dr. MacQuirk.

“E-e-e-e-yah!” mouthed the doctor. “Not there, man, not there! You’re not ready for that yet. I just bought that operating chair. It cost a lot of money.”

“Sorry,” said Mr. Bland again as he heaved himself out of the chair and found another one.

“You should be,” pronounced the doctor. “What did you come here for, may I ask?”

“I wanted a thorough physical examination,” said Mr. Bland. “Recently I’ve been turning to a skeleton every now and then.”

“Losing weight, eh?” muttered the doctor, far from appreciating the full purport of Mr. Bland’s information. “And you don’t know when you’re excited. No wonder you’re losing weight. You’re probably seething with excitement all the time and imagine you’re resting. That’s bad.”

“You don’t understand,” Mr. Bland pursued patiently.

“Don’t tell me I don’t understand,” MacQuirk threw back explosively. “It’s my business to understand. That’s why I’m a doctor. Are you setting up your judgment against mine?”

“No, Doctor,” said Mr. Bland. “I merely meant that I actually turn to a skeleton. My flesh disappears and, to all intents and purposes, I’m composed entirely of bone.”

For a moment or so there was silence in the room while the doctor considered his patient out of brooding, bloodshot eyes. At last he spoke.

“How would you like to go to a nice, quiet place for a while?” he asked. “You’ll be very comfortable and everybody will be kind to you. And,” added the doctor with the failure of a bright smile, “you can play skeleton there just as much as you like.”

Quintus Bland swallowed hard. The consultation was proving even more difficult than he had expected. He hardly blamed the doctor. No one would believe without proof the incredible statement he had made. It was essential, however, that he should convince this irascible physician.

“Doctor,” he said, “still you don’t get me. I’m not suffering from a delusion. I’m just as sane as you are. My condition can be traced to a perfectly definite cause – a chemical formula which I have inadvertently assimilated into my system. Should the same thing occur to you, your reactions would be the same as mine. Why, even my dog has begun to change to a skeleton.”

“The madder they are the more convincingly they talk,” murmured Dr. MacQuirk as if to himself. “I don’t think your dog could accompany you to this nice, quiet place, Mr. Bland, but he might come to see you, and then you could romp around on the lawn and play skeleton together. How would that be?”

“Doctor,” pleaded Mr. Bland, “I realize it’s difficult to believe, but I assure you most earnestly that what I have told you is the plain, unvarnished truth. Both myself and my dog actually change to skeletons. It has just occurred to my dog, but for several days past I have been subject to these seizures. My wife will confirm my statement. She is waiting outside with my dog.”

“I suppose she becomes a skeleton, too, occasionally?” observed the doctor. “Tell me, Mr. Bland, am I a skeleton?”

“No,” shouted Mr. Bland, suddenly losing his temper, “but I wish to God you were and buried in your grave. You’re not a skeleton. You’re a pig-headed torturer.”

“Now, now, Mr. Bland,” said the doctor soothingly. “Mustn’t go on like that. We’re old friends. Don’t you remember me? I’m the doctor, and you are in my consulting room. Everything is going to be all right. There’s nothing to get excited about.”

White-lipped, Mr. Bland rose and faced the doctor. MacQuirk was already standing, watching his patient with a wary eye. One hand was in his desk drawer, in which there was a gun. He was thoroughly convinced he was dealing with a dangerous maniac, and he was taking no chances.

“Doctor,” said Quintus Bland with the calm of desperation, “are you going to examine me or not? Are you going to take a blood test and endeavor to find out what can be done? If not I’ll walk right out of this room and find a more enlightened physician.”

MacQuirk was convinced that Mr. Bland should not be allowed at large. It was his professional duty to place the man under restraint. He was a danger to the community as well as to himself. A man who claimed to own a skeleton dog was very far gone indeed.

“Of course I’m going to examine you,” he replied in as hearty a voice as he was able to assume. “There never has been any question of that. Now, if you’ll just remove your clothes and get yourself onto that table we’ll see what can be done about it.”

The moment Mr. Bland was stretched on the table, MacQuirk threw himself upon him.

“Miss Malloy!” he shouted. “Come here and clamp him down. Quick! The man is dangerous.”

Like a white flash the nurse joined forces with the doctor. Mr. Bland felt himself being strapped and clamped to the table. The attack had been so unexpected that the advantage lay all with the doctor. In spite of this Mr. Bland succeeded in giving him a vigorous kick in the stomach before his legs were expertly captured and strapped to the table. It was not until he was entirely helpless that he raised his voice in a loud cry for Lorna. The cry was immediately answered. Like a small blonde whirlwind Lorna entered the room with the square dog at her heels. Without waiting to ask questions she spun the nurse about and gave her a terrific punch on the nose. Although trained to handle rough patients, Miss Malloy was not equal to the speed displayed by the infuriated wife of the captive Mr. Bland. Before she could get into action Lorna had seized the nurse’s skirt and pulled it over her head. Then she tripped the unfortunate woman and stepped on her prostrate body.

In the meantime Busy had permanently affixed himself to the lapel of the doctor’s coat while the doctor was trying to jab the dog with a hypodermic needle originally intended for Mr. Bland.

Leaving the nurse to work out her own salvation, Lorna slapped the doctor’s glasses into a thousand pieces, then hit him over the head with the nearest object at hand. It proved to be a bottle, and the doctor sank to the floor. So far it had been a wordless battle, but now Lorna became vocal. She had snatched the doctor’s revolver from the desk drawer. With this weapon in her hand she felt that further effort on her part was unnecessary.

“Now,” she said in a deadly cold voice, “get up from that floor, both of you, and tell me the big idea. If I don’t like your explanation I’m going to telephone for the police and have you locked up. Snap to it, damn you! You’ll be sorry you ever laid a hand on my husband.”

Dazed, battered, and bloody, the doctor and his nurse eventually succeeded in rising from the floor. They found themselves confronted by a small woman with a large gun. At this moment the mental case thrust her head through the door.

“Spinach! Spinach! Spinach!” she shouted, and everybody jumped.

Busy took a quick run, then left the floor in the general direction of the doctor. He struck the man on the chest and knocked him flat again. Then he stood over the fallen physician while he selected a fresh spot to bite. From the dog’s point of view the day had vastly improved.

“Will you please call your dog off?” the doctor pleaded in a feeble voice. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”

“For his sake, not yours,” said Lorna, “you cowardly little quack.”

The appellation of “quack” momentarily fired the battered physician with a faint spark of courage.

“Madam,” he said from the floor, “you’re going to pay dearly for this.”

“Shut up, you,” snapped Lorna, knocking a row of bottles from a shelf with the long, blue barrel of the revolver. “Come here, Busy, and let that would-be assassin get up. I haven’t finished with him yet.”

As the bottles crashed to the floor, screams came from the anteroom, the loudest of which issued from the mental case, who was still calling for spinach.

“Why doesn’t somebody give her a plate of spinach?” came the calm voice of Mr. Bland.

Lorna turned to regard her husband, then whirled back just in time to swipe the nurse across the cheek with the heavy revolver. With a cry of horror the nurse staggered back and abandoned the battle. Nevertheless she was consumed with hatred for her small blonde victor, who was eyeing her coldly.

“Listen,” she said to the nurse, “you look like the wrath of God already, but if you want to look even worse I’m perfectly willing to help you. Take a look at yourself in the mirror, then let me know.”

“Godamighty!” came the startled voice of Mr. Bland. “I’m a skeleton again! That damn-fool doctor wouldn’t believe me. Give him a chance to see for himself.”

“Are you still strapped down?” asked Lorna.

“I’m more tangled up now,” he told her. “It’s like being in a spider’s web.”

Lorna swung on the doctor, who was holding a handkerchief over his eyes.

“Take that handkerchief away,” she commanded, “and release that skeleton.”

“I can hardly see without my glasses,” said the doctor brokenly. “There’s an extra pair in my desk. May I get them?”

Before Lorna could answer, the nurse uttered a piercing scream. She had turned away from the mirror and seen the writhing skeleton of Mr. Bland.

“Doctor!” she cried. “Doctor! There’s a skeleton where the man used to be. And it’s squirming all over the table. Please, Doctor, do something about it.”

“There’s more life in that skeleton than in me,” said the doctor. “I can barely move. This has been a very discouraging morning. Madam, may I get my glasses?”

“If you’re as bad as all that,” replied Lorna, “I’ll get them for you.”

She found the glasses in the middle drawer and handed them to the doctor. With trembling hands he placed them on his damaged nose. Then he turned to look at the table.

“Good God!” he said. “Do you expect me to unstrap that?”

“Yes,” replied Lorna. “And without further delay.”

“Then you may as well shoot me,” said the doctor decisively. “I won’t go near a living skeleton who has it in for me already.”

“Very well,” retorted Lorna. “I’ll shoot you. The law is on my side.”

She raised the revolver and leveled it at the doctor. He held up a restraining hand, too filled with horror to speak. This woman was more dangerous, more bitterly determined, than all the devils in hell. She would shoot him in his tracks without the slightest compunction. He would have to give in. With drooping shoulders he approached the writhing skeleton. Mr. Bland increased his writhing just to make the situation more difficult for the doctor. While the trembling physician was unstrapping him Mr. Bland amused himself by stroking the doctor’s arm and cheek with his long, bony fingers. Once he gently tweaked the man’s nose and chattered agreeably in his face. For a moment MacQuirk had to steady himself against the table, so great was his fear and revulsion.

“Don’t do that,” he pleaded. “If you only knew how awful you are. Take the word of a doctor.”

“Like hell I will,” said Mr. Bland. “How would you like to go to a nice, quiet place?”

“Nothing would please me more,” replied the doctor. “I slept very poorly last night, and after this experience I fear I’ll never sleep again.”

When Mr. Bland was released he swung his legs from the table, then eased himself to the floor.

“Come on,” said Lorna. “Let’s go.”

As she placed her hand on the knob of the door she was arrested by a cry of protest from Dr. MacQuirk.

“My God,” he pleaded, “don’t go out like that. You might kill some of my patients or drive them mad. Imagine what they’d think. They see a man come in and a skeleton go out. Naturally, they’ll assume I stripped him clean of his flesh. The news would spread and my practice would be ruined.”

“Very well, then,” said Lorna. “I don’t want to be too hard on you. What are we going to do about it? We’ve got to get home.”

“We might do this,” said MacQuirk after a moment’s thought. “If Mr. Bland will agree to play the part of a dead skeleton I’ll carry him out to a taxi and pay your way home. That is,” he added hastily, “if you don’t live too far away.”

“Scotch to the last,” said the skeleton. “How do I know you won’t drop me on the pavement?”

“I’ll shoot him dead if he does,” declared Lorna in an effortless voice that carried conviction.

When the taxi arrived, MacQuirk shudderingly lifted Mr. Bland in his arms.

“Now just relax quietly,” he said. “Make no effort of your own. No, don’t put your arms round my neck. That would look too silly, and besides I couldn’t stand it. And try not to breathe so hard. I’m not going to drop you. Just strike an attitude and hold it. Ready?”

“Right, Doc. Shoot,” said Mr. Bland.

Miss Malloy opened the door, and the doctor with his odd burden passed through, followed by Lorna, holding the gun under her jacket. Busy padded after her, ready for immediate action should teeth be needed. Although he had only a vague idea of what was going on, he was definitely certain that Dr. MacQuirk was a low-grade man who required close watching.

When the waiting patients saw the doctor with an oversized skeleton in his arms their expressions were a study in horror and incredulity.

“Hello! Hello!” said the doctor by way of a cheery greeting. “I’ll be right with you. Just getting rid of some old junk.”

“I don’t blame you for wanting to get rid of it,” declared a wan-looking lady, “but I question your good taste in selecting this particular moment.”

“Frankly speaking,” said a smartly dressed, middle-aged gentleman, “I believe the doctor’s a murderer. If you remember, the gentleman who went in there was lean and lanky just like that skeleton.”

“There was a terrible rumpus going on,” put in a young prospective mother. “That I know. It sounded like a murder.”

“Let me assure you,” protested Dr. MacQuirk, “there has been no murder.”

“Then produce your patient,” challenged the middle-aged gentleman.

“He left by another door.”

“There isn’t any other door,” said the wan lady. “I know because I’ve looked.”

“I’ll explain everything in half a minute,” the doctor flung back over his shoulder as he staggered from the room.

“No monkey business, Doc,” said Lorna. “I’ve got the gun leveled on your spine.”

“Don’t make my task any harder,” MacQuirk panted, beads of sweat standing out on his forehead. “If we all pull ourselves together everything will be all right.”

Just for something to do, Mr. Bland leaned over and chattered into Dr. MacQuirk’s left ear. The doctor almost dropped him, so profoundly was he moved.

“That,” he declared emphatically, “was about the worst sound I’ve ever heard. If you value your life and limb don’t do it again.”

Out into the sunlight emerged this quaint little procession. Several passers-by stopped to witness the spectacle. By the time they had reached the taxi a tidy crowd had gathered. Suddenly Mr. Bland’s weight took a decided upward turn, and the doctor, to his infinite mortification, found himself holding a naked man in his arms. For a moment he swayed on the sidewalk, struggling gamely to support his burden.

“Put me down, you damn’ fool!” shouted Mr. Bland. “Don’t hold me up to the crowd as if I were an offering.”

“All right,” muttered the doctor. “All right. There’s nothing to get excited about.”

“Oh, no,” snarled Mr. Bland. “Nothing at all. Would you suggest I dance naked on the pavement for the edification of the crowd?”

Before Dr. MacQuirk could be any more encouraging he sank with a deep sigh and a naked Bland to the sidewalk. The crowd was mute with stupefaction for a moment, then out of the silence a woman’s voice was heard.

“Close your eyes this minute, Betty,” cried the voice. “That man is all naked.”

“You don’t have to tell me, Mom,” Betty replied. “I could tell that at a glance. He’s not so hot.”

“Well,” quoth a lazy voice from the crowd, “considering he was a skeleton a moment ago I think he’s done very well.”

“He’s scarcely more than a skeleton now,” observed a feminine voice. “And I thought my husband was thin.”

“Mind your own business,” Mr. Bland shouted furiously. “If you had any sense of decency you’d get to hell out of here.”

Busy was barking passionately and making frantic lunges at whatever parts of the doctor he could find.

“Mr. Bland! Mr. Bland!” sobbed MacQuirk. “Your knee is in my stomach, and your dog’s got hold of my leg.”

“Are you crying?” asked Mr. Bland.

“A little,” admitted the doctor. “I told you I had a bad night.”

“Well, I slept like a top,” said Mr. Bland, “but I could cry like a baby myself.”

The crowd parted, and Officer Burke once more appeared on the scene. For a full minute he stood looking down at the tangled bodies on the sidewalk, then, after scratching his head, he brought himself to ask a question.

“What’s the meaning of all this?” Officer Burke demanded.

“Officer,” said Mr. Bland, “it hasn’t any meaning. The whole thing is perfectly ridiculous.”

“This man is a patient,” put in the doctor with great presence of mind. “A serious nervous case. I’m trying to get him back to my office.”

“What’s he doing naked out here?” asked Burke.

“I was giving him a physical examination,” said the doctor.

“Right out in public?” exclaimed the officer. “You oughter know better than that. I’ve a good mind to back up the wagon.”

“You and your old wagon,” Mr. Bland grumbled. “I bet you haven’t got a wagon.”

Before the officer could think up an answer to this, Lorna inadvertently fired the revolver and Busy turned to a skeleton.

“It’s all right, officer,” said Lorna quietly. “It’s the doctor’s gat. We were going to shoot my husband if he started to run away.”

It is doubtful if Burke had ever been so hopelessly confused. There were too many situations with which he had to deal. There was the naked maniac on the pavement. There was the irresponsible lady with a revolver. And there was the animated skeleton of a dog barking furiously in the face of the laws of God and man. Finally there was the watching crowd. With this Officer Burke could deal. Abandoning the other problems to their own solution, he once more charged down on the spectators.

“Clear out of here,” he shouted, “every mother’s son of you, or I’ll back up the wagon.”

While this diversion was in progress Mr. Bland rose from the pavement. He picked up the winded physician and draped him over his shoulder for the sake of protection. MacQuirk did not cover much of Mr. Bland, but he did serve the purpose of making his wearer feel a little less naked.

“Let’s go back and get my clothes,” said Mr. Bland to Lorna. “That damn-fool dog has lost his flesh again.”

“Don’t I know!” replied Lorna. “Between you and that dog my life isn’t worth living. There’s always a skeleton.”

“Put me down, Mr. Bland,” pleaded the doctor. “This is most undignified. What will my patients think?”

“Sorry, old chap,” said Mr. Bland, “but I simply must wear you. What little protection you afford is absolutely essential. Figure it out for yourself.”

“Say, lady,” said the taxicab driver, “is anybody going to use me?”

“What’s the matter with you?” snapped Lorna. “Aren’t you having a good time?”

“I am that, lady,” conceded the driver, “but I ain’t getting paid for it.”

“Oh,” said Lorna, “the doctor will settle up later.”

“Don’t listen to her,” shouted MacQuirk as he was borne into the house.

If the doctor’s first appearance had caused a sensation, his reappearance created a panic.

“First, the doctor goes out carrying a skeleton,” summed up the well-dressed, middle-aged gentleman, “and then a naked man comes in carrying the doctor. An odd sort of business.”

“And we’re supposed to be here for our nerves,” complained the wan lady. “I think I’m going to have an attack.”

“Let me out!” another patient suddenly cried in a strangled voice. “Look! Look! The living skeleton of a little something.”

Still barking under his breath like a thunderstorm on the ebb, the skeleton of Busy followed Lorna across the room and disappeared into the doctor’s office.

“Hey, Doc,” called Mr. Bland, pointing to what was left of his dog. “Are you convinced now?”

From his own operating table MacQuirk raised a weary head.

“Thoroughly,” he said. “Miss Malloy, please go out and dismiss my patients. Tell them I’ve had a sudden attack of frenzy – tell them anything. It doesn’t matter. I’ll never get over this.”

“They’re all gone already,” announced the nurse when she returned. “All except the mental case. She still wants some spinach.”

“Well, what are we going to do?” MacQuirk asked distractedly. “I haven’t any spinach to give her. And if I did give her some spinach I would be establishing a dangerous precedent. First thing you know, mental cases would be dropping in, demanding a square meal.”

“Have you,” asked Mr. Bland, “by any chance a drink to give us?”

“Why didn’t I think of it before?” replied the doctor. “Of course, of course, most certainly. A drink is the very thing. Miss Malloy, if you please. You know where the stuff is. Didn’t sleep a wink last night.”

By the time Lorna and Mr. Bland were ready to leave, the square dog had regained his body and the exhausted physician a sunnier outlook on life.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Traveling Beard

The express train was swarming with commuters. And Mr. Bland was one of them. Some were reading papers, others playing cards, and some were impatiently awaiting their opportunity to explain the N.R.A. to others who were explaining it to them.

Quintus Bland was far from happy. He had no confidence in himself. Although he had retained his flesh for nearly twenty-four hours he had no definite assurance it would not fade away at any moment.

He would hate to become a skeleton among so many well-dressed and well-fed gentlemen. They would never understand. They were too firmly rooted in convention – too all-fired orthodox. They might have their own failings, but they were the failings of the average man. They might sin and commit crimes, but they would do so according to well-established lines. And yet, thought Mr. Bland, here was a trainload of problems, each individual intent on solving his own. After all, there was something admirable in the way these men accepted their destiny, which seemed to be largely that of catching trains, taking other men’s orders, keeping their automobiles in shape and their homes intact. And above all they had to maintain a certain prosperous front. In spite of failure and reverses they had to meet the commuting standard and keep their troubles to themselves. A smug lot, perhaps, but partly so because of the insecurity of their own economic futures. They had to keep up the pretense. At home their wives were doing the same thing, while in the privacy of their own houses they scanned newspaper advertisements of alluring wearing apparel with broodingly envious eyes that held but little hope.

The tragedy of this train, Mr. Bland continued to reflect, was that most of its inmates were in a position to glimpse without grasping the full possibilities of a good, fat, materialistic life, the only one their training and traditions had equipped them to understand. They lived on the fringe of security, desperately clinging to prospects, and often their wives grew old and bitter with those prospects unfulfilled. They themselves never grew old, for that is against the laws of commuting which say that a man must always be brisk and snappy until suddenly he dies and another commuter takes up his fallen cards or moves into his seat. Mr. Bland found himself wondering if it would not be a better thing to be so hopelessly poor that all this strain and pretense would become unnecessary and a man would be able to be his natural slovenly self, always about two thirds binged.

These thoughts passed through his mind as the familiar landscape passed by his eyes. Seated by the window, he protected himself from observation with a newspaper which he did not read. The gentleman seated beside him he knew only slightly, but the gentleman had no intention of letting matters rest at that. He was one of those exceedingly trying persons who believed that the more people you knew the better off you were. He had a ruddy face, a thick body, and virtually no mind at all. He could talk for a long time in a loud voice in the face of polite indifference or hostile opposition. His success in the advertising world was assured. Already he sat at the speakers’ table whenever the Advertising Club stepped out. He was one of those elbowing individuals whose faces stand out with shocking vividness whenever a flashlight picture is taken of groups. And he had a disconcerting habit of thrusting his head round Mr. Bland’s newspaper to see what he was reading and then telling him about it with the addition of his own personal views on the subject.

This morning he was a little baffled, for Mr. Bland had not had the enterprise to turn past the women’s page before he had abandoned reading entirely. The thick man, whose name was Blutter, was puzzled by his silent neighbor’s preoccupation with matters exclusively pertaining to the home, the table, and the adornment of the feminine body.

“Interesting page, that,” he said at a venture. “It has always been my claim that the average American husband is far more interested in his home than is the average American wife.”

“He doesn’t have to live in it so much,” retorted Mr. Bland, his lips closely approaching a snarl.

“Perhaps there’s a little something in that,” Mr. Blutter strode confidently on in his speech, “but I still maintain – and I have an insight into things through years of advertising experience – that the average American husband is far more competent to deal with domestic problems than the average American wife. In fact, I know he is.”

“Then that’s all settled,” said Bland with dangerous mildness. “You appear to be pretty well sold on the average American husband. You must be one yourself.”

Mr. Blutter did not get within jumping distance of this remark.

“Yes and no,” he stated. “I am essentially a creative man, being, as I am, in the advertising profession, but in every other respect I daresay I represent the point of view of the average American husband.”

“You must be no end of a comfort to your wife,” observed Mr. Bland. “After she’s had a long day of petty frustration about the house, no doubt you come home and set things straight with one large, inclusive gesture.”

This observation was too sharply barbed to escape the notice of Mr. Blutter, as dumb as that gentleman was.

“As an average American husband,” he retorted with some heat, “I’m not ashamed to say that I enter directly into all matters pertaining to the home and its management. Mrs. Blutter, I am proud to say, finds my coöperation not unhelpful.”

“I’m either too drunk to eat,” announced Mr. Bland, “or the cook is too drunk to cook. We seldom eat at our house, and when we do, the meal, such as it is, almost always ends up in a row. As a matter of fact, my wife and myself only maintain a home in order to have a quiet place in which to fight. We’re both fond of the lower diversions of life and spend most of our time either acquiring or getting rid of a hangover.”

Mr. Blutter’s eyes bulged behind his glasses.

“You’re a whole pack of cards, Mr. Bland,” he said with an uncertain laugh. “I’ll bet you run an A-1 plant, you and the missus. I knew a chap like you once. Name of Dobbs. Always comical. Never took life seriously, but at heart one of the finest fellows you’d want to meet. Mighty good company, but of course he couldn’t last. Not in the advertising world, he couldn’t. You have to have get up and go there and keep your eyes open.”

“On what?” Mr. Bland asked innocently.

“Your clients’ interests,” replied Mr. Blutter.

“What about the buying public?” pursued Mr. Bland.

“The what?” said Mr. Blutter, as though the buying public were a new idea to him. “Oh, yes, the buying public. It’s my business to educate it to purchase the right products.”

The word Mr. Bland employed at this point has recently become quite the vogue in the best circles of society, although for years it has been unmelodiously shouted through the streets by the commoner run of man. It popped so explosively now from Mr. Bland’s lips that the good Blutter was at first startled and then offended.

“To who?” he asked with faint truculence.

“To you,” said Mr. Bland.

“Then right back at you,” retorted the advertising ace, feeling he had held his own in a difficult exchange.

Quintus Bland grunted and retired behind his paper. A man like Blutter was bad for his soul. He hoped that for the good of the advertising profession there were not many Blutters in it. Not much good hoping a silly thing like that. All professions were overcrowded with Blutters. Blutters ran the world and retarded its progress. There were Blutter statesmen and Blutter generals and, doubtless, Blutter safecrackers. Blutter was a frame of mind throughout all walks of life.

Idly, as he watched the flying billboards, Mr. Bland began to compose an aimless bit of doggerel in which the words “splutter,” “clutter,” and “gutter” were employed to rhyme insultingly with that of Blutter.

In the meantime that individual had closed his eyes, the better to concentrate on the problems of the day. They were not quite insuperable. A big client was coming to town, and it would be his, Blutter’s, duty to entertain him. Speakeasies, a show, more speakeasies – perhaps girls. Mentally Mr. Blutter smacked his lips. It would be a relief to give Mrs. Blutter the gate for a change, especially when acting in the line of duty. The average American husband would lose his flair for business if he did not step out occasionally. And the less the average American wife knew about such steppings the better for domestic relations. It was not so much cheating as toning a fellow up.

In spite of the fascination of his anticipatory debauch, Mr. Blutter was not completely satisfied with himself. That word Mr. Bland had flung at him still rankled in his mind. He, Blutter, had failed to impress sufficiently this long, crude, scoffing creature at his side. He would retain his good nature and try again.

Accordingly Blutter reopened his eyes and thrust his head round the barrier of Mr. Bland’s paper. Then with startling suddenness Blutter’s head sprang back as if it had been rudely pushed. For a moment he sat in dazed silence, his eyes still blinking from what they had seen. Then he made another try, this time more circumspectly. He had been right the first time. The man sitting beside him had the face of a grinning skull. And even as he looked, the fleshless face turned slowly toward him and two vacant eyeholes peered inquiringly into his.

“Who are you looking at?” croaked the skull.

“I – I – I confess I don’t know,” stammered Mr. Blutter. “There was a gentleman sitting there named Bland, but he must have slipped out.”

“Slipped out?” repeated the skull disapprovingly. “Slipped out on what?”

“You know,” Blutter faltered. “He just went away.”

Suddenly the skull thrust itself into Blutter’s horrified face.

“Rats!” snapped the skull with an ominous click of its teeth. “Rats, I repeat. No more loose talking. Who am I?”

By this time Blutter’s eyes had discovered the hands of the skull. The sight of those fleshless fingers clawing the morning newspaper struck terror to his heart. “I don’t know who you are,” he said in a strained voice, “but I think I’d better be going.”

“You’ll stay right where you are,” replied the skull, once more approaching itself to Mr. Blutter’s face.

“Don’t!” gasped Mr. Blutter. “I think I’m going to die. Do you want to kill me?”

“Yes,” said the skull, “I want to kill you, and I will, too, if you even so much as budge.”

“Tickets!” came the voice of the conductor from a few seats down the aisle.

The skull promptly retired behind its newspaper, and when it next emerged it had amazingly grown a beard.

“What do you think of the beard, you rat?” demanded the skull. “How did I do it?”

Mr. Blutter had thrust a handkerchief into his mouth to keep himself from screaming. He now removed this self-inflicted gag and struggled to make his trembling lips form coherent words.

“I don’t know how you did it,” he managed to say at last, “but won’t you take it off? I don’t want to be seen talking to a person with such a beard.”

“What’s wrong with the beard, rat?” the skull rasped dangerously. “Feel it! Stroke it!”

“Oh, no,” babbled Mr. Blutter. “Oh, no, indeed. You don’t know what you’re asking.”

“Feel it! Stroke it!” said the skull inflexibly.

The arrival of the conductor saved Mr. Blutter from losing what little mind he had. Automatically the conductor accepted the two commutation tickets and punched them. It was not until he was returning them to their individual owners that he noticed anything wrong. It was the bearded skull’s hand that first attracted his decidedly unfavorable attention. The beard was the next point of interest. Over this he lingered a moment with rapidly mounting astonishment, but it was not until he looked at the face itself that he received the full shock of the object he was scrutinizing.

“Who are you?” demanded the conductor. “You’re not Mr. Bland.”

“No,” mumbled a cracked voice through the beard. “I’m Mr. Bland’s grandfather. He said you wouldn’t mind.”

“Never knew he had a grandfather,” said the conductor.

“Why should you?” asked the beard. “My grandson has lots of things he never told you about.”

“What happened to your hands?” the conductor wanted to know.

“My hands?” repeated the beard. “Oh, those. I started biting my fingernails when I was a baby, and I just kept on going.”

“Mean to say you bit your hands off?” incredulously demanded the conductor.

“Nibbled,” Mr. Bland corrected. “Nibbled. It took years and years to do it. Now there’s nothing left to nibble, so I’ve broken myself of the habit. I’m a very old man, you know.”

“Well, you’d better tell your grandson,” said the conductor, “that he ought to buy you a pair of gloves. Your hands are a sight.”

“He did,” mumbled Mr. Bland. “He bought me a pair of gloves, but I ate holes in the fingers. There was fur inside. I boggled a bit at the fur, but finally I got used to it. Never got to like it much. Too old, I reckon. Did you ever try fur?”

The conductor gulped, then shook his head. This horrid old man was positively making him sick.

“Don’t,” said Mr. Bland briefly. “It gets in the teeth.”

The conductor gagged slightly and passed to the next seat, but his mind was not on his work. His thoughts kept reverting to Mr. Bland’s grandfather and his unattractive ways. He was about the oldest old man the conductor had ever seen. He looked more dead than alive. However, if he could eat fur and get away with it he must have a strong constitution.

Being a natural-born gossiper, the conductor did not delay long in telling some of his more favored passengers all about the strange old grandfather of Mr. Bland and of how he had nibbled off his hands and then started in on fur-lined gloves. Soon Mr. Bland was the center of no little attention. Heads were turned in his direction, and low conversations ensued. Mr. Bland was not happy about this, but Mr. Blutter was still less happy. He was looking around for a means of escape when he felt five bony talons burn into the flesh of his thigh. Involuntarily he uttered an inarticulate cry. This attracted even more attention.

“No, you don’t,” grated Mr. Bland. “You’re going to stay here and keep me company, and when the train reaches the station you’re going to help me along the platform. See this?”

Under the cover of the seat ahead Mr. Bland pulled up the right sleeve of his coat and displayed the bare bone of his arm.

“Oh!” gasped Mr. Blutter, fairly cringing in his seat. “Oh! I can’t last much longer. Please don’t show me any more awful things.”

“I’m like that all over,” Mr. Bland informed him with a note of pride. “Would you like to see my ribs? You can look right through them.”

“I don’t want to look,” said Mr. Blutter.

“Then how’s this?” continued Mr. Bland, giving his beard a slight twist. “Do you like it better on the side or in the middle?”

“Off,” said Mr. Blutter.

“Can’t take it off,” Mr. Bland observed reflectively, “because then I wouldn’t be my own grandfather, and if I’m not my own grandfather who the hell am I?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

“I’m an average American husband,” announced Mr. Bland. “A part of the buying public, and you’re my very old and very dear friend. How about stroking my beard?”

“Please pull it back,” said Blutter. “Beards don’t grow like that even on a face like yours.”

“Very well,” Mr. Bland agreed amiably. “Back goes the beard. And just in time, too. Here we are.”

Mr. Blutter’s relief in putting that trip behind him was short-lived. This was due to the fact that Mr. Bland’s trousers slipped over his pelvis about halfway down the platform, and he, the redoubtable Blutter, had to assist in securing them while all the world looked on. What Mr. Blutter saw of Mr. Bland during this feverish and complicated procedure improved his morale very little.

“I’ll hold ’em up,” Mr. Bland told him, “while you twist the belt.”

“What will I twist around?” Mr. Blutter chattered.

“I’ve a bit of a spine back there. Twist it around that.”

“If I wasn’t so damned scared of you,” said Blutter in a burst of frankness, “I’d like to twist your spine off.”

“You can have a twist if you like,” Mr. Bland replied generously. “I can grow another one.”

With his trousers securely in place, Mr. Bland took his unwilling companion’s arm and continued on down the platform, shuffling noisily as he went.

“Can’t you lift your feet a little?” complained the freely sweating Blutter. “We’re conspicuous enough as it is without you making all that noise.”

“No,” said Mr. Bland. “My shoes would come off. If you think the rest of me is horrid you should take a look at my feet.”

At the telephone booths Mr. Blutter was released from his terrific ordeal, but not before he had experienced the harrowing sensation of shaking hands with a skeleton.

“Goodbye, old chap,” said Mr. Bland. “Be a good average American husband, and some bright day I’ll drop round to call on you and the – er – missus. I think that’s the acceptable term for the average American wife, or is it ‘the little lady’?”

Without stopping to answer, Blutter sped like an arrow from the bow the instant his hand was released from the blood-chilling grasp of that fleshless hand.

Mr. Bland watched the retreating figure of Mr. Blutter, then mentally took stock of the situation.

“I’m in one hell of a fine fix,” he said to himself. “Here I stand with an obviously false beard, no flesh at all, and a pair of treacherous trousers. What am I going to do? I’ll get picked up sure as shooting if I try to barge along on my own. Wonder what Lorna’s doing.”

Feeling much more miserable than he was willing to let himself know, he turned toward a telephone booth, the queer, awkward figure of what recently was a man, now entirely cut off from the flesh-and-blood people milling busily round him.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Whittles Reappear

It was an inspiration on Mr. Bland’s part to think of Claude Whittle. Both Whittle and his wife were cast in an imperturbable mold. They could take an animated skeleton in their stride without batting an eyelid. More than that, they could bring themselves to associate with that same skeleton on terms of unstrained equality. Sound people in a tight fix. Mr. Bland was certain that if any man’s fix was tight, his was that fix. Accordingly he dialed Mr. Whittle’s hotel and was soon connected with that gentleman himself.

“Hello, Whittle,” he said when a mild voice at the other end of the line had announced that its owner was there. “This is Quintus Bland.”

“What a name that first half is,” said the mild voice plaintively. “You can’t imagine how silly it sounds just coming out of nowhere, although when I saw you last you were nearly next to nothing yourself. It’s raining.”

“Listen,” said Mr. Bland, “are you sure you’ve finished about my name and your zippy little weather reports? I’m paying for this call and you’re using it all up.”

“People so seldom telephone me,” Mr. Whittle explained, “I’m actually telephone hungry – starved, I might say. Famished. Where’s your body now?”

“That’s just the trouble. I haven’t anybody.”

“But you did have somebody? Is that it? I’m no detective. Never was.”

“Don’t you ever stop drinking?” Mr. Bland demanded. “I’ll try again. Listen well. I did have a body only a few minutes ago, but the damned thing has done a bunk on me and left me stranded in the D. L. & W. station with a long white beard and no place to go.”

“Whose beard is it?” asked Mr. Whittle.

“Does that mean a lot to you?” Mr. Bland replied impatiently.

“No,” admitted the mild voice reflectively, “but it’s sort of interesting. You have a beard, you say, and it’s white. That means you have a white beard when one really gets down to brass tacks. What more do you want – another beard?”

“God, no!” exclaimed Mr. Bland, slipping another coin in the slot at the urgent behest of the operator. “I’ve got enough beard to last one a lifetime if I’m careful. I want you to come over here and get me.”

“You or the beard?” asked Mr. Whittle.

“Me in the beard,” said Mr. Bland.

“Will you wear the beard for me?” the mild voice asked with increased animation.

“What do you think I’m going to do with it, wave it like a flag?”

“You could,” said Mr. Whittle after a short pause, “That is, if it’s long enough, and the way I figure it, a beard doesn’t have to be so long to be waved like a flag. I’m to look for a skeleton in a white beard, is that it?”

“You’re to be prepared for a skeleton in a white beard,” Mr. Bland told him.

“Oh, I won’t mind greatly,” said Mr. Whittle. “You’re not as bad as loathsome reptiles, at any rate. If I could stand you in a pillowcase I guess I won’t balk at a beard. Where will you be?”

“In one of those private washrooms.”

“Oh, I know those places,” said Mr. Whittle. “Went to sleep in one of them once and they thought I’d committed suicide.”

“You were drunk,” said Mr. Bland.

“Yes,” said Mr. Whittle sorrowfully, “I was drunk.”

“You won’t be long, will you?” asked Mr. Bland, a note of real anxiety creeping into his voice. “And you won’t forget all about me?”

“Certainly not,” protested Whittle. “Pauline will remind me. She’s collected my clothes already. There’s something morbid about that woman the way she falls for the abnormal. She wants to know if your beard flows.”

“Freely,” said Mr. Bland, “and without stint.”

“I can hardly wait,” came the mild voice of Mr. Whittle. “How will I know which one you are in?”

“Just call my name softly,” replied Mr. Bland, “and I’ll snap right out.”

“Well, don’t snap out too fast,” said Mr. Whittle. “I’m willing, but my heart is weak, and your beard might get caught in the door. I won’t say ‘I’ll be seeing you,’ because the last person who said that to me I called an exceptionally vile name. Shall I ring off now?”

“Why not?” said Mr. Bland.

“All right, I’ll do it,” the voice of Whittle replied, “but isn’t it funny, me looking for a skeleton with a white beard in a gentleman’s private washroom. Don’t you think so, or do you know of something funnier?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you,” said Mr. Bland. “Get started.”

“Don’t forget,” came the voice of Whittle faintly. “I’m going now. Goodbye.”

Mr. Bland returned the receiver to the hook and got himself into a private washroom as unobtrusively as possible, warning the Negro attendant not to disturb him until called for. When the Negro looked at the size of his tip, each tooth in his head fairly gleamed its gratitude.

“Thank you, boss,” he said. “Thank you kindly. You can stay a solid month, and if you want your meals brought in, I’m your man.”

Mr. Bland entered the small room and, knowing the casual ways of the Whittles, sat down and prepared himself to wait for an indefinite period. However, on this occasion Claude Whittle did not tarry long on the way. About an hour after Mr. Bland had heard his voice over the wire he heard it again outside the door to his room.

“George,” Mr. Whittle was saying to the attendant, “I’m looking for a white beard feebly supported by a tall, thin gentleman. Have you seen anything like it?”

“Sure have, boss,” replied the attendant. “He’s right in there, suh, and he can stay just as long as he wants.”

“Good!” cried Mr. Whittle; then, slightly elevating his voice: “Señor Toledo, how long do you want to stay in there?”

“Señor Toledo doesn’t want to stay in here another minute longer,” replied Mr. Bland. “Señor Toledo comes.”

Unlatching the door, he stepped out and faced Mr. Whittle. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say he outfaced that gentleman, for after one swift look at Mr. Bland and his beard, Mr. Whittle’s eyes fell.

“Well?” said Mr. Bland, feeling somewhat self-conscious. “What do you think of me?”

“Don’t let’s take that up at this moment,” replied Mr. Whittle. “Give me a little time to analyze my emotions. I will say this, however, you’re not an anticlimax. Pauline has a taxi waiting.”

The door to the taxi swung open at the approach of Mr. Bland and his escort. A woman’s low voice came from the semidarkness of its interior.

“Is he wearing any drawers?” Pauline wanted to know.

“How about yourself?” snapped Mr. Bland as he jackknifed himself through the low door.

“What do you think I am?” asked Pauline Whittle indignantly. “A prude?”

“Do you know what she’s trying to get at?” inquired Mr. Whittle in his mild, patient manner.

“I hope she isn’t trying to get at anything,” replied Mr. Bland.

“Come, come,” said Mr. Whittle.

“I asked merely because I want to have a clear understanding of the situation,” Pauline explained. “If his trousers fall off in the lobby it would be well to have a second line of defense.”

“My drawers are no defense at all,” said Mr. Bland. “They’re a second source of anxiety. If my trousers fall off in the lobby my drawers will accompany them. They have always been too large.”

“I say, lady,” said the taxi driver, thrusting his head through the partition window, “is there anything criminal in this?”

“There is,” replied Pauline. “Now do you feel at home?”

“It’s all right by me,” said the driver, “but that’s a damn’ poor disguise. The dumbest flattie on the force could spot him a mile off.”

“We’re not going to let him play with flatties,” said Pauline. “He’s keeping under cover. Snap to it and drive on. You’re carrying the oldest gunman in the world. He’s likely to knock you over just in the spirit of fun.”

“Okay, lady,” said the driver. “Tell the old murderer I’m on his side.”

The Whittles lived in a large and ostentatious uptown hotel. About it there was no suggestion of home atmosphere. For this reason the Whittles liked it, never having been able to get through their heads what home life was all about. It was frankly a pagan temple, this huge structure dominating the Gay White Way. It offered every modern convenience except a morgue. Its Turkish baths and dormitories did much to keep gangsters both clean and sober. In luxurious suites of rooms beautiful women lived not such beautiful lives. And almost everybody had a good time until he was either shot down or kicked out. So far the Whittles had managed to avoid both of these unpleasant occurrences.

When the trio emerged from the taxi its bearded member was discovered wearing Mr. Whittle’s raincoat. It was much too short for him, but that slight detail made little difference. Mr. Bland could look no worse than he did regardless of what he wore.

“Pull your coat collar up and your hatbrim down,” Pauline commanded, “and hang onto your pants and beard.”

“Trousers,” muttered Mr. Bland. “I keep on telling you.”

The desk clerk’s name was Booker, and his eyes were harassed and weary from looking into so many different types of faces. Booker believed there was not a face in all the world of which he had not seen the counterpart. He promptly revised his opinion when he looked into Mr. Bland’s. Confronted by this somewhat synthetic gentleman, Booker for once lost his air of cynical detachment. He held his left hand up before his eyes and told off the fingers with his right. Once more he looked at the bearded face as if still unconvinced. Then he repeated the performance, only this time he held up his right hand and counted its fingers with the left.

“Why are you doing that?” asked Mr. Bland. “You’re making me very nervous.”

“You’ve already made me that,” said Booker. “I was trying to discover if I was losing my eyesight. I almost wish I were.”

“This gentleman is a friend of ours,” Pauline Whittle explained. “He wants a large room with a bath.”

“I should say,” replied Booker, “the gentleman wanted a doctor, or a barber, or better still, a hearse.”

“Nonsense,” snapped Mrs. Whittle. “Señor Toledo is a distinguished Spanish magician.”

“Then Señor Toledo should play some tricks on himself,” said the clerk. “He’ll have a hard time holding an audience if he doesn’t do something about his appearance.”

Annoyed, Mr. Bland held two fleshless fingers directly beneath Booker’s nose, then snapped them suddenly. The resulting noise was not unlike the explosion of a small firecracker.

“Bah to you,” said Mr. Bland. “Do I get a room or don’t I?”

“I guess you get a room all right,” replied Booker, “but I hope to heaven you stay in it until you’ve decided to change your make-up. It might go big in Spain, but it’s a little too strong for Broadway.”

“I’ll knock them cold,” said Mr. Bland.

“You will that,” agreed the clerk. “I’m chilly as hell myself – pardon my language, Mrs. Whittle.”

“Don’t show off,” replied Pauline, “or pretend you have any gentlemanly instincts left, if you ever had any to begin with.”

Mr. Booker grinned and, summoning a bellboy, handed him the key to 1707.

“Take Señor Toledo to his room,” said Booker, “and see that he stays there – I mean, see that he’s made comfortable.”

As they were turning away from the desk, Mr. Bland was politely accosted by a small, suave individual with piercing eyes and a black goatee.

“Pardon me,” said this gentleman, deftly extracting a visiting card from Mr. Bland’s beard, “but did I hear this lady say you were Señor Toledo, a distinguished Spanish magician?”

“You did,” announced Pauline aggressively. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Simply this, madam,” said the stranger, suddenly wiggling his chin like a rabbit and flipping his goatee into oblivion. “I am the Great Girasol, the mysterious jewel of all magicians. What did you think of that?”

“Great Scott!” exclaimed the simple-minded Mr. Whittle. “The little beggar fairly tossed his beard away.”

“Yeah,” put in Pauline nastily. “Well, just keep your eyes on our entry. Come on, Señor Toledo, show this rank amateur some real hot stuff.”

By this time they found themselves in the center of a circle of spectators, all intent on extracting the last ounce of amusement from whatever was taking place, which is a good old New York custom. Mr. Bland glanced nervously about him, then looked at the inflexible Pauline. Previously he had suspected, but now he felt convinced, that both she and her husband had been drinking.

“Do you mean,” he asked uneasily, “right out here in front of all these people?”

“Why not?” she retorted. “Girasol started it. Show the little geezer up, or I’ll leave you flat.”

For a moment Mr. Bland pondered. He knew that as he stood he was the most remarkable man in the world, yet he felt disinclined to demonstrate that fact before so many spectators. Nevertheless he could not allow this challenge to pass. Pauline had already announced to the world that he was Señor Toledo, a distinguished Spanish magician. He could not let her down. He took another look at the mysterious jewel of all magicians, then quickly made up his mind. Girasol was strutting like a game cock, a smug smile on his vividly red lips.

“All right,” said Mr. Bland. “For the honor of dear old Spain.”

He stepped back a pace, then gave his skull a violent snap. When he looked up, the white beard was resting beneath his left ear.

“What do you think of that?” he demanded.

“Girasol did better,” said a voice in the crowd. “He made his beard disappear.”

“That’s all very well,” another voice argued, “but look at the difference in the sizes of the beards. Girasol’s beard you could put in a thimble. You’d have to get a truck to lug that other brush away.”

Pauline was somewhat disappointed in Mr. Bland’s effort, but she did not show it.

“Swell work, Toledo,” she said. “That’s got the little guy guessing.”

The Great Girasol held up a hand for silence.

“Observe,” he said in a magnificently deep voice, then quite casually tossed his left arm away. “Match that if you can.”

Before the cries of horror and approval of the spectators had died away, Mr. Bland, now thoroughly aroused, got into action. Once more he snapped his head, but this time with such violence that his hat flew off with the beard nesting in it. Then he raised his head and presented a grinning skull to the crowd.

“God!” exclaimed a professional gambler. “If they keep it up at this rate they’ll be getting rid of themselves entirely.”

Girasol looked at Mr. Bland’s skull, then blinked several times. Here, indeed, was a new one on him. He was game, however, and did not show his perturbation.

“What did you think of that?” asked Mr. Bland, feeling a little better about himself.

“Good,” admitted Girasol, “but not good enough. Watch this!”

He extended his right arm in the air and snatched back his left, which he fitted into place, then with a wriggle of his chin he somehow succeeded in recapturing his black goatee.

“Thank Gord,” said a well-kept blonde. “If he’d started in flinging his legs away I’d of gone clean batty.”

“Get in there, Toledo,” Pauline urged. “Get in the game and show them what you’re made of.”

“Shall I?” asked Mr. Bland.

“Sure,” said Mr. Whittle. “Give the Great Girasol the shock of his life.”

Without another word Mr. Bland busily stripped himself to the waist, then slowly turned around like a mannequin displaying the latest Paris model.

“What do you think of that?” he asked the Great Girasol.

Girasol was sweating. He mopped his forehead and made a heroic effort to pull himself together. The spectators gazed at Mr. Bland with a mixture of admiration and revulsion in their dilated eyes.

“Don’t know why I’m standing here,” came the voice of the well-kept blonde. “That Spanish lad has aged me ten years already.”

“You can see clean through his ribs,” whispered the gambler, “and out the other side. What manner of man is he?”

The Great Girasol, realizing the tide had set against him, made a supreme effort.

“Attend!” he cried. “The Great Girasol will make Señor Toledo look sick.”

“He looks every bit of that already,” said a well-known racketeer. “He looks damn’ well near dead.”

Sitting down on the floor, Girasol created the perfect illusion of a man tossing his legs into space.

“What do you think of that?” he cried, turning triumphantly on the partial skeleton.

“I knew it,” said the well-kept blonde. “That little guy’s been itching to chuck his legs away, and now he’s gone and done it. Next thing you know the kid from Spain will be pitching his skull in our laps.”

Pauline, tense with excitement, took Mr. Bland aside.

“Girasol has shot his bolt,” she whispered. “Now you must shoot yours. Take off your pants and give them everything.”

“Trousers,” murmured Mr. Bland. “I keep on telling and telling you. Men wear trousers and women wear pants.”

“I don’t wear either,” said Pauline, “but that’s another matter.”

With a brief nod Mr. Bland stepped forward and tauntingly confronted his rival, then bowed to the spectators.

“Girasol,” he said, looking down at the dapper magician, “you’d better get your legs back and be prepared to run. Clap your eyes on this.”

Quickly releasing his belt, he stepped out of his trousers; then, kicking off his shoes, he stretched himself to his full height and extended two long, bony arms in the direction of the seated Girasol. That jewel of mystery did not remain long seated. With a startled cry he unfolded his missing legs and sprang to his feet.

“Toledo isn’t a magician!” he cried. “He’s the son of the devil himself.”

And with this parting denunciation the Great Girasol turned on his heel and took both himself and his magic off.

“I don’t know but what he’s right,” observed the well-kept blonde. “I must get myself a facial to get rid of my horror-stricken expression.”

Having driven his opponent from the field, Mr. Bland was calmly dressing again.

“Don’t trouble about that now, Señor,” said Pauline, swiftly gathering up Mr. Bland’s abandoned garments. “You can dress in your room.”

“I’d like to have my beard,” said Mr. Bland. “I don’t feel quite so naked with it on.”

“Oh, he’s got to have his beard,” declared Mr. Whittle.

“Take your old beard,” said Pauline, “and stick it on your chin.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Conversation in a Cage

If he is really out to get it, a skeleton has little difficulty in obtaining as much privacy as he wants. The problem with which he is confronted is the establishment of desirable social contacts. Mr. Bland was fortunate in having the loyal if somewhat inebriated friendship of Mr. and Mrs. Whittle. These two hard-boiled exponents of the lower pursuits of life were a host in themselves. To know the Whittles was much like associating with a three-ring circus on the loose. Although very little occurred that surprised this well-matched couple, it was interested in almost everything. And when the Whittles’ interest was aroused, some sort of trouble usually resulted. If Mr. Bland had hoped to obtain quietude and contentment when he called on them for sanctuary, he was doomed to disappointment. The Whittles were opposed to quietude and constitutionally incapable of contentment. Both of them were now jubilant over the defeat of the Great Girasol at the hands of Mr. Bland. As they followed the boy to the elevators they were making elaborate plans for their protégé’s stage début, entirely disregarding his voluble opposition.

“I didn’t like it at all,” said Mr. Bland, “the way you made me exhibit myself in public. Suppose I should have regained my flesh when I stood there before all those people?”

“Why, that would have made your act even more piquant,” replied Pauline. “I wish you could figure out a way of controlling the comings and goings of your body.”

“Nothing would please me more,” Mr. Bland assured her.

The elevator was crowded. When the skeleton walked in, it tried to be less crowded, but the operator was quick with the door. At that, one gentleman did succeed in getting himself out with the exception of his left foot, and even though he found himself in great danger and lying in a most undignified position on his face, he felt he had materially improved his position. When his foot was released he took it away to the nearest speakeasy, where he drank himself into a state of happy forgetfulness.

Within the ascending cage a state of panic reigned. In their eagerness to remove themselves as far as possible from the immediate vicinity of the skeleton, men and women climbed impartially on one another’s shoulders. In the presence of an animated skeleton chivalry strikes a man as being nothing less than folly. Before the elevator had lifted itself six feet from its base, Mr. Bland found himself isolated in a corner with only his beard for company. This state of isolation did not long endure. Strong men, in endeavoring to achieve a point of vantage, catapulted defenseless women against him. The cries and screams that followed caused the operator to stop the elevator between floors. This did not help matters any, because everyone had planned to get off at the first opportunity, and now there was none. They were literally up against a blank wall with a skeleton in their midst.

In vain did Pauline and Mr. Whittle endeavor to bring comfort to the occupants of the cage by assuring them they were traveling with Señor Toledo, a distinguished Spanish magician. This information brought scant comfort to them so long as Señor Toledo remained in his present wasted condition.

“If he’s such a distinguished magician,” a gentleman inquired, “why doesn’t he make things a little easier for us all by taking on a little flesh?”

“Yes,” came the positive voice of a woman. “Who asked him to play nasty tricks in a public elevator? When he gets in his own room he can practise being a skeleton to his heart’s content. We don’t want to see him do it.”

And as if in answer to these questions, Mr. Bland momentarily regained his flesh. He was first apprised of this fact by a startled exclamation from one of the ladies pressed against him.

“Gracious!” he heard her say. “There’s a naked man in this lift.”

“How do you know?” her friend wanted to know.

“Don’t be silly,” replied the first lady.

It was now Mr. Bland’s turn to become panic-stricken.

“Go ’way!” he cried. “Can’t you see I’m naked?”

“Well,” began the lady. “I – —”

“Will you two be still?” cut in Mr. Bland. “You must be bereft of shame.”

He deftly yanked the skirt off the loquacious lady and wrapped it about himself.

“Oh,” cried the lady to the occupants of the elevator. “The naked man has stolen my skirt, and now I’m nearly as naked as he is. What shall I do?”

“Hide behind the naked man,” someone suggested.

“Like the deuce,” said the naked man in an injured voice. “If she’d only kept her mouth shut no one would have been any the wiser.”

“It doesn’t make me feel any wiser to look at a naked man,” a woman declared stoutly.

“I’d have known,” said another woman who had been forced against Mr. Bland. “At first I couldn’t believe what I was – well, I just couldn’t believe it, that’s all,” she ended up lamely.

“What the hell sort of a hotel is this anyway,” came the voice of a gentleman in complaining accents, “allowing skeletons and naked men to go riding about in elevators?”

“What I want to know is,” said a fresh voice, “are we going to stay here all day with this naked man?”

“I’d rather stay in here with a naked man,” proclaimed a feminine voice with disarming frankness, “than with a grinning skeleton. What’s become of him?”

“He must have turned into the naked man,” someone replied.

“If that’s the case,” said another voice, “Señor Toledo should travel with a bathrobe.”

The elevator got under way, then halted again at the first floor. It is a striking commentary on the relative popularity of a naked man and a skeleton that only a few passengers got off at this floor. Panic in the cage had now given place to curiosity, and there was none more curious than Pauline Whittle.

“Do you know,” she said to Mr. Bland when the crowd had somewhat thinned, “this is the first time I’ve seen you in the flesh? You make a perfect picture standing beside that pretty girl in those perfectly ridiculous little panties.”

“He won’t give me back my skirt,” said the girl.

“Don’t worry, my dear,” replied Pauline. “You look much better with it off.”

“If you’ll tell me the number of your room,” said Mr. Bland, “I’ll bring you your skirt. You can see for yourself it wouldn’t do at all to give it up now.”

“Isn’t he long,” observed Mr. Whittle, “and lean and knobby? Don’t know but what I prefer the skeleton. I’d got sort of used to that.”

“I like him as he is,” declared Pauline.

“You would,” said Mr. Whittle.

“I wish you’d both keep your opinions to yourselves,” said Mr. Bland.

“Never change back,” Pauline urged him. “And never get dressed. Men look so dull with their clothes on.”

“You’re an incorrigible voluptuary,” Mr. Whittle told her. “A sex-ridden hag.”

“God gave me sex whether I wanted it or not,” Pauline replied. “I say make the best of it, or the most of it, or the worst of it, according to your lights. It isn’t a subject for adult consideration. Sex is simply a fact – about the only pleasant fact of life.”

“How long are you going on about it?” Mr. Whittle asked her.

“I seldom talk about sex,” she replied. “I let it speak for itself.”

“And in no uncertain terms,” said Mr. Whittle.

“Here’s your skirt,” said Mr. Bland to the girl in the ridiculous little panties as the elevator stopped at last at the seventeenth floor. “Thanks a lot for letting me use it, but now I don’t need it any more.”

The girl uttered a little cry and snatched at her skirt.

“Why, you’re a skeleton again,” she said.

“Unfortunately,” Mr. Bland replied, stepping from the cage.

And so he was.

“There goes a beautiful friendship,” said Pauline Whittle, following the skeleton out of the elevator, “not to mention some other rather entertaining possibilities.”

“Am I not present,” asked her husband, “that you should go on thus?”

“You should know whether you’re here or not,” Pauline told him.

“I know where I am, all right,” said Mr. Whittle, “but I wasn’t sure whether you did or not.”

“I’ve always been aboveboard,” declared Pauline.

“And below par,” added her husband.

“Little boy,” said the skeleton to the page, “please lead me to my room. These people are unnecessarily tiresome.”

As they progressed down the corridor, a door suddenly opened and a thuggish, bloated face appeared in the opening. Two bloodshot eyes were fixed on Mr. Bland with such burning intensity that he stopped in his tracks and turned to confront the owner of such a malevolent gaze. Mistaking the skeleton’s intentions, the man whipped out a revolver and sprang into the hall.

“Ha!” he mouthed. “So you’ve come back to torment me. Well, I sent you to the grave once and I’ll send you there again.”

“There must be some mistake,” said Mr. Bland politely. “I’m not dead and I’ve never been buried.”

“No?” sneered the man. “Then where did you get that beard?”

“I got it from a friend,” Mr. Bland told him. “It’s not really mine.”

“You lie!” the man shouted. “You grew it in the grave. That’s the only place you could grow a beard like that.”

“Don’t you like it?” asked Mr. Bland, hoping to keep the man’s attention from straying back to the gun.

“You know I don’t,” said the man excitedly. “I hate it. And when I’ve finished with you they can suck up your powdered bones in a vacuum cleaner.”

“Gr-r-r,” said Mr. Bland. “How graphically you put it.”

“Look out!” warned Mr. Whittle.

And then the shooting started.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

From Bed to Bed

The first report of the revolver galvanized all legs present into desperate action. And with each subsequent explosion those legs got busier and busier.

The Whittles, led by the bellboy, fled in one direction; Mr. Bland with the man behind him sprinted in the other. And Mr. Bland did very well. He tried to do even better. The prospect of being blown to powder to make life easier for a vacuum cleaner added many inches to his stride.

As Mr. Bland bounded past the floor telephone operator, that courageous young woman promptly plugged in on the desk clerk. He had just relieved Mr. Booker, so the operator’s information was all news to him.

“There’s a skeleton up here,” said the girl. “He’s running through the halls.”

“What’s that to you?” snapped the clerk. “A guest in this hotel has a perfect right to be as thin as he wants.”

“This one’s a real skeleton,” said the girl unemotionally.

“Well,” replied the clerk, “you’re not so fat yourself.”

“And a man is shooting at him,” went on the girl, disregarding any implied dissatisfaction with her figure.

“Who’s doing the shooting?” the clerk wanted to know.

“That person in 1782,” replied the girl.

“Up to his old tricks, eh?” said the desk clerk. “Well, you can tell him for the management that if he pulls another murder in this hotel we’ll throw him out on his ear.”

“He’s in no mood to listen,” replied the operator.

“He’s nothing but a drunken gangster,” said the clerk a little irritably.

“That’s quite a lot to be,” said the girl and pulled out the plug.

In the meantime Mr. Bland was weaving his frantic way down the long, heavily carpeted corridor. Bullets were either speeding past him or through him. He could not be sure what the bullets were doing, but from the speed he was making he felt satisfied he was still alive. He pranced round a corner and ran into a volley of shrieks issuing from a door on his right. Some woman was in mortal terror of her life. Forgetting his own peril, Mr. Bland flung open the door and sprang into the room, slamming the door behind him.

A brutal-looking man was busily choking a scantily-clad woman. Mr. Bland noticed she was wearing cerise-colored garters. He was not sure he liked them, then decided they looked excitingly meretricious. The rest of the woman was in keeping with her garters. She could still be a useful and active member of society if she were not choked too much.

Upon the entrance of Mr. Bland the man gave the woman a rest and looked over one shoulder to see who had so rudely interrupted his pleasant occupation. When he got it through his head that he was looking at a heavily panting skeleton he froze in his position, one great hand still open, as if waiting for a throat to fill it. When the girl saw the skeleton she closed her eyes and thrust her neck back into the extended hand.

“Go on and choke me,” she said in a flat voice. “Finish me off quickly before that thing has a chance to drag me down to hell.”

For the moment the man had lost his taste for any further murderous activity. He backed away from the girl, allowing her body to fall on the bed. Mr. Bland moved away from the door. If the brutal man wanted to go, there was nothing to be gained in preventing him. Mr. Bland would be only too glad to see the last of him.

The man made a rush for the door and seized the knob, pausing for a moment to glare back at the girl on the bed.

“I see how it is,” he cried. “I see everything.”

Mr. Bland looked more closely at the girl.

“Don’t leave me alone with that,” she pleaded.

“Acting!” cried the man. “Always acting! Not content with snatching them from the cradle, you also snatch them from the grave. I’m going to get a gun and blow you both to bits.”

“That makes two marksmen,” thought Mr. Bland as the door closed on the brutal man’s exit.

He turned and considered the girl lying half crouched on the bed.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he told her.

“What else can you do?” she asked, sitting up quite unexpectedly and fluffing out her hair, which was, Mr. Bland noted, almost the color of her garters.

“Are you suggesting games?” he asked her.

“Anything that’s friendly,” the girl replied. “I’m tired of being choked.”

At that moment the voice of the drunken gambler sounded in the hall.

“Where are you?” it shouted. “Hey, skeleton, come on out and take your medicine. Back to the grave for you.”

A loud report immediately followed this uncongenial suggestion, and a bullet buried itself in the door. Mr. Bland had no desire either to take any medicine or to go back to the grave. He dived into the girl’s bed and pulled the covers up over his skull.

“Your beard is sticking out,” she told him.

“Tuck it in, won’t you?” he asked her. “There’s a man outside with a gun.”

“It would take a lot more than gunplay,” said the girl, “to get me to tuck that beard in bed.”

“What’s wrong with the beard?” Mr. Bland demanded.

“It isn’t human, if you want to know,” she answered.

“A beard isn’t supposed to be human,” he told her. “It’s merely a decoration.”

“Come on out,” cried the voice of the gangster. “Hey, skeleton, come on out. I hear you whispering in there.”

A second shot lodged in the heavy door.

This was a little too strong for the girl. She tumbled into the bed and pulled up the covers on her side.

“Just because you saved my life,” she whispered, “don’t think you’ve a right to get gay.”

“Gay,” muttered Mr. Bland. “My dear young lady, I’m feeling far from that.”

“Don’t blame you,” whispered the girl. “I couldn’t be gay either if a man was looking for me with a gun. Think it’s all right, me being in bed with a skeleton?”

“It’s all right with me,” said Mr. Bland. “As a matter of fact, I’m glad you’re here. Being shot at by strangers is one of the loneliest feelings in the world.”

“Did anybody ever choke you?” asked the girl.

“Not yet,” said Mr. Bland.

“Well, that isn’t any fun, either,” she told him.

“This seems to be a very violent sort of hotel,” observed Mr. Bland.

“It is,” agreed the girl. “You can get away with murder here as long as you pay your bill.”

“I hope that man owes a lot,” said Mr. Bland.

The door banged open, and the drunken gangster stood on the threshold.

“Hey, skeleton,” he called; then, seeing a girl in the bed, he addressed himself to her: “Have you seen a dirty skeleton?” he asked her.

Mr. Bland did not like this description of himself one little bit. Lorna called him a dirty man, and this drunken gangster called him a dirty skeleton. Something should be done about it, but all he could do at the moment was to lie quite still and hope against hope his beard would remain undetected.

“No,” replied the girl, “but I saw a dusty skeleton once in a sideshow.”

The drunken gangster shook his head in a dull way. His lips fumbled for the words before they formed and spoke them.

“This was a dirty damned skeleton,” he said with stupid gravity, “this skeleton I’m looking for. Thought he’d come back to torture me, but I showed him different. I put him in his grave once and I’ll put him there again. The damn’ thing’s wearing a beard. I don’t care if he wears a dozen, understand?”

Mr. Bland thought this over. He fervently wished he had a dozen beards. A dozen beards like the one he had on would make a fur coat, not a long one, perhaps, but adequate for the purposes of concealment. The girl beside him was speaking. Her voice sounded coolly annoyed. As Mr. Bland listened he reflected that women were at their best when they had something to conceal. They generally came up to scratch. Man with his arrogance and physical superiority had forged a weapon against himself and placed it in the mouth of a woman.

“Why are you confiding all this in me?” asked the girl. “I’m not your big sister. If you’d stop stuffing my door with bullets I’d try to get a little sleep.”

“I won’t be able to sleep,” said the man, “until I’ve put that skeleton – that dirty skeleton – into a can of tooth powder.”

“That man is a sheer genius,” thought Mr. Bland. “He can think of the most amusing things to do with me. I’d hate like hell to be cooped up in a can of tooth powder. A vacuum cleaner would give me a better run for my money.”

The man turned to the door, then turned back again and made a sudden lunge across the room to the bed. Mr. Bland had just sufficient time to snatch off his beard and thrust it under a pillow before the bedclothes were dragged from his body.

“Jeeze!” said the gangster. “He’s as naked as a babe.”

The familiar comparison sounded quaint on the gunman’s lips.

“What!” exclaimed the girl in genuine surprise. “Why, so he is. I don’t think I ever saw a nakeder man.”

“Don’t look!” cried Mr. Bland.

Frantically he plowed up the bedclothes like a dog digging sand. Both modesty and caution prompted him to cover himself as speedily as possible. He had been changing form so frequently since arriving at the hotel that he was afraid he might return to a skeleton at any moment.

“Why don’t you go skeleton-shooting?” he demanded indignantly. “You’re wasting three people’s time here, and that’s too much for any one man.”

“Jeeze, mister,” said the gunman apologetically, “I’m sorry, honestly I am. Thought you might be that dirty skeleton.”

“Are you thoroughly convinced I’m not?”

“Sure,” said the man. “I could tell you wasn’t a skeleton.”

“So could I,” said the girl in an ominous voice.

“But if you see that skeleton,” went on the gangster, “just give me a shout. I’ll be sneaking along the halls. You can tell him by his beard. You won’t like it.”

“Why should I?” said Mr. Bland. “On the spur of the moment I can’t think of any beard that claims my admiration.”

Holding his automatic ready for immediate action, the gangster placed a finger to his lips, winked frightfully, and left the room.

“I wouldn’t be in your spot for all of Radio City,” said the girl as soon as the man had gone.

“What do you mean?” asked Mr. Bland a little nervously.

“That’s easy,” replied the girl, sitting up in bed. “If you stay the way you are, my boy friend will shoot you, and if you change back to a skeleton, that drunken thug will fill you full of lead.”

“His present plans are much more elaborate than that,” said Mr. Bland moodily. “You heard what he said about a can of tooth powder. His heart is set on putting me in one.”

“That’s what you get for diving into my bed under false pretenses,” declared the girl. “I don’t know what manner of man you are, or how you pull your stuff, but I do know that a skeleton is the last thing in the world a lady in bed wants to see.”

“I’d better be going now before your boy friend comes back with his gun,” said Mr. Bland.

As he half rose in the bed, the girl flung two cool arms round his neck.

“This,” she whispered, “is for saving my life.”

And she gave him a long and experienced kiss.

How long it might have lasted will never be known, for it was rudely interrupted by a ferocious cry from the door.

“By God, what a woman!” came the furious voice of the boy friend. “First a grinning skeleton and then a naked man.”

Under such unfavorable circumstances all the laws of decency were so much unnecessary ballast. Mr. Bland snatched his beard and sprang from the bed. He could never recall how he got himself out of the room, but he had a vivid recollection of dashing down a long corridor while bullets overtook and passed him. This time he was pursued by both the boy friend and the gangster, the latter apparently willing to shoot at any moving object.

Although Mr. Bland could outrun his pursuers, he could not hope to equal the speed of their bullets. With a pang of alarm he realized it would be a matter of only a short time before one or more of these missiles laid him low. Putting a corner between himself and his two unreasonable enemies, Mr. Bland turned sharply to the left and disappeared down an off-jutting hallway. It was not such a good move. The passage was a short one and offered no outlet. Mr. Bland was forced to choose between one of two doors. The first one was uncompromisingly locked. The second one gave to his hand. In went Mr. Bland and into another bed, this one also attractively filled by a woman, as were most of the beds in that hotel.

“Heavens! What a rush you’re in,” said a sleepy voice. “Didn’t you stop to lock the door?”

“I’ll lock it in a minute,” Mr. Bland panted.

“It isn’t very tidy to fling yourself into bed with your clothes on,” continued the sleepy voice, “shoes and all.”

“I haven’t any clothes,” muttered Mr. Bland. “Not a stitch.”

“Haven’t you?” said the woman beside him, reaching out a hand. “Why, I should say you haven’t. Don’t see how you did it.”

Mr. Bland shrank back in the bed.

“You mustn’t do that,” he said reprovingly.

“Why not, I’d like to know?” the woman demanded.

This time she reached out two hands and rolled over on her side. They both screamed at the same time and almost in the same key.

“I told you you shouldn’t do it,” said Mr. Bland.

“I thought you were a different man,” replied the woman.

“Oh, dear,” said Mr. Bland. “Don’t tell me you’re expecting a different man.”

“I certainly am,” the woman told him. “He will be here at any minute. That’s why I left the door unlocked.”

“Does he carry a gun, too?” asked Mr. Bland.

“Does he carry a gun?” said the woman with a hard laugh. “My man isn’t a lizzie. He carries two guns.”

“One would be more than enough,” Mr. Bland replied in a heavy voice. “There are two guns already after me. I might just as well lie here and get shot in comfort.”

“But you can’t lie here,” the woman protested. “He’s likely to kill us both.”

“A gun for each,” said Mr. Bland with a shudder.

“And then it isn’t nice,” continued the woman, as if the idea had just occurred to her. “A lady shouldn’t allow naked strangers to come bounding into her bed. What did you do with your clothes?”

“Another lady has them,” said Mr. Bland in a hopeless voice. “At least I think she has. The last time I saw her she was running with them along the corridor.”

“Gord,” breathed the woman. “You’re a terrible sort of man. Mean to say you got undressed in the hall?”

“No,” said Mr. Bland. “In the lobby.”

“In the lobby!” exclaimed the woman. “Did the lady get undressed there, too?”

“No,” said Mr. Bland. “Just me. I was doing tricks.”

“Getting undressed in that lobby is a trick in itself,” observed the woman. “Wonder the management let you.”

“I was a skeleton then,” said Mr. Bland.

“You’re hardly more than one now,” the woman told him.

“I mean I was a real skeleton,” explained Mr. Bland. “All bones and no flesh at all. I’ve been changing to a skeleton on and off all day.”

This last piece of information was a little more than the woman could bear. She slipped out of the bed and from a safe distance stood nervously watching Mr. Bland, who was now wearing his beard. The woman gasped and put a hand to her eyes.

“Please don’t play any more tricks in here,” she said. “Go on back to the lobby and have a good time.”

“I haven’t had a good time in years,” Mr. Bland told her.

The door opened quietly and a tall, powerful, competent-looking man entered the room. With purposeful deliberation he drew two automatics and leveled them at Mr. Bland.

“So you haven’t had a good time in years,” said the man in a mocking voice. “Well, I’m sorry to interrupt, but you’re not going to have one now. You’re going to have the worst time you ever had in your life.”

“I’ve been having it all morning,” answered Mr. Bland in a small dull voice.

“You can’t shoot him,” said the woman, throwing her arms about the man. “Look at his long white beard. He’s old enough to be my grandfather.”

“I don’t want to look at his beard,” replied the man, struggling to free himself from the woman’s arms. “He might be old enough to be your grandfather, but he still has young ideas. Let me at him.”

Tired as he was, Mr. Bland sprang from the bed. While the man and the woman were struggling, he succeeded in opening the door and getting into the hall. This time as he fled through the corridors he was pursued by three heavily armed men, the other two suddenly appearing the moment the two-gun stranger opened fire on the fleeing Bland.

“The management of this hotel is very lax,” he reflected as he endeavored to equalize the discrepancy in numbers by running three times faster. “Very lax indeed. It’s all very well to let guests have a good time occasionally, but there’s no sense in allowing three murderers to chase a man through the halls.”

His reflections were cut short by the sudden appearance of a woman at the far end of the corridor. As well as Mr. Bland could make out she was partially clad in a bath towel. She was so excited that apparently she forgot the sparse state of her attire, for she quickly snatched off the towel and waved it frantically at Mr. Bland.

“That,” thought Mr. Bland, “must be about the only woman in this hotel who hasn’t any so-called boy friend. She seems to want to see me.”

When he reached the woman he discovered she was Pauline Whittle.

“My God!” he panted. “Don’t wave that towel at me. Throw it around you somewhere. I can tell who you are.”

“The hell with all that,” she retorted, seizing him by the hand. “This is no time to stand on ceremony. Quick!”

She pulled him through the door, and together they raced for the bed. Mr. Bland was too exhausted to cover himself up. Pauline performed that office, then flung herself in his arms.

“I’m so frightened,” she murmured lazily.

“You don’t act it,” said Mr. Bland. “Where’s your husband?”

“He’s gone out to look for you,” she told him. “Save me from those bad, bad men.”

“Listen, Pauline,” said Mr. Bland, “this is the third bed I’ve been in this morning, and each time I get in a bed another man appears with a gun. I’m getting sick and tired of it. I can’t get rid of them. They keep chasing me about the halls and popping off their guns at me. If this keeps up there’ll be so many gunmen wanting to take a shot at me they’ll have to make appointments.”

“Were there women in the other beds?” Pauline wanted to know.

“Is that all that interests you,” demanded Mr. Bland, “with three murderers waiting outside that door ready to blow me to bits?”

“Did you try to get in bed with them?”

“No,” said Mr. Bland. “I got in bed with their women.”

“Did the women mind?” Pauline asked.

“They were much more adaptable,” said Mr. Bland with some dignity, “than their boy friends.”

“I’m adaptable, too,” Pauline told him. “Why don’t you take off your beard?”

“I won’t,” said Mr. Bland. “You’re more than adaptable. You’re damn’ well depraved.”

At this moment Mr. Whittle walked into the room and stood regarding the couple in the bed.

“There are a lot of rough-looking men standing outside the door,” he announced, “and all of them are holding great big guns in their hands.”

“Have you a gun by any chance?” Mr. Bland asked uneasily.

“No,” replied Mr. Whittle. “I couldn’t hurt a fly, but if Pauline doesn’t get out of that bed I’ll beat her within an inch of her life.”

“That,” said Mr. Bland with a feeling of deep relief, “is what I call the reasonable attitude to take.”

Outside the door the waiting gunmen were conversing in low voices.

“He’s the damnedest man for women I ever saw,” proclaimed the strangler. “I chase him out of my Jane’s bed, and by God, he runs smack into the arms of a naked woman waiting for him in the hall.”

“After first having got in bed with my girl,” said the man with two guns.

“With all of us shooting at him,” observed the man in search of a skeleton, “you’d think he’d cut it out for a while.”

When Mr. Whittle appeared among them and busily entered his room the three gunmen fastened their eyes expectantly on the closed door.

“If that guy doesn’t shoot him down,” said the strangler, “we’ll get him when he rushes out.”

But Mr. Bland never appeared, and eventually the gunmen abandoned their vigil.

“I know what it is,” said the strangler in tones of deep disgust. “I learned all about it in France, during the war. Them Frenchies call it a ménagerie à trois.”

And that was just about what it became after the Whittles and Mr. Bland had finished the second bottle.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Furious Bath

Pauline Whittle was sleeping the sleep of a weary wanton. She was weary of her husband and weary of Mr. Bland; also, so far as strong drink was concerned, she had reached the point of saturation. She was now lying handsomely if a little untidily on the bed with a flame-colored negligee tossed over her. Although much of her long, slender body was exposed, the conventions had been satisfied because the fair Pauline was technically covered. An attempt had been made.

In two comfortably upholstered chairs, Mr. Bland and Mr. Whittle were sitting by a large window, surveying in Jovian aloofness the myriad lights throbbing through Central Park like a swarm of golden bees. These two worthy gentlemen were carrying on a conversation which neither of them ever remembered. From time to time they addressed themselves to their glasses. Mr. Bland was still in the flesh.

“Bland,” said Mr. Whittle with ponderous deliberation, “I will admit you had a difficult morning, not to say a dangerous one, but I’ll be damned if I can see how that entitles you to remain here alone with my wife when both of you are quite without clothing.”

“But I’m sleepy,” protested Mr. Bland.

“Granted,” said Mr. Whittle, “but that woman over there on the bed, once the mood is on her, could arouse a graven image. Why, man alive, if she woke up and found you sleeping here she’d burn your feet with the curling iron until you were willing to keep her company.”

“I’d do my best,” said Mr. Bland.

“That woman over there on the bed – —”

“Why don’t you call her Pauline,” Mr. Bland interrupted, “and save yourself six words?”

“Eh?” said Mr. Whittle. “Oh, that. I don’t know hardly. Sometimes I just can’t bring myself to call her by her Christian name. But as I was saying, that woman over there on the bed doesn’t want you to do your best. She wants you to do your worst. At heart she is, perhaps, not altogether vile. At heart, I daresay, she is no worse than any other woman, but the fact remains she’s a woman, and therefore not safe. I don’t want to expose you to the risk of betraying me, your best and oldest friend.”

“That’s awfully good of you, old chap,” said Mr. Bland, deeply impressed. “Are you my oldest friend?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then,” said Mr. Bland, “let’s drink to the traditional friendship existing between the famous house of Whittle and the illustrious house of Bland.”

“That’s exceptionally handsome of you,” declared Mr. Whittle, reaching for the bottle. “How lovely it is in the park. Did you ever dance in the dew?”

As drunk as he was, Mr. Bland took exception to this question. He peered at Mr. Whittle suspiciously from beneath his heavy eyebrows.

“Do I look like one who would go dancing about in the dew?” he asked in a cold voice.

“No,” replied Mr. Whittle, “but all sorts of persons go dancing about in the dew. You’d be surprised.”

“I’d be disgusted,” said Mr. Bland. “Can you do tricks with string?”

It was now Mr. Whittle’s turn to be annoyed.

“Don’t be insulting,” he said. “I once knew a man who did tricks with string and he came to a very poor end – oh, a very poor end.”

“What happened to him?”

“He was hanged by the neck until dead. That was his last string trick – and his best.”

“I believe you made that up,” said Mr. Bland. “It’s much too pat. However, had you once known a man who did do tricks with string, which, mind you, I very much doubt, he should have been hanged by the neck and then drawn and quartered.”

“Then we are in complete accord,” remarked Mr. Whittle happily. “What would you rather do, dislike a person thoroughly or like him only a little?”

“An interesting question,” observed Mr. Bland. “Speaking quite frankly, I derive more downright satisfaction in disliking a person thoroughly.”

“So do I,” said Mr. Whittle. “The happiest friendships always exist between persons who have a lot of hates in common. Only trouble with me is I hate almost everybody except you and Pauline and this lovely bottle. I can’t quite hate Pauline. I pity her too much.”

“I find it very stimulating,” remarked Mr. Bland, “to sit on the veranda on a bright, sunny day and think how insufferable my neighbors are, what wretched children they have, and what low-spirited dogs they own. At the country club and on the train I find myself doing the same thing – quite cheerfully detesting most of the people around me. I very rarely stop to think of how admirable a certain person is. That’s far too depressing. It lowers one’s self-esteem. I owe a debt of gratitude to the people I dislike.”

“How true,” agreed Mr. Whittle, “and how beautifully expressed. You should have sold things. I’m sure I’d have bought some.”

“Without knowing what they were?” asked Mr. Bland.

“Certainly,” declared Mr. Whittle. “Even if you didn’t know what they were yourself.”

“I wonder what they would have been,” Mr. Bland wondered.

“You mean the things you might have sold me?” inquired Mr. Whittle.

“Yes,” said Mr. Bland. “Those things.”

“Well,” reflected Mr. Whittle, “if I didn’t know what they were you might have tempted me with neckties. Would you have liked to sell them, do you think?”

“I never sold any,” said Mr. Bland, “but they are rather cheerful. I feel myself losing the thread of this conversation.” He paused and looked out over the park. “It is a lovely night,” he continued. “I wish I were in a swan boat with Lorna – Lorna’s my wife, you know.”

“Good God!” exclaimed Mr. Whittle in an agitated voice. “I haven’t thought of swan boats for years. They’ve gone completely out of my life, and once they meant so much. I must go out and look at a swan boat some morning, or better still, later in the day.”

“You should,” declared Mr. Bland, “and so should I. Call me up next week and we’ll look at some swan boats together.”

“I certainly will,” promised Mr. Whittle. “Swan boats are singularly festive things. Would you like to take a Turkish bath?”

“In what?” asked Mr. Bland.

“In an extra pair of slippers and a bathrobe,” replied Mr. Whittle. “And then there’s a special elevator.”

Mr. Bland rose with a sigh and got himself into the slippers and bathrobe provided by Mr. Whittle. Into the pocket of the bathrobe he thrust the long white beard.

“What about the drink?” he inquired.

“I’ll carry a flask along,” said his host. “We’ll take a couple of hot shots before we go. It would never do to be seen in a Turkish bath sober.”

“I hope I retain my body,” said Mr. Bland. “It would be one hell of a note to lose it in a Turkish bath.”

“Probably do you a world of good,” the optimistic Whittle told him. “Especially the steam room. Might sweat all of that chemical stuff out of your system.”

“If it does,” said Mr. Bland, “I’ll bring my dog, Busy, to a Turkish bath. He spilled a bottle of the fluid and now the poor damn’ fool keeps changing to a skeleton dog at the most embarrassing moments.”

“No!” exclaimed Mr. Whittle, “does he really? Who are the moments embarrassing for, you or the dog?”

“For me,” replied Mr. Bland. “It’s not pleasant to have a skeleton dog tapping along at your heels. Especially if you’re likely to turn into a skeleton yourself. Busy has no sense of shame. I suspect he rather enjoys it.”

“I don’t think I’d fancy seeing him,” observed Mr. Whittle with a little shiver.

“You’d hate to see him when he scratches,” said Mr. Bland. “His nails scrape across his ribs and he sort of rattles all over. It’s ghastly.”

“Oh, I say,” protested Mr. Whittle. “Don’t go into detail about that dog. I might have a severe attack of loathsome reptiles at any minute, and I’d hate to have a skeleton dog scratching himself among them. Let’s talk of other things. Let’s drink.”

“Just the same,” said Mr. Bland, “it is sort of odd to see a fleshless dog scratching nonexistent fleas.”

Mr. Whittle hastily gulped down a drink.

“Did you ever think of going to New Guinea?” he asked Mr. Bland.

“No,” the other replied. “Frankly, I never did.”

“Neither have I,” said Mr. Whittle. “Let’s think about it. I’ll even be willing to think about New Rochelle if you’ll only stop telling me about that damned disgusting dog of yours.”

After another stiff drink they left Pauline still sleeping well but immodestly, and quietly let themselves out of the room. In the hall Mr. Bland looked about him nervously for signs of lurking gunmen.

“You know,” he said to Mr. Whittle, “this is the first time I’ve traversed these corridors without being shot at. I’d gained the impression that the only way to get about this hotel was on a dead run.”

“Lots of people sneak along very quietly,” Mr. Whittle told him.

“I don’t doubt it,” said Mr. Bland. “Behind every door there seems to be a good-looking woman in bed.”

“Gangsters have a way of picking rather neatly upholstered girls,” observed Mr. Whittle. “After an especially brutal murder a man deserves a little recreation.”

“To some men murder is a recreation in itself,” said Mr. Bland.

“I know,” replied Mr. Whittle, “but those men are artists – dreamers. They come to a bad end. Our gangsters make a business of it and eventually rise to higher things, such as directing the destiny of a nice, clean city like New York.”

Without any untoward experience the two gentlemen reached the Turkish bath. After parking their dressing robes they made their way to the showers and then to the steam room, which was already occupied by all shapes and sizes of men. Before going into the room, Mr. Bland studied its occupants through the glass walls. The sight made him feel sorry for the male division of the human race. How, he wondered, did men manage to grow themselves into such curious shapes and sizes, billowing out here and jutting in there? And how could nature permit such an unequal distribution of stomachs? Some of the stomachs in that room were larger than their owners. In fact, those stomachs were their owners’, or at least nine tenths of them. Mr. Bland decided he would much rather associate with naked women. He was still naïve enough to think of naked women only in terms of beauty. This is perhaps the best way to think of naked women, because when a naked woman is not beautiful she is even more depressing to look at than a man.

“Looks just like a waiting room in hell, doesn’t it?” said Mr. Bland to his companion. “All that steam and all those sprawled and contorted bodies. It’s just too bad.”

“Let’s sprawl and contort ours,” suggested Mr. Whittle. “I have the bottle wrapped in my towel, but I expect the whisky will get pretty hot in there.”

“So will we,” replied Mr. Bland, “and that will make things equal.”

Gasping for breath and already a little dizzy, they made their way through the clinging, steam-laden atmosphere of the room and, sitting down in deck chairs, added their own unlovely bodies to the naked company.

Mr. Bland found himself sitting next to an individual who was at least fifty pounds overweight. From the expression on this gentleman’s face Mr. Bland gained the impression he was not at all happy about himself. He subjected Mr. Bland’s body to a long, critical scrutiny, after which he considered his own stomach dejectedly, then transferred his gaze to the lean flat belly of the recumbent photographer.

“If I was as thin as you,” the fat man crossly opened fire, “horses couldn’t drag me into this miserable place.”

“It is a miserable place,” admitted Mr. Bland, “and almost everybody in it appears to be miserable, too.”

“Probably deserve to be,” said the gentleman. “But I don’t deserve to be miserable. What have I done?” Here he paused dramatically, then repeated, “What have I done?”

“Don’t you know?” asked Mr. Bland, a little mystified.

“Of course I know,” snapped the man with intense bitterness. “I’ve done nothing. That’s what I’ve done. Nothing. I don’t eat, I don’t sleep, I don’t have a good time, and still I get fatter and fatter. Bah! Men like you give me a pain in the neck.”

Mr. Bland’s eyes traveled to the man’s neck. There was such an awful lot of it to have a pain in. Mr. Bland felt sorry he was causing the man to suffer so much. He showed the man the flask of whisky.

“Have some of our drink?” Mr. Bland asked him. “It’s warm, but it’s good.”

“Can’t drink,” growled the man. “Doctor’s orders. Every time I take a drink I gain another pound. A chap like you doesn’t belong in here. You don’t need to lose weight.”

“I don’t want to lose another ounce,” the long man assured him in an earnest voice. “Not another ounce.”

“Then you’d better get out,” said the fat man, “or the first thing you know you’ll become a walking skeleton.”

Mr. Bland started, and then, as if the words of the fat man had reminded him to make the change, his flesh melted away, and right there before the man’s very eyes he became what the man had predicted, with the slight difference that at the moment Quintus Bland was a reclining skeleton instead of a walking one.

Naturally the fat man’s first reaction was that this thing could not possibly be. It was not true. At first he tried to attribute what he believed to be an optical illusion to the steam and the generally depressing atmosphere of the room. Without uttering another word he looked away from the skeleton for a full minute, feeling sure that when he turned his head again everything would be all right. In this he was disappointed, but still not greatly alarmed. The skeleton was still sitting beside him, and although it had no visible eyes, the fat man felt he was being politely but steadily scrutinized.

“Tell me,” he said in a low voice, “do I look as if I’d just taken leave of my senses?”

“In this place,” replied Mr. Bland, “everyone looks as if he’d taken leave of his senses. We’re all mad.”

“You look worse than that,” continued the man in the same low voice. “To me you look exactly like a skeleton, but of course that’s obviously impossible so I’m afraid I’m a little bit mad. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” said Mr. Bland. “Go right ahead and be as mad as you like. It may help you to lose weight.”

“Your friend over there doesn’t seem to notice anything odd in your appearance,” went on the fat man, “but then, he’s so drunk he wouldn’t find it odd if all these chairs were occupied by polar bears instead of human beings.”

“This would be a tough spot for a polar bear,” said Mr. Bland with forced lightness. “They’d have to drag the poor thing out.”

“Well, if I don’t stop looking at you,” observed the fat man with the utmost gravity, “they will have to drag me out, I’m afraid. Although I realize I must be wrong about it, you are beyond doubt the worst-looking object it’s been my misfortune to meet.”

“What would you do if I actually were a skeleton?” Mr. Bland asked his neighbor.

“I’d run like hell,” the man replied simply. “I can’t run very fast since I’ve taken on all this flesh, but I’d do my best.”

“Hey, there,” came the voice of Mr. Whittle. “I say, Bland, do you realize you’ve turned to a skeleton?”

“Do you see it, too?” cried the fat man. “Oh, my God! And he’s been letting me think I’m mad, and engaging me in conversation just as if he’d never seen the inside of a grave. What a skeleton!”

“Why don’t you run like hell?” Mr. Bland asked him.

“Don’t talk to me,” said the fat man. “I don’t know you. And I don’t want to know you. I am going to run like hell.”

He heaved himself out of his chair and toddled briskly across the room. At the door he stopped and pointed to Mr. Bland.

“There’s a dirty, lying skeleton in that chair,” he announced to the roomful of naked gentlemen. “If you don’t believe me, just take a look for yourselves.”

“That tears it,” said Mr. Bland to his companion. “How am I going to get out of this?”

“I don’t think you’ll have to,” Mr. Whittle answered calmly. “Everybody else seems anxious to get out of it for you.”

Mr. Bland looked up and saw innumerable large naked men striving to get themselves through a small door at the same time. The steam in the room was cut by cries of physical pain and mental anguish. Squirming bodies were trampled underfoot while others were seized in the most convenient places and dragged cursing bitterly away from the door.

“Now wouldn’t you think,” observed Mr. Whittle, “that grown men would have more sense than to carry on like that?”

“This place looks more like hell than ever,” said Mr. Bland. “It looks like a Doré picture suddenly come to life.”

Outside the room, bath attendants and husky Swedish masseurs with towels round their waists were doing their best to quell the panic that had so suddenly and inexplicably broken out. But apparently when a man has once seen a live skeleton nothing is going to change his mind until he has enjoyed his panic to the full. Finally the attendants and rubbers grew so tired of being told there was a skeleton in the steam room that they let the naked men run wild and took a look for themselves. Some of them even went into the steam room, but found no traces of a skeleton. They did find, however, two placidly intoxicated gentlemen amiably conversing while drinking warm whisky neat from a flask.

“Did either of you gentlemen see a skeleton in this room?” one of the attendants asked, feeling somewhat silly because of the ridiculous nature of the question.

“Certainly,” was Mr. Bland’s prompt reply. “I was a skeleton myself only a moment ago, but my bones began to warp, what with all this steam, so I got my body back again.”

“He was a terrible sight,” said Mr. Whittle. “You should have seen him. No eyes at all. Ugh!”

The attendants laughed, but not very heartily. It struck them that these two drunkards had an especially unpleasant brand of humor.

“How about a rub-down?” suggested Mr. Bland.

“Do you dare?” asked Mr. Whittle.

“I dare anything,” Mr. Bland told him. “Just because I am occasionally a skeleton, I don’t see why I should be forced to sacrifice all the good things of life.”

After polishing off the bottle in what had now become their own private steam room, the two gentlemen repaired rather unsteadily to the rub-down tables upon which they virtually collapsed. Two huge, malevolent-looking individuals thereupon descended upon them and expertly endeavored to tear off their arms and legs.

“That’s the catch in getting drunk in a Turkish bath,” Mr. Whittle managed to get out between gasps. “When these devils find you in our condition they go on the principle that you’ve lost all sense of feeling and don’t give a damn what they do.”

“They experiment with our drunken but human bodies,” complained Mr. Bland, a strained expression on his face. “This is worse than vivisection.”

“It’s the very refinement of torture,” observed Mr. Whittle. “They never pull your limbs entirely off, but just far enough to maim you. This demi-murderer has got one of my legs about eight inches longer than the other. He’d either have to push it back or pull the other one out.”

“You could live on a hillside,” suggested Mr. Bland.

“Haven’t seen a hill in years,” replied Mr. Whittle. “Wouldn’t know what to do with one. Are mountains still doing?”

“Splendidly,” said Mr. Bland. “They’re up and doing.”

The rubber who had been buffeting Mr. Bland about took a deep breath as if preparing himself for the final assault. Several times he opened and closed his hands, flexing his viselike muscles. Mr. Bland watched him with growing apprehension, then extended an arresting hand. But it was not the hand he had been using only a few minutes before. It was composed entirely of bone and looked more like a claw than a human hand. Both the rubber and Mr. Bland stared at it in numbed wonderment, then transferred their gaze to other sections of the photographer’s person. Nothing but bare, unvarnished bones greeted their eyes. Neither of them was favorably impressed by the greeting. Of the two the rubber was the more surprised and the more alarmed. Mr. Bland was merely disgusted with himself.

“Don’t touch me,” snapped Mr. Bland. “Don’t put even a finger on me.”

The rubber’s short laugh was devoid of all mirth. He edged away from the table.

“I’d like to know who would?” he retorted. “Not for a thousand dollars would I willingly lay a hand on any one of your ghastly bones.”

“Thank God for that,” said Mr. Bland. “A skeleton is not without some compensation after all.”

“Then there was a skeleton in the steam room like the man said?” the rubber faltered, his strength seeming to drain from his body.

“Didn’t I tell you I was the skeleton?” demanded Mr. Bland.

“You did, but I thought you were drunk,” the man replied.

“I was and I still am,” Mr. Bland told him, “but that happy fact doesn’t prevent me from getting rid of my body, especially when it’s going to be torn from my bones anyway.”

Mr. Bland swung his legs from the table and found himself confronting the three gangsters of the morning’s pursuit. Automatically he began to run, and out of force of habit the gangsters began to run after him. He dashed through a door and found himself in the swimming pool. Cries of consternation greeted his arrival. Not having the slightest idea whether he would crash like a rock to the bottom of the pool or be able to keep his skull above water, Mr. Bland launched himself into the air and plunged into the pool.

“A diving skeleton!” cried a man. “Godamighty! A swan-dive, at that.”

“Not bad,” thought the diving skeleton as he struck the water cleanly. “I still retain my form.”

A moment later his skull popped up about three inches from the placid face of a gentleman contentedly churning water. At the sight of Mr. Bland the gentleman’s legs refused to do any further churning.

“I’m going to drown,” announced the man unemotionally, “and I’m glad of it.”

“I’ll save you,” said Mr. Bland.

“I’d much rather you wouldn’t,” the man replied coldly, then sank beneath the water.

Mr. Bland then began to worry about his own safety. He took a few tentative strokes and found he could swim like a fish. Indeed, the absence of his flesh enabled him to twist and turn in the water like some ghastly denizen of the deep. It was a terrible exhibition. Strong men clapped their hands to their eyes and called aloud to God in frantic voices. A man sitting on the edge of the pool hastily removed his feet from the water as the skeleton streaked by.

“I never knew a skeleton could swim,” said the man to a companion.

“I never knew a skeleton,” said the other. “Are you beginning to see things?”

“Look,” was all the first man said, and pointed.

His companion looked, then hastily arose.

“That finishes my swim,” he told his friend. “When skeletons start using this pool it’s time to hurry home.”

A cold plunge does not always have a sobering effect on one inebriated. Frequently it makes him even drunker. The same must hold true with skeletons. It certainly did with Mr. Bland. He had forgotten all about his implacable enemies and was having the time of his life. He had climbed to the highest springboard and was now exhibiting himself shamelessly before a stunned group of naked gentlemen standing within safe striking distance of the exit. Through this door appeared the three gangsters, now armed to the teeth.

“There he is!” cried the man who was going to make tooth powder of Mr. Bland. “I put him in his grave once and I’ll put him there again. Always spoiling my fun.”

Immediately a volley of deafening explosions rang out in the swimming pool. Mr. Bland rose lightly from the springboard and neatly split the water twelve feet below. The gunmen still squeezed their guns, but Mr. Bland outwitted them by swimming under water. He emerged at the far end of the pool, dashed through a door, and found himself in a vast, dimly lighted dormitory. He was standing at the head of a long aisle with beds on either side. And in these beds were sleeping men, blissfully unaware there was a skeleton in their midst. But one man was not sleeping. His name was Joe. Joe was lying quite still in his narrow bed, and his eyes, sharp now with dread, were fixed on the skeleton of Quintus Bland, standing in great indecision as water dripped from rib to rib.

Quietly Joe thrust out an arm and shook his friend in the next bed.

“Wake up, Charlie,” he said in a low voice. “There’s a skeleton down there and he’s all wet.”

“You’re right,” admitted Charlie after his sleep-laden eyes had discovered the skeleton of Mr. Bland. “He’s wet all over.”

“But don’t you realize he’s a skeleton?” said Joe, annoyed by Charlie’s calm acceptance of the awful sight.

“I don’t,” replied Charlie, “but I will in a minute. Why don’t you give him a towel?”

“Me?” asked Joe incredulously. “Why, I wouldn’t give him a handkerchief.”

“He could mop his skull with a handkerchief,” Charlie said musingly, “but that’s about all.”

“Look!” exclaimed Joe. “He’s tiptoeing down the aisle in this direction.”

“I see him,” said Charlie. “The sly devil.”

“Wonder who he’s after,” muttered Joe.

“Maybe the poor lost soul is looking for a bed,” suggested Charlie, “or he might be looking for another skeleton – a friend. Almost everybody goes to a Turkish bath with a friend.”

“What!” exclaimed Joe. “Another skeleton in this room?”

“Why not?” replied Charlie. “This room may be filled with skeletons for all we know.”

“If it is,” declared Joe, “I don’t want to know. One skeleton is enough for me. I came in here to keep from seeing things like that.”

“He’s got into bed,” said Charlie.

“Is there anyone else in it?” Joe asked.

“I guess we’d have heard if there was,” replied Charlie.

“God, yes!” said Joe. “If that thing got in bed with me I wouldn’t make any secret of it.”

But the casual Charlie had been mistaken. Mr. Bland had not got into bed. He was trying to get into bed, but the man already occupying it didn’t see things eye to eye with the skeleton.

“I want to get into bed with you,” the gentleman awakened to hear a skeleton saying.

“With me?” he asked in amazement. “You? Do you realize what you’re asking? Why, I don’t want to be even in the same room with you, much less lying in bed cheek by jowl.”

“I haven’t any cheek,” muttered Mr. Bland.

“Well, I haven’t any jowl,” replied the man. “So that’s that, and I don’t want to talk about your body.”

“But, my dear sir,” said Mr. Bland, “I haven’t anybody.”

“That’s as plain to see as the nose that isn’t on your face,” declared the man. “You can’t get in bed with me, and that’s final.”

“I’d lie very still,” Mr. Bland said rather bleakly, “and scrunch myself over on the side.”

“Scrunch yourself?” repeated the man. “Oh, no. That settles it. I could never bear that. Why don’t you find a man who’s passed out cold and scrunch yourself up with him? I’m nearly sober myself, since arguing here with you.”

Mr. Bland straightened himself and looked hopelessly around him at all the comfortably occupied beds. In the long, dimly lighted room he was a lonely-looking figure. He thought of Lorna peacefully sleeping at home and wondered if Busy, like himself, was an undesirable skeleton. With sagging collarbone he turned away from the bed. What could a skeleton do with the human race set against him, three members of which were actively gunning for his life? And why should everyone assume that just because a man was a skeleton he was going to start trouble? He had no desire to start any trouble. He wanted to go to bed.

As he stood there lost in thought, his chin buried on his breastbone, he became gradually aware of the fact that his feet were covered with flesh. Following his legs as they ascended steeply towards his hips, he was delighted to discover he no longer differed from his fellow men in any important respect. He turned back to the bed.

“I want to crawl in with you,” he told the man.

“What, again?” exclaimed the man irritably, then stopped abruptly as his gaze rested on the figure of a naked man. “What the hell!” he exploded furiously. “Do all you people think my bed is a public parking place? A skeleton was around here a minute ago giving me a hell of an argument about getting into my bed, the big stiff. And you’re hardly any better. Go find a bed of your – —”

Three snappy shots cut short the man’s ill-natured tirade.

“There he is!” cried the voice of the strangler. “That guy was in bed with my girl.”

The man in bed looked curiously at Mr. Bland.

“You try to get in bed with everybody, don’t you?” he said. “Well, you’re entirely welcome to mine. I’m going to get under it.”

But Mr. Bland was hiding in no one’s bed. He was sick and tired of being a target for the gunmen. Charging through a fusillade of bullets, he bore down on his enemies. One long arm shot out and snatched the covering from a peaceful spectator cowering in his bed. The next minute Mr. Bland had tossed the coverings over the heads of the gangsters. Having momentarily rendered them impotent, he proceeded to smite them with terrific punches wherever his fists could land. Then he jumped through the door and, hurrying through the deserted swimming pool, collected his slippers and bathrobe. A few minutes later he let himself quietly into Mr. Whittle’s room.

Pauline had shown the grace to get herself under the covers. Mr. Bland, drunker than ever from excitement, his inflamed mind set on getting into a bed – any bed – got under the covers with her.

“Hello,” said Pauline. “Do you know any funny stories?”

“No,” snapped Mr. Bland. “You leave me alone and go back to sleep.”

But the idea of going to sleep was the farthest thought from the fair Pauline’s attractively depraved mind.

Some time later Mr. Whittle appeared.

“Am I too late?” he asked nervously, then hastily added, “Don’t answer! I suspect, but I’d rather not be told.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

A Skeleton at Bay

The hue and cry was on. Bending low to the ground, the skeleton of Quintus Bland was running through the woods. And the woods were dark. At that moment the usually peaceful photographer would have been a dangerous man to meet. He was a fugitive from the mob, and his hand was turned against men.

The skeleton ran awkwardly. Ahead of him the black trees stepped ever higher up the steep incline until their wind-swept branches swayed among the stars.

Underbrush lashed at the bones of the skeleton, reached out to trip him as he blundered on. And stones lay in wait to crush his feet as they fumbled blindly for a footing on the uncertain terror. Branches whipped against him and threatened the safety of his brittle bones. But still the skeleton ran, his breath rasping painfully through his naked teeth and an all-consuming bitterness burning where his heart should have been.

Behind him rose the sound of hoarse, excited voices, shouting through the woods. Those voices held a note of hateful triumph. Back and forth they fled across the night, troubling it with their sinister intent. Lights stabbed at the trunks of trees, and bushes thrashed viciously as the bodies of the searchers hurtled through them. Occasionally the sharp, efficient voice of a revolver stood out with disagreeable distinctness from the confused onrushing of sounds.

“Damn them all to hell,” muttered the skeleton, steadying himself wearily against a tree. “Just because a man is different he doesn’t necessarily have to die.”

The sounds were sweeping nearer, spreading out and closing round him. He held his breath and listened, then swore softly up at the stars.

“At any rate,” he reflected as he resumed his flight, “I’ve got one thing to be thankful for – a skeleton can’t sweat.”

Shivering involuntarily, he pushed deeper into the woods, the lone skeleton of a living man fleeing to escape the cruel, stupid fury of the self-righteous mind of the race.

Quite unconsciously Mr. Bland had selected an unfortunate moment for his return home. The mob was milling over his front lawn, calling aloud for his blood. On the front porch stood Lorna, and she was calling the mob inclusively and each member specifically every vile name that popped into her pretty, defiant head. Not knowing what it was all about, Mr. Bland listened to his wife with admiration. For the moment he forgot the harassing fact that his flesh was no longer with him. He was far too interested in hearing Lorna, loyally supported by Fanny and the partially drunken cook, defy this mob of masked men. When Lorna ran out of words she would turn to her two domestics, who eagerly replenished her exhausted stock with exceedingly common but telling contributions.

It was an unsavory body of men that received Lorna’s taunts and insults. And it was out for an unsavory purpose – the mobbing and doing in of Quintus Bland. Its members were armed, masked, and mean – mean with the ruthless arrogance bred of numbers.

It seemed that their leader had been that morning most brutally assaulted, but not quite killed. This was too bad, for the leader and organizer of this viciously intolerant rabble, glorified under the name of the Guardians of America, was none other than Mr. Blutter, that superfluous member of the human race and flower of the advertising world.

He had been found rather badly banged up in his own woodshed, and when found he was raving wildly about a skeleton who was Mr. Bland and Mr. Bland who was a skeleton. Already rumors about a skeleton had been circulating through the village from several sources, Dr. MacQuirk being the most authentic. These rumors had come to the ears of the Guardians and were to be taken up seriously at their next secret conclave. The just retribution sustained by Blutter supplied the excuse for immediate and direct action.

With the Guardians the darkly sardonic Bland had become increasingly unpopular. He had gone out of his way to denounce them in public and to ridicule their avowed purpose to protect the home life of the nation. The delirious mouthings of a natural-born fool had been sufficient to furnish them with a pretext for going out after Mr. Bland and getting him good.

That a man should change himself into a skeleton was, to the Guardians, a sufficiently un-American act to warrant their violent intervention in the private life of their severest critic. This, together with the assault on their leader, enabled them to work themselves up to a mood in which they became dangerous and irresponsible members of the community, especially for Quintus Bland. Their sick, egotistical conception of patriotism, morality, and civic virtue made them far more undesirable citizens than the relatively honest gangsters of Chicago and New York. And because they were many while Bland was but one, the Guardians of America felt no fear behind their masks.

Unable longer to stand seeing these worthies deflowering his lawn, Mr. Bland deliberately took his skeleton through the mob and joined his wife on the porch. At the sight of the skeleton an angry buzzing sounded in the heart of the Guardians until it gained sufficient courage to swell to a roar.

“You damn’ fool,” breathed Lorna, “this is no time to come home. These slop-fed thugs are out to get you.”

For the first time Mr. Bland noticed the pallor of his wife’s face and the signals of fear in her eyes. She was afraid for him, and with reason. Already stones were falling around them and breaking the front windows. The mob was pressing forward, some of its more courageous members having one foot on the lower step leading up to the porch.

“Slop-fed thugs,” repeated Mr. Bland, getting himself in front of his wife. “Lorna, my dear old love, your vocabulary grows more impressive every day. Have you called them that? If not I would like to borrow it.”

“You don’t seem to realize,” replied Lorna in level tones, “That these masked devils have put you on the spot. Last week they dipped a girl in tar because she refused the advances of one of their members in preference to somebody else. God knows what they won’t do to you. And in your condition you could never stand rough treatment.”

“What have I done to them?” asked Mr. Bland.

“You’re supposed to have assaulted their leader, a person who thrives under the horrid name of Blutter.”

“I wish I could take the credit,” said Mr. Bland. “In my heart I’ve assaulted that creature at least a dozen times.” He paused and considered the mob. “I think,” he resumed, “I shall endeavor to bewilder them.”

Reaching in his pocket, he produced the long white beard and affixed it to his chin. For a brief moment an awed silence fell upon the mob while its members were recovering from the shock produced by this sudden alteration in their quarry’s appearance. Then voices rose in anger as they realized they were being scorned and belittled by a skeleton.

“You swine!” shouted Mr. Bland. “You inferior grade of scum! It pains me to hear that your leader, that insufferable bore, Blutter, was not murdered outright and in his own cold blood. As soon as he is well enough to walk, I myself personally shall make it my business to correct this error. Now get the hell off my lawn or I’ll wiggle my beard at you.”

It was not a tactful speech. So far as the fate of Mr. Bland was concerned, it definitely clinched matters in the mind of the mob. There was a general scramble for the porch. The world seemed suddenly to have turned to a sea of reaching hands, but before they reached Mr. Bland he was seized from behind by three determined women and dragged into the house.

“Listen,” said Lorna, speaking rapidly and very earnestly. “Please listen and stop cursing for one minute. Your presence in this house is a danger to all of us. You’ve got to do a bunk. Slip out by the back door and make for the woods. You know that little cave we used to play in years ago? Well, try to get to that. When things quiet down I’ll come and let you know.”

Disregarding his protests, she led him to the back door just as a loud crash gave warning that the front one had fallen before the assaults of the Guardians.

“Damn them,” muttered Mr. Bland. “I wish I had my body back.” He paused and looked at Lorna, started to place his hands on her shoulders, then quickly withdrew them. “Goodbye, kid,” he said. “I’d like to kiss you if I had a couple of lips. Ah, to hell with it. I’m off.”

Then with a wild yell of defiance designed to draw the pursuers away from the house, Mr. Bland sprinted across his backyard, climbed a fence, and vanished into the woods. Once he was among the trees he divested himself of his garments the better to speed his flight. For a moment he gazed thoughtfully back at his home until the sound of shouts and shooting assured him the chase was on, then he turned and ran as best he could in the direction of the little cave.

Eventually he succeeded in reaching it, but before he did so he had taken a far more serious view of the situation. There was a note in those following voices that sounded cruel and ominous – a note of blind antagonism not only against himself in the form of a skeleton but also against the way he conducted his life as a man. These men were dead set against frank and open living openly arrived at. They feared such an existence and were prepared to stamp it out. To them sin was a secret form of enjoyment derived entirely from sex. Therefore, sex was sinful, a subject to whisper about and smirk at from behind curtains. Mr. Bland realized, also, that he could not continue indefinitely being a peripatetic skeleton. Something had to be done about his condition or else he would have to withdraw permanently from all social relationships and live in the privacy of his home.

It was now late at night. The sound of his pursuers had died away in the distance. Mr. Bland had come out of the little cave and was sitting miserably at its entrance. Lorna had not shown up, and he was worried about her. The damp air in the woods seemed to have got into his bones. It was the first time he had realized a skeleton could be cold. A feeling of solitude and isolation settled down on him, and he knew fear. He was afraid of the little cave behind him. It suggested the grave or the tomb. And he was afraid of the possible dangers lurking in the woods – an unexpected shot in the dark or a sudden assault in overpowering numbers. Mr. Bland did not want to die. He was altogether too fond of Lorna. He wanted to carry on with her for some years to come, assuming his damn’ unreliable body would only stick around.

Some yards off, Lorna stood and gazed with a curious expression at this skeleton who was her husband. For the first time she saw him as a man alone, sorely afflicted and brooding over his problems, in all of which she realized she played an important part. And once again she felt that tight little clutch at her throat.

“Sweetheart,” she called softly, not wishing to disturb him.

The skeleton turned his blind face to the darkness.

“Sweetheart,” he muttered. Then in a louder voice, “Anything serious, kid? I haven’t heard that in years.”

She came up to him quietly and sat down on the dried leaves of a dead year.

“You’re cold,” she said. “Here’s a drink.”

She handed him a flask which he eagerly accepted.

“I was just thinking,” he said rather diffidently, “that we could have a lot of fun – you know – you and I – if I ever got my body back. Don’t you think we could?”

“I know,” replied Lorna with reassuring conviction. “There’s nothing like losing your husband’s body to find out how much you love him. Why, you horrid thing, I love you even as you are right now.”

“Sure you’re not playing futures?”

“Perhaps I am,” she said, “but the present is very much with me.”

“Is the coast all clear?” asked Mr. Bland. “Is it safe to return home?”

“That’s just the trouble,” she answered. “I can’t be sure. I noticed nothing suspicious on my way here, but somehow I’ve a bad feeling inside me. I’m afraid for you – sweetheart.” She stopped abruptly and looked at her husband with bright, defiant eyes. “Did you hear that?” she continued. “I called you sweetheart again, and I didn’t hardly boggle.”

“It embarrasses me a little,” said Mr. Bland, “but I wouldn’t mind getting used to it, although I’ve grown fond of being called a dirty dog.”

“I’m afraid,” said Lorna in a strained voice, dropping all attempt at lightness. “If anything happened to you now I think I’d go mad.”

Instinctively he stretched out a hand towards her, then slowly took it back.

“Hell’s bells,” he muttered and rose impatiently to his feet.

There was a spurt of flame in the darkness and the sharp report of a gun. Mr. Bland whirled and made for the trees on the opposite side of the little clearing.

“Goodbye, kid,” he called back. “Sweetheart.”

Another stab of flame. Lorna was running towards it. She never heard the explosion. In her ears sounded a choked cry, followed by a thrashing in the leaves. It stopped and the woods were still.

Then she found herself looking down at him. He was back in his long, lean body. Blood was flowing from a wound in his left breast. She was surrounded by a circle of masked men seen but dimly. Their lights were playing on the still body lying naked beneath the trees.

It was typical of the mind of the mob that somebody snickered, then looked slyly at the small, tense figure of the woman. She was a good looker, she was. There was something almost salaciously intimate in the situation.

“I’m not going to curse you,” said Lorna in a voice of weary detachment. “If there’s a God sitting in on this He has already done it for me. You are all damned forever. Go away now. You have killed a man.”

The lights flashed out as she knelt beside her husband.

“Sweetheart,” she called in the darkness.

Her voice broke. Lorna was crying.

The men had gone away, the sound of their receding footsteps leaving a trail of sound behind in the rustling woods.

Presently four of the men came back and carried the body down the hill. Lorna followed them, a blood-stained handkerchief clutched absently in her hand.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Blands Come Through

Mr. Bland was not a great help to the hospital. As soon as his wound had healed he began to get funny. On one occasion when his nurse was absent and he found himself a skeleton, he deliberately removed his pajamas and slipped out into the hall on a trip of exploration.

Seeing an intern coming toward him, Mr. Bland froze in his tracks, hoping to be mistaken for a dead skeleton. The intern was new and had heard nothing about the strange case of Mr. Bland. He stopped and regarded the skeleton, then called to a passing nurse.

“What is your name, nurse?” he asked.

“Crawford, Doctor,” the nurse replied.

She was quite young and pretty. The intern noted that, as interns have a way of doing.

“Well, Miss Crawford,” he said with a slight frown, “can you tell me what this old skeleton is doing here? I should think it belongs in one of the lecture rooms.”

“I’m sure it does,” replied Miss Crawford. “He wasn’t here when I passed about fifteen minutes ago.”

Turning her neat back on the intern and the skeleton, she looked down the hall as if seeking an explanation. Unseen by the intern, Mr. Bland extended one hand. Miss Crawford gave a slight but convulsive start and stifled a small scream. For a moment she remained rigid in her tracks, striving to regain her composure, then she slowly turned on the intern, her face still crimson.

“Please don’t do that again,” she said. “A doctor should have better sense. I don’t even know your name.”

“I’ve done nothing at all,” the young doctor protested.

“It may seem like nothing to you,” said the nurse, “but it means a lot to me.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the intern declared. “It must be your nerves. Your eyes look funny.”

“No wonder,” replied the nurse, edging back of the doctor as a precautionary measure. “Let’s say no more about it.”

This time the depraved Bland repeated his experiment, with slight difference that it was upon the doctor. The young man bounded forward, then with an effort regained his dignity.

“Miss Crawford,” he said, “that was a dirty trick. I hope it doesn’t become a habit. You actually hurt me.”

It was now the nurse’s turn to be mystified.

“What did I do?” she wanted to know.

“Plenty,” replied the intern, furtively rubbing the seat of his trousers. “You must have used forceps instead of your fingers from the way it stings. Did you use forceps?”

Miss Crawford shrugged her pretty shoulders helplessly, then looked at the skeleton. The doctor turned and got behind the nurse. Carelessly locking her hands behind her, Miss Crawford stepped aside.

“Something should be done about this old duffer,” said the doctor. “If a patient came upon him unexpectedly he might receive a terrible shock.”

In answer to this remark the skeleton chattered very gently in the doctor’s face.

“Doctor,” whispered Miss Crawford, “did you hear that peculiar sound?”

“Yes,” replied the doctor. “I assumed you were making it.”

“Why should I make a sound like that? It wasn’t at all nice.”

“Well, what you did to me,” remarked the doctor, “was not exactly ladylike.”

Both of them now had their backs turned towards Mr. Bland. It was a heaven-sent opportunity. Realizing it might never come again if he stood there for years, he stealthily extended two hands. As if rehearsing an act, Miss Crawford and the intern took a delicate leap of about a foot, gasped simultaneously, then placed a hand behind them and rubbed with solicitous fingers. Miss Crawford was the first to speak.

“We just couldn’t have done it to each other at the same time,” she said reasonably enough.

“Are you sure you didn’t do it?” asked the intern. “Think carefully, Miss Crawford. I won’t tell.”

Miss Crawford grew furiously red.

“Do you imagine that if I nerved myself to do a thing like that to a gentleman,” she demanded, “I’d be likely to forget it?”

“I don’t know,” said the intern wearily. “I thought it might be a sort of friendly habit you formed during your training period, and it had become second nature. You just did it automatically.”

“Regardless of color, race, or sex,” the nurse added sarcastically. “Just a cheery little greeting.”

At this moment the skeleton of Mr. Bland once more claimed their undivided attention. He had been trying to hit on something that might upset them even more, and had just thought of an especially novel idea. He would pretend he was going to pull his head off, then see if their sense of thrift would prompt them to try to stop him. Accordingly he seized his skull in both bony hands and began to tug at it violently.

“Come off, you old skull,” he mumbled. “Get to hell off my neck. All the time grinning and gnashing your teeth. Off you go, old skull.”

It was an upsetting spectacle. Both Miss Crawford and the doctor were stultified with astonishment.

“By God!” cried the doctor. “He’s trying to get rid of his head.”

“No, I’m not,” said Mr. Bland. “I’m just trying to twist it off, then I’ll be able to carry it under my arm and scold it from time to time.”

“What with?” asked the doctor, professional interest overcoming his horror.

“Hadn’t thought of that,” said the skeleton. “You think of everything, don’t you? I’ll give it to the pretty nurse.”

The pretty nurse was in such a condition that she cared little what was done to her. The young intern found himself supporting her lush body with much more than necessary coverage. He felt almost grateful to the skeleton. In the meantime Mr. Bland was once more tugging at his head.

“It’s good-night for you, old skull,” he muttered. “Off you go and away.”

“Don’t let him do it,” Miss Crawford pleaded. “He’s just mad at his skull now. Later on he’ll wish he had it.”

The arrival of his nurse interrupted Mr. Bland’s fun. The moment he saw her he dropped to all fours and started to crawl busily away, his head twisted jauntily over his spine.

“Spinach! Spinach! Spinach!” he shouted, which was the most inane thing he could think of shouting.

Quite naturally these gratuitous sideshows on the part of Mr. Bland did not exactly endear him to the staff of the hospital. He was fascinated by the idea of getting hold of the ancient, flyblown skeleton in the lecture hall. Once he actually succeeded in substituting himself for it and was carried up to the platform. When old Dr. Weiss, half blind from years of service, turned back from the blackboard to consider his companion of years – the skeleton – he was surprised to find it sitting cross-legged in his chair, idly turning the leaves of a book.

“Ha!” cried the old doctor. “I always thought that skeleton had more sense than my students. Now I know it. The class is dismissed.”

As the students filed out of the hall they looked back and saw the doctor drag up another chair and start an animated conversation with what was to them the most baffling object in the world. Dr. Weiss never gave another lecture, but retired on a comfortable pension and wrote a book about a skeleton, who, after years of listening to lectures of great erudition, at last returned to life and discoursed intelligently on almost any subject.

On another occasion Mr. Bland contrived to steal the skeleton and take it to bed with him. When the nurse pulled down the covers she nearly had a fit. Mr. Bland insisted he had just become a mother.

But as the effects of the chemical fluid in his system gradually grew less potent through a system of irrigation and dieting, these little excursions occurred at longer intervals, until finally they ceased altogether and Mr. Bland became almost a normal patient. He insisted to the end, however, that both doctors and nurses had mistaken him for the Grand Canal.

•   •   •   •   •

Since the episode in the woods Lorna had lived in the ultimate chambers of hell until her husband was out of danger. Although still her old, unedifying self, she showed unmistakable marks of strain as she sat by his bedside. Mr. Bland, now himself permanently, considered her the most beautiful woman in the world and rejoiced in the return of his body.

He reached out a casually searching hand and Lorna slapped it sharply, looking quickly at the half-open door as she did so.

“You’re still a dirty dog,” she told him, then bent over and placed her mouth on his.

“And that doesn’t make me a better one,” he said when their lips parted.

“I wonder,” mused Lorna.

•   •   •   •   •

Some time later a wild scream from outside sent Lorna, in a state of happy confusion, hurrying to the door. Opening it and looking out, she saw the skeleton of Busy tapping briskly down the hall. The sight of a skeleton dog was doing convalescent patients little if any good.

Lorna quickly collected the dog and carried him into the room. After greetings had been exchanged between master and beast, Mr. Bland rose, dressed hastily, then, after a few words of admonition, placed the dog in the bed where he promptly fell asleep. Taking Lorna by the hand, he quietly drew her from the room.

A few minutes after their unobtrusive departure the nurse arrived. When she threw back the covers of the bed her reason almost crumbled.

A small cluster of bones occupied the center of the bed.

“My God!” she cried hysterically. “The patient’s had a relapse!”

— THE END —

THE GLORIOUS POOL

DESCRIPTION

Perhaps the best example of Thorne Smith’s acutely sharp social humor played out against a backdrop of the Volstead Act (Prohibition). Two unrepentant reprobates are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the seduction which made the stylish Rex Pebble into an adulterer and his companion, Spray Summers, into his hard-boiled mistress. The two slip into a swimming pool, the waters of which have been changed into a fountain of youth.

CHAPTER ONE

Congratulations

The old gentleman with the resplendently starched cuffs moved into the room. In the kindly half light of the long, low apartment he stood poised like an ancient ramrod, worn and polished from long years of campaigning. About his person clung a pleasantly subtle suggestion of good soap and even better cigars. An expensive and thoroughly masculine smell.

With meticulous care he began to remove his gloves, releasing each imprisoned finger as if the action were an independent and definitely unrelated operation, requiring individual attention.

It was rather impressive, the way he took off his gloves – that is, if one’s nerves and patience were in good working condition. But the woman sitting in one corner of the huge divan had never been heavily endowed with patience, and at present her nerves were not so good. They were very bad nerves indeed.

“If you don’t take those gloves off,” she said, “I’ll drag them off with my own two hands. Your fingers aren’t made of china. Why do you wear them, anyway? They make me feel like sweating.”

“Give full rein to your animal impulses,” suggested the old gentleman in a calm, deep voice. “You might lose a few superfluous pounds hither and yon.”

Imperturbably he returned his attention to his gloves. He took them off as if he were really fond of them. And he was fond of his gloves. Always he had been like that, a creature whose nature was so ebullient with affection that it was generous enough to include even inanimate objects – all the good things of life. Now, at the age of sixty, he still loved the world, although he had learned to regard its creatures with affectionate contempt not untinged with that inner loneliness that comes from utter disillusionment.

He had loved a lot, and to no good end, so far as he could see, had this old gentleman.

With a slight pat of approval he placed the gloves on a rangy grand piano sprawling in the shadows like one of the less unneighborly monsters of the prehistoric past. Then from under his right arm he took a package and placed it neatly beside the gloves. This he also patted, but with a somewhat ironical gesture. Having attended to these little details with fitting solemnity and obviously to his entire satisfaction, he bent two remarkably bright and penetrating eyes upon the woman who sat watching him with an expression of brooding animosity on her faded but still good-looking face. Noiselessly he moved over the heavy carpet, bent with easy gallantry, and lifting one of the woman’s fleshy hands, kissed it quite impersonally, as if it were little better than a fish. Furiously she snatched her hand away. He made little effort to retain it – no more than one would to retain a fish unless one were grim about it.

“How do you do, my antiquated trull,” he said with unruffled good- nature.

The antiquated trull – a gamely preserved woman in the unreconciled fifties – answered with restrained passion.

“Don’t call me a trull, you crumbling ruin,” she told him. “What do you think a body can do at my age?”

The old gentleman gave an unnecessarily refined cough of admonition.

“My inquiry,” he explained with exasperating patience “had no anatomical significance. Let’s skip your body for the moment and totter up to a slightly higher level, if you don’t mind.”

“I wish I could skip my body,” complained the woman “These days I can scarcely drag the thing about.”

“That’s pitiful,” replied the old gentleman unemotionally. “It’s your appetite, my dear. You eat like a wolf. It’s surprising. But to get away from that for a moment, I might suggest that you’re supposed to have also a mind not to mention a bit of a soul knocking about within that gnarled exterior of yours.”

“All I have are corns,” said the woman, gloomily surveying her feet. “Toes full of corns. They keep me busy cutting them.”

“You disgust me,” replied the old gentleman. “Honestly you do – actually disgust me.”

“Rex Pebble,” the woman told him, “don’t stand there like an old hypocrite. For twenty-five years I’ve been trying to disgust you without the least success. I’m too tired now to try any more.”

“I don’t know about that,” Mr. Pebble reminiscently observed. “At times you’ve been fairly disgusting, my dear. I might even say, revolting.”

“But not to you,” retorted the woman. “You were born demoralized.”

Mr. Pebble selected a long cigarette from a box on a low table, then lighted the slender tube as if from afar he were watching himself perform the act with profound admiration.

“Birth,” he observed through a scarf of smoke, “is a demoralizing transition. Much more so than death, which has at least the dignity of something definitely accomplished. Birth – I don’t know – it always strikes me as being so tentative and squirmy.”

“You do love to hear yourself talk,” said the woman. “Especially when you know it annoys me.”

“Sorry,” said Mr. Pebble complacently. “If you don’t care to talk, Spray, my old decrepit, what do you want to do?”

“What did I ever want to do?” she demanded. Mr. Pebble started slightly.

“Let’s not go into that,” he said with some haste. “You appall me. This is becoming most difficult. At our time of life we should sublimate sex into an anticipation of an air-cooled existence on wings.”

“Nonsense!” snapped the woman called Spray. “I’d turn in my wings without a qualm for one good shot of sex.”

“How debasing,” said Mr. Pebble. “Unadmirable in the extreme. You, Spray, are about the most unreconciled old voluptuary it has ever been my misfortune to encounter.”

“You’re just a string of long words,” Spray retorted. “And that’s all there is to you. There’s nothing else left. Not,” she added regretfully, “that it would do me any good if there was.”

“Really,” objected Mr. Pebble, “I shouldn’t be allowed to listen to this sort of thing. It’s far too low for me. My natural elasticity of spirit becomes rigid in your presence.”

“Twenty-five years ago —” began Spray.

“That reminds me,” said Mr. Pebble. “I called this evening especially to offer you my congratulations.”

“For what?” asked Spray in surprise. “For God’s sake, don’t tell me I’m another year older.”

“No,” said Mr. Pebble. “It’s not as bad as that. Tonight is the twenty- fifth anniversary of your first seduction. I’m rather sentimental about such things. For a quarter of a century now you have had the honor of being my mistress.”

“What’s honor without pleasure?” Spray demanded bluntly.

“That’s a very difficult question to answer honestly,” Mr. Pebble admitted.

“I’m your mistress in name only,” went on Spray, her eyes clouding. “I’ve outlived my usefulness.” She paused and smiled maliciously at the man. “How do you know,” she asked, “I was first seduced by you?”

“I don’t,” replied Mr. Pebble. “Knowing you as I do, I think it highly improbable. But, if you don’t mind, allow me to retain at least one harmless illusion. I’m an old man, you know.”

The woman looked up at him thoughtfully. He was tall, slim, and straight, and faultlessly groomed. About him there seemed to linger still something of the insinuating, care-free, insatiable young devil she had known and loved in her way. But his face was lined now; his fine hair was white, and his eyes, though keen and alert, gazed down at her from a lonely height as if from another world. This much she could understand, for she too was lonely now that her fires were spent. Swiftly and regret. fully she traveled back through time, and yet a little proudly. This man had loved her and kept her, and although she had failed him more than he would ever know – at least, she hoped so – she was glad to remember he had never done a deliberately unkind or dishonest act so far as she was concerned. The years washed about her, and memories drifted among them. Perhaps not admirable memories, but happy ones. And there were some she refused to admit even to herself, for women are made that way. She had been a fair, ripe figure of a girl, and she had not wasted much time. This man still meant more to her than any man who had ever come into her life, although she still regretted a certain young doctor who had been so stupidly decent her charms had left him cold. What a fool that young doctor had been. She had liked him the better for it. Her face softened as she held up a hand to the man standing above her.

“You are an old man,” she said, her voice taking on a richer quality. “A distinguished old devil of a man. Sit down. You make my corns ache.”

“To relieve those corns of yours,” said Mr. Pebble, sinking into the divan beside her, “I would grovel on the floor. Gladly would I grovel.”

“And gladly would I let you if it would do any good,” she told him. “But nothing helps corns, really. When you grow old your feet grow tired all over. They ache and make you mean.”

“I know,” he said sympathetically. “I am not without my twinges and disconcerting cracks. There is no sense in crying out against nature, yet I fiercely resent my aged body and its lost powers. The mental tranquility that comes with age may have its compensations, but one has to be damnably philosophical to attain them. It grows tiresome at times, being philosophical.”

“Give me a cigarette,” said Spray.

He lighted her cigarette, and for a moment the woman leaned back, puffing thoughtfully.

“Tell me about it,” she said at last.“About what?” asked Rex Pebble.

“About my first official seduction,” Spray replied.

“Don’t you remember?” asked Mr. Pebble.

“I might,” she told him, “if you’d just give me a start.”

“It was quite all right,” began Mr. Pebble. “As a matter of fact, it was hardly a proper seduction at all.”

“Are any seductions proper?” she wanted to know.

“No,” admitted Mr. Pebble, “but some are highly salutary – greatly to be desired, you know. What I mean to say is that both of us knew exactly what we were doing.”

“I’m glad I didn’t think I was flying a kite,” Spray observed innocently. “First impressions are so important in such affairs.”

“As I remember it,” went on Mr. Pebble, “you seemed to be quite favorably impressed. I hope you don’t think I’m bragging.”

“A sensible pride in achievement is perfectly permissible,” said the woman. “Especially at your age. It’s all you have left to brag about.”

“You depress me,” said Mr. Pebble.

“Go on with that seduction,” Spray reminded him.

“Then don’t interrupt,” Mr. Pebble objected. “And stop making me feel my years. It was a glorious night, as I recall it. Such a night as this. There was something a little mad about it – something that made important things, such as honor and loyalty, seem quite remote and futile. I had been married to Sue about three months at the time.”

“That’s a long time for a man to remain faithful,” observed the woman.

“Sue never gave me a chance to get started,” replied Mr. Pebble without rancor. “The little devil was up to her tricks six weeks after we were married. As a matter of fact, I don’t know to this day whether I’m the father of my daughter or not. Neither does Sue. It doesn’t really matter. She’s a decent sort, anyway, and, thank God, she doesn’t take after either of us.”

“Then her father must have been a nice man,” said Spray. “He couldn’t have been you.”

“I’ve about come to that conclusion myself,” Mr. Pebble admitted judicially. “He must have been much too good for Sue. Probably didn’t even know she was married. I like to think so, at any rate.”

“You haven’t much of an opinion of either of us, I suppose?” Spray suggested.

“Not much,” agreed Mr. Pebble, “but that doesn’t keep me from liking you both – I might even go so far as to say, loving you both.”

“Even knowing we’ve both been unfaithful?” Spray asked softly.

For a moment Rex Pebble stared unseeingly into space, then passed a hand across his eyes as if to brush away an unpleasant vision.

“Even knowing that,” he replied. “It isn’t sinning that counts so much as the concealment of the sin. You, Spray, and Sue, have been fairly honest with me in so far as your natures would permit. As for me, I have scarcely had the time or inclination to be unfaithful, what with two healthy women at my disposal. You know, the flesh is the frailest of our possessions, and yet we expect it to be the strongest. I’m inclined to believe that too much idealism leads to the cruelest sort of bigotry. Where was I?”

“I was in a fair way of being seduced,” said Spray, “and you seemed to think it was a nice night for it.”

“It was,” said Mr. Pebble. “Couldn’t have been better. You were singing at some Egyptian-looking cafe then, and showing as much as the law allowed. Very good stuff it was, too – song and all. I admired your voice as well as your body.”

“How about my brains?” asked Spray.

“There was very little about your brains,” said Mr.Pebble. “You didn’t need any. But to continue. I was exceedingly low in my mind that evening and was finding it difficult to get drunk. So I gave up the attempt and solaced myself in you instead, which was much wiser.”

“I remember now,” said Spray. “You drove me to your home and introduced me to Sue, then you borrowed some of her things for me, and we went for a cruise on Long Island Sound. She was very sweet about it.”

“There was a reason for that,” observed Mr. Pebble with a faint grin. “She had a boy friend almost suffocating in the cellar. I nearly packed his trousers by mistake.”

“Edifying, we were,” said Spray, “the three of us, weren’t we?”

“Perhaps not,” admitted Mr. Pebble, “but at least we had both the good taste and the good sense not to waste the evening in noisy melodrama. Sue told me later she had spent a very pleasant week-end. She was pointed about it. You may never have realized it, Spray, but it was you who kept my marriage with Sue from going on the rocks. You actually held us together. It was only after I had provided you with a home that she felt inclined to provide me with one.”

“Glad to have been of help,” said Spray. “And so I was seduced.”

“And so you were seduced,” agreed Mr. Pebble. “You were even good enough to return my wife’s nightgown.”

“It was a lovely, daring bit of stuff,” Spray observed.

“Yes,” said Mr. Pebble almost sadly. “She would never wear it for me.”

“So you got another girl to wear it for you,” said Spray.

“It seemed the most reasonable thing to do,” said Mr. Pebble. He paused and took a small square box from his pocket. “And,” he added, presenting the box to the woman, “if you don’t mind, I am going to ask you to wear this, also.”

Spray opened the box and gazed down into the flickering fires of a black opal. The glowing beauty of the jewel was transmuted to her eyes.

“When the sun went down behind the green islands in the Sound the sky looked a lot like that,” she said. “Cool fire and disturbing beauty – beauty that almost hurts. Thanks, Rex, I’ll wear it.” She took his hand in both of hers and held it against her cheek. “But I’d much rather be able to wear that nightgown for you again,” she added.

“Still harping on the same old subject,” said Mr. Pebble, fastidiously brushing some powder from the back of his hand.

“It’s been more than a subject to me,” she retorted. “It’s been a career.”

“How awful,” observed Mr. Pebble, rising and walking over to the piano. “Why don’t you call it a hobby?” “Hobby, hell!” declared Spray. “It’s been a craze.” Mr. Pebble looked pained.

“Let’s try to forget everything you’ve said,” he suggested, “and start afresh. It would be more fragrant. Here’s a present Sue sent you.”

He took the package from the piano and carried it to the divan. Spray opened the package and read aloud the card enclosed.

“To Spray Summers,” she read, “my husband’s mistress, from Sue Pebble, your patron’s wife. Congratulations!”

Mr. Pebble took the card and looked at it, a faint smile edging his lips.

“Right to the point,” he remarked. “No unnecessary words. Rather sporting, I’d say.”

A cry of animal ferocity broke in upon his observations. Spray was confronting him with a large pair of carpet slippers in her hands. Mr. Pebble needed only one glance to feel convinced that they were the worst-looking pair of slippers he had ever seen. His wife must have searched with fanatical zeal to find a gift so devastatingly humiliating. He admired her for her perseverance but lamented her shocking taste. He lamented it all the more when he received the slippers with sudden violence in the pit of his stomach. For a moment Mr. Pebble was forced to abandon his impressive poise. The sheer fury behind Spray’s arm did much to make up for the softness of the slippers. With a dull, businesslike thud they struck the stomach of Mr. Pebble, and with a look of utter astonishment he promptly doubled up, his hand pressed to the assaulted spot. However, this undignified posture was of short duration. Summoning to his aid the traditional pride and courage of a long line of Pebbles, he immediately snapped erect and stood regarding the raging woman with a calm and imperious eye.

“I would rather receive an honest kick in the seat of my trousers,” he said with stoical self-control, “than have one treacherously hurled at me from afar.”

“Well, you just show me the seat of your pants,” said Spray, “and you’ll get a kick there, too.”

“Madam,” replied Mr. Pebble, “why should I show you the seat of my trousers? That would be literally asking for it. In your present mood it would be more than a foolhardy gesture of defiance, not to say a grotesque one. It would be actually dangerous, even if your feet are the Bull Run of chiropody.”

This remark did nothing to restore tranquillity to the heaving bosom of Spray Summers. If anything, it heaved all the more. She snatched up the slippers and prepared for a second assault.

“If you throw those slippers at me again,” Mr. Pebble told her in level tones, “I’ll be forced to step on your corns – all of them.”

Spray’s right arm halted in its swing. The threat had proved effective. The very thought of such retaliation sent twinges of pain through her feet.

“You deliberately helped your wife to insult,” she said. “I’ll never forgive you for this. Look at them. Look at those slippers.”

With a tragic gesture she thrust out the slippers for his inspection. Unflinchingly he looked at the horrid things, but was unsuccessful in repressing a smile. Although they shocked his esthetic sense, they immensely appealed to his sense of humor.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “I knew nothing about those slippers. What’s wrong with them, anyway? For a woman with feet like yours I should think they would be ideal.”

Spray choked over this one.

“I’m humiliated,” she said bitterly. “Humiliated. Do you know what I’m going to do?”

“I never know,” declared Mr. Pebble.

“I’m going to buy a Mother Hubbard – a horrid flannel one – and sent it to that wife of yours on her next birthday. And you are going to take it to her for me. Don’t forget that.”

“I’m afraid I won’t,” replied Mr. Pebble a little wearily.

“Wonder who she thinks she is!” went on his mistress. “I’m every day as young as she is, if not younger. I am younger. I know it. Five or ten years younger.”

Realizing the impossibility of trying to reason with a woman who made such extravagant statements, Mr. Pebble, in spite of years of experience, did the worst thing he could have done. He agreed with her.

“I’m sure you must be right,” he said placatingly. “I should say nearer ten.”

“To hell with you,” blazed Spray. “You chattering old monkey. To hell with you, I say. What are you trying to do, treat me like a child?”

“If you keep on lopping the years off your age,” Mr. Pebble assured her, “you’ll soon be a babe in arms.” “I wish I were,” she retorted.

“In whose arms?” asked Mr. Pebble.

“Not in those brittle pipe stems of yours,” she answered. “I want to be in my mother’s arms.”

“Funny thing,” casually observed Mr. Pebble, “but I can never picture you as ever having had a mother.”

“I never had one,” said Spray.

“Then why do you want to be in her arms?”

“Well, you got to be in somebody’s arms when you’re a mere babe, don’t you?” she demanded. “Any fool would know that, even an old one.”

“Not necessarily,” replied Mr. Pebble. “You could be in a basket or a cradle or a shoe box or even an ash can, for that matter.”

“Could I?” sneered Spray. “Well, I wasn’t that sort of baby. I was always in my mother’s arms.”

“But I thought you said just now you did not have any mother,” objected Mr. Pebble.

“Will you stop trying to pin me down?” Spray cried fiercely. “I simply meant that we did not carry on long conversations.”

“About what?” asked Mr. Pebble.

She started to answer, then stopped with an expression of frustration.

“How should I know?” she said at last. “If we never had any long conversations, how do you expect me to tell you what we didn’t talk about?”

“I don’t,” Mr. Pebble replied rather hopelessly. “I don’t even know what we are talking about.”

“Neither do I,” said Spray. “You’ve got me completely baffled. Why don’t you go home?”

“Aren’t you going to give me anything to eat?” Mr. Pebble demanded.

“I don’t know where Nokashima is. Haven’t seen him for days.”

“Is that wretched heathen drunk again?”

“He’s always either drunk or telephoning,” Spray complained. “Often he’s both drunk and telephoning. Then he’s just too bad. Also, he suffers from hallucinations. Why don’t you take him home to live with you? Whenever I discharge him he simply eats a box of rice and goes to bed. Then he covers his head with the blankets and gibbers back at me in a weird, muffled voice. It’s worse than talking to a ghost.”

“I should say so,” said Mr. Pebble.

At this moment a strange couple entered the room. It consisted of a bloodhound who could not smell and a Japanese houseboy who could scarcely walk.

The bloodhound’s name was Mr. Henry, and no one knew why.

“Good-evening, madam,” said the more loquacious of these two animals in a slightly blurred voice. “I was shot in leg by baroness while crossing Fourteenth Street.”

“That explains everything,” exclaimed Spray Summers with a hopeless waving of arms. “What did I tell you? Hallucinations! I might be able to stand a crazy Jap or a drunken Jap, but certainly not the two rolled into one. You talk to him, Rex Pebble – that is, if you want any dinner.”

Mr. Henry lowered himself thoughtfully to the carpet. Once seated he pretended he was smelling something by making his nose quiver. The dog was living a lie. Yet it was a harmless form of deception, for a bloodhound who had lost his sense of smell must do something to overcome his inferiority complex.

Deprived of the support of his companion, Nokashima clung to the back of a chair and stood looking with guilty eyes at the tall, menacing figure of Mr. Pebble.

CHAPTER TWO

Nokashima
and the Bloodhound

Rex Pebble had lived far too long and had been told far too many lies to take anyone at his or her own word. The most obvious statement was suspect to him. On the other hand, he had lived quite long enough to know that almost anything was possible, especially when it happened on Fourteenth Street.

Therefore, he did not immediately call Nokashima a liar and a drunkard, although he knew the servant was congenitally both. It was just barely possible that some passing baroness had encountered the dissolute Jap on Fourteenth Street and taken a pot shot at him. Knowing the little man as he did, it struck Mr. Pebble as the most reasonable thing for a baroness to do to Nokashima. Probably the woman had once employed him and become, as a consequence, slightly deranged. Mr. Pebble could well understand that.

Accordingly he greeted Mr. Henry, the non-smelling bloodhound, with a casual nod, then bore down on the wavering Nokashima, whose expression of quiet was immediately replaced by one of protective stupidity.

“Nocka,” said Mr. Pebble with friendly incredulity, “do you mean to stand there swaying before me and to tell me to my face that you’ve actually been shot?”

“Yes, boss,” replied Nocka with stolid conviction. “I been shot all right. Through and through. Also,” he added, so that there might be no misunderstanding, “up and down.”

“Literally riddled,” murmured Mr. Pebble. “Sure you’re not just half shot, Nokashima?”

“That too,” agreed the Jap, visibly brightening. “Half shot – all shot. Leg of the worst. There are holes in it.”

“But why a baroness, Nocka?” asked Mr. Pebble.

“Titled ladies like me,” Nocka explained.

“So they shoot you out of sheer affection,” said Mr. Pebble.

“That’s right, boss,” replied Nocka. “They shoot me up.”

“I’d rather they shot you down,” observed Mr. Pebble, “and out. However, one can’t have everything. Any blood?”

“No, boss,” said Nocka. “Just holes. Blood all gone.” “Do you mean to tell me you’re bloodless, Nocka?”

“Yes,” vouchsafed the servant. “I am without blood.”

“How do you keep on living?” asked Mr. Pebble, interested in the Jap’s mental processes.

“I don’t,” said Nocka simply. “I am dying. Soon I will be good and dead.”

“You may be dead,” remarked Mr. Pebble, “but I very much doubt if you’ll be much good.”

“Oh, I’ll be all right, boss,” said Nocka encouragingly.

“I’m glad you take that view of it,” observed Mr. Pebble. “Of course, after you’re dead we can’t keep you on here. What do you want us to do with you?”

“Put me in jug,” said Nocka, “and send me home as token.”

“What sort of jug, Nocka?” Mr. Pebble wanted to know.

“An ash jug,” declared the Jap. “I want to be burned all up.”

“Nothing would give me more joy,” put in Spray Summers. “If I had my way I’d set fire to you right now.”

“Only after I am all dead,” said Nokashima firmly. “I burn then.”

“You’ll burn in hell,” Spray assured him, “you black-hearted heathen.”

“Don’t scold at me, madam,” Nocka said quite seriously, “or I’ll become nervous breakdown.”

“Ha!” cried Spray bitterly. “I like that. You’ll become a nervous breakdown. Why, you’ve made me a gibbering idiot. Go on and die, sottish little ape.”

“Soon,” said the sottish little ape. “But no words, madam.”

“No,” retorted Spray. “Just cheers.”

Mr. Pebble decided that this sort of thing would arrive at no good end.

“Nocka,” he said, shifting his attack, “how old are you?”

“I am of no years,” replied the Jap surprisingly. “I am all things to all men.”

“You’re a pain in the neck to me,” cut in Spray Summers. “And elsewhere,” she added with characteristic abandon.

“Show me those holes in your leg,” Mr. Pebble demanded rather hastily.

“What holes, boss?” asked the servant.

“What holes?” Mr. Pebble repeated. “Didn’t you tell me a baroness shot your leg full of holes?”

“You thought I did,” said Nokashima, now in his most baffling stride.

A groan of mental anguish escaped Spray Summers’ lips.

“He can throw you every time,” she told Mr. Pebble.

“The horrid little beetle plays jujitsu with the English language.”

“Are there no holes at all in your leg?” Mr. Pebble asked a trifle wearily.

“In which leg?” was the cautious answer.

“In any leg,” replied Mr. Pebble, who was rapidly losing control.

“In some legs, yes,” declared Nocka.

“But not in yours?” insisted Mr. Pebble.

“All gone,” replied the Jap. “I am weak from the loss of holes.”

By this time Spray was laughing comfortably on the divan.

“My god,” she said, “how you two can talk. I don’t know which is the most unintelligent. The heathen is weak from the loss of holes, is he? Well, I’ve got a gun upstairs. Shall I get it and make him strong with holes?”

“I’d like to make him nonexistent with holes,” grated Mr. Pebble. “I’d like to make him just one hole in space.”

“Like baroness,” suggested Nokashima. “Cocktail, boss?”

The servant’s question was timed to the exact second. Mr. Pebble checked his mounting wrath and struggled back once more to his poise.

“By all means,” he said. “That is the best way out of everything. Are you able also to cook dinner?”

“Shake first, then cook,” replied the Jap. “We must all be hungry.”

“Go on and shake your head off,” Spray flung after him as Nokashima left the room, Mr. Henry acting in the double capacity of guide and support.

When Nocka returned with the frosted shaker all sense of guilt appeared to have departed from his soul. His eyes had lost their expression of protective stupidity. They were now alert and gleaming. He even walked with Mr. Henry as an equal.

“He must have made a good one,” Spray observed. “How are the cocktails, Nocka?”

“I am all recovered, madam,” replied the Japanese. “I have no years at all.”

“I feel somewhat younger myself,” remarked Mr. Pebble after he had emptied his glass. “That was an honest cocktail mixed by dishonest hands, which goes to show that through evil great good can accrue. How are your wounds, Nocka?”

“I have no holes either,” the small man replied proudly.

“I wouldn’t brag about that,” commented Spray Summers.

“I suggest we avoid the subject,” interposed Mr. Pebble. “These cocktails are actually buoyant, Spray. Have another.”

Spray did. Then she offered the slippers to the non-smelling bloodhound. Realizing what was expected of him, Mr. Henry came over to the divan and went through the elaborate pretense of sniffing them.

“Too bad he can’t smell,” Spray observed sadly. “If he could, the scent of these slippers would so infuriate him he’d tear the things to pieces.”

“I wonder why that dog can’t smell?” Mr. Pebble wondered without much interest.

“He does smell at times,” replied Spray, “but never with his nose. I think his mother dallied with a Pekingese.”

“You can cram more unsavory suggestions in the smallest space,” protested Mr. Pebble, “of any woman I know.”

“Mist’ Henry,” put in Nokashima, “him must have smell something very shocking when small babe of pup. It stultify his nose.”

“Nothing should be too shocking for a bloodhound to smell,” remarked Spray Summers. “That’s their sole purpose in life – to take it on the nose, so to speak.”

“Not when babe of pup,” said Nocka. “When smell is too awful young nose declines to play part. It withers like delicate flower beneath blast of sun.”

“That’s the way I like to have things put,” declared Mr. Pebble, pouring himself another drink. “Fine poetic frenzy evoked by a dog’s nose.”

“Well, I’ve lived with that dog and that Jap for five long years,” said Spray, “and I defy William Shakespeare to do as much and retain one whiff of poetry in his soul.”

She too poured herself another cocktail, and looked defiantly about her. Mr. Henry, as if sensing his defective part was under discussion, put an end to a trying situation by taking the slippers in his mouth and stalking from the room. With a quick bow Nokashima followed the dog.

“Exit three unsightly objects,” said Spray with satisfaction, “but of the three those slippers are the worst.”

“Sue can think up some dirty tricks,” observed Mr. Pebble. “She has a perverted sense of humor.”

“I don’t mind an occasional dirty trick,” replied Spray. “I’ve pulled a few myself in my time, but those slippers were wicked. It’s the first time in twenty-five years she has ever got the better of me.”

“Wish I could say the same,” responded Mr. Pebble. “She’s got the better of me more than once – both of you have.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Spray. “You haven’t been so desperately treated, considering the chances you took. You’ve had more than most men – two lovely homes with a lovely woman in each. In addition, you’ve had the privilege of bringing up another man’s daughter and of making a home for your nephew. What more could you ask?”

“I’ve had more than enough,” was Mr. Pebble’s enigmatic rejoinder. “Lots more.”

“How is Kippie, by the way?” Spray wanted to know. “Haven’t seen him for some time.”

“He’s growing more divertingly worthless every day,” said Mr. Pebble. “He’s twenty-six now, and in the three years since he left college he hasn’t earned an honest dime. As a matter of fact, he’s virtually ruined that advertising agency of mine.”

“If he ruins only advertising agencies,” remarked Spray, “no great harm will be done. Does he stop there?”

“I fear not,” said Mr. Pebble. “The other morning I took one of the cars out for an early spin and found myself sitting on a pair of so-called step- ins.” He paused and sighed a little wistfully. “Women’s undergarments have taken vast strides since our day. There’s nothing to them at all now except speed. They’re very nice.”

“I wear all the latest things,” said Spray Summers. “For all the good it does me.”

“Or me,” added Mr. Pebble.

He rose and, taking up the shaker, went in search of Nokashima. In the kitchen he discovered the Japanese engaged in an odd ceremony. With the slippers in one hand and a large steak in the other he was endeavoring to instruct Mr. Henry in the fine art of smelling. From the tense attitude of the bloodhound’s rump Mr. Pebble could see that the dog was taking the situation seriously.

“Sniff hard, Mist’ Henry,” Nokashima was saying. “Which smell more better, steak or slips? Take good sniff now.” Here the little man first passed the steak across the dog’s nose and then did the same with the slippers. “Which you like,” he demanded, “nice steak or delightful slips?” Apparently Mr. Henry had little preference, or perhaps both steak and slippers were equally revolting to him. With a puzzled expression in his limpid eyes he looked adoringly up at the Jap. “Ha!” cried Nokashima, refusing to be discouraged. “Hard to make up mind, eh? Both so good. Take deep whiff now, then wag for favorite.”

Once more the steak and slippers were offered to the dog’s nose. The sight was too much for Mr. Pebble.

“Oh, I say,” he exclaimed. “I wouldn’t do that. Don’t let him smell the steak.”

Nokashima glanced up with innocent concentration. “Mist’ Henry,” he said somewhat sadly, “him can’t smell steak, I don’t fancy.”

“Well, I don’t fancy him getting his great nose all over it,” Mr. Pebble protested.

“Mist’ Henry’s nose is all right outside,” explained the Jap. “Inside not so good.”

“Nokashima,” said Mr. Pebble severely, “I’m not out here to argue with you about the relative merits of the inside and outside of Mr. Henry’s nose. No side of that hound’s nose belongs on a steak. I don’t even care to discuss it. It’s not fitting for animals to smell people’s food.”

“He can’t smell anybody’s food,” replied Nocka with increasing sadness. “Not even his own food.”

“Whether or not that dog can smell his own food is a matter of indifference to me,” said Mr. Pebble. “That’s his hard luck, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to allow him even to try to smell mine.”

“I let him smell my food,” said Nokashima gently.

“I don’t care if he eats your food,” replied Mr. Pebble. “You keep that dog’s nose in one place and that steak in another.”

“Where’s good place for dog’s nose?” the little man wanted to know.

“What?” asked Mr. Pebble, a little mystified.

“Where I keep Mist’ Henry’s nose?” replied the Japanese.

“I don’t see why either of us should be concerned where Mr. Henry keeps his nose,” declared Mr. Pebble, “so long as he keeps it entirely to himself. Furthermore, I’m getting fed up with Mr. Henry’s nose.”

“You feed on dog’s nose, boss?” asked Nokashima, with an expression of horror on his wrinkled face.

“Oh, God!” exclaimed Mr. Pebble. “Don’t be a fool, Nokashima. I never ate a dog’s nose in my life.”

“That’s nice,” said Nocka approvingly. “That’s very good. Tough on dog to feed on nose. I take care of Mist’ Henry’s nose if you not eat.”

“I don’t have to promise you not to eat that blood-hound’s nose,” retorted Mr. Pebble. “More for my sake than his, I wouldn’t touch his nose. I have a nose of my own.”

“And you eat that?” asked Nokashima, now thoroughly interested.

“Certainly not,” snapped Mr. Pebble. “Are you deliberately trying to infuriate me?”

“That’s nice,” said the Jap. “That’s very good.”

“Are you telling me it’s nice that I don’t eat my own nose?” demanded Mr. Pebble, his consumption of cocktails having made him a little childish.

“Don’t you think so?” asked the guileless servant.

“I don’t even have to think about it,” replied Mr. Pebble. “How can a man eat his own nose?”

“With his teeth,” said Nokashima quite reasonably, and Mr. Pebble was undone.

He began to tremble so violently that the few remaining ice cubes in the shaker tinkled pleasantly against its sides. The sound automatically attracted Nokashima’s attention.

“More cocktails, boss?” he inquired.

Once more the servant’s question had been happily timed.

“For God’s sake, yes,” gasped Mr. Pebble. “Don’t say anything more to me. Just make the cocktails, then bring them in. That’s all. Just make them and bring them in. No more talk about my nose, or that dog’s nose, or of any nose in all the world. Understand that. Just make them and bring them in. That’s all.”

Still mumbling to himself about what Nokashima should and should not do, Mr. Pebble tottered from the room and sank wearily down on the divan beside his mistress.

“What kept you?” she inquired.

“I think,” said Mr. Pebble, “that Nokashima was put on this earth just to torture my soul. He has noses on the brain.”

“How do you mean?” asked Spray. “How on earth can a person have a nose on the brain, even such an original type as Nokashima?”

“Are you starting in, too ?” demanded Mr. Pebble. “Or is it a plot to drive me mad?”

Before Spray could answer, the small man entered triumphantly. He was carrying a fresh shaker of cocktails.

“Mist’ Henry knows difference now,” he announced, happily. “He can smell like regular dog.”

“How do you know that?” asked Mr. Pebble, intrigued in spite of his determination never again to discuss any subject with this mad Oriental.

“I taught him,” said Nocka proudly.

“Still I don’t understand,” pursued Mr. Pebble. “He ate steak all up,” said Nokashima.

Both Spray and Mr. Pebble gazed in blank astonishment at the Japanese servant. This was indeed a stunning piece of information.

“What?” said Mr. Pebble after a dazed silence. “He ate steak all up?”

“Every bit,” replied Nocka in a pleased voice. “All. But not these.”

He set the shaker on the table and produced the slippers from his pocket. These he extended to Spray. With a choking sound, she covered her face with her hands.

“Take them away,” she moaned.

Mr. Pebble was too stunned to speak. His poise was shot full of holes. With fascinated eyes he watched the Japanese pour two cocktails. What manner of man could this be? Mr. Pebble wondered vaguely. Why did God permit the little man to live? Perhaps there was no God. Perhaps life was just one long dirty trick.

“Mist’ Henry knows difference now all right,” continued Nokashima cheerfully. “He crunch into steak with great enjoyment, but not slips. They’re not so good.”

CHAPTER THREE

Baggage Checks Out

Neither Mr. Pebble nor his mistress felt in the least inclined to discuss any subject with Nokashima. Time passed in brooding silence which Rex Pebble devoted to the restoration of his cherished poise through the consumption of numerous cocktails. Feeling considerably fortified, he rose at last, and placed a friendly arm round the happy little servant’s shoulder.

“How can you bring yourself to touch the vile body of that misbegotten little monstrosity?” Spray Summers demanded.

“Oh well,” said Mr. Pebble, none too definitely, then added, for lack of anything more adequate to say, another “Oh well.”

“Our dinner has gone to the dog,” Spray continued bitterly, “and you more than shake the hand of the telephoning drunkard who fed it to him. You actually caress the withered marmoset.”

“I know,” said Mr. Pebble with alcoholic tolerance, “but you still have your slippers, and you must admit the marmoset can shake a two-fisted cocktail.”

“Get out of my sight, you soiled camels!” the irascible woman exclaimed, “and take these damn slippers with you. Mr. Henry might like them for a little goûter, the dirty dog.”

This time it was the rear of Mr. Pebble that received the slippers instead of the stomach. He accepted them there with unflinching heroism, thanking his lucky stars he had been fortunate enough to escape a frontal attack.

“You should join a major league,” he tossed back over his shoulder. “Remarkable control.”

Gently but firmly he propelled Nokashima from the room.

“Madam no like Mist’ Henry to eat steak all up?” the small Jap inquired when safely out of earshot.

“Not all up, Nocka,” Mr. Pebble explained. “She’s funny that way. Madam likes it better to eat her own steak. I’ll telephone for another one.”

“Let me telephone, boss,” said Nokashima quickly. “I get a steak of most rarefied succulence plenty quick.”

Remembering the servant’s passion for the telephone, Mr. Pebble interposed no objection, feeling that as long as the Japanese was having such a thoroughly good time he might as well make a night of it. Accordingly, he abandoned Nokashima to the telephone, then quit the kitchen and the house by a side door. It would be just as well, he reflected, to let Spray simmer for a while.

Blending the fragrance of moist herbage with the scent of cocktails, Rex Pebble bore his sixty years along an uneven brick wall that led to a walled garden at the back of the house. And the moment he entered this quiet place the summer twilight claimed him. It was a spacious garden with fine turf pierced by the trunks of trees, and it sloped gently to the brow of a hill which lay without the walls, thus giving the spot a fair, broad view of the valley below and the villages nestling in it. A long green pool, now glowing in the sunset, dreamed tranquilly within the garden and all day long reflected the changing moods of the sky. In the middle of the pool the statue of a naiad stood lightly poised on the surface of the water. A border of flagstones circled the pool, converging at the steps of a little white pavilion which stood partly hidden among the trees. This small but luxuriously appointed structure had been built essentially for privacy, which was just as well, for it had been the scene of full many a revel in those days when sixty years were an inconceivable distance off to Rex Pebble. He gazed at the pavilion now, then certain memories forced him politely to avert his eyes. They rested on the statue of the naiad, and Mr. Pebble seated himself on a bench beside the pool the better to contemplate this wild nude figure.

For many years Rex Pebble had been contemplating this naiad, and for many years the naiad had been contemplating him with the same provocative smile on her half-parted lips. He had given her the name of Baggage because he was fully convinced she was both saucy and promiscuous. And he liked her the better for it, although in his heart he chided her gently for her folly.

Baggage was a lush figure of a wench, the creation of vanished hands that either had known women too well or else had been deprived of them entirely. Certainly the stone had been caressed with desire and fashioned with a hungry ruthlessness that had left it a brazen challenge to the eyes of man. Yet there was something refreshingly honest and direct in Baggage’s lack of modesty. Her seeming depravity sprang not so much from weakness or viciousness as from an ordered philosophy of existence – a desire to share with others the good things of life of which she herself was one of the best. If endowed with life Baggage would never be one of those women who tearfully proclaim, “I didn’t mean to do it.” Not Baggage. She would say instead, “Sure I did it, and if you don’t watch out I’ll go and do it again.” Also, one would always know where to find Baggage. One would only have to look for the nearest man, and if there were two men, no doubt the other one would be waiting for her as patiently as possible.

These unedifying reflections upon the probable character of Baggage passed through Mr. Pebble’s mind as his eyes dwelt on the lithe, lovely lines of the full-blown figure.

He had found Baggage in a storage warehouse. She had been sold in default of payment for her keep. Yet even the dusty mantle gathered from her long incarceration had failed to rob her body of its wild pagan grace. Mr. Pebble had an eye that automatically discounted the outer draperies of women in favor of what lay beneath. He had bought her on the spot.

“Wouldn’t you like a sheet about her?” the man had asked when Baggage had been deposited in the back of the open motor.

“I might,” Mr. Pebble had told the man. “In fact, I’m sure I would, but I doubt if the lady would like it.”

Leaving the man a little shocked, Mr. Pebble had driven off with Baggage. Later he had presented her to his mistress. Since then she had become a part of the establishment, like Nokashima and the bloodhound, Mr. Henry.

With a slight start Mr. Pebble raised his snow-white head, then shrugged his shoulders as if remonstrating with himself. Had those cocktails made him drowsy, and had his thoughts gone straying into the realms of pure fancy? Surely he had imagined he had seen the tawny, voluptuous form of Baggage step down from her little pedestal and come gliding towards him across the path of the slanting sun now flickering on the still waters of the pool. Surely he had imagined this, and yet – Mr. Pebble half rose from the bench and looked at the spot where the statue had been but where it was no more.

“My god!” he muttered. “Did the poor girl fall in? This is indeed a night of catastrophe.”

“Sit down, old man,” said a low voice beside him. “I didn’t fall in the pool. I have come to pay you a long deferred visit.”

Mr. Pebble resumed his seat. Quite calmly he accepted the situation.

“Hello, Baggage,” he said. “I’m afraid you’ve come too late. I’m an old man now, as you have just reminded me.”

He glanced at the beautiful figure beside him, then savored as if on the tip of his tongue the full bitterness of his years. There was something so imperatively urgent in the sleek young body of the girl sitting so close to him on the bench, Mr. Pebble felt that a just God should do a little something about it. Either the cocktails or the animal magnetism of his companion was making him a bit dizzy. His old, tired heart was thumping dangerously against his vest. What was it the doctor had told him about that heart – no excitement? That was it, no excitement. How absurd. If the doctor himself were here he would be fit to be tied. In fact, he would have to be tied if only for the sake of propriety. The low voice was speaking again. “You were too busy when you were young to pay any attention to me,” said Baggage. “What were you always doing in that little pavilion down there?”

“You know all the answers,” Mr. Pebble told her. “Hadn’t you better let me get you some clothes?”

“And you know me better than that,” said the girl, with a mocking laugh. “I never wore a stitch of clothes in my life. Why should I begin now?”

“Well, times are not what they were, my child,” Mr. Pebble answered feebly. “Women wear clothes nowadays – not much of them, I’ll admit, but still they wear a few.”

“I wish you were young again,” said the girl, fixing Mr. Pebble with a pair of wickedly disturbing eyes.

“Oh, how I do,” muttered Mr. Pebble. “Don’t look at me like that. It won’t do you a bit of good, and it’s upsetting me terribly. After all, I did you a good turn once. What’s the idea now? Why are you trying to torment me?”

“I’m jealous,” replied Baggage, “jealous of the youth you’ve lost. I want you back again.”

“Listen, Baggage,” Rex Pebble said earnestly. “Nobody wants to get back more passionately than I do, but you can see for yourself, my child, it just can’t be done. There’s no going back for me. I’m an old man now, with a heart too weak to hold its memories.”

“Your memories would overtax the strongest heart,” she told him; then asked curiously, “Has all desire vanished from your body?”

“Yes, my dear,” responded Mr. Pebble a little sadly, “but not from my brain. That’s what makes it so difficult to look upon you as you deserve – to estimate you dispassionately for what you are.”

“And what am I?” asked the girl.

“A saucy, impertinent young wanton with a single-track mind,” he told her; then added reflectively, “Not that the track doesn’t run through diverting pastures.”

“You’ve said it, old man,” replied Baggage commonly. “I need a spot of diversion.”

“I’m afraid you won’t find any here,” said Rex Pebble, “unless you’d like to have me try to improve your morals.”

“How can one improve what never existed?” Baggage wanted to know. “I never had any morals. That’s why I’ve always remained an essentially honest girl.”

“Perhaps you’re right at that,” observed Mr. Pebble. “Human beings are cluttered up with morals altogether too early in life. A wise providence should wait until our bodies are too old and weak to resent them – to get our backs up, so to speak.”

“How do you mean, get our backs up?” Baggage asked in a puzzled voice. She paused, then smiled delightedly. “Ah,” she said, “I think I see. What an odd way to put it.”.

“You don’t see at all,” declared Mr. Pebble, “but you’re quite right about having no morals. You remind me of my mistress.”

“What!” exclaimed the girl. “That old —”

“If you please,” Mr. Pebble hastily interrupted.

“Oh, all right,” said Baggage impatiently. “I’d remind you of all women if you only really knew them. At heart we’re not nearly so refined as you men try to make us, and we know a lot of words, too.”

“Don’t I know!” replied Mr. Pebble. “Not only do you know a lot of words, but you also love to use them. My life has not been overburdened by too many refined women.”

“Then you should know a lot of bad words I’ve missed,” the girl said hopefully. “Tell me some.”

Mr. Pebble looked really affronted.

“You’d better talk with my mistress,” he replied a little coldly, “or better still, with my wife.”

“I won’t have any dealings with either of those hags,” Baggage retorted. “They had all the youth of you. What have I got? Nothing but an old horrid.”

“Why don’t you join the army?” Mr. Pebble ungallantly suggested. “You should be able to get plenty of action there.”

“I’ve had my heart set on you for years,” said Baggage. “I hate to let you escape me.”

She cuddled up closer to him on the bench and put a cool arm round his neck.

“Heaven protect me,” muttered Mr. Pebble. “If that woman of mine called Spray finds us together like this there’ll be no escaping her.”

“I hope she does,” said Baggage. “I’d love to annoy her.”

“I feared as much,” said Mr. Pebble. “She is annoyed enough already.”

“Are you?” asked the girl, burrowing her small nose into his neck just behind his ear. “You smell awfully clean. Why don’t you take your clothes off?”

With a startled ejaculation Mr. Pebble broke the girl’s strangle hold and slid along the bench to momentary safety.

“You can think of the damnedest things,” he complained. “Let me point out this to you: I am a clean old man, and you are a vile young woman. We have nothing at all in common.”

“I want to bite your ear,” said the girl. “That is always a good way to start.”

“Keep your teeth to yourself,” Mr. Pebble retorted. “What are you thinking of starting, anyway?”

“Something in the nature of a seduction,” said Baggage. “That is, if you’ll stop flitting about like some nervous old bird.”

“I am a nervous old bird,” replied Rex Pebble. “A very nervous old bird, indeed. Why can’t you talk and be reasonable instead of mauling me about? You have even less consideration for a body than a professional wrestler.”

“Then consider my body for a moment,” said Baggage.

“What am I going to do with it?”

“Why don’t you take it back to your pedestal, where it belongs?” asked Mr. Pebble.

“My body belongs with yours,” replied the girl.

“Then it virtually belongs in the grave,” said Mr. Pebble. “I’m going to fall down dead if this keeps up.” “Let’s fall down together,” Baggage suggested.

“By God!” cried Rex Pebble. “If I were twenty years younger, or even ten —”

“Yes?” broke in the girl. “Go on. What would you do?”

“None of your damn business,” said Mr. Pebble. “I’d teach you a lesson.”

“How do you know you could?” Baggage challenged.

“By all that’s holy,” exclaimed Rex Pebble, now thoroughly aroused, “I will teach you a lesson if it’s my last act in life.”

He rose quickly from the bench, and ripping off his coat and vest in one ruthless movement, tossed them to the flags.

“Hurry!” cried the undismayed Baggage encouragingly. “Stick out your legs and I’ll drag your pants off.”

The hard-boiled ardor of the girl was too much for Rex Pebble. With a sudden revulsion of feeling he sank back on the bench.

“What a suggestion!” he muttered. “What a picture! Me with my legs stuck out and you dragging off my trousers. What do you think this is, a game?”

“Sure,” replied Baggage. “You can keep your shoes on. I don’t mind.”

“I’d look crisp with my shoes on,” observed Mr. Pebble. “Not to mention my socks and supporters.”

“Who’s going to worry about your feet?” demanded Baggage. “Snap off those pants.”

“Snap them off?” repeated Mr. Pebble. “Oh, my word. Everything is all off. I am definitely beyond seduction.”

“You’re no such thing,” cried the girl, flinging herself upon him and dragging out his shirt tails.

Once more the famous Pebble courage asserted itself. No woman was going to drag out his shirt tails. That was going too far. He rose from the bench and seized the girl by the shoulders. Mistaking his intentions she abandoned his shirt tails to the light summer breeze, and threw her arms round his neck. For a moment they struggled perilously on the edge of the pool, then Baggage with a low laugh wriggled from his grasp and sprang lightly away.

“Pist!” She uttered in a piercing whisper. “Look behind you!”

The water of the pool parted smoothly as the even smoother body split its surface. Like a flash of silver Baggage streaked through the green depths, then dwindled and disappeared. Where had she gone? Rex Pebble wondered. Had the whole episode been a figment of his disordered imagination? Or had Nokashima mixed some curious Oriental dream-stuff in the cocktails? From cocktails to shirt tails was not a wide leap in thought. Mr. Pebble took the leap. His shirt tails were out. They were playing havoc with the Pebble poise. That was not a question of imagination. It was grim reality. And equally real was the fact that Baggage, in the flesh, had dragged those same shirt tails from their tender concealment. An impulsive wench.

Mr. Pebble realized with a pang of regret that he could not stand there forever gazing into the pool for a last glimpse of that swift silver body. Baggage had withdrawn from life as remarkably as she had appeared. He hated to turn about and face his mistress. Nevertheless, it would have to be done, or she would do it herself by force. He sighed, and without any unnecessary ostentation, collected his shirt tails and tucked them out of sight. It was not a neat job, but at least he felt less like a flag. Then slowly he turned his back on the pool and faced about to meet Spray Summers who, in spite of her feet, was bearing down upon him like a ship under full sail. Mr. Pebble noted with relief that the good lady appeared to be far more astonished than angry.

“A pretty way to be carrying on at your time of life,” she announced, a trifle winded from the unaccustomed speed of her progress. “Tell me without even attempting to lie, you senile atrocity, just who was that naked trollop you were trying to assault before you chucked her into the pool.”

“You’ve got your facts in reverse,” said Mr. Pebble. “In the first place, the trollop was trying to assault me, and in the second place, she chucked herself in the pool the moment she saw you.”

“Then why doesn’t she come up,” demanded Spray, “so I could give her a piece of my mind? Perhaps she’s drowning. I hope so.”

“It was Baggage,” said Mr. Pebble. “But she’s gone now. Look, Spray. The pedestal is vacant!”

CHAPTER FOUR

Just a Dip at Twilight

Spray Summers looked with large eyes at the pedestal upon which the wench Baggage had once stood so gracefully poised, then she sniffed with all the righteous indignation of the most moral woman in the world.

“Good riddance of bad rubbish,” she said. “What was she doing?”

“As far as I could find out,” replied Mr. Pebble, “she was trying to drag my trousers off.”

“What for?” demanded Spray.

“How should I know?” asked Mr. Pebble innocently.

“Who should know better than you?” snapped the woman. “If a man started in to drag off my pants I’d ask as a matter of interest exactly what he was after.”

“I was a little afraid of the answer,” said Rex Pebble.

“You needn’t have been,” observed Spray, witheringly. “She must simply have wanted a pair of pants. That’s the most you could offer the hussy.”

“Isn’t that quite enough?” asked Mr. Pebble.

“Empty pants never meant much in my young life,” said Spray, dropping wearily to the bench. “From the way that woman was tugging at you it looked to me as if she was after a great deal more than your pants.”

“It would look that way to you,” remarked Rex Pebble. “Aren’t you the least bit interested in the disappearance of the statue?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Spray, passing a hand across her eyes. “Odd happenings seem to be the natural order of events this evening – such as Mr. Henry eating the steak and Sue sending me slippers and you fighting with a naked woman for possession of your pants. I feel a little odd myself. It might be the cocktails, but I haven’t felt like this for years.”

Rex Pebble took her hand in his.

“I know how it is,” he said. “Almost anything might happen. But,” he added with a shrug, “nothing ever does. We just sit here growing older like a pair of spectators waiting after the curtain has dropped. There’s nothing more to see and no place new to go, yet here we sit, you with your tired feet and me with my bad heart.”

“You were wrestling with a naked woman only a minute ago,” said Spray. “Isn’t that enough for one evening?”

“No,” replied Mr. Pebble decidedly, “it is not.”

“How about that precious soul of yours?” asked Spray Summers. “What’s become of that?”

“I’m afraid it never clicked,” said Rex Pebble. “Just a string of long words. Certainly, I don’t care for you with my soul, because now that you’re old I think you’re pretty awful.”

“And I think you should be chloroformed,” retorted Spray. “You sit there brooding over the past like an old buzzard on a dead cow.”

“Prettily turned,” said Mr. Pebble. “And quite right, too, but one can’t wrestle with a nude girl, even at my age, without feeling somewhat aroused.”

“It would only make me feel tired,” observed Spray.

“Obviously,” said Mr. Pebble, “but you’re not a man, and I am.”

“You’re merely the crumbling ruins of a man,” said Spray, pressing the hand that was holding hers, “but I like you just the same. You’re still so much of a fool.”

“But you don’t care for me with your soul?” continued Mr. Pebble. “Don’t tell me that.”

“No,” she said. “That sort of talk has always been ’way above my head. I don’t understand it. If I were a young girl and I came upon you here, I know jolly well I wouldn’t fall in love with a white-haired man of sixty, no matter if I was fairly bursting with soul. I just couldn’t do it. And now I’m an old woman I don’t love you for what you are so much as for what you were – what we were together.”

“That’s it,” said Rex Pebble. “That’s it exactly. I keep calling on you and listening to your banalities not for what you are now, but because of old associations, for the things we’ve done and seen together, the good times we’ve had and the bad ones we’ve shared. Like the memory of a dead child, the past holds us together.”

“Beautifully but depressingly put,” murmured Spray. “The past is the only child I’ve ever had.”

“He was a lusty little devil,” said Mr. Pebble. “I wish we had him back.”

“Yes,” agreed Spray sadly. “He was a very amusing child and always up to mischief.” Cupping her mouth in her hands, she turned her head toward the house and shouted, “Nokashima, you heathen! We want cocktails!”

“If he isn’t singing aloud to Mr. Henry,” said Rex Pebble, “as is his custom, it’s barely possible he may have heard you.”

As if by magic Nokashima appeared, hurrying busily across the grass. On a tray he was carrying the silver shaker and two long-stemmed glasses.

“That’s a real pretty sight,” remarked Spray, growing a little esthetic at the prospect of a drink. “The white jacket, you know, and the silver shaker and the green grass and all. Only the man is vile.”

Collecting a red metal table on the way, the little servant deftly placed it before them; then, with a clever flourish, he deposited the tray on the table.

“I had drink all mixed,” he announced with satisfaction. “Nice evening, madam, for drink. Wine go good with dinner.”

“Damn me if I know how you’re still able to walk,” said Spray, “let alone to think, but for this service, Nocka, I freely forgive you the steak.”

Nokashima giggled his pleasure, gave several quick, ducking little bows, and was about to withdraw when his eyes chanced to stray across the pool. For a moment he stood staring with foolish astonishment at the vacant pedestal, then looked inquiringly from his mistress to Mr. Pebble.

“Naked lady all gone?” he asked in a hushed voice. “She no more be with us here?”

“I’m afraid not, Nocka,” said Mr. Pebble. “The naked lady seems to have taken flight.”

“Too bad,” said the Japanese sorrowfully. “She pretty good, I thought. She very nice.” Once more he was about to turn away, and once more he stopped as if remembering some trivial incident, “I saw naked lady on next lawn,” he announced quite casually. “She look like our one only this naked lady all flesh and no stone.”

“What was she doing on the next lawn?” asked Spray Summers, always alert for a little scandal.

“Oh, she just attack chauffeur,” explained the Jap indifferently. “Chauffeur called Alfred. Naked lady very determined. She get Alfred down right on grass —”

“Pretty,” interrupted Spray sardonically. “And only next door. Go on, Nocka.”

“Then Alfred spring up,” said Nokashima, “with big howl but no pants. Just drawers for Alfred.”

“The poor chap seems to have escaped not entirely without honor,” observed Mr. Pebble, “although it was just drawers for him. Were they long, Nokashima, those drawers?”

“Yes, boss, with bags,” said the Jap. “Quite funny.”

“She may have been naked,” put in Spray, hoping to cast a feeble beam of morality into the darkly unmoral jungle of her little servant’s mind, “but she was far from being a lady. She actually attempted to take off Mr. Pebble’s pants.”

“Yes, madam,” agreed Nocka sociably. “I saw that, too. Very active occasion. She pretty good.”

“Nocka,” put in Spray severely, “you can take yourself off without any more personal observations, or I’ll chuck you out on your ear.”

“Yes, madam,” murmured the small man, with one of his quick bows.

This time, when Nocka withdrew he made no attempt to turn back. He had read correctly the danger signals sparking in the eyes of madam.

“That naked lady doesn’t seem to be having much luck,” observed Mr. Pebble, looking with a faint grin after the retreating figure of the little Jap.

“She’s making progress,” replied Spray. “She succeeded in getting your shirt tails out and the chauffeur’s pants off. Anything may happen when her technique improves. Still, I contend her methods are too disconcerting. They tend to make the subject forget the object of the assault.”

“Exactly,” agreed Rex Pebble. “A man is accustomed to take the initiative in such affairs.”

“But they don’t take it often enough,” replied Spray Summers. “There should be an open season for unmarried women over a certain age.”

“From the little I’ve been able to observe of the modern young woman,” said Mr. Pebble, “assault seems no longer necessary. I have an idea there should be a closed season for men.”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” replied Spray. “Your season is closed for good.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Pebble regretfully. “My hunting days are done.”

“And I am no longer hunted,” added Spray. “All I am is an old abandoned quarry whose feet have been run ragged.”

“I tell you’ what let’s do,” said Mr. Pebble, seized by a sudden impulse. “Let’s strip off our clothes and take a dip in the pool.”

“Are you craftily trying to get me to help you look for that naked lady?” demanded Spray Summers. “We haven’t been in the pool for years. The shock might kill us.”

“What if it does kill us?” replied Mr. Pebble, now reckless from many cocktails. “It would be as good a way to go out as any. My heart is ready to call it a day at the slightest provocation. Let’s take a chance. The cool water might soothe your tired feet.”

This last possibility did much to break down the woman’s resistance, which at best had never been strong.

“Give me another cocktail,” she said, “and I might consider it, although I think the idea is perfectly mad.” She accepted the proffered glass and polished off its contents with professional celerity. As the potently stimulating concoction was assimilated into her system the idea lost some of its madness and her mood became more yielding. “Your suggestion has its points,” she resumed, breaking the short silence. “It might be fun at that. We’ll take our last swim, and if we do die it will save us a lot of time and trouble.”

“You always were a game kid,” said Mr. Pebble approvingly. “Especially where foolishness was concerned. Come on, let’s strip.”

“I’d like to be foolish again,” replied Spray. “And this certainly seems foolish to me.”

A few minutes later two mother-naked figures were standing on the edge of the pool. Had Nokashima been watching – as he probably was – he would have found the occasion highly diverting. The years had added flesh to Spray Summers’ body and removed it from Mr. Pebble’s. Of the two it was the man whose figure appeared the more youthful. Spray was fat and flaccid, given to sagging here and there and bulging in various places. When she had finished with her body she had shamefully let it down, and now it was taking its revenge. Rex Pebble still remained as straight and slim as a boy, but a great deal more knobby.

“I hate you,” declared Spray Summers, regarding him enviously. “You remain the same from year to year while all I do is get fatter and more jellified. It isn’t fair. I hate my body.”

“See that scar,” said Mr. Pebble, pointing to a long white line on his right leg. “I got that twenty years ago when you pushed me into the fireplace. The andirons did it. It doesn’t seem all that time ago, does it?”

“No,” replied Spray. “Look at this one.” She lifted her left foot and displayed a wicked scar. “That came from stepping on a broken glass during one of my less responsible moments. It seems only yesterday. I can even recall the doctor’s face and how I accused him of not knowing his business. That was a wild party.”

“Just a couple of old battlers,” said Rex Pebble with a grin. “Weather- beaten and dishonorably scarred.”

“I’ve got some on my head,” replied Spray Summers.

“I was always knocking it against things that refused to budge.”

“You were terribly unfortunate that way,” agreed Mr. Pebble reminiscently. “Always being patched, or stitched, or turning blue in places.”

“I bruised so easily,” replied Spray, “and you could never learn to keep your great hands to yourself.”

“In those unregenerate days,” said Mr. Pebble, “your body attracted my great hands like a magnet.”

“Excuse please,” a voice broke in behind them. “I catch sight of unfrocked bodies, so I bring towels.”

With admirable presence of mind Spray Summers and Mr. Pebble snatched the towels from the Japanese and draped them about themselves to the best advantage. “You think of everything, don’t you?” said Spray, in an evil voice. “If I wasn’t so busy hiding my person I’d like to break your neck!”

“I not think of this,” declared Nokashima. “This occasion too much for me. When I see boss and madam without stitch, I think naked lady come back and take clothes. I bring towels so not catch cold.”

“I’m the only naked lady around here,” said Spray Summers tartly. “Who’s this person?”

“I beg your pardon,” said a tall elderly gentleman, emerging from a clump of bushes. “I really wasn’t going to make my presence known under the circumstances, but seeing you don’t seem to mind —”

“Who told you that?” demanded Mr. Pebble. “I mind a lot.”

“What were you doing in those bushes?” Spray Summers put in. “Do you happen to be a Peeping Thomas?”

“Far from it,” replied the stranger. “I was merely trying to spare your feelings, but as I said, seeing you don’t seem to mind —”

“I do wish you’d stop telling us we don’t seem to mind,” Spray interrupted impatiently. “If it wasn’t for this towel I’d be groveling on my face in an agony of embarrassment.”

“Will you be so good as to state your business,” said Mr. Pebble, “and then clear out? This isn’t a permanent exhibition, you know.”

“Most assuredly,” replied the gentleman politely. “An off moment, so to speak. It occurred to me in passing that you might be interested in some old and rare.”

“Are you the man with the steak?” asked Spray Summers, out of a clear sky.

“I beg your pardon,” said the old gentleman. “Where does steak come in?”

“I don’t know that it does,” replied Spray. “I just thought you might be trying to interest us in some old and rare steak. Mr. Henry ate ours all up.”

“That was too bad of Mr. Henry,” said the old gentleman with vague insincerity, looking reprovingly at Mr. Pebble.

“I didn’t eat the steak,” Mr. Pebble told him. “Mr. Henry is a bloodhound. That’s a dog. Just who and what are you?”

“Look!” cried Nokashima. “Fifi, she come, too.”

The group turned and watched the excited approach of Spray Summers’ dangerously pretty French maid. What with her high-heeled shoes, her undulating hips, and the mincing steps she took, the girl was literally tripping across the grass.

“My word,” observed the purveyor of old and rare. “This begins to look more and more like a musical comedy.”

“All we need is a chorus of neighbors,” said Mr. Pebble bitterly.

“Madam!” exclaimed Fifi. “What can one do? This is an affair of love. Privacy is most important at such times. These men are not amiable thus to delay your pleasure.”

“My God,” breathed Mr. Pebble. “Are all women indecent? This maid of yours has put us on the spot.”

“A thousand pardons!” cried the elderly gentleman. “I had no idea I was interrupting a —”

“Shut up!” shouted Mr. Pebble.

“It’s quite all right, Fifi,” said her mistress. “We can control ourselves. But I don’t know what’s come over everybody. Nokashima wants to keep us from catching cold; you want us to do something altogether different and better; this man keeps mouthing about old and rare, and we want to go swimming. Everything’s all mixed up. Why don’t you take them away and stop trying to memorize every joint in Mr. Pebble’s enfeebled body?”

“Some are not present,” said Fifi.

“That’s just too bad,” flung back Rex Pebble. “They’re present but concealed.”

“My word,” murmured the Old and Rare. “This is better than a musical comedy. It’s more like a burlesque.”

“That monsieur I will take away,” declared Fifi, “but not the unclean Japanese. He made a lewd suggestion a little while ago, then with a grip incroyable in one so small followed it up with a pinch.” Here Fifi patted herself with a gentle but unabashed hand. “And, madam, I bruise so easily. There will be a spot on that place there.”

“So do I,” said Spray sympathetically. “I sometimes wonder if that isn’t why we are built so large. You know – just to have room for the pinches of unclean men. And the more unclean they are the more pinches we get.”

“A small pinch, yes,” replied Fifi. “One can understand – one can even enjoy. That is a friendly thing and to be expected. But that man there, he has the fingers of steel. His clutch is like a trap. He makes me push a great cry even when Madam entertains.”

“The wicked little beast,” said Spray. “It seems to be a habit with him.”

“It is, madam,” replied Fifi, elevating her round tragic eyes. “It is a mania – a depravity. Pinch, pinch, pinch, all the time it’s pinch. I get no rest, and sit down only with groans of distress. The small man with the talons, he is making my life miserable. I grow old from his fingers.”

“If I not pinch,” put in Nokashima, “Fifi get glum. Then she flaunt it and get it in way of work. I pinch and Fifi curse, then start sing so happily about la-la-la.. Who is this la-la-la?”

“Not now, Nokashima,” protested Mr. Pebble. “We will go into la-la-la later. Everything will be explained, including the technique of pinching evil-thinking French maids.”

“I pinch baroness,” replied Nocka. “She not cry. She giggle like girl.”

“Then shoots your leg full of holes,” put in Spray Summers.

“Ha!” cried Fifi, completely forgetting herself. “So the depraved one not content with mine also pinches those of others. He is a dirty cow and his mother never said no to a sailor. Upon the occasion of his next attempt, me, I will bite off his fingers.”

With a flip toss of her pretty head Fifi, the fair product of France, swayed gracefully across the lawn, her flexible torso keeping rhythm with her emotions. Nokashima looked after her undecidedly, quite obviously disturbed by some inner conflict.

“Why should my mother say no to a sailor?” he asked

Mr. Pebble. “That girl not know my mother. She crazy.”

“Don’t worry, Nocka,” said Mr. Pebble. “I don’t understand her either. There’s no reason in the world why your mother should have said no to a sailor. There’s no reason why your mother should have talked to a sailor at all.”

“I go find out,” replied Nokashima.

With an extra quick duck of his head the little Jap spell across the grass and overtook the French maid. Hurling the mangled remains of the English language at each other they disappeared from view behind the garden gate, from the other side of which Fifi promptly pushed a great cry.

“He’s at it again,” said Spray Summers darkly.

“At what?” asked Mr. Pebble.

“Do you want me to show you?” she demanded.

“You’re showing the world already,” he answered briskly, then addressed himself to the elderly gentleman. “They’re all gone except you,” he said. “When are you going?”

“As soon as we’ve settled this little business of the old and rare,” replied the gentleman.

“Listen, mister,” said Spray Summers. “I’m old, but I’m not so rare. If you don’t clear out pronto I’m going to get tough as hell.”

“You are,” replied the elderly gentleman, but whether it was a question or a simple statement of fact neither Spray nor Mr. Pebble could decide.

“Couldn’t you dignify this discussion,” Mr. Pebble suggested rather hopelessly, “by giving yourself some sort of name?”

“Heaven strike me pink!” the old gentleman exclaimed. “I entirely forgot my letter. I have one, you know, but so much has been going on – what I mean to say is, I already feel a part of the family.”

“Then don’t,” said Spray crudely.

The letter he gave to Mr. Pebble read as follows:

Dear Rex

The individual who hands you this note seems to enjoy being known as Major Lynnhaven Jaffey. I doubt if he remembers his real name, having had occasion to change it so often. He has been everything from a soldier of fortune to a high-class swindler. I know he’s a first-rate forger because he raised a check on me quite successfully.

However, he’s a diverting rogue, and in view of his unique qualifications I thought he might be ideally fitted for the advertising profession. I am sure you will have much in common. He is all yours if the police don’t get him first.

Most cordially

Tom Pierce.

“That’s very nice,” said Mr. Pebble with a false laugh when he had finished reading the letter. “He speaks quite highly of you, Major Jaffey.”

“He should,” replied the Major enigmatically. “Now if you would care to give me a small check for a few items I should —”

“Skillfully make it a large one,” Mr. Pebble finished for him. “Don’t go on. I know all about it, Major. Why don’t you toddle back to the house and call aloud for a long drink? We’ll talk the matter over later.”

For a fleeting moment the Major permitted himself to look slightly distressed; then the bland smile returned to his not unhandsome face.

“A thousand thanks,” he replied. “A small drop of something would not be entirely unwelcome.” Here he bowed gallantly to Spray Summers. “In the meantime,” he continued, “I hope you enjoy your swim or whatever it was you were about to do.”

He turned on his heel and strode across the lawn, which was just as well for all concerned, because Spray had it on the tip of her tongue to call the Major a big bum. Instead, she contented herself by sitting down on the flags and dipping her feet in the water. Rex Pebble sat down beside.

“That old man,” she observed, “has a very bad mind.”

“According to Tom’s letter,” said Mr. Pebble, “he’s a very bad old man all over. I like bad old men.”

“You should,” commented Spray. “That’s why you’re so fond of yourself. What an odd sort of evening it’s been. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if a couple of lions came bounding across the lawn and tearfully pleaded to be allowed to listen to Little Orphan Annie.”

With the utmost conservatism Mr. Pebble lowered himself into the pool until he was standing on the bottom waist high in water. Turning to Spray he was surprised to see her examining her foot with an expression of profound astonishment.

“What’s up now?” he inquired. “Feel any better?”

“Look at them!” Spray cried, holding out her feet to him. “And take a look at those legs. They couldn’t be prettier if they belonged to a girl of twenty.”

Mr. Pebble looked at the proffered legs and even went so far as to feel them.

“They look swell,” he admitted, “and they feel even better. What’s happened to them?”

“I don’t know,” replied the delighted Spray. “It just happened. Maybe it’s the water. If it is, you should be fixed up fine by now. Are you?”

“What do you mean?” asked Mr. Pebble.

“Come here a second,” said Spray.

“Nothing doing,” replied Mr. Pebble. “I don’t like the look in your eyes.”

He turned his back to his mistress, peered eagerly down in the water, then took a quick jump. With an incoherent cry of exultation he flung himself on his face and began to swim the crawl with the vigor of a man far younger than his sixty years. Spray watched him with growing astonishment as his long arms cleft the water; then, breathing a silent prayer, she slipped into the pool. The moment the water closed over her head a feeling of buoyant happiness flooded through her. The blood in her veins grew strong with life, and weariness fled from her eyes. When Rex Pebble swam back to her from the other end of the pool he found a beautiful young woman looking down at him from the flags, a woman he had not seen for years save when memory had evoked her vision from the past.

“Hurry!” cried the woman. “Get out of that water quick, or you’ll drop below the age of puberty.”

“That would never do,” said Mr. Pebble, springing from the pool.

It was a fine figure of a man who took the woman in his arms.

“What a kiss!” murmured Spray. “What a kiss. Do you remember how! Tell me, Rex, is my face burning? How old do you think I look?”

“Not a day over twenty-five,” he declared. “Has anything happened to me?”

Spray inspected the length of the long, lean body, hesitated a brief moment, then politely averted her eyes.

“I should say it has,” she announced decidedly. “Why, Rex Pebble, I haven’t seen you like that for years.” She paused for a moment, then added demurely, “I mean your white hair is all gone. You might be thirty-five, but I doubt it.”

Mr. Pebble looked both proud and embarrassed.

“I say,” he said, “what do you think has happened to us?”

“Darned if I know,” replied Spray, eagerly examining various points of interest about her body. “I haven’t had time to think. With a figure like mine I doubt if I ever will.”

“I put it down to Baggage,” said Mr. Pebble. “The contact of her body has fired this pool with vitality.”

“Make it your business to see that her contact is confined to the pool,” Spray Summers warned him, then added with a mocking smile, “Mr. Pebble, don’t you think we are wasting a lot of time?”

“I think so,” said Mr. Pebble.

Once more he took her in his arms and held her there for a long time.

“Thank God,” murmured Spray piously, “it’s quite dark now.”

“Yes,” replied Mr. Pebble, “it covers a multitude of sins.”

“I could stand a multitude of sins,” said Spray. “You see, I’ve been born again, and I have no sins left.”

“Something should be done about that,” said Rex Pebble, “or you’ll fall into the error of self-righteousness. I wonder if the door to the pavilion is locked?”

“If it is you can break it down,” replied Spray. “What does a small door mean in our young lives?”

“It might mean quite a lot,” observed Mr. Pebble.

As they walked down the path in the direction of the pavilion Spray began to laugh softly to herself.

“What’s it all about?” Mr. Pebble wanted to know.

“This,” replied Spray, “is just about going to burn Sue up.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Alarums and Incursions

Quiet had returned to the garden The grass and bushes were powdered with silver dust. Moonlight and starlight sifted through the air. A pale unearthly radiance lay over all things save where the tracery of trees tossed weirdly beautiful tapestries across the close-cut lawn. In a near-by bush a fastidious wing fluttered impatiently with a little drumming sound, momentarily ruffling the silence which was lulled again to tranquillity by the subdued chirps of drowsing birds. Far below in the dark oblivion slashed by the winding valley the lights of the little villages winked vaingloriously back at the stars. Like an urgent summons from a lost world the rhythmic thrumming of a train rose on the still air, and the pain-edged voice of its whistle filled the night with a restless loneliness. Then silence again and enchantment, as the stars cast coins in the pool.

And into this silvery silence two white figures emerged from the small pavilion and mingled with the night. The silence was rudely shattered by the vulgar sound of a hand slapping bare flesh. No chance now for enchantment. They were back again, those two mortals, and with them they had brought a lusty love of life.

“Well, Dame Quickly,” exclaimed Mr. Pebble with unwonted commonness as he briskly whacked his mistress on the flank, “there’s life in the old mare yet – what?”

,“Ouch!” protested Dame Quickly. “Can’t you ever learn when it’s time to let a lady alone? What a way for a man to act.”

“You should consider your self flattered,” responded Rex Pebble.

“Flattened would be more like it,” observed Spray Summers.

“You’re upset,” said Mr. Pebble with unruffled urbanity. “Listen, Spray, I can scarcely realize we’re young again.”

“If you can’t realize that,” Spray retorted with unnecessary significance, “I can’t think of any new way to make the fact clear.”

“Let’s turn to athletics,” Mr. Pebble hastily suggested. “Come on old darling, I’ll race you to the other end of the pool.”

“I will if you give me half a chance,” Spray told him. “No monkey business in the water.”

For a moment they stood poised on the edge of the pool; then, like two living spears, cleanly sheathed themselves in its star-plunged depths. Behind them a trail of sparkling drops fell and twinkled in the moon-light. By the time the swimmers had reached the far end of the pool two years had been subtracted from their respective ages. And when Spray’s gleaming body slipped sinuously from the water she stood revealed in the silvery light a beautiful girl of twenty-three. Although her figure was full blown and luxurious with all the approved pneumatic features, still it carried the speed and lithe, sleek grace of a soft-footed cat of the jungle. An instinctive temptress was Spray, as are most women, which is just as well for the good of the species. Long lashes, wet from the pool, half veiled her large, dark eyes which were very wicked and charming. Her full lips, a trifle slack, were parted in an indolent smile. Hers was the fascination of youth made dangerous by a world of experience. There were two small ears, a short, selfish nose, and a wilderness of copper-colored hair, now matted to her head and spangled with drops of water.

The man who stood beside her was no mean companion, although it would never have occurred to an artist to single him out for a model for an epic advertisement of drawers, cigarettes, or motorcars. Ten years the senior of his mistress, he had an attractively knit body, long of limb and loosely jointed. And his muscles were not of the knobbily obtrusive variety, being of the sinewy pattern that told of a flowing continuity of endurance rather than brute strength. Yet in spite of his youthful appearance some traces of the man of sixty still lingered in his face. Unlike the more volatile Spray, he had not lightly cast aside the disillusioning knowledge of a past which had now so strangely become the future. His clear blue eyes were as wise and defensively skeptical as they had been, and the deep lines that cleft his cheeks gave an odd effect of maturity. His hair was rather silly, sandy colored and too finely spun. It did much to destroy the natural dignity of the man’s expression. Beneath the eyes the cheek bones were harshly prominent, and the skin that slanted down to the chin had a firm, hungry leanness. His long thin face bore a stamp of distinction, a patrician type, the strong, aquiline nose made somewhat less formidable by the mouth beneath it, with the slow smiling lips a little bitter yet wholly pleasure-loving. It was a difficult face to read, so marked was it with conflicting characteristics – the face of a man who could scale the loftiest heights or else take a tremendous tumble down them with an equal thoroughness of purpose. One thing was fairly certain, Rex Pebble would never stand still in the same place long.

“You know,” remarked the girl, lazily flexing her body, “if we keep fooling round this pool we’ll be getting childish next.”

“Even that,” observed Mr. Pebble, “would be preferable to senile decay.”

“I like us just as we are,” declared Spray, “with a few cocktails tossed in just for good measure. Are there any left?”

Rex Pebble tested the shaker, then filled two glasses and extended one to Spray.

“Here’s to that lush nymph, Baggage,” he said, flooding his drink with moonlight, “a fair, virile wench with a bountiful disposition.”

“You better lay off that supersexed wanton,” Spray Summers warned him. “No one yet has ever accused me of being stingy. Furthermore, there’s your old wife to be considered. What are you going to do about her?”

“Great guns!” exclaimed Mr. Pebble, suddenly concerned. “My wife! What is she going to do about me? is a lot more like it. I’ll still carry on, of course. There’s such a thing as loyalty. A chap can’t very decently abandon a legitimately old wife simply because he happens to have suddenly grown backwards.”

“Perhaps she’ll die soon,” said Spray consolingly. “It’s almost time she did.”

“God!” ejaculated Mr. Pebble in a shocked voice. “What a thing to suggest! Would you like to have me murder her, perhaps?”

“Not immediately,” she replied calmly. “I want my revenge first. When she sees me all dolled up in the latest and most youthful styles she’ll probably be glad to die.”

“I hope you won’t rub it in too much,” Rex Pebble told her.

“Don’t worry about me,” said Spray. “You have quite enough to worry about as it is. There’s your business connections, for example. Do you think people are going to believe you when you tell them you’re Rex Pebble?”

“I don’t care how passionate a woman may be,” Mr. Pebble declared in a disgusted voice, “the practical side of her nature is sure to crop out at the wrong moment.” Thoughtfully he sipped his cocktail, then resumed: “Indubitably there are going to be no end of embarrassing complications, but on this happy occasion I steadfastly refuse to anticipate them. Trouble can find its way about without my assistance.”

“Here comes a compact little chunk of it now,” observed Spray Summers, hastily snatching up a towel. “That runt of a heathen is running as if his heart would break, if he had one. Wonder what’s taken possession now of his undeveloped mind?”

In a condition of mental and physical demoralization, Nokashima arrested his mad progress and stood scrutinizing the two nude figures, his small, rapidly blinking eyes generating hopeless bewilderment.

“This night,” he announced at last, “the nakedest I recall. No clothes for anybody. Maybe I take off mine too.”

“No,” said Mr. Pebble hastily. “Don’t do that. Someone must stay dressed.”

“Perhaps yes,” agreed the little Jap. “You see two other naked bodies knocking about? Old naked bodies – not so good.”

“The parchment-faced little ape,” muttered Spray Summers. “I like his nerve.”

“Listen, Nocka,” said Rex Pebble. “Those old bodies you referred to so offensively are new again. Here they are, standing right before you. Don’t you recognize our voices?”

Nokashima received this startling information with truly admirable self- control.

“How nice,” he said approvingly. “Hot stuff now.”

“Just what does he mean by that?” inquired Spray. “Is there no bottom to his depravity?”

“Don’t ask him to elaborate,” replied Mr. Pebble.

“Voices just same,” continued the grinning servant, “but bodies quite different. Very rapid improvement. Boss look similar to young nephew, Mist’ Kippie. Madam some wow. Look like naked lady. Madam have every-thing. Pretty good, I, think.”

“Only pretty good,” put in Spray tartly. “They don’t come any better. I’m the swellest-looking naked lady you ever clapped an eye on, you squat myopic dreg.”

“Madam look like naked lady on next lawn,” declared the myopic dreg as if he had not heard. “You know, boss – pants snatcher.”

The little man’s eyes were not as myopic as Spray had told him. She did look remarkably like the nymph, Baggage. Her half-parted lips had the same provocative smile, and her body the same brazen challenge.

“You do look a lot like Baggage,” remarked Mr. Pebble, regarding her curiously. “I knew there was something just a little different about you. Every now and then I’ve had a feeling she was looking out at me through your eyes. I hope it isn’t a case of atavism. If she has merged her peculiar talents and disposition with yours there won’t be a pair of trousers left in the countryside.”

“How come you and Madam so much younger, boss?” Nokashima wanted to know. “Big surprise to me. Head take spin. Very strange thing, this. Very strange.”

“It is,” agreed Mr. Pebble. “And it has to do with magic. Someday, Nocka, I’ll tell you all about it.”

“Magic,” repeated the Japanese. “You believe magic, boss?”

“I’m afraid there’s no way of getting around it,” replied Mr. Pebble.

“I know man who got around magic,” declared Nokashima. “He Japanese fella, too.”

“How do you mean?” asked Spray Summers, interested in spite of herself.

“By squeeze,” replied the servant.

“What did he squeeze?” demanded Rex Pebble, then hastily added, “Think well before you answer.”

“Well,” vouchsafed Nocka, his eyes growing even more animated, “this man I know meet fox once. Fox suddenly turn into beautiful naked lady. By and by man and lady go sleep. When man wake up fox sleep on pillow beside him. Man nudge fox. ‘Where my beautiful naked lady?’ he ask. ‘I that beautiful naked lady,’ declare fox, much amused. ‘Maybe yes to another fox,’ say man all excited, ‘but you great disappointment to me.’ Here man squeeze down own throat of fox. Fox turn into big snake. ‘Goodness gracious,’ says man, ‘this get worse and worse. This quite impossible now.’ He keep on with squeeze, and snake turn into little flea. ‘What idea?’ demand man. ‘Little flea not help matters any. Only small strand of patience remain.’ Flea only giggle with rage-provoking mirth. ‘You do that on other side of face,’ grit man, and with both hands squeeze down on neck of little flea.”

“How in God’s name,” demanded Spray in a thoroughly exasperated voice, “could that friend of yours squeeze down with both hands on the neck of a little flea? A flea hasn’t got any neck to speak of – not even a big one. You’re just telling us a long string of tiresome lies. How did it turn out?”

“Well,” resumed Nokashima, drawing a deep breath, “flea make great moan and groan, then utter piercing scream and turn into lobster, and lobster turn into sheep. ‘Getting close,’ say man, ‘but not quite.’ He squeeze some more, and sheep turn into naked lady. ‘Hullo,’ say man. ‘Where you been?’ ‘I been in trouble,’ say naked lady, very hoarse. ‘No more choke now, if please.’ So man take hand from throat of naked lady and place elsewhere. Naked lady giggle just like flea. ‘Suppose I turn into angry tiger?’ she ask. ‘If do,’ say man, ‘you have to hurry like hell.’”

“He did?” said Spray, now deeply interested. “And what did the naked lady do?”

“She not turn into angry tiger,” replied Nokashima. “She give up.”

“It was about time she did,” declared Spray. “Just imagine, going through all that for no earthly reason. She should have given up in the first place. The man must have been frantic.”

“That man my cousin,” the small servant concluded proudly. “He quite fond of magic.”

“He had every reason to be,” said Mr. Pebble. “I’m quite fond of magic myself.”

“Would you mind telling me,” Spray Summers unamiably demanded of the little yellow man, “if you came streaking across that lawn like a bat out of hell for the express purpose of telling us a long, lying, and very dirty story about fleas, foxes, and naked ladies, not to mention your lecherous cousin?”

Nokashima’s expression underwent a sudden and startling change. His features were twisted into lines of consternation.

“Goodness gracious!” he exclaimed. “So sorry, madam. Bad business back at house. We are all very deep in trouble.”

“I knew it,” declared Spray in tones of deep conviction. “I knew it from the moment he opened his lying mouth. That old and rare major has either walked off with all the silver or else set fire to the house. Which is it, Nocka?”

“You quite right, madam,” said the servant, gazing with surprise upon his mistress. “House on fire all right, but not like you say.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Rex Pebble quickly knotting the towel round his waist. “Speak up, you graven image.”

“It was steak,” spoke up the graven image obediently.

“I see it all now,” said Spray with suppressed fury. “The steak got loose and went dashing about setting fire to the house. It’s all very clear.” She was silent a moment, then suddenly shouted at the startled Jap, “Be quick, weazened little liar of a man, what did the steak do this time?”

“Oh well,” said Nokashima, a little sadly. “You know how it is, madam. Steak catch fire and burn oven up and oven catch fire and burn room up and room —”

“I know how it is,” cried Spray in a wild voice. “And room catch fire and burn house up. We could play this game indefinitely. Come on, Rex, let’s run like hell.”

Following the example Mr. Pebble had set with his towel, Spray raced across the lawn, the sketchily draped Mr. Pebble at her heels, and the weazened little liar of a man, thoughtfully carrying the cocktail shaker, making scrambling noises in the rear while idly toying with the idea of suicide.

A few minutes later the three of them burst into the kitchen, which was filled with smoke and overflowing with firemen. Water applied with indiscriminate generosity composed the third and most disturbing element save one. That element was Fifi, the French maid. She was pushing both cries and firemen about with impartial zeal.

“Malheureuse!” she was lamenting as the group arrived. “This is conduct of the most furious. Madam will be decomposed. Allez-vous en, soiled cows! Vien vite.”

“What kind of lingo is that broad gargling?” a fire-man was asking his chief when the voice of Spray Summers cut through the smoke and confusion.

“Nocka, you rat!” she cried. “What have you done with that steak? I’m going to have my dinner if I have to eat it on the lawn.”

“Too crisp, madam,” protested Nokashima. “Steak start all the trouble.”

“Then fill that shaker,” she snapped. “I’ll drink my damn dinner. Where did all these silly-looking men come from? Tell them to clear out.”

Fifi gave a small shriek that sounded more pleased than embarrassed.

“There are two nudes!” she exclaimed. “Regardez-la.”

“Say, Chief,” demanded the inquisitive fireman, “what kind of a house is this anyway? A sporting house?”

“You ask too many questions,” retorted the chief. “Do you know where the fire is? I can’t find a flame.”

Upon the entrance of Spray and Mr. Pebble the business of fighting fire had been brought to a sudden and complete stop. The firemen were now standing about, their expressions registering emotions running from profound disapproval to open admiration, according to the characters of their individual owners.

“Say, sister,” a voice sang out, “have you been playing strip poker?”

“Listen, lady,” another voice called, “you’re a big girl now. Why don’t you hide your shame?”

“Hey, buddy,” a third voice inquired. “Who do you think you are – Strangler Lewis?”

“Tell him for me,” said another, “his cute little towel isn’t on straight.”

Nervously clutching his sole claim to decency, Mr. Pebble turned to confront his tormentors, then the hopelessness of the situation overcame him.

“Nokashima,” he said wearily. “Are those cocktails finished yet?”

“Gord amighty!” observed a fireman in an awed voice. “With the house burning down around them all those two seem to care about is eating and drinking and carrying on foolish. I can’t figure these society birds out.”

“I could carry on foolish myself,” contributed a brother-in-arms, regarding Spray Summers with unconcealed admiration. “That dame is making me downright silly.”

At this point the chief decided it was high time to intervene.

“Say, lady,” he said, stepping up to Spray. “You’d better run upstairs and put on some clothes. My men can’t keep their minds on their work with you sticking around. I’m sort of slipping myself.”

Spray laughed softly.

“What about the fire?” she asked.

“We’re looking for that now,” said the chief, scratching his sorely perplexed head. “There’s got to be a fire somewhere, what with all this smoke, but damn me if I can find a single flame.”

An anguished cry burst from Mr. Pebble, and the assembled firemen broke out into a chorus of coarse laughter. Spray turned quickly and looked at her companion in nudity, then added her voice to the chorus. Mr. Pebble’s towel lay uselessly at his feet. Furiously he wheeled about and confronted the small French maid. This one, after a rapid survey, raised her wild eyes to heaven.

“This,” she said in a voice choked with emotion, “is far more than I asked. M’sieu is too impulsive. We are not alone.”

“Why did you take my towel off?” demanded Mr. Pebble.

“I wanted to fix him,” exclaimed the maid. “It, as you say in your language.”

The laughter of the firemen increased in volume. “It?” repeated Mr. Pebble, in a shocked whisper. “It? Just what do you mean, Fifi?”

“That!” cried Fifi, pointing, and Mr. Pebble shrank back from the unabashed finger. “The towel, m’sieu. Me, I want to fix that towel. It was about to descend.”

Here she stooped suddenly and deftly flipped the towel. round Mr. Pebble’s waist.

“Here! Here!” he exclaimed, seizing the towel with both hands. “Don’t do that, Fifi. I can manage it.” Thinking Mr. Pebble was endeavoring to toss the towel aside, Fifi struggled all the harder.

“But M’sieu should wear at least a little something,” she protested. “These firemen, they have no appreciation.”

“Take your hands away from that body,” Spray Summers broke in angrily as she strode across the room. “Your appreciation is altogether too personal.”

But the little French maid was not to be so easily turned from her purpose. Not recognizing her rejuvenated mistress, she clung gamely to her end of the towel while Spray snatched the other from Rex Pebble’s nerveless grasp. Once more he was bereft of adornment.

“Oh, I say,” he protested, dancing agilely after the hotly contested towel in the vain hope of obtaining some small degree of protection from it. “Can’t you two women settle this matter amicably? Why not give me the towel? I’m still quite old enough to know what to do with it, and,” he added earnestly, “I want to do it very badly.”

“Assuredly, M’sieu has sufficient age,” said Fifi. “I could see that at a glance.”

“Did you hear that, Rex?” cried Spray. “This product of the Parisian boulevards has been giving you the once over.”

“So has everyone else,” said Rex Pebble in a hopeless voice. “Where the hell is Nokashima? Hey, Nocka, bring me a tablecloth or anything else that’s handy. I’d be glad to get even a doily.”

There was the sound of a great deal of china falling crashingly to the floor. This was almost immediately followed by the lurching entrance of the Japanese, negligently trailing a tablecloth. It was plain to see that the little man was far gone in drink.

“Here is, boss,” he announced thickly. “I snatch off table plenty quick.”

“So we heard,” said Mr. Pebble dryly as he took the tablecloth and draped it round his body in a sketchy imitation of a Roman toga.

“That right, boss,” said Nokashima approvingly. “All things concealed from prying eye now. You look so nice. Just like long-dead statue.”

In the meantime, Spray, in trying to gain possession of Mr. Pebble’s abandoned towel, stood in imminent peril of losing her own. Preferring to retain her dignity rather than to win a hollow victory, she suddenly relinquished her hold on the towel, with the result that Fifi was sent hurtling through space into the arms of the little Jap, who clung to her for a moment, then carried her with him to the floor from which she promptly began to push a series of frantic cries.

Upon this scene of utter confusion a third nude figure entered and stood peering down with polite interest on the two struggling bodies. This third nude figure was also draped in a large bath towel. And the figure, such as it was, belonged to Major Lynnhaven Jaffey.

“I was taking a bit of a shower,” he explained to the room in general, “when, hearing a great commotion, I thought that possibly something might be wrong. Apparently there is.”

“Everything is wrong,” replied Spray Summers. “Every damn thing.”

“I see,” said the Major suavely. “This has all the ear-marks of a very low stag party. How I enjoyed them in my youth – the lower the better. I hope I’m not interrupting the entertainment.”

“Not at all,” Mr. Pebble assured him. “Nothing seems to be able to interrupt this entertainment. And in the meantime the house is afire.”

“Great heavens!” exclaimed the Major, nervously fingering his towel. “My old and rare will burn.”

“Your old and rare what?” demanded the chief in an uncompromising tone of voice.

“Never mind,” said the Major firmly. “Never mind. I must protect my old and rare.”

And with this he quickly departed,

“Damn me,” said the chief, greatly puzzled, “if I can see why his old and rare should burn any faster than the rest of him. This is the craziest house I’ve ever been in. What’s wrong with all you people, anyway?”

“I’ve got it, Chief,” declared the inquisitive fireman. “We’ve been lured to a nudist colony.”

“Oh, yeah?” cried Spray Summers in a nasty voice. “I wish someone would lure you to a graveyard! I’m getting sick of this. Come on, Rex, let’s go upstairs.” At the door she paused and looked back at the little Jap upon whose deflated chest Fifi was now sitting. “Nokashima,” said Spray severely, “stop pinching that French trollop and snap to it with those cocktails. This smoke has made me thirsty.”

“I not pinch French trollop,” said Nocka, in a weak voice. “She sitting on it, madam, and me, too.”

“Let the little drunkard up, Fifi,” continued Spray.

“And give those dull-looking firemen something to drink. It might sharpen their wits a bit.”

“Madam,” said Fifi, looking curiously at the woman standing in the doorway, “who are you?”

“I’m your mistress,” replied Spray coolly. “I’ve had my face lifted and everything else, too.”

“And the M’sieu,” asked the maid, “is he a new one, madam, or is he the old?”

“He is the old,” answered Spray. “And was he lifted, too?”

“Entirely out of himself,” said Spray, “but remember this, Fifi, just what was lifted should be no concern of yours.”

CHAPTER SIX

The Major’s Old and Rare

Mr. Henry, the non-smeller, felt nervously exhausted. By awkward leaps and bounds he was rapidly becoming a mental case. These leaps and bounds had carried him to the comparative seclusion of the front hall closet. Here he lay and considered the demolishment of his comfortable routine. The trying events of the evening had shot it full of holes. Mr. Henry seriously doubted if he would ever have the heart or the strength to reestablish it again.

From street corners the dog had hitherto been fearsomely impressed by fire engines and had vaguely wondered what devil’s work they were about, but until tonight he had never had any dealings with the rough-and-ready gentlemen who clung to these moving vehicles on their terrific dashes through the streets. This one experience had been more than enough for Mr. Henry. Being a dog of delicate sensibilities, he had formed the lowest opinion of the swarm of heavy-handed ruffians that had so ruthlessly invaded the privacy of his home. The vast quantities of water they had brought with them, together with the alarming appearance of so much smoke, had forced the animal to retreat with streaming eyes and a wet hide to his present place of safety.

Here Mr. Pebble and his mistress discovered Mr. Henry on their way upstairs. For a moment they stopped to consider the fitfully trembling bloodhound; then Spray’s lips slowly curved in scornful lines.

“Look at the recumbent coward,” she said. “Look at him.” She waved a hand disparagingly at the dog. “He lets the house burn down. He lets us all die in agony. He says, ‘To hell with all that so long as I am safe and undisturbed.’ And there he plops his great body down in that closet and reclines in a half swoon. If there ever was a pansy bloodhound that dog is it.”

“Not necessarily a pansy, Spray.” Mr. Pebble spoke up in defense of the dog. “That’s a pretty hard term to apply to a bloodhound. Only a short time ago I would have swooned with the greatest relief in the nearest closet at hand. The poor beast is a little fastidious about firemen, perhaps. Can’t say as I blame him for that.”

“Well, I blame him for everything,” retorted Spray. “If he hadn’t eaten up our steak there wouldn’t have been any fire, and if there hadn’t been any fire there wouldn’t have been any firemen. The dog deliberately got us into this jam. He couldn’t have done any worse had he gone rushing through the streets screaming, ‘Fire!’ at the top of his lungs.”

“You’re beginning to talk like Nokashima,” Rex Pebble warned her gently. “Don’t do it, for my sake. I’m not even convinced there is a fire.”

“Then you’re just as dumb as those firemen,” she retorted. “Never sure of anything. I suppose you’d have me believe there isn’t a fire raging somewhere in this house? Don’t be an ass. We’re actually trembling on the brink of a volcano. It’s terrific. And there that foolish sissy soul-fully luxuriates in the clutch of abject fear. No wonder he hasn’t any girl friends. The poor mutt hasn’t stayed away from this house a single night in his life. Does he expect us to carry him out in our arms? I’d like to torch-murder the beast.”

“You’re a little unfair to Mr. Henry,” said Rex Pebble mildly. “I hope you wouldn’t like the dog to become a debauched bloodhound. He’s bashful about his nose, perhaps. I should imagine a smell-less nose would be a terrible handicap to a dog in his relations with the opposite sex. You must know what a high value a dog places on his nose.”

“I neither know nor care what a dog places on his nose,” she replied. “I’d like to place a price on that dog’s head. I have my own nose to worry about, and it’s fairly gushing out smoke. And another thing, Mr. Henry isn’t atrophied in all his parts. He must be alive somewhere. Even if I were deaf, dumb, and blind I’d still find my man, believe me.”

“I do, Spray,” Mr. Pebble said with great sincerity. “I don’t doubt it for a moment. You’d even find your men, but you shouldn’t judge a clean-living bloodhound by your low standards.”

Mr. Henry did not at all relish the situation in which he found himself placed. He strongly objected to having himself discussed by persons he believed to be perfect strangers. Unable to recognize his old friends by their respective smells, he could find no traces in their radically altered bodies to give him a clue to their real identities. One thing alone remained familiar, and that was the sound of their voices. But this strange phenomenon, instead of comforting the dog, disturbed him all the more. How could these apparently new bodies make noises exactly like the old ones? Furthermore, these strangers had succeeded in ascertaining his name. That looked bad. They were doubtless up to some mischief – probably trying to snatch him for ransom. Unwilling to give any cause for offense, he wagged a deprecating tail, twisted his back to his audience, and lay still, hoping against hope that his little yellow boy friend would stagger to his rescue.

“Mr. Henry’s so lazy with his tail,” Rex Pebble remarked sadly as he slowly mounted the stairs.

Mr. Pebble maintained a suite of rooms in his mistress’s establishment. When things got too hot for him at his own home he frequently found it expedient thither to repair in search of mental tranquillity as well as bodily safety. Inasmuch as neither of these conditions lasted very long in the company of either woman, he was forced to do considerable traveling between the two houses. Mr. Pebble could not remember ever having been so fortunate as to find both of the ladies agreeably disposed towards him at one and the same time. Not infrequently in his endeavors to escape conflict he found himself leaping from the frying pan into the fire, both ladies being in their most hellish moods. In compensation he comforted himself with the thought that if Socrates achieved self-discipline by putting up with Xanthippe, he himself, by living with two shrews, might in the due course of time become twice as good as a philosopher – that is, if he did not crack under the strain. For the sake of convenience no less than cleanliness he found it helpful to maintain in each establishment a duplicate wardrobe and set of toilet accessories.

In the upper hall he took leave of his mistress and made his way to his own quarters. Here, for the good of his soul and the appeasement of his disgruntled poise, he poured himself a stiff drink and polished it off at a gulp. When both poise and soul were feeling somewhat bucked up, it occurred to him he might as well take a shower to dash off some of the wear and tear sustained by too long confinement in the smoke-filled kitchen. When this little matter had been safely put behind him, it again occurred to Mr. Pebble that it would be even a better idea to take still another drink for the purpose of keeping his soul and his poise in the pink of condition to which the first drink had jerked them.

It was while he was thus conscientiously employed that the sound of strange voices attracted his attention to the bedroom occupied by his mistress. Had that good lady been inhabiting the body she had possessed previous to her immersion in the pool, it would have mattered very little to Mr. Pebble if she had chosen to entertain the entire Marine Corps in her bedroom, but in her present rejuvenated condition he decided that such liberties smacked a trifle of immorality and were greatly to be deplored.

Tossing his soul and his poise to the four winds, but still retaining possession of his glass, Rex Pebble padded softly across the hall and bent an attentive ear to his mistress’s door, sipping thoughtfully the while. It should be said for Rex Pebble that he was blissfully unconscious of the damning fact he was seriously involving himself in the low practice of eavesdropping. To make matters even, however, it should also be stated that had he been aware of the nature of his occupation it would have made very little difference to him. He had lived too long with two women not to know that the game was played without any rules. It was catch as catch can always. The great hother and pother which nice people felt themselves called upon to make about eavesdropping did not trouble Rex Pebble at all. While admitting the fact that the eaves-dropper seldom heard anything good about himself, experience had proved that he frequently gleaned some in-valuable sidelights about others. To him it was the logical and intelligent thing to do, especially when dealing with such an unreliable character as his self-dramatizing mistress. Therefore, with a placid conscience Rex Pebble addressed his lips to his drink and his ear to the door and eavesdropped for all he was worth. From the other side of the door Spray Summers’ voice came to him in cold, dispassionate tones.

“For the second time,” she was saying, “I ask you, Major Jaffey, to explain your remarkable conduct. What do you mean by taking a shower in a lady’s bathroom?”

“I was told the house was on fire, madam,” explained the apologetic voice of Major Jaffey, “so I thought I’d be less inflammable if I kept myself wet.”

“If that was your brilliant idea,” continued Spray, “why didn’t you carry it out in Mr. Pebble’s bathroom?”

“I didn’t want to bother him with my old and rare,”

said the Major, as one who explains everything.

“And what, may I ask,” she demanded, “have I ever done to make you think your old and rare would be warmly welcomed here?”

“It’s still in tip-top condition,” Major Jaffey replied hopefully. “I have it right with me.”

“You have it with you,” repeated Spray in a startled voice. “Quite naturally you would have. Where else could you keep it?”

“Oh, I sometimes forget it,” the Major casually informed her. “Leave it knocking about, you know.”

“I don’t seem to understand all this,” she declared, “and I’m afraid I should not be enlightened.”

“But, madam,” protested the Major, “it’s very interesting, I assure you. You couldn’t help being delighted.”

“The mere thought of it even is revolting,” she retorted. “What sort of a proposal are you trying to make, anyway?”

On the other side of the door Mr. Pebble’s ear hinged forward in its anxiety to catch the Major’s answer.

“I would welcome an opportunity,” he told her, “to exhibit it to you and Mr. Pebble.”

“Major,” Spray Summers told the man, more in sorrow than in wrath, “I don’t know why you haven’t been run in long before this. Mr. Pebble is not the kind of man to be interested in your old and rare. He might be a bad man, but he’s not morbid.” She hesitated a moment, then added, “However, if it will make you feel any better I might take a little peek myself just to show you I’m broad-minded.”

“What a woman!” Rex Pebble inwardly exclaimed. “Neither age nor youth teaches her any better.”

“It’s all wrapped up,” said Major Jaffey, proudly. “No one can accuse me of not taking the best of care of it.”

“Who would even think of it, I’d like to know?” retorted Spray Summers. “It seems to be the only thing in the world you give a tinker’s damn about.”

“It keeps the wolf from the door,” observed the Major cheerfully.

“Does it?” replied the woman. “What a remarkable statement to make. I can’t see the slightest connection between wolves and your old and rare.”

“Madam,” responded the Major, “I was speaking merely figuratively.”

“Major,” Spray said wearily, “I don’t give a damn how you were speaking. Either produce this old and rare of which you seem so inordinately proud, or else have the grace to take it away. I want to put on some clothes.”

“Very well, dear lady,” said the Major. “I won’t be half a minute.”

Rex Pebble, on the other side of the door, was in a small flutter of excitement. He wanted to be in on this. His curiosity was only natural. He had heard too much about the Major’s highly vaunted old and rare not to be interested on his own behalf. It must be something extra special, he reflected, as he removed his ear from the door and placed an eye to the keyhole. His vision was disappointingly limited. All he could see were small sections of two towels. Making the best of a trying situation he riveted his gaze on one of these and waited breathlessly. At last this remarkable old and rare was about to be revealed. But unfortunately it never was – that is, not on on this occasion. The three actors involved in this unedifying little drama were doomed to disappointment by the unexpected arrival of a fourth. A small protesting shriek from Spray greeted his arrival.

“What do you mean,” Rex Pebble heard her demand, “by crawling in my window? Can’t you see I’m nearly undressed?”

“Sorry, lady,” said a bored voice. “Hope you don’t think I’m blind. Nearly’s not the word. You damn well are undressed. Why don’t you put something on?”

“I’ve been much too busy,” said the lady haughtily.

“So I see, lady,” said the fireman, “but you’ll have to cut all this funny business out for awhile. The house is on fire.”

“This part of it isn’t,” objected Spray. “What are you doing up here?”

“I’m looking for the fire, lady,” the voice explained patiently. “The boys downstairs are sick and tired of looking for it. And they’re drinking something fierce. Say, lady, is that old bird your father or just a friend?”

“What’s that to you?” snapped Spray.

“Not a thing, lady,” replied the fireman. “Not a thing. I was just wondering what he was to you.”

“That, also, is none of your business,” Spray retorted, “but if you must know, the gentleman was just about to show me his old and rare.”

“No shame,” muttered Mr. Pebble sorrowfully. “No shame at all. Just a gregarious old moll.”

“What was he going to show you, lady?” asked the fireman in an awed voice. “His old and rare, did you say? And you’re telling me? Fire or no fire, I guess I’ll go away.”

“I didn’t suggest it,” Spray replied defensively, “but the man seems to be frantic to have someone look at his old and rare.”

“Well, I won’t be a party to this sort of thing,” said the fireman. “I’m going to clear out.”

“Don’t go,” said the Major politely. “Perhaps I could interest you. I make my living by it, you know.”

“Not off guys like me you don’t,” proclaimed the fire-man with some show of heat. “We’ve got old and rares of our own. Why should I look at yours? Is there anything funny about it – you know – anything strange?”

“Of course, I can hardly say,” replied the Major in a professional voice, “until I’ve looked yours over.”

“You’ll never get the chance to do that,” said the fire-man stubbornly, “not unless you throw me down and hold me, the two of you.”

“We could hardly bring ourselves to do that,” declared the Major. “I merely thought you might be interested in comparing items, that’s all.”

“That’s too much,” retorted the fireman. “You have some paralyzing thoughts, mister.”

“I’m getting sick and tired of all this talk,” broke in Spray Summers. “Why don’t you both toddle off with your old rares? They’re no novelty in my young life. Here I come peacefully and decently into my own room to put on some clothes, and what do I find? I ask you that. What do I find? One man taking a shower and another one crawling in my window, and both of them trying to show me their old and rares. What chance has a poor girl got, anyway? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if that shrimp Nokashima came crawling out from under the bed.”

“Listen, lady,” put in the fireman in an injured voice, “I didn’t climb up this ladder for the express purpose of showing you my old and rare. You’ve got me all wrong. I’m not like that, lady. I generally have to know a person a long time before I even think of such a thing. I know how to act. It’s the old bird that started all this, him and his precious old and rare. What’s he got to be so proud about, anyway?”

“I’m sure I can’t tell you,” Spray declared, “but he does seem to be just mad about it. That’s all he’s had on his mind since the moment I first set eyes on him.”

“How they do run on,” Rex Pebble mused, looking into his empty glass. “I wonder what it’s all about?”

He was not long in learning. Major Lynnhaven Jaffey had been wondering the same thing himself. He now decided to take definite steps to bring the situation to a head.

“Aren’t either of you fond of reading?” he asked, “because, if you’re not, I might just as well call the whole thing off.”

“Sure I’m fond of reading,” retorted Spray, “but what has that to do with your old and rare?”

“Say, lady,” suggested the fireman, seized by a sudden inspiration, “maybe the old guy is tattooed. That might explain everything.”

“Will you please keep still!” cried Spray.

The suggestion of the fireman had so intrigued Mr. Pebble that he actually tried to worm his eye through the key-hole. Perhaps, after all, the man had hit upon the explanation of the Major’s quaint obsession.

“I confess I am quite unable to follow this conversation,” that gentleman announced in distant tones, “but I am referring to my collection of old and rare books. I have some exceptionally fine items, I assure you.”

For a moment dead silence followed this revelation; then Spray Summers rallied her scattered faculties and made as women will – a courageous effort to save her own face at the expense of someone else’s.

“Oh,” she said a little flatly. “Why, of course. For goodness sake, Major, old boy, what did you think I was talking about? Address your remarks to this dumb fireman. He’s balled everything all up. But don’t be too severe with him, Major. He doesn’t know any better. You know how firemen are. They are born with low instincts – all of them.”

“Is that so?” retorted the fireman. “Trying to make me the goat, are you? Well, it won’t wash. I had nothing to do with this old and rare party to begin with. And if you’d like to know the truth you’re about the rummiest couple I’ve run into since I’ve been on the force. There you stand, the two of you, with only a pair of towels for protection, and acting as high and mighty as if you were clad in blinking ermine.”

“What’s a blinking ermine?” asked Spray, hoping to change the subject.

“Aw, it’s some sort of a skin,” muttered the fireman sulkily. “You should know, lady. They get it off animals – some sort of animals.”

“Who do?” Major Jaffey wanted to know.

“Does,” corrected Spray.

“How do I know?” exclaimed the fireman. “The guys what go after the blinking ermine, I suppose. Don’t ask me, lady. I’m just a dumb fireman with low instincts like you said.”

“You’re all of that,” replied Spray, “but I have to ask you questions. What makes these ermine blink?”

“Oh, let me alone!” cried the fireman peevishly. “I can’t stand any more. Maybe the blinking ermine blink because they don’t know any better. Maybe they blink because their eyes get all watery from looking out for trappers. There might be a hundred reasons, and,” he concluded in a hoarse voice, “maybe they don’t blink at all. This house is burning up, and there you stand trying to get me to tell you bedtime stories about cute little blinking ermine. To hell with ermine, I say!”

“And that’s about the only sensible thing you have said,” Spray told him coldly.

“Madam,” declared the Major, “this fireman deserves to be pitied. It’s plain to see he’s in a state of nerves. He might even be a little mad. Not dangerous, you know, but still scarcely responsible. I have long believed that all firemen eventually become a trifle mental – like nurses and doctors and dentists; also butchers and judges.”

Horrid, gasping noises from the window put an end to the Major’s observations.

“Ugh!” mouthed the enraged fireman, and this was followed by a sound not unlike a long drawn out, “o-o-o,h.”

Neither noise the man made was very pretty to hear. “Just wait till I get my hands on the old guy,” he continued more coherently. “I’m going to tear his naked body to bits.”

“Be quiet, my good man,” said the Major, not unkindly; then, turning to Spray, he politely inquired, “Shall I show you my old and rare now, madam? I took the liberty of tucking the bundle in the bathroom where it would be quite safe.”

“Then you also took the liberty of tucking your body under the shower,” she commented caustically, “where it would be quite safe. Go on and produce your old and rare, even if it is an anticlimax.”

“Say, lady,” said the fireman plaintively, as soon as the Major had left the room, “I’m getting awful tired standing out here on this ladder. Can I come in now and adjust my nozzle?”

“Adjust your what?” gasped Spray a little hysterically, swinging quickly about. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You must be delirious.”

“My nozzle, lady,” went on the fireman in a dull, patient voice. “My nozzle needs fixing.”

“Be still!” Spray scolded. “Don’t go on about it. You’re as confiding as a boy of five.” She looked at the fireman rebukingly; then her heart softened at the sight of his worried face. “Oh, all right,” she continued in a hopeless voice. “It’s all too much for a single mind to bear. Come on in if you have to, but you’ve got to wait until the Major gets out of the bathroom. What with you and your nozzle, as you so childishly call it, and that one with his blooming old and rare, I’m beginning to think I’m going a little mad myself.”

And so was Rex Pebble. Unable to stand the suspense any longer, he flung open the door and strode majestically into the room. He was just in time to see the fireman entering through the window, laboriously dragging after him a length of hose with a gleaming nozzle.

“Oh!” exclaimed Spray, looking at the hose. “Oh dear, how stupid of me. I didn’t understand.”

“And I still don’t,” said Mr. Pebble. “What goes on in here?”

“Gord!” muttered the fireman, gazing at Rex Pebble with round, wondering eyes. “Another old and rare. Don’t anybody ever wear any clothes at all in this joint?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Exit on Hook and Ladder

“Why should we wear clothes?” demanded Rex Pebble with an ill-advised swish of his toga as he stalked across the room. “this lady and myself have been born again. we have nothing to conceal.”

“You’ve got enough and more,” retorted the fireman. “I wouldn’t go round like that in my own home.”

“Fireman,” replied Mr. Pebble, “yours is a mistrustful nature or a very bad home. At the moment, I can’t say which. You should learn to forget your body – to dismiss it, so to speak.”

“If I had a body like his,” put in Spray, “I’d be only too glad to forget it. I’d chuck it through the window.”

“What’s so awful about my body, lady?” the man asked in hurt tones.

“Almost everything,” declared Spray. “It’s overdressed, to start with. You’ve got on a funny hat, and you’ve got on a funny coat, and your rubber boots are a fair scream. I don’t know for certain, but I’d lay attractive odds you’re wearing long drawers as well – red ones.”

“I am,” admitted the fireman. “I always wear ’em, but they are not red.”

“As I thought,” replied Spray. “They’re not red, but he always wears them. That means he sleeps in the things, and probably in his shirt, also. Tell him to go away.”

“But, lady,” protested the fireman, “us boys just naturally have to sleep in our underwear.”

“You couldn’t sleep naturally in your underwear,” said Spray. “Don’t try to do it in this house.”

“I’m not sleeping, lady.”

“You might as well be,” she told him, “for all the good you’re doing.”

“But, lady,” began the fireman, then hopelessly abandoned all thought of speaking sensibly with anyone connected with this surprising establishment. “You’ve got me all confused,” he finished moodily. “I can’t seem to be able to think straight any more.”

“Fireman,” said Mr. Pebble, “sit down and tell us your story from the beginning. Take off your hat and coat and forget dull routine for a space. And please endeavor to stop bickering with that woman. You should have better sense.”

“But this house is burning up somewhere,” the fireman protested.

“But not here,” replied Mr. Pebble calmly, “and we are all that matter. Anyway, fireman, if this house does burn down, I’ll set fire to another one and let you put it out. Nokashima will do it for me.”

“Ha!” exclaimed the voice of Major Jaffey as the man himself staggered from the bathroom with a large bundle in his arms. “Ha! How jolly everyone looks. Ha!”

“Will you stop making that foolish noise?” said Spray. “You talk like a radio announcer for little children.”

“Forgive my enthusiasm, madam,” apologized the Major. “I always get that way when exhibiting my old and rare.”

Mr. Pebble groaned.

“I wish you would add ‘books’,” he said, “when you refer to that bundle, Major. Although I know what’s in it now, the shock still remains.”

“Certainly, sir,” agreed the Major readily enough, then paused and looked closely at Rex Pebble and his mistress. “Tell me,” he continued, “are you the same couple I had the privilege of meeting near the pool? You seem so very much younger now, but, of course, I may be wrong. The light was failing then, and my eyes are not what they used to be. Also, owing to the circumstances, I imagine you must have been under a considerable strain at the moment.”

“You can attribute your error to all three factors,” replied Mr. Pebble, “although I will admit I haven’t felt so young in years.”

“I felt that way myself,” remarked Spray, “before I got involved with these two idiots. They have aged me terribly.”

“Considering your abundant beauty,” replied the Major with questionable gallantry as he ran his eyes over the woman, “you are lucky you did not get yourself even more deeply involved. Had I been a few years younger —”

“Say it and I’ll knock your block off,” said Spray. “I’ve stood enough from you and your old and rare. Break out your items. Have you any real bad books in that bundle?”

“That’s all I have,” replied the Major proudly. “Frankly, I don’t see how any one person could have written some of them. They seem more like a compilation – the dregs of the ages, you know. I’ve a few that are so exceptionally vile they have to be printed in Latin.”

“Well, don’t show us any of those,” Spray told him. “I’m a patriotic woman, and I don’t like foreign dirt. It must be made in America.”

“Your country is quite capable of it,” the Major assured her generously. “But most American women are still a little fanciful about pornography and husbands.”

“Pornography and husbands,” Spray interrupted, “mean exactly the same thing.”

“Which is as it should be,” replied the Major, “but as I was saying, my lady clients – they constitute the majority – seem to fall more readily for both men and books bearing foreign titles.”

“They’re more depraved,” observed Spray, “and all women need a dash of depravity to round out their natures. Men are depraved always. Women only in spots.”

“Lady,” said the fireman unexpectedly, “you never seem to be able to get out of your spot.”

“Hit him with something,” said the lady composedly.

“I think I’ve been insulted, although it doesn’t hurt any.”

A perfunctory knock on the door heralded the arrival of Nokashima, carrying a tall shaker full of fresh cocktails and two glasses.

“Get two more glasses, Nocka,” Spray commanded. “I’m celebrating this fire with the dregs of society. It’s a regular slumming party.”

“Very good, madam,” grinned the little yellow man. “I go get. One glass for brute of fire fella, other for Old and Rare.” At the mere mention of the name Nokashima seemed to become irresistibly amused. He indulged in several inane giggles, then rapidly blinked his eyes. “Very funny name, that,” he commented. “Always good for small giggle. Old and Rare. What is this old and rare he all time talk about? I fairly stream with mirth. Such elderly gentleman to go on so. Old, yes, but rare – I not think that, boss. What you think? Maybe I know. Maybe I not. I keep mouth shut. Not laughing matter, all this old and rare.”

“You neither keep your mouth shut,” Spray retorted scoldingly, “nor do you refrain from laughing. That’s all you’ve been doing since you tainted the air with your presence – giggling and gibbering like an hysterical high- school girl with a case of yellow jaundice. Get out of here and fetch those glasses.”

“I get,” replied Nokashima. “I get, madam, plenty quick. I know man once with old and rare. He Japanese fella, too.”

“No,” said Mr. Pebble firmly but sympathetically. “No, Nocka. Not that one. You can tell it to Fifi after you’ve brought those glasses.”

Nokashima was always at his highest efficiency when ministering to people’s thirst, including his own. He was both generous and broad-minded about it. Something in his simple nature was soothed and filled with joy by having dealings with either a bottle or a cocktail shaker. He would never have lasted long in a bone-dry family. The quick little patter of his feet had hardly died away before he was back again with the glasses.

“Fire fellas all good and drunk,” he announced as he filled the four glasses. “All wet, too. Unable to find small blaze they put themselves out with roars and drinks. Lots of fun down there. Fifi very busy with love and fury. I participate, madam, with tentatively. That right, boss?”

“Almost, Nocka,” replied Mr. Pebble. “We’ll take that up later. Is there still any smoke doing?”

“Plenty of all that,” declared Nocka. “All come from oven where steak still smolder. They not look into that. Shall I suggest, madam?”

“No,” Spray told him. “I wouldn’t go so far as that. They might think you officious. Firemen don’t like to be told anything. Just let them romp around in their own oafish way. Perhaps they will go to sleep.”

There was a knock on the door, and a fireman partially blinded by either smoke or liquor staggered into the room.

“Chief sends his compliments, lady,” he said in a dazed voice. “He wants to know if we can set fire to your house in a couple of places – just little ones, you know. You see, lady, we’ve got to have some sort of a fire to give us boys an excuse for having stayed away so long. Can we?”

“Sure,” replied Spray generously. “Go right ahead. Lend us your hook and ladder?”

“Help yourself,” replied the fireman with a big-hearted wave of his hand. “But don’t hurt it. It’s a good old hook and ladder. Hal, there, will help you. He swings a mean rear wheel.”

“I do that,” replied Hal modestly. “Glad to bear a hand.” He paused and grinned at the other fireman, then added, “These are real nice people after you get to know them.”

“That’s mighty nice of you,” Rex Pebble told the fireman. “It’s a funny thing, but I’ve never been on a hook and ladder.”

“You’ll like it,” said the Chief’s emissary simply. “The corners are just great. They’ll like the corners, won’t they, Hal?”

“Yes,” replied Hal. “They’ll like the corners.”

“May I be the bell ringer?” asked Spray Summers. “I never rang the bell on a hook and ladder.”

“Go right ahead, lady,” said the first fireman. “You can ring the bell just as much as you please. There’s a siren, too.”

“Isn’t that dandy!” said Spray. “Empty that shaker, Nocka, and fill it up again. Listen, Hal, will you lend me your hat and coat?”

“Guess I better had,” replied Hal, thoughtfully surveying the woman. “You don’t seem to be willing to wear anything else.”

“Then I’ll drive,” Mr. Pebble decided, “and the Major can hang on.”

Nokashima giggled at this as if amused by some inner vision.

“Tough riding for Old and Rare,” he said, “but what matter? All in fun. I come along with bottles.”

“Must I go?” asked Major Jaffey. “I too have never been on a hook and ladder, and I’m not sure that I yearn to acquire the habit at my time of life.”

“Oh, you’ve got to come,” Spray assured him. “Our hook-and-ladder party wouldn’t be complete without you, Major.”

The Major sighed resignedly, then retired to the bath-room from which he presently emerged attired in a pair of trousers.

Several shakers later the five members of the improvised fire company, now no longer in their right minds, clung to the long vehicle for better support and peered unintelligently at its various mysterious parts.

“It’s a wicked-looking thing,” observed the Major skeptically. “Which is the front end of it, do you suppose?”

“Here wheel,” exclaimed Nokashima. “Maybe that front end. I not sure. Maybe is, though.”

“There are two wheels,” declared Rex Pebble. “Two good excellent wheels. Both different. I’m looking for the front one.”

“There’s the front one,” said Hal, the fireman. “That’s your wheel. I’ll take the back wheel and twist it clean off.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” objected Major Jaffey. “We might need the thing for corners.”

“There are not going to be any corners,” said Rex Pebble. “I’m going to cut right through them.”

“Oh, you take the front wheel and I’ll take the back wheel,” Spray sang in a high, plaintive voice, “and I’ll be in wee bits before you.”

“Don’t,” protested the Major, shivering in spite of him-self. “When your voice issues from under that helmet it sounds like a wind blowing from a cave. That’s a very sad song. I have Scotch blood in my veins.”

“And I have Japanese,” Nokashima informed them. “Might not have too much of that very long. Where I stand, boss?”

“Stand on the running board,” commanded Mr. Pebble, “so you’ll be able to run back and forth with the bottles. I want some Scotch whisky in my veins. Pass me a bottle.” He drank deeply, then surveyed his crew with a kindling eye. “A strange gathering,” he murmured, “to be seen anywhere, but especially on a hook and ladder.”

Rex Pebble had spoken no more than what was true.

For the first time in her life Spray Summers had allowed her personality to become completely submerged, although much of the rest of her was fully exposed. In place of the towel she wore the fireman’s rubber coat, only the top button of which was in service. Her head, nose, and eyes were hidden from view within the helmet. Her legs and feet were bare save for the unhelpful addition of a pair of high-heeled mules.

“They ought to cut windows in these diving bells,” she complained as she groped her way round the hook and ladder. “It’s like playing with a prehistoric animal in the pitch dark. I’m not going to see much life in this darned thing.”

“Why don’t you take it off?” asked Mr. Pebble.

“I refuse,” she retorted. “It must stay on. This helmet disguises my sex.”

Major Jaffey laughed mirthlessly.

“I’m glad you think so,” he said.

“Listen, lady,” put in Hal, the fireman, “I don’t like to say anything, seeing as how you all have been so nice to me, but if you’re going happily about thinking your sex is disguised, someone’s going to get an awful shock. That helmet just hides your head, and there’s lots more to you than that. Why don’t you button my coat? I always do.”

“You button your mouth,” said Spray. “I’m not going to suffocate for anybody. And, anyway, what’s the great difference between us? You’re naked from the waist up, and I’m naked from the waist down. It’s a tie. And look at Gaius Cassius, there. He’s just an animated tablecloth.”

It was true. Rex Pebble was stalking about in the darkness very much in the manner of the last of the Romans. His feet were encased in a pair of soft-soled slippers. Major Lynnhaven Jaffey was dressed in the same fashion as the fireman, being content with a pair of trousers. The little yellow man was the best dressed member of the party. He was fully clad, and his white mess jacket gave a nautical touch to the outfit. However, it must be said that it would have been difficult to find five persons who looked less qualified to take a hook and ladder out for a spin.

“Yes,” Mr. Pebble was saying to no one in particular, “it certainly is a bang-up hook and ladder. Never looked at one close before.”

“Bang-up is an unfortunate term,” replied Major Jaffey. “I greatly fear it’s going to look even banger-up before this night is over.”

“Have no fear,” Mr. Pebble assured him. “Have no fear at all. This is going to be a runaway. I could drive the thing in my sleep. Come here with that pail, Nocka. I want a drink.”

“We all want a drink, Nocka,” said Spray. “We’ll make it a stirrup cup.”

The little yellow man set down his pail while the party gathered round it and selected bottles at random. Stars from a naked sky winked at their libations. It was a clear, still night. Occasionally a snatch of song or a burst of coarse laughter drifted from the house. Once the French maid, Fifi, was heard to push a perfunctory scream, after which the burst of laughter was, if anything, even coarser. The street was deserted. What few neighbors had been attracted to the spot by the noise of the fire apparatus had returned to their respective homes, their fond expectations unrealized. Few things are more disappointing to the normally constituted man or woman than a fire that fails to come off, especially when the fire belongs to someone else. Taking all things into consideration, Rex Pebble could not have chosen a better night for a hook-and-ladder ride.

“To your places, everyone,” he commanded. “Hal, you know this hook and ladder very much better than we do, help them to climb aboard. Nokashima, look alert with that bucket of bottles, and when anyone calls, scramble to him with a drink. I suspect he’ll need it.”

“Also she,” commented Spray.

It is doubtful if the members of that oddly assorted group actually believed they were going through with the mad enterprise up to the moment Rex Pebble set the hook and ladder in motion with a violent and ominous lurch.

“It’s a runaway,” he called back over his shoulder. “I could drive this boat with my eyes shut.”

“Hope not do,” muttered Nokashima. “If boat run away already, what will be later? Mere scamper along, I fear, don’t you, boss?”

“I fear nothing,” Mr. Pebble shouted.

“So do I,” sang out Spray. “Lend an ear to this one.” Like a soul in torment the scream of the siren split through the night.

“Don’t do that,” protested the Major, who appeared at the moment to be chinning himself on a ladder. “It sounds so ostentatious. Why not glide smoothly along so we can all enjoy the scenery?”

“This crazy hook and ladder doesn’t know any better,” Mr. Pebble explained between lurches. “It seems to have only one speed, and that’s high, like myself. Haven’t found the foot brake yet.”

“Well, hurry up and find it,” shouted the firemen, his face streaming with perspiration. “If we don’t brake together we’ll damn well break apart.”

“Sounds like a quotation to me,” Rex Pebble observed above the racket. “Oh, here’s the brake. Hold tight, everyone.”

For an awful moment the hook and ladder seemed to be of at least two minds about what to do with itself. The front wheels came to a sudden stop while the rear ones appeared to be determined to continue forward to see what was going on up there. The middle section, after a passionate attempt to buck, compromised by slewing sidewise, thus giving to the hook and ladder the appearance of a sprawling Z. Mr. Pebble, looking back over his shoulder, found himself sitting almost face to face with the fireman in the rear seat.

“Good gracious!” exclaimed Mr. Pebble. “How did you get here? I’ve been under the impression there were yards and yards of sheer ladder between us.”

“God!” grated the fireman. “What a thing to do! I’m disgusted.”

“Mist’ Old and Rare,” proclaimed Nokashima, “seem to be disgust also. Hear funny noises he make.”

“Dear me,” ejaculated Rex Pebble, regarding the dangling body of Major Jaffey. “The poor chap. I think we’ve jerked him into a suicide. He’s actually strangling to death between two ladders. Hurry, Nocka, and unhook his chin. I can’t stand those noises.”

“He not make them long,” said the little yellow man. “All up soon with Old and Rare.”

Giggling callously to himself at the prospect of the Major’s approaching strangulation, Nokashima wormed his way through a jungle of ladders and laid hands on the dangling body. And that was literally what the Major had succeeded in doing with his body. In some strange way he had contrived to get his neck wedged between two ladders. The rest of the man was swinging free. Now, it does not improve a dangling body to be burdened with additional weight. The little yellow man burdened the Major’s with his, or to put it clearly, he added his body to the Major’s and clung on. Even in his agony an expression of sheer astonishment flickered in the old gentleman’s bulging eyes before horror once more filled them.

“Come down,” panted Nokashima. “You hear up above? Boss say not dangle. He not like whiffling noise. Squeeze hard through.”

Every instinct in the Major’s body cried out to have words with this maniacal Japanese, but those instincts were set at naught by his rapidly closing throat. Rex Pebble had climbed down from his lofty seat and now stood watching the efforts of the little servant with deep absorption. He was joined by Spray and the fireman.

“What’s wrong now?” she wanted to know.

“The Major’s dangling,” Mr. Pebble told her briefly. “I can’t drive a dangling body through the streets.”

“Why doesn’t that little Jap try to push the body up?” demanded the fireman. “He’s swinging from the poor guy’s legs just like they were a couple of ropes. That’s not going to help his neck any.”

“I’m afraid the neck is beyond redemption,” Mr. Pebble observed. “However, there’s no harm trying. Hey, Nocka! Stop playing Tarzan with the Major’s legs and try to push him up. See if you can keep his head on. He’ll be no good without it.”

Nokashima reversed his tactics and pushed with all his might.

“You hear up there?” he grunted. “You hear what boss say? Push hard up. Altogether push.” The Japanese took his own injunction so seriously that the Major’s long body doubled up like a jackknife. This greatly perplexed Nokashima. “Can’t squeeze shoulders through now, boss. What say I do – let body hang?”

“Spread the ladders,” cried Hal, the fireman. “Here, let me at him.”

He clawed his way through the ladders and quickly released the Major. That gentleman dropped to the street and refused to budge until he had been resuscitated by several drinks, after which he called Nokashima every vile name he could drag from the darkened recesses of his memory. This served only to amuse the little yellow man.

“Major better dead than live,” he observed. “He make bad sounds either way.”

“Is that so, you dope-fed flea?” growled the Major, seating himself on the curb. “Who did you think you were, anyway, the man on the flying trapeze? One would think my neck was a length of molasses candy, the way you wobbled it about.”

“Let’s try to forget all about it,” Rex Pebble suggested, seating himself by the Major. “Sit down, everybody, and we’ll have a bit of a drink before we try another spin.”

It was while they were thus peacefully engaged that they became aware of a person behind them. Turning defensively, they confronted the presence. It turned out to be a hatless gentleman in evening clothes and a flushed face.

“Hello,” said the well-dressed gentleman with childlike directness. “Give me some of that drink. I’m thirsty.”

“Why should we give you some of this drink?” asked Spray Summers. “We’re thirsty, too.”

“But you’ve got such an awful lot of it,” explained the man. “And I haven’t any.”

“We like a lot of it,” Spray retorted.

“So do I,” agreed the man. “Give me just a little sip.”

“Give him a little sip,” Mr. Pebble said, then addressed himself to the stranger. “Have you got a fire any-where that needs a little putting out?”

“I’ve got one inside me,” said the man, “but nothing can put that out.”

“You don’t understand,” said Mr. Pebble. “I mean a real one. We’ve got a hook and ladder we could use if you only had a fire.”

“I’ve got a house,” replied the man thoughtfully. “It would make a good fire. It’s so big. But you might burn my family up. You don’t want to do that, do you?”

“Not especially,” said Rex Pebble. “We’ll put your family out also.”

“You mean, after it’s caught fire?”

“Any old time,” declared Mr. Pebble. “If and when your family catches fire.”

“Why not put my family out first?” asked the gentleman.

“We might wake somebody up,” said Mr. Pebble.

“That’s right,” agreed the gentleman, now thoroughly convinced. “We’ll put them out after. Let’s have some more drink, then we’ll set fire to my house and family. Sure you can put them out?”

“No,” declared Spray promptly. “We never put out any fires. My house is on fire right now, but we can’t find out where.”

“Maybe it’s your family,” suggested the man.

“No,” replied Spray. “I don’t think you’re right. I haven’t any family.”

“Then it’s burning elsewhere,” commented Mr. Pebble.

“You never lose a chance, do you?” sneered the woman. “When I was a babe in arms I had a swell family.”

“All right, sweetheart,” said Mr. Pebble, hastily. “All right. Let’s not start that again.”

“I’ve put out lots of fires,” Hal announced boastfully as he removed a bottle from his lips. “I’ve put out entire cities.”

“That’s all very well,” put in Major Jaffey, “but what we need now is someone who knows how to build a fire.”

“I know how to make fire,” said Nokashima, “but I not know how to put it out. I break down in nerves.”

“I can build ’em,” bragged the fireman, “and I can put ’em out. Come on, show me this house.”

Together the little party followed Hal across a smooth lawn in the direction of a magnificent residence.

“We’ll set it afire in the back,” he whispered, “because if we started it in the front someone might notice it before it had time to do any good.”

“It’s not going to do my family any good, no matter where you set it on fire,” observed the gentleman. “My name is Gibbs. What’s yours? I’d like to know the name of the people I’m setting my house on fire with – it seems less impersonal that way.”

“That man’s name is Major Jaffey,” Spray said with great presence of mind. “He’ll do for the bunch of us. We’re all Jaffeys except the opium eater, and he isn’t human. The Major’s our drunken father.”

“He dresses you sort of funny,” remarked Mr. Gibbs. “Haven’t you enough clothes to go round?”

“Around what?” asked Spray.

“It doesn’t matter,” replied Mr. Gibbs. “Don’t mention it. Sorry I spoke. What a lovely night for a fire. Thought you had no family.”

“I don’t count them,” Spray told him.

“I couldn’t tonight,” said the man. “Not even if I tried, but I won’t ever forget them.”

This sort of conversation was enough to get them without mishap to the back of the house. Here they busied themselves collecting papers and bits of wood which, under the direction of Hal, the two-way fireman, they piled up in a corner of the back veranda.

“That should be enough to burn my house up,” observed Mr. Gibbs, “not to mention my family.”

The Major produced a box of matches, and soon the fire was merrily burning. Mr. Gibbs considered the blaze for a moment, then disgustedly snapped his fingers.

“There’s been a mistake,” he announced. “We’ve set fire to the wrong house. This one isn’t mine.”

“Don’t you know your own home?” demanded Rex Pebble.

“Well, you see,” explained Mr. Gibbs, “I live in the front of mine. Rarely get round to the back.”

“Oh, I see,” said Mr. Pebble. “That does make things different. What shall we do now?”

“We might put this fire out,” replied Mr. Gibbs, “and then go over to my place. It’s just next door. Or we might burn them both down. What do you think?”

“I think,” said Major Jaffey, “that it’s high time we were shoving off. It wouldn’t look well for us to be seen setting fire to the house of perfect strangers.”

“Oh, I know these people,” declared Mr. Gibbs. “They are good friends of mine.”

“You mean,” put in Spray, “they were good friends of yours. I agree with Daddy for a change. Let’s clear out.”

“Wait a sec,” said Mr. Gibbs. “I’d better let these people know their house is burning up, or they might burn up with it.”

With this he started shouting in a loud voice and kept it up until a window flew open and a bald head was thrust out into the night. Mr. Pebble and his companions crept shyly out of sight behind some bushes.

“Oh, it’s you, Gibbs,” said the owner of the bald head. “Drunk as usual. What have you done this time – set fire to my house?”

“My mistake, Charlie,” replied Gibbs. “I thought this house was mine. Sorry.”

“No,” answered Charlie, looking down at the blaze. “This isn’t your house. Yours is next door. I’ve been living here for quite some time.”

“Sure you have, Charlie,” laughed Mr. Gibbs. “As if I didn’t know that.”

“But you didn’t know it,” said Charlie. “You just admitted you didn’t.”

“Not in the dark,” explained Mr. Gibbs, “but now that it’s burning down I recognize it distinctly. This is your house, Charlie, and I set fire to it. How am I ever going to make it up to you? Shall I set mine on fire, Charlie?”

“No,” replied Charlie generously. “Don’t do anything rash. Let me set it on fire for you.”

“That’s fair, Charlie,” said Mr. Gibbs with every indication of sincere gratitude. “That’s what I call meeting me more than halfway. But hadn’t you better wake your folks up first? A spark might blow in, you know, and ignite one of them.”

“I hope a spark ignites them all,” declared Charlie with surprising ferocity. “If it did, I might be able to enjoy a little peace at home.”

“But not if your home burns down,” Mr. Gibbs re-minded him. “Not then, Charlie, because if your house burns down you won’t have any home in which to enjoy your peace.”

“That’s well taken,” said Charlie. “I’ll be right down to help you put out this fire; then we’ll see how your house burns.”

Charlie’s bald head was withdrawn from the night, and in a surprisingly short time the man appeared on the back veranda.

“It’s a good fire,” commented Mr. Gibbs modestly.

“Much too good for this house,” replied Charlie. “A fire like that deserves far better material – something more institutional and centrally located. What’s bad for fires?”

“Water,” suggested Mr. Gibbs.

“I know,” said the other impatiently, “but that’s so old-fashioned. Couldn’t we think up a new way?”

“You know something,” said Mr. Pebble in a low voice to Spray. “The way they go on is almost making me sober. We’ve been listening to a conversation either between two exceedingly courteous lunatics or else two quietly plastered gentlemen with a quaint sense of fun.”

“Perhaps they’re drunk and insane too,” suggested Spray. “These thoroughbred families can throw off some rare progeny every now and then. Let’s clear out of this. We’re really quite harmless compared with them.”

But before they crept away through the shadows the members of the party were privileged to catch a last snatch of conversation between the two gentlemen.

“It entirely slipped my mind,” Mr. Gibbs was saying. “Only a short time ago I invited a number of half-naked persons to take part in this fire. They had a dandy hook and ladder.”

“That’s too bad,” was Charlie’s sympathetic reply.

“They must have gone to some other house. I’ve had a swell hook and ladder up in the attic for years. Got it on my seventh birthday. Only trouble is, two wheels are missing and it hasn’t any ladders.”

“And anyway,” said Mr. Gibbs, “it wouldn’t be quite large enough. This fire’s getting taller all the time.”

“They do,” observed Charlie wisely, “until they go out.”

“That tears it!” exclaimed Spray. “Let’s hurry. Those two men are as mad as a couple of hatters.”

Mr. Pebble never did learn what the two gentlemen did with their fire. The amazing events of that evening and of many subsequent ones fully occupied his mind. In later years, however, he occasionally found himself wondering whether Mr. Gibbs and his friend Charlie were really as mad as they seemed or were merely passing the time away in idle banter. Probably he could have found out had he cared to, but it was one of those piquant little problems he preferred to leave unsolved. As it was, Rex Pebble learned far too many of the truths of life to make it a going concern. However, he succeeded in disguising this knowledge to himself as well as to others – that is, most of the time he did.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Lower Half’s a Lady

It has been almost definitely established that no one hook and ladder ever succeeded in making more of a nuisance of itself than did the one so casually borrowed by Rex Pebble and his party.

After its departure from the slightly burning residence of Charlie, the various stages of its progress were reported more or less hysterically by outraged property owners of the surrounding community telephoning in to police headquarters.

The eccentric behavior of the hook and ladder could be attributed to several causes, all of which militated against the safety and best interests of those riding upon it as well as those innocent citizens who were so unfortunate as to have anything at all to do with it. Unfamiliarity with the operation of the attenuated vehicle was one of the main causes. Another one could be reasonably said to be the artificially stimulated condition of the members of its crew. A steady flow of gratuitous and irresponsible advice added to the general confusion, but by far the most influential factor was the preoccupied state of Rex Pebble’s mind.

His thoughts still lingered with those two strange beings, Charlie and Mr. Gibbs. He was considerably puzzled by their philosophically discursive reactions to a deliberate act of incendiarism, which even at that moment was threatening the safety of one of their homes. Mingled with his doubts and speculations was a definite element of envy. Never before had Mr. Pebble encountered anyone outside of an institution whose conduct had been more calmly and consistently unbalanced than his own when once he had set his mind on it. If possible, he decided, those two gentlemen were even madder than Nokashima, and to Rex Pebble’s way of thinking such a triumph of madness was well-nigh inconceivable. Therefore, with all these thoughts racing through his mind, there is small wonder that he drove the machine through the streets of that thriving surburban community with the capricious abandon of an enterprising child playing in a crowded room with an overgrown toy.

“Hey, Sergeant,” a voice said over the telephone about ten minutes after the Pebble party had taken leave of Charlie and Mr. Gibbs, “a hook and ladder has just driven through my dog house.”

“Eh?” muttered the somnolent policeman. “This isn’t a dog house. It’s worse. This is a police station.”

“I know,” came the patient reply. “This isn’t a dog talking. I’m an owner, and I’m talking for my dog. A hook and ladder has just driven through his house.”

“What’s the dog doing now?” asked the sergeant, realizing something was expected of him.

“Does it matter?” demanded the voice. “But if you must know, the damn fool is sitting on the boards, and they’re all full of nails.”

“Why don’t you whistle?” suggested the sergeant.

“Why should I whistle?” asked the voice. “I don’t feel like whistling.”

“I mean,” said the officer heavily, “why don’t you whistle to the dog?”

“Oh,” replied the voice, “I see. Wait a moment.” A shrill noise offended the sergeant’s ears. “He won’t come,” the voice resumed in tones of discouragement. “Not a budge out of him. He looks sore as hell.”

“He’ll budge all right,” said the officer, knowledgeably, “if he sits on one of those nails.”

“Say, officer,” continued the voice, “let’s waive the dog for a moment.”

“Don’t see what good that’s going to do,” grumbled the sergeant. “It certainly won’t help the dog any to go waving him about. He’d hate it more than sitting on a nail.”

“I don’t mean to wave the dog like a flag,” protested the voice. “I mean, let’s drop the dog.”

“If you want to drop your dog,” said the sergeant impatiently, “go right ahead and do it, but damn me if I’m going to help you.”

“I don’t want you to help me drop my dog,” said the voice wearily. “I don’t want you to do anything. Just hang up quietly and try to forget the whole unpleasant incident. Good-night!”

A vicious banging of the telephone on the other end of the line emphasized to the sergeant the speaker’s desire to have nothing more to do with him. He was still puzzled some minutes later when the telephone rang again.

“Officer,” cried an excited voice, “there’s a hook and ladder full of murderers on my lawn.”

“Funny place for a lot of murderers to be,” commented the officer. “What are they doing on a hook and ladder?”

“It’s what they are doing on my lawn that’s burning me up,” said the voice. “They’re shouting and singing and flinging themselves about. You should see them.”

“I don’t want to see them,” the sergeant answered truthfully. “But somehow that doesn’t seem to be the way murderers are supposed to act.”

“How are they supposed to act?” asked the voice.

“Oh, I don’t know,” the sergeant hedged. “Different ways, but they don’t shout and sing and fling themselves about. Not murderers.”

“Maybe they do after they’ve committed a pretty good murder,” replied the voice. “Might make them sort of happy like.”

“Murderers are never happy,” said the sergeant, who had never seen one. “They slink along carrying blunt instruments.”

“How awful of them,” replied the voice admiringly. “Would you mind telling me if you happen to be a murderer?”

“I would be one, if you were here,” snapped the exasperated policeman.

“You talk just like a murderer,” went on the voice. “I mean, you seem to be so thoroughly familiar with their nasty ways – just how they walk and what they carry. It’s wonderful. How about the murderers on my lawn? Do you want to come up and give them a little talk? I want to go to sleep.”

“No!” shouted the sergeant. “Go out and throw yourself into their midst. I hope they cut you to ribbons.”

“But, officer,” objected the voice, “how could they, with a blunt instrument?”

This time it was the sergeant who viciously snapped down the earpiece. Before he had time even to think about cooling off, the bell once more chattered irritably in his flushed face. Seizing the telephone round the neck as if he were going to throttle it, he shoved the receiver against his ear with such force that he cursed bitterly into the mouthpiece.

“Damn it to hell!” he said.

“No,” a timid voice faltered. “I don’t want any of that. I want the police station.”

“Lady,” said the officer, “this is the police station. You’re talking to it.”

“Well, I must say,” remarked the lady, “it doesn’t talk like a police station. I mean to say, a police station shouldn’t talk like that. Are you very busy?”

“Of course not,” replied the sergeant with ponderous sarcasm. “Do you want me to come up and see you sometime? Or would you rather bring your tatting down here?”

“I don’t want to see you at any time,” declared the voice decidedly. “I want to see a gentleman. A face just looked in at my window.”

“What do you mean, a face looked in at your window?” demanded the officer. “Didn’t it have anybody?”

“Not at first it didn’t,” said the lady. “It was just a face, and it had queer little slanty eyes, and skin like an old, dried orange.”

“What did it see?” asked the sergeant, growing interested.

“It saw me,” said the lady. “And it spoke.”

“It did?” replied the officer. “What did it say, lady?”

“Must I tell?” faltered the voice. “Must I?”

“Certainly,” snapped the sergeant. “That’s important.”

“Well, officer,” said the lady slowly, “this slanty-eyed little face said in the strangest voice, ‘Night keep up all naked. This pretty good stuff.’ That’s what it said, officer.”

“Why didn’t you pull the shade down?” asked the sergeant.

“I was too busy crouching,” replied the lady. “I got all scroggled up.”

“You got all what, lady?” asked the sergeant in a shocked voice. “That sounds bad.”

“Well, it wasn’t any laughing matter,” said the lady, “but it wasn’t as bad as that. I got all scroggled up, you know – bent double and everything. And the face just giggled. ‘He-he-he,’ it went, just like that.”

“Don’t do it any more, lady,” pleaded the sergeant. “It sounded awful at this end.”

“It sounded even worse here,” said the lady. “I’m way up on the sixth floor.”

“I see it all, lady,” replied the officer. “Don’t worry your head any more. It must have been a bird. No one man is twelve stories high.”

“No, officer,” stated the lady most emphatically, “I know that. No one man is twelve stories high in his bare feet, but this man was standing on a ladder. I saw his body.”

“Wasn’t he even dressed?” asked the officer in a hoarse voice. “You really saw his body?”

“You’re getting all mixed up,” complained the lady.

“I was the one who wasn’t dressed, but the man was. He had on pants and a white jacket.”

“Thank God for that,” breathed the sergeant. “Are you dressed now, lady?”

“What do you want to know for?” the voice asked suspiciously.

“Not for fun,” replied the officer. “Suppose I send some of the boys along?”

“No,” declared the voice, “don’t send any boys. I want this handled by men.”

The sergeant almost choked.

“What do you want handled by men?” he whispered over the wire.

“What do you think?” the voice demanded snappily.

“I don’t know, lady,” he replied helplessly, “but please don’t say anything you wouldn’t like used as evidence. Let’s get back to your story. What happened next?”

“Well,” the voice replied, “nothing much happened. I just stood there scroggling – bent double, you know – and those slanty eyes in that yellow face kept blinking at me like two jumping beans. ‘You should see boss,’ he said. ‘Boss plenty naked, too. Only tablecloth. But he not have pain in belly. I go get.’ Then —”

“Have you a pain in your belly, madam?” asked the sergeant, growing a little tired. “I mean stomach,” he added hastily.

“No,” replied the voice quite cheerfully, “but that funny little yellow face made the same mistake, too. I’m all right.”

“Good,” said the sergeant, wishing the woman was in convulsions. “If you don’t mind, will you please finish your story? I might have a murder or something at any moment.”

“Oh, don’t have a murder, sergeant,” admonished the woman. “Try counting up to one hundred. Well, as I was saying, the yellow face disappeared, and before I had time to snatch a robe another one popped up in its place.”

“Another yellow face?” gasped the officer. “Sure it wasn’t the same one back?”

“You mean the back of the same yellow face?” came the voice.

“No, no, lady,” said the officer, “I don’t mean that. God!” he cried out in an exasperated aside, “this woman is worse than Gracie Allen.”

“No, I’m not,” retorted the woman. “I’ve heard her too, and she’s ever so much worse than I am.”

“All right, lady,” agreed the sergeant. “Tell me the end of your story?”

“This new face was much better than the yellow one,” the voice resumed. “A great improvement. In fact, it was a real nice face. Splendid eyes. I could feel myself getting red.”

“How do you mean, lady?” asked the officer, hopelessly confused. “Where were you turning red?”

“All over,” said the lady.

“All over?” the man slowly repeated. “Oh, I think I see. You were blushing, eh? Well, that was quite a blush, lady. Lots of ground to cover. Between yellow faces and red bodies I don’t know where I’m standing. Kindly state only the important facts.”

“This new face spoke English,” the woman continued. “‘Do you want to be saved?’ it asked. ‘What for?’ I asked right back. ‘I’m not so bad.’ ‘I should say not,’ replied the face, but I wasn’t having any of that, so I said, ‘And furthermore, mister, this is no time and place to start preaching sermons to a lady.’ ‘No harm in asking,’ he answered, ‘but if I stay here much longer I’ll be needing a little saving myself.’ What do you think he meant by that, officer?”

“He probably wanted to strangle you to death,” grated the officer, momentarily losing control of himself. “Sorry, lady. Is that face still there?”

“No,” said the voice sadly, “but I don’t think it wanted to strangle me. It didn’t look like the face of a murderer. It isn’t here any more, and when I looked out the window I saw a naked man in a towel chasing a hook and ladder down the street. I saw everything distinctly. The little man in the white jacket and yellow face was driving like mad. I couldn’t have driven worse myself. And that’s all I know, officer. Will you send some of your men around? I’m all upset.”

“Me, too, lady,” shrilled the sergeant, a maniacal light in his eyes. “I’ll send around the firing squad.”

“Then you’d better send that hook and ladder smack back with it,” said the voice of the woman. “To put out the fire, you know.”

Slowly and with the utmost care the sergeant lowered the receiver on its hook. He was too consumed with brute passion, too straining with evil intent, to trust himself to express his emotions either in word or deed.

The next time the telephone rang he turned the call over to a sleepy-eyed rookie.

“Hey, Pat!” called the sergeant with hypocritical heartiness. “Snap out of that chair and I’ll give you a chance to take a call. It’s a good thing to get the hang of. There’s a knack in it.”

Feeling as highly favored as his sluggard wits would over allow to him, the heavy-footed young son of Erin lumbered over to the telephone and made his hands into fists virtually all over it.

“Fine, Chief,” he said gratefully. “This will do me good.” Thrusting his mouth into the transmitter he began to do himself good at the top of his lungs. “Hello! Hello!” said Pat excitedly. “This is Murphy of the police force talking. Who are you?” A sudden pause. “Oh,” he began again. “It’s a drunken hook and ladder, did you say?” Another pause while Pat more deeply entrenched his ear. Then, “Hold the line, mister.” Turning to the sergeant, Pat tried to impart his information. “It seems, Chief,” he said, “that this guy has been dodging either a drunken hook and ladder or a hook and ladder driven by drunkards or maniacs escaped from the asylum. What shall I tell him?”

“That hook and ladder is going to drive me into my grave!” groaned the sergeant.

“That’s what it’s nearly done to this man,” said Pat. “He says he can’t keep up dodging it much longer. He’s fair exhausted from being pursued by the hook and ladder.”

“Ask him where it is,” commanded the sergeant.

“Where is this hook and ladder?” Pat asked over the wire, then waited to be told. “Hang on,” he said, and again turned to his superior. “I thought this was going to do me good,” he complained, “but damned if I believe it will. Do all people go crazy when they telephone to us?”

“This is no time for idle questions,” said the sergeant tartly. “I don’t care whether or not it does you any good. That damn telephone has almost ruined me already. Where did the guy say it was?”

“He said it was all over,” Pat replied. “Sometimes here and sometimes there. It sort of appears from all directions, then goes bounding in pursuit of him, no less.”

“That guy must be drunk himself,” muttered the sergeant. “A hook and ladder can’t appear from all directions. Ask him if he is.”

“Are you drunk, mister?” asked Pat of the man at the other end of the wire, then quickly removed the receiver from his ear. Even the sergeant, standing several feet away, could hear the incoherent protests tumbling from the mouth of the telephone. “He says he isn’t, Chief,” said Pat at last. “He seems to be sure about it. He says he is a public-spirited citizen, and unless something is done about that hook and ladder he is going to report the entire force. Do you want to talk to him? I’m dead certain this isn’t going to do me any good at all.”

“Are you afraid to talk to the man?” demanded the sergeant. “You started the conversation, go on and finish it.”

“What shall I say now?”

“Ask him where he is – if he won’t tell us where that hook and ladder is,” replied the chief. “String him along somehow. Maybe he’ll forget about it or the thing will go away.”

“A bounding hook and ladder filled with maniacs would be a hard thing to forget,” commented Pat, looking with distaste at the telephone. “All right, Chief. I’ll take another chance.” Once more he hid as much of his mouth as possible in the telephone and shouted what he hoped would be soothing words to the infuriated citizen at the other end. “Don’t be like that, mister,” said Pat. “We didn’t mean it. The chief was just having some fun.” Pause. “Oh, you’re glad to know the chief is enjoying himself.” Here Pat turned to the sergeant. “The guy says he’s glad you’re having a good time,” he told his superior. “Says he wishes you were down there where he is.”

“I heard! I heard!” cried the sergeant irritably. “Leave my name out of it. Ask him where he is.”

After Pat had complied with this request he listened for a long time to the voice at the other end of the wire, an expression of profound astonishment on his face.

“What!” the sergeant heard him exclaim. “There’s a woman on the hook and ladder? Yeah? Oh, half fireman and half woman, you say. Now, mister, how can that be? Hold on! I’m not calling you a liar. Sure, I know. Certainly. You can tell half of a woman when you see one. I never saw one that way. Of course, you’re no baby. You could tell even less of a woman than that. Wait a minute. The chief ought to hear this.” With wide blue eyes Pat stared his incredulity at the sergeant. “Golly,” he said, “something’s funny somewhere. I’m almost afraid to tell you what that guy told me. Shall I?”

“Go on!” cried the sergeant.

“Well,” said Pat in a hushed voice, “he says there’s a thing scrambling around that hook and ladder that’s half fireman and half lady, and he claims the men are maniacs.”

“Ask him which half is which,” said the chief in a dead voice.

“Do you think I should?” asked Pat a little slyly. “I should think either half of a woman or a fireman scrambling over a hook and ladder would be enough to upset anybody. And when it comes to a half of each crawling after one another – my eye! I don’t like to think about it.”

“Go on and do as I say,” said the chief. “It’s important.”

“Why?” asked Pat.

“Haven’t you got sense enough to know that there’s a lot of difference between the two halves of a woman?”

“I know there is,” replied Pat, “but I don’t see what good either half is going to do us now. Whatever half it is, the other one’s a fireman, and that’s not so good.”

“What are you trying to get at?” the sergeant demanded.

“Nothing at all,” Pat hastened to assure him. “I certainly don’t want to get at that monster, no matter which half is which. Let’s hang up, Chief.”

“Go on and ask that question,” commanded the sergeant.

“Listen, mister,” said Pat diffidently. “The chief wants to know which half of the thing is which, a woman or a fireman?” As he listened his face grew pink. Finally he put his hand over the mouthpiece and addressed himself to the impatient sergeant. “It’s the bottom half,” said Pat in a hushed voice.

“The bottom half is which?” demanded the other.

“The bottom half is all lady,” replied Pat. “Think of it, Chief, think of it. And on top there’s a fireman. What a sight that must be!”

“It’s as I thought,” muttered the sergeant. “No wonder those men are maniacs. Did he say where this hook and ladder was?”

“Somewhere around Main and Spruce,” replied Pat, “It’s playing all about.”

“Hey, boys!” the sergeant shouted with sudden decision in his voice. “Murphy, O’Brien, Samuels, and Schmidt, line up, the four of you.” When the boys, languidly buttoning their tunics, were standing in front of the desk, the sergeant snapped out his instructions. “There’s a wild hook and ladder raising hell all over this town. God only knows what it will do next. Go down to Main and Spruce and pick up the trail and —”

“Do you want us to shadow the thing?” Officer Samuels asked hopefully.

“Certainly not!” exploded the sergeant. “I want you to arrest that hook and ladder and drag back here either dead or alive. And everybody on it,” he added.

“What about the half and half ?” inquired Pat. “Shall we treat the thing as a lady or a fireman?”

“That depends upon which half gives you the most trouble,” replied the chief.

“I don’t like any part of the unholy body,” answered Pat.

“You don’t have to like it,” the sergeant retorted, “Policemen ain’t supposed to fall all over the people they arrest.”

“Gord!” ejaculated Pat. “I wouldn’t fall all over that thing if my life depended on it”

“What sort of a thing is it?” asked Officer O’Brien.

“It’s a thing,” Pat Murphy explained, “that’s one half fireman and another half woman.”

“Yeah?” said O’Brien. “Who do you you think you’re kidding? Which half is a woman?”

“The bottom half,” said Pat.

“And how far up does it go?” asked Schmidt.

“That’s none of your business,” put in the Chief. “You clear out of here and bring both halves back.”

“Divs on the south end,” said Samuels as the policemen filed from the room.

“You’re welcome to both ends of it,” Pat Murphy told him.

The telephone tinkled merrily. Before he settled back in his chair the sergeant gently removed the receiver and placed it on the desk. Then he lighted a fat, black cigar and sighed a long pull of smoke into the still air. He had done his duty. Now he would rest and relax. He was still doing this when the head of the Fire Department strode in.

“I’ve lost my hook and ladder,” he announced.

“You have?” said the sergeant mildly. “Well, that’s just too bad. Every member of the community has found that hook and ladder with the exception of yourself. And,” he added with swelling bitterness, “if you ever get the damn thing back, I hope to God you’ll never let it out of your sight again. I’m dog tired of your hook and ladder.”

“What do you mean?” demanded the other.

“Listen,” replied the sergeant. “Have you a number on your force that’s half fireman and half woman?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the owner of the lost hook and ladder. “Have you gone crazy?”

“I have,” replied the sergeant quietly. “Stark, staring mad. Listen some more, Commissioner.”

Then the sergeant told him all. And when he had finished, the Commissioner was just human enough to want. to know which half was which.

“I knew you were going to ask that question,” the sergeant replied sorrowfully. “Commissioner, the lower half’s a lady.”

CHAPTER NINE

Crown’s Cosmopolitan

Meanwhile, Mr. Pebble and party were steadfastly trying to mind their own business with a discouraging lack of success. For once in a blue moon the telephone reports of eyewitnesses had been substantially accurate, if a trifle irrelevant. One might even say those reports had been misleadingly conservative. No mention had been made of the incident of the demolished hothouse or of the mutilated ninth green on the local golf course. Also, several twisted lamp posts seem to have passed unnoticed. The desperate struggle caused by Nokashima inadvertently starting the hook and ladder during the temporary absence of Rex Pebble never became public knowledge, although it was long remembered by those directly concerned. Hal, the only professional present, was by far the most unhappy. He was firmly convinced he had lost not only his livelihood but also the need of having one, inasmuch as he would soon be losing his life as well. Nokashima’s rendition of “The Last Round-up” in pidgin English went a long way toward making everything less pleasant. The Pebble party was now enjoying a brief breathing spell in a dimly lighted alley situated in the heart of the town. On their right rose the sheer walls of a large and enterprising department store. Throughout the surrounding countryside Crown’s Cosmopolitan was jointly famous. No finer store existed outside of a large city. On the left of the little group the smooth, windowless side of a bank building offered scant hospitality. The end of the alley was uncompromisingly blocked by a formidable brick barrier. In other words, Rex Pebble and his companions would find themselves in a pretty kettle of fish should their present whereabouts be discovered by Pat Murphy and the rest of the boys. However, for a moment or so their peace remained undisturbed.

“It’s pleasant here,” Mr. Pebble observed. “A good place to stretch one’s legs before hurtling forth on another spin.”

“My legs stretched from ear to ear already,” Nokashima declared. “That seat too high for short Japanese body to attend pedals. Feet dangle on way.”

“And if you try to monkey with the hook and ladder a second short Japanese body will be dangling at yellow end of a rope.”

“Speaking of necks,” remarked Major Jaffey, gently fingering his own, “mine has not settled back to its former position since that short Japanese body in question dangled on the end of my legs.”

“Give me a cigarette, Major,” said Spray Summers, “I’m dying for a smoke.”

Courteously the Major passed a package of cigarettes among the members of the party. Soon five small red sparks were glowing in the darkness. It was these indications of life that first attracted the attention of the squad of searching policemen.

“Look!” cried Pat in a piercing whisper. “I’ll bet they’re down there. Be careful of an ambush.”

“Did you hear that?” asked Hal in a low voice. “Somebody’s betting we’re down here.”

“Then he wins,” commented Rex Pebble. “We are.”

“Not if I know it,” flung back Hal. “They’re cops, and they’re after us. Nothing would please them more than to run in a fireman.”

“How to get out?” soliloquized Nokashima in the manner of a Nipponese Hamlet. “That plenty vital question.”

“We’re not going to get out,” said Rex Pebble. “We’re going to get up and in. Bear a hand there, Hal. We’ll raise a couple of ladders and escape through the Cosmopolitan. My wife has a charge account there.”

“So have I,” observed Spray Summers, “but any judge in his sober senses would think it an odd time to be seized with a sudden desire to make use of it.”

Disregarding this somewhat depressing observation, the four men busied themselves setting up the ladders.

“Major,” commanded Rex Pebble, “you and Hal go up first. Something seems to tell me that you are not without experience in the art of breaking and entering. Hal makes a regular business of it. Look lively, both of you. I hear the unmistakable sounds of flat feet flapping at our rear.”

“I’d like to flop mine against theirs,” grumbled Spray. “What have we done? Nothing!”

“Perhaps you’re right,” replied Rex Pebble, “but we’ve done it so damn thoroughly that it will be more than enough to lock us up for life if we trust entirely in our innocence.”

“When I go, boss?” Nokashima asked eagerly.

“You can nip up at any old time,” Mr. Pebble told him. “You’re doing me no good here.”

And that was exactly what Nokashima did. He nipped up the ladder with the agility of a monkey, which he closely resembled.

“Pist!” came the signal from somewhere in the darkness above their heads. “Pist! Pist!”

“What is it!” asked Mr. Pebble, lowering his voice.

“Pist!” was all he got for his trouble. “Pist! Hey, pist! Pis-s-s-t-t!”

“Stop it!” exclaimed Spray Summers. “Of all the asinine noises to make. And he keeps on doing it. Always makes me think of bum actors in long cloaks ducking in and out of the wings. Pist, up there yourself!”

Nokashima, who had been making no noise at all, evidently believing that something was expected of him, ducked his head over his shoulder and peered down into the darkness of the alley.

“Pist, madam!” he offered politely. “Am hell bent on escape. Pist! Pist!”

“Please stop pisting,” shouted Rex Pebble. “There’s no time for all that. It makes us nervous.”

“Holy saints, will you listen to them?” Pat Murphy said to his brother officers. “It’s lunatics they are. And it only makes the other two nervous. I’d get sore as hell.”

Nokashima had disappeared into the blackness of an open window, and Spray and Rex Pebble were two thirds the way up by the time Pat and his boys had reached the foot of the ladders.

“Begord, it’s true!” explained Pat, looking up at Spray. “It’s half fireman and half lady.”

“That lower half ain’t no fireman,” declared Officer Samuels with deep conviction.

“Well, it ain’t no lady, either,” put in the one called Schmidt. “Even in these-days a lady wears a little something.”

“Hey, you in the helmet,” shouted Murphy. “Stay where you are. I see everything.”

As unconventional as Spray was, this gratuitous information made her feel decidedly uncomfortable. Clutching the awkward rubber coat around her, she took a quick, strained glance below.

“If you were a gentleman you’d bow your head,” she called down, “and look at your ugly feet.”

“And if you were a lady you’d take a pike at something else,” retorted Pat. “What sort of a thing do you
happen to be, anyway?”

“I thought you were seeing everything,” she retorted.

“Not quite,” said Officer Samuels. “It’s still too dark.”

“Well,” replied Spray cuttingly, “you should have seen enough from where you’re standing.”

“I’ve seen almost too much,” admitted Pat Murphy.

“One can’t get enough of a good thing,” Spray replied coolly, edging up a few more rungs. “That’s what I always say.”

“Will you come down, whatever you are?” demanded Pat Murphy.

“No, I won’t,” cried Spray. “Will you go away?”

“I’ll come up there and lay hands on you,” the exasperated policeman shouted.

“What a man!” she said to Mr. Pebble, perched semi-recumbent on the other ladder; then called tauntingly to the men below her, “Is that a threat or a promise?”

“You know,” put in Mr. Pebble, “I’m finding it increasingly difficult to retain my poise. This ladder sways like a camel’s back.”

“I’m finding it damn near impossible to keep my modesty,” she retorted, “and climb the thing at the same time.”

“Why trouble about modesty now?” he inquired. “After all, it’s merely a matter of one’s point of view.” “That’s just what I’m worrying about,” said Spray. “Those coppers down there have the wrong point of view.”

“Pist!” sounded suddenly in the darkness only a few feet away. “Pist!”

“He’s at it again,” grumbled Spray. “Will you tell me whether that noise is intended to repel or attract? I can’t get the idea.”

“Maybe the excitement has driven the Major mad,” suggested Mr. Pebble, “and he thinks he’s playing snake.”

“I wish he’d stop playing it in my ears,” she complained. “I’ll never get up this ladder with all these interruptions.”

“Look out, madam,” Nokashima called excitedly from a window. “Officers make grade. Snatch at behind.”

“What!” cried the startled Spray. “The horrid things! There is no time to stand on any further ceremony. Hurry
up, Rex.” Hastily she scrambled up to the window, then added as an afterthought as she pulled herself through, “And no matter what those rude policemen snatch at, Nokashima, you should endeavor to select your words with a little more delicacy. I don’t know which is the more objectionable, to be snatched at or to be told where.”

“Madam,” replied Nokashima pedantically, “there are two behinds. One is thing, other is place. I refer to latter.”

“Say, lady,” came the earnest but subdued voice of Hal, the renegade fireman, “you and that dopey laundryman are going to talk us all into jail if you don’t dry up.”

“I not wet yet,” Nokashima announced proudly.

“Listen, little Fu Manchu,” the fireman retorted. “Those flatties are about to chuck their dogs right in those windows. You’d better hide while you can.”

“If dogs of flatties smell no better than Mist’ Henry,” replied the Jap complacently, “we remain in obscurity to end of days.”

“Pardon the interruption,” spoke up Major Jaffey in a calm, informative voice, “but from a brief investigation of our whereabouts I should say we are now in the furniture department. There is also a suggestion of toys at the far end. It’s a jolly place for hiding. God only knows where we’ll be cuter.”

“Fine!” exclaimed Spray. “Lead me to a bed.”

“Hot invitation, that,” observed the voice of Nokashima. “Who you ask, madam?”

“Somebody hit that Jap,” said Spray. “He’s gone bad on our hands.”

“Am on hands and upper joint of legs,” the loquacious little yellow man informed them. “Like missionary fella, I progress amid encircling gloom.”

“What’s that!” exclaimed Spray as a violent commotion broke out near the windows.

“Flatties chucking in dogs,” hazarded Nokashima,

“Dogs not amused, nor this wormlike son of honorable house. In silence I seek a huddle.”

From the moment the little yellow man set forth to seek a huddle that floor of Crown’s Cosmopolitan became the center of dark confusion, occasionally relieved by the flashing of electric torches, the flame of a match and the momentary switching on of overhead lights. Cries of consternation echoed through the vast department. There were the sounds of running feet, of pursuing grunts, of painful collisions with unseen objects, of unexpected giggles and scattered conversation. There were shouts of surprise and mortification and some of mortal fear. It was no floor at all for nervous people, yet every person on it was more or less that way. It is almost safe to say that no group of frenzied bargain hunters on sales day ever conducted themselves on that floor as unbecomingly as did the police and the Pebble party.

The opening signal of distress came from Spray Summers, who had thoughtlessly concealed herself in the first bed she could find. Her fool’s paradise was suddenly and rudely shattered by the frantic arrival of two unknown figures caroming off her body from two different directions. They were received with a grunt of anguish which was the best the lady could offer at the moment. Painfully she reached out her left hand and felt a small semi-human face; then her fingers slipped down to the fabric of a starched jacket.

“Not that, madam,” Nokashima whispered tragically. “Not that! If do I push loud cries like Fifi.”

“You snake in the grass,” gritted Spray. “Do you realize you’re in bed with me?”

“Realization almost stupefying,” breathed the little servant. “I feel just like it”

“You do?” Spray whispered. “Take this, then, and tell me what you feel like.”

“Hardly can,” gasped Nokashima, taking what Spray had given him in the pit of his stomach. “I feel like small cherry blossom beneath foot of great giant.”

“This is no time to be talking about cherries,” retorted Spray.

“Cherries my dish,” the little man informed her. “I go mad for cherries.”

“You’ve gone mad without them,” Spray told him.

“Yes, madam,” he admitted. “That why I go mad.”

“Do you realize, small ounce of vileness, what a liberty you’ve taken?”

“If not take some liberty here,” declared Nocka, “I lose all liberty to dogs of flatties. Where are flatties’ dogs, madam? I hear no sniff-sniff nor patter of bounding feet.”

“One can’t hear anything above the roar of those policemen,” replied Spray. “Do you happen to know who belongs to this other body beside me?”

“Only vague surmise,” admitted Nokashima. “Madam may have caught cowardly flattie. Squeeze down on neck. Maybe he turn to fox.”

“I don’t want to be in bed with a fox,” declared Spray. “You’re bad enough.”

“If I turn into fox,” mused Nokashima, “I lure dogs on pursuit of untamed goose, then I go home and. offer myself to nose of Mist’ Henry. If he no smell, my broom droop with deep despond.”

“Not broom,” Spray corrected. “You mean your brush.”

“Is that what I have, madam, if I turn to fox? Brush on the end of me. How nice.”

“How awful,” murmured Spray Summers. “Please be quiet, snake in the grass.”

“One more thing done,” the little servant pleaded. “I not snake in grass, madam. I not even so funny as fox. Just small little Japanese feller in bed with lady and unknown body, and contorted with alarm.”

“I’m not altogether easy in my mind myself.”

“Why not tentatively finger opposite body?” the yellow one inquired. “Maybe encounter familiar object.”

In spite of herself, Spray laughed.

“What a fool you are, Nocka,” she said, then turned to the other object behind her. “Who are you?” she demanded sharply. “Speak up!”

“Pist!” came so suddenly and explosively from the unknown body on her right that she jumped almost a foot from the bed. While she was up Nokashima frantically burrowed under her. When she settled back she felt very much like a person who had unexpectedly sat on a cat.

“Pist!” once more popped irritably from the man beside her. “Pist!”

“Unidentified must have been restraining those for long time,” observed Nokashima in a muffled voice. “Your body, madam, is mutilating too many of my parts.”

“And this body over here has got me completely baffled,” replied Spray. “I don’t know how to open a conversation with it if it keeps on making those noises.”

“Pist!” uttered the body.

“Will you stop doing that!” cried Spray, blindly cuffing the body in the dark.

The pist was promptly turned to a grunt.

“My dear lady,” expostulated the voice of Major Jaffey. “Never do that again. As it is, I doubt if it will be necessary. You should have better sense.”

At this moment a light flashed blindingly in the eyes of the three occupants of the bed, and the voice of Pat Murphy cried loudly, “Here they are, boys! I’ve got ’em!”

From all parts of the floor heavy feet came crashing towards the center of attraction. The bodies on either side of Spray Summers were galvanized into desperate action as they melted into the darkness, their eager feet adding to the general din and confusion. Cursing all Japanese and majors from the bottom of her heart, Spray remained behind, struggling in the grasp of Pat Murphy. That lusty limb of the law unceremoniously dragged the furious woman from the bed, dropping his torch in so doing, then, with no definite object in mind, hurtled her along the floor.

“Say, Pat!” shouted a voice. “Where are you now, man? Is the lower half a lady?”

“Haven’t been able to find hide nor hair of a fireman yet,” Pat called back. “It seems to be all lady.”

“Well, don’t look any farther,” Spray protested. “You’re here to do your duty, not to amuse yourself.”

“If you’d only tell me whether you’re a lady or not,” the policeman panted. “I might know what to do with you.”

“And what would that be, may I ask?”

“Don’t exactly know,” said Pat, “but I wouldn’t handle you so rough, maybe.”

A body collided violently with the woman as a fresh pair of hands took hold of her.

“I’m with you, Pat,” said the newcomer. “Which half do you want?”

“Will you two men stop trying arbitrarily to divide me,” protested Spray. “I’m one continuous body, and if there’s any fireman about me I have yet to find it out.”

“You mean, you’re all lady?” breathed Pat.

“From head to toe,” said Spray.

“The sergeant said you were some fireman, lady,” said the other voice in disappointed tones.

“Well, you tell the sergeant,” she retorted, “that I’m not going to switch my body about just to please him. Where are we going, anyway? Are we just taking a walk in the dark?”

“We don’t know, lady,” Pat Murphy replied. “Haven’t had time to think. Hey, boys!” he shouted suddenly.“Round up the rest of the gang. We’ve got one of them. Dig the others out.”

From somewhere in the darkness came the quavering notes of “The Last Round-up.” Nocka was at it again.

“I don’t know where I’ve hidden myself,” a voice complained, “much less where the rest of ’em are.”

“Holy Saints!” breathed Pat. “What an awful sound! It’s like a ghost wailing for its lost soul.”

Spray felt herself suddenly seized from the rear and plucked from the grasp of her two astonished captors. She was dragged through an aperture, and a door slammed behind her.

“Who’s got me now?” she inquired pessimistically. “Not that it makes much difference.”

“You’re in the model home,” whispered the voice of Rex Pebble. “This is the bathroom.”

“Thank God for that,” said Spray. “How is it under the shower?”

“A bit stuffy,” replied Rex Pebble, “but at least it’s quiet and exclusive. You’re a public scandal.” -

“I’d be all of that,” she admitted, “if I had a public.”

“I say, old darling,” asked Mr. Pebble conversationally from the shower, “doesn’t this strike you as being rather an odd way to be spending the first night of our new lives?”

“It does. It does,” she assured him. “It’s one hell of a quaint way to be spending the first night of a new life or an old one. But we don’t seem to learn any better.”

“And,” observed Mr. Pebble, “if those policemen have their way with us we’ll be spending the last night of our new lives locked in the arms of the law.”

“I’ve been locked in those arms already,” said Spray.

“And you’d be locked in them still,” Rex Pebble assured her, “had I known what use you were going to make of your freedom.”

While this reunion of souls was progressing, Nokashima, that prince of Japanese house boys, had found his way by nervous fit after frantic start into the toy department, which was situated at the rear of the floor. Here it was his momentary bad luck to encounter the papier-maché head of an exceedingly dashing-looking lion, glorying in a pair of great malevolent eyes and a mane of tremendous vitality. It was a trying moment for the already hard-pushed little man. Although darkness saved him from savoring the full horror of the object con-fronting him, those parts of it which his groping hands had felt were more than enough to convince him he was standing unarmed in the presence of a deadly peril – possibly one of those dogs of the flatties, a strong, silent dog. Fortunately for himself as well as for others the little yellow man was too overcome by his emotions to push even so much as a squawk. Too terrified either to retreat or to advance, he remained static in the darkness, shuddering in all his Oriental limbs.

However, as time passed and no overtures of a hostile nature were manifested by the deadly peril, the inordinate curiosity which had made Nocka’s life one continuous calamity reasserted itself to such an extent that before the lapse of many minutes he was cheek and jowl with this effigy of the king of the jungle. At last, with some vaguely formulated plan in his peculiar little mind, he slipped the head of the lion over his own and went circulating aimlessly through the darkness to discover what fate held in store for him in his radically altered appearance.

A short time later Officer Pat Murphy was indelicate enough to switch a light on the retreat occupied by Mr. Pebble and his mistress. Officer Pat Murphy was thereby a very much startled policeman.

“What’s this?” he asked, for lack of anything better to say.

“A bathroom,” replied Spray, springing up. “What does it look like to you?”

“Say, lady,” he answered chidingly, when he had recovered a little from the shock of discovery, “you can think of the damnedest things to do when you’re being chased by the cops. First you go to bed, then you find a bathroom. Haven’t you got any better sense? This isn’t a private home.”

“It’s the only private home I’ve got at the moment,” the lady responded. “Be so good as to respect its privacy.”

“The devil I will,” said Pat. “I’m going to run you in.”

“On what charge, may I ask?”

“On any one of fifty. You and your boy friends too. If I tell the judge what I just saw he’ll put you away for good.”

“Don’t be childish, Pat,” replied Spray. “How would you tell the judge that?”

“I’d whisper it to him,” said Pat meanly. “In his ear, I would.”

“Oh,” retorted Spray, sparring for time. “Not in his eyes, like most people.”

“Nobody whispers in other people’s eyes,” said Pat. “Don’t be funny. Come on and snap out of this.”

“I like it here,” she told him.

“You certainly made yourself at home,” he retorted. “Do you want me to put the bracelets on?”

“Do I have to look pretty to see the judge?”

“If he sees you the way you are, he’s going to look awful,” Pat assured her. “It might kill the old man.” “Then you will be charged with murder,” she said, “for showing me to the poor old man. Go away now and look for some of the boys.”

“I will not,” said Pat. “This is the nuttiest place to try to find anyone in. What did you want to come up here for?”

“I wanted to go shopping,” she answered.

“You sure do need some clothes,” he admitted. “All you’ve got on is a coat, and that isn’t yours.”

“How about fixing me up nice for the judge?” suggested Spray. “Slip downstairs and grab off a nice dress and a pair of passionate panties.” - -

“Lady, you’re bad,” said Pat. “You shouldn’t use such words. You’re after asking me to compound a felony.”

“You’ll be compounding another one if you don’t get me some clothes,” she threatened. “I’m going to take the coat off.”

“Don’t, lady,” Pat pleaded.

“Off comes the coat!” cried Spray.

“Button it up,” he urged her. “What will the boys think if they find us together like this?”

“What do you think they’ll think?”

“You know,” he replied.

“I do not,” retorted Spray. “I haven’t an evil mind. And if I can make myself heard above the din the boys are making, I’m going to scream for help. Off comes the coat.”

For the salvation of his own soul Pat Murphy sprang through the door and began to wrestle with the apparently furious woman. Unseen to the combatants, Rex Pebble thrust a curious head through the curtains and peered at the active scene, then hurriedly withdrew. To retain his poise he grasped the nearest tap, and a vicious deluge of icy water descended on his naked spine. A long, shuddering cry issued from the shower. The wrestlers immediately released each other and stood regarding the curtain with startled eyes.

“What’s that?” Pat gasped. “It sounded like a poor soul being murdered in cold blood.”

“Cold blood it is,” complained the shower wetly. “The damn fools didn’t have to make their confounded shower so all-fired realistic.”

“Turn on the hot,” suggested Spray, “and I’ll come on in with you. I’m getting sick of this dumb policeman.”

“You mustn’t do that,” admonished Murphy in a shocked voice. “You’ve gone far enough, lady. Who’s the guy in the shower?”

“I’m the guy in the shower,” the curtains announced. “And you’re a gone cop. Stand where you are.”

“What do you mean?” asked Pat.

“I’ve got you covered,” said the shower.

“I wish you’d cover this lady,” the officer answered moodily.

“Never mind the lady,” snapped the shower. “You back out of this room.”

At this moment a scream bearing all the earmarks of sincere distress came simultaneously from Spray and Pat Murphy. Popping his head through the curtains Rex Pebble made a scream of his own. Completely unstrung by this reception, Nokashima began to scream too, which made him all the worse. Three hurtling bodies bounded over his speedily flattened figure and became wedged in the door of the bathroom.

“Let me outta here!” gasped Murphy. “Holy Saint Patrick, the baleful eyes of the beast! Did you see them?”

“Shut up!” chattered Spray. “It might understand English.”

“That monster’s so awful,” declared Pat, “it doesn’t understand itself.”

“If you two want to stand here and discuss the thing to its face,” said Rex Pebble, “I don’t want to be included. Give me a chance to run.”

“Give me the strength,” muttered Spray.

From all points of the floor lights were flashing on and off, and excited voices were bellowing through the darkness.

“Have you got one, Pat?” a colleague called out.

“I haven’t,” he shouted, “but one has almost got me. And what a one it is!”

“You mean the half fireman and half lady?”

“No,” replied Pat. “It’s half monster and half man. And it’s all bad.”

“Then don’t arrest it,” urged the voice.

“Arrest it!” cried Pat hysterically. “I’m trying to leave it miles behind. The baleful eyes of the beast. Let me through, the both of you.”

As the deadlock was broken, Nokashima, bereft of his lion’s head, rose from the floor and, still screaming at the top of his lungs, dashed after the retreating figures. The fireman known as Hal, on his way to no place in particular, spied the abandoned head lying in the light of the bathroom, and promptly placing it over his own, ran after Nokashima. Pat Murphy, looking back over his shoulder, caught a horrified glimpse of the oncoming figure.

“Begod!” he cried in amazement. “It’s grown twice its size.”

Nokashima, far too busy to realize his loss, followed the policeman’s example, then turned his screams into speech.

“Dog of flattie,” he told an uninterested world, “is fox of evil magic.”

“Fox, me eye!” breathed Pat. “Take another look, you runt.”

“Not need another look,” Nocka assured him. “Didn’t enjoy last. Wait till it turns to serpent. Then watch out.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Pat scolded, “or I’ll lock you up for baiting an officer.”

“Please you do,” replied Nokashima. “Lock me up from beast of monster when sure it not turn to beautiful naked lady. I know Japanese fella —”

“Shut up!” gasped Spray. “Would you tell dirty stories in the very jaws of death?”

“Not in jaws,” murmured Nokashima. “I want but small how-do-you-do with jaws.”

“It will soon be goodbye,” said Spray.

Suddenly the overhead lights flashed up in all parts of the floor. Hal, who was passing a mirror at the moment, caught a glimpse of his unamiable reflection and jumped two feet from the ground, uttering hoarse cries the while.

“I’m worse than I expected,” he mouthed hollowly. “I’m even scared of myself.”

“Listen, he admits it,” said Spray. “The damned thing’s talking to itself.”

“It’s better than having it screaming at us,” observed the philosophical Mr. Pebble, clinging to his dripping tablecloth. “Any fair-minded monster with eyes in its head would have to admit it isn’t a hot number. That thing would be silly as hell if it considered itself a bathing beauty.”

“Your sarcasm is about as labored as my legs,” retorted Spray. “Heavens! What’s that?”

It was the sound of several revolvers all talking at once. From various parts of the room excited policemen were taking pot shots at the fleeing monster. In self-defense Hal removed the lion’s head from his and hurled it well before him. Cries of horror and stupefaction broke from all beholders of this ghastly act save Nokashima. That one was giggling knowingly.

“Very funny business, this,” he managed to get out. “I fairly stream with mirth.”

Spray blinked, then closed her lovely eyes, although running at full speed. “I wish it would chuck its legs away next,” she wheezed; “then we might be able to give ours a bit of a rest.”

“Never a dull moment,” said Rex Pebble. “We got our youth and strength back just in time to become physical wrecks.”

“Rex,” cried Spray suddenly, “it’s got me!” So saying she catapulted through the air, rolled over several times, then came to rest with Hal’s helmet miraculously on her head and the lion’s on her left foot. “Rex! Rex!” she sobbed. “The monster’s swallowed my foot with his neck. Please do something about it.”

“What do you want him to swallow it with?” Rex Pebble asked reasonably enough.

“I don’t want him to swallow my foot at all,” she complained rather pathetically, “especially since I’ve lost my corns. Come here and take it away.”

Here she waved one slim, lion-capped leg aloft in a frantic effort to dislodge it. A carefully concealed police-man thrust his head from behind a pillar just in time to witness this odd spectacle.

“Hey, boys!” he shouted, quickly withdrawing his head. “It’s one half fireman now, and the other half’s a wild beast. And both ends are peering at each other.”

The boys received this devastating bit of news in stunned silence. Presently a timid voice spoke up.

“Which half of the thing is wild beast?” it wanted to be told.

“I don’t know,” replied the policeman behind the pillar. “Both halves are heads and a lot of mouth.”

“And what’s become of that lower half of a lady?” the voice continued.

“Damned if I know that either,” said the policeman. “I’m out of luck entirely.”

“Why not take a shot at the wild beast?” suggested the voice. “That is, if you’re sure no part of it is the lower half of a lady.”

This suggestion paralyzed Spray. She strove so hard to get her leg as far away from the rest of her body as possible that she was lying on the back of her neck. A shot rang out, and the lion’s head became merely a matter of record, its fragments flying through the air. They flew no faster than Spray. With one bound she was clear of the floor, and with another she was climbing up Rex Pebble’s back.

“That ends all hope of poise,” he bitterly observed. “What are we going to do with each other?”

“I don’t know,” she retorted wearily, “but I’ve been a half of this and a half of that for so long I might just as well pretend I’m a part of you. Run away somewhere and hide us. My foot still tingles.”

“This way!” suddenly bellowed the parade-ground voice of Major Jaffey. “This way for the fire party. An exit. It is here!”

Although the good Major had not the vaguest idea as to what new dangers the exit led, he rightly assumed they could be no worse than those already confronting them. With the Pebble party at his heels, he dashed down several flights of stairs and at last emerged into the main floor of Crown’s Cosmopolitan. Here, protected once more by darkness, the old business of hiding began all over again.

“Grab whatever clothes you can find and put them on,” ordered the Major. “Thus we will be disguised for a later flight. If you insist on being honest we can charge them to Mrs. Pebble. Her husband will explain later.”

“In detail,” came the caustic voice of Rex Pebble through the darkness. “My wife will enjoy it.”

For some minutes the darkness of the main floor was filled with the stealthy yet industrious sound of searching feet. Rex Pebble fortunately encountered the figure of a gentleman in evening clothes. This he promptly stripped of all garments and transferred them to his own person. He was completely attired in every detail, including a top hat. No sooner had he finished his toilet than he felt a pair of hands furtively investigating his body. Mr. Pebble froze in his tracks and tried to emulate the position of the figure he had just denuded. Suddenly his hat was deftly whisked from his head. Mr. Pebble made no remonstrance. The next minute one of his feet was lifted from the floor and the pump flipped from it. This happened to the other foot, and still Mr. Pebble made no demur. But when his trousers were firmly seized and neatly slipped down his legs he thought it was high time to take a little interest in himself.

“Whoever you are,” he said in his most formal tones, “be so good as to put those trousers back where you found them. Also the shoes and hat.”

“All right, boss,” came the depressed voice of Nokashima. “You must look so nice. Not first time I undress you. He! He! Where I put pants?”

“Where I usually wear them, Nocka,” replied Rex Pebble patiently. “On the legs and middle section.” When the little servant had finished redressing him, Mr. Pebble patted him affectionately on the shoulder. “Sorry to have disappointed you. Better luck next time. Go find an outfit of your own.”

“I go, boss,” replied Nokashima. “I array myself like baron. All very fine.”

But like many whose hearts are overflowing with the best intentions, Nokashima soon became discouraged and finally desperate. This unsettled state of mind led to another contretemps.

Spray Summers, who had got herself into something rather good in the line of an evening gown, was at first a little flattered when she felt masculine hands laid upon her. However, she remained motionless and silent until she had assured herself that the hands were on friendly business. When her step-ins were seized and zipped from their place of repose she did not scream as would have some women, but merely satisfied her emotions by giving the unseen gentleman a playful little push. What was her surprise when she received a push back of such vigor that the breath was nearly knocked from her body. Staggering back, she rallied her forces, shook her head like a dazed boxer, then gamely returned to the assault. No matter how friendly his intentions, this man must be taught a lesson. His advances had been satisfactorily direct. Those step-ins had been handled with the deftness of an expert. But the man’s idea of playfulness was altogether too rough. He needed a little polishing to make him entirely acceptable. She would be forced to show the fellow that there was a right way and a wrong way to everything. In such affairs technique meant much to a lady. There was nothing to be gained in crippling a woman one intended to amuse later on. Therefore, when this time Spray Summers unleashed a blow in the darkness, she did so with a will. The flat of her swiftly traveling hand forcibly encountered a closely cropped head. There was a sudden gasp, the sound of a body operating out of control, then an alarming crash of glass as a show case was definitely and permanently put out of business. Spray smiled grimly but not for long. If he returned to her after that one, she reflected, he would be a determined chap indeed. And return he did, but in no soliciting mood. Spray felt herself grasped firmly round the knees, lifted from the floor, then violently deposited thereon. For a moment or so she sat moodily where she had landed and rubbed the spot of contact. Then she sighed. This last attack of her unseen admirer was sufficiently ruthless to convince her that no matter how agreeable he ultimately intended to be, he was certainly making a shambles of things at the present moment. In short, the ends failed to justify the means. The wear and tear was too terrific.

Heaving herself to her hands and knees, she was about to crawl from the field, using the better part of valor for an excuse, when she was seized from behind and the slippers – a size too large – dragged from her feet.

“What the hell!” she muttered, twisting her head back over her shoulder. “I say there, are you still playing, or are you mad at me?”

“Not each,” came back the answer. “Striving to retain life in small body. Also to disguise same beneath alien garments.”

Spray was appalled. The cool effrontery of this imp from some Japanese hell made her momentarily speech-less.

“Will you stop trying to disguise yourself beneath my garments?” she demanded at last. “Give me back my shoes and pants. You deliberately stole them from me.”

“Not steal, madam,” said Nokashima. “All charged up. Very sorry. Every figure I attempt to uncover turns into angry being. ‘Go ’way, vile Jap,’ all say. Night of vast frustration. Here things, madam. Want me to slip on?”

“You slip on through the darkness,” replied Spray. “And don’t come near me for years.”

“As I thought,” said Nocka, sorrowfully. “Once more driven round about. Don’t angry, madam. Maybe I suicide in own blood. Not sure, though. Maybe dogs of flatties mangle first. Where are dogs of flatties? I not see one.”

“Don’t trouble to look for them,” advised Spray a little more kindly. “They’ll find us soon enough.”

Nocka suddenly giggled.

“I thought you dog of flattie,” he told her. “Fight grimly for life.”

“Dogs don’t wear pants, Nocka,” she informed him.

“Dogs of flatties might,” he argued. “How I know? Dogs of flatties adopt confusing disguise, maybe. I not surprise if do. What a romp we had. I almost repose in glass casket like famous Russian redman.”

“Are you still drunk, Nokashima?”

“A mere pushover,” replied Nocka. “I suspend, madam.”

“I wish you could find a drink.” Spray’s voice sounded wistful.

“Wish could,” said Nocka. “No disgrace in valiant endeavor. I worm in search, teeteringly. Excuse please, madam.”

Spray listened to his quiet departure for a few minutes, then she no longer had to strain her ears. A great rumpus somewhere out in the black void apprised her of the fact that the little yellow man had once more established contact with an angry being.

“Take your hands off me, whoever you are,” she heard Hal, the fireman, declaiming. “Neither man nor beast is going to handle me that way.”

Seemingly the small creature was out of luck again. Feeling a little sorry for him and a lot more for herself, Spray rose slowly from the floor and rearranged her dress and things.

While she was thus engaged, several lights flooded on in various parts of the store. The darkness was decimated. She glanced quickly around, then froze in her tracks. Other than the invading policemen there seemed to be no sign of life. This was due to the fact that, like herself, each member of the Pebble party stood poised in a position of suspended animation. Major Jaffey was modishly attired in a checked cap and light raglan. Hal, the fire-man, looking like an example of what the well dressed man was not wearing, had rigged himself up in a cross between a yachting outfit and a riding costume, retaining the worst features of each. Of Nokashima there was no sign.

“They’re hiding on us,” said Pat Murphy in a low voice. “Spread out and comb the floor.”

Looking tremendously impressive in his evening clothes, Mr. Pebble stepped forward and confronted Officer Murphy.

“Murphy,” he said severely, “I would like to know just what you and your men mean by making a play-ground of this store? I am chairman of the board of directors and have a perfect right to be here. I was telephoned to during a party I was giving and forced to hurry right down. If you haven’t a satisfactory explanation, I’m afraid things are going to go very badly with you.”

“Sorry, sir,” said Murphy. “We were looking for a thing that was half fireman and half lady. One of the halves turned to a wild beast right before our eyes.”

“I’m sorry, Murphy,” said Rex Pebble regretfully. “When your buttons are popping off, just think of what you’ve been telling me.”

“But this store was full of robbers and things,” Pat desperately assured Mr. Pebble. “Ask any of the boys. We saw ’em and we heard ’em. Look, sir, that case is smashed a bit.”

“True,” admitted Rex Pebble. “I want to be fair and reasonable. We heard that disturbance. Perhaps robbers are in the store. If so, it is your duty to apprehend them. In the meantime have one of your men open a door and let us out.”

With a stately stride Rex Pebble walked to the nearest door, a policeman preceding him. To the surprise and consternation of Pat Murphy and his brother officers the figures of a woman and two men suddenly came to life and followed their leader. Well in the rear glided the most surprising of all the figures. It was the stiff, lifeless form of a store model clad in the costume of a maid. This model had two pairs of feet, only one pair of which was moving.

“Look,” cried Pat, pointing. “Look, for the love of God! It moves and it’s not alive.”

Major Jaffey, with great presence of mind, lifted the strange object in his arms and bore it to the door.

“It’s the lady’s maid,” he explained over his shoulder. “The poor girl’s scared stiff.”

When the Pebble party was a safe distance from the store, the Major set his burden down, and the small body of the little yellow man was extracted with some difficulty, owing to the fact that various parts of him had become wedged within the hollow shell of his temporarily adopted habitation.

“Unable to disrobe one similar to Fifi in time,” Nokashima explained blinkingly. “I attack from under. Amazed at own brilliance. What say, boss?”

“Ask that diminutive Japanese maniac to say as little as possible to me for at least ten minutes,” Rex Pebble said to Spray. “I will need all of that time to rehabilitate my poise. We are now going home – to my home, for a change.”

“Look what I apprehend,” announced Nocka, producing the lion’s head from some recess within the shell of his recent disguise. “I bring home to Mist’ Henry, and he bound with alarm.”

Without a word Rex Pebble turned on his heel and led the way through the night.

Later that same night Officer Pat Murphy encountered the abandoned model of the maid leaning dejectedly against a wall. It was only after questioning it closely for some minutes that he discovered the object was not alive.

“I knew all along,” he said to the fading stars, “there was some monkey business going on.”

But when he gave his report to the sergeant he made no mention of his discovery. Things were bad enough to explain as they were, without adding another mystery to the list.

CHAPTER TEN

A Walk Through Town

“Never mind about my excitable nature,” remarked Spray Summers, as they turned into a particularly quiet and deserted street. “I never would have believed that being bottled up in a department store with so many men could make me so nervous, but I feel like jumping at every shadow. Can’t we keep off these side streets? I expect to meet Frankenstein or Dracula any minute.”

“After our recent experiences,” said the Major gravely, “side streets are the thing for us. It was just about here, only one block down on the main thoroughfare, that we made that corner on two wheels.”

The night was black. Black as ink. Black as pitch. Black as Egypt. Any one of the stand-by comparisons would have done, but the truth is that this particular alley looked like nothing so much as the inside of a stovepipe or a coal cellar in the dark. You felt as though something might be living in it, beyond eyesight, sneaking along, maybe tap-tapping with an invisible cane.

“Where are the stars?” asked Hal, the fireman, sleepily and innocently.

“Hasn’t anybody told you?” returned Spray with kindly venom. “We’re not using them since the Light and Gas Code was signed. They’re on a strike. Wish they’d do some picketing, though,” added the woman, shivering, as an afterthought. Rex Pebble, in the lead of the group, stepped into a doorway to light a cigarette. It seemed a shame to run the risk of having their trail again picked up by the police just for the sake of one little light. He opened a packet of matches and struck one. Nothing happened. He struck another match head, and this one, just as his companions caught up, ignited. Rex stepped out from the doorway.

“My God,” screamed Spray at the top of her none too delicate lungs, “the place is alive with men!” She clutched the arm of Hal, who, stumbling along in his weariness, suddenly leaped forward like a fire horse at the sound of the bell. From the rear Hal tackled Major Lynnhaven Jaffey, who in turn whirled upon Nokashima. Spray Summers, seeing herself deserted, flung her lissom young form harshly against Rex Pebble.

“It’s I!” cried Rex, pushing her away.

“Oh, yeah?” retorted the woman. “Well, plenty of women have gone wrong from believing men who said it’s I in the dark.” Spray landed a swift slap on Rex’s right cheek, while Hal, the Major, and Nokashima, after banging one another around, recovered their wits sufficiently to rush to her defense. They all landed upon Rex full force. The poor fellow was sinking under their combined weight when Spray discovered their mistake.

“It’s Rex!” she cried, and her friends, believing her to be hailing Rex’s approach as a new champion, flattened the unfortunate man on the sidewalk. “I’ve got him,” said Nokashima glibly, sitting on his boss’s neck at the uncomfortable point where Adam’s apple is the Gibraltar between Atlantic of body and Mediterranean of head.

“So I see,” whispered a weak voice from beneath the human pile. “Now that you’ve had your fun, let me up, will you?”

“Very fresh for masher,” returned Nocka, practically jumping up and down. “Teach good lesson.”

“You let him up this minute, you wizened yellow idiot,” said Spray. “Do you realize who you’re sitting on?”

“Formal introduction not necessary,” returned the Japanese,, who was proudly taking credit for the entire triumph of the onslaught. “Only that madam attacked.”

“We do not care, my dear girl,” said Major Jaffey with’ great heroism and formality, “who the fellow is, so long as we have saved you from dishonor and disgrace.”

“Let him up, Major,” commented Spray. “You’re too late. You should have met us in a dark street twenty years ago. That’s my fate you have glued to the sidewalk there.”

“Your fate?” inquired the Major, raising his eyebrows and looking round for Rex. “I was under the impression that I had been out with your fate all evening.”

“Out with him and on top of him,” returned Spray; “only, when you’re through using his reconditioned chassis as a mattress, I think I’ll wrap it up and take it home with me. In other words, gentlemen, you’re sitting on Rex Pebble.”

Three shadowy figures sprang up in the darkness, out-lined faintly in the pale wash of light that drifted through the street from the lamp on the corner. A fourth shadowy figure rose and seemed to creak as it rose. It also seemed to stretch its arms and legs, and from it issued a deep and satisfying groan.

“A good job,” commented Rex. “I’ve never been so thoroughly mistaken for a gang of stick-up artists in my life. Something to add to my experience.” While his three assailants continued to pour regrets and apologies upon him, Rex Pebble took Spray Summers’ arm, and again the group moved down the street.

“First think we meet strange men and beat up,” apologized Nokashima; “now only hope do not meet strange dogs or animals.” He brandished his spoil, the lion’s head. “May prove turning point in Mist’ Henry’s life. Very likely to arouse primitive passions. Either Mist’ Henry overcome with superiority of imitation over nature, inspired to help self, or slink off coward-like.” Nocka was genuinely worried. It was vital that Mr. Henry take to the lion’s head.

“Never mind that bloody beast – I mean that bloodless beast,” Spray spoke out of the blackness; “just let’s get home before we massacre each other. Let me hold your arm too, Major. I don’t feel too easy yet.”

Spray Summers suited the prophecy to the moment, for, just then, from the dark triangle of a small doorway stepped a figure. The only thing visible about it was a white handkerchief across its face. The Pebble party felt its presence rather than saw it. They stopped short, arm in arm, with Nokashima in the rear pressing close against Major Jaffey and Hal.

“Stick ’em up!” said a voice, “or I’ll fill your bellies full of lead!” Ten hands shot into the air.

“Now turn around and walk Indian file in front of me,” continued the voice. There was a peculiar note of hesitancy in the command. The voice seemed somehow to question its own judgment. It wavered. “Is that right, Joe?” it inquired of an unseen presence in the doorway.

“Yes and no,” returned the presence. “Of course, you’ve got to vary your technique with the personalities concerned. However, I can’t really sense these personalities, let alone see them. It’s hardly a fair trial.”

Rex Pebble felt that it was time to put in a word. “Are you predicting anything about a trial, or is that just part of your course in technique?”

“Just part of the course,” said the presence in the doorway, which was male. “We’re just a couple of young fellers working our way through school, and we’re on the second story now, won’t you help us out?” The presence seemed to be struggling with an old instinct for salesmanship, just as the actual robber appeared to be mentally thumbing the index of a book of directions on how to commit a robbery.

“Sure, glad to accommodate,” answered Rex Pebble, “especially if you’ll give us a receipt and let us go on home.”

“Oh, no,” said the first voice, quite shocked. “We can’t let you go home alone. First we’ll take your clothes – just come along now, strip them off – and then we’ll be very glad to see you home.”

“You’ll see more than my home if you take these clothes off,” remarked Spray, as she started to slip off her dress, “because I only had time to grab something for the outside. I’m practically nude inside, you know.”

Both voices were silent. They seemed to be considering. What was the proper thing for a robber to do now? The romantic thing was to let the woman keep her clothes, reform yourself, and then marry her, but that seemed a little harsh for a young gentleman gangster just starting out.

Spray sensed the embarrassment that hung over the scene. “Oh, come now,” she said, “we didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. You’re far too sensitive as it is. I just don’t see how you could use clothes like mine in your business.”

“Well,” he said, “you’d better keep your clothes on. We want to keep this hold-up clean. No sex. It’s against the Union now, anyhow.” The fellow stuck a torch into Spray Summers’ face.

“Oh, she’s lovely,” said the somewhat cold presence who came forward from his director’s stand in the door-way. They both were engrossed; they spoke as though none of their victims could hear. “I could use that in my business.”

“Look out now,” said No. 1. “I may not know as much as you do about technique, but I can tell about some other things. You can’t have love and a career, you know.”

“Who do you think I am – Hitler?” inquired No. 2 icily. “I’m afraid that I’ll just have to ask you to stick to your work. I think we might just try taking that dress off.”

Rex Pebble realized that things were coming to a crisis. No. 2 was evidently a man of social grace, highly susceptible to feminine charm if, without even seeing Spray’s face, he wished to take her dress off. Something had to be done quickly. Rex felt his adversary’s weakness.

“You fellows might be interested in a little party we’re throwing up at our place,” he suggested. “It seems like an awful bad night in your line.”

“Matter of fact, couldn’t be worse,” said No. 2 sociably. “I never would have gone out at all if it hadn’t been for him.” It appeared that he was pointing with scorn at his companion. “They didn’t think he was getting along at all, and it was just my luck to have him come into my class. I always say that if you stay in a school as long as three years without progress, you’ll never get out.”

“Have you been in three years?” asked Spray Summers, following Rex’s lead in hoping to keep the talk impersonal.

“In three years?” replied No. 1 viciously. “What does she mean, in three years?”

“Now, don’t go getting on your high horse,” warned No. 2, “because that’s one of the main things that holds you back. She doesn’t mean any offense. She merely means, have you been in school three years.”

“Oh,” said No. 1 with evident relief, “oh, that, sure. It isn’t the work so much that holds me back as the social life. School is so much social life, nowadays.”

“Which is all the more reason for you to come along and join us. When we left the house there was half a fire department and a French maid at play.”

“See there,” remarked No. 2, who apparently, after looking forward to a dull evening, saw things beginning to pick up. “What you ought to do is to get out and meet some of the customers.”

“Can’t mix business and play,” No. 1 was murmuring stubbornly when Nokashima broke in with admirable tact.

“Perhaps,” suggested the little man, whose knowing smile could not be seen in the deep night that surrounded them, “young men like nightcap?” No. 2 appeared to be utterly overwhelmed with this idea. He abandoned all attempt at a professional manner and frankly tugged at his companion’s sleeve.

“Listen, pal,” said Joe pleadingly, “these ain’t the regular kind you’ll find yourself sticking up. They’re decent. They’re worth meeting. Come to think of it, you ought to get used to finding your way around homes of hospitable people. It’s knowledge that will come in handy someday. Go to the bathroom. Find how it lets out of the bed-room. Pardon me, folks,” Joe interrupted himself, “I gotta tell him some of these things so’s to sell him on the idea of coming along with us. It’s the inside layout that counts. You got the approach. You can handle a ladder. I’ve seen you work: you’re slick as a cat, you go through a place like greased lightning. The fellas all like to work with you. But what good does all this do you if you don’t know the build-up of these places inside? Not often you get a chance like this. Come on, pal, I can’t quit on you, but I want to go.”

“That’s right,” said Rex Pebble, who would have been dubious about the whole proposition except for the fact that No. 1 could not be persuaded to lower his pistol, which was pointed directly at Rex, or so he imagined. “Why not settle the argument? You come along with us, Joe, and let your friend here bring up the tail end. He can keep on aiming his pistol at the last one in the line.”

No sooner had Rex got the words out of his mouth than there was a mad scramble in the street, everyone striving to get first into line, with Major Lynnhaven Jaffey in the natural process of evolution coming out last, No. 1’s unhesitating gun poked between his shoulder blades. The line proceeded up the street.

“Well, it’s mighty funny to me,” persisted No. 1 as the party moved along, “and I can’t see why I should be still sticking you up when you’re all on the move and on your way home, but I guess I know my duty when I see it. Get along there,” he commanded the Major roughly.

“Could you possibly lower that thing just a bit?” inquired the Major, “because, while I may be an old man and not particularly interested in life, it tickles me when it bobs up and down. You might as well put it away, anyhow.”

“What kind of drinks have you got?” asked Joe, coming to the point in a business-like manner. “Somebody remarked something about a nightcap. What’s that?”

“Oh, that’s a drink we give you before we put you to bed,” answered Spray Summers, who had begun to wonder how these latest two additions to the party were going to fit into the group that might already be celebrating something or other at her house when they got home.

“Bed?” Joe packed a wealth of meaning into one small word. “Did you hear that, Elmer? Bed.”

Rex, Spray, Hal, Nokashima, and Major Jaffey were swinging along in lockstep now, much more as though they were on their way to the workhouse than to Spray’s comfortable home. .

“Why so surprised?” asked Spray. “Don’t you boys ever go to bed?”

“Well, yes,” admitted Joe. “But everything does seem pretty upset tonight. Not more than an hour ago I was back there” – he indicated somewhere behind them with a jerk of the thumb – “watching Elmer clean up his tool for the evening, and now here I am going home to bed with my prospects. I guess I’ll never be a success. I think I must have an inferiority complex. Just ask me somewhere, and I’m a pushover.”

“Well, you’ll be all right when you get some of our drinks under your belt,” Rex assured him. “I could use one myself. How long have you been in this game?” he asked the sociable young man who had directed the stick-up.

“Oh, say three years, off and on,” returned Joe. “Long enough to get the feel of the thing. But I don’t like it. I always wanted to be a banker.”

“Well, now,” spoke up Major Lynnhaven Jaffey, with interest, “just how much would you be interested in putting up, should the right opportunity present itself? I think I know of something most attractive to a chap of your background and bearing.”

“Major, Major,” warned Spray Summers, “remember he’s only a boy.”

“I could round up five or six thousand pretty easy,” answered Joe, who in order to make the Major hear him had to raise his voice quite a bit. It was a strange procession. But it was making time, owing to the relentless pace set by Joe in the hopes that they could shake his accomplice or tire him out. “Five or six thousand, did you hear me?”

“That would do nicely,” called back Major Jaffey, “this particular institution is out in Arkansas, near Pine Bluff.”

“Neat,” commented Spray. “An institution, is it?”

“What would five or six thousand get me?” asked Joe. “I want a white- collar job.”

“Well, just look at me, my boy,” admonished the Major. “You can hardly see me at the moment, but we’ll remedy that later. I am a tall, distinguished, well-dressed man of sixty, and attribute my success solely to one thing: I never let anything worry me. You just let me have that five or six thousand, and neither of us will worry about anything.”

“Could I stand behind a cage and pass out books?” asked Joe eagerly.

“I think you’re confusing banks and public libraries,” remarked Spray, “but you can do one thing for me.”

“What’s that, lady?”

“Just sell your boy friend on the idea of dropping that gun. The Major, though a friend of mine, is pretty thin, and I’ve just been thinking that if your friend should shoot him, the bullet would probably push its way through him, on up here to me. And I don’t want to die – not tonight.”

“Listen, Elmer.” Joe adopted a new tack. “If you’ll put the gat away, I’ll let you hold ’em up on the front steps of their own house when we get there. Think of what that would read like in the papers. I’ll even have a flashlight picture made. Elmer Browne, snapped sticking up prominent West End residents. We might even get a spread in the society section. How’s that?”

“How often,” replied Elmer with ponderous dignity, “do I have to tell you that I take this profession seriously. If I stick somebody up, he stays stuck up, society section or not, even if I have to follow him home.”

“That’s it,” cut in Spray, “we want to give you a break. We want you to have a fresh start right at our home. You’re all tired out holding that gun. You’ll feel a lot more like making a snappy hold-up if you’ll just put it down for a while.”

“And meet some nice girls,” invited Rex.

“And have potent drink,” added Nokashima.

“And take that damned pistol out of my shoulder blades,” said the Major.

“Oh, all right,” Elmer capitulated reluctantly. “But remember, when we get there?”

“When we get there,” promised Rex.

“Speaking of there,” suggested Spray Summers, her ear cocked in the direction in which they were walking, “I suspect that I hear music.”

From the direction of the Summers ménage there issued a medley of sound. It was as though a Negro band in collision with a load of milk cans were playing Gershwin. Somebody was evidently beating on a dish pan, and somebody else had manufactured a home-made comb cornet. The air was not easy to identify, as the singers themselves seemed uncertain, but one thing was sure, that Fifi, patriotic to the core, imagined herself to be leading in the less mentionable verses of “Mademoiselle from Armentières.”

“How nice,” said Rex Pebble. “I think the Fire Department must have arranged a housewarming.”

“Well, if they did,” Spray came back, “I hope they left some of my extinguisher in the cellar. It sounds as though they must have drunk it all up.”

“Do you take home gangs every night?” put in Elmer doubtfully, his fingers slipping over the handle of his pistol.

“Oh, no,” said Spray; “these were just some fellows from the Fire Department who stopped in some hours ago to help extinguish a blaze. I think they stayed to entertain the maid, or vice versa. You’ll like them. They’re awfully jolly people – in for anything, at the drop of a hat.”

“The drop of a fireman’s hat is very important.” Major Lynnhaven Jaffey cleared his throat and called ahead, “Don’t forget, old man, that when we arrive at our host’s I would like a few quiet words with you. A banker never forgets.”

Turning from the side street abruptly brought the Pebble party suddenly before a small gate in the wall of Spray Summers’ garden. Rex, as first in line, had been guiding the footsteps of that intrepid brigand Joe, a willing victim of victimized hospitality. There was a tiny ship’s lamp alight above the gate, and in the diffused yellow glow from this the party drew up. Elmer, a tanned-face, black-eyed, sullen young man, regarded the company with distrust, wagging his head at Joe. Joe, on the other hand, wore an alert expression on his blond countenance. He turned a quizzical expression upon each face in turn. “Well,” he said, “you’re not a bad lot of yeggs at all. Who’s the old codger?”

“That’s your prospective banking associate, of whom you speak so flippantly,” Rex Pebble informed him. “And be sure to lock the cash drawer nights,” advised Spray.

“My friends here are being jocose with me,” laughed the Major. “We’ll just step inside and discuss the matter.” The Major opened the little gate and stepped in. At once he stuck an astonished face back. “What’s going in here?” he queried. “They’ve broken windows and knocked down doors.”

“Still looking for a fire,” said Spray disconsolately, “that’s where our taxes go.”

“Should think Mademoiselle Fifi provide plenty fire for boys,” put in Nokashima.

“Well, you just go in and tell them to come out, Spray dear,” suggested Mr. Pebble. “Tell them it’s time to go home, that the chief wants them. And you might add that they’d better hurry, as we’re arranging a little stick-up party on the front lawn.”

“I will not,” retorted the woman. “It’s as much your house as it is mine. I’m damned if I’m going to get mixed up with any more municipal branches. I started out with the Fire Department, got in bed with the police, invited gangsters home, and now you want me to start all over. I may not be the same as I was this morning, but I know when my dogs are tired, even if I am restored to my youth, and they are tired now.”

“Perhaps I’d better go in and fetch you the slippers Sue sent you for the anniversary of your seduction?” Rex insinuated, a teasing little smile curving his handsome mouth.

“You leave that hussy of a wife of yours out of this,” in a tone that rang through the night air. Both Elmer and Joe looked shocked. It was plain to see that they felt that if the trend in robbery was towards the gentlemanly frisk, this was not the sort of company for them to be out with. From the house, however, came an inquiring voice that drew the attention of the company.

“Who’s there?” it called in a deep bass.

“A friend,” returned Spray Summers. “In fact, I’m the mistress of this house.”

“Mistress?” questioned the voice. “Well, then, come on in,” it continued with a show of determination.

“No, you come on out,” returned the woman. “Let’s play out in the yard.”

“If you’re really the mistress of this house, I’ll give you a drink. I bet you’d like a drink, too. You must have been away a long time, because I’ve been here for hours and hours and hours, and I can’t remember ever seeing you.”

“Oh, you were young when I left this house. But don’t let that worry you. I’ll bet you know your way about now. Come on out and bring your friends.”

“I haven’t any friends. They’ve all deserted me. I’m all alone in the world. They’re all out in the kitchen with Fifi, singing dirty songs.”

“Why aren’t you out in the kitchen with Fifi?”

“Because I don’t know the words.”

“That won’t make any difference,” called Spray. “Come on out; we want you for witness at a shooting.”

“A shooting?” The word hung poised on air.

“Yes, and then we’ll sing afterwards.”

“Oh, but are you sure that I’ll sing afterwards?”

“Well, what difference will it make? You can’t sing now.”

“That’s right,” agreed the voice. “You sound like a mighty sensible woman. I may be mad, but I think I’ll take you up on that. Tell you what, I’ll come out on one condition.”

The Pebble party held its breath. Elmer was beginning to finger his pistol. It seemed like a shame to let the lad grow restive and really spoil things. Besides, he looked like an awfully good shot. Joe wore an apprehensive look, as though his period of influence with the hothead were rapidly drawing to an ending. Then there was the matter of ridding the house of firemen. This would take considerable strategy. A great deal depended on the answer of that unseen voice in the window.

“We’ll do ’most anything to please you.” Spray Summers chose her words with care, as became the feat of dealing with a distant drunken fireman.

“I’ll come down and I’ll witness your shooting – or my shooting, if you must – but you’ve got to have a drink with me.”

“Oh, that. That’s easy.” A sigh broke over the whole band, from the Major to Nokashima. “Hurry up, now, come on down and bring that drink. There’re eight of us.”

“Eight of you? What is this – a shooting gallery? Wait till I go where I started to go up here on the second floor hours and hours and hours ago.” The voice trailed off like the Cheshire cat’s head.

“What happens when he does come down?” demanded Elmer. “You told me when we got to the house we’d have the stick-up.”

“Certainly,” returned Rex, “but the idea is that you must accept of our hospitality first. One drink. One drink to a good haul and a better shot if necessary.”

“That’s fair,” urged Joe, who in the soft light of the ship’s lamp above the little garden gate was taking a keen interest in Spray Summers’ lissom young form, and in those deep, burning brown eyes whose sparkle was heightened by her recent debate. Suddenly, while Elmer argued with himself, a hand was thrust through the gate, extending a quart bottle of liquid.

“Here,” said the bass voice, “I’ll be out in a minute. Don’t you lose this, now, because it’s all I’ve got, and you’re all the friends I’ve got.”

Nokashima took the bottle from the hand. Tut-tutting over it, the little yellow man bemoaned the lack of a cocktail shaker and equipment. “Gurgles from bottle grow tiresome,” he murmured. “Anxious restore proper order to madam’s bar. If any bar left.” He gazed with rue toward the gate, when a bright idea seemed to attack him.

“Here, take,” said Nokashima to his boss, handing him the bottle and at the same time donning himself the phony lion’s head which he had lugged along as a trophy for Mr. Henry. “Scare burning daylights out of Fire Department.”

Evidently the fireman with the conversational bass had returned to the house for glasses, for at this moment, as Nokashima poked his lion’s head inside the gate, there was a crash as of many small glass objects dropped at once and a heavy pounding of feet on the lawn. “God help me!” the words tumbled through the night air, “if it isn’t a menagerie.” A door slammed.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The House Beautiful

When the last sad sounds of the fleeing fireman had died on the night – or very early morning – air, Rex Pebble and his retinue still stood in front of the little garden gate of his mistress Spray Summers’ house, wondering what next to do. A hold-up had to be arranged for the two mystified gentlemen gangsters who had accompanied the party home only on being promised that they might have their stick-up on the front lawn. That is, Elmer seemed adamant; Joe had really only come for the fun.

The party sadly lacked leadership. Its motives were many. Fascism was in urgent demand. Spray Summers’ chief desire was to get home, and not far distant in her thoughts was a bed. Rex Pebble, to a not surprising degree, held similar notions, that is, if amended with a few last drinks. Major Lynnhaven Jaffey, after searching half the world around, suspected that at length he had found the ideal angel for his pet bank, in Joe the Brigand. Hal, a little ashamed of being away so long, rather hated to face his compatriot brothers-at-hose, though this dread was alleviated by the sounds of merriment that issued from the house. Nokashima, of the whole band, had the least complicated ideas: with a bottle of liquor in his hands, there was only one thing that really remained to be done, and that was to shake it up skillfully into tempting cocktails. Nokashima should have been house man to Jove, or Bacchus’s bell boy: nothing delighted him so much as to relieve suffering mankind by the simple magic of alcohol.

Nokashima now addressed his mistress. “Early bird catch cocktail,” the fellow put his thought axiomatically. “I go make same – providing sufficient glasses left in honorable establishment.” Nocka vanished through the gate.

“You never have to worry about what to do next with that young Oriental around,” breathed Spray with a sigh of relief and anticipation. “Shall we join the firemen?”

From Elmer there was a silence that, unseen, was a scowl. “I want to know —” began that young man.

“Yes, we know,” returned Rex Pebble patiently. “But you can’t start till you get inside. That’s the first principle of burglaring. Haven’t you even taught him that, Joe? You’re a heck of a professor.”

“He’s persistent, Chief,” replied Joe blithely. “Per-severance always wins. I’ll bet you’ll let him stick you up yet. Me for that nightgown that somebody mentioned.”

“Nightcap,” corrected Spray. “Remember, this is a nice house, and no monkey business.”

Spray Summers, as hostess after her own peculiar fashion, led the way through the gate and down a pebble path to the veranda door. Off to the left of the party as they moved down the drive, the waters of the garden pool whispered in a slow night breeze. Their whisper was a dare to secret rendezvous, to something precious that few people would have suspected, for all the fresh lush summer loveliness of the garden and the clear deep beauty of the water. Spray Summers took Rex Pebble’s hand in hers, in the dark. It was the first time they had been near the magic spot, the curious, kindly fountain of youth, since new strength and years came back to them. An evening had slipped by swiftly, on wings of adventure, and now, within the almost sacred precincts of the house again, Spray felt stirred as she had not in years. “We’ll get rid of them all soon,” she whispered. “If we don’t, we’ll let Elmer shoot them,” Rex answered, pressing her hand tightly.

From within the house came continued noises of gayety and high joviality. “How shall we get them out?” asked Major Jaffey. “I’d like a quiet spot for a business conference.”

“I must say, Major,” declared Spray, “that you choose the damnedest moments for your multicolored activities that I ever heard of. First you appear out of the bushes minus clothes, stay with us all evening, appear to be on the verge of spending the night, and now you want me to drive out my favorite firemen so that you may have a conference in the house. Of all the brass.” Spray laughed. “I think the best thing is just to spread ourselves here while we await Nokashima. Besides, the fire laddies may join us themselves at any moment.”

“Can’t you take it off?” asked Rex of Elmer, who was struggling to sit down on the stone terrace without entangling himself in his pistol.

“Never have yet,” said Elmer doggedly.

“I should think it might be pretty uncomfortable at times,” said Spray Summers with an evil look. “I can think of a couple of times, at least.”

“Oh, he takes it off sometimes,” Joe defended his true-blood comrade. “I think I know what you mean. Yes.” Joe was subtle if not delicate.

A crystal tinkle of ice in tall glasses unmistakably heralded the approach of Nokashima, the tireless, the all-faithful. The drinks were long and cool and potent. From the first sip there was a deceptive charm to them, a suggestion that if you like me, don’t hesitate to drink me, because I’m perfectly harmless, just a little drink trying to get along. They were matchless for good taste and for kick, the kind of thing one’s palate remembers with the first fresh taste of surprise, in spite of what may follow after.

Nokashima had switched on a wall light on the veranda before departing again for the house, and in the glow of this Elmer seemed gingerly to be sipping at his glass. It was plain that he wanted it but hated to give in. “Go on, old man,” urged Major Jaffey, whose glass was half empty and who feared that one slow drinker might slow up the tempo of the party. “Dive in – it won’t hurt you. I hear that a good drink now and again improves marksmanship.”

“Yeah,” coaxed Joe, equally well along, “lift it up like this and take a great big swallow, like a man.” Joe tossed off the remainder of his glass.

“Well,” said Elmer with more determination than grace, “I’m a sport. I guess I can take it. Down the barrel!” He tilted his glass and drained it, wiping his mouth on his sleeve with a gusty “Whew!”

“So that’s that,” whispered Spray to Rex. “You can just hand me that gun.”

From the house Nokashima came trotting with great excitement. “Mist’ Henry delighted with head of lion,” he announced proudly. “Expect great comedy when exhibit self to visiting firemen.”

“The breaks seem to be coming our way,” commented Rex Pebble. “Here, Nocka, fill up these gentlemen’s glasses.” Nocka, still trembling with excitement over the amazing courage of Mr. Henry, the smell-less bloodhound, poured gurglingly from a tall pitcher with frosted sides. Elmer, less scowling, reclined against a pillar of the stone porch, and Joe, blissful as a cherub, opened a quiet financial harangue with Major Jaffey.

“I think,” Spray Summers’ voice was low in her lover’s ear, “that you and I might sneak out for a little anniversary. What do you say?”

“You bet!” responded Rex. “Look here, Nocka,” he addressed the diminutive servant, “suppose you take the responsibility of removing those raving hyenas in there before the police arrive. Will you do that?”

“Great pleasure, boss,” grinned the Japanese. “Solicit help from Mist’ Hal and others and make quick work of fire chasers. You beat it.” Nokashima’s vocabulary strained at no gnats for delicacy of expression. Elmer was staring thoughtfully into the cool green depths of his glass as Rex and Spray stole away in the dark toward the pool. His eyes were large and full of wonder. drink

Nokashima first helped himself to a generous drink and then clapped his hands sharply, like a miniature Eastern potentate summoning his slave. “Hi, Mist’ Henry, hi!” he called. A creature crept out of the shadows, its tail drooping, and lifting large sorrowful eyes. He came up to Nokashima, plastering his small yellow hand with a bright red tongue of just about the same size.

“Do you know what’s the matter with that dog?” asked Hal, the fireman, bluntly.

“Have suspicions but not plenty evidence for statement,” said Nokashima. “However, Mist’ Henry potentially very fine dog.”

“That’s just it,” remarked Hal, “and that’s exactly where I disagree. I don’t think he’s potentially anything. That is to say, I don’t think he’s got any potentials at all.”

Nokashima sighed with the air of one who is reluctant to accept the truth. “If Mist’ Henry only develop interest in other bloodhounds,” he moaned. “Apparently very much one-dog dog. No interest in anyone but me.”

“What did he do with the lion’s head?” asked Hal. “Did he chew it up?”

“No,” returned Nokashima more brightly. “Mist’ Henry apparently very fond of mask. Must have known lion in this or former existence.”

“Here’s an idea,” proposed Hal. “This dog has some kind of complex. You know. I could spell it for you, but it doesn’t matter. It’s something he lacks and keeps thinking about all the time. Like not being able to smell. I wouldn’t go around with my tail like that if I couldn’t smell. We got to show Mr. Henry how to be a poker face.”

“That easy,” agreed Nokashima eagerly. “Let Mr. Henry wear lion’s head for some time, get to thinking self lion, maybe roar, certainly sniff, give nostrils work-out.”

“That’s right,” said Hal, “but that ain’t all.” Hal cupped one hand over Nokashima’s right ear and whispered, “This guy Elmer, he’s like Mr. Henry. He wants to shoot somebody just to show how big he is. Suppose we get Mr. Henry and Elmer to get my pals out. That would be teaming ’em up!” Hal laughed softly. He was immensely pleased with his own idea.

“Gland idea,” exclaimed Nokashima enthusiastically. “Combine good and bad points of situation. Great aid Mist’ Henry and Mist’ Elmer; big bounce for visiting firemen.”

“I think that idea could be celebrated with a few more drinks, then,” said Hal, quick to lose no quarter, or cocktail. “Or is there any left?”

“Always plenty in shakers of Summers house,” returned the small fellow hospitably. “If no, can go out quickly for more.” Nokashima poured liberally from the seemingly inexhaustible pitcher that served in place of the silver shakers now greatly in demand by the convention of heroes in the kitchen. In pouring, he did not spare Elmer, the reluctant drinker who had by this time become completely won over to the charms of blood-cheering alcohol and lay semiprone against the stone pillar, lost apparently in contemplation of some gigantic pilfery.

On nimble feet Nokashima sped into the house, pitcher in hand, returning in a split second with a fresh supply of drinks and the ferocious phony lion’s head. Mr. Henry, as averred by his faithful friend the Japanese, may not have definitely feared the thing, but he certainly displayed no great affection for it. Nokashima placed the head on the veranda and urged the bloodhound to examine it. With slow, slouching, cautious steps, the lanky creature moved round it, drinking in its every repulsive feature with his sad, distrustful eyes, and making now and again a pathetic attempt to resuscitate his long-lost sense of smell, if such a sense had ever indeed thrilled those ponderous nostrils. Mr. Henry turned regretfully to the Japanese; he appeared in effect to shake his head. You may have imagined that I cared for it, his look seemed to say, and I don’t want to disappoint you, but heaven knows I can’t see why I should have anything whatever to do with it. What’s it for?

“Tsch, tsch!” muttered the Oriental, chagrined. “Mist’ Henry exhibit no distress, but also show no great pleasure.”

“I could hardly say he seemed thrilled,” said Hal scathingly. “It’s what we say about some of the fire horses, there are more plugs than the iron ones on the corner. Try putting it on him.”

Nokashima adjusted the grinning lion’s head over Mr. Henry’s drooping visage. Nothing happened. The figure stood still, a ridiculous blend of lion and bloodhound, the face looking pleased as Punch, the shaggy knees and legs of the brute sagging under its weather-beaten, bone-ridged body. The face swung slowly from side to side in a grotesque combination of radiant and dismal regard. Take it off, said Mr. Henry, it’s no use. I can’t smell, I have no emotions, as a bloodhound I’m a total wash-out. Nokashima seemed on the point of tears. Carefully and tenderly as though he were lifting back the shroud of a dear one recently passed away, he removed the lion’s mask from the drooping bloodhound’s shoulders. Mr. Henry had not changed his expression; he half stood, half sat, gazing at his proxy master with disconsolate incompetence.

“Here,” said Hal, the fireman, “have a drink.” He proffered his glass, out of sympathy and understanding, to the dog.

“That’s a good idea,” commented Joe, who, in his absorption with the unexpected delights of alcohol so freely dispensed, was beginning to tire of Major Lynnhaven Jaffey’s steady quiet drone of sales talk on the merits of the proposed banking scheme. “And while you’re at it, you might give me one – that is, if you can spare it from the cur.”

“Him no cur,” defended Nokashima, generously filling Joe’s extended glass. “Him bloodhound of noble blood greatly afflicted with multitude of sorrows of life. No blame for Mist’ Henry. Suppose honorable stick-up man unable to stick up?”

“That’s Elmer,” admitted Joe readily. “Look at him. Dozing. Not doing a damned thing. Not even trying to get the lay of the land. I mean that in a clean way. Give him a drink too. Let Hal feed the hound a drink and I’ll feed Elmer one.” With none too gentle hands, Joe pried open Elmer’s mouth and poured a glass of drink into it. Elmer gave no signs of feeling, other than a half absent-minded air of gratitude.

Hal, too, was quick to take Mr. Henry in hand. “Here,” said the young fireman, “drink this.” Mr. Henry sidled over and obediently opened his cavernous jaws. The dog wrapped his great tongue around the glass – in fact, so recklessly that Hal clung to the stem with alarm lest he swallow glass and all.

“First time Mist’ Henry ever take drink,” murmured Nokashima, shaking his head as though his sense of morals, whatever they were in their obscure Oriental way, had been violated. If it was the first time the dog had taken to drink, however, he did not give indication of his inexperience. He lapped up the liquid and seemed to call for another round. “My God!” exclaimed Hal, examining the glass. “It’s a good thing you didn’t offer him the bottle. If you ask me, I think Mr. Henry’s a silent drinker. Let’s see what he’ll do with another one. That one just wet his whistle.”

“Beware drunken bloodhound,” warned Nokashima. “Very much alarmed consequences Mist’ Henry’s heavy drink. Never can tell what happen.” Hal ignored this sage advice. “Rats!” he said, “another drink will do the dog good. I think I’ll have one with him. Here’s to you, Henry, old boy, old boy,” toasted his companion. The dog responded with what was the nearest approach to a smile of joy that anyone remembered to have seen written on his features. He gave a cross between a wheeze and a snort, ending in a low, melodious howl that brought Elmer’s eyes open with a start, cut short the Major’s monologue and caused a sharp, sudden quiet within the Spray Summers ménage. With Mr. Henry’s long last note lingering in the air, there was dramatic silence for a moment. The hubbub resumed, filling the dark, sweet-smelling garden and the veranda with a low buzz that might have been made by a ladies’ aid society drinking spiked punch.

Mr. Henry, licking his lips monstrously, downed his second highball. Eyes focused on the creature. Stretching both front legs luxuriously, he wagged his head foolishly from side to side and glanced coyly at Hal, his benefactor, then at Nokashima, his future source of supply. With a new grace the dog ambled over to the Japanese and gazed into the depths of the silver pitcher in his hand. “No, no, Mist’ Henry,” remonstrated Nokashima, throwing Hal a reproachful look. “Now see, Mist’ Henry practically confirmed drunkard. His fate in your hands now.” The small yellow man appeared to waive all responsibility for the bloodhound, to wash his hands of the whole affair. “You put Mist’ Henry to bed,” he said to Hal.

“Leave him alone,” returned that young man. “I think he’s getting on fine. That’s what’s the matter with the brute. You’ve been sissifying him. What if he can’t smell? He can drink, can’t he? A dog’s got to have some kind of fun.”

But it was at this point that Mr. Henry really became alarming in behavior. With the pitcher upright in Nokashima’s hand, it seemed impossible to get a drop of liquid out. The dog realized this and made a sudden lunge which landed Nokashima, amazed beyond words, in a sitting position on the lawn. The pitcher was now on the ground. Mr. Henry tentatively put forth one paw to tilt it over. With admirable dispatch Nokashima recovered his bearing. He snatched the pitcher off the ground, stubbornly folding his arms about it. Mr. Henry seemed to consider, then, with great deliberation, as though he wished to injure no one, but was equally determined to have his way, the bloodhound laid a ponderous paw on either of the little man’s shoulders and pressed him to the earth. Just to make his intentions clear, that he bore no ill feeling, he swiped his great red tongue twice across the man’s face and, standing on Nocka’s chest, sank his mouth into the pitcher. There was a deep gulping sound, like the noise of an old-fashioned cistern when the bucket reaches the surface and begins to imbibe water for its return voyage.

Hal rose hastily and rushed to Nokashima’s aid. He was too late. The man was not hurt, though stunned. Mr. Henry, having cleaned up the pitcher, calmly moved off Nocka’s chest and began, first lumberingly, then with a sort of childish gayety, to cavort about the lawn. Not since he was a pup, if even then, had the bloodhound appeared so full of pep. He tore off apparently in pursuit of imaginary bones that had been pitched to him, cutting great circles about the lawn and then lunging into the circle of light like a locomotive out of a tunnel. With a tremendous bound he leaped across the huddled figures of Major Lynnhaven Jaffey and Joe, who were practically embracing one another in their panic. Elmer rubbed his eyes as the bounding creature stopped long enough to place a thick alcoholic tongue on his cheek.

“Great Fujiyama!” exclaimed Nokashima, giving way to his tallest expletive. “Mist’ Henry mad with drink. How will ever explain to boss unusual behavior of pet?”

“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” said Hal as he dodged an affectionate forward pass. “Mr. Henry’s not anybody’s pet now. The world’s Mr. Henry’s pet.”

What to do with a stewed bloodhound? Nokashima called and wheedled. It was no use. The creature knew the pitcher was empty, and that was that. Elmer was the first member of the party to suffer from serious attack.

Some instinct – could it have been a reviving sense of smell? – led the beast to rush the stick-up artist, languishing on the veranda, and, pinning him down, to lap up what remained of drink in his glass. It was some time before the print of importunate claws smoothed out of Elmer’s face.

“Damn you, Joe!” sang out the attacked one. “You not only stop me from my work, but you get me into a dog-fight. What did he do to me, sting me or bite me?”

Mr. Henry sprang happily here and there, racing off into the shadows of the garden, only to tear back in search of companions. He would whirl first up to one, then to another, until Hal, realizing his desire, timidly ran away with the dog. When they emerged a second later from the dark, Hal was limping in apparent agony. “He plays too rough,” the fireman complained. “I never met such a dog. Whose bloodhound is he, anyhow?”

“Mist’ Rex’ bloodhound,” returned Nokashima, “and he going to be plenty sore when he sees condition of pet. Heaven knows what Miss Spray say!”

“The thing to worry about is what we’ll do,” said Hal, a victim, “because this has got to stop. He’s a regular lion.” Hal stopped short. “Say, that’s an idea,” he exclaimed, “why not put the lion’s head on Mr. Henry now? Hell’s bells, what a lion he’d make!”

Nokashima was in a quandary. He didn’t want to take Mr. Henry indoors in this shameful condition, nor did he wish to call for help. The suggestion was not a bad one. It would cut off Mr. Henry’s sight, and there was no telling what might happen. It couldn’t be worse than having a mad dog at large on the premises. “Here, Mist’ Henry, hi, come, nice bloodhound,” lured the deceptive Japanese, pretending to produce a flask from his pocket. Mr. Henry slowed up in a whirling circle, bewildered with doubt. He didn’t really know whether he should have another drink or not. Enough was enough; he had lost all sense of inferiority, and he was certainly the center of attention, if not of alarm. Mr. Henry’s life long ambition had been to be a catastrophe, and this seemed his big chance – only if he didn’t get too tight. One li’l’ drink. The dog hesitated. He moved cautiously to Nokashima’s side.

Suddenly, from behind, the lion’s head was clapped over his shoulders. Mr. Henry emitted a long, soul-rending protest that again brought complete blanketing silence to the house and its environs. No heart could have heard that anguished howl in the night without missing a beat.

Mr. Henry had put his whole being into it, a magnificent, ravishing cry of outraged merriment, but it did not produce results. The lion’s head stayed on. Fortunately for Mr. Henry, though he could not see, he could breathe through the lion’s nostrils. He snorted and uttered a second howl. There was silence. Mr. Henry felt a grey surge of disgust sweep over him. What bad sports humans were! Here they go and get a bloodhound tight and then they wouldn’t play. It wasn’t fair. Everything began to seem muddled and confused; Mr. Henry’s canine values were completely upset. He felt like running right out of the garden gate and never coming back. By gosh, thought Mr. Henry, he would – and forthwith he started at a gallop in the direction of what he imagined must be the gate.

In all fairness to his human playmates, or drunken associates, it must be said that Mr. Henry was properly warned. As the hound leaped off into the darkness, it is possible that Nokashima, spiritually psychic to the demands of inebriated characters, canine or human, may have guessed his intention. That is, to make off with himself, out into the great wide world, where no bloodhound is obliged to drink white man’s liquor and not have white man’s fun.

“Be careful,” shouted the house man to the rapidly retreating figure. “If wish long sprint in woods, do not head for fountain.”

“God knows what that crazy mutt will do next,” complained Hal, rubbing his thigh. “He certainly stepped all over me.”

“What you expect?” demanded the Japanese man curtly. “You kennel snatcher! Go feed nice dog all gin – best Tom Collins Nokashima made in three summers – and expect him to behave as in Book of Etiquette. I only uneasy about Mist’ Henry’s whereabouts now.”

“The dog has had three drinks or more,” put in Major Jaffey. The confusion had been a great break for Joe, for in the midst of the clamor he had been able to remove himself somewhat from the Major’s wave length and no longer had drilled into him comparative bank earnings for the last ten years. “I’ve only had four, and I’m not nearly so well behaved. If I had my youth back again, I’d scamper around the yard and do somersaults myself.”

At this moment there was a loud splash. It was the sort of sound that could only be made by the unexpected contact of a whirling object with a large expanse of water. The splash was quickly followed by a loud and terrible howl.

“Something dreadfully wrong now,” remarked Nokashima with fatalistic philosophy. “No ordinary dive. That accident of two bodies – water and other body.”

“Could that poor hound have jumped into the —” Joe left his question unanswered. It was quite clear what had happened: Mr. Henry had taken the wrong direction. He had headed straight into the garden pool.

“The poor brute,” commiserated Major Jaffey. “I do hope that he has not drowned himself.”

“Poor brute more likely drowned if stayed in present company than in pool,” commented Nokashima dryly. “Other people’s liquor flow freely.”

“That was a crack,” interposed Joe, “which I have no idea of hearing. Consider it erased, rubbed out. Wiped off.”

From the direction of the pool came another howl, this howl curiously less distinct. There were no further splashings. Nokashima and Hal were collecting themselves with an idea of stopping this bloodhound suicide, if that was his idea, when an object emerged from the darkness that would have stopped a magician in Baghdad. Half lion, half pup, it pranced up, wagging its stubby tail and begging for affection.

“You can’t tell me,” said Joe rubbing his eyes, “that bloodhounds breed that fast. And even if I believed that, I wouldn’t believe they’d be born with fake lions’ heads on. What a nightmare!” Joe hid his eyes.

The joyous malformation, which seemed utterly delighted with life, was undoubtedly the old Mr. Henry, now become a new Mr. Henry. His small sleek backsides wiggled mischievously, and his tail stood up as pert and emphatic as an exclamation point. His body was thin, like a colt’s, but there was youth in it, and a careless abandon that was completely new to Mr. Henry.

“Only one thing do now,” said Nokashima, as the first to recover his wits, “and that, use Mist’ Henry to help scare away firemen.”

“I want to be in on this.” Hal rose and followed Nokashima, who was leading Mr. Henry toward the house. “I’ve always felt some of the fellows needed stirring up, and now I want to see how they’ll take it.”

“Bring Elmer,” Major Jaffey instructed Joe, “because we want to let him see how a real stick-up is staged, and after that, if there’s anything left, we’ll let him play with that pistol of his.” Joe, practically shouldering Elmer, staggered in the rear of the procession.

To firemen, absent from the station for hours in search of a blaze that never appeared, and lured away from the gentle art of fire-fighting by such odd-pursuits as blotting up a few drinks and playing around with a French maid, the sudden sight of a Japanese face is not calculated to improve public confidence. And if, in addition to all these things, the face be accompanied by a bounding half-dog, half-lion affair, the effect is likely to be quite upsetting. Such was the combined effect of Nokashima and Mr. Henry when Elmer, pressing jealously to the fore, produced his gun and brandished it in the doorway. The place was cleared instantly. There were several hurried words of protest, but for the most part the kitchen and the premises were clean-swept of firemen.

“Holy mackerel!” whispered the station lieutenant, “if that isn’t Hal with them!”

“The house is screwy, Lieutenant,” advised another, who helped to lead in the disorderly retreat of the department. “I’ve known that ever since that girl Fifi got started.”

“Got started what?” Even in his haste the lieutenant could not suppress his curiosity.

“Oh, surprising a fellow with pretty intimate business now and then, especially as a fellow goes to sit down.”

“Oh, that,” said the lieutenant. “Come on, we’ll never get away if we start to talk about the monkey business of this house, including that gal.”

“What have we been drinking?” asked one fellow in consternation, as he peered from his hiding place behind the large electric stove. “I thought there was something wrong about getting this whole joint free, including the French one.”

“That was wrong to begin with,” whispered the lieutenant, who crouched beside the man. “What is the creature? I seem to remember having seen the Jap before.”

“I’d say it’s half and half,” was the answer. “Half beast and half pet. That is, if it’s real.”

Mr. Henry, filled with drink and the glamour of youth, roped about the kitchen, practically dragging Nokashima after him. Fifi, still preoccupied with the cocktail shaker, over which, in the absence of Nokashima, she had been mistress, had not noticed the uproar. Firemen are apt to do anything, Fifi had learned, and they seemed always ready to start off at the sound of a gong. Something came nosing at her back. “Go ’way,” said the girl. “Now, now, go ’way.” She reached behind her, intending to slap the playful fireman, when her hand encountered something new and strange. It was somewhat bearded, it had an unusually large mouth, even for a fireman. Fifi raised her hand a bit. No fireman that she knew had such heavy brows. There was a loud sniff, a sniff like a dog. Fifi thought with scorn of Mr. Henry and his lack of smelling ability; at least, if the house was beset with firemen, there weren’t any dogs around. The girl helped herself to a small drink and looked around, charitably intending to give the playful fellow a taste of her highball.

“Oh, mon Dieu!” the cry rang throughout the building. Rex Pebble and Spray Summers, blissfully resting beside the pool, heard it and started for the house. They could hardly believe it, but it seemed that something was either happening or about to happen which they had never imagined possible with a Frenchwoman.

“Take eet away,” cried the girl. “Eet is hor-ri-ble. You feelthy man!” she screeched at Nokashima. Mr. Henry was delighted with this show of attention. He bounded about the prostrate girl, quite out of control, and in touching the corners of the room, caused the heroes of many fires to cower in their hiding places. For the first time in her experience Fifi willingly embraced a Japanese. With a quick motion she grabbed the little man and clung to him in terror.

Rex and Spray at this moment appeared in the door-way. The room was a wreck. Glasses graced the floor, over which Mr. Henry tore in ecstasy, tail waggling, lion’s head tossing. Fifi hid her eyes on Nokashima’s shoulder.

There was hardly a sign of a fireman, except for stray helmets here and there, and a coat or two piled on the stove.

With amazement the mistress of the house gazed on the scene of recent revelry, and at the creature which romped about the room.

“If I didn’t recognize the symptoms,” said Spray, “I wouldn’t know what it was.”

Mr. Henry paused for a second to whiff generously at his mistress’s feet. It was a new sensation for the creature. He drew enormous breaths and smelled rapturously. It was as though a man long blind for the first time beheld the sunlight. Mr. Henry, restored to puppydom, had regained his sense of smell. And he meant to use it.

“Well, he seems to be shaking a mean nostril at your feet,” said Rex. “You lose your corns, and Mr. Henry regains his smell. That’s fair.”

“Let’s forget my corns,” retorted Spray, “and see what can be done to clear up this bacchanale. Here, Henry old fellow,” she said, picking up a fireman’s helmet, “smell this out.”

The bloodhound took an eager whiff and reeled off. From corners firemen emerged.

“Not that I don’t want to be hospitable,” called Spray as they poured forth into the night, “but it’s time all good firemen got to bed.”

“Is this Elmer’s cue?” inquired Joe enthusiastically from the doorway. “Can he hold up the Fire Department? He’s rarin’ to go.”

Nokashima, pushing the weeping Fifi away, hastened after the exiting firemen. “That our idea, madam,” he said over his shoulder. “Mist’ Elmer devote pistol to fleeing figures.”

Elmer leered in the doorway, a face in the night. In trembling fingers he held a revolver. “Can I now?” he asked. “Can I let ’em have it?”

“I think that would be a very fitting climax to the party,” remarked Rex Pebble. “Yes, let ’em have it.” Elmer whirled about unsteadily. There were loud reports on the night air, and in the distance much shouting of unmentionable words.

“Mist’ Henry like March,” philosophized Nokashima, “come in like lamb, go out like lion.” For mingled with Elmer’s shots was a clamor like the far-off baying of the hounds in a posse pursuit of escaping convicts.

Spray Summers calmly, with hands on slim, alluring hips, surveyed the scene of hilarity. It was anything but a house beautiful, but it never lacked for excitement.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Sue Turns

Sue Pebble was Rex Pebble’s wife. She had been that for twenty-one years. Obdurately, determinedly, Rex Pebble’s wife. There had been times, in those years, when Sue’s patience had been strained to the breaking point, but she never gave up. Start a thing, you must finish it, was Sue’s philosophy, even if in name only. She liked being Mrs. Rex Pebble, she liked the house she lived in, she was not blind to her husband’s faults, and best of all, she was not blind to her own. Mrs. Pebble liked her fun and could take it. Though her heart line may have somewhat resembled the twisting course of the Snake River during the years of her marriage with Rex, she had at least pursued a tangent of tacit honesty, and she had made Rex a good home.

Mrs. Pebble glanced about the spacious, well-appointed living room. Violently addicted to change in a great many different things, perhaps her best expression of this attitude had been in the quick adoption and equally rapid scrapping of various modes of house furnishings. This room, like Mrs. Pebble’s emotions, had gone through regimes of horsehair, mission, antique, and Colonial. The room was now modern. It was hard but not harsh, with its pleasing tubular curves of gleaming metal and its soft, downy corduroy upholstery. Mrs. Pebble looked about her with evident satisfaction, while in a small mirror that she held in her hand she proceeded to make up her race. There was some contrast here. There were few modern lines in Sue Pebble’s face. Sue had reached fifty-five years of age, and despite her often frantic efforts to deceive, on close observation she looked it.

For instance, there was her hair. It was blond. It had been blond originally, but it was a white blond now. If Sue had not developed so watertight a system for regular visits to her hairdresser’s her hair would probably have showed more white than blond. As it was, she out-Harlowed Harlow. And the mouth. There was a certain tense, fierce expression about it, as though Sue Pebble hardly dared laugh out loud for fear something might crack or chip. She wore a high collar that flared around the upper reaches of her throat. Her lips were carefully outlined with sharp bright scarlet. Sue spent a great many hours a day in the huntress’s passionate pursuit of beauty.

It was with no pleasure that she gazed into the little mirror. Damn it, thought Sue, you can do wonders with your figure, but what can you do with your face? Considering everything, her face was about the best it could be, but it was not exactly satisfactory from any standpoint.

With pent-up resentment, Sue Pebble thought of her husband. Rex was older than she, but he carried his years with a great deal more ease and grace. He was a distinguished old devil, she thought, and he certainly didn’t deserve the break the years were giving him. These considerations led inevitably to a question that always lay smoldering, not to say blazing cheerily, in Sue’s mind. How did that woman Spray Summers, the hussy, keep her hold on Rex Pebble? Sue thought of Spray with very little envy, so she imagined, but with an amazing amount of curious respect. Simply out of professional regard, she was constantly pricked with amazement at this phenomenon. There had been quite a few men in Sue Pebble’s married life, but, drat them, she thought, they had always folded their tents and silently stolen away. Spray was only a few years younger than Sue, yet she held a firm grip on the woman’s husband. What in heaven’s name, Sue wondered, did they do all the time – all those long evenings on which, with the poorest excuses, Rex Pebble stole away to be with his mistress?

Sue’s questions and her little game of make-up were suddenly interrupted by the sound of the doorbell. Pretty late, she considered, as she rose to go to the door, but one could never tell what doorbells at late hours might produce.

It was just Kippie, Rex Pebble’s twenty-three-year-old nephew, who looked so much like his uncle at the same age that Sue almost started with surprise every time she saw the boy.

“Well, what do you want at this hour?” the woman demanded. “You know very well where your uncle is!”

“I don’t,” lied Kippie glibly, “and besides, might I not sometimes wish to see my charming aunt?”

“Stop it, stop it,” said Sue glumly. “I can’t listen to any such words as those after the inventory I’ve just been giving myself.”

“What, scoring up your lines again, you old witch?” said the young devil. “You ought to go out with me sometime. I’ll bet I could add a few curves of surprise to your collection.”

“Oh, no, you couldn’t,” retorted Sue. “You look too darned much like your uncle to add a thing to my experience. I could keep one jump ahead of you in anything you did.”

“I don’t think that sounds very nice,” said Kippie, “but I’ll give you credit for the best sort of meaning. By the way, what do you mean, I should know where Rex, that old fox, is at this hour?”

“It’s the children’s hour, isn’t it?” demanded Sue Pebble. “And besides that, it’s an occasion. Twenty years ago tonight my husband seduced his lifelong mistress. You can imagine with what misgivings I sit alone at home. I’m glad you came: we might have some fun.”

Kippie’s young face, so disturbingly handsome to the woman, was puckered with doubt.

“Well, I don’t care what the occasion is,” he remarked with a curious note of concern, “but I’ve got to see the old codger. Something’s up on the market. We might be wiped out. You know, stranded at the bread line.”

Sue Pebble’s nose showed that she had caught the scent. Only one thing could give her quite the look of quiet determination that was printed on her features. She rose from her chair and started toward the telephone. “I know the number,” she said. “In crises, whenever I’ve had to get that man in a hurry, I’ve imitated everything from a Negro maid to a taxi driver. I only hope I don’t get that slant-eyed Japanese master of lies on the phone, as I did one night.”

“Here,” said Kippie, catching up with her and detaining her. “Don’t do that. Phoning won’t do any good. I’ve got to talk with Uncle Rex in person. This is serious.”

“Well,” returned Sue, “what did you come here for?”

Kippie ran his fingers through glossy brown hair. “The truth is,” he said, “I saw the light as I drove past, and I just wondered what you were doing. I thought you might be in for a little adventure.”

“Adventure?” inquired Sue, pricking up her ears. “Precisely what kind of adventure? Are there men involved?”

“Well, I’ve got to see Uncle Rex, and we know where he is, and this is sort of an anniversary” – Kippie told the story in one breath – “and I thought it might be a lot of fun just to drop by and pay our respects – that is, your respects.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said his aunt. “I think that calls for a drink.” She started for the pantry. “And I don’t know but that I’ll take you up on that,” her words floated back from the door.

So it was that several shakers later Sue Pebble, accompanied by a young man strangely resembling the youthful Rex Pebble, set forth for the home of Spray Summers. The ride, due to their condition of heightened gayety, was a fairly hilarious one, over a course that wove perilously around corners and through red lights that continued to blink their reproach at the fast retreating car.

“So this is the love nest?” said Sue Pebble as they drew up with a shriek of brakes in front of the house with the garden and the pool in which her enterprising husband had installed his mistress. “I think they ought to have Japanese lanterns out, or flags in front, or a band playing.” She added, “How do you suppose they’re celebrating?”

“I’m too young to answer that one, Auntie,” said Kippie, “but I can use my imagination, or should I?”

“Never mind,” answered Sue. “I see lights, and I think I hear music. There must be other guests. I hope I shan’t have the pleasure of meeting his other wives calling on my husband’s mistress, or is that too confusing?”

“The morals of this family would tax the English language,” said Kippie, “and I haven’t even begun to tell you about mine.”

“Take it from one who knows,” advised his aunt, “and stay single. Rex has been going along for years under the false impression that three can live as cheaply as one.”

“All I hope is,” Kippie said wistfully, “that they have as good liquor as the old girl had the last time I was here.”

“Am I the other old girl when not present?” asked his aunt sternly.

“Nope,” answered Kippie blithely, “I just call you old soak and let it go at that.”

The woman and her youthful escort stole quietly through the little garden gate that so lately had been the scene of a near hold-up and an impromptu cocktail party. The gravel of the walk crunched under their feet as they neared the door. “Shall we ring,” inquired Rex Pebble’s wife, “or just break in? I seem to lack the proper etiquette for calling on the mistress of one’s husband, particularly on the anniversary of her seduction. I daresay I won’t be any more welcome for the anniversary present I sent, either.” Sue tittered with mirth. “Bedroom slippers – for her corns. Best wishes from Sue Pebble.”

“Come on,” said Kippie, who was familiar with the house. “Let’s just slip in the side door.” They entered a reception hall, from which a stairway ran up to the second floor. It was dark and smelled strongly of whisky and burned clothing. There was a faint whiff of dog about the place, also. “There’s been a party,” observed the young man, “and someone got burned.”

“I hope it was that wench,” returned Sue Pebble uncharitably. “I can hardly wait to see her in her bedroom slippers, sitting by the fire.”

“They’re upstairs,” remarked Kippie. “Let’s go on up.”

“Don’t be a fool. I may be the man’s wife, but I know when I’m not wanted.”

“Oh, come on, we’ll surprise them.”

“I should think so.”

“Wouldn’t you like to be surprised?”

“I have been. That’s why I’m a wife in name only.”

“Well,” said Kippie, taking Sue Pebble’s hand and urging her up the stairs, “turn about’s fair play.”

They tiptoed up the stairs in a spirit of jovial fun, hoping that the upper floor would yield the highballs of which it seemed to smell so generously. Suddenly a door was thrust open and a small dark form padded toward them along the dimly lit hall. At its heels followed a creature of jagged outline, which appeared to be a misfit head on a very gay animal body of four legs and a joyously wagging tail. Still in the rear were two figures with locked arms. The leader of this miniature parade bore what was unmistakably a cocktail shaker. The figure hesitated; so did the procession. A light switched on.

“Hi!” Nokashima greeted the newcomers. “Unaccustomed to receive guests on upper story, but this pleasant surprise. How do, Mist’ Kippie.” The years had only added to Nokashima’s stolid Eastern philosophy. If people wished to keep coming to call all night, that was too bad but unavoidable; and if they wished to insinuate themselves into the more intimate apartments of the house, they might hold themselves responsible for shock, not him.

“I think, in view of your perpetual rudeness and deceit over the telephone,” said Sue, advancing on the diminutive figure, “that you may just pass over that shaker.”

Nokashima clung to the object. “Very special property, this,” he returned. “Never allow out of personal hands.”

“I’ll get personal with your hands,” cried Sue, snatching the shaker. “That’s right, Auntie,” cheered Kippie, “let her have it, Nocka. I think Mrs. Pebble should be given the run of the house.”

“Come, come, my good woman!” remonstrated Major Jaffey, stepping forward, “and who may you be?” A slight tussle over the shaker seemed imminent.

“I might ask the same of you,” returned the woman, “if I didn’t think it would be wasting good breath. I haven’t the slightest idea who you are, but I would suggest that you just pick up your feet and carry them on downstairs. I’m going to have a good big highball and then take a look around for my husband. I want to congratulate him.”

Major Jaffey was visibly taken back. So were Rex Pebble and Spray Summers, who stood only a few feet distant from Sue Pebble, just on the inside of a studio door. Spray called the room a studio: it was where she kept a choice assortment of spirits, vinous and alcoholic.

“In that case,” the Major was humbled, “I suppose I’ll just breeze along downstairs. Coming, Hal?” The fireman and the Major pressed past Mrs. Pebble somewhat fearfully, while Nokashima hurried off for glasses.

“Back in a minute, Auntie,” said Kippie. “I think I’ll see that we get the proper size of highball. They’re a little backward sometimes around here.”

Sue seemed torn between a desire to investigate the home of her husband’s mistress and an appetite for the contents of the shaker. She reached for the nearest door-knob and turned it slightly. Rex Pebble and Spray Summers, on the other side of the door, hastily retreated. “I think I’d better go and see what I can do about her,” whispered Rex.

“Get rid of the old hag as soon as you can,” returned Spray. “What poor taste to come at this hour!” Spray drew her lace gown about her lovely young form. “I wish she could have come with the milkman.”

“I’m surprised that she didn’t,” said Rex knowingly.

Spray stood back of the door, and Rex slipped into the hall. The man was quite unprepared for the reception that greeted him.

“Hello!” remarked Sue Pebble sharply. “No tricks, now. Quit jumping in and out of doors.”

“I’m not jumping in and out of doors,” the woman’s husband answered in an astonished voice. He was astonished both at her remark and at the apparent calm with which she greeted him. Rex had been ready to weather a tempest of wrath.

“Well, what did you go in there for” – Sue pointed to the door through which Kippie had vanished – “and then come out here? Don’t think I’ve had that many.”

“I wouldn’t put it past you,” answered Rex, both vexed and mystified at his wife’s behavior.

“Something’s come over you since you came in this house, young man,” remarked Sue Pebble sternly, “and I just want to warn you not to get fresh. You brought me here, it was your idea – be a gentleman.”

“I never said a word about your coming here. In fact, I hoped you never would come here,” said Rex.

“Look here, this has gone far enough. Did you or didn’t you suggest that we come to see that hussy, Spray Summers?”

“Of course I didn’t. What makes you think I did?”

“Nothing more nor less than my ears,” snapped Sue. “You may think I’m older than you, but I’m not deaf.”

“I have no reason whatever to think that you’re deaf. But I could show you a thing or two.”

“What are you driving at?” asked Sue acidly. “I’m beginning to think that I’m loose with a madman. After all the things that I’ve done for you, that you should lure me to this evil place and then begin to play practical jokes on me.” Sue Pebble was approaching the point of tears. Looking at this attractive young male, she could only think of her husband as she had first met him, and it was a pleasurably poignant memory.

“In addition to jumping in and out of doors,” Sue reproached, “you have to go around without any clothes on. Whose pajamas are those?”

A light of realization began to dawn in Rex Pebble’s eyes. So Sue thought he was Kippie. For the first time during the whole adventurous evening he could see himself in someone else’s eyes, as he must really look, though Spray’s point of view, it must be admitted, was a bit colored by prejudice and emotion.

“Look here,” said Rex in a kindly tone, “I think there’s a mistake been made. Come with me into the bedroom.” Rex started toward a door across the hall.

“That would make two mistakes,” Sue’s voice was tart, “and I want to tell you that, broad-minded as I am, I’ll brook no incest, even by marriage.”

“Come in here and I’ll tell you a secret,” coaxed Rex.

“Not on your life,” returned Sue, “and I think the quicker you stop this foolishness, young man, the better it will be for you. Just wait till I find your uncle, or did he put you up to this?”

Something slipped a cog in Rex Pebble’s mind. He was overwhelmed with mirth at the oddity of the situation. Rex laughed loudly. “He certainly did, the old devil,” he exclaimed, snatching Sue off her feet and bearing her through the bedroom door. There were screams in the hall which the closing door muffled.

Young Kippie, from where he stood matching glasses with Nokashima, heard the screams and came running into the hall. Spray Summers heard them too and also rushed into the hall. The two bumped into each other, then stopped in surprise. Before him Kippie saw a lovely creature in a thin lace gown, ready for bed. His eyes swept her; he was moved to speech.

“Oh, I say,” remarked the young man, “this is a pleasure.”

“I think you’re getting too accustomed to things,” said the young woman. “What did the old hag say?” “What old hag?” asked the puzzled Kippie.

“Sue, you fool, your wife,” said Spray Summers.

“I have no wife,” Kippie returned. Then, after glancing up and down the lovely, appealing figure, he said abruptly, “I want to come in with you. May I?”

“What for?” snapped back Spray. “Are you mad or am I?”

“Just for fun,” answered the very forward young-man. “Oh, that.” A pause. “Come on in.” Spray’s graceful hand stretched toward him.

“Just a minute, if you please,” said the voice of Rex Pebble, issuing from the opposite bedroom door.

“Good gracious!” said Spray, staring at Rex and realizing her mistake. “I thought he was you. How careless of me. I’ll have to watch my step. You look so much alike.”

“Hold on,” said the disappointed Kippie. “I thought I was myself, but apparently I’m that guy. Who are we, anyway?”

“Believe it or not,” answered Spray, “he’s your darling uncle Rex, and I am the mistress known as Spray. A miracle has given us back our youth, and we are preparing to make the best of it.”

“No, you’re not, hussy,” Sue Pebble chimed in, appearing behind her husband in the doorway. “If I have to tear his body limb from limb, I’ll get the secret of this rejuvenation out of him, and use it myself.” The woman threw Rex Pebble a fierce look. “Then I’ll make the best of it!”

“You may have the secret, my dear,” said the woman’s husband, “if I can give it to you. I’m beginning to think it’s more of a curse than a blessing. Particularly to be sane and yet young. The two don’t mix.”

“Oh, they don’t, don’t they?” interrupted Spray Summers hotly. “Well, fancy that! Only two minutes ago you were standing on the other side of that door – a bedroom door – suggesting things to me that I hadn’t considered for years, and now here you are – telling your wife – the old cow – that you’re cursed with youth. It wasn’t youth you were cursed with two minutes ago.”

“Well, if he wasn’t cursed with youth, just what was he cursed with?” inquired Sue Pebble. Her tone had that icy cordiality which women hold in reserve for their most bitterly detested rivals. “Just what was he cursed with?”

“For my part,” said Spray, raising her voice, “I wouldn’t say that he was cursed with anything. But whatever it was, it was something you haven’t known about for a long, long time.”

“I suppose you know everything that goes on in our home?” Sue shot back at her rival.

“I certainly know everything that does not go on in your home. And I do know what goes on in my home.”

“Make up your minds, girls,” Kippie cut in genially. “Decide between you where something does go on. It’s important.”

“You keep your trap shut, you young whipper-snapper,” Sue hissed. “I’ll thank you to keep out of what you’ve gotten me into. As for you, Rex Pebble,” the woman flung at him, “I should think you’d be ashamed to go around jazzing up your body like that! You should be content to grow old gracefully.”

“Like whom?” Spray’s quiet young voice bit into the controversy.

“Like me,” Sue snapped back. “I’ve had my fun and I don’t go around like a chameleon, changing colors all the time.”

“I don’t suppose you put that red on your lips, either, or were just threatening to tear Rex Pebble limb from limb unless you could discover the secret of youth?”

“Since I’ve seen how young blood goes to old heads, I’ve learned a lesson.” Sue spat out the words, but they deceived no one. With wonder and envy she looked upon Spray’s body that glowed with beauty and vitality. There they stood, elderly blonde and young brunette, Rex Pebble’s public and private life, his lost world and his world regained, while the man gazed from one to the other in silent bewilderment. Never could there have been a greater contrast between two women, yet their behavior was strikingly alike. Both wanted the man and were ready to do battle for him, even to his chagrin and embarrassment. Rex glanced at Kippie. Surprise and a little horror were written on the young man’s face.

“Listen,” Rex whispered. “Let’s skip the tournament and get a drink.” The two stole away downstairs, Nokashima following in awed silence. A few minutes later they were comfortably ensconced in the kitchen, scene of late merriment, all thoughts of the battle lost to mind. Hal and the Major toasted the new arrivals.

Upstairs Spray Summers had the parting shot as she prepared to retire into her bedroom and close the door temporarily upon this disconcerting woman.

“Incidentally,” Spray remarked, “you might just drop that cocktail shaker. No wonder some people get such queer ideas in their heads. I’m sorry for anyone who can’t take his drinks.” The door closed none too gently.

“I’ll see you later,” promised Sue Pebble between clenched teeth, “and when I do, you won’t know me, even if I have to cut my hair.”

For the second time that evening Sue was on the verge of tears. It was all so bewildering, and she felt so left out of things. What was the secret? How had they done it? Did she have a chance in the world of catching up with this curious parade of youth? Sue felt very sorry for herself. It was extraordinary, too, how possessive she had become about Rex. She was wondering at the whole state of affairs and, in desperation, considering a drink out of the shaker which she still held when a soft hand slipped its fingers into hers.

“I heard the whole thing, my dear,” murmured a pleasant feminine voice, “and I don’t blame you a bit. For fifteen years I was shut up in stone and never had a chance. It’s terrible.”

Sue Pebble turned and stared. The girl beside her was young and beautiful in a classic, glowing sort of way. She had long hair, wound about her head, and she moved with a flowing rhythm that was unlike anything Sue had ever seen. However, Sue winced at the expression “shut up in stone.”

“Don’t tell me,” she admonished, “that you’ve been shut up in a tomb and have just come to life. I couldn’t stand it. Too many awful things have been happening around here.”

“Very interesting, if you ask me,” said Baggage, the garden piece. “That is, if you like firemen. It just happened that I brought one upstairs with me. He wasn’t run out with the rest. He’s gone to sleep in there.” She indicated a door.

“Of course, nothing that you say makes the slightest sense to me,” remarked Sue, “but then I’m getting used to that. I don’t understand about the fireman or the stone or anything,” she faltered.

“Come with me,” suggested this unusual girl, “and I’ll tell you a story that will curl your hair. Besides, if you’re a good listener I’ll give you a secret you’d very much like to know.” Baggage led the way downstairs and out into the garden, meanwhile telling the tale of her sudden overpowering impulse to leap into the glorious pool, and its consequences.

They drew near the pool. Sue stared with envious fascination at the calm water, gently ruffled by the breeze.

“If you want to be as young as that other bi – I mean wench – you see your husband told me not to say ‘bitch’ – why, just swim across the pool, and you’ll have it.”

“Have what?” Sue inquired.

“It,” repeated Baggage. “Isn’t that what you were wishing for just now? Youth, beauty, sex appeal, or what have you these days. Anyway, you’ll be like the other one in there.” This she said with a wave of her slim white hand toward the house.

Sue was skeptical but interested. Between the lines of the girl’s story, which recounted so many years of gazing wistfully out at men from a cold beautiful stone face, and of watching the playful antics of couples on this very lawn, she could read genuine longing and convincing desire. She was inclined to believe the fantastic tale, if for no other reason than that the creature seemed to tell it out of such a wistful sort of memory.

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

“The gods only know, perhaps,” said Baggage. “But I think I’m jealous. And, anyway, you’re his wife, and it will even things up a bit if you both are young together. Not only even things up, but make them much livelier, and I love excitement!”

“Maybe it was what was in the shaker, but whatever it was, or is, I’m diving in that pool,” said Mrs. Pebble. “The only thing I can get is a cold in the head and my clothes wet, if your recipe doesn’t work, and if it does – well – let the fireworks fly!”

So saying, Sue Pebble, who had not swum with such enthusiasm in years, plunged into the silvery water. For a moment she stood poised, as though experiencing a new sensation. A delighted smile began to spread over her features, which even in the dusky light of the garden appeared magically to take on new attractions. The woman dipped her head beneath the surface and came up beaming.

“Something’s happening,” she shouted with joy, as with new life and vigor she began to streak across the pool. An inscrutable Mona Lisa expression grew on the lips of Baggage. For soon, on the other side of the pool, stood a girl who, even in the wet baggy clothes of a middle-aged woman, was a creature of infinite blond beauty.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Man into Child

The new and lovely edition of Sue, Mrs. Rex Pebble, stood beside the magic pool, rinsing her soaked garments and regretting not a whit the miraculous plunge that had caused her to ruin one of her favorite gowns. Sue ran admiring hands over her hips. They were beautifully rounded, svelte but well filled, the kind of hips that make cotton look like silk and $17.75 resemble a straight $75. No more lying awake nights planning how to infuse youth into her clothes; no more anguished early mornings of strenuous exercise, or evenings of denying herself the fatal sweets that add weight.

“Look,” called Sue Pebble in a voice so musical that it surprised herself, “did you ever see anything neater?”

She indicated her bust with a proud gesture.

“Very good,” commented Baggage across the water,

“but I think I’m pretty neat myself.” The girl abruptly lifted her skirts, revealing ankles and limbs of graceful beauty. They were, however, somewhat on the classical mold, while Sue Pebble’s rejuvenated form was nothing more nor less than the lusciously appealing, smoothly curved figure of a girl in the deceptive neighborhood of twenty.

“No wonder,” returned Sue; “You ought to be beautiful. You’ve been in this pool all your life.”

“A hell of a lot of good it did me,” came back the sharp answer. “I’d like to know what fun the Venus de Milo ever had. All that ever happened to her was to have her block knocked off.” Baggage, out of bitter experience, was deeply scornful of the ways of art.

“I wonder, my dear,” said Sue, in the voice of half-abstraction which a beautiful woman uses while she is engaged in examining her figure, “whether you have ever looked at the Venus closely enough?”

“Oh, I’ve been chipped myself,” said Baggage, “but that’s just by curiosity-seekers, people you’d meet in any museum. It’s no more damaging than riding in a taxi – I should say less so, on the whole. What I mean is, there I was locked up in stone for fifteen years, watching everyone else have fun, while some of them actually used to laugh at me.”

“They did?” inquired Sue, but her tone revealed only perfunctory interest. Sue preened here and there, removing wet garments from time to time to get as much look at her new-found loveliness as she possibly could.

She began to wish desperately for a full-length mirror.

“They used to snicker and say, ‘Wonder what that old gal would do if she could get down off her pedestal?’”

“Well, my dear, wasn’t that just what you were thinking yourself?”

“It certainly was,” answered Baggage, “but it was the way they used to say it that burned me up. Of course, my clothes were old-fashioned, but, after all, you can’t keep up with the styles if no one will send a sculptor around. Besides, those men do have the most awfully phooey ideas. A sash here and a bow there, and they call it class. Personally, I think clothes are heaven’s greatest gift to man. I’d rather tantalize any day than give away the whole show the first time I see a man.”

This bit of philosophy seemed to give Mrs. Pebble pause. She shook out her tousled golden curls and a strange light came into her china-blue eyes.

“You know,” said Sue, “you start me to thinking. I believe I’ll actually have to borrow some of that brazen hussy’s clothes.”

“Borrow them?” mocked Baggage. “I’ve been changing dresses every two hours since I jumped off that rock.” She pointed with distaste to the plinth that stood in the center of the pool, lonely and deserted without the adornment of her classical beauty. “When I get through with a dress, I just touch a match to it. I’ve always wanted clothes to burn.”

“How do you get them?” inquired Sue. “Do you know where the clothes closet is?”

“Do I?” asked Baggage. “That’s where I parked that red-hot fire-eater I was out with when I first met you in the hall. He’s lying under a blanket and two or three old suitcases and some shoes. I thought I’d cover him up so nobody’d take him away till I saw whether I could use him again.”

“What’s the matter with the poor fellow? Is he ill? Was he overcome?”

“He’s just tired,” returned Baggage. “I thought he needed a good nap, so I just handed him a little poke in the nose.”

“I see that I can learn things from you,” remarked Sue Pebble, walking around the edge of the pool toward Baggage, who stood nearest the house. “Just now I can’t think of anything that would give me greater satisfaction than a small theft from Miss Spray Summers’ wardrobe. I hate that woman cordially.”

“Oh, I know,” answered the girl. “And I do too. She’s so damned confident. No woman ought to be as confident of a damned man as she is of your husband. And she has been for years.”

“You’re telling me,” said Sue. “Personally, I don’t give a hang much one way or another, but I hate to see the bi – wench have such smooth sailing.”

“The nights I’ve stood out there and watched them,” Baggage’s words seemed torn out of a searing memory. “At least you would have thought they’d have the decency to keep from in front of me. But no, sir, they seemed proud as pie about it. They hadn’t been out in the garden much of late, though.”

“You liked my husband, didn’t you?” asked Sue Pebble, drawing close to Baggage.

“You mean, I like your husband,” responded the girl with determination, “but I don’t seem able to get near him with that woman around.”

“Well,” said Sue, “we’re both out after the same scalp. You’ve helped me a lot, and now I’m going to do something for you. Just come this way and show me that clothes closet.”

“We want to be careful not to wake up Bill,” Baggage observed, “because if we did he’d probably raise a heck of a squawk and the whole house would come running.”

At the precise moment that these two eye-filling figures were moving across the Summers’ lawn toward the house, Rex Pebble, inside, reached a decision. He was in no cheerful mood. To have a mistress restored to her pristine beauty and an elderly wife dropped on your hands in a rage of jealousy, perhaps quite justified, is something to add iron-gray hairs to the head. This was one situation in which Rex, an inventor of sorts, could think of nothing to relieve the tension of the situation. And on top of this here was young Kippie telling him the most monstrous kind of ill luck at the office. It appeared that the Rex Pebble fortune was on the eve of being rubbed out. It was horrible to think what both Sue and Spray would have to say, after all these years, in a jam like that. Rex’s new-young brows were furrowed with care.

The group on the whole was a congenial one. There was Major Jaffey, who since the dramatic departure of Joe, his banking prospect, with Elmer, had no one but Rex to whom he could confide his world-shaking ideas. There was Hal, the faithful fireman, who had stayed on after his fellows had gone. Nokashima, feeling the call for food, was busily preparing a steak on the capable-looking electric stove, at the same time feeding Mr. Henry from a baby’s bottle. Mr. Henry had doffed his ferocious king of the jungle headdress and was now nothing more or less than a playful bloodhound puppy, who frisked about the kitchen, exhilarated by his brand-new sense of smell. There was plenty to smell in that room. Steak, highballs, toasting bread, and the various alluring scents of Spray, Sue, and Fifi, not to mention Baggage, who had passed to and fro through the place.

“I could make a suggestion or two,” Kippie was saying, “only I’m afraid of getting my head snapped off.”

His uncle turned on the youth, though actually to an outsider it would have looked as though one youth were turning viciously on another.

“None of your funny ideas,” said Rex Pebble, shaking a vigorous forefinger in an elderly way that was quite incongruous with his dapper appearance. “I suppose you don’t think it’s enough to have imported your dear aunt into this madhouse? That idea ought to last you for about a month.”

“But this is a dandy thought, Uncle Rex,” explained Kippie. “I wish you’d give me a chance to tell you about it. It’s about an invention.”

“Oh, yeah?” Rex’s tone was bitter. “I suppose you want me to start a nudist colony or a health-giving springs resort founded on that blasted pool.”

“Not at all,” returned Kippie. “All I’d like to see you do is get back the blueprint of the mouse trap that fellow got away from you.”

“Rats!” said Rex appropriately. “I hoped I’d forgotten that. There may have been money in it, but I was gypped, and the fellow got away with the plans, and that’s that.” He dismissed the subject.

“Wouldn’t you get it back if you could sell it and save us on margin?” Young Kippie’s tone was sly.

“Nocka, when you’re through torturing that piece of meat,” Mr. Pebble addressed his small servant, “I think it would be a good idea to open up a bottle of brandy for Mr. Kippie. I can’t think of anything but brandy and women that will keep him quiet, and of these two, drink is the lesser evil.”

“O.K., O.K.!” Kippie was quick to jump at whatever came his way, “but if I ever get a chance myself, I’m going to get that mouse trap back, and the world will beat a path to my door.”

“I don’t seem to need mouse traps to get the world to my door.” Rex glanced around the room, which seemed wilted in its state of disarray. No one had bothered to pick up the glasses of the late firemen’s ball. In fact, the only difference in the room was that other glasses had been added by the more recent inhabitants.

“Down, Mist’ Henry, down!” Nokashima pushed the eager bloodhound away from the sizzling skillet and hastened to produce the bottle of brandy. It was old and mellow, and it had the look of belonging in an inn in Normandy on a cold midnight, when the innkeeper, maids, and attendants gathered round the kitchen.

“What’s Spray doing?” inquired Kippie eagerly. “I thought she liked brandy too.”

“She does, you young hound,” responded his uncle, “which is all the more reason for you to confine your thoughts to yourself. I’d hate to think of letting you loose with Spray Summers in her present state. As though I hadn’t enough troubles. Did you ever think, young man, that you ought to get married and settle down?”

“What brings that up?” asked Kippie. “You got married, but I never noticed that you settled down. The fact is, I suspect there’s been a lot more going on around here tonight than anyone knows.”

“We haven’t been around here much tonight,” Major Jaffey defended his host. “We’ve been out riding and all sorts of things.”

“Yeah,” said Hal, “you’d be surprised if you knew all the places we’ve been and the things we’ve done.”

Kippie preferred the main line of discourse. He accepted a brandy from Nokashima, who passed drinks to the others as well.

“Suppose, then,” the young man countered, “if you want me to settle down, that I ask you for Spray Summers’ hand?”

“That would be a hell of a note,” rejoined his uncle.

“Seems perfectly proper to me. She’s a lifelong acquaintance of yours, sort of a friend of the family, as it were. You could give her away.”

“How could she tell us apart?” parried the older man.

“There’re ways – we’re not twins.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I hope we’re not. You could just as well be your own nephew. That would make you completely backwards.”

“I am now, but what I want to know is, why should you think you’d like to marry Spray Summers?”

“Because she’s a nice girl.”

“I can see that everything’s different,” objected Rex. “That was certainly never the reason I was attracted to her.”

“Oh, well, she’s changed.”

“She couldn’t change that much. Besides, I have reason to believe differently.”

“Supposing I were to get older, could I marry her then?”

“Not without my consent.”

“But if you’re where you were twenty years ago, you don’t know whether I have your consent or not. You aren’t yourself. You’re what you used to be.”

Rex Pebble saw that it was time to put a stop to this harangue. “I can see that you’re where you be, and apparently always will be – standing beside a bottle. Don’t try confuse me any more than I am. That is, unless you can relieve my mind of that overdraft account.”

“That’s the great disadvantage,” remarked Kippie sagely, “that you grow backwards in everything but difficulties. Maybe you can find a pool that turns bonds into gold.”

“Give Mr. Kippie some hot food, Nokashima,” instructed the young man’s uncle, “and let’s see if we can’t stop the flow of his thoughts. I’m going out for some air.”

Rex Pebble strode out onto the veranda. It was queer, he thought, that one’s necessities should be so insatiable. Here, by a gentle miracle of a prankish and beneficent stone figure, the one person dearest to him in the world was restored to her youth and the ripe physical beauty that had caught him up in passion in his younger years, and yet he wasn’t satisfied. First there was in his mind the vision of Sue Pebble, his wife, as she looked at the lovely Spray with jealous envy in her eyes. Sue had not been a bad wife to him, in spite of her frequent flirtations and her stormy temperament. Certainly Rex had lived for more than twenty years in the same house with Sue, and that was something he had not done with Spray, for all her charm. It worked both ways. Seeing Spray in the evenings, when women are able by artificial charms and the conspiracy of nature to appear most glamorous, had added to her attractions, kept them perennially stirring to the man. Seeing Sue in the daylight, with the white glaring atmosphere of practicality about her, had taken away from her feminine appeal and had added to her reassuring stability. He felt sorry for Sue that she should be so unfortunately placed in the all too penetrating spotlight of everyday life. She had been robbed of a part of her woman’s heritage. Rex Pebble felt on the point of tears. He felt sorry for himself too. For here, with Spray restored to him, and himself, too, young again, and with a new feeling toward Sue, the unhappy business of money had shown its ugly head.

It was at moments like this, when the world seemed pitch black and without point, that Nokashima seldom failed to appear to comfort his boss. The Japanese appeared now.

“Mist’ Kippie and Mist’ Henry fed and bottled,” he announced. “Good idea catch breath of air on lawn. Just hear noise in upper story also – feel safer outdoors.”

“You’re right,” agreed Rex Pebble, “I was afraid of that. It’s much safer outdoors. What are they doing?” Rex glanced toward the upper floors of his mistress’s home. Something very queer was going on. Lights were flashing here and there, as though someone were running from room to room, switching them on and off. “Is somebody playing tag?” asked Rex.

“Sounds as of great whoopee. Loud manly answered screams. Have idea Miss Baggage on loose,” answered the wise little man. “Also Miss Spray and honorable wife up to old tricks.”

“You mean they’re having an argument over, me?”

“Cannot tell subject, but quite plenty redhot, boss. It appear much hair- pulling.”

“Well, I think I’ll just take a little pull at that bottle you so thoughtfully brought along, my good fellow,” said Rex, relieving Nokashima of his pet. “This is good stuff, indoors or out, with wife or mistress, at home or abroad.” Rex, who had not indulged deeply during the entire adventurous evening, took a long drag and smacked his lips. “We ought to think of a nice game ourselves,” he suggested. “You and I ought to get together and play something. We never have.”

“What shall it be, boss?” asked Nokashima, whose chief charm, perhaps, was the complete readiness with which he embraced any new suggestion of adventure or diversion. “Leapfrog?”

“I’m afraid I might hurt you,” said Rex, “and then again you might hurt me. I don’t trust that jujitsu.”

“Me no jujitsu artist,” Nokashima declared, “just humble Japanese fellow anxious to play. Suppose call Mist’ Henry. He always ready to play, too.”

“O.K.!” said Rex Pebble, “get the hound. One bloodhound more or less can’t hurt.” Rex chased his first brandy with another quick one. The tempo and warmth of his s blood was pleasantly speedy. “Here, Nocka, let’s see you toss one off. That’s the first requirement for a really good game of any kind.”

“Here goes!” Nocka held up the brandy bottle. A shiver raced over his small, sturdy frame. “Hot stuff that. Make plenty warm belly. Very comforting. Hi, Mist’ Henry,” the man called in his peculiar way, ending in a low, tempting whistle that could not have been duplicated by another human being. His mouth was large and usually fixed in an irrepressible grin that produced in the whistle a quality of escaping steam, which wound up in a surprisingly sharp note of command. A racing figure hesitated uncertainly just outside the door to the veranda, while a screen door slammed shut.

“Mist’ Henry very smart dog, even when honorable battery recharged. Not silly. Very sensible bloodhound with new acquired smell.”

“Let’s hide from him,” proposed Rex boyishly. “I think I can get behind that tree.”

Let it be said for Rex that he tried to get behind the tree. The trouble was’ that the tree would not get in front of Rex. It wobbled and wavered and behaved in a fashion totally unprecedented in Rex’s memory. Mr. Henry, entering gayly into the spirit of the chase, was dangerously near, seeming to prefer the scent of Rex to Nokashima’s more obvious smell, lurking beside the stone veranda steps. Rex Pebble helped himself to a short choke of brandy before attempting again to cope with the tree. Hoping to appease the thing and make an ally of it, he offered the tree a swallow of brandy in a low tone. The tree continued to dance but refused to accept the man’s hospitality. Wherewith Rex dashed a small slosh of brandy against its trunk and silently christened it the Sally Rand. “Stop it, Sally,” whispered the husky male voice, “you make me dizzy, and how can you expect me to find coverage in a game of hide-and-seek behind such a whirling dervish?”

The tree was utterly obstinate. It would not hold still. Rex grew quickly disgusted, as Mr. Henry appeared to get hotter and hotter on the scent. The man lunged from behind the tree and sought the protection of some near-by bushes. These two were addicted to the dance, but in a much smoother, more classic sort of way. They held hands gracefully and loped about like the figures of a Greek frieze. It was not so hard to conceal oneself behind them or in them. The bushes, however, did have very sticky fingers, and they kept pricking Rex here and there most irritatingly. “Behave,” growled the man fiercely, “or I’ll not give you a drop of brandy, not a single little drop. I won’t even baptize you, and how you’d like to go all your life unbaptized? Just imagine, no name, no nothing. By the way, are you all sisters, or am I seeing more of one family than there really is? To think that I’ve been in and out of here all these years and never knew what charming neighbors we had.”

Mr. Henry, dashing up and enthusiastically licking Mr. Pebble’s hands and face, cut short this monologue, while Nokashima stepped forth rather unsteadily from hiding and suggested that another game would not be amiss.

“You it,” he told Rex.

“Don’t be cryptic,” replied his playmate. “I it – what do you mean?”

“Just that – you it.”

“Haven’t you any verbs?” Rex interrogated sharply. “Can’t explain,” said Nokashima thickly. “You tell him, Mist’ Henry. Tell him he it.”

“Stop it!” commanded Mr. Pebble. “This is the worst language I have ever heard. I’m surprised at you. You could curse me out with words like that, and I wouldn’t know the difference. What are your antecedents?”

“Got no ant’cedents, however, nevertheless,” said Nocka. “Very simple. We play game now.”

“Not till I get it straight. Explain it this way: Suppose there were four of us playing?”

“Me tell him tell them tell you you it.”

“Impossible!” exploded Rex. “You’re either a genius or rapidly descending into the moronic stage. Do you always go after the pronouns when you have drinks, Nocka?”

“If good-looking,” admitted Nokashima, “especially fond just plain she. No it. Lady them best of all.”

Rex sighed heavily. More and more it seemed useless to try to understand; yet the man evidently had something in his mind. “Well, supposing I consent, what do we do next?”

“Absorb small drink,” said Nokashima quickly, his eyes gleaming. “Very intoxicating evening. Stimulating to all concerned. Most enjoyable part of evening now in progress for unspeakable Japanese man. Great fun at games.” Nokashima interrupted his flow of bouquets long enough to take a good firm hold on the brandy and pour a fiery trickle down his throat. “Hot dog, let’s go!” he cried.

“What shall we play now, you insatiable Oriental athlete?” asked Rex Pebble of the diminutive man, who danced round him in glee, rubbing his stomach happily with both hands.

“Now we skip steps,” said Nocka.

“Yes, Nocka, I know,” answered Rex sympathetically, “I’ve skipped steps too, but I never tried it as a pastime. However, nothing ventured, nothing learned.” He followed Nokashima to the steps.

“Oh, infinite more humor, boss, to skip steps. I begin,” and with a pleased expression in his tiny eyes Nokashima flew up and down the steps on nimble feet, skipping to the tune of a very weird chant that only Nocka, and maybe God, knew.

To Rex Pebble this demonstration of the crazy little fellow was the last straw. He felt himself slipping, his poise seemed to have vanished, and with a last effort he pulled himself together to call for a drink. As always, the magic word brought Nokashima to his senses and his shaker, in this case a brandy bottle.

“Watch me,” said Rex, standing on the top step of four, “with a running start I bet I can stop before I get to the water. Wait, though,” the man added, “suppose you go get a watch and we’ll time each other. We’ll have races. Mr. Henry can hold the watch.”

“O.K.,” said Nocka agreeably. “I go get timepiece.” Nokashima hurried on unsteady legs into the house. Left alone, Rex Pebble felt the gayety of the games slipping away from him. His forehead was warm and moist. Instead of four steps there seemed to be eight, instead of one tree there seemed to be two. It was nice, anyway, he calculated, that things worked out so evenly. Just double of everything. That was fine. He wondered if there were two bottles of brandy instead of one, and indeed there were. Not only two bottles, but just twice the amount of brandy as in the one bottle. Rex began to speculate as to how this other bottle of brandy might taste. Would it be different, or would it taste the same, and if he drank out of the one, would it reduce the amount in the other? It waa a charming speculation that left room for a great many discoveries. If there were one Spray Summers now, that would mean two – only the disadvantage would be that his wife, Sue Pebble, also would be multiplied by two. Which would mean that the fight between the two women would be twice as fierce and, also, alas, if Rex’s overdraft were now $25,000, under the present system of computation, that would mean a deficit of $50,000.

It was all very distressing. Rex began to feel that he couldn’t stand it. If under normal conditions it would take Nokashima two minutes to find a watch, this would mean four minutes before he could return and the happy games be resumed. Rex began greatly to feel the need of water on his forehead. He decided to take a chance on reducing the amount of brandy, which was now double, and lifting the two bottles with both hands, drank with both mouths.

Well, at least it was consoling to think that he had four legs to walk on. This happy thought produced a decision. Rex looked toward the inviting waters of the pool. A little dip would do him good, he thought. On all four legs he began to gallop to the edge. His forefeet were over the side and touching the water before he remembered that there was something strange and magic about this small body of water, something that had brought him new youth and vigor and that might very likely handle him roughly if indulged in too liberally. It was too late, however, to stop. He plunged into the gratefully cooling waters and waited curiously to see what might happen.

What did happen was most shocking. A contracting sensation overtook the man, shook his frame with short spasms as though he were being pushed bodily into a hot-water bottle that was too tight for him. He underwent a brief siege of choking, his eyes blurred as though with fever.

With rapidly diminishing strength Rex beat back the water. He tried breast and crawl strokes and then a general sort of floundering, but it was easy to perceive that something very unusual was taking place within him. Either he was losing his strength altogether to some unknown inner tax of power, or else, perhaps, the magic pool was busy doing its stuff again. Rex Pebble began to grow alarmed. With the greatest difficulty he managed to keep his head above the surface of the water. He raised his voice to call Nokashima, but nothing happened. Rex had yelled, and he had heard nothing. He cleared his throat and took a fresh start.

“Nokashima,” he screamed, and as though from afar, strange and unfamiliar as the voice of a babe, he caught a minute sound: Nokashima! Rex was very quiet. This was terrible. He couldn’t make a sound. Suppose he should drown? But the water couldn’t be that deep; no one could possibly drown in Spray Summers’ handsomely landscaped garden pool. A man would have to be an utter fool, holding his head under, to do that. Rex looked down at the glistening surface.

What he observed, floating like jelly beneath the silver surface, was something to startle a city editor. This time Rex could not believe his eyes. The brandy was no good. Too bad to spoil a nice evening this way; it had started out so glamorously, so memorably, and now here he was, whisky and highballs and gin and brandy, imagining the oddest things about his own silly body reflected in a garden pool. Rex summoned his courage and endeavored to take a realistic view of the whole matter. He glanced down into the water, and what he saw this time made him start in amazement and chagrin. Eyes may be bad reporters the first time you send them out, but the second, they have to tell the truth; and the truth was cruel. Rex Pebble put all the lung command into one mighty screech for Nokashima. Across the lawn came the piercing cry of an infant. There was no doubt of the horrifying truth; Rex Pebble ducked his head under water. It popped up again in shame and mortification. Where only a few moments before had been the whipcord, vigorous, handsome form of a young man was now the sprawling body of a baby. “Oh, my God!” murmured the strange infant, then howled aloud again for its faithful Japanese follower.

Nokashima, hastening on nimble but uncertain feet into the garden with a watch for the impending races, was bewildered at the disappearance of his employer. There was not a sign of the man in sight. No bottle, no coat, no trace of him anywhere. Even Mr. Henry had vanished. Nocka unsteadily beat around the bushes, and then, remembering Rex’s penchant for hiding behind trees, began to startle imaginary playmates by dodging around and crying hi! wherever he went. Anyone watching the fellow would have thought him utterly stark, raving mad. Liquor has its novel effects, but the game which Nokashima seemed to be playing with himself was gone about in a spirit of absolutely logical insanity.

Nevertheless, no tree yielded Rex Pebble. Nocka grew uneasy. What could boss have done with self? He cogitated. Nocka felt sure the master had been having a very fine time when he had left only a few minutes before, and it was totally out of keeping with his character for him entirely to abandon an object while in his cups. Nocka counted off on his fingers various improbabilities: Rex had not run away; he had not hidden playfully anywhere on the lawn; he certainly had not gone indoors, for Nocka had just come from the house through the only door that opened onto the veranda. The Japanese was genuinely disturbed and puzzled.

Then he heard the cry. It was a baby’s importunate yell to be tended to, and at first Nocka imagined that the long-awaited heir had at last arrived next door. The little fellow was feeling rather fine, and he felt glad that the anxious parents had finally been blessed. Complacently he went on to enumerate the possibilities of the whereabouts of his boss.

The baby cried again. There’s really very little to consider deeply about a baby’s cry unless it comes late at night and keeps one awake, or unless one is the father of the infant and has to walk the floor with it. Nokashima, however, pricked up his ears sharply the second time he heard this particular baby cry. It was not the tone exactly that electrified his small Oriental being: it was what the baby said. Nocka was standing fairly near the water from which the cry seemed to emanate; he could not have been mistaken.

“Goddamn it, you dopey Jap,” said the high falsetto, speaking, however, in crisp, careful enunciation, “come here this minute and drag me out of this pool before I shrivel up to nothing. Quick, I tell you – I’m on my way!”

Nokashima had seen a lot of queer things in his life, but now he was dumbfounded. Horror rendered him speechless. He dreaded to turn his eyes to the pool because of the sight which he was sure would greet him. And it did.

For there, struggling and breasting the surface as best it could, was a babe of perhaps one year old, greatly impeded by long trousers, a dress shirt, and a tuxedo coat.

“Well,” said the mind of Rex Pebble through the voice of the babe-in- arms, “don’t stand there all night. That is, unless you want to lose the best boss you ever had. I’ll be subtracted to zero if you don’t hurry. I think I must be down to about one year now. Only a year left to go, and I’m going backward fast.”

The startled house man recovered sufficiently to rush to his employer’s rescue. With tender care he reached down and lifted the squirming form from the water. Nokashima felt an almost fatherly pride as he cupped the infant in his arms. Life had its compensations. He had never dreamed that he would hold Rex Pebble in this fashion. The quaint fellow began to croon what he imagined was a lullaby as he started toward the house, rocking his impromptu cradle back and forth to the melody. It wasn’t hard for Nokashima to rock, not in his condition.

“Stop that!” remarked the baby harshly. “Don’t you think it’s bad enough to have to endure this final mortification, without being sung to? Get me a brandy-and-soda, and make it snappy!”

Seldom had Nokashima heard such commands from the sweet mouth of a new- born. Seldom, either, had he observed so ludicrous a costume as Rex Pebble wore, the long trousers drooping and dripping far beyond the tender pink toes they concealed.

With a curious mixture of feelings and a very unsteady walk, the little yellow man crossed the lawn with his new charge to the home of Rex Pebble’s mistress.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Of Human Badinage

When Sue Pebble, accompanied by that lush garden piece, Baggage, emerged freshly trim and twenty from the wonder-working waters, she made straight for Spray Summers’ home with the evil intent of lifting a new gown to take the place of the one which she carried, dripping, on her arm. Sue was attired solely in step-ins, and a sweet sight she was, too. The garment fitted her appealing form like a pair of mittens, showing off its lovely contours to the best and most dangerous advantage, depending upon the point of view.

“Here,” directed Baggage, “we’ll just slip in the bar and have a little snifter to celebrate before we go on upstairs.”

At first Sue was reluctant to enter the kitchen-bar, not because the men of the house were collected there, but because, before she took another step, she had a vain desire to observe her new build in a full-length mirror. The idea of a highball, none the less, overcame her pulsing vanity, and Sue went into the room with Baggage.

Kippie, Major Jaffey, and Hal sat in the kitchen, steeping themselves in the beneficent fumes of alcohol. Kippie had had quite a few. Robbed of the brandy bottle which Nokashima had carried out into the garden, he had laid siege to the cellar and from it taken a choice array of old Irish whiskies. Kippie knew the secret of Spray Summers’ cellar, which was that, because of Sue Pebble’s scruples, Rex did most of his really professional drinking away from home. Kippie was so-high with his Irish whiskies-and-waters, and was holding forth with great gusto on the vices and virtues of blondes versus brunettes when Sue and Baggage entered.

The three men, lifting their eyes through a haze, stared at the newcomers. Sue Pebble, clad in step-ins, showed not the slightest embarrassment. Temporarily Sue had lost sight of the magic of her transformation.

“Which one of you men would like to lend a girl a drink?” demanded Baggage. “You seem to be pretty well stocked.”

“Both inside and outside,” admitted the handsome young Kippie, “but not too much so to know a pretty girl when we see one, eh, fellows?” The Major and Hal murmured hearty approval.

“Well, I like that,” remarked Baggage, since all eyes seemed to center on the charming Mrs. Pebble. “No accounting for tastes. However, you may pass that bottle around, and we’ll toast your good taste.” Baggage was a generous-hearted girl.

There was a general clinking of glasses.

From Sue’s arm hung the dripping clothes which she had just taken off.

“Have you been immersed in a lake or something, madam?” asked the Major, by way of opening a conversation.

“I’ll say I have,” smiled back Sue, “and what an immersion it was, old son.”

“Major Lynnhaven Jaffey, at your service, madam.” This with a dignified bow.

“I’ll be calling on you, probably,” said Sue.

“I’m usually in bed by eleven,” returned the Major, misunderstanding.

“You’re one up on me, Uncle Jaffey,” said Mrs. Pebble, “but you do look like an exceptionally decent sort.”

At the moment Hal, the fireman, who out of the entire household had probably made the steadiest, least spectacular alcoholic progress throughout the evening, broke in, gazing at Sue earnestly.

“Say, lady,” inquired Hal, “is this guy really your uncle?”

“No, I have no uncle,” Sue replied. “I did have, but he’s dead.”

“Dead?”

“Quite.”

“Your uncle is quite dead, lady?”

“He should be. He was a fine fellow.”

“You seem to take his passing rather calmly.” Hal shook his head sorrowfully.

“He didn’t pass. He was murdered.” Sue looked intently at Hal.

“Don’t look at me like that, lady. I didn’t murder your uncle. Did I?” asked the anxious Hal.

“How could you murder my uncle?” calculated the lovely Mrs. Pebble, drinking.

“Offhand I can think of five different ways to murder people. I’ve been considering them for years,” said Hal.

Kippie, through his bewildered point of view, had been trying to make something of this hit-and-run conversation. Apparently there was nothing to be made, only a vague doubt assailed him. He glanced sharply at the wet garments hanging on Sue’s arm. Surely somewhere he had seen those clothes before. There was something very familiar about them which he couldn’t quite place.

“Speaking of murder,” Kippie tried a shot in the dark, “where did you get those clothes?”

“They’re my clothes,” returned Sue defensively. “I bought them – that is, my husband bought them for me.”

“Who are you, anyway?”

“You ought to know who I am.”

“Maybe I ought to, but I don’t, and that’s what’s worrying me. You’re pretty, I like you, I could be very fond of you, but I don’t know you.” Kippie shook his head sadly.

“Maybe I know somebody you know,” said Sue Pebble teasingly. “Maybe I know an aunt of yours or something.”

So that was it! A small charge of recognition went off in young Kippie’s head. The woman had his aunt Sue’s clothes. A murderess! She had done away with his aunt and taken her clothes.

“That’s right,” Kippie agreed cautiously, “maybe I might have an aunt or something. By the way, when did you see my aunt last?”

“Oh,” responded Mrs. Pebble coyly, “I haven’t really seen her since I put on these step-ins.”

Aha – check! flashed through Kippie’s mind.

“How was she?” asked the woman’s nephew shrewdly. “I had a hard time with her, but I finally got her to agree to do as I said.”

“What did you say?”

“I told her it was time she passed on.”

The foul, heartless cruelty of it! Kippie thrilled to the scent of violent death. He almost whistled for Mr. Henry, the bloodhound, then considered how much more a hero he would be if the whole discovery of the deed devolved upon himself.

“Didn’t you care for my aunt?” asked Kippie craftily. “Why did you tell her it was time she passed on?”

“For one thing,” answered Sue Pebble enigmatically, “her batteries needed recharging. Then there were other things wrong with her – her husband, for instance.”

“It seems to me that that’s off the point,” cut in Sue Pebble’s self- appointed cross-examiner, helping himself to another whisky-and-soda and blinking at his aunt through heavy-lidded eyes. “I asked if you had no emotional feeling toward my aunt, no affection for her.”

“But I am on the point,” protested Sue. “I say that the worst thing wrong with her was her husband. He was an old fossil.”

“Was an old fossil?” inquired the young man sharply, wondering dimly when it was he had last seen his uncle. He looked around the room. No Rex Pebble in sight. He tried to find his way back in memory through a tangle of uplifted glasses to the last time he had seen the man. Very darkly, as though from a great distance, he seemed to catch a glimpse of Rex Pebble leaving this room with a bottle of brandy under his arm and some most disturbing ideas in his head – something about an overdraft. That was it! Kippie had brought the news from the office himself. And Rex had gone off into the garden in a distressed state of mind. It was very evident that this beautiful creature in step-ins, who sat beside him gracefully tossing off liquors and enjoying herself, was a first-class criminal character, fit for the line-up.

“If you ask me,” confided Sue Pebble, “I think your uncle was an awful fool to marry that woman in the first place. Imagine being cooped up in a house for twenty years with a person like that.”

The crassness of the woman, talking about the person, or perhaps the two people, with whom she had done away, shocked Kippie to the core of his soul.

“Don’t you think my uncle and my aunt got along well?” asked the young man.

Sue Pebble was enjoying herself to the fullest. To be young again and unrecognized and on her own. Besides, this handsome Kippie was a distressingly accurate replica of her own Rex when she had first married him. Sue smoothed her golden curls with a graceful hand.

“They got on well enough for a couple of old dodos,” she returned, “but I can’t see why you’re so interested in old people and the past.”

“I’m interested in justice,” flashed the young man. “I won’t see innocent people foully murdered and not lift a voice in protest.”

“So you think I’m the murderess, do you? Well, I want you to know that your uncle had just as much to do with killing his wife as I did. Besides, if the truth were known, there’s a brazen challenge who lives around here named Spray Summers, that had as much to do with it as anyone.”

Things were moving entirely too fast for Kippie. He was delighted to uncover one murder, but a widespread net of crime was more than he could comprehend. It smacked too much of mass production.

Kippie’s one-man investigation of the foul deeds which he suspected had been going on outside, on Spray Summers’ lawn, was destined to get away from him. At this moment Spray Summers herself came into the bar. Her dark beauty was contrasted sharply with the blond loveliness of Sue Pebble. The women stared at one another, held rigid by a long bond of fascination. Spray Summers had seen Mrs. Pebble years before, when the woman was Rex Pebble’s lovely young wife, and she could not forget that memory. With a jealous pang she realized that Sue, too, had discovered the secret of the pool. She coolly sized up the appealing girlish figure in the cream-colored pants. What would Rex think? Spray wondered. But Rex Pebble’s nephew was not to be detoured from his criminal exposures. In Spray he sensed an ally.

“This is the murderess of your husband,” he calmly introduced Mrs. Pebble. “I suspect that she may have got rid of the old lady too.”

“I think she did,” commented Spray thoughtfully. “She got rid of the old lady all right, and I distinctly remember hearing her say that she would also tear Rex Pebble limb from limb if he didn’t give her the secret of youth that he had. Why, the poor man’s probably lying all over the garden this very minute in small bits. Let’s go and see.”

“No, wait,” Kippie directed. “We want to hear her whole confession.”

“Well, if you must know, I fell in love with a younger man.”

“What,” said Kippie, greatly surprised, “I don’t see how you could have fallen in love with a younger man. That is, without falling in love with a man who was too young.”

Baggage, who had been preoccupied with Hal, having a penchant for firemen, interrupted. “Well, say a man about your age,” she hazarded to Kippie. “I understand what she means. I think you’re just about right. I could use you.” Baggage advanced upon the young man; there was meaning in her eyes. But Major Jaffey, interested in the outcome of the inquest, detained her with a hand on her arm. “Won’t you sit here, my dear?” he suggested,offering a knee. Such offers come with disconcerting infrequency in the life of a girl like Baggage. Like a drowning man, in a flash she recalled her years in stone. No one had ever offered her a knee. She sat down abruptly, but her mind was still on young Kippie, so tantalizingly like the Rex Pebble she had watched grow out of magnetic young manhood into distinguished though dapper age.

“It’s a long story,” continued Sue Pebble, “and I shan’t burden you with it here, but, in short, this young chap was my husband’s nephew.”

Kippie whistled between his teeth. Things were moving around in a whirling circle. Kippie took a drink.

“Come clean, my dear,” said Spray Summers icily to her rival as Kippie’s expression grew darker and more bewildered.

“This, Kippie dear, is your charming Aunt Sue. But I still believe she may have murdered her husband for the secret of youth she was raving about.”

“By the way,” said Sue sweetly, ignoring Kippie’s chagrined amazement, “where is that dirty, low-down husband of mine? He’s not in the garden, I assure you. I generally imagine that you have him in tow when he’s missing, my love, but I see that something or somebody else must have got the lock and key tonight. If you’ll pardon me, I think I’ll just go in search of some dry clothes.” Sue Pebble swept from the room, a fuming Spray after her.

“God, this is too much for one fireman to bear! It would take more than a seven-alarm fire to make me feel this bad,” said Hal, dropping his head on his arms.

“Quite more thrilling than any of my adventures have ever been,” murmured Major Jaffey from beneath the lissom weight of Baggage. “One does not know what to expect next.”

“It’s a good thing I’m not a mind-reader, Grandpop,” said Baggage impudently. “I’ve always had the idea that this was the way to start things.” Baggage bounced up and down on the old gentleman’s knee.

“I don’t understand what you mean by things,” remarked the Major, “but the drift of your inference is very bad indeed. You should keep such ideas to yourself.”

“Not after fifteen years on a marble column, I shouldn’t. I have every intention of telling the world exactly what I expect to do. Even if I get disappointed,” added the girl bravely.

“Well, there’s always the danger of trial and error,” the Major told her sagely, “but I should imagine you would bat a fairly high percentage.”

“Take that one,” said Baggage pointing at Kippie. “I think I’ll drag him out into the garden with me. For years I watched his uncle and this Summers woman behave in the most scandalous way in the night on the lawn. This one’s a pretty good imitation of the original. I believe we should get along swell.” The girl slid off Major Jaffey’s lap and approached Kippie with determination.

“Come with me,” she commanded.

“What for?” inquired the befuddled youth.

“That you should ask!” exclaimed the girl.

“It’s better to ask first and get things clearly understood. I may be risking a lot.”

“Don’t be so old-fashioned. Come right out with it. I can’t imagine what your generation is coming to if it gets so inoculated with decency that it has to hedge like that.”

“I don’t want to go,” said Kippie stubbornly.

“Something’s wrong with you, then, or else you’re not Rex Pebble’s nephew. He never said that to anyone.”

“It’s certainly time someone in this family called a halt.”

“I’m not going to lower my womanhood,” stated Baggage, “to stand here all night arguing about a little detail. You come with me or I’ll scream. I’ll scream so bloody loud they’ll hear me at the police station, and then wouldn’t you be ashamed? Imagine what you’d have to tell the officers when they came. Denied a little girl, just feature that – what the coppers would say!”

“I think you’re disgusting – you’re too plain spoken. Can’t you veil a few things?”

“Veil them?” Baggage glanced down at herself with evident astonishment. “I believe in solid cloth and no veils. I’m darned sick and tired of veils. You would be too if you’d caught cold as many nights from draughty wrappings as I have. Yes, sir, I believe in good honest whole cloth, or the human hide. There’s only two ways to tempt, by sleight of hand or by slight of eye.”

Here the girl gave way to her emotions. “Come on, now, and listen to my story. I was the one that put your uncle and the Summers creature and Sue Pebble up to their tricks. I’m the cause of this whole evening. If I hadn’t slipped off the pedestal, Rex Pebble would never have regained his youth, but I admit that if I’d thought I could have found you here, I’d have stayed down there in the garden and waited.”

There was a loud infantile wail from the direction of the upper floor.

“Hurry up,” said Baggage, “they’re in the second generation upstairs.” Kippie let his dark, fiery young eyes wander over the appealing girl. He debated. There was too much going on to go out, and yet…

“Hurry,” urged Baggage, “I think we’re on the point of something.”

“I think we are,” answered Kippie, taking her arm and moving toward the door. “I think they’re bringing a baby downstairs.”

They were bringing a baby downstairs. The child was Rex Pebble, who screamed and protested above the din made by the two women and by Nokashima. The devoted little man still clung to his charge, in spite of frantic snatches at the poor manhandled body of Mr. Pebble. Across the man’s loins, in lieu of diapers, Nokashima had rigged up a heavy towel and a large safety pin of such a size as to make it look more like an instrument of combat than a method of holding on one’s clothing. Both Rex’s hands and feet were in a perpetual wriggle, while he screwed fists into his eyes, bawling at the top of his high falsetto voice. On either side Sue Pebble and Spray Summers besieged the harassed Nokashima.

“You let me have that thing this minute,” shouted Sue. “He would play a trick like this on me just when I get in form. Give the brat to me, you slant-eyed Fu Manchu, and I’ll do something about it.”

“Nonsense,” said Spray harshly. “Give it to me. It’s in pain. It needs bicarbonate of soda.”

“Ridiculous,” cried Mrs. Pebble. “Give a baby bicarbonate of soda!”

“It isn’t a baby,” Spray retorted. “It’s a full-grown man.”

“I don’t dispute you there,” said the wife. “You have plenty of basis for your statement, I daresay. But it’s not a full-grown man at this moment. Not unless this deceptive Oriental is a magician with bath towels.”

“It’s ill, just the same,” Spray Summers contended loudly, above Rex Pebble’s long-continuous wailing. “It does need soda or ginger or catnip or something.”

“Catnip, indeed!” screamed the baby. “You get me a whisky-and-soda. How long do I have to yell for one simple little thing? Isn’t it bad enough to be in this condition without having you two women pulling me about like a fishing worm?”

“Worm, ha, that’s good!” cried Sue. “Worm, that you are. Do you realize that I’m a young woman, hale and hearty, and that here you maliciously have yourself changed by a supersexed wanton into a mere babe-in-arms?”

“I’m sure I’m not finding it an experience to treasure in memory,” said Rex bitterly, “but the least you could do would be to get me that drink.”

To Hal and Major Jaffey, who had silently watched so much go on in this particular room that evening, this was the last straw. At first Jaffey was inclined to dismiss the whole affair as a practical joke, but by the time Rex Pebble had begun to call for drinks in so realistic a fashion, the Major began to feel that anything was possible. He took a very cautious look around the room just to be sure nobody was about to surprise him with a magic baptism. To Hal, whose mouth was fixed in a permanent sort of gape, he whispered, “Look here, old man, I don’t think we’d better drink any of the water around this place. As for bathing, I wouldn’t be caught near a bath-tub.”

Suddenly twisting himself in Nokashima’s cuddling arms, with the Jap tut- tutting over him, Rex spied his two male friends. “Major,” cried the infant in arms, “well, for the love of Pete, am I glad to see you?” The baby’s face beamed. “And accompanied by bottle and glasses.” Rex reached a tiny chubby hand of pink crinkled flesh toward the Major. “Gimme one, old scout, will you?” pleaded the child.

Major Jaffey pretended not to notice that he had been addressed. Indeed, he wondered whether he had been addressed. It was perfectly possible still that these two madwomen and the willing Japanese had conspired to take advantage of his and Hal’s somewhat credulous condition.

“All right, all right!” screamed the baby to whom Nokashima clung with difficulty. “Just wait till I get out of this diaper. Just wait till I get my strength back. I’ll beat you two eggs up so you won’t know each other. Is this gratitude? I take you in and give you a big evening, and then what happens? You make out as though you didn’t know me, just because I happen to have shrunk and have to wear a bath towel around my middle.” Res tugged at the safety pin with his small pink fists.

“Boss best to leave honorable towel around loins. Very draughty, also likely to shock ladies present.”

“You too, Nocka?” cried Rex Pebble. “Going back on me, making fun of me? After all the years I’ve known these two women,” it was a strain to distinguish just what the tiny, thin voice was saying, “that I should give either of them a shock. You make me laugh!”

“Great shock possible from disappointment,” murmured Nocka, adjusting his charge’s pseudo-diapers. “Nokashima somewhat surprised himself.”

“Keep your surprises to yourself, you Japanese limb of Satan,” remarked Sue Pebble, “and let me have my husband. I’ll fix him!”

Spray took up the battle cry. “He wants milk,” she said, “hot milk.”

“What gave you the maternity complex?” the baby asked acidly. “I never noticed you going round trying to feed babies hot milk or catnip. You were much more likely to be feeding hot babies whisky.”

“May I take a close look at the little fellow?” asked Major Jaffey unsteadily, hoping to detect a fraud.

“Help yourself,” answered Sue Pebble. “It’s no treat. We aren’t going to put him in a side show. That’s the trouble. He’s a perfectly ordinary baby.”

“My old friend Rex, at his age,” observed Major Jaffey, “really should prove something a little unusual.” “If he is, it’s escaped us,” snapped Sue.

“I think,” said Spray sweetly, “that if you just let me have the child for a few minutes, I can work wonders with him.”

“I lent him to you for twenty years,” said the man’s wife, “and I quite agree that you’ve worked wonders with him. Next time I lend anyone a husband, I’m going to have him insured.”

Rex Pebble was addressing the Major fiercely between beautiful little white baby teeth, “You get me a drink, you pop-eyed, evil-minded old wreck, or I’ll batter your face to a pulp when I get back my years,” he muttered.

The Major, however, was literal-minded. “I should think, Rex,” he chided, “that you would learn to get what you want by being a little gentleman and behaving yourself. You can’t bully people, remember, because it’s going to be years and years before you grow up into a big strong man again.”

“Just for old times’ sake,” begged the baby, “hand me a small finger. It won’t hurt me. I’m still myself.”

“Beg honorable pardon,” interrupted Nokashima in the interests of truth, “but that no strictly so. Nokashima already forced change bath towel twice. Hard on laundry. Mr. Pebble not man he used to be.”

“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” said Spray Summers, with compassion in her lovely dark eyes. “We’ll let the child have some sherry. That will be all right for him. It’s in the cellar. We’ll all have some. I like sherry late at night. Remember, Rexie?” the young woman asked, with a curiously knowing look.

“Yes,” answered the baby, gritting its teeth.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

All in a Night’s Work

The idea of giving poor little Rex Pebble a drink of sherry was a charitable one, to begin with, but in execution the scheme took on a slight tinge of manhandling. Spray Summers had suggested the wine with the best of intentions, out of genuine sympathy for this man whom she loved, now so pathetically reduced to the shape and the figure of a babe-in-arms.

But it had been a long time since Spray Summers had been to her cellar. Rex himself was in the habit of getting up what was required in drink, or else Nokashima would go scuttling down the steep, tortuous steps into those regions. Spray didn’t realize how dark the place was until she led the party of wine seekers thither. It smelled musty and sweet, as indeed it might, in view of the rows of shelves so amply stocked with choice liquids of all kinds, including a fine wine supply.

“Ooh! how dark!” squealed Spray. “I can’t see a thing.”

“There’s nothing to see that I can make out,” responded Sue Pebble suspiciously. “You aren’t now conspiring to lure me down into this imitation afterlife and bump me off, are you?”

“Why should I clutter up a perfectly good cellar with extra bodies?” inquired Spray Summers. “If I were going to dispose of you, I think I’d find a pleasanter place to do so. Out of the way, something quiet and retiring, to match the corpse.”

“It is dark,” admitted Major Jaffey, who was experiencing some difficulty in locating each next step. “I just don’t think I can find a thing around here.”

“Now, Major,” warned Spray, “remember, we’re all going to behave down here in this nice dark place.”

Spray led the parade, followed by Sue, then Hal, who was muttering incoherently to himself about the absurdity of going down into cellars in the pitch black of night. After that came Major Jaffey and Nokashima bearing Rex Pebble.

“Stop being so silly,” screamed the baby, “just take me back upstairs and give me a drink of whisky. That’s all I want.”

“No, you must have wine,” said Sue; “it will be good for you. This is the first time I ever had a chance to have a hand in regulating your diet, and I think I’ll just be pretty firm about it.”

“Look here, after all,” remarked Major Jaffey, “I can’t see why the whole bloody lot of us should be diving down into this hole. We could send one person down and get the stuff.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” agreed Sue. “Let’s just sit down here nice and cozy in the dark and have a little drink on the steps while we’re waiting for Nokashima to come back. I’ll hold Rex.”

“Oh no, I hardly think so,” said Spray. “This is my house, and I’ll hold him.” Both women made a snatch for the man-child, one in the dark clutching a small leg, while the other grabbed a hand; both tugged.

“Let go of me,” screamed the infant. “What do you think I am – a mere thing, a mama-doll ?”

“Best leave honorable boss alone,” suggested Nokashima timidly as he held on to Rex with the idea of protecting him from the overzealous wife and mistress. Sue and Spray, however, continued to grab at the man until he piped at the top of his tiny voice:

“Goddamn it, leave me alone!”

Hal, the fireman, sensed the tensity of the situation. “Hold on,” he said, “let’s think of some way we could all share Mr. Pebble.”

The baby groaned.

“No, best I hold master,” objected Nocka. “Have seen ladies loose with babies. Impossible to predict what happen to this one should fall into clutches.”

Both women laughed sneeringly, but Hal pursued his idea. “Why not tie a string to his safety pin and lower him down to find the bottle himself ?”

It seemed a little hard on the child, but since it was practically impossible for any member of the party to regard Rex in any other than an adult light, the thought was considered a good one. Of course, the baby might bang his nose, or he might bump into a large healthy rodent, or Nokashima might even let go of the string, by mistake. Human bodies seemed so comparatively easy to obtain that evening that no one except Rex Pebble took these hazards as serious.

“If I ever get back to where I was,” breathed Rex Pebble, “I’ll fix you two women.”

“Is that a threat or a promise, you shrunken shadow of a husband?” inquired the man’s wife.

Nokashima took a firm stance and began to lower the body, hand over fist, into the deep well of darkness. Hal held the Japanese around the waist, while Major Jaffey clung to Hal. It was a little ridiculous, as Rex Pebble, since his magic reducing swim, could have been held by one little finger. However, the men above him panted and held to each other in desperation, as though they were letting a grand piano over a cliff. The baby screamed. “Ouch!” it cried, “you’re banging me against the stairway. Keep clear to the right. Ouch! Look out for that stone wall. You hit me behind.”

“Watch your grammar!” called Sue Pebble sharply. “You sound like an Irishman.”

“You’ll find the bottle over by the coke bin,” instructed Spray Summers sweetly. “You may have to look around a little, but it’s there all right. Only don’t get the wrong one. There’s some absinthe around there somewhere.”

There was no sound from Rex.

“When you’re ready to come up, just tug on the string,” called Hal, originator of the idea. Hal had read about pearl diving. The weakest and least professional part of their equipment, he had pointed out, was the string. No diver would go down unless he was sure that his rope was strong enough to withstand pressure. Hal had just happened to find this string around a packing case. It wasn’t awfully strong.

“I hope he comes back sometime,” murmured Spray, “I think there’re a lot of things I could still do for him. Things that make you sad when you think of them,” she sighed.

“I should think they would make you sad,” remarked Mrs. Pebble, “but considering his present state I think that you did quite a bit for him! What’s the little fella doing now?”

There was silence from the depths of the cellar. Everyone’s ear was cocked, but nothing happened. No tug came on the rope; no sound was heard. “Drop the string a little farther, Nocka,” said the Major. “Perhaps that will bring him to.”

“It ought to bring him to something,” added Hal. “He must be at the bottom by now.”

“Well,” suggested the Major, “I think we ought to give a little toast to Mr. Pebble’s expedition. To the Rex Pebble Research Foundation!” The bottle was passed.

As the party sat huddled on the basement stairs waiting for news from below, there was a great clatter above in the bar and the kitchen. Evidently Baggage had returned with her latest catch, young Kippie. Sounds indicated, however, that there was a third person accompanying the couple, and that this person was being most unwillingly dragged around.

“It’s no time of night to go about telling fortunes,” remonstrated an elderly female voice, “and I can’t understand how you could find that many people up at this hour to have their fortunes told them, anyhow. Just give me that drink you mentioned, and I think I’ll be going along.”

“Oh no, you won’t,” cut in Baggage. “There’re a lot of things these particular people ought to be told, and you’re going to do it. Besides, the way we happened up with you is anything but creditable to your character. Suppose I were to tell?”

The party on the steps listened in tense silence.

“Yes,” interrupted Kippie heatedly. “I never would have imagined that even a fortune teller could be so base.”

“I can’t see anything wrong with what I did: it’s what you were doing that was so shameless,” protested the strange woman’s voice.

“Answer me this,” demanded Baggage, “and we’ll call it quits: would you have known we were in that hedge if you hadn’t been psychic?”

“Well, my dear,” returned the voice, “I can only say that even a medium uses her ears.”

“Very good,” said Baggage, “however it was, I’m expecting you to help us out. We’re lucky to have you around. Come, Kippie, my pet, I think we’ll just let Alma do her stuff. Where are my friends now?”

On the floor above the group there came the sounds of the tap-tapping of a cane. “Holy Christmas,” murmured Hal, “she’s got a witch after us!”

The tapping wavered in apparent uncertainty as to direction for a moment, then headed straight for the head of the stairs. “I should say they are somewhere in this neighborhood,” wheezed Alma. “What is it?”

“I can’t see what they’d be doing in there,” Baggage speculated, “but you may be right. There’s no telling what these people are likely to do. What are you doing to find them?”

“I’m following a mystic call for help,” returned Alma. “It seems to come from the lips of a babe. This child seems to have fallen into bad company. The words it uses are anything but polite.”

“Is this babe a gentleman or a lady?” inquired Baggage. “I know a couple of babes here, but both of them use that kind of language.”

“Neither a gentleman nor a lady,” snapped the woman, “as far as I can tell. It seems to be making a terrific effort to do something.”

“That must be Uncle Rex trying to get away from Sue and Spray,” guessed Kippie.

“Well, open the door. They can’t be up to any good if they’re all down there in the dark,” returned Baggage. “Let’s see what they’re doing.”

“Aha,” sneered Alma the medium, “who’s being curious now?”

The door to the stairway was opened, dropping a plane of bright electric light across the men and women on the steps. Faces flashed around guiltily. Hal and the Major grinned sheepishly, standing close around Nokashima’s bent-over body, hoping to conceal the little man and his nefarious operations.

“So!” Baggage packed a wealth of meaning into the word.

“How long has this been going on?” inquired Kippie. “And where is my dear harassed uncle Rex?”

“Oh, he’s hanging around,” Sue Pebble informed the girl, with some degree of truth.

“Who’s that,” countered Major Jaffey, “that you have with you?”

Baggage was not to be thrown off the track. “It’s a fortune teller and character reader,” she said, “and I want you all, including Rex Pebble, to come up here right now and have your characters read.”

“You flatter us,” Spray Summers said sweetly. “Do you read between the lines?”

“I tell everything I see, the whole story,” said Alma the medium, with professional pride.

“Tell you what,” proposed Major Jaffey, “if she tells everything she sees and she can see without light, why not have her sit down right here and talk to us in the dark? That won’t be any hardship on her, and it may save us a lot of blushes.” There was no tug on the string from the Pebble infant. The whole party was beginning to undergo distinct misgivings as to Rex’s whereabouts and condition. Supposing the poor creature had bashed in its head on the hard cement floor or strained its baby figure by the band around its middle? Any one of many horrible things might have overcome that small, bawling, protesting wine seeker in the dark of the underground place.

“All right,” Baggage conceded dubiously, “I guess we can do that. How about it, Alma?”

“O.K. by me,” responded the medium blithely. “All I need is a hand to look at, and a crack of light from the door here” – she seated herself – “will fix that.” Baggage and Kippie joined the band on the stairs. “Who’s first?” asked Alma.

This threw the company into considerable confusion. Spray maintained that Sue, as the wife of Rex Pebble, should be first. Sue, on the other hand, declared that Spray Summers, as the mistress of the house, should be first. Alma spied Nokashima.

“Bring him here,” she commanded.

Major Jaffey, of those in on the secret about little Rex Pebble, was the first to use his wits. “Oh, he’s permanent,” the Major said. “You can’t move him. He has to stay there. Anyway, he’d be too hard to read.”

“I could read that fellow myself,” remarked Baggage. “Come, come, there’re a lot of fortunes to be done here tonight.”

“You couldn’t do him,” Alma objected in a hurt tone, “but I can, and I like ’em hard. Give me your hand, fella.”

Nokashima extended his left hand, with the right still clinging to the rope that held Rex Pebble. “No, the other,” said Alma. “Don’t be dumb.” With the agility of Orientals, Nocka switched hands without letting go of the rope, on which there now came a violent tug.

“What’s the matter?” asked Alma. “Are you afraid? That’s the way with guilty minds.” The hag bent inscrutably over the hand. It was wrinkled and tiny and difficult to see, but to the fortune-telling mind it contained a secret of great import. Alma started up in alarm. “He has something to do with a baby, something to do with that baby I was telling you about.” She addressed Baggage. “There’s some mighty funny business going on here.”

“I quite agree,” said Baggage, “but that’s not news. Now, get your mind off babies and tell us what you see.”

Alma, however, was insistent in her messages of alarm. On the rope from Rex came heavier and heavier tugs of warning. Nocka found it hard to keep the rope in his fingers. He tried to slip it to Major Jaffey, but Alma intercepted him.

“Stop twitching,” she commanded. “Do you do that all the time? You Japanese have too much jujitsu in your blood.” She scrutinized the hand. “I see blackness and a bottle and a baby and a rope.”

“It sounds like the difference between a hanging and a cocktail party,” said Baggage. The girl was growing impatient; there was a great deal to be done. Somehow, in the last few hours, she had begun to have her doubts as to whether or not mortals were ever happy. Give them youth, restore their physical attractions, smooth out their wrinkles, their memories, and what happened? What use did they make of their happiness, of this good fortune? Baggage remembered all her years on the marble column, the days of boredom and the nights of yearning. She thought of Rex Pebble and the graceful, manly form she had watched change with the years into the lines of age, distinguished though it was. There was a great deal, she felt, that she could tell human beings about their lives, and she longed for the opportunity to do so. Baggage had a growing feeling that, with an apparently incompetent medium in charge, she should take over the works and reveal what was on her mind.

“Here,” said the girl roughly to Alma. “Stop jabbering about babies, and I’ll tell you a few things.” She grabbed Nocka’s hand. So excited was the little man with these rapid developments that he almost dropped the rope.

“Excuse, madam,” he murmured, “but greatly disturbed in mind. Impossible to have fortune told. You miss fortune.”

“I think I’m beginning to understand that you’re all hiding something from me. Which hand shall I take?” Baggage grasped Nocka firmly around the waist and wrested the rope from him. “So,” she said. “Maybe the old girl wasn’t so wrong after all. Whose body is on the end of the string?”

“That’s what we’ve been disagreeing about,” Major Jaffey informed her as she hauled the rope up hand over fist. The whole party looked aghast, watching with horror for the sight that should meet their eyes when Baggage drew in the last few feet of rope.

The sight was deplorable but altogether different from what might have been expected. Rex Pebble held a bottle in one hand while with the other he swung his makeshift elevator from side to side. He was singing to himself. The voice was small, but it was hearty. The song was something about a French girl who had three lovers and what happened when they all went to war. Its tone was lewd, but Mr. Pebble, in his infantile way, seemed to find it highly amusing.

“Hello,” said the baby, interrupting his song. “So this is Baggage. Well, well, well! Where’ve you been since I dropped out of the picture? Have a drink, anybody?” Rex had gotten into the whisky section. His small, sweet mouth put forth a large, offensive breath. “If you won’t give me a drink, I guess I’ll just have to go around cellars grubbing for myself.”

Both Sue and Spray reached for the child as his body drew alongside the stairs. “Hi, there, Sue old girl,” he sang out. “Been thinking about you. Business is better. I’ve got something big coming up.”

“That,” remarked Sue, “would be news to me. Give him to me,” she demanded. “I’m his wife.”

“Yes, and I’m his mistress, and this is our anniversary,” complained Spray Summers.

The women struggled to get at the baby. To Baggage, observing the pathetic situation of Rex Pebble, this was a crowning blow. For years she had worshiped the idea of the man. Had it not been for him, she would never have dived off the pedestal. Then he had been restored to youth; but so had Spray, dashing into the water in angry jealousy, and so had Sue, because Baggage her. self, out of pity and jealousy, had helped her. Baggage looked at Kippie. He was young and handsome, and he looked amazingly like the young Rex at whom she had gazed longingly for so many hours from her classic imprisonment, but there was something of Rex that the youth lacked. Baggage grew thoughtful. What was that escaped quality? Was it that she had grown used to Rex, had watched him so long that without the gestures he had acquired with time Kippie seemed lacking somehow? And was it that no one else in the world, however attractive he might be, or how near a replica of the original, could bear for her the same charm?

Nokashima had rescued Rex Pebble from his two wrangling women, but they continued to fight for possession of him. The rest of the party looked on in awed silence. Things seemed to be drawing to a dramatic climax. Rex Pebble’s face was a study in changing emotions; something magic and curious seemed to be working in it.

“Here,” said Baggage suddenly to the astonished Alma, “give me your hand and I’ll tell you a thing or two.”

“I see two women fighting over a man,” Baggage broadcast. “One woman has loved him a long time but never quite enough. The other has loved him a long time also, but too much. I see that their struggles over him have put lines into his face, because, even if they were given eternal youth, human beings would always fight over each other and make themselves old. I see that the longer they fight the older they grow before their time. I also see that something very strange is happening to a baby named Rex Pebble.”

As indeed it was. For, as the women argued, Rex grew older with each sentence, and the older he grew the tighter his home-made diapers fit him.

“For heaven’s sake, shut up,” said Rex, “or you’ll have me busting this bath towel.” He was almost full-grown now, and the towel stretched around him like the skin on a very fat pig.

“I think I know what you need,” suggested Baggage, pushing the full-grown man off her lap. “Come with me,” she said.

“I think I can see that, for all your charity, you’re still up to your old tricks,” remarked Spray, who had not lost her grip.

Rex Pebble, in splitting bath towel, sped up the steps, followed by the whole pack of guests and relations. He felt somehow gayer and more elated than during the whole evening, for the world had taken on a surety of beauty that he had not known before. After all that had happened, things seemed rather beautiful in the ways in which they best belonged. That is to say, being a distinguished old man would never seem quite so much a hardship again, he considered, provided one had a certain amount of wisdom not to wish for too much, and a lusty, unvarying sense of the ridiculous. He looked behind him as he sped, completely naked now, because the towel, unable longer to stand the strain, had burst asunder. Baggage was running almost as fast as he, and she was catching up. At his heels leaped the gay bloodhound puppy, Mr. Henry. After that came Spray and Sue, two beautiful, bounding figures of blonde and brunette youth, shouting wisecracks at one another as they sped. Then came Nokashima as fast as his short legs would carry him, Hal, and the Major. Alma, the old crone, lagged by the house, smirking and cursing.

Rex wondered about his two women. The magic of the pool had given him a new light on them both, and the evening had been a curious kind of beautiful adventure, unique in the world. Sparkling satisfaction of the senses was all right, but he wouldn’t care now if it came to a sudden end. For there was Spray Summers, a delightful, incurable wanton – Habeas Corpus was her middle name – and Sue Pebble, a strangely faithful and harshly helpful wife, both of whom loved him, and both of whom he loved.

Baggage was the unattainable. When it came to running, he couldn’t even keep up with her. She sped past him now, shedding her clothing as she ran.

“Come on, Nurmi,” she called, and her voice seemed almost to vanish in distance as she passed. “I’ll race you to the pool.”

Rex Pebble exerted his last ounce of effort, with Sue and Spray hot after him. He wondered what the water would mean to them this time. It was clear to see where Baggage was headed: straight for the empty pedestal. If that was what the girl was going to do, what would he and Sue and Spray Summers do? The magic of the evening had not failed. Rex was not uneasy. Whatever might happen now, he was practically sure that it would be fun.

— THE END —

THE BISHOP’S JAEGERS

DESCRIPTION

The depressed, indifferent heir of a vast coffee import fortune, Peter Van Dyke finds his life and high society engagement turned upside down when his secretary, Josephine Duval, determines to “rescue” him by ruining him morally. After an amusing scandal in a coat closet, he is cast adrift in a fog with a motley crew that includes a bishop of the Episcopal Church and a former nude model named Aspirin Liz. The enterprising party lands unceremoniously on the shores of a naturist resort, and the liberation of the coffee importer is set in motion. Smith, in one of his few comic novels devoid of any element of the supernatural, assumes the reader would know that “Jaegers” refers to a union suit/long underwear.

Dedication

FOR
FRANK C. REILLY
FROM
THE FOUR STRAY LAMBS
IN FRANCE *

* The lambs being
June, Marion, Celia,
and the author himself, no less.

PROLOGUE

Dealing in Drawers

Before hoisting them over his sturdy, ecclesiastical shanks the Bishop contemplated his drawers with nonsectarian satisfaction. It was not the Bishop’s wont thus to dally with his drawers. Far from it. As a rule the Bishop paid scant heed either to his own drawers or to those of his parishioners. He took it for granted they wore them.

And although, during the course of a long and active career devoted to good works, the Bishop had been responsible for despoiling the dusky limbs of innumerable South Sea aristocrats with drawers of surpassing unloveliness, he did not look back on his success in terms of drawers alone. Not at all.

To Bishop Waller drawers were merely the first move in a long, grim contest with the devil, a contest in which long, grim drawers served as the shock troops of righteousness. They were an important but unattractive gesture in the general direction of God – a grotesque but essential step in a complicated ritual of spiritual costuming.

Perhaps it was partly owing to the fact that none of the Bishop’s so-called savage converts had ever turned to him and remarked in tones of mild complaint, “This Adam chap of yours never wore a pair of drawers in his life. Why should I?” that the good Bishop had so far failed to give due consideration to the rights of the vast anti-drawers-wearing element still shamelessly thriving on this and probably other terrestrial globes. For Bishop Waller was above all things a fair man. It simply never occurred to him that a fellow creature could commune either with himself or his Maker with any degree of equanimity unless a great deal of his person was securely done into drawers.

For women the Bishop’s program was a little more elaborate. Women were quite different. It was difficult to decide which half of their bodies needed to be covered first and most. Both halves were dangerous, both to be greatly deplored. Either one of them made virtually impossible a constructive consideration of a life beyond. Repeatedly he had been pained to discover that in the presence of unconverted island girls, men were quite content to risk the somewhat nebulous joys of the life beyond for the assured ones closer at hand.

Therefore it was the Bishop’s conviction that all women should be all covered at all times. It was safer – far, far wiser. Men found out about such things quickly enough as it was without having them dangled before their eyes. For this reason religion for men began with drawers and for women with shirt and drawers – preferably with the addition of a voluminous Mother Hubbard.

This morning there was a special reason for the Bishop’s rapt contemplation of his drawers – new, judiciously selected, upstanding garments. And if they could not be called things of beauty, these brave long jaegers of the Bishop’s, they did without question represent the highest expression of the drawers-maker’s craftsmanship. Not that the Bishop’s jaegers were in any sense crafty. No franker or more uncompromising drawers could have been devised to protect the modesty of man. Once they had been decorously adjusted, they made absolutely no weak concession to the curiously roving eye.

As Bishop Waller, forgetting for the moment his rather shocking condition, held his jaegers extended before him at arm’s length, he presented a picture of innocently happy concentration. He was gratified by the chaste austerity of these drawers. They were the ideal drawers for a bishop. There was no monkey business about them. They pretended to be nothing more than what they were – simply and definitely drawers – long ones. Once a man had sought refuge behind or within their rugged embrace there was little likelihood that any woman no matter how optimistic would ask him to emerge from his unattractive concealment. The exterior view was far too depressing – too utterly discouraging to light dalliance and abandon. They had a numbing effect on the mind, those jaegers of the Bishop’s. They reared themselves like a mighty tower of righteousness in a world of makeshift and evasive garments. No one could imagine their wearer leaping sportively in pursuit of a wanton nymph. The very beasts of the fields would have staggered off in horror to their lairs.

As he proceeded to plunge his vast nakedness into the even vaster reaches of his jaegers, the exact structure of the Bishop’s thoughts is, of course, not known. However, it is safe to assume that as he stood appreciatively before his mirror conscientiously adjusting them to the last strategically plotted button – a formality seldom if ever observed by the average run of laymen – Bishop Waller was saying to himself:

“I might have my faults as a bishop, but no one can say a word against my drawers. Not a bishop in all these United States can produce a finer pair than these.”

So much for the Bishop for the time being, now that he has at last got himself into his drawers and girded his loins with righteousness if not with romance.

2

The drawers of Josephine Duval were a different matter entirely. Accurately speaking, they were hardly drawers at all. They were more like a passing thought or an idle moment. Compared with the splendid new jaegers of the Bishop’s – if one’s chances of salvation will not be eternally damned by such a sacrilege – Jo’s drawers were as nothing. Not even a flash in the pan.

One is occasionally perplexed by the great quantity of different-looking dogs one meets in the course of a day or a week. One is given pause by the fact that such totally unrelated objects in appearance should be even loosely classified under the covering name of dog. Yet in spite of this, one seldom or rarely ever stops to consider how many different-looking drawers there are in the world either gracing or disgracing the limbs of humanity. Perhaps this is due to the fact that one gets more opportunity to look at dogs than at drawers, which is, no doubt, just as well for everybody concerned. However, the fact still remains that drawers can be so bewilderingly different and yet come under the general classification or family name of drawers.

Between the Bishop’s drawers and Jo’s drawers lay all the difference in the world – different aims and aspirations, a different philosophy of life – a gulf, in fact, which could never be bridged except under the most incredible circumstances with which there is no occasion here to deal. No good end can be served by further prolonging this rather questionable comparison.

Looking logically at Jo’s drawers – an attitude exceedingly difficult to maintain when they were inhabited as only Jo could inhabit them – one could see no proper reason for their being in existence at all. To say that they were the direct antitheses of the medieval ceinture de chasteté is to state the case mildly. Not that this brief consideration of the young lady’s even briefer garments is to be regarded as a plea for the return of the chastity belt. On the contrary. There are too many locks already in this world. As a matter of record the efficacy of the chastity belt has never been clearly established. Love has ever had the last laugh on the locksmith. Furthermore, the belief is now held by several eminent students of the question that the employment of the chastity belt was directly responsible for the rapid rise of a class of gentlemen extremely annoying to absent husbands because of their nimble and industrious fingers. As time passed and experience was passed along with it, respectable husbands found that not only were their women no longer secure but also neither were their treasure boxes and safe deposit vaults. This situation was just too bad. During foreign wars and crusades the activities of these notoriously home-loving picklocks became so widespread, in fact so much in demand, that medieval locksmiths grew quite inured to the sound of ironical laughter.

But if conditions were loose in those days, they are running wild today. The time when women selected their nether garments logically has long since passed into oblivion. It is the regrettable tendency of the times for women to regard this item of their apparel not in the light of logic but rather in that of allurement. And men are just low enough to regard this change with approval. Even the name itself has fallen into disrepute, as if it suggested some humorous connotation. Whereas men with the utmost indifference still struggle along quite cheerfully with the old-fashioned and time-honored name of drawers – drawers plain and unvarnished – women have far outstripped them. Theirs must be known now by such frivolous and leading appellations as panties, scanties, briefs, fleshies, woolies, step-ins, dansettes, speedies, and other similar evocative terms. Bloomers, which at one time were considered no end daring, are today rarely if ever encountered in actual circulation, and then only after the most patient and exhaustive research for which the majority of men are constitutionally disqualified unless very carefully watched.

However, although these new underthings give rise to all sorts of nonsense, it must be admitted they are nice.

Jo’s were, at any rate.

This morning, at about the same time the excellent Bishop was contemplating his equally excellent jaegers, Miss Josephine Duval, whose paternal grandmother still sipped her wine in France, rolled a body of the most disconcerting loveliness out of its bed. It was Jo’s own body, and she sat with it in lazy companionship on the bed’s edge while she permitted several tremendous yawns to escape her recklessly red and rebellious lips. After this she stretched, and the effect was devastating. For a moment even the world must have paused in its revolutions. As the girl’s small and not unbecoming feet sought with all their ten useless toes a pair of mules that were a sheer waste of time, her cool white arm automatically reached out and the hand on the end of it affixed itself to one of the garments under discussion. Whether they were briefs, scanties, or step-ins is an open question, but for the sake of this history they might just as well be called step-ins. Bending a dark red head of tousled hair over her trophy, she allowed her brown eyes to consider it none too favorably.

They were far from being the step-ins of her choice. However, many a girl would have thought herself fortunate to have been caught in a gale in such a pair. In a nutshell, which would nearly have accommodated them, they were good, middle-class businesslike-looking step-ins without a great deal of foolishness about them, yet sufficiently attractive to do justice to their subject. Josephine’s French blood cried for fairer step-ins, while her French sense of thrift assured her that for a hard-working secretary who spent most of her time sitting they were altogether adequate.

“If I didn’t have to work so darned hard and scrimp so much,” yawned Jo to herself, “I’d buy me some bang-up underthings, wouldn’t I just. Regular knockouts. Black and very, very bad.”

With a supple flexing of her body which should have been prohibited by an act of Congress, she shook off her nightgown and snapped on her step-ins. The movement combined the speed of a fireman with the deftness of a contortionist. Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she regarded her step-ins critically.

“Good enough for day-in-and-day-out service,” she decided, “but hardly suitable for occasions should they ever arise.”

To what occasions Jo was alluding, it would be better to leave to individual preference. Jo had her own clearly defined ideas about almost everything. For the most part they were uniformly unedifying. However, they enjoyed the advantage of having been dragged out into the open, where they operated in a state of healthy activity to say the least.

“Pay day today,” she gloated as she continued with her dressing. “A beggarly sum at that – a mere pittance. I’ll spend it all on underthings as soon as the office closes, see if I don’t. Even though a girl should be good, she doesn’t have to feel that way. Funny thing, I always feel at my best when I’m feeling thoroughly depraved. There’s no use of a girl trying to tell herself anything different, either. Women are born that way.”

Accordingly her thoughts veered to Mr. Peter Duane Van Dyck, who at that moment was very busy doing things about his own drawers, as were thousands of other New Yorkers of high and low degree.

Peter Van Dyck was of high. He scarcely realized the fact, and whenever it was forced upon him by his relatives he showed a decided lack of appreciation. His respect for the traditions of his ancestors, those early Dutch settlers, had been interred with their bones. He was Josephine’s employer – her boss. She was his secretary, and it would not have required much enterprise on his part to make her even more. As it was, he admired the young lady for her efficiency, but was alarmed by her bold eyes, which to his way of thinking, had a suspiciously bad look about them. They were not good for the coffee business, whose destiny he guided along well-established lines.

“He’s an old stick,” Jo decided as she tightened up her stockings so that they gleamed on her well-turned legs. “Doesn’t seem to know I have these. Not an eye in his stupid head. I’ll make him know, doggone it.”

And Jo deftly curbed her abundance within the delicate web of a brazen brassière.

3

To Peter Duane Van Dyck drawers presented no difficulty. He never considered them at all. They were merely a part of the scheme of things. He disregarded drawers. Automatically he changed them. Not every day, like other nice men of his station, but whenever the idea occurred to him. Sometimes he lost his drawers; that is, misplaced them, forgot where he had seen them last.

This morning he was in this quandary. With exasperated diligence he searched for his drawers, completely blind to the fact that he had lazily left them crumpled in his trousers upon retiring the previous night. It was not a Van Dyck trait, this leaving of his drawers in his trousers. It was a habit characteristic of Peter – one of his little labor-saving devices which would have been revolting to the long line of Van Dycks from which he had sprung without any great show of agility.

Abandoning all hope of ever seeing his drawers again, Peter put on a new pair and dragged on his trousers after them. The fact that the old pair remained untidily wedged in his trousers caused him no discomfort at the moment. He ascribed the slight fullness on the right side – a tendency to bind, as it were – to some inexplicable caprice of his shirt tail. He would deal with his shirt tail later if in the meantime it did not adjust itself of its own accord. Shirt tails usually did in the course of a day, he had found. He hoped this one would, because he hated to trouble himself with such matters. It would have been wiser had he done so.

He did things to his sandy-colored hair, decided after a quick scrutiny of his vaguely blue eyes that they had a peculiarly harassed appearance, wiped some dried soap off his right ear, and left the room wearing two pairs of drawers and carrying one towel. On the Van Dyck landing he became conscious of the towel still clutched in his hand. Draping it over the bare expanse of a statue of an Aphrodite seemingly seized with qualms or cramps in a near-by niche, Peter Van Dyck permitted his five feet ten inches of body to find its way downstairs unassisted by any mental effort.

He entertained hopes of filling it with coffee and lots of breakfast. Peter was thirty-four. Also, he was hungry.

4

An hour or so later it was Miss Yolanda Bates Wilmont’s turn to deal with her drawers. Rightly speaking, Yolanda Bates Wilmont seldom if ever dealt with her drawers in person. She had a maid to deal with them for her. And to continue rightly speaking, what the maid dealt with could not by the wildest stretch of the coarsest imagination be called drawers. They were creations – fragile poems done in gossamer and lace – real lace. In fact everything was real about them except the woman they adorned. She was too good to be true, but she did not realize this. She considered herself a young lady of the highest principles and the most unassailable morals. With the exception of herself and a few chosen members of her social standing she heartily disapproved of any unnecessary display of feminine blandishments. With herself it was quite different. Yolanda Bates Wilmont sincerely believed that she knew as no other woman, exactly what she was doing, that she was by the divine right of birth the arbiter of good taste and refinement, that she had limbs whereas the general run of girls merely had legs and far too much of them.

As she gazed at herself in the long pier mirror this morning, she was thinking quite unconsciously that it was a fortunate thing indeed so few girls could afford to wear such lovely step-ins as hers. The average woman could not be trusted in so expensively chic underthings. No telling what one of those lower-class girls might do if she suddenly found herself in possession of such a pair. Certainly she would not keep them to herself. No. The cheap, feminine display complex would get the better of what little scruples she had, if any. The modern girl was permitted to show too much of herself as it was. Take the beaches and the buses and the dance halls – disgusting. Such liberties should be enjoyed only by members of exclusive house parties and by girls who knew how to be careless without being common – girls whose reputation needed no protection. The same held for drinking and all the other amenities of life. Her one regret was that when she should marry Peter Van Dyck, as had been ordained from the beginning of time, she could not have her baby in a different and hitherto unattempted manner. In a fleece-lined capsule, for instance, or a handsomely tailored cowl. The usual way was far too popular.

After the maid had done every possible thing for her, except think and breathe, Yolanda allowed herself to be helped into a ravishing negligee. This was negligent to the point of aggressive indecency, but was perfectly all right on Yolanda because she was so utterly different from other women, although, from the various samples of herself she so generously displayed, the untutored eye would have gained the impression that she was made very much in accordance with the usual specifications.

Also the eye – even the untutored one – would have gained the impression that these specifications had been most skillfully carried out. Yolanda was a good-looking girl, well-built, attractively colored, and perfectly finished. There were deep blue eyes, fine golden hair, vivid lips, and a healthy outer layer of pink and white satin-smooth skin.

Yet beneath the outer layer Yolanda was exactly like every other woman who had ever entertained the illusion that she was different from all of her sisters. Nor would Yolanda’s highly refined reactions have been especially cordial had anyone taken the trouble to supply her with this gratuitous piece of information.

No one ever did.

5

In quite another quarter of the city Aspirin Liz heaved her generous bulk out of bed and wearily dragged a pair of tent-like bloomers over enough body to make two of Yolanda’s.

Grunting comfortably as she reached for the kettle sequestered in a dark closet, she proceeded to make herself some coffee. Also she found time to take a couple of aspirins, for which she was well named. These little duties being performed, and a shirt and flowered dressing gown added to her toilette, she collapsed in a chair and gloomily considered a hole that had but recently appeared in her bloomers. True, they were old bloomers, but still that hole had no right to be where it was. And it was not the first time either.

As Aspirin Liz regarded this new evidence of the bloomers’ unworthiness her heart was filled with bitterness and indignation against the low-lives who had made the bloomers as well as the dirty dogs who had tricked her into buying them.

“Never put enough reinforcement into the damn things,” she grumbled to herself, little realizing that hers was a figure that demanded more in the line of reinforcement than either the looms or sewing machines could profitably afford to supply. “Always busting out in a fresh spot like one of those all-fired Holland dykes.”

Idly her mind drifted back through the years until she saw again a small boy thrusting some part of his body through a hole in a dyke. Just what part of his body it was remained a little vague to Aspirin Liz, but she was reasonably sure it was either an arm or a leg or a foot. It might even have been a finger to begin with, and later on an arm. She knew the little boy had not stuck his head through the hole, because her own common sense, of which she had a lot, convinced her that no little boy could have been as big a damn fool as all that.

She had always liked that story as a child. Game little beggar, that boy. As she had progressed through life, she had kept her eyes peeled for such a youth but had never come across one, although she had met many who had played games, and not very nice games at that. Even then they had cheated.

There was hardly anything Aspirin Liz did not know about men, and even less to their credit. They drank and cursed and treated women like hell and left the place all messed up. The more work you did for a man, the more things he could think up for you to do. If God had only made men more like animals, more like dogs, for instance, without any too much brains, things would be a great deal easier for women. But unfortunately men had brains, mean, bad-acting brains that kept interfering with the business of living. Women could handle their bodies all right, but the devil himself could not deal with a man’s brains.

Aspirin Liz picked up last night’s newspaper and broodingly considered a salaciously illustrated underwear advertisement.

“Wouldn’t have lasted a minute in my day,” she told herself as she studied the delicate lines of a pair of step-ins. “Yanked ’em clean off you, they would. Nowadays everything’s so fancy. Didn’t need all that nonsense when I was a girl. God knows nothing could have been more discouraging than those long, dangling, iron-clad, rock-girt flannels I grew up in, yet everybody seemed to do pretty well in spite of ’em. Drawers were drawers in those days. And when you took ’em off you knew you had ’em off. No two ways about it. Now take these makeshift bloomers.…”

It does not really matter where Aspirin Liz took her makeshift bloomers. She was always taking them somewhere. This morning, as on every morning, she had a bit of a headache. Perhaps a spot of gin would help. She took one. If it did not help her head it did at least make her solitary existence a little more endurable. Another cup of coffee and a fag. Liz yawned and stretched her heavy frame.

Once she had been an artist’s model and very much in demand, very much in the front of things. Now … oh, hell, a woman couldn’t keep her figure always. Use it while you have it and then forget it. So said Liz.

But she could never quite forget the figure of her heyday, for what it had once been was still hanging in several New York galleries she occasionally visited when all other comforts failed.

“Got to find a needle and thread,” muttered Aspirin Liz, “and do something about these bloomers before the whole damn dyke pours through. Game little nipper, that kid was. Must have been his leg.”

6

When Little Arthur exhumed himself from a disorderly pile of bedclothing and stood up, one of New York’s most astute pickpockets was once more on his feet. But unlike Mr. Peter Duane Van Dyck, Little Arthur did not have to look for his drawers. He already had them on. Little Arthur had slept in his drawers, as was his invariable rule.

Gentlemen devoted to Little Arthur’s profession frequently find it the wisest policy to sleep that way. Even a pickpocket has some qualms about making a surreptitious exit when clad only in nothing. The criminal classes are notoriously more modest, more observant of the little niceties of convention than those who remain smugly within the boundaries of the law. Little Arthur would have willingly faced arrest and long detention rather than to have presented an unadorned rear view to a callously jeering group of pursuing Irish minions of the law.

Yet even though Little Arthur habitually slept in his drawers, he was not altogether unmindful of them. This morning as he moved round his room he was thinking in a dim way about the state and efficacy of the miserably shabby garments he was wearing. They were unpicturesque, to say the least. Little Arthur felt they did not do him justice. The things he had on had never been intended to do any man justice. However, they were amusing, assuming one recovered from the shock of seeing them in action.

Nevertheless those drawers meant everything to their wearer. That is literally the truth. Yet, truthfully speaking, they were not drawers at all. They were a complete costume, a sort of overall arrangement that concealed the facts about Little Arthur from his scraggy neck to his pipe-stem ankles. A visitor from Mars would have found it difficult to believe that the body within was human.

However, the parts of Little Arthur that one was permitted to see were not entirely unprepossessing. He had a brisk little face, hardly any hair to speak of, and a devouringly alert pair of mild blue eyes. Frequently Little Arthur took those eyes to the movies, where they wept copiously over the sad parts and sparkled with pleasure when virtue triumphed and won its own reward.

Little Arthur’s thoughts were now toying with the subject of drawers. He was discontented with his present ones. He felt that he deserved a new deal.

“Can’t very well snatch a pair of drawers off a customer’s legs,” he regretfully observed to himself. “Funny thing, that. Easier to steal a man’s purse than his drawers.”

Second-story men were lucky. They could steal all the drawers they needed – more drawers, in fact, than a man could reasonably use, although second-story work probably was exceedingly trying on drawers. Take a pickpocket now. A pickpocket was by the very nature of his calling entirely cut off from drawers as a source of loot. Oh, well, a dip should not expect to have everything. He was better off as he was. Climbing had always made him dizzy even as a boy. A man should stick to the job he was best fitted for instead of drifting from pillar to post. Never establish yourself that way. Little Arthur felt grieved over the fate of rolling stones. If he had a good day today, Little Arthur promised his legs a new pair of drawers.

With this promise in mind the weird-looking little man retrieved a last night’s edition of the morning’s paper from the floor and ran a professional eye over the list of public events.

CHAPTER ONE

An Embarrassing Situation

Van Dyck Coffee had been responsible for keeping more generations of New Yorkers awake than had the product of any other importer in lower Manhattan. In the early days of the company’s activities the Van Dycks had endeavored to popularize the beverage among various tribes of the less homicidally inclined Indians. However, finding that these original Americans seemed to prefer gin almost as avidly as Americans do today, the cannily hospitable old Dutchmen promptly broke out the square bottles and prospered greatly thereby.

With this phase of the business the current generation of Van Dycks habitually dealt with commendable vagueness. Inasmuch as the Van Dycks had been fairly respectable even before they took up the New World in a big way, it never occurred to their descendants that their present exalted state was established on the hang-overs of a great multitude of red men.

Peter Van Dyck knew far less about coffee than had any of his predecessors. He was somewhat less backward where gin was concerned. Peter found it difficult to break himself of the habit of regarding coffee in the light of a personal indulgence rather than as a commercial asset. Some mornings it tasted better than others. That was about the extent of Peter’s knowledge. This morning, he decided, it did not taste so good.

As he left his house in the West Seventies he was wondering vaguely why his eyes had such a harassed expression and his coffee such a comfortless flavor. The season of the year was propitious – late spring with summer lounging among the buds. Business not too bad when compared with that of his competitors. As a matter of fact the morning paper had announced the untimely end of one of his closest rivals, yet even this gratifying occurrence failed to lend zest to Peter’s day. Something was radically wrong with him.

Then, suddenly, a thought rose bleakly from his subconscious mind and flopped down heavily on his conscious one, where it lay like a dead weight. This afternoon his Aunt Sophie, his statuesque and painfully modern Aunt Sophie who presided over his household, was giving a cocktail party for Yolanda Bates Wilmont. And at this party the cat which had long since been out of the bag was obligingly going to crawl back into it again to permit itself to be officially released. After today he, Peter, would no longer be a freelance in the courts of light dalliance. He would be irrevocably engaged to Yolanda with all her beauty and wealth and firmly rooted convictions. This knowledge somehow failed even more lamentably than had the sudden departure of his business rival to add zest to Peter’s day. Yes, there was no doubt about it. Something was radically wrong with him. His responsive faculties seemed to have become strangely atrophied by the thought of life and Yolanda Wilmont.

For a few brief moments Peter’s troubled blue eyes dwelt on the lines of a well-formed girl sitting opposite him in the downtown subway express. Little suspecting the highly improper trend of his thoughts, Peter felt that he would like to lie down quietly somewhere with that girl and talk the situation over. He felt the need of a female confessor as well as entertainer. There had been too few women in his life. With a sense of panic he began to realize this as the imminence of his official betrothal confronted him. Quickly he averted his eyes. The girl was chewing gum. This girl, in spite of her lines, was definitely out of the picture. Well, was not life exactly like that? At its most alluring moments it suddenly began to chew gum in one’s face. Revolting, Peter shrank slightly and returned to his paper.

It was not until he had reached the seclusion of his private office that the extra pair of drawers he was unconsciously wearing began to manifest themselves. Even then he was not aware of the exact nature of his difficulties. He experienced merely a sense of unwonted fullness – a growing sensation of insecurity. Suddenly, however, as the drawers gathered headway his alarm and discomfort became acute. In his anxiety forgetting that his office though private was not quite impenetrable, Peter allowed his trousers to descend several inches, the better to deal with the perplexing situation.

Miss Josephine Duval, armed with the morning mail, entered the room quietly and closed the door behind her. For a moment she allowed her cool but curious gaze to dwell on the orange and black stripes decorating all that could be seen of the southern exposure of Mr. Peter Van Dyck’s shorts.

“Looks like summer awnings,” she observed more to herself than to her employer. “And to think I never suspected!”

With a low moan of distress Peter’s body went into a huddle as only a body can when plunged into such a situation.

“Haven’t you got sense enough to get out?” he demanded, twisting a strained but indignant face over his shoulder.

“I have the sense, but not the power,” Miss Duval retorted calmly. “Your condition has robbed me of that.”

“For God’s sake,” the man almost chattered, “hurry! Suppose someone should come in and find you here?”

“I’m all right,” said Miss Duval. “It’s you who would give rise to comment.”

Something was slipping farther and farther down the right leg of Peter’s trousers, slipping stealthily but relentlessly to the floor. And the trouble was that Peter, not suspecting the presence of a stowaway, visualized the worst. What a fearful picture he must be presenting from the rear, yet the front view would not improve matters any. How could such a demeaning thing happen to a man in this day and age?

“Won’t you please go away?” he asked in an agitated voice. “What would people think?”

“Well,” replied Jo with dispassionate deliberation, “from the trouble you seem to be having with your trousers, people might get the impression you’d asked me in here to watch you do tricks with your shorts.”

“What’s that!” exclaimed Peter, more upset by the girl’s attitude than by her words. “Oh, you’re fired. There’s no doubt about that. This time you’re through for good.”

“Do you realize that I could play you a decidedly dirty trick?” Jo inquired lightly.

“What do you mean?” asked Peter, his fingers furtively fumbling with various buttons.

“If I should scream now – —” began Jo, but was interrupted by Peter’s heartfelt, “Oh, my God!”

“If I should begin to shout and rush about,” she continued, as if savoring the idea, “there’s not a jury in the world that wouldn’t convict you of at least breach of promise.”

“Swear to God I never knew there was such a woman in the world,” Peter Van Dyck replied in an emotional voice as if appealing to some unseen audience. “If you’ll only go away and let me finish what I’m doing you’ll not be fired.”

“How about all this mail?” she demanded.

“Am I in a condition to go into that now?”

“I should say not,” said the girl. “You don’t know how awful you are.”

“Then don’t trouble to tell me. I can very well imagine.”

“Before I go,” Josephine continued, placing the letters on the desk, “would you mind explaining what was in your mind when you got yourself into this terrible condition?”

“I don’t know,” Peter answered. “And I fail to see how it’s any of your business.”

“Well, it’s a sight a young lady doesn’t see every day of her life,” replied Jo. “Especially in an office building and at this time of day.”

“I don’t make a practice of it,” Peter retorted, with an attempt at dignity.

“I wouldn’t,” Miss Duval assured him. “There’s an unpleasant suggestion of senility about it. And by the way, if you’re looking for an extra pair of drawers you’ll find them sticking out of the right leg of your trousers. Although why you want two pairs I can’t for the life of me understand. The ones you have on are giddy enough.”

As the door closed quietly on his tormentor, Peter Van Dyck reached down and, seizing the offending drawers, hurled them furiously in the general direction of the waste basket, upon the edge of which they sprawled unbecomingly.

“Damn my absent mind,” he muttered, “and damn that woman’s impudence. What a decidedly unpleasant occurrence! She actually seemed to enjoy it. These modern girls.…”

A few minutes later Jo briskly followed her perfunctory knock into the room and found her employer wearily seated at his desk. He was gloomily scanning a letter.

“Oh,” exclaimed Miss Duval amicably. “Quite an improvement. All tucked in, I see.”

Before Peter had time to think up a fitting retort, William, the office handy man, entered the room and cast about for something on which to exercise his talents. Spying the drawers dangling over the waste-paper basket, he held them aloft admiringly.

“Fine pair o’ drawers, these,” he observed in a conversational tone of voice. “A real fancy pair. Begging your pardon, sir, but are they yours, Mr. Peter?”

Mr. Peter preferred not to notice William’s polite inquiry. Jo saw fit to bring it to his attention.

“William wants to know,” she said in level tones as she seated herself in a chair with her dictation pad open on her knee, “William is anxious to find out if those – if that florid object belongs to you.”

“Tell him they don’t,” Peter mumbled unhappily.

“It would be more manly if you spoke of such things yourself,” the girl replied. “However – he says they’re not his, William.”

“Well, I’d like to know how they got here, then,” William continued stubbornly. “All spread out like that. They must be his.”

If William had not emptied many a waste-paper basket for Peter’s departed father, the man would have been fired on the spot. As it was, a friendship of many years now stood in serious danger of an open break.

“Is there any reason why you should doubt my word about those drawers?” Peter asked the man coldly. “Someone might have left them here as a sample.”

At this William shook the drawers playfully and chuckled his incredulity.

“Not these, Mr. Peter,” he declared. “We’re in the coffee business.”

“Well, even coffee merchants are supposed to have some self-respect,” replied Peter.

“Not the coffee merchant who wore these,” asserted William with a wise shake of his head. “Couldn’t keep much self-respect in them things. They’d suit my Alf to a tee. He’d go crazy about them drawers with their funny little pink dots.”

“I’ll damn well go crazy myself if you don’t get them out of my sight,” Peter assured his handy man.

“Yes, William,” put in Jo Duval. “Why not take them through the office and inquire of the gentlemen if they have lost a pair? We might be able to find a home for them that way.”

“No need to do that,” said Peter hurriedly. “Take ’em home to Alf with my compliments. Do anything with them you like so long as you let me hear no more upon the subject. I’m completely exhausted by drawers.”

“Thanks, Mr. Peter,” the grateful man replied, giving the garment a possessive flirt as he made his way to the door. “As neat a little pair o’ drawers as I ever laid eye on. All full of funny pink spots, they are.”

“William is getting old,” observed Peter Van Dyck, to break the pause following the man’s departure. “I’ll have to lay him off with a pension one of these days.”

“Wouldn’t mind a little bit of that sort of thing myself,” replied Jo, carelessly crossing her legs and fixing her employer with a level gaze. “Why don’t you pension yourself off, for a change? You’re not interested in business.”

“What makes you say a thing like that?”

“Well, obviously a man who has such playful ideas in drawers can hardly be expected to keep his mind on work.”

“Is that so!” grumbled Peter. “You’ve been with this company altogether too long. Take a couple of letters.”

Jo indulged in a short but ironical laugh.

“What’s wrong now?” he asked suspiciously.

“I was only thinking that while you’re dictating letters to me,” she replied easily, “William is probably exhibiting your disinherited drawers to the entire office force.”

“Take a couple of letters nevertheless,” said Peter Van Dyck, with characteristically Dutch stubbornness. “Just because an old fool chooses to make a public display of a private affair, I can’t leave the coffee business flat.”

“What a man!” remarked Jo in a low, admiring voice.

Once more he regarded her suspiciously.

“How long have you been with us?” he asked.

“Much longer than I expected to remain in a purely professional capacity,” she told him.

“I very much doubt if you could remain long purely in any capacity,” said Peter, feeling a little set up by his unexpected burst of repartee.

“Some girls might take that amiss,” said Jo, “but I consider it a compliment. I didn’t think you knew.”

“Knew what?”

“My attitude – my moral outlook.”

“Oh, I don’t know that,” he said hastily. “And I don’t want to find out. You take too many liberties as it is. If you hadn’t been here already when I took over the reins, I’d have fired you on sight.”

“And driven the business into a ditch,” Jo replied complacently. “You haven’t the foggiest idea where anything is – not even the most personal of things such as your – —”

“Don’t let’s go into that again,” he interrupted.

“I have no desire to,” she assured him.

But Peter Van Dyck was destined to take up the matter of drawers once more before it was definitely dropped. There was a scrambling noise outside the door, a nervous scraping on the glass partition, then the door flew open and Freddie the small but aggressive office boy, excitedly waving the erstwhile drawers of his employer, hurried into the room with William close at his heels.

“Beg your pardon, sir,” said Freddie, waving the spotted garment in the indignant William’s face, “but ain’t these drawers yours? He says they’re his. I saw you with my own eyes – you had ’em on one day when you were in the – —”

“Stop! Stop!” cried Peter Van Dyck in a stricken voice. “And please close the door.”

“Here’s a go,” murmured Jo Duval. “Those drawers seem to have a mind of their own.”

Peter Van Dyck looked hatefully at her, then drummed distractedly on his desk. Once his glance strayed in the direction of the drawers. With an effort he averted his fascinated eyes. Finally he spoke. His voice was low and cultured. In it was a note of despair.

“Freddie,” he said, “those drawers are the property of William. They are his without let or hindrance – his irrevocably. Do you understand that, Freddie? Then hand those drawers back to William who I hope to God will put them in his pocket and take them home to Alf. If he doesn’t I’m going to fire you all, and that includes you.” His eyes burned with bitterness as he studied the expression of bland enjoyment on his secretary’s face. His voice gathered volume. “And as for you, Freddie, if you kept your eyes more on your business and less on other people’s drawers you might grow up to be a coffee broker yourself someday.” He paused to consider his words. Somehow this rebuke of Freddie seemed to lack in strength what it gained in dignity. Once more his eyes were attracted to the drawers; then his dignity and self-control departed. He rose, spluttering. “William,” he thundered, “if you don’t take those miserable drawers away I’ll drag yours off your baggy-looking legs.”

“No need to get personal,” Jo reminded the aroused man.

“What!” cried Peter. “I’d like to drag yours off, too.”

“Thanks,” she answered. “Hadn’t you better ask the gentlemen to withdraw first?”

“Oh!” said Peter as if stung to the quick. “Oh, my God!” He sank back in his chair and held his forehead in his hands. “That will be all about drawers for this morning,” he said at last. “Please leave the room quietly with – with them. Don’t bring them back.”

When Freddie and William and the drawers had departed, silence reigned in the room. Peter looked wearily out of the window. He was considering whether it would not be simpler to hurl himself through it. The door opened and William thrust in an apologetic head.

“Sorry, Mr. Peter,” he said. “I kept telling young Freddie that just because he happened to see you yanking ’em up once it didn’t mean you were going to wear ’em all the time. He hasn’t gumption enough to know that a gentleman changes his – —”

“Can’t you explain to William?” Peter interrupted, turning appealingly to Josephine. “He doesn’t seem to understand.”

“William,” said the girl quietly, “Mr. Van Dyck is too upset to hear any more about his drawers today.”

“Ever,” put in Peter.

“Yes, William,” Jo continued. “Don’t ever talk to Mr. Peter about his drawers again. Talk about something else – his socks, for instance.”

Peter winced. His eyes were filled with disgust.

“Thank you, miss,” said William. “I’ll try to remember. You said his socks, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” replied Jo. “His socks, although from his expression he doesn’t seem so fond of those either.”

“The door – the door!” grated Peter. “Close it on your horrid face, William.”

The door was closed.

“Did you want to dictate a couple of letters?” Jo asked imperturbably.

“Yes,” replied Peter. “Take a couple of letters.” For some time he sat in gloomy concentration, then abandoned the effort. “Oh, hell,” he said, “I can’t think of one letter, much less two.”

“I’ll answer them for you,” Jo assured him soothingly. “You need a long rest.” She looked him over appraisingly. “Wonder how Alf’s going to look in those – —”

A strangling sound from Peter cut short her sentence.

“Go!” he whispered, pointing to the door with a trembling finger. “Get out! I don’t give a damn how Alf looks.”

“You should consult a doctor,” she told him as she prepared to leave the room. “There’s something preying on your mind. Do you drug, perhaps?”

“Do I what?” demanded Peter.

“Do you drug?” she answered simply.

“No,” he replied confronting her, “but I can still drag, and that’s what I’ll damn well do to you if you don’t get out of here.”

With a glance of deep commiseration Josephine gracefully left the room. The provocative fragrance of her perfume lingered in the air. Peter Van Dyck wondered why he did not discharge the girl. Little did he realize that her perfume was one of the reasons.

CHAPTER TWO

On a Park Bench

Several hours after these undignified happenings Peter Van Dyck emerged from a restaurant in which he had been lone-wolfing, being able to think of no language fit for decent conversation. In the crowd outside the door Josephine Duval caught sight of his slim and dejected-looking shoulders. Without a moment’s hesitation the young lady abandoned her window-shopping and blithely set off to dog the footsteps of her employer. Having snatched a glimpse of the girl out of the tail of his eye, Peter immediately divined her intention. This stalking procedure had occurred more than once. Accordingly he quickened his pace. Emphatically he assured himself he had seen quite enough of his secretary for one day. She was a creature totally lacking in either pride or pity. Several times he glanced back to ascertain if his dodging tactics had succeeded in eluding pursuit. Each time he was disappointed. Josephine was still there – grimly there. A most annoying situation. Disgraceful. Why was she making no effort to cut down the distance? Was it torture? Peter was seized by a nervous impulse to take to his heels and run. However, he checked himself, feeling convinced that Jo would have no compunction in doing likewise. She might even find it amusing to shout his name through the streets. Hang it all, what did the girl want with him, anyway? The street was littered with unattached men. Why did she not confine her attentions to one or more of them? He was an engaged man. Within a few short hours he would be a doubly engaged man. Officially hooked if not spliced. Vaguely he wondered whether he was endeavoring to elude Josephine or the thought of that engagement. He crossed over to Battery Park and sat down on a bench close to the waterfront. The fragrance of Jo’s perfume still lingered in his nostrils. Presently it grew stronger. He stirred restlessly. She was there.

“You’ll be late at the office,” he announced, without turning his head.

“I’ll say I was out with you,” said a small voice beside him.

“And I’ll say you deliberately followed me through the streets of New York,” he told her.

“Would you like the office to know that?” asked Jo.

“No. I would not.”

“Then why not be friendly?”

“I’m quite friendly enough for a person who wants to commit murder. In fact I’m damned patient. Don’t let’s talk, then people won’t suspect we know each other.”

“Why won’t they suspect?”

“They’d never think that a person like me would talk to a girl like you.”

Jo considered this insult judicially while swinging her small feet.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said at last. “You don’t look so awful.”

“What?” exclaimed the man indignantly. “You entirely misunderstood my meaning.”

“Peter.” In a very small voice.

“Yes.” Grudgingly. “Mr. Van Dyck to you.”

“Your father called you Peter.”

“Well, you’re not my father.”

“But I helped to bring you up in the business. It’s been three years now.”

“Seems longer.”

“Does it? Well, it hasn’t been long enough to make a coffee man of you.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, that’s so. You’re a hell of a coffee man.”

Peter looked pained.

“It doesn’t speak well for your teaching,” he said.

“You never give me a tumble. Don’t even call me Jo. Everybody else in the office calls me Jo.”

“What do I call you?”

“You don’t call me anything. It’s ‘Please take a letter,’ or ‘How do you feel today?’ or ‘Sorry to keep you late.’ Never any name. To you I’m a nameless woman. Might just as well be a – a – little bastard for all you care.”

This time Peter was profoundly shocked. He actually looked at the girl beside him. His eyes held a mixture of alarm and disapproval.

“Don’t use bad language,” he said.

“Why not use bad language?” she retorted. “You flaunt your drawers in my face.”

“Is that quite fair?” he asked her. “You stormed into my private office. Didn’t stop to knock. And there I was. That’s all there is to it.”

Jo laughed tragically.

“So that’s all there is to it,” she flung back with a mean sneer. “I suppose you think I’m going to be satisfied with that – a mere matter of drawers.”

When Peter looked at her this time, alarm had utterly routed disapproval.

“My God!” he managed to get out. “What do you mean about not being satisfied with that?”

“Exactly what I said,” she replied. “I want to see all. Everything! It’s whole hog or nothing – that’s how I am.”

Peter felt his reason slipping. He could not believe his ears.

“Well,” he said at last, “all I can say is that it’s not a very nice way to be. It must be your French blood.”

“I don’t care whose blood it is,” she replied stubbornly. “I want to see all.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Peter. “Do you mean all of me?”

Josephine looked him over from head to foot. Peter felt a little undressed. Then suddenly she began to laugh.

“You’d look awfully funny,” she said at last, as if actually seeing him that way. “What a fright! Imagine!”

“Don’t trouble yourself,” said Peter acidulously. “I’m not exactly deformed, you know.”

Jo stopped laughing and regarded him through moist eyes.

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “You’re hiding something from me.”

“Do you expect me to walk about my office naked?” he asked.

“After this morning I don’t know what to expect.”

Peter Van Dyck shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

“I’d prefer not to continue this conversation,” he remarked coldly. “No good can come of it.”

“Very well,” replied Jo. “Let’s sit like a couple of bumps on a log.”

“You may sit as you jolly well please,” replied Peter. “However, I don’t see why you are sitting here at all.”

“Why don’t you push me off?”

“Nothing would please me more, but I’m too much of a gentleman.”

“You mean, you’re afraid,” she taunted.

“Please be quiet.”

“I suppose you’re afraid Mr. Morgan or some other international banker might come along and see us talking together?”

“I am,” replied Peter.

“Well, listen to me, Mr. Peter Duane Van Dyck. If one of those old bozos got an eyeful of me he’d give you money instead of lending it to you.”

“You seem to fancy yourself.”

“I know my own value, and that’s more than you do,” she retorted. “I’ve a good mind to sell my body to an international banker.”

“I wish to God you’d sell it to an international vivisectionist and have done with it,” Peter asserted brutally.

“Why?” she inquired. “Does my body bother you?”

“Not at all. It means nothing to me.”

“You mean you can take it or leave it – just as you please?”

“Will you kindly keep quiet? I’ve a lot of things to think about. If I could take it and leave it somewhere else I’d feel much better.”

Several minutes of silence passed. Josephine’s gaze was idly sweeping the harbor. Presently she spoke.

“Peter,” she said.

“Yes,” replied Peter. “What is it now?”

“Do you see that liner?”

“Can’t help seeing that liner. It’s blocking up the whole harbor.”

Jo snaked her supple young body close up beside her employer.

“Would you like to be on that liner, Peter?” she asked him.

“Listen,” protested Peter. “Are you trying to sit on my knees? We’re huddled up together on this bench like a couple of lost waifs. It’s not a cold day.”

“Sorry, Peter. Wasn’t looking where I was going. But you haven’t answered my question. Would you like to be on that liner?”

Peter considered the girl briefly; then his gaze returned to the outbound ship now stepping delicately on her way to open water. The bay glinted with sunlight, and its blue was very blue indeed. Like a virgin murmuring indiscreetly in her dreams, the soft air spoke of summer, of summer and secret places remote from the haunts of man. There was a note of promise too in the voice of the old gentleman who owned the long telescope gleaming on its tripod.

“Visit the harbor and its institutions without budging your feet an inch! The Statue of Liberty and Governor’s Island – all points of interest like as if you was there in the flesh.”

Moodily Peter watched a customer tentatively approach a self-conscious eye to the telescope and begin his visit to the harbor. Peter followed the movements of the man with some anxiety. He wondered what point of interest the fellow was visiting now. Was he seeing anything at all or just pretending to, as most people did when involved with the end of a telescope? Peter had peered through a telescope once. There had been certain things on the moon – mountains, craters, or warts, for all he had been able to discover. He had lied about that moon. Said he had seen everything. Dwelt on the wonder of it all. Inwardly he had suffered from a sneaking sense of guilt and frustration. This visitor to the harbor was doubtless experiencing similar difficulties. That dusty mop of a dog curled up under the instrument knew perfectly well that the visitor was seeing nothing – less than nothing. They never did. For a moment the dog leered cynically at Peter, then transferred his gaze to a sparrow. He would dearly love to chew on some of that sparrow.

Now the liner was spreading her wake along the channel. Soon she would find the sea. What the hell was wrong with him, anyway? Mooning here on a park bench with an impudent chit of an office girl for a companion. Maybe it was spring fever. Then maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was the thought of that cocktail party. He rather more than suspected it was. After the party he was scheduled to take Yolanda to some stuffy house party in New Jersey over the week-end. Not much comfort in that. Peter objected to house parties. Bridge, booze, and boredom. Gay laughter as false as hell. Feeble wisecracks and smart talk – the smug assurance of one’s daily bread whether school kept or not. Golf links, motorcars, tennis courts, and swimming pools – all the paraphernalia of good, clean sport. Healthy bodies and tanned hides. Thoughts and manners cast in the same mold, case-hardened with the same prejudices and polished with the same culture. And here this poor devil, having paid his ten cents, stood all spraddled out vainly endeavoring to snatch a moment’s enjoyment from the end of a telescope. The subtle invitation of Jo’s perfume once more assaulted his nerves. Peter liked that perfume, and the fact that he suspected he also liked its owner a little more than was seemly made him deliberately hostile.

“You haven’t answered my question,” she said.

“What question?” asked Peter uneasily.

“About that liner. How would you like to be on her?”

“I’d like it,” said Peter surprisingly.

“You mean us?” put in Jo. “Just you and I … outward bound … springtime in France … windows on the sea – think of it, Peter. Just you and I. Married, perhaps, or almost the same thing.”

Peter gasped at the immoral conclusion to this lyrical outburst.

“I’d jump off the ship,” he said.

“Oh, no, you wouldn’t,” the girl replied with every show of confidence. “If I had you alone for five minutes you’d jump in only one direction, and I’m too much of a lady to mention that.”

“Are you just naturally plain bad through and through?” Peter asked her. He was really interested to know.

“I’m what you’ve made me,” she answered humbly.

“What!” exclaimed Peter. “I haven’t done a thing to you.”

“I know. That’s just the trouble. That’s why I’m bad. Don’t you realize a body has to be bad before it can plop down and be good?”

“I don’t care to discuss bodies. Much rather swim after that ship.”

“Why don’t you? I hope you drown.” Then with a sudden change in her voice, “What’s on your mind, Peter? You haven’t been so gay lately.”

Her brown eyes studied the features of the man with their suggestion of gauntness. For a moment they rested on his expressive lips, broken by a faintly ironical twist. She moistened hers, then peered inquiringly into his eyes, unremarkable mild blue eyes, rather gentle and easily tired yet strangely capable of conveying a world of hidden meanings. He was not a good-looking man, yet Jo had always found him attractive. Especially his eyes, in which in spite of their apparent weariness he seemed to live most of his life. He was a kind of old young man to Jo, an old young man who had never been really young and who never would grow really old. He belonged to an old unclassified type – no three-dimensional hero, Peter, yet very definitely himself. At present his eyes were haunted with all sorts of unexpressed difficulties.

“What’s on your mind?” she repeated.

“Nothing definite,” said Peter, allowing his gaze to rest on the girl with a little less disapproval. “You know. One of these cocktail teas – stupid things.”

Jo did not know. She was deeply interested, as are all daughters of Eve, in social functions in which they are not included.

“Today?” she asked.

“After office,” said Peter. “My aunt’s doing it for Yolanda Wilmont. We get engaged at it – officially engaged and all that.”

“All what?” she inquired suspiciously.

“Oh, just all that.”

“I hope you don’t mean what I’m thinking,” said Jo.

“At my lowest moments,” he replied, “I never could mean what you’re thinking.”

“Thanks,” murmured Jo. “What’s she like? Of course, I’ve seen her pictures in the scandal sheets. They’ve given me many a good laugh.”

“You’re just envious,” retorted Peter, hardly spirited enough to be stung to a defense of his fiancée.

“I might possibly be envious about all that,” she admitted, “but certainly not about being engaged to you.”

“Neither am I,” replied Peter cryptically.

The girl cast him a swift look – a look of sparrow-like intelligence. She was snatching at crumbs of comfort now, yet at the same time finding room to feel a little bit sorry for Peter.

“So that’s why you’d like to swim after that ship,” she observed in a thoughtful voice.

“After any ship,” said Peter.

“I understand,” she answered.

“No, you don’t,” replied Peter, suddenly getting up from the bench. “As a matter of fact I’m very happy. I’m a decidedly lucky man.”

“Of course you are, Peter,” she assured him.

This time he cast her a swift look.

“An exceptionally lucky man,” he reiterated with quite unnecessary emphasis. “Getting far more than I deserve, in fact.”

“Now you’re talking,” said Jo. “Much more than you deserve, and you’re pretty bad.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t mean anything, Peter. I’m agreeing with you.”

“Well, don’t,” he snapped. “I dislike the way you do it. Anyway, it’s time to get back to the office. Can’t remember ever spending a more trying luncheon hour.”

“Would you believe it?” said Josephine. “It’s been much longer than that. Time passes so quickly for a young girl when she meets an interesting, middle-aged party.”

“Middle-aged hell. How old are you?”

“Swear to God I’m twenty-four, mister.”

“Well, I’m only ten years older.”

“Just the right age, although you do look a wee bit faded.”

“The right age for what?” Peter was unwise enough to want to know.

“For fatherhood,” she told him, looking glowingly up into his face.

Some hidden strain of old Dutch modesty forced Peter to lower his lids.

“Come,” he said. “We’re going back to the office.”

But before they left, their eyes sought the liner nosing far down the Narrows. Jo gave a little sigh, the wistful ghost of a great big wish. In Peter’s eyes the harassed look had deepened. It was verging on the desperate now.

CHAPTER THREE

Revelation of the Legs

The day was dragging on, and by now that liner must be far out at sea. Peter sat thinking about it. In his thoughts were mingled fleeting visions of Yolanda Wilmont and Josephine Duval. What was it all about, all this uneasy speculation, this sensation of approaching loss and separation? Separation from what, from whom? Obviously, he must be in love with Yolanda Wilmont – had been in love with her for years. That was all settled, one of the established facts of his life. She was beautiful, she was cultured, and she seemed to find nothing especially wrong with him. Of course, she had never allowed either herself nor him to become in any sense intimate on the strength of this engagement of theirs. She was not at all like that. Just the opposite of this Duval woman. That was something to be thankful for – but was it? Peter wondered. On the other hand he seriously doubted if one man could last long with an oversexed creature like Josephine without calling in outside assistance, which did not make for a happy married life. Josephine was impossible. He failed to know why he was thinking about her at all. What business had that brazen vixen preening herself in his thoughts? She was merely his private secretary, an efficient one but forward. She, too, had become a fixture in his life. His father had found her amusing, but then, the elder Van Dyck had been a loose liver after office hours. He had found any good-looking wench amusing. Peter was not like that. He had never had the chance. As he sat there thinking, he found himself rather envying his father’s disregard of convention. Closer than had any other Van Dyck immortalized in the family record, the old gentleman had approached the open ground of disreputability. He had been keenly alert to every female leg in the office, and he had personally seen to it that every leg in the office was first-rate. Yet everyone had been fond of old Peter Van Dyck, including his son. Young Peter had been too greatly occupied fearing the consequences of his father’s ambitious but questionable experiments to embark on any of his own. Many a father has lost his morals in saving those of a son, although it is highly problematical that the elder Van Dyck had this idea in mind as he tidily tottered among his vices. His interest in Jo Duval, however, had been restrained to one of fatherly admiration mixed with a little fear and respect, emotions few women had ever inspired in him.

Peter’s thoughts were interrupted by the entrance of Josephine Duval. Without so much as favoring him with a glance, she marched up to his desk, smacked down on it an intra-office memorandum, then turned and retraced her steps. At the door she paused and fixed him with a pair of glittering eyes. Peter quailed before their malevolence. In the way she closed the door behind her there was a suggestion of a challenge.

Why was this creature so disturbing? Peter wondered. At times, when it so pleased her mood, she acted exactly as if she were in a play. It wasn’t natural. Imagine! This stalking into a man’s office, then stalking out again with never a word. And what a look she had left behind – what a downright sinister look! What had she meant by that?

With the least interest in the world in intra-office routine Peter picked up the memorandum and glanced at it. Quite suddenly his bored expression changed to one of consternation. He read:

To Peter van Dyck, President:

The moment you consummate your marriage with Yolanda Wilmont (what a name!) I want my resignation to take effect. However, until that moment it’s still anybody’s game, catch-as-catch-can, and you’re It.

Respectfully yours,

Josephine Duval.

P.S.

A carbon of this memorandum will be found in my files under “Unfinished Business.”

As if it were scorching his fingers, Peter hastily destroyed the compromising slip of paper. This was going too far. He rang for his secretary.

“Haven’t you got any better sense than to start in playing childish games with me?” he demanded.

“The games I intend to play with you will be far from childish,” she assured him.

Peter began to think this over, then decided it would be better to leave it alone.

“Sit down,” he said in a reasonable voice, “and let’s try to get things straight.”

Josephine flopped down and recklessly tossed one silken leg over the other.

“In the first place,” began Peter, “why have you selected today of all days to deport yourself in an especially hellish manner?”

“I’m like this every day, only somedays I let go,” she told him.

Peter considered this for a moment.

“Do you mean you’re like this with everybody,” he inquired, “or just with me?”

“Just with you,” she confided. “If I was like this with everybody I’d have a much nicer time.”

“You don’t mean nicer,” said Peter. “You mean better, perhaps.”

“It’s too fine a distinction for me to understand,” she replied. “But it’s the truth just the same. I let go only with you.”

“Why with me, may I ask? Do you regard me in the light of a small office boy – a person to tease?”

“Hardly,” she said. “I regard you as a weak but adult male.”

“Apparently,” replied Peter. “But would you mind not letting go with me, or try letting go with someone else, for a change?”

She looked at him thoughtfully.

“I’d rather not,” she said.

“So would I,” replied Peter, not realizing what he was saying.

“You mean you’d care if I let go with someone else?” she asked.

“Certainly not,” replied Peter. “I don’t care if you let go with Mahatma Gandhi, with all due respect to that gentleman.”

“It wouldn’t be hard to let go with that one,” Jo observed. “He has so very little to let go of.”

“That’s neither here nor there,” said Peter impatiently. “You’ll have to stop letting go with me or I’ll let go with you.”

“I’d like that,” replied the girl quite seriously.

“I mean, I’ll have to let you go,” he corrected himself.

“You haven’t even got me yet,” she answered.

“And I don’t even want you,” said Peter.

“How do you know?” she demanded. “You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know I live in New Jersey, that I support a drunken uncle, that I’m an orphan on both sides and sleep on the left. You don’t know that I love salted almonds and that I don’t earn enough money here to keep myself in nice underthings. You wear pure silk drawers. Don’t tell me – I saw them with my own two eyes. What sort of drawers do you think I wear? Answer me that. What sort of drawers do you think I wear? Pure silk? Bah!”

“I’m sure I don’t care to know that,” Peter interrupted. “And please don’t keep repeating the question.”

“No,” she sneered, “you don’t care to know. You’re too much of a coward. Well, if you must know, I’ll tell you. They’re artificial silk – not all silk like yours – but the lace on ’em is real.”

“Must I know all these things?” asked Peter weakly.

“Certainly you must,” she snapped. “You’re dealing in human souls.”

“I had hoped to deal in coffee,” he replied with a show of bitterness, “but you don’t give me time to sell a bean.”

“I wouldn’t be found dead in those things you have on,” she continued. “Mine are better for less money.”

“No doubt,” Peter said coldly. “But did it ever occur to you that I have no desire to be found dead in yours?”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” she flung back. “Not dead.”

Here she laughed significantly – suggestively, in fact. Peter Van Dyck was most unpleasantly impressed by the insinuating look that followed. Helplessly he turned his eyes to the window.

“I fail to see where all this is leading to,” he said at length. “Hadn’t you better take a couple of letters?”

“All right,” she retorted. “Give me a couple of letters. It’s better than getting nothing. But while we’re on the subject, there’s another thing you don’t know.”

“I’m off the subject. Most definitely off it.”

“Well, you’ve got to know this,” she continued. “One of the last things your father asked me to do was to make a man of you.”

“If you followed his ideas on that subject,” said Peter, “you’d make a wreck of me instead of a man, I’m afraid.”

“You’re certainly not the man he was,” she admitted with uncomplimentary readiness, “but I’m going to do my best with the little there is.”

“That’s very gracious of you, I’m sure. But let me get this straight. Do you intend to make a man of me or a wreck?”

“I’m going to wreck you,” said the girl, “and enjoy myself doing it.”

“A nice young girl!” murmured Peter Van Dyck. “An admirable character all round!”

“And while you’re talking of nice young girls,” said Jo, “you might as well know your father wasn’t any too fond of that nice young girl of yours with the name of a fairy princess. And as for an admirable character – pish! I’d rather have a swell shape.”

“Couldn’t you strive to develop both?”

“I’m fully developed as it is,” she asserted. “If anything, a little too much so in places, but you’d never know that.”

“I have no desire to be further enlightened,” Peter hastened to assure her.

“You have no ambition,” said Jo.

“How about a couple of letters?” he asked.

“All right. How about ’em? I’d almost given those letters up.”

“And will you take the carbon of that memorandum out of your files?” he asked her.

“If you don’t hurry up with those letters,” Jo replied, “I’ll take it out of the files and tack it on the bulletin board.”

This threat so upset Peter that he in turn upset a box of paper clips. As he bent over to pick them up, he came face to face with Josephine Duval’s knee. Some artists claim that the knee of a woman is not an object of beauty. No such claim could be made against Josephine Duval’s knee. If an artist lived who, upon seeing Josephine’s knee, did not want to do something more than paint it, he was not worthy of his brush. And the wonder of it was that Josephine had two knees. Peter Van Dyck was gazing at them both. It was an experience he never forgot – a revelation. For the first time in his life he realized that a woman’s knees and legs were capable of expressing personality. And with this realization came the explanation of his distaste for the cocktail party and what it represented. In the course of his life he had seen a lot of Yolanda’s legs, but never once during the period of this long association with them had he been moved by a desire to do anything other than look at them, and not so strongly moved at that. As Peter sat half crouching in his chair, it came to him, with a sense of having been cheated, that Yolanda’s legs had never meant anything more to him than something to separate her body from the ground, something to move her about on from place to place. They might as well have been a pair of stilts or a couple of wheels. In spite of their gracious proportions they were totally lacking in personality. They exercised no fascination, no irresistible appeal. They were cold but beautiful legs. Josephine’s legs were different. The more Peter looked at them the more he wanted to see of them. He frankly admitted this. Not only were they beautiful but also extremely interesting – breathtaking legs, legs seen once in a lifetime. He wondered what had been wrong with him not to have noticed them before. Why had he made this startling discovery at this late date, virtually at the very moment when he was going to become officially engaged to an altogether different pair of legs – to legs he would have to live with for the remainder of his days?

Josephine’s voice cut in on his meditations.

“Have you decided to conduct your business in that weird position?” she asked. “Or have you been seized suddenly by a cramp?”

“I’m not going to be like this long,” he answered, “nor am I subject to cramps. I am merely thinking.”

“Then I think you’re overdoing it,” said the girl. “First thing you know you’ll be having a rush of blood to the head.”

“I have one already,” replied Peter in an odd voice.

Slowly he straightened up, then sank back in his chair. Almost immediately he fell into a brown study, and although he was looking directly at Josephine his gaze seemed to pass through and far beyond her. The girl eyed him curiously. What had come over this man? Little did she suspect that what she had so often wanted to happen actually had happened without her knowledge or contrivance.

In the presence of this startling revelation Peter Van Dyck sat bemused. For the first time in his life he concentrated his mental forces on legs. How, he wondered, had a leg, a mere leg, the power to move a man so profoundly – to revolutionize his entire outlook on such matters? All legs were more or less alike, he argued, so much skin and so much bone. Take his own legs, for example. He had never derived any pleasure or satisfaction in contemplating their hungry contours, if they had any contours to contemplate. He supposed they had, yet he was not in any way moved when he cast his eyes on them unless it was by a feeling of distaste. As a matter of fact, he preferred not to look at his legs at all. He rather avoided them. Yet wherein were they so different from those of Josephine Duval? They were composed of the same elements, served the same purpose, and reacted to the same external influences – heat, cold, kicks, and bites. Certainly mosquitoes did not differentiate between legs. About Jo’s legs there was something impudent and piquant, a devil-may-care attitude. She had, morally speaking, a wicked pair of legs.

“Take a couple of letters,” he began in a dull, preoccupied voice.

“That would be amusing for a change,” said Jo sweetly.

“Almost anything would be amusing for a change,” he agreed. “Get on with it. This is to Mr. Benjamin Clarke. You have his address. Dear Ben.” Peter’s eyes strayed downward, “Dear Ben,” he resumed.

“Dear Ben twice?” asked Jo.

“Once or twice,” replied Peter. “It doesn’t matter. He knows who he is. Dear Ben: Referring to our recent conversation about knees and legs – —”

“Pardon me,” smoothly interrupted the girl. “Did I understand you to say knees and legs?”

“Means and ways,” corrected Peter.

“Were you and Ben discussing means and ways to knees and legs?” she asked him. “You’ve got me all mixed up.”

“That doesn’t matter either,” said Peter. “I never discuss such subjects. You should know that.”

“It would do you a world of good,” she assured him.

“Please keep such advice to yourself.”

It was at this moment that Jo became aware of the direction of her employer’s intent gaze.

“Are you, by any chance, looking at my legs?” she inquired in a pleased voice.

“Yes,” he answered. “One can scarcely look at anything else.”

“You mean they’re so attractive?”

“No. I mean they’re literally all over the place.”

“If I’m not being too bold,” said the girl, “would you mind giving me a rough idea of what you think of them?”

“I don’t think of them,” he answered coldly. “I look at them the same as I would look at a chair or a desk or – or – the Pyramids.”

“Go on,” she said in a dangerous voice. “Why bring up the Pyramids?”

“I am trying to explain to you the impersonal attitude I take to your legs.”

Jo sprang from her chair. Her face was flaming, and from her eyes fire flashed through two angry tears.

“And I’d like to explain to you,” she said in a low voice, “the personal attitude I take to your words. You may criticize my typing as much as you please, but I won’t allow you to say a word against my legs. Your Yolanda may be able to afford better stockings, but taking her leg for leg she’s a hunchback compared to me.”

“Aren’t you getting your anatomy a trifle scrambled?” asked Peter in a collected voice.

“I’d damn well like to scramble yours all over the map,” she retorted. “Hitting below the belt.”

“Quite,” replied Peter, coolly measuring her figure with his eyes. “I should say about twelve inches or more.”

“I’m going to get out of this room,” she declared, “and never come back into it again. If you want to hurl insults at me and talk in a low, lewd manner you’ll have to do it outside where everyone can hear what a lecherous creature you are.”

“On your way to your desk,” he called after her pleasantly, “will you be so good as to ask Miss Bryant to stop in?”

“Sure,” she flung over her shoulder. “I suppose you’ll compare hers to Pikes Peak or the Empire State.”

“I’ll have to consider them first,” said Peter.

The sound the door made when it closed had in it the quality of a curse.

CHAPTER FOUR

Riding to a Fall

Betty Bryant was not a bad-looking girl. Peter realized this when, a few minutes after Jo’s impassioned exit, the young girl entered his office and stood waiting expectantly before his desk. Since the demoralizing revelation of his secretary’s knees and legs Peter had begun to feel that he was looking at women through an entirely new and improved pair of eyes. Now, when it was almost too late to take advantage of his clearer vision, he was beginning to regret the opportunities he had missed in the past as well as those he would have to forgo in the future. The situation was nothing less than tragic. Life owed him many unclaimed women. The reprehensible blood of the elder Van Dyck throbbed rebelliously in his veins.

“Miss Bryant,” he said, protecting sections of his features behind a letter, “I wish you would toss on your hat and buy half a dozen pair of stockings at one of the smarter shops in the district. Would you mind?”

Miss Bryant certainly would not mind. She would be glad to go to even greater lengths for Mr. Peter Van Dyck. She would, however, have been interested to know what clearly impure motives lay behind this unexpected request. From the little she could see of Peter’s features she was convinced they did not belong to a thoroughly honest face.

“Have you any particular shade in mind, sir?” she asked him.

“Shade in mind?” repeated Peter. “Er – oh, yes, of course. Naturally.” He laughed for no reason. “Flesh,” he announced, coloring slightly. “I mean all shades. You know. All the fashionable shades. Youthful. They’re for my Aunt Sophie. She has rather silly ideas – ambitions, one might say.”

“Oh,” said Miss Bryant. “So they’re for your aunt.”

“Yes,” retorted Peter. “I said they were for my aunt. Why? Is it funny?”

“No. Oh, no. Not at all. I was wondering what size stocking your Aunt Sophie wears, that’s all.”

“Any size I give her,” replied Peter, striving to maintain a casual note in his voice. “I should say about the same size as that Josephine Duval or any other girl her size.”

“I think I understand,” said Miss Bryant thoughtfully.

“I was very much afraid you would,” remarked Peter as he handed the young lady several crisp notes. “And while you’re about it, treat your own legs to a pair on the house,” he added. “Fine feathers make fine birds, you know. Ha, ha! Capital!”

With her employer’s false laughter ringing in her ears, Miss Bryant departed, wondering why she had never suspected him before of being mentally unsteady. These old families got that way in spots. Too bad.

When she had successfully fulfilled her mission and delivered the stockings to Peter, he summoned his secretary. Although she had flatly announced her intention of never entering his office again, Josephine Duval appeared almost immediately.

“What improper suggestions have you been making to that Bryant thing?” she demanded. “She’s gone light in the head all of a sudden.”

“I know nothing about that,” said Peter. “She struck me as being an uncommonly sensible and willing young lady.”

“Willing, no doubt,” snapped Josephine, and laughed disagreeably.

“I particularly dislike the sound of that laugh,” said Peter, “as well as the coarse implications behind it. Here are half a dozen pairs of stockings – pure silk stockings – all silk stockings, in fact. Yank a couple of them over your legs and let’s hear no more on the subject. This has been a fruitless day, and it’s not going to get any better.”

Josephine took the extended package and tore off its wrappings. For a moment there was silence in the office as she examined the contents with an experienced and rapidly calculating eye. Presently she turned and looked darkly at Peter Van Dyck.

“And for this,” she said, “I suppose you expect to own me body and soul.”

“I’m not interested in your soul,” Peter informed her curtly.

“Oh,” said Josephine, momentarily nonplussed. “All right. It’s a bargain. We’ll let it go at a body.”

“I have no idea what you are planning on letting go,” Peter replied uneasily, “but I strongly advise you to hold everything. And please get it into your head that I have no desire to own either your body or your soul.”

“How about a little loan?” Josephine suggested.

“Will you now go away and stop talking wildly,” said Peter. “After all, I am your employer. You’re supposed to be working here, you know, and not paying me little visits throughout the day.”

Josephine looked at him furiously.

“You’re going to own my body,” she said between her teeth, “if I have to ruin yours in the struggle.”

“An edifying picture,” Peter dryly observed. “However, I shall keep on the alert.”

“If they weren’t pure silk I’d cut these stockings to ribbons.”

“Glad you like them,” said Peter mildly. “If I were you, I wouldn’t carry them about with me in the office. People might talk.”

“I’ll stick ’em down here,” she declared, thrusting the six pairs of stockings down the front of her dress, where they produced an interesting, not to say scandalous effect.

“If you go out there in that condition,” observed Peter, “people will do more than talk. They’ll swoon in your face. Even I, in full possession of all the facts, cannot suppress a pang of uneasiness.”

“You’re responsible for my condition,” she flung back.

“Granted,” replied Peter reasonably. “But I’m not responsible for what others might erroneously conclude was your condition.”

“Anyway, here I go,” said Josephine. “We have a secret between us now.”

“It looks as if we have a great deal more than that,” Peter replied.

“Nobody will notice anything if I go like this,” the girl explained, placing her hands across her stomach.

“Oh, no,” agreed Peter. “They’ll merely think I kicked you in a moment of playfulness, that’s all. Please hurry. It upsets me to look at you the way you are.”

At the door Jo turned and glanced back at him.

“You can’t tell me,” she said, “you didn’t have something else in your mind when you gave me these.”

The door closed behind her, and Peter leaned back in his chair. He was wondering himself exactly what he had in his mind in regard to Jo Duval. Time passed while Peter sat thus steadily accomplishing nothing. He had contributed very little to the success of the Van Dyck coffee business that day. Presently he stirred and reached for his watch. After thoughtfully considering the time of day it announced, he compared it with the clock on his desk.

To make assurance doubly sure, he rose and, opening the door, glanced at the office clock. As he closed the door he got the impression that Betty Bryant was studying him with new interest. Perhaps there were others, he unhappily decided. Crossing the room to the window, he stood looking down on the narrow street. People were already turning their released expressions homeward. They were looking forward to a few hours of personal living, a few hours of individual freedom. Five p. m. was for them a daily declaration of temporary independence. Not so for him. He had to go home presently and let that damn cat out of the bag. He would much rather wring its neck. Was he not voluntarily thrusting his own neck into a noose for life? It was still not too late. Why not take a ferryboat to Staten Island and live among the trees somewhere? Why not cross a bridge and lose himself in a swarm of unfamiliar streets? Why not scuttle through a tube and seek oblivion in a waterfront speakeasy? There were any number of things he could do. As he stood there by the window, he became uneasily aware of the fog drifting through the street. Figures of men and women were cutting through it, zigzagging past one another, going north, going south, ducking down the side streets. Boys were whistling. Boys always were. Why? Why were they always whistling? From two rivers came the haunting voices of ships – tugs, liners, ferryboats, yachts going up to pleasant moorings. Foggy as hell somewhere. What sort of mooring was he going up to? An anchorage for life. Maybe something would happen. Lots of things could happen in a fog. He turned from the window, walked slowly to the hatrack, and collected his hat and stick. As he bade his office staff good-night, he felt he was saying goodbye. Josephine Duval had already gone.

The subway crowd was familiar, but not friendly. It was composed of individuals, each having tenaciously held ideas about his or her place on the platform. They knew where they wanted to go and how they wanted to go there, and nothing was going to stop them or change them or soften them. Looking slightly pained, Peter Van Dyck, with a delicate but nevertheless protesting arc in his back, allowed himself to be catapulted into a train in which he stood tightly wedged, suffering from a loss of both dignity and breath. He decided he was lucky to lose no more than that in such a frenzied stampede.

“If you don’t stop doing that to me,” said a woman’s voice somewhere in the neighborhood of his chest, “I’ll slap you in the face.”

Peter’s first reaction was to glance nervously about him to ascertain if the entire car had overheard the woman’s intentions. Then he spoke in a low, reassuring voice in which was a note of appeal.

“I’m not doing it,” he whispered.

“Don’t tell me that,” said the woman. “Can’t I feel? There you go, doing it again. You’re getting a lot for a nickel ride, mister.”

“My God,” thought Peter, striving unsuccessfully to remove himself from the woman, “what a thing for her to say!” Crouching over, he muttered to the top of a small hat, “Madam, I can’t help it. I’m – —”

“Do you mean you’ve lost control of yourself?” the woman’s voice cut in.

“No,” he protested. “I can’t think of what I’m doing.”

“I don’t like to think of what you are doing,” the woman continued. “Lay off, that’s all. Do you want me to scream for help?”

Straining his neck down and to the side, Peter succeeded in getting a glimpse of his accuser. It was as he had been suspecting for the past few moments. She was there – Jo. Peter did not know whether to be relieved by this or alarmed.

“Don’t go on like that,” he pleaded.

“Don’t you go on like that,” she told him. “Should be ashamed of yourself. Of all the things to do.”

“But what in God’s name am I doing?” he asked in desperation.

“To explain what you’re doing would be even more embarrassing than to submit to it,” she told him with elaborate dignity.

“It can’t be as bad as all that,” he said.

“I’d hate it to get any worse,” she replied, “at least with so much public about, I would.”

“It is too close for decency,” agreed Peter.

“You seem to find it so,” she retorted. “Suppose they knew at the office?”

“Knew what?”

“Never mind about what. You know perfectly well. I hate that sort of thing – that type of man.”

“So do I,” replied Peter earnestly. “The very idea is revolting to me.”

“Then obviously, you don’t believe in letting your left hand know what your right hand is doing,” she retorted.

“Both of my hands are busy,” he declared.

“Don’t I know that?” said Jo. “I’d call them frantic. Only married couples should be allowed to travel in the subway during rush hours.”

“What did you do with the stockings?” he asked her, hoping to change the subject.

“You couldn’t get closer to them unless you put them on,” she assured him.

“Then they’re still in the same place?”

“Either there or hanging on my backbone.”

“How ghastly!”

“It’s your fault if they are,” she replied. “Do you still intend to go through that mock engagement announcement?”

“Why not?” demanded Peter.

“Shouldn’t think you’d have the nerve after this ride.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I’m not being silly when I tell you,” she replied quite seriously, “that I doubt very much if you get yourself engaged today.”

Peter glanced quickly down into her upturned face. In her eyes he read an expression of grim determination. For some reason her portentous threat or warning did not strike the disagreeable note one might have expected. Peter received it almost with a feeling of relief. In fact, he found in her words a fragile straw of salvation. If it would have served to delay the formal betrothal announcement, Peter would have welcomed a localized earthquake. So far as his engagement to Yolanda was concerned, he found himself strictly neutral. He was on the fence. It was not as if he wanted to call the engagement off definitely and forever. Peter simply did not know. Why had they not gone through with it several years ago, instead of waiting until the idea had grown stale? No. Yolanda had wanted to travel on the Continent unattached. She had wanted to develop her art. She had wanted to enjoy her position as a much sought after débutante. She was one of those young ladies who wanted Life with a capital L, yet who would not know what to do with it should it come to her. She had wanted ever so many things and she had got all of them. And in the background she had also wanted Peter, Peter in a waiting capacity safely packed in ice. She was such a glittering, assured sort of person, so certain to be right, so well versed in all the social amenities. She would be quite a comfort when people called, as they inevitably would call, in droves – dumb, well-dressed, well-nourished, chatty little droves of really nice people. Peter wondered unhappily in his increasing morbidness what they were going to do with all the people who called. Where were they going to put them? How deal with them? The years ahead presented themselves to Peter as pillars in an endless hall lined with nice people who shook hands and chatted delightfully about non-essentials.

And all the while he was puzzling over these things, Jo was looking up into his troubled, rather sensitive face from beneath the heavy lashes of her amused but devoted eyes.

“Hang it all,” he said at last, “why do you like me, anyway? I should think you’d fall for a truck driver or a professional wrestler or a strong man, or for one of those great big silent chaps who make the maximum amount of empire on the minimum amount of words. The movies are full of them. Look at me – I’m virtually a physical and mental wreck. Might just as well be an idiot. I catch cold almost always, my nose gets red in the winter and even worse in the summer – frost and sunburn vie for honors – I probably snore enormously and, as you know for yourself, I don’t even know how many pairs of drawers I’m wearing half the time, whereas during the other half I daresay I’m not wearing any drawers at all. I’m quite impossible any way you look at it.”

“I realize all that,” she said, “but I bet you know a lot of dirty stories, and I fairly wallow in those.”

Peter groaned spiritually. This creature was beyond belief – literally incredible. And to think that he had been in the same office with her for three whole years, and before that his father had been subjected to the same demoralizing influence. Perhaps that accounted for the old gentleman’s perennial bloomings.

“Furthermore,” the girl’s voice continued, “professional wrestlers and strong men and those silent birds you mentioned are notoriously moral. They hold deep-rooted convictions and have exceedingly piggish ways. Now you – you’re quite another proposition. Without realizing it you are so morally flexible that you must have been born corrupted. I’d much rather live amid physical ruins than stagnate amid moral perfection.”

“Your sentiments and opinions do us both credit, I’m sure,” observed Peter Van Dyck. “What sort of life are you planning for me to live with you – one of pillage, rape, and arson?”

“Pillage and arson, perhaps,” she said briefly. “The other will not be necessary.”

“Aren’t you getting off soon?” asked Peter.

“Yes,” she replied as the train lurched into Times Square. “Right here. Goodbye, for the moment, and don’t be surprised at anything that happens. Remember, I’m on your side.”

Peter’s gaze followed her through the door of the train and out onto the platform. As she looked back at him Josephine decided she had never seen a more lost and miserable expression in any man’s eyes. Being of a primitive nature, she still had room for pity. Her scheme for helping this man and at the same time helping herself crystallized there in her mind as Peter’s train drew out. Tossing her shopping expedition to the winds, she boarded the next uptown express.

On her way to 72nd Street she revolved many desperate remedies in her mind. At the same time she found occasion to congratulate herself for having come to a decision while still in the subway, for thus she had saved the price of another fare. Jo was passionate about everything – even thrift.

CHAPTER FIVE

Little Arthur in Quest of Drawers

Little Arthur’s aggrieved meditations on the greater advantages enjoyed by second-story men in providing themselves with the drawers of others had led him far afield. As a result of these meditations he had momentarily yielded to the temptation to stray adventurously a little outside the professional limits of his calling. Having established the fact that Central Park was virtually barren of loot of the smaller species, he found himself this afternoon wandering watchfully through the streets of the West 70’s, his disarmingly mild blue eyes constantly on the alert for a convenient house to second-story. Once he had selected a suitable subject for his nefarious project, he had certain ideas of his own in regard to carrying it to a successful conclusion.

After tentatively weighing the pros and cons of an area-way that impressed his sensitive nature with its unmistakable air of good breeding, Little Arthur proceeded down it until it eventually terminated in Martha, one of the trimmest of the Van Dyck maids. The kitchen being unchaperoned at the moment, Little Arthur with his usual subtleness prevailed upon Martha to invite him in for a cup of tea. He achieved this by convincing the guileless maid that in him she was beholding not merely one of the offshoots but absolutely the very flower itself of depression.

Presently, seated at the kitchen table and made confidential by a cup of tea, the two of them were bending their heads prettily over the tepidly glowing allurements of a spurious ruby ring.

“Wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” Little Arthur admitted softly, “if that gem hadn’t belonged in its time to one of them far-Indian potentates.”

“No!” exclaimed young Martha. “You don’t mean ter say? One of them redskins like?”

“How should I know,” put in Little Arthur, “not ever rightly having seen the color of this here potentate’s skin? May have been red. May have been brown. May have been as white as the back of me hand.”

The back of Little Arthur’s hand somewhat spoiled the effect of this ill-chosen comparison.

“That far-Indian potentate wouldn’t have been so white, at that,” remarked the maid, Martha, prompted no doubt by that nasty streak which lies ever close to the surface in all members of her sex.

Little Arthur delicately removed his hand from the critical examination of the girl’s frankly skeptical eyes.

“It’s the hand of an honest man, at any rate,” said he with a note of bitterness.

“Mean ter say this old potentate’s hands weren’t strictly honest?” Martha’s large gray eyes grew larger and a little frightened.

“I keep telling you I never met this here far-Indian potentate,” Little Arthur protested, amazed by the hopeless irrelevance of the feminine mind. “But you know how them potentates are.”

“No,” the girl admitted quite frankly. “I don’t know much about potentates. How are they, now?”

“Well,” replied Little Arthur, heartily wishing he had never brought up the subject, “you can’t quite say how they are. They sort of take things when they fancy ’em – like women and gold and jewels.”

“Maybe this jewel belonged to one of this potentate’s women,” said Martha in an awed voice. “Think of it! This jewel being on the hand of one of his favorite slaves. Guess she didn’t need to wear much more than that.”

Little Arthur embodied his disapproval of the trend of the girl’s remarks in a slightly offended cough.

“I hope,” he replied, “that the lady who wore that ring was a step above a harem hussy.”

“What’s a harem really like, mister?” Martha asked him wistfully. “I’ve often wanted ter know.”

A gentle pink was finding its way into Little Arthur’s ears. The conversation was becoming increasingly more difficult to maintain. Once more he endeavored to signify his disapproval through the medium of an especially refined cough.

“Shouldn’t think you’d want to fill your head with a lot of truck like that,” he observed with some severity.

“But I do, mister,” pleaded the maid. “Go on and tell me. The movies make ’em fine.”

Fearing lest refusal might endanger the outcome of his enterprise, Little Arthur compromised with his scruples as have many an artist before him. He made a brave attempt.

“Well,” he began, “a harem, properly speaking, is sort of like a nursery only for grown-ups, yer understand. It’s a place where you sort of have fun in and lark about.”

“I knew you had fun,” admitted Martha innocently, “but I’d never heard about that nursery part before. Sounds kinda dull.”

From beneath eyebrows arched in pain, Little Arthur distastefully regarded the girl.

“It’s like that,” he said shortly. “Dull. Now about this here jewel. I – —”

“Always thought I’d like to join one of them harem places,” Martha interrupted dreamily. “Dancing all day and resting on piles of pillers … eating fruit and drinking wine and telling great big naked slaves to get a move on with them fans. Flies tickle something fierce when you ain’t dressed for ’em.”

Little Arthur’s eyes were almost bulging from his head.

“Just a minute,” he put in hastily to prevent further disgraceful admissions on the part of his alarming companion. “Let’s get back to this here potentate’s jewel.”

He had no intention of allowing the situation to develop any further along its present lines. He had insinuated himself into the good graces of this girl with a definite object in view. He had staked his professional reputation to procure what he firmly believed to be the most personal article of a gentleman’s attire. It was far beyond the scope of his operations to jeopardize the integrity of his own in so doing. To victimize the maid was one thing. To become her victim was quite another. He would leave that sort of conduct to his betters.

“All right, mister,” said the girl. “What about that jewel?”

“Now you’re talking,” replied the little man, allowing a note of approval to rob his voice of its former austerity. “I’ll let this jewel go for less than nothing because of the tea and all.”

“And how much is that in money?” the girl inquired nervously.

“About two dollars,” he confided. “And I should be shot for doing it.”

Not for a moment suspecting how thoroughly the artful little man deserved to be shot, Martha rose from the table.

“All right, mister,” she announced. “I’ll run upstairs and get my purse.”

“Where’s that?” he demanded.

“Servants’ quarters,” she told him. “Top floor.”

This suited Arthur’s plans to perfection.

“Don’t be long,” he warned her as she turned to the service stairway.

The moment the sound of her tripping feet had died away in the upper regions of the house, Little Arthur deposited the ring on the table and silently hastened up the stairs. Attaining the second floor with a thrill of elation, he crept up to the nearest door and listened. Then, like a half-starved shadow, he faded noiselessly into the room. It was a large, pleasant room – a man’s room, he was quick to note – and heavy portières were hanging from the windows. Crossing swiftly to one of these, he looked out to ascertain the easiest means of exit. There was no easiest means of exit. It was a sheer drop to the street from every window. At that moment he heard the knob of the door turning. Little Arthur could not recall ever having listened to a more unwanted sound. Ducking round a table laden with bottles and a siphon, he secreted his small person with the deftness of desperation behind one of the portières. To have been released from his present predicament, not only would he have willingly sacrificed his prospects of ever obtaining the drawers of others but also tossed his own into the bargain as a gesture of good will.

Peter Van Dyck, ruffled by the world in general and the subway in particular, slowly entered the room. Little Arthur, catching a furtive glimpse of his expression, decided that here indeed was a man who would regard none too favorably any slight familiarity from a member of the criminal class. Why had he, Little Arthur, not been satisfied with the drawers that had served him so long and well? Why had he allowed shallow frivolity to cloud and confound his discretion? All the drawers in all the world were not worth the anxiety he was experiencing there behind that curtain.

Suddenly the small, unhappy man caught his breath. Good God! What next? The owner of the room was actually undressing. Could he be going to bed at this hour? What a glutton for sleep! But some men were like that, only they seldom stopped to undress. It was shoes and all with them. Suppose this chap took it into his head to sit up and read? He himself was given to that small relaxation after a difficult day. He might be forced to remain concealed until he fainted from sheer exhaustion. Little Arthur was becoming panic-stricken.

While this scene was working up to its inevitable climax, Josephine Duval was resolutely ascending the front stoop of the Van Dyck residence. Just what she intended to do when she got inside, she had not the slightest idea. However, Jo was one of the world’s most successful opportunists. Something would be sure to turn up. Something always did. But what turned up at first was not any too reassuring. This was no less a personage than Sanders, the Van Dyck butler.

“Would you mind telling your mistress,” said Jo, neatly slipping past the great man, “that there’s a lady calling on her who is in an interesting condition?”

Now this form of announcing herself, especially in view of the fact that it was entirely misleading if not worse, might strike some as being particularly ill-advised. However, Jo found herself in the position of one suddenly called upon to speak when there is absolutely nothing to say, and so she very wisely decided that it really did not matter much what she said so long as she said something – anything. Furthermore it cannot be denied that her opening speech was not without an element of surprise. Even the impeccable Sanders found the information difficult to take in his stately stride.

“Thank you, madam,” he replied, his suavity jarred a note off key. “Has my mistress any special reason to be interested in your interesting condition, may I ask?”

“No,” snapped Jo, “but her nephew has. And while we’re on the subject you might as well know that I’m not a madam yet. I’m still a miss, if in name only. And you’d better carry on with a click. My condition grows more interesting by leaps and bounds. Soon it may become engrossing.”

Sanders had encountered many extraordinary young women in the course of a long and inactive career but never one quite so buoyantly extraordinary as Josephine. She impressed the astonished butler as being actually exuberant over a situation which any properly constituted girl would have considered, if not desperate, at least disturbing.

“I quite understand, miss,” he replied soothingly. “If you’ll pardon me a moment I’ll withdraw to consult – —”

“And if I’m not here when you get back,” Jo broke in, “you can look for my body in the nearest river – which one is that?”

“The Hudson, miss,” said Sanders hopefully. “About three blocks over to your left as you go out.”

“You’re almost too eagerly explicit,” Josephine observed as the butler turned a dignified back and departed.

As soon as he had gone, Josephine looked quickly about her. From a room opening off the hall about ten feet away came the hum of conversation. Also the sound of clinking glasses. The cocktail-tea party was already getting under way. Josephine was greatly interested. She yearned to see everything – how these people lived and what they intended to do to Peter, who by now had become in her illogical mind irrevocably her man. Regardless of the laws of decency and self-respect, she must prevent this engagement. The door to what appeared to be a clothes closet presented itself as the most obvious means to this end. As she slipped into this closet and closed the door behind her, she was still assuring herself that something would turn up to delay the formal announcement of Peter’s betrothal to that snake-hipped Yolanda Wilmont. The closet was fairly commodious, but without light. Innumerable unseen coats were hanging on all sides of the girl – fur coats, storm coats, top coats, motor robes, and dusters. Thinking how grandly the rich lived, she disappeared behind the coats and temporarily withdrew from active participation in the destiny of the Van Dycks.

Abovestairs, in his room, Peter was wondering if the shower bath he fully intended to take was going to improve matters any. Did condemned men take showers before they faced the firing squad or marched to the chair? The only condemned man he knew anything about was himself, and what little he knew about him was hardly interesting enough to be told. However, things might be worse. He was not actually getting married today. There was always poison as a last resort. He wondered whether he should take it himself or give it to Yolanda.

And while these speculations were passing through Peter’s mind, equally perplexing ones were engaging the mind of Sanders as he stood in the hall below and looked round for signs of the vanished Jo. Presently he shrugged his shoulders as if to dismiss the incident. Evidently the young lady had decided in favor of the river. Under the circumstances that was probably the most tactful arrangement for all concerned. In spite of her bold manner the young woman must have had some sense of the fitness of things. Had he said the river was three or four blocks over? He did not quite recall. Too many things to think about. By now she should be quite definitely drowned if she had not changed her mind. She had seemed like a determined character, if a little callous. There were other things to be done. Cocktails to serve. Sanders moved away, leaving the hall deserted.

Several times while undressing, Peter had approached dangerously close to the curtain behind which Little Arthur stood concealed. Altogether too close for the peace of mind of that small pickpocket. Now that his uninvited host was completely naked, there was the possibility he might be prompted by modesty to draw the curtains entirely. That was what Little Arthur would have done had he been in the same condition. Maybe the rich were different. Maybe they did not care. If he could only create some diversion, thought the man behind the curtain, some little distraction sufficient to occupy the other’s attention long enough to enable one to get out of that fateful room.

What could he do? Peter had turned and was looking intently at the portière. Had he noticed anything, any slight, betraying movement? Little Arthur broke out into a gentle, sweat. Those eyes – those probing eyes. As soon as Peter looked away, the pickpocket’s arm slid from behind the portière and withdrew with the siphon. Little Arthur had not the vaguest idea what he intended to do with the bottle, but at least it was better than having nothing at all, better than facing with bare hands an infuriated and naked property owner. Once more Peter’s eyes strayed toward the portières. Why did he look at that one portière always instead of some other? Surely he suspected something. Yes. He did suspect something. He actually knew something. Once more he was approaching the portière. He was halfway across the room, and naked as a primitive man. Little Arthur was as much unnerved by what he saw as by what he feared. His grip tightened on the object in his hand. Two thirds across the room Peter stopped and, turning his bare back, reached down and meditatively scratched his leg as men will. This was a trick, Little Arthur decided. No man, unless fired by some sinister determination, would permit himself to appear in such an unfavorable light. Furthermore, the rich, if they took advantage of their opportunities, should have no occasion thus to scratch themselves. Little Arthur was not to be deceived. This was a trick. If Peter Van Dyck had been hoping to rattle the small criminal, he had virtually succeeded. To witness these preparations was even worse than facing the attack itself.

It was at this moment that Little Arthur was seized by a mad impulse, an uncontrollable desire to squirt the contents of the siphon on the exposed back of the busily scratching man. It was an impulse not difficult to understand. Virtually everyone is visited by it at least once in the course of his life. Some persons never outgrow it. To them a siphon and a naked back mean only one thing – immediate contact. At the moment Little Arthur had not sufficient mental stamina to resist any impulse. He raised the siphon, drew an accurate bead on the exposed surface, then pressed the lever. The liquid missile splashed smartly against Peter Van Dyck’s back and broke into little cascades along the ridges of his spine. The effect was instantaneous. Peter snapped erect and looked wildly about him. Astonishment, shock, and indignation fought for ascendancy in his eyes. But his gaze encountered nothing enlightening. For a moment he feared for his reason. Was it possible that in his spiritual turmoil he had imagined himself under the shower? The water trickling down his flanks annoyed but reassured him. Then anger mounted within his breast. A Van Dyck would stand for no nonsense, especially a nude Van Dyck. The perpetrator of this outrage against his privacy and person must be concealed somewhere within the room. Probably behind one of those portières. Almost slithering with excitement, Peter warily advanced upon one of the hangings. That he had selected the wrong one did not rob his activities of interest. Little Arthur was interested and also a bit relieved. As a matter of fact he was even faintly amused. The idea of a naked man stalking an empty portière had its lighter side.

As Peter, quivering with purpose, sprang upon his portière, Little Arthur, quivering with no less purpose, sprang from behind his and sprinted to the door. Reaching this before Peter had time to turn, the flying pickpocket dashed out into the hall and slammed the door behind him. The sound of the door brought Peter back to action. Passionately cursing the portière, he sped across the room and threw open the door. The intruder was gone, obviously having succeeded in putting the front flight of stairs between himself and pursuit. This time Peter was right. Little Arthur, tossing discretion to the winds, had nipped down the first flight of stairs that offered itself to his frantic feet. For a brief moment Peter hesitated in the doorway, then, adding decency to discretion, he tossed them both to the winds and took up the chase.

On the landing he ran into Martha.

“Gord, Mr. Peter!” she gasped. “Whacha doing?”

“Running,” said Peter briefly. He had no time for explanations.

“I should say,” murmured the maid after his bare back. “Running wild like Adam hisself.”

CHAPTER SIX

The Loquacious Closet

Peter’s descent into the front hall fortunately went unnoticed. More guests had arrived, and more guests were due to arrive. It was this latter possibility that brought Peter to a full and blinding realization of his position. For the first time he saw himself as indubitably he would appear in the eyes of others. He saw himself not as an innocent man seeking justice, but simply as a stark naked coffee importer, dazzlingly greeting his guests at the doors of his ancestral home. The picture was somewhat too vivid for his nerves. He delivered the soul of his craven attacker into the arms of divine retribution and flung himself into the clothes closet, a split second before Sanders appeared to answer the summons of the doorbell.

Reaching out in the darkness, Peter’s hand groped horrifyingly over a face. Now this is a decidedly disagreeable experience, perhaps one of the most disagreeable in the world. It is especially so when one is under the impression that there are no faces about. Even married people, after long years of propinquity, are frequently revolted when in the still hours of the night they inadvertently extend a hand and find themselves fumbling drowsily with the face of a mate. The same holds true even of one’s mistress. One receives quite an unpleasant shock. With other parts of the body it is not so bad, but with the face, yes. It was certainly so with Peter. Had it not been for his nakedness, he would have emitted scream upon scream. Little Arthur, too, was far from well.

“Who are you?” demanded Peter, his voice hoarse with consternation.

“I’m Little Arthur,” chattered a voice in the darkness. “You know, mister, the guy you was chasing.”

If it had not been for the fact that every instinct in Peter’s being cried out against further association with any part of Little Arthur, the man would have been strangled there and then in the blackness of the closet.

“Sorry I squirted the water on you, mister,” the little dip began in mollifying accents.

“It doesn’t matter really,” said Peter with false politeness. “I was going to take a shower anyway. May I ask, though, what you were doing in my room?”

“I’m a burglar,” replied Little Arthur, too depressed to be other than truthful. “But I wasn’t looking for anything valuable. Only a pair of drawers.”

“If only I had a pair myself!” muttered Peter. “And to think that just this morning I had more drawers than I needed – more than I could comfortably wear. What are you doing in here, Little Arthur?”

“The same thing as you, sir. Keeping out of the public eye.”

A moment’s silence, then Peter’s voice, nervously: “You seem to be in front of me, and yet I distinctly feel you breathing heavily on my back. How do you manage that?”

“I’m not doing it, mister,” said Little Arthur. “I ain’t got strength enough left to do any breathing at all.”

“No?” replied Peter, turning. “That’s funny. Oh, my God! I’m surrounded.”

He had thrust one of his fingers into Josephine’s mouth, and she had instinctively bitten it for lack of anything better to do.

“Remove your finger from my mouth this instant,” she gabbled furiously.

Peter’s hand was quicker than the eye.

“What are you doing in here with Little Arthur?” he demanded, nursing his damaged finger.

“I hadn’t thought of doing anything with Little Arthur,” Jo retorted. “Don’t even know what to do with myself much less with anyone else. He must have come in here after me.”

“The dirty little crook!” said Peter. “I’ll strangle him with these two bare hands right here in cold blood.”

Little Arthur closed his eyes, yet still saw two bare hands floating through the darkness.

“Go on and do it,” urged Josephine. “There are too many of us in this closet already.”

“I don’t want to be in here alone with you,” Peter told her. “And the dead body of a criminal, perhaps.”

“It won’t make any difference so long as the body is good and dead,” Jo explained.

“Oh, what a terrible woman!” Little Arthur chattered from his corner. “Where did she come from?”

“Don’t know why you followed her in the first place,” said Peter.

“I won’t ever again,” vowed the little man. “Didn’t even know she was here.”

“He’s a nasty little liar,” whispered Josephine. “He deliberately came in after me.”

“Don’t you believe her, mister,” Little Arthur pleaded. “She’s trying to turn you against me just as we were getting along, like. I know her game.”

“Shut up, you rat!” the girl flung at him. “I’ll claw your wicked tongue out.”

“Don’t let her at me, please, mister,” Little Arthur put in. “She wants to get us both in trouble.”

“We are in trouble,” Peter reminded him. “Terrible trouble. Suppose someone should come barging into this closet?”

“I’ll swear I was lured in,” said Jo.

“On what pretext?” Peter demanded.

“A fur coat,” she answered readily.

“Wouldn’t speak well for your morals,” he snapped.

“Nor any better for yours,” she replied. “But if you don’t like that, I’ll say that the two of you dragged me in.”

“Wouldn’t put it past her, mister,” warned Little Arthur. “She’s a bad one, she is. Glad I can’t see her.”

“You horrid little crook!” shrilled Jo. “Where do you get off?”

“I’ll have to ask you both to shut up,” said Peter. “You’ll be having the whole damn house in.”

“Oh, dear,” murmured Jo. “Here I am cooped up in a closet with a naked man and a thief. I don’t know which way to turn.”

“Well, don’t turn this way,” said Peter. “And how do you know I’m naked? Oh, for God’s own sake, is that your hand? I’ve been thinking it was mine all the time. I’m so upset. No wonder you know how I am.”

In the darkness Jo laughed evilly.

“I saw your impassioned entrance,” she gloated.

“If you don’t keep your hands off, you’ll see my impassioned exit,” he retorted.

“All women seem ter be loose,” muttered Little Arthur moodily, his thoughts reverting to Martha and the harem. “Weren’t like that when I was a boy.”

“You’re no bigger than a nipper now,” retorted Jo.

“Perhaps not,” said the pickpocket, “but I got more sense. Why don’t you keep your bold hands off the gentleman? He don’t understand your common ways.”

“I’ll make them unmistakable,” said the girl.

“What are we going ter do, mister?” Little Arthur asked hopelessly. “There ain’t no good in her.”

“Why don’t you do something?” demanded Peter. “You got me into this.”

“No, I didn’t,” the pickpocket protested. “I was trying to get away and you insisted on following me.”

“Naturally,” replied Peter.

“Must have wanted me mighty bad,” observed Little Arthur, “to have followed me in your condition.”

“I wanted to kill you,” admitted Peter, “and I’m not at all sure I won’t.”

“Don’t think about it any more,” said Little Arthur soothingly.

“My, you’re thin,” said Jo in a surprised voice.

“Take your hand from my ribs,” Peter commanded. “Haven’t you any shame?”

“No,” answered Jo promptly. “Not since you started in. This morning in the office you try to take off your drawers. On the way home you practically assault me in the subway. And now to cap the damn climax you follow me nakedly into a dark closet. How do you expect a girl to have any shame left when you act like that?”

“Is that right, lady?” asked Little Arthur, thinking that indeed he had got himself into bad company. “Did he do all them things, taking off his drawers and all?”

“Sure, I’m right,” said Jo. “It was just his drawers this morning. That seemed to satisfy him. Now it’s all or nothing. Don’t know what he’ll think of doing next.”

“Hope he stops thinking altogether if he’s going ter carry on like that,” said Little Arthur, making no attempt to disguise his disappointment in Peter.

“Someone will have to do some inspired brainwork to think us out of this place,” Peter announced to his unseen companions.

“Does your spine begin there?” Josephine suddenly asked in an interested voice.

“No,” replied Peter passionately. “That’s where it ends.”

“Oh,” said the girl rather hurriedly. “I’m sorry.”

“Then why don’t you keep your hands to yourself?” demanded Peter.

“Thank Gord it’s dark in here,” murmured Little Arthur. “I wouldn’t know where to look if it wasn’t.”

“Throw the little beggar out on his ear,” urged Jo.

“Think I’ll get out myself, naked as I am,” declared Peter. “It’s better than staying in here and being explored like a map.”

For some minutes Sanders had been evincing an unusual interest in the closet. Aunt Sophie, sailing from the drawing room with a group of guests at her elbows, chief among whom was Yolanda, actually saw the man with his ear almost if not quite pressed to the door.

“What on earth are you doing there, Sanders?” she inquired fussily. “You look as if you had seen a ghost.”

Sanders nodded his sleek head wisely.

“I believe I’m hearing them, madam,” he vouchsafed in a low voice. “This closet suddenly seems to be endowed with the gift of speech.”

“Nonsense!” the splendid lady tossed out. “You’re running down, Sanders. Closets don’t talk.”

“This one does,” Sanders assured her. “It carries on a three-cornered conversation in as many different voices, madam. One sounds strangely like a woman’s.”

“What?” exclaimed Aunt Sophie. “A woman in that closet? That is queer.”

“Perhaps Sanders had better look,” Yolanda Wilmont suggested. “Sneak thieves, you know.”

“Sneak thieves are not given to holding animated conversations in closets,” objected Mr. Prescott Gates who, because of his remote connection with a law firm, felt that his knowledge of sneak thieves was more extensive than the others.

“We’re not acquainted with the habits of sneak thieves,” Yolanda contributed coldly. “However, I do believe that closet should be investigated. There are several valuable furs inside.”

“By all means,” agreed Miss Sophie Van Dyck. “Open the door immediately, Sanders.”

But the door, when Sanders endeavored to carry out this order, seemed inclined to argue the point. For several moments it quivered elastically like a thing of life and purpose in the hands of the butler; then, with a groan of utter despair which sounded hollowly in the hall, it flew partly open. Sanders recoiled as if from the pit of hell itself. Instantly the door closed of its own volition with a bang of remonstrance. Inarticulate sounds issued from the closet, sounds of whining protest.

“What on earth is it, Sanders?” Aunt Sophie demanded in a strained voice. “Sounds like an animal.”

“Must I say, Miss Van Dyck?” asked Sanders in a cornered voice.

“Certainly you must,” she retorted. “What would Mr. Peter think if he came home and found his closet full of strangers? He dislikes things like that.”

Wondering in a dazed sort of way what things could be even remotely like the things he had momentarily glimpsed, Sanders looked speculatively at the door.

“Hurry, Sanders. What’s inside?” Yolanda Wilmont asked insistently.

“Well, madam,” said Sanders reluctantly, “there seems to be more in there than valuable furs at the moment. Looked like quite a gathering to me.”

“Tell them to come out this instant,” Miss Van Dyck commanded.

“I’d hardly suggest that, madam,” said Sanders in a shocked voice.

“Here, Sanders,” put in Prescott Gates. “I’ll handle this situation. I’ll jolly well make them come out, whoever they are.”

“I strongly advise against it, sir,” said Sanders. “Not with the ladies present, if I may say so.”

“What on earth, Sanders?” exclaimed a young and rather swagger looking maiden whose eyes gave the impression of having seen about all there was to be seen in life. “Just for that I’ll never leave until that closet has given up its dead.”

“Why not tell us, Sanders,” remarked a stout lady in cascades of lace, “exactly what you saw, and then let us decide?”

“Yes,” agreed Aunt Sophie. “We’re growing decidedly impatient with all this beating about the bush. Speak up, man!”

“Well,” began the butler in a voice of academic detachment, “you see, there seems to be an entirely naked gentleman in that closet – —”

“Impossible!” exclaimed Miss Van Dyck.

“I very much wish it were, madam,” Sanders continued piously. “But that’s not all. This gentleman has either been undressed by a lady or, having undressed himself, is about to undress her.”

“Need you be so graphic?” inquired Yolanda.

“The picture was remarkably vivid,” explained the butler.

“I wonder where they think they are?” Aunt Sophie wondered aloud.

“Certainly not at a private reception,” observed the lacy lady, regarding the door with thoughtful eyes, “That is, not at a nice reception.”

“What can they be doing in that closet?” Aunt Sophie continued, bemused.

“Practically anything by now,” said the girl with the worldly eyes. “Especially if the gentleman has succeeded in carrying out his intentions.”

“You mean in that closet?” Yolanda demanded incredulously.

“What’s wrong with the closet?” demanded the other girl philosophically. “Many have managed with less.”

“What a shocking situation!” murmured the lace-bedecked lady. “Shouldn’t something be done? Can’t you speak to them, Sanders – admonish them?”

“Certainly, madam,” replied Sanders, his suavity regained. “How would you suggest wording it?”

“Why, tell them to stop, of course,” Aunt Sophie snapped irritably.

“Stop what, madam,” the butler inquired.

“You can be most exasperating at times for a man of your age, Sanders,” Miss Van Dyck complained. “Tell them to stop whatever they’re doing.”

“But, madam,” the butler patiently explained, “we’re not sure just what they are doing. It would be pure speculation.”

“Not so pure at that,” put in the girl, “but it does seem logical, doesn’t it, Sanders?”

“I must confess, Miss Sedgwick,” said Sanders with becoming modesty, “I have never been in the same situation.”

“No more have I,” the girl retorted, “but I can use my imagination.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” Yolanda remarked frigidly.

Mr. Prescott Gates now felt called upon once more to display his greater knowledge of the seamy side of life.

“If they are professional sneak thieves,” he advanced weightily, “I hardly think they’d endanger their chances by that sort of nonsense.”

“What sort of nonsense?” Miss Sedgwick inquired with disarming innocence. “And what makes you call it nonsense?”

“Don’t answer her, Prescott,” said Yolanda.

“And all this time we’re talking here,” Aunt Sophie burst forth in a tragic voice, “God only knows what is going on inside that closet.”

“Perhaps only God should know,” replied the stout lady with the resignation of a true believer.

“I have an idea,” Miss Sedgwick offered. “Perhaps a man and wife wandered into that closet and not being able to find their way out became so exhausted – you know, so discouraged about it all – they just decided to go to bed.”

“Don’t be childish, Madge Sedgwick,” Aunt Sophie scolded.

“Well, at least, I’ve got ’em married,” said the girl. “That’s more than any of you have done.”

“You said a ‘gentleman,’ Sanders,” Aunt Sophie went on in a worried voice to the butler. “Are you sure he was a gentleman?”

“That’s difficult to tell, madam,” said Sanders. “He didn’t have a stitch on.”

“I can well understand that,” Madge Sedgwick agreed sympathetically. “Without any clothes on there’s not a scrap of difference between a sneak thief and a gentleman.”

“I should think all naked men would look a little sneaky,” the lady in lace unhelpfully contributed.

“There should be some distinction,” Miss Van Dyck protested indignantly.

“Yes. It would be convenient on occasions to be able to tell at a glance,” Madge Sedgwick remarked as if to herself.

“What did he look like, Sanders?” Yolanda Wilmont demanded. “Did you recognize his face?”

“I didn’t see his face, Miss Yolanda,” the butler explained.

“What did you see?” asked Madge with lively interest.

“His back, miss,” said Sanders. “He turned it rather briskly, I thought.”

“At least he had the instincts of a gentleman,” remarked the stout lady.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Madge Sedgwick countered. “Even a sneak thief might have his little qualms.”

“Did you recognize the woman?” Prescott Gates inquired.

“I got the impression I’d seen her before, sir,” admitted the butler. “Looked very much like a young woman who was here a little earlier announcing she was in an interesting condition.”

“Sanders, you keep the most extraordinary things to yourself,” Aunt Sophie said with severity. “Do you mean to say you put this person in that closet to bear her child?”

“No, madam,” Sanders smoothly replied. “I rather concluded she’d left to commit suicide. She was inquiring about the rivers. I gave her adequate directions.”

“Maybe she came back to find out which was the deepest,” Madge Sedgwick suggested.

“Heavens on earth!” exclaimed Aunt Sophie distractedly. “What are we going to do? Here we have a naked man in the closet and a woman going to have a baby or commit suicide or something even worse. Prescott, you’re a man. Why don’t you suggest something?”

“I’m going for a policeman,” Mr. Gates replied with surprising decision as he hurried to the door.

“Should think a preacher or a doctor would do better according to the circumstances,” Madge flung after him, but Mr. Gates was already gone.

“That tears it,” whispered Peter Van Dyck to his companions in the closet. “That unweaned ass has gone to get a cop.”

“Gord!” breathed Little Arthur. “There ain’t a pair of drawers made that’s worth a pinch.”

“Ah,” came the voice of Josephine, “how about mine, Little Arthur?”

“Make her stop talking like that, mister,” the small thief asked in an injured voice. “We’re in a very bad spot.”

“Don’t tell me,” said Peter. “I know it already, and I’m going to get out of my section at once.”

“Don’t mean ter say you’re going out there in front of all them people the way you are?” the man inquired in an awed voice.

“Almost,” Peter told him. “With the addition of this coat.”

Fumbling in the darkness, he seized the first coat his hands encountered and squeezed himself into it. Fortunately for Peter’s self-assurance he was unable to see how he looked. He was wearing a fur coat belonging to his Aunt Sophie. It was short but luckily full.

“Wait a second,” said Josephine. “You’re not going to leave me alone in here with that dip. I’m going to disguise myself, too.”

“No fear,” shot back Little Arthur. “I don’t associate with the likes of you.”

“Oh!” cried Josephine, enraged. “I’ll strip him to the buff.”

“What’s that?” asked Arthur anxiously.

“I don’t know,” the girl replied, “but it must be awful.”

“Will you two please stop bickering?” cut in Peter. “Or wait until I’ve gone.”

“I’m ready,” said Jo. “Go right ahead. I defy recognition.”

“What have you got on?” Peter was interested enough to inquire.

“Goggles and a long duster,” the girl said briefly.

“Let’s change?” Peter suggested.

“Too late now,” she told him. “We’ve got to hurry right along.”

“Don’t leave me here alone,” Little Arthur pleaded.

“I’d like to leave you lifeless,” Jo informed him.

“Almost wish you would,” bleakly Arthur replied.

The policeman, followed importantly by Prescott Gates, arrived just in time to witness the emergence of Peter Van Dyck. What struck the officer as being especially remarkable about this odd affair was the length and bareness of Peter’s legs. In real life Peter’s legs were not really so bad. Though long and slim they were at least not distorted. They were just ordinary male legs, which are never much to get excited about. Now, however, protruding as they were from a woman’s fur coat, they fairly screamed for attention. The officer’s eyes responded. He could not recall ever having seen such peculiar-looking legs on either man or beast. In spite of this they seemed to carry their owner along busily enough as he made for the front staircase. Behind him trailed a strange object which at first glance did not appear to be entirely human. Josephine in goggles and duster hurried to the front door, where she was stopped by the officer, who told her, “Oh, no, you don’t!” in what can only be described as a nasty voice. Little Arthur, apparently preferring arrest to being left alone with his thoughts, brought up a shrinking rear. Walking nervously on tiptoe, he started to follow Peter. Aunt Sophie’s voice stopped him. Aunt Sophie’s voice stopped everyone, in fact.

“Peter!” she cried. “Peter!”

“Yes, Aunt Sophie,” Peter replied in a natural tone which contrasted strangely with his attire and which almost stupefied the policeman, who had expected something entirely different from such an object. “Yes, Aunt Sophie. Were you calling me?”

“Peter,” continued the outraged lady, “what in the world have you been up to?”

“Nothing at all, Auntie,” he assured her, growing more uncomfortably aware of a sea of upturned faces. “Merely getting ready, you know. Making little arrangements.”

“Is that person following you?” Miss Van Dyck demanded, pointing a quivering finger at Little Arthur, shaking as unobtrusively as possible on the stairs.

Peter started visibly. He found himself extremely nervous.

“What person?” he gasped; then, glancing back and encountering the mute appeal in the miserable little creature’s eyes, his heart melted. “Oh, that person,” he said hastily. “Yes. He’s following me – how do you do, everybody.” Here Peter thought it best to bow carelessly to those below him. “Yes, Aunt Sophie,” he hurried on. “He’s following me. I asked him to. He’s helping me to get ready. My new valet. Do you like him?”

“Decidedly not!” exploded Aunt Sophie. “He has the face of a born criminal.”

“Say,” put in the policeman, “how many more of you are there in that closet?”

“What, officer?” said Peter. “How many more of me are there in that closet? No more at all. I’m the only one.”

“Does your nephew happen to be nuts, lady?” the policeman asked Miss Van Dyck.

“No,” Yolanda answered for the stunned woman, “but I fear he’s suffering a little from overwork.”

“Thank you, Yolanda,” called Peter with a fearful smile. “But if you want to know, I’m suffering hideously from overexposure.”

“The coat! The coat!” shouted Madge. “It’s slipping, Peter. Look out!”

Peter snatched at the coat in the nick of time, then waved lightly to the girl, who of all the group had not averted her eyes.

“Thanks, Madge,” he called. “Wouldn’t want that to happen.”

“I wasn’t anxious about it for myself,” she replied. “I was thinking of your aunt and Yolanda.”

“Thanks,” Yolanda told her. “We are quite able to think for ourselves.”

“Oh, very well,” said Miss Sedgwick. “I don’t care if he takes it off altogether and dances like a savage.”

“No doubt,” said the other sweetly.

“If it’s all the same to you ladies,” called Peter, “I’d prefer to keep it on. And I don’t feel like dancing.”

“My stockings! My stockings! They’re gone!” burst suddenly from the object behind the goggles, making a frantic dash for the closet, only to be brought up in mid-flight at the end of the officer’s arm.

“None of that,” he said rudely. “You’re staying here.”

“Oh, am I?” Jo replied, dealing him a clever Gallic kick. “I want my stockings.”

“Ah-ha,” observed Madge Sedgwick, triumphantly. “Then he did undress her.”

Probably because they assumed it to be a part of a policeman’s duty, no one seemed to pay the slightest attention to the officer doubled up in anguish. That is, no one save Little Arthur, who, for the moment forgetting his own troubles in the presence of those of the law, was laughing weakly upon the stairs.

“Did it hurt much?” solicitously asked Peter, who from his Olympian heights had witnessed the incident.

“Hurt?” gasped the policeman, stung by the inadequacy of the word. “It’s ruined I am to the grave.”

“See what you’ve done to our police force,” said Peter, looking down on Josephine clawing in the closet.

“Can’t help that,” she answered. “No low cop can come between me and my stockings.”

“Oh, this is too disgraceful,” Sophie Van Dyck informed all present. “Too disgraceful for words.”

“Not disgraceful enough for my words,” muttered Josephine. “Ah! Here they are – my stockings!”

As the girl rose with a wad of stockings in her hand, Sophie Van Dyck directed on her the full force of her attack.

“Young woman,” she demanded, “did you tell my butler you were going to have a baby?”

“After being cooped up in that closet with your naked nephew,” Jo replied indignantly as she stuffed the stockings back in their tender concealment, allowing one of them to dangle untidily down the front of the duster, “after being in there like that, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if I had a male quartet. Would you?”

Miss Van Dyck saw no good in being dragged into this discussion.

“May I ask if you have anything on beneath that duster?” she asked.

“What do you think?” replied Josephine. “What has he got on beneath that fur coat?”

As she pointed to the odd figure on the stairs, everyone looked up and decided it did not have much. Before the direct fire of so many calculating glances Peter shrank a little. By this time the injured officer had discovered he could stand erect.

“What are you laughing at?” he demanded reproachfully of Little Arthur.

“At them,” said Little Arthur, pointing to the legs above him.

“What!” cried Peter, turning fiercely upon the pickpocket. “You lying little – —”

“Don’t say it, mister,” Arthur pleaded. “I wasn’t laughing at all.”

“You’ll be hysterical when I get you up before the boys,” the assaulted policeman promised him.

“Aunt Sophie,” Yolanda said in a low voice, “there can be no announcement today. This has spoiled everything.”

“I agree with that,” Aunt Sophie replied. “But just the same we’ll carry on as if nothing had occurred. Take our dear guests back to the reception room.”

“Hoorah!” cried Jo, tossing up her arms, the hands of which lay concealed well down in the sleeves of the duster. “You’re saved, Peter. You’re saved.”

“Saved for what?” he asked her. “Another day?”

“For us, of course,” she replied. “For me!”

“A living death,” he answered.

“Gord spare you, sir, from that one,” put in Little Arthur piously. “No matter what you’ve done.”

The bell rang, and Sanders, as if arising from a long illness, admitted several guests. With startled eyes they regarded the group on the stairs, then transferred their gaze to the enigmatic figure lurking within the voluminous folds of the duster. It was peering at them like a strange bird from behind a pair of goggles.

“What’s that?” asked a tall gentleman, his face growing pale beneath a fresh massage.

“Don’t know,” gasped a lady with him. “It’s awful. And Peter Van Dyck is almost …” Her voice trailed away.

“It’s charades, my dear,” Aunt Sophie smoothly explained. “It’s been such a lark, Yolanda, take them directly to the drawing room. Cocktails.”

Yolanda did.

“Now, young lady,” Aunt Sophie continued severely, “your conduct has been most disgraceful. I don’t know what to do with you. Obviously you are a thief – perhaps even worse. You must leave this house at once, quietly and without further violence. You will, of course, leave our stolen articles behind.”

“They’re not so hot, anyway,” said Jo.

“And they’re not stolen,” called Peter, momentarily feeling sorry for the small, defiant creature looking a little lonely in the great hall. “I’ll explain everything, Auntie. You see, I’m sending those things over to one of my friends. He’s going on a trip. Wanted to borrow them. Sent one of the maids – a fresh piece, I admit – but that’s how she got here.”

“But why is she wearing them in that ridiculous fashion?” Aunt Sophie persisted, her curiosity overcoming her eagerness to believe in any comfortable explanation.

“Oh, that,” replied Peter, thinking quickly. “More convenient, you know. Doesn’t have to carry them. Perhaps it even amuses her.”

“Well, it doesn’t amuse me,” declared Aunt Sophie with conviction.

“Come, Little Arthur,” said Peter. “Get me ready.” He paused and looked back at Jo, who had snatched off the goggles and was standing gazing up at him like a child about to be sent to bed; a child, Peter decided, who certainly should not be allowed to sleep alone.

“Goodbye, mister,” she said. “And thanks for all the things you’ve done – even though you shouldn’t have.”

Jo made sure that Yolanda, emerging from the drawing room, overheard her parting remark.

“Hold on!” cried the officer. “Don’t I make no pinch?” “Pinch yourself, brother,” said Jo. “You’re sleeping on your feet.”

The front door closed behind her.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Six Characters Embark in a Fog

When Peter van Dyck closed the door to his room his action was accompanied by such violence that Little Arthur, doglike at his heels, barely escaped bisection. Unlike a dog, however, the small, dishonest man emitted no yelp of protest. He merely stood looking at the door and thought of the policeman whose indignant voice still sounded discordantly in the hall below.

“Sanders,” he heard Aunt Sophie saying, “take the officer to the kitchen and provide for him properly. Perhaps a bottle or so of that Canadian ale might help to relieve his pain.”

Little Arthur’s heart sank. Retreat was cut off in the rear. Ahead of him lay a decidedly delicate, not to say dangerous, interview. Squaring his thin shoulders, he raised a timid hand and knocked.

“Come in, you criminal!” a hoarse voice shouted. “Since when have you troubled to knock on doors?”

Automatically the shoulders resumed their former droop of nervous exhaustion as the criminal entered the room.

“Since when have you troubled to knock?” the voice repeated disagreeably. “Answer me that.”

Arthur noticed with increasing dread that the owner of the voice was drinking whiskey straight in great gulps.

“Always knock, mister,” he muttered. “Outa hours, that is.”

“When not calling in a professional capacity,” Peter added sarcastically.

“That would be silly,” said Little Arthur on the defensive.

“You malignant germ!” replied Peter, his throat working horribly, Arthur thought, as whiskey splashed down its bobbing length. “You less than louse – worse than louse!”

“Mister,” protested Little Arthur, for some strange reason feeling more hurt for the other’s lack of refinement than for any reflection cast on either himself or his habits, “is that a nice way ter talk?”

“Perhaps not,” said Peter after a moment’s reflection. “There isn’t any nice way to talk – not to you.”

“But I’m only a pickpocket,” the man modestly explained. “This was my first second-story.”

Peter gulped down some more whiskey while considering this statement.

“How do you mean,” he asked, “your first second-story? Are you trying to confuse me?”

“No, mister,” said the little dip, “I’m giving it to you straight. This is the first time I ever done a second-story. I was only after some drawers – an old pair or so.”

“You lie,” Peter told him. “You know as well as I do you couldn’t wear my drawers. They’d hang all over your little wizened legs.”

“I ain’t perticular,” Little Arthur said stoutly. “Scrunch ’em on somehow, what with a pin or a string or an old nail, for that matter.”

Peter thought this possibility over while absently redonning his recently shed raiment.

“You must be mad about drawers,” he admitted at last, “and I don’t care a damn if you are. Might be much worse. As a matter of fact, some nice, clean persons might even consider it creditable, Little Arthur, for a man to risk losing his shirt for the sake of a pair of drawers. But I, who don’t care a snap of my fingers about either shirt or drawers, can’t see it in that light.”

“That’s a powerful queer-looking pair you got on now,” vouchsafed Little Arthur. “Orange stripes, no less! Can’t say as I’d care a lot for them drawers myself.”

“Critical, eh?” Peter remarked coldly. “Well, I’d like to know who sat you up in judgment on my drawers? You never had a pair of silk drawers on your mean little shanks in your life. Not real silk,” he added, his thoughts reverting to Josephine Duval.

“No, mister,” Little Arthur agreed. “I wear regular drawers – men’s drawers. After taking a pike at them things, I can see that all my trouble has been a sheer waste of time.”

“Just for that,” said Peter, with a whiskey glitter in his eye, “I’m going to make you wear a pair of my drawers, the funniest pair I’ve got, and believe me, I’ve got some funny ones. Much funnier than these,” his voice trailed on as he rummaged busily in a bureau. “Ha! This pair’s a humdinger. A regular scream. You’ll go well in these. Wonder how I was ever so mad as to buy them myself. Red and purple grapes – bunches of ’em. A cute idea.” He turned with the garment to confront the stricken eyes of the petty felon. “Down with those trousers,” he grated. “Yank ’em off with a snap.”

“But, mister,” objected the shocked man, “I’d have to undress naked to put them things on. You see, I wear allovers like – long legs and all.”

“Eh?” said Peter. “Oh, all right. That doesn’t matter a bit. You can drag ’em up over your long ones. Make it snappy now.”

“That wouldn’t look right, mister.” Arthur’s voice was eloquent with reproach.

“You’re going to wear these drawers,” Peter told the pitiful object, “if I have to disjoint you to get ’em on. Hurry up, man. Don’t make me lose my temper.”

“If you make me put them dreadful drawers on,” said the other, “I think I’ll lose my mind.”

“You’ll lose more than that if you don’t,” Peter snapped, taking a step towards the man.

“Oh, Gord,” whined the unfortunate creature, hastily removing his outer garments, “all this terror and disgrace just because I got a yen ter feel clean!”

“You don’t look so hot, yourself,” Peter assured him as he contemplated the homely lines of the battered union suit. “From the back you look simply shocking – worse than I ever thought a man could get.”

Little Arthur spun round as if stung.

“Cut it out,” he said in some confusion.

“Now yank these on right over them,” commanded Peter. “Anything to blot out that awful sight. The back especially.”

Little Arthur yanked them on, and Peter was vividly reminded of a medieval court chamberlain who had fallen upon evil days.

A knock sounded obsequiously on the door. Sanders entered on silent feet. Even his iron self-control was taxed to its utmost to restrain a slight outcry. All the human side of the butler cried out to inquire what inconceivable events were taking place in this room. However, his professional ethics forced him to present a passive face. In his eyes alone could be detected a faint gleam of revulsion. The expression in Little Arthur’s eyes as he stood like a shamed maiden in a slave market, as well he might in his weird attire, defied all description. This was because Little Arthur, realizing the delicacy of his position, had bashfully lowered his gaze. Sanders cleared his throat behind a large fat hand.

“Beg pardon, Mr. Peter,” he murmured. “Is this the new valet?”

“The very newest, Sanders,” replied Peter. “I’ve been trying to get some conception of how I look in my own drawers. Never had the opportunity before. What do you think of them, Sanders?”

“Very nice, sir, I am sure,” said Sanders, who prided himself on his esthetic reactions. “The background is a trifle dingy.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” remarked Peter airily. “We can remove the background and have them washed.”

“Burned,” suggested Sanders.

“That ain’t nice,” broke in Little Arthur with a sob in his voice. “Call that there copper and let him take me away.”

“I was instructed to inform you, Mr. Peter,” went on the butler, disdainfully disregarding the little crook, “that Miss Yolanda and your aunt await your presence below, sir. It is almost time to call the motor if you intend to cross by ferry.”

“Why the ferry?” demanded Peter.

“Miss Yolanda finds the tube rather common, sir,” said Sanders, and God only knew what the man was thinking. “She has decided objections to the ventilation.”

Peter took another drink.

“Little Arthur,” snapped Peter, suddenly brisk, “pack a suitcase for me – not for yourself, mind you, but for me.”

“Me, mister!” protested the pickpocket. “Pack it like I am?”

“Certainly,” replied Peter. “It will amuse me while I’m dressing. And listen to me, Sanders. Tell Miss Yolanda with my compliments that if she doesn’t like the tubes she’ll have to bear with the subway downtown. I won’t drive or be driven in traffic on a night like this.”

“I quite understand, Mr. Peter,” said Sanders, and with a lingering glance at Little Arthur quietly withdrew.

“You oughten ter have let him see me like this,” complained the little man in the large drawers. “It’s more than flesh can bear.”

“I think Sanders stood it admirably, taking you all in all,” asserted Peter, “which is the only way to take you. Step lively with that packing.”

Half an hour later Peter and Yolanda left the Van Dyck residence on foot for a week-end in New Jersey. Behind them came Little Arthur. He was bearing up as well as he could under the weight of two suitcases. Peter was a little drunk and Yolanda a little peeved. Peter’s explanations of his conduct had been almost incoherent. He had expected her to take too many things for granted. Still, until the country had recovered somewhat from its protracted attack of melancholia she saw no advantage to herself in precipitating an open break with her fiancé, who was indubitably more than enough mad. As long as coffee remained in popular favor, she would put up with his eccentricities – humor them, in fact.

“The rest will do you good,” she told him as they walked to the subway.

“I never find these house parties in the least way restful,” replied Peter complainingly. “They wear me down a lot.”

“I know, my dear,” she said tolerantly, “but one must be seen. Especially persons in our position. Can’t afford to stagnate, you know. Must carry on. In these bad times it is expected of us.”

“You mean going to house parties, dinners, dances, and all?” incredulously Peter asked her.

“Obviously,” she replied with the superior patience of a higher being.

“What good does that do?” the man wanted to know.

“Keeps society on an even keel. Offsets the influences of radicalism – communism,” she assured him without batting an eye. “Shows the nation at large that the real people are not taking seriously all this talk about depression.”

“Strikes me as being a bad excuse for doing even worse,” observed Peter. “And as for stagnation, that’s all you do at these house parties – stagnate. Not that I object to that, but I prefer to do it in my own home.”

“You’re such a child,” said Yolanda, tapping him lightly on the arm.

Peter’s reply to this was rotten but inaudible.

From the shadows of a building a small figure in a ridiculous duster watched Peter’s progress with wicked but devoted eyes. When Little Arthur had lurched by with his burden, the figure discarded the duster and became an exceedingly well-built young woman. With a set face and a determined eye Josephine Duval proceeded to stalk her prey. She was bound for New Jersey herself. She might just as well kill two birds with one stone. And if she did not succeed in killing them, she could at least make them quite uncomfortable.

Josephine had a lovely body, but her mind was altogether bad. An ideal combination.

Ahead of her Little Arthur stumbled through the fog blowing in from the river. He was wishing he had the courage to drop the bags and run, realizing with a pang of regret that he could not make his escape with them.

•   •   •   •   •

That same evening Bishop Waller was gratified to discover that both God and his own inclinations coincided in calling him and his newly acquired jaegers to the state of New Jersey. Accordingly he decided to answer this call in person as well as in jaegers. Furthermore it was his ecclesiastical preference to approach this friendly state through the instrumentality of a ferryboat, which he earnestly hoped would be less crowded than the tubes.

“And Blakely,” he told his man, at the same time striving to tune out of his voice an overtone of mundane pride, “be sure you put in an extra pair of those new jaegers – the spring-weight ones.”

Blakely had hoped to be permitted to pack a pair of these new jaegers. He admired them tremendously. In fact, in his quiet humble heart of hearts he almost found the hardihood to wish that he too were a bishop so that he might be able to wear drawers similar to the man he served.

“They’re an excellent pair, sir,” he observed as he reverentially carried the new jaegers to the suitcase. “An excellent pair, if I may say so.”

“Certainly, Blakely,” beamed the Bishop. “By all means admire the drawers.” He found himself greatly pleased. Crossing the room, he stood for a moment by his man and admired the drawers with him. “They are excellent in every respect,” he continued pontifically. “Honestly made and generously fashioned. I find them exceedingly comfortable.”

“I’m sure you must, sir,” agreed Blakely, his eyes involuntarily straying to the lower half of the Bishop as if endeavoring to visualize the ineffable comfort enjoyed by this man of God.

A few minutes later Bishop Waller departed. Stepping into a taxi, he instructed the driver to proceed with judicious perseverance to a downtown ferry slip. Then, with a clean conscience and a contented mind, he settled back in the cab and awaited future developments.

Bishop Waller had not long to wait. The future developed almost too soon.

•   •   •   •   •

At about this time Aspirin Liz, after a dust-mottled sort of day, felt herself deeply stirred by a craving for beer – beer and a little companionship over a table unspoiled by a cloth. She desired to relax for a while with the knowledge that a bar was within easy call, that she had merely to press her finger lazily on a bell to have her modest and essentially reasonable wishes filled to the brim, nay to overflowing.

In her youth, when she derived both pleasure and profit from her figure, she had sedulously aschewed beer. Now, when her once lovely body had become an expense without compensation, she indulged it affectionately for the sake of what it had been. She gave it beer up to and sometimes past the limits of its ample capacity. With grim satisfaction she plunged into it great sides of corned beef rising like rocks of Gibraltar from choppy seas of cabbage. She talked to middle-aged ladies of similar tastes, and discovered that, no matter how dissimilar their lives may have been, their interests in life were basically the same – a little rest, a little peace and quiet, food, drink, an audience, and a room of one’s own where one could remove in comfort one’s stays and shoes.

For Aspirin Liz the most satisfactory escape from the solitude of her four walls lay on the opposite bank of the Hudson. It was her custom occasionally to take a ferry headed for this bank and, arrived there, to seek out one of several waterfront cafés in which she was both known and admired for her true worth – a good, solid, level-headed woman with a sincere fondness for beer and a capacity to hold it.

After a day devoted to aspirin, the retired model felt she owed herself beer. And this is an excellent way to feel – one of the most satisfactory feelings extant. Many persons want beer, and almost as many drink beer, but it is given to few – and then very rarely – to be convinced that not only do they want beer but that they actually deserve beer, need it, in fact.

Therefore, it was with a feeling of rectitude almost approaching the self-sacrificial that Aspirin Liz prepared her face, adjusted her hat, shrugged her hips into proper working relations with her corset and, after looking both for and into her pocketbook, departed in the direction of the river.

Thus it came about that the same ferryboat was enabled to set at naught the various plans and prospects of a diversity of characters. Even more. It was given to this ferryboat to mingle the interests and alter the destinies of persons whose lives had hitherto developed along seldom-intersecting paths.

•   •   •   •   •

And as these several characters converged upon this ferryboat, the fog blew in their faces and blanketed their lungs. Figures swift with purpose lived jerkily for an instant in the eyes of others, then faded out. Trucks tunneled through wet fluff and dragged a hole behind them. Sound and light were muffled. Distance ceased to be. Each man carried with him the boundaries of his universe. Out there on the river a little hell of whistles dwelt in the heart of the fog.

The ferryboat drew out. Mist rolled down on its exit. A sharp report and a spit of fire. Then fog where a figure had stood – a half-crouched shape peering in the direction of the ferryboat now unseen.

There were very few passengers who ascribed the report of the gun to a cause other than the back-firing of an automobile.

Little Arthur was not one of these.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A Shot in the Arm

It really does not matter who fired the shot or at whom it was fired, save for the fact that it caused Little Arthur to fall promptly to the afterdeck of the outgoing ferryboat and to remain there, to all intents and purposes a dead pickpocket. And let it be added that no one was more convinced of this fact than was Little Arthur himself. To begin with, the day had proved too much for his delicately organized nervous structure. Add to this a frail body and two suitcases, and it immediately becomes evident that Little Arthur was in no condition to stand a great deal more of anything. In short, this pocket edition of petty larceny was through – a broken reed.

At the same moment that his newly acquired valet fell to the deck, Peter Van Dyck lurched a little as a stinging sensation manifested itself in his left upper arm. This he promptly dismissed in favor of peering down into the face of the stricken man. It was not much of a face to peer down into – in truth, it was a face he would much rather not have seen at all. From the unprepossessing expression Little Arthur turned to the world, it was obvious he had been mortally wounded.

But what creature in the world was so lacking in aspiration as to want to wound Little Arthur? At his most vigorous moments the small felon was only half alive. This did not mean that the man responsible for his death would be regarded by law as only half a murderer. Not at all. Peter in his heart swore that if he ever discovered who had fired the shot he, Peter Van Dyck, would make it his business to see that the wretch was regarded as being something more than a murderer. In the short time Little Arthur had been with him, Peter had formed a sort of watchful yet commiserating attachment for this unreliable visitant from the underworld. It was one of those inexplicable affections that defy all natural laws, because it was far from natural to be fond of Little Arthur. Most people found it impossible. But Peter was not like most people. He was a great deal worse than those who knew him suspected, and at the same time much better. They had been through a lot together in a few crowded hours, he and Little Arthur. They had suffered much. Side by side they had passed through humiliation and public disgrace.

With a sudden pang Peter thought of the drawers he had forced upon the now lifeless legs. Then came another thought – a worse one. What would the undertaker think about those drawers? Would the man be able to survive the shock? Would he be able to approach those drawers in a purely professional capacity or would he consider them in the light of a personal affront? No undertaker, no matter how case-hardened, would be able to regard them with indifference. No, those drawers presented a problem. Peter felt a little responsible. Life was funny – always letting one in for things.

While these thoughts were flashing through his mind, a small but keenly interested crowd had collected round Peter and the fallen man. Peter knelt down and began to examine him. There was no mark of a bullet wound. No sign of blood.

“Who pipped him, mister?” asked a man’s hoarse voice.

“Who did what?” Peter inquired.

“Pipped,” replied the voice. “You know – gave the little bloke an airing.”

“If you mean who murdered this poor devil,” said Peter, strongly objecting to the speaker’s language, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it were you. Gave him an airing! Is that any way to speak of a man shot down in cold blood?”

“Where’s the cold blood?” another spectator morbidly wanted to know.

“There ain’t a speck on him,” announced still another spectator disappointedly. “Not a speck. And blood ain’t cold to begin with, even a silly-looking geezer’s like that.”

Peter was moved to reply.

“Don’t let’s go into the temperature of his blood right now,” he observed with what he hoped was withering sarcasm. “You’d look silly yourself if you were murdered, and I’d feel greatly pleased.”

“No, mister,” answered the other. “I’d look plain scared.”

Dismissing this person as unimportant, Peter endeavored to turn Little Arthur over to ascertain if he had been shot from behind. Once more he felt a stinging sensation in his left arm.

“Yolanda,” he called, for the first time remembering his fiancée. “Would you very much mind giving me a hand with Little Arthur? He’s been shot.”

“I wouldn’t touch Little Arthur with a pair of tongs,” Yolanda coldly replied from the outer fringe of the crowd. “I am waiting for you to take me to my seat.”

“I’ll help you,” said a familiar voice, as Jo knelt down beside him. “Aren’t you strong enough to turn the little blighter over yourself?”

Peter tried without success to conceal his relief when his worried blue eyes looked into the warmly brown ones of Josephine.

“I’m strong enough,” he muttered. “Merely a little nervous.”

“I get you, mister,” the girl replied in a voice that denoted long years of close companionship. “Let’s go.”

“This isn’t a sporting event,” said Peter. “Don’t be so snappy about it. You’ll roll him off the boat.”

Together they turned the still figure over. Peter was unable to find any sign of bullet marks. He had been cowardly enough to leave the trousers for Jo to examine. This did not appear to gag her in the least. Several heads were peering down interestedly over her shoulder.

“From the holes in them pants,” said an awed voice, “it looks like he’d fairly been riddled with bullets.”

“Must have been a machine gun that pinged him in the pants,” another observer declared.

Peter also objected to the use of the term “ping.” However, he refrained from protesting, realizing that these callous persons must have cut their teeth on lethal weapons and played tag with machine gun bullets.

“If he was hit by a machine gun,” said Jo in a brisk voice, “the bullets must have balked at his drawers. From the little I can see, I don’t much blame them at all.”

“Those are my drawers,” objected Peter.

“What are your drawers doing on him, mister?” a deeply interested voice inquired.

Peter looked pained.

“Does it matter,” he asked, “what my drawers are doing on this man? He’s been mortally wounded. That’s what matters now. Whether my drawers are off or on him makes absolutely no difference. In fact,” he added with a touch of bitterness, “it doesn’t very much matter if he’s wearing any drawers at all.”

“Well, a guy’s got to wear some sort of drawers,” retorted the rebuked spectator in an injured voice.

“Not the sort I see bits of,” objected another.

Josephine’s calm voice cut short Peter’s reply to this fresh insult.

“Why do you let yourself become involved in these futile discussions?” she asked. “There might be some life left in the little crook yet.”

They returned the body to its former position and looked at it with baffled eyes. Peter’s left hand brushed against the pale face. Instinctively he drew his hand back. Little Arthur’s face presented a red smear.

“Gord,” a voice whispered, “the little feller’s just beginning to bleed. How do you make that out?”

“Ain’t bleedin’ from no hole,” said another member of the helpful gathering. “Must be bleedin’ through his pores.”

“How do you mean,” a third voice inquired, “bleedin’ through his paws? He ain’t no dog.”

“Didn’t say he was a dog,” the second voice snapped back. “Don’t have to be a dog to bleed through your pores.”

“But you got to be an animal,” the other announced triumphantly. “I ain’t as dumb as all that.”

“I mean the pores of his skin,” the second speaker replied somewhat wearily.

“Never knew skin had no paws,” said his stubborn opponent.

“You keep thinking of dogs’ paws,” the second man replied almost pleadingly, “while all the time I’m talking about skin pores – tiny little holes.”

“Well, why don’t you say little holes,” the persistent party demanded, “instead of using a lot of foreign language?”

“Would you believe it possible?” Peter asked Josephine in a low voice. “And in the presence of death, at that.”

“The trouble with you,” said the girl, “is that you let yourself get dragged in. You’re just as dumb as they are. Help me – —”

She stopped suddenly and looked at a dark stain on the left sleeve of Peter’s coat; then her eyes sought his hand. Blood was dripping slowly from his knuckles. For a moment her hand flew to her mouth, stifling a little cry. Then she said quite calmly, trying to keep her feelings from flooding through:

“You’ve been shot in the arm, Mr. Van Dyck.”

“Me?” inquired Peter. “That’s odd. My arm does feel a bit funny now that I come to think of it.”

“What I want to know,” put in a fresh voice, a rough argumentative voice, “how can this guy bleed when the other feller’s shot?”

“Perhaps the bullet went clean through the little feller,” a spectator explained, “stopping on its way first to kill him, and then bunged into this other bloke.”

“Knew it wasn’t his paws,” an all too familiar voice put in. “He ain’t shot at all. Them holes in his pants are just natural holes, worn out, like.”

“Mean to tell me,” another man demanded, “this big guy gets shot and the little one falls down for him? It ain’t reasonable.”

“I don’t mean to tell you nothing,” the first voice cried excitedly. “Wasn’t talking to you anyway. Just making a harmless suggestion.”

“You mean useless,” sneered the other.

By this time it was Peter’s turn to become indignant. He looked darkly upon the recumbent form of Little Arthur while Josephine did things to his arm.

“Then that dirty dog of a thief,” he said as if to himself, “has been having a nice long rest while all the time I’ve been shot in the arm and feeling sorry as hell for him.”

“If you will select your valets from the scum of the underworld,” Josephine told him, looking closely at Little Arthur, “you must expect things like this to happen.”

“Nobody could have expected this,” said Peter.

“Say, mister,” put in a voice admiringly, “you must be pretty used to bullets if you don’t know when you’re shot.”

“Either that or he’s just plain dumb,” another passenger explained. “I’d damn well know if I was shot.”

“I damn well wish you were,” grated Peter; then, turning to the girl beside him: “I’ve a good mind to pull down his trousers and see if he hasn’t been shot. Something’s surely wrong with him.”

“Go on,” replied Jo. “Pull his trousers off for all I care.”

Whatever the part of Little Arthur it was that remained alive must have been the modest part, for at the mention of his trousers his hands clutched them firmly and his eyes snapped open.

“None of that,” he got out weakly but distinctly. “Them pants are up for good.”

“Ain’t you even shot, buddy?” a voice called out.

“How do I know?” Little Arthur answered. “I heard a shot and felt its breath.”

The interrogator laughed ironically.

“I guess you’re O. K.,” he said. “To hear a shot is one thing, and to feel a shot’s another. You just fainted from fright.”

“Oh, yeah?” retorted the small man, sitting up with an indignant snap. “Well, this shot didn’t sound like no lullaby to me. It didn’t exactly croon in my ear, if yer get what I mean. You’d of fainted, too.”

Little Arthur turned a pair of injured eyes on Peter, whom he regarded in the light of a patron and protector, but he found scant comfort in that quarter.

“If you’ve settled your discussion entirely to your own satisfaction, Little Arthur – —” Peter began coldly.

“Oh, I don’t mind the likes of him,” the recovered crook assured Peter.

“That’s good,” continued Peter with false solicitude. “But as I was saying, do you think it would inconvenience you too much if you got yourself to hell off that deck and looked for those two bags?”

“Can’t you hunt ’em up yourself while I’m getting my breath?” was the pickpocket’s reasonable suggestion.

“Little Arthur,” replied Peter, a feverish glitter burning in his eyes, “I’m afraid you don’t quite understand the position. By rights I should be lying down where you are and you should be where I am. In other words, while you have been taking your ease on the flat of your back I’ve been slowly bleeding to death looking for your wound, you craven-spirited, low-down, grubby little snatch-purse. Is everything quite clear? Get up, damn your eyes.”

Little Arthur rose hastily from the deck.

“Mean ter say you’re shot, mister?” he asked nervously.

“Sure, I’m shot,” growled Peter, “and have been shot ever since this ferryboat shoved off a couple of days ago.”

“Then why are you standing up on your feet?” the small thief incredulously inquired.

“We all can’t lie down on our backs,” Peter told him with due bitterness. “You got there first. Find those suitcases and come inside. I’m getting weak.”

Before they moved away, Josephine found an opportunity to add to the pickpocket’s mental unrest.

“And if anything happens to Mr. Peter,” she assured the small man, “anything serious, that is, you’re going to spend the rest of your life flat on your back in jail, and I’m going to put you there.”

“Gord, lady!” said Arthur. “Don’t feel that way. I ain’t done a thing.”

“No,” she replied coldly, leading Peter away. “And you look as if you never will, you dip.”

Yolanda met them at the entrance of the women’s section of the cabin.

“It’s taking terribly long to get across,” she complained; then coolly surveying Josephine: “You have met a friend, I see, Peter.”

“Don’t you remember me?” Jo asked her sweetly. “I was the young lady behind the goggles. Your fiancé was nude with me in the closet.”

“Heavens!” exclaimed Yolanda. “I should think you’d be ashamed to admit it. Are you really going to have a baby?”

“Several, I hope, someday, but not today,” said Jo. “You see, Miss Wilmont, your quondam fiancé has been wounded.”

“Why do you say quondam?” asked Yolanda. “Mr. Van Dyck is still my fiancé.”

“You mean – after all that went on in that closet?”

“Would one of you mind taking a look at this arm?” Peter edged in weakly.

“Just a minute,” retorted Yolanda. “What did happen in that closet, now that this woman has brought up the subject? I insist on knowing.”

“In detail?” Jo inquired.

“Don’t be common,” snapped Yolanda. “I demand a plain statement from Mr. Van Dyck.”

“Well,” said Josephine with a shrug of her charming shoulders, “we might as well confess, Peter.” She turned to the waiting girl and extended her outspread hands in a helpless gesture. “The usual thing,” she said. “You know – the usual thing.”

“I think I do know,” replied the other, “but I certainly did not know it was the usual thing. Is she speaking the truth, Peter?”

“Well, didn’t you see for yourself?” Jo cried in exasperation. “He was as naked as a coot, wasn’t he? What else but the usual thing?”

“It might be usual with you,” said Yolanda, “but I didn’t think it was with Mr. Van Dyck – especially in a closet. Is it, Peter?”

“Eh?” asked Peter. “What’s that? Oh, no. Certainly not. Most unusual in a closet – almost unthinkable.”

“There you are,” said Josephine with finality. “He admits it. Says it’s unusual, but only in a closet, mind you.”

“I want to sit down,” said Peter. “Aren’t either one of you going to do a thing about this arm?”

“I’ll look after you in a minute, Peter,” Yolanda told him.

“No, you won’t,” said Josephine. “After all that has passed between us, that is my privilege.”

“My dear young woman,” replied Yolanda, “you have no official standing.”

“I can hardly stand at all,” said Peter. “I’m going to sit down before I fall down.”

Finding a place on the long seat, he sank wearily down beside a stout, neatly arrayed woman with an anticipatory expression in her eyes. Although Peter did not know it at the moment, this woman was thinking entirely in terms of beer. So engrossed had she been in her thoughts, so spiritually steeped in beer, as it were, she had failed to notice how long it was taking for the ferryboat to nose its way across the fog-piled river. Beneath her breath the woman had been humming “California, Here I Come” – an old favorite with Aspirin Liz. Peter’s near collapse on the bench beside her drew the thoughts of the bemused woman back to her present surroundings, which were not nearly so congenial as those of a waterfront café. She gave the wounded man a quick survey, then turned halfway round on the bench and faced him. Her eyes were fixed on the dark, moist stain on his sleeve. Liz promptly drew the logical inference. Here was a wounded gunman who with the invariable delicacy of his kind refrained from drawing attention to his little contretemps. From the appearance of this gunman, racketeer, gangster, or whatever his class or creed, Aspirin Liz concluded that his present contretemps was something more than a little. The man looked downright bad. Aspirin Liz, with the quick comradery of her training, was worried about him.

“In trouble?” she asked in a low voice.

Peter started nervously. Liz attributed the movement to guilt.

“Yes,” he muttered. “Terrible trouble. Shot in the arm.”

“Are you asking for a shot in the arm?” Liz asked him. “Or have you been shot in the arm?”

“Yes,” said Peter. “I’ve been. Never take dope.”

“Good,” replied Liz. “That’s one thing you’ve missed, anyway.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Peter. “Did you take me for a dope fiend?”

“Never can tell,” said Liz. “Ought to do something about that arm.”

“What should I do about it?” asked Peter.

“Take it out of its coat sleeve and shirt, for one thing, then take a look at it.”

“In front of all these people?”

“Why not? Never been in your shirtsleeves before?”

“Much less than that,” said Peter, thinking back over the past few hours. “You might not believe me, madam, but I’ve been dashing about naked.”

Liz’s opinion of the man underwent a quick change.

“Oh, I see,” she said. “That explains it. Then you’re not a gangster?”

“Certainly not!” indignantly.

“Sort of shot in the line of nobody’s business,” said Liz. “In the pursuit of pleasure, so to speak. Are all husbands born with gats? Come on. Off with that coat.”

“It wasn’t that,” complained Peter as she helped him to slip out of his coat. “Not what you mean at all.”

Josephine and Yolanda, having succeeded in giving each other thoroughly bad tempers, presented themselves before Peter at this moment.

“What did I tell you?” demanded Jo, pointing a finger at Peter. “There he goes again. Getting undressed already, and I bet he hasn’t known the woman five minutes.”

“You viper!” said Peter. “You’d rather let me bleed to death than stop telling lies.”

“I see you brought your trouble with you,” observed Liz in level tones. “Those two your molls?”

“Not both of us,” said Jo promptly, with a nod indicating Yolanda. “She is. I’m just his fancy lady.”

“What am I?” Yolanda demanded.

“It doesn’t matter,” replied Aspirin Liz with an amused smile. “I don’t care if you’re a couple of nuns. This man’s been wounded. You can wash your dirty linen later.”

“Dirty linen!” put in Yolanda disdainfully. “Peter, am I to be insulted in your presence?”

“Yes,” said Peter, disgusted. “You are. I’d like to do it myself.”

“You have,” replied Yolanda.

“And speaking about linen,” Jo tossed in, “I know the color of his drawers.” Peter groaned aloud at this. “That,” continued the girl, “should be enough to convince you of the irregularity of our relations. They’re not linen, his drawers. They’re silk – all silk with orange stripes. Look for yourself, if you don’t believe me.”

“Is that true, Peter?” Yolanda demanded.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he answered distractedly, flinching beneath the investigating hands of Liz. “Maybe she does and maybe she doesn’t. I forget myself. Why don’t you drag my trousers off and get my damned drawers witnessed by a notary public?”

“Apparently,” remarked Yolanda, “you don’t care what woman undresses you so long as you get undressed.”

“No,” gritted Peter. “I like myself that way.”

At this moment an impressive gentleman in clerical attire introduced himself to the contentious group.

“I was told a passenger had been shot,” he began as if passengers were always being shot. “Can I be of any help?”

“Well,” Jo replied, favoring the Bishop with a glowing smile, “he’s not quite ready to be buried yet, but if this boat doesn’t land somewhere soon you may have the pleasure of chucking him out at sea.”

Bishop Waller permitted himself a faint smile, then stooped over and examined Peter’s arm while Aspirin Liz looked at him with respect bred of the awareness of a slightly dappled past. Soon the two of them were working in complete accord to staunch the wound and bandage it, Liz acting in the capacity of water carrier to the man of God. When it came to procuring a bandage she promptly solved the difficulty with a coy look at the Bishop.

“I can see those two ladies don’t wear them,” she said reprovingly, “but I do and always have and always will. Here goes.”

Turning her back on the Bishop, who in justice to his exalted spirit was not at all interested, she did some considerable ripping. Her face flushed from exertion rather than from the inquiring scrutiny of several dozen passengers who sat patiently following her movements with the dull curiosity of the mentally vacant, she turned back to the Bishop and offered him a strip of cloth. This he accepted with a word of dignified commendation, then bound Peter’s arm.

“Under the circumstances,” he said when his task was finished, “this is about the best we can do, but the moment you get ashore, sir, I strongly advise you to see a physician to guard against infection. May I ask how the unfortunate accident occurred?”

“Merely one of the commoner risks of contemporary life in America,” said Peter. “A stray shot, you know.”

“Exactly,” replied the Bishop. “Today one can hardly telephone without having the booth shot from around one.”

He seated himself beside Peter with the air of a man both able and willing to watch the whole night through.

“Most people in telephone booths deserve to be shot,” Josephine declared. “It’s the only way you can get ’em to come out.”

Bishop Waller received this bloodthirsty sentiment with unexpected approval. He had frequently felt that way himself about people in telephone booths, but had never gone so far as to put his feelings into words.

“Of course,” he said judicially, “one’s attitude may change considerably according to whether one is doing the telephoning or the shooting.”

“That’s so,” replied Jo. “Hadn’t thought of that.”

The Bishop’s smile embraced her.

“Of course, my dear,” he said. “Such minor considerations escape us all at times.”

Hardly had the Bishop rounded off his sentence as such gentlemen will and must, when the ferryboat fairly tore its heart out in a protesting blast against fate in the guise of fog. As the engines sent chills along its timbers the reversed propellers bit back into the hidden water. From dead ahead came the answering scream of a half-crazed whistle. Danger ten feet off. Passengers ran to look at it, faces pressed against the windows. Eyes too filled with the wonder of ignorance to know they should look frightened. Waiting … drifting smoothly … then a soft, silly bump, a mere touch in the fog.

“Well, your reverence,” said Aspirin Liz, “there’s one of those minor considerations we didn’t quite escape.”

“Bishop Waller, madam,” the excellent man informed her calmly. “Episcopal bishop of the Eastern States. And should this present consideration prove a little less minor than we would like it, let us face it with the fortitude and courage of true Christians – civilized Christians, that is.”

Even at this serious moment Bishop Waller insisted on stressing that nice distinction existing between civilized Christians and savage ones – those who always wore drawers and those who gleefully discarded them after the closing hymn.

A small figure between two suitcases was taking up a great deal of room as it staggered across the cabin towards Peter Van Dyck.

“Here’s your bags, mister,” gasped the pickpocket, supporting himself between them.

“Thank you, Little Arthur,” said Peter. “But we have neither the time nor privacy to dress before sinking, I fear.”

“Are we doing that?” the small man asked in an even smaller voice.

“You had best prepare yourself to meet your God either now or a little later,” Bishop Waller told the pickpocket in a gentle voice.

“If you don’t mind, your honor,” Little Arthur chattered, “I’m going to pray to God to meet Him much later – with all due respect to Heaven and Himself.”

“You’ll never meet Him at all, you thing!” Josephine assured him.

“Peter, please do something,” Yolanda burst out. “My nerves are on an edge.”

“Don’t worry,” said Liz brightly. “They might be all wet, you know.”

“Ugh!” gasped Little Arthur. “What are we going to do?”

Then a great voice drilling down through the fog told Little Arthur in no uncertain language exactly what to do.

CHAPTER NINE

Bad Talk and Worse Weather

“Get the hell out of here, you booby!” boomed out the great voice, making an unpleasant evening even more unpleasant.

“Seafaring men have such unbridled tempers,” mildly observed the Bishop.

“I’d hate to be called a booby even in a fog,” Peter declared. “It’s a word to which I strongly object. Seems to strike at the very roots of one’s being.”

Apparently the skipper felt the same way about it.

“Who the hell are you calling booby?” he cried from the hidden aloofness of his little pilot house.

“I’m calling you a booby,” answered the other skipper across the milling fog.

“You’re a booby yourself,” retorted the defender of the ferryboat, seeing no reason to improve on the word. “A blundering booby at that.”

“Call me a booby!” almost screamed the other voice. “I’d like to cut you in two. What do you mean running into an ocean liner, endangering the lives of my passengers?”

“What do you mean by picking on a ferryboat carrying American citizens?” demanded the local skipper, introducing an international flavor to the dispute.

“Your passengers don’t count for a damn,” he was informed. “They’re dirty commuters. They aren’t even human.”

“Is that so? Well, so are yours. You’re all boobies – the lot of you.”

A clatter of protesting voices burst through the fog. One shrill, ironical voice made itself disagreeably articulate.

“You can drown commuters by the handful,” announced this voice, “and the world would be better off – much better off.”

This time the commuters’ voices shattered the fog with indignant discord.

“Your passengers are a lot of pleasure-loving swine,” screamed the skipper of the ferry, his voice rising above the disgraceful din.

“Will you keep that rabble quiet?” came the voice of the liner’s skipper. “Can’t hear a word you say.”

“Keep your own immigrants quiet,” retorted the small craft’s skipper. “Why don’t you fumigate ’em?”

The reception of this crude suggestion by the passengers of the liner was deafening. Obviously they were infuriated far beyond the bounds of good taste. The ferryboat jeered triumphantly, and the word “immigrants” found immediate favor, also such terms of endearment as wops, kikes, bolshies, anarchists, reds, and a few others that will not bear repetition. In the midst of this hubbub the voices of the two skippers could be distinguished passionately cursing the passengers they had so recently been defending. Gradually the voices died exhaustedly away so that the respective representatives of the opposing ships were enabled to continue insulting each other in comparative peace and quiet.

“An edifying way for ships to act,” observed Peter, “when fogbound far at sea.”

“If you don’t take that waterlogged louse of yours away from my ship I’m going to run you down,” the voice from the liner shouted. “I’ve got a peace delegation aboard.”

“Sounds more like a mob from hell,” the ferryboat replied.

Upon hearing this, the peace delegation apparently became so warlike it had to be roundly cursed back into silence. Aspirin Liz, with the light of battle in her eyes and closely supported by a quivering Josephine, made for the head of the ferry. The others followed the two women.

“Go to hell, you!” shouted Aspirin Liz as soon as she had taken up her station. “We’ve got a bishop of the Episcopal Church on our boat and if you don’t believe that his name’s Waller.”

“My dear! My dear!” protested the Bishop. “Don’t use my name in all this fog.”

“What’s wrong with your name?” snapped Jo, then shrieked through her hands at the opposing ship. “His name is Waller – Bishop Waller. Never heard of Bishop Waller, you big stiff?”

“I’m doing the shouting, lady,” the ferryboat’s captain called down to Jo.

“Don’t give a damn if he’s the twelve apostles,” the seafaring skipper blasphemously retorted. “Go tell him to waller in the waves. That’s where he’ll soon be and you, too, you Jersey broad.”

“My God! He called me a broad!” cried Josephine, white with rage, then furiously to the fog, “Shut up, you lily.”

“What!” screamed back the fog. “Me, a lily! I’d like to come down there and punch you on the nose.”

“A most violent character,” objected the Bishop; then, suddenly losing his ecclesiastical calm: “Take your vile craft out of the way, you zany, and let God-fearing people proceed in peace.”

“Yes,” yelled Aspirin Liz. “Get a move on. I want some beer.”

“Who the hell cares about you and your beer?” the liner flung back coarsely. “All you’ll get is salt water and lots of that, you dizzy Jersey broad.”

“Lily! Lily!” sang out Jo. “Think up another name.”

“Oh, my God,” came the voice of the distracted skipper, and Peter in his mind’s eye caught a glimpse of weatherbeaten features distorted with impotent rage. “Oh, my God,” came the strangled voice. “If I could only come down there and pull your nose.”

“Oh, my dear, how vicious!” Josephine tossed back girlishly. “We’re thumbing our noses at you, in case you can’t see us.”

“Make that woman stop,” called the liner’s captain, appealing directly to the commander of the ferryboat. “By rights she should be put in irons for calling me such names.”

“Oh, you lily!” yodeled a chorus of voices through the fog, a group of truck drivers seeming to be especially gifted at this form of derision.

“You’re forgetting to sound your whistle, sir,” the local skipper pleasantly reminded the other. “It ain’t sounded for seven minutes. I’ll report that little neglect of duty.”

“I’m forgetting I’m a human being,” the voice came back wildly from the liner. “I’m forgetting I’m an officer and a gentleman. I’m forgetting I’ve got a soul.” The last word rose in a howl. “I’m mad. I’m going mad, I tell you,” it resumed. “Going mad alone in the fog.” A burst of maniacal laughter followed, then a snatch of demented song. “All alone on the telephone,” quavered the voice of the liner’s skipper. “Sleep, sailor, sleep all alone on the telephone – ha, ha, ha!” The climax was a volley of incoherent obscenities, which ceased suddenly as a new voice was heard, a quiet, reasonable, cultured voice.

“Sorry,” this voice sang out, “but our skipper has just lost his reason or had a stroke or something. Do you happen to know where we are?”

“Too bad about your old man,” answered the ferryboat captain. “Merely having a bit of a jaw-back. I swear to God I don’t know where we can be.”

“Might be off the old Rock herself for all I know,” the other replied hopelessly. “Sounds like open water to me.”

“Are you anchored?” asked the ferry captain.

“Been anchored for hours,” he was told.

“Well, I haven’t got any anchors,” declared the skipper of the ferry.

“Wish you had one round your neck,” a vulgar voice observed weightily, “an’ that you was right with it forty fathoms deep.”

“Pipe down, there!” cried the cultured voice. “I say, Captain, would you care to tie up ’longside of me?”

“No, thanks,” replied the other. “I’ll go smousing round for a bit yet. Might find something. Hope the old man gets well.”

“And tell him for me,” Little Arthur surprisingly shouted, “a ocean-going liner shouldn’t have a weak-minded skipper.”

“Shut up, you worm!” snapped Jo. “You would pull a wisecrack just when we were getting nice and friendly. Don’t you realize you aren’t good enough to insult even a body-snatcher?”

If the skipper of the liner had been incapacitated, his passengers still remained loyal. As the two ships parted company in the fog their insults fell thick and fast. The ferryboat did not remain silent. Foul words and frantic filled the air.

“If an angel should appear now,” remarked the Bishop with a sigh of regret, “I very much fear he would mistake the earth for a region far below. These maddened voices in the fog sound like spirits in torment.”

“How long have we been afloat?” Peter asked a little wearily.

“Nearly two and a half hours,” replied the Bishop glancing at his watch.

“I’m hungry,” complained Little Arthur.

“We’re not interested,” Jo retorted, then considered him with sudden interest. “Come here, Little Arthur,” she said at last in a dangerously honeyed voice. “I want to have a friendly talk with you.”

“Are you sure it’s friendly?” he asked with justifiable suspicion. “I’ve had more than enough trouble for one day.”

“There’s not going to be any trouble,” Josephine assured him. “You’re going to like this.”

For a few moments they conversed earnestly together; then, with a backward glance at the others, wandered innocently off in the direction of several trucks hunched in the gloom of the traffic alleys filled with fog and the fumes of gas. Peter and his companions returned to the relative comfort of the cabin. A trifle depressed after the excitement caused by the recent encounters, they sat down and confronted the faces of their fellow passengers. Those faces were a study in conflicting emotions. They furnished ample food for thought if one felt inclined to think under such exasperating conditions. Peter’s brain was working dreamily on the borderland of sleep. His head felt hot and heavy. There was a throbbing pain in his arm.

So many interrupted lives, he mused. So many routines broken. Wives waiting all over New Jersey. Dinners getting cold. Children staying up for Daddy, then going to bed without him. Mothers glancing out of windows and running to front doors. Little speeches of greeting being rehearsed. Furious little speeches – perfect gems of sarcasm and sweet recrimination.

“No, dear. Little Junior couldn’t wait up until dawn. Sorry, but if you must stop off at a speakeasy, you’ll have to do without your son. Of course, it doesn’t matter about me. I haven’t counted in years. Do you find it close in here, dear? I’ll open up all the windows so the neighbors can enjoy your breath, too. No. Don’t try to get around me. Keep your horrid hands off. Save them for one of your flash stenographers. You seem to prefer their company to mine.”

Peter’s thoughts veered off at another tangent. He was convinced that the little chap with the pinched face across the way was making up a lie already. Years of experience had taught the man that his wife would never believe the truth. He must perjure his soul to keep peace in the family. He must tell a lie to give her the pleasure of catching him in it. If he told the truth and stuck to it, the lady would feel herself injured. She always felt injured. She was born with an ax to grind with life in general, and he had been feeling its blade for years until he was chipped away to his spiritless soul.

That quiet-looking fellow a few seats away seemed actually to be enjoying the situation. He was probably welcoming this fogbound interlude in his unadventurous days. Doubtless wished the ferryboat would never find its rightful slip. Peter felt that the man hated that ferry slip, had been hating it night after night, week after week, for many years. No wonder war was popular when life was unable to dig up anything better than a couple of ferry slips with uncongenial destinations at either end.

But there was a person eager to get home. Newly married, Peter placed him. Probably a baby on the way. No word from his wife for twelve whole hours. The poor devil was too nervous to sit down. Kept walking about and doing silly things with his hands. Aimless things – futile gestures. And all because some unremarkable girl in some equally unremarkable town in New Jersey was about to add her even more unremarkable contribution to an already overcrowded world. But none of it seemed unremarkable to this young fellow. Neither the town nor the girl nor the baby. Life for him was touched with wonder. For him there was a zest in things. Peter decided that if he had the chap in his office, he would give him a worth-while raise.

There was a pretty girl who had had about enough of fog horns for one night. Probably worked in some office near the river. Had been hearing them all day long. Someday she would probably contribute to the world’s population. Funny thing, that. She would grow old and change and look different, and years from now another girl looking not unlike her would come there and sit in that same seat. And the whole thing would begin over again. Just like a picture with the same picture in it and the same one in that, only a little smaller, going on forever.

Peter wondered drowsily if he were growing a little delirious. Snatches of conversation kept getting mixed up in his mind. Why was he leading these people’s lives for them, hearing the things they said, imagining their thoughts? The world was being eaten up by fog and driven mad by fog horns. A detective story would go well now. Somebody should be murdered. Somebody almost had been murdered. A few inches to the right with that bullet, and he would not have cared whether the boat made land or not. Where would he be now? Out there in the fog somewhere, lending his voice to the whistles?

That girl down the line – what was her trouble? Why that bitter expression? She was getting along in years now. Already that deadly look of efficiency, that expression of command, was stealing into her face. Perhaps she had passed up a date to spend the week-end somewhere with her boss. Maybe her last chance – her last chance to find out about a lot of things, to experience a lot of things. When she reached home tonight – if she ever did – two old people would be waiting there for her. A little worried always. Always a little fearful. Something might happen to this girl of theirs, this girl growing old like themselves, yet still almost as inexperienced as the day when she was born. Family loyalty and self-sacrifice could be carried too far. Always was. This girl would never add to the world’s population, and she damn well should. Someone should seduce her – make a mother out of her, give her a break in life. Peter wouldn’t want to do it, but then there was always someone.

Peter’s brain was once more snatching conversations from the air – Hello, J. B. How’s tricks? Reached your quota yet? He’s a ten-thousand-dollar-a-year man. Must be a nice guy. Thought you always rode up with another party – tall, dark feller. Usually do. He’s a fifteen-thousand-dollar-a-year man. Must be a wonderful guy. The little lady all right? Nervous – this depression. Have to send her to Lakewood. Mine, too. Got to pack her off. Women can’t stand depression. Nobody can. Depression’s bad for the country. That’s what I say. See that guy over there? He’s a five-thousand-dollar-a-year man. Must be a washout. Where does he get off to carry a cane? There’s a pip – what a leg! Know her? Oh, you do – any good? I should tell you. Hoover’s a gentleman, at any rate, not a goddam red. Get your ticket ready. Here comes Pete. Getting old, Pete. Been punching my ticket for the past seventeen years. Got a piece I want to read. Bedtime stories? Right. Tell ’em to the kiddies. Nothing like kiddies. She has got a swell leg.

The synthetic snatches faded away. Peter’s head sank lower and lower. Aspirin Liz collected it and propped her well-padded shoulder against his cheek. Close to the surface of consciousness Peter slid along through the fog.

In the meantime Jo and Little Arthur were lurking round the trucks like wolves round a wagon train. They were inspecting the trucks with careless-seeming yet calculating eyes. Each truck was wondered about, each truck peeped into, poked and felt. Their hands were furtively caressing. Little Arthur’s favorite truck gave promise of fancy groceries. He opened a knife in his pocket, looked quickly about him, then operated on the truck with the skill of a surgeon on a mere appendix. Jo’s hands were darting into another truck. Jo believed in bread. She succeeded in snatching cake, also a thermos bottle, the personal property of the driver. Little did Jo care whose personal property it was. She had to provide for her own.

“This is the first time I ever stole a chicken,” Little Arthur whispered, pointing to a bulge in his coat.

“Put it back!” said Jo. “Put it back. The damn thing will squawk all over the ferry.”

“It ain’t that kind of a chicken.”

“Mean it’s a dumb chicken?”

“No, it’s a dead chicken.”

“But raw?” asked Jo.

“Very,” admitted the crook. “Cold and raw.”

Jo thought rapidly but effectively.

“Come,” she said at last. “There must be a fire in the engine room. We’ll borrow a chunk of the ship’s fire, but listen, Little Arthur, let me do the talking.”

“Don’t I know!” the little chap replied. “I’d never try to can your chatter.”

“Follow me, little thief,” said Jo almost tenderly.

A few minutes later some passengers were slightly interested in seeing two figures, crouched as if in pain, move swiftly to the small door of the engine room and neatly disappear behind it. Jo descended a short steep metal ladder, regretting the while the absence of an audience below. She felt sure that had the engineer been present he would have granted her every wish. Men were like that – foolish. A blackened face seated on a box rolled two white eyes at her from behind a stanchion.

“Hello!” said the face. “What’s up?”

“Nothing much,” replied Jo easily. “I’m the daughter of a ship’s captain myself.”

“I’m not a ship’s captain, lady,” the face replied, “much less his daughter.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Jo. “I want to cook a chicken.”

“Oh, yeah?” the face grinned back. “I’d like to run races. Is that the bird you want to cook?”

The face pointed at Little Arthur.

“No,” said Jo. “Hell isn’t hot enough for that one.”

“It’s too noisy here,” the dip complained.

“What do you want to do?” asked Jo. “Sing?”

“No. It hurts my ears.”

Jo turned away from Little Arthur and considered a small black door, through the edges of which gleamed a frame of fire.

“Might cook it in there,” she remarked.

“To a cinder,” grinned the man.

“Might fix something up.”

“Sure, lady. What do you think this is, the Ritz?”

“Slip me that chicken,” said Jo.

Arthur produced the chicken as a magician produces a rabbit and handed it to Jo, who in turn passed it to the man with the black face.

“Pretty slick chicken, that,” allowed Jo.

When the man had finished his examination the chicken looked pretty black.

“It’s a good chicken,” he agreed, holding it out to Jo.

“I don’t want it,” she told him. “Put it on some fire.”

“Listen, lady, are you nuts?” the man asked.

“Certainly not,” the girl replied. “Why?”

“Nothing,” said the man. “Only I was afraid you figured yourself home in your own kitchen and had mistaken me for your cook.”

“You don’t look a bit like my cook,” said Jo. “You’re much nicer.”

“Come on, quit your kidding!” The man looked pleased.

“Can’t you cram it into some fire?” asked Jo.

The man looked at her and grinned. Then he spat copiously. After that he got up.

“You’re a funny sketch,” he said at last. “This chicken all ready?”

“Don’t know,” replied Jo. “Let me look at it. No. You look at it.”

The man thereupon elevated the chicken and sighted through it, one white eye professionally closed. It was not a nice scene to witness under the most favorable conditions, but in that engine room and done by a man with a black face it was almost more than Little Arthur could bear. He closed both his eyes.

“What do you see?” the girl asked breathlessly.

“Wish I could see land,” said the man. “We seem to have lost that. Even the fog horns are getting scarcer, but I’ll cook your chicken for you, lady.”

“That’s swell,” said Jo. “You’re a good egg, chief. I’ve a sick man up there. He’s been shot.”

“Heard about that guy,” the chief replied as he moved searchingly about the confined area. “Sort of queer thing, that. And all the time there’s some man sitting quietly on this boat who was intended to stop that bullet. It just shows. You never can tell. Who’d ever thought I’d be cooking a chicken in a fog?”

“Ain’t he even going ter wash it?” asked Little Arthur.

“What for?” asked Jo. “We’ll burn the dirt off.”

Little Arthur shrank even smaller.

“Always like my chickens washed,” he muttered.

The black-faced man had found what he wanted. It was a pan – a large pan. This he filled with glowing coals upon which he placed another and smaller pan.

“Ask him to dust the ashes out,” urged Little Arthur.

“Will you be quiet!” said Jo, who was by now greatly interested.

From a suspicious-looking can the chief poured some water into the smaller pan, plopped the chicken in it, then covered the whole affair with a galvanized washtub.

“Wouldn’t want no better oven than that,” he remarked, surveying his rude creation.

“Who wouldn’t?” muttered Little Arthur.

“You’re a genius,” said Jo admiringly. “Have a hunk of cake.”

She produced a box of cake from beneath the duster she had managed to retain and tore off the cover.

“Just a little,” said the chief.

“Go on. Take a lot.”

He accepted the cake and munched.

“Good cake,” he observed. “I like cake. You know – good cake.”

Little Arthur decided that here was a man who would be at home in any surroundings. He was the same as a dog or any other animal. His reactions were the simple ones of the brute. The girl was like him. Little Arthur, to show how much nicer he was than his companions, produced his knife and cut himself a slice of cake.

“Nice, ain’t it?” said the chief, rolling his eyes at the little man. “Orange icing’s good.”

Little Arthur waited until his mouth was clear, then spoke with marked distinctness.

“Not bad for store cake,” he replied. “It’s sticking on your chin.”

“What?” asked the black-faced man.

“The crumbs,” said Little Arthur.

The man once more laughed coarsely.

“If that’s all,” he got out. “Bah!”

“That’s not all,” replied Little Arthur meticulously. “There’s bits of waste and coal dust and oil.”

“I guess that chin can stand it,” the man remarked, not even taking the trouble to wipe his chin.

“No doubt,” agreed the pickpocket, “but I almost can’t.”

“What do you mean?” the other demanded truculently.

“Oh, nothing,” said Little Arthur, “only there’s a lady present and you ain’t doing yourself justice with that chin. Looks like an ashcan, it does.”

“Oh, all right,” the chief grumbled, looking furtively at Josephine, now seated on the box by the chicken. “All right. Here goes.”

He produced a wad of waste from his pocket and drew it across his chin.

“That makes your chin look better,” said Arthur, “and the rest of your face worse.”

“Don’t mind him,” Jo put in. “I like your face as it is. Let’s take a look at the chicken.”

With a steel rod the man raised the washtub. Three pairs of eyes were fastened on the chicken.

“Smells good,” said the man. “She’ll be done pretty soon now – sooner than in a regular oven.”

She was. The chicken was done, or partly done, in a surprisingly short time. The man with the face refused.

“No, thank you, lady,” he protested. “I put on the feed bag before we shoved off. Take her up to your young man with the compliments of the chef.”

For some reason Jo blushed. She realized she was blushing, and that made her blush all the more. The girl was amazed. She had never thought of herself as having a young man. With her it had always been grabbing off a guy or being grabbed herself. She had never had a real, acknowledged young man for herself. Hers had been the easy-come, easy-go type, For a moment she caught a mental image of Peter’s pale, bony face with its sardonically set mouth and mild blue eyes full of vagrant fancies. God knows what he actually thought of her. She had not tried to show herself in an any too favorable light. Making herself impudent and more than plenty tough. True, he wasn’t quite a young man, but then she did not care much for that sort. There and then amid the smells and grime of the ship’s clanking bowels she knew that Peter meant much to her and that she was going to make herself mean even more to Peter in spite of all the Yolanda Wilmonts in the world. But perhaps he was dead by now. She had forgotten about his wound.

“Thanks, chief,” she said, holding out a hand to his. “Got to hurry. Grab that bird, Little Arthur, and come right along.”

“Here,” said the man with the black face, producing a thick cup, and tipping the gravy from the pan into it. “Here. Might as well take this along. It’ll strengthen the young feller up.”

“God bless your black face, chief,” said the girl as she turned to the ladder. “You’re white, clean white inside.”

“I know that poem, too,” cried the man, as if someone had touched a button somewhere concealed about him. “I can say it all by heart.”

“Wish he hadn’t said that,” thought Josephine as she toiled up the ladder. “If Peter knows that poem I’ll eat this chicken myself and throw the bones in his face.”

CHAPTER TEN

Dinner Is Served

“Listen, Peter,” said Jo a few minutes later. “Do you know any poetry?”

Peter skidded back to consciousness with a wince. His arm was bad. Little flames of pain licking stiff flesh.

“What’s that?” he asked, blinking at the girl. “Do I know any what?”

“Poetry,” said Jo. “You know. Like Milton or Ogden Nash?”

“I can’t quote a line written by either gentleman,” Peter told her. “Did you wake me up with the weird hope that I’d say little pieces for you?”

“No,” went on Jo, “but if you’re sure you don’t know any poetry and you swear never to learn any, I’ll give you a cup of chicken soup and a chunk of the chicken from which it oozed.”

“I don’t know any poetry and I never will,” said Peter in a disgusted voice. “I don’t feel at all like poetry unless it’s composed entirely of bad words.”

“Good!” exclaimed Jo, then hesitated. It could not be true. “Sure you don’t know anything about the mighty God that made you and you’re white, clean white, inside?” she asked, watching his face anxiously.

“No,” said Peter, “and I doubt very much if I am. Got a lot of different colors inside. So have you.”

“Let’s not go into that,” Jo hastily put in. “Here take this soup and get that inside. Little Arthur, break out your magic knife and carve that ruddy chicken. I’ve got some cake and a small ration of coffee.”

She produced the cake and thermos bottle. Little Arthur placed the chicken between Aspirin Liz and the Bishop, then attacked it with his invaluable knife. Peter sat drinking an exceedingly pungent liquid which was nearer to chicken grease than chicken soup. However, it was hot and had food value in it. The other passengers looked on with expressions ranging from greed and envy to revulsion bordering on nausea. The little group, through lack of even the most primitive implements, was forced to be rough in its dealings with the chicken. Even Bishop Waller went at his section with tooth and nail. Yolanda strove to be dainty about it and nearly lost her share as a consequence. Soon she was gnashing away as cheerfully as the rest of them.

“My dear,” said Bishop Waller after his portion had disappeared into the pontifical belly, “my dear young lady, how did you manage the chicken, may I ask?”

“We stole him or her,” Josephine replied. “Little Arthur and I.”

The good Bishop thought this over with a slight frown on his fine face. At last his expression cleared, and he favored Jo with a smile.

“I am glad I asked that question after rather than before eating,” he admitted with happy sophistry. “It was a delicious chicken in spite of the irregular circumstances surrounding its getting. But perhaps the less said the easier digested.”

“Was it already cooked?” asked Aspirin Liz.

“No,” replied Josephine. “Just dead. We cooked it down in the engine room. There’s the sweetest man there with a dirty black face and grimy hands. He helped us cook it.”

“Oh, dear!” murmured Yolanda, looking as if she had been poisoned. “A dirty black man!”

“Only his hands and face,” Jo protested. “Don’t know about the rest of his body. May have been as white as yours, if that’s saying anything.”

“It’s saying too much,” Yolanda retorted. “What did you cook it in?”

“A couple of old ashpans,” Jo informed her.

“My word!” said Yolanda, looking at the others with round eyes. “Think what we have inside us besides chicken!”

“A lot of satisfaction,” Peter put in, “where before there was nothing but craving. Good work, Jo! Our tame thief is a credit to his profession.”

“May I ask,” began the Bishop, “why you occasionally refer to this seemingly harmless little chap as being a thief and a criminal?”

“Because he is,” Jo answered proudly. “A regular thief.”

“Only a pickpocket, yer honor,” Little Arthur protested. “Just pockets, yer know. Little pockets. Never much in ’em.”

“But you take what little there is, don’t you, Little Arthur?” Jo insisted.

“Nobody ever minds much,” he answered.

“Nobody has much these days to mind,” Aspirin Liz observed. “You’ll have better and bigger pockets to pick before you die, Little Arthur.”

“I’m thinking of giving it up,” he declared. “Now that I’ve met a holy man – a real, live bishop, that is.”

“Splendid, Little Arthur! Splendid!” cried the Bishop. “I’m gratified my presence has done some good. You might celebrate your career of regeneration by returning to me the watch you borrowed when Mr. Van Dyck asked for the time out there on deck. I’ve been wondering which of you had it.”

“Honest,” said Little Arthur, producing the watch from a side pocket, “that watch had just gone clean out of my mind.”

“Very little can go clean out of your mind,” Aspirin Liz assured him.

“Honest, now,” the small crook repeated. “Honest. I mean it. The Bishop shouldn’t take out a valuable watch like that in a lot of wet fog. It’s fairly criminal, it is. He’ll spoil it.”

“It was most unwise, I’ll admit, with you around,” said the Bishop with a benevolent smile as he courteously accepted the watch. “However, all’s well that ends well. We’ll say no more about it.”

“Thank you, yer honor,” said Little Arthur gratefully.

“Your extensive acquaintance with judges, I imagine, has led you into error,” the Bishop continued. “I do not judge men professionally, Little Arthur. Rather, I endeavor to save them. Privately, I have my own opinions which, I am sorry to say, are not high – far, far from high. I am not ‘your honor.’ If you insist on a title I might bear up beneath the weight of ‘your reverence.’ ”

“Thank you, yer reverence,” said Little Arthur, “Nice-sounding name, that – yer reverence. Never liked ‘yer honor’ much. Always meant worry and trouble and a lot of – —”

“Lying,” Jo helpfully supplied.

A large, rough-looking person wearing a strangely ingratiating smile had been standing for some minutes gazing down from his impressive height upon the remains of the chicken. It speaks well for Josephine Duval’s character that she never suspected anyone of being really bad at heart save herself, and she rarely if ever thought much about that. A few other passengers had gathered unobtrusively round the outskirts of the large, rough-looking man.

“Young lady,” he now inquired, addressing Jo in tones of respectful admiration, “that was a mighty slick trick you did with that chicken. How did you manage to work it, if I may be so bold?”

Flushed with triumph, Jo turned to one whom she fondly believed to be her latest conquest.

“You’re right it was a slick trick,” she told him. “When it comes to the survival of the fittest you can’t afford to stand on ceremony.”

“I should say not,” the man replied, a little overenthusiastically. “What did you do, miss? Let me in on it.”

“What did I do? Why, I helped myself, of course,” she asserted. “And this little beggar helped me.”

“I found it,” Little Arthur proudly declared.

“Oh,” said the man, beaming so energetically he looked as if he were going to explode. “So you found it. Now that is good.” His voice dropped to a confidential whisper. “And where did you find it, miss?” he asked.

“That would be telling,” Josephine hedged.

“Go on, miss,” the great man almost whined. “Why not tell us? We’re all hungry, too – like yourselves.”

“I suspect the integrity of that large individual’s motives,” Bishop Waller murmured to Peter.

“There’s an air about him,” agreed Peter. “A faint suggestion of menace.”

Jo looked undecidedly at the man for a moment, then her impressionable French heart melted. Besides, it would cost her nothing. Furthermore, she decided, when a man as big as this one got hungry all over he was a danger to his fellow men until glutted with food.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” she began. “There’s a boob of a truckman aboard this ferry – —”

A spasm of terrific emotion passed over the great man’s face.

“Yes, miss,” he broke in, his voice trembling with what Jo fully believed to be eagerness. “You said a boob of a truckman. Hear that, everybody. Ha, ha! A boob of a truckman! That’s good! Oh, that’s very good!”

Pleased by the reception of her words, Josephine endeavored to better them.

“Yes,” she continued, “a regular boob of a truckman. Must be a poor fish – —”

“Ha!” cried the great man. “A poor fish, eh? So he’s a poor fish no less than a boob?”

Jo nodded quite seriously.

“Yes,” she said. “Do you know what he did, the sap-head?”

“What did he do, lady?” the man whispered, as if he were having trouble with his throat. “Tell us what the sap-head did.”

“Why, he left his truck unguarded,” replied Jo. “That’s what the sap-head did – just strolled off and left his truck flat.”

“And what did you do?” asked the great man.

“My dear,” broke in Bishop Waller, “I strongly advise against any further exchange of confidences.”

But the Bishop’s cautious admonition came too late. Jo was in full cry.

“What did we do?” replied the girl. “Why, naturally, we helped ourselves. Little Arthur there yanked out his knife, cut a hole through the canvas covering, and reached out a chicken just as easy as taking a rabbit from a hat. And the funny part of it is the half-wit who’s driving the truck isn’t any the wiser yet. When he discovers that hole I’d like to take a look at his face.”

An amazing transformation had taken place in the great man’s features. They were congealed now in an expression of superhuman malevolence in which a smile of tremendous bitterness cracked about his bared teeth. Outside of the movies Jo had never seen such a face, such an evil, sadistic mask. The man was wheezing as if someone had kicked him in the stomach.

“You’d like to see his face?” he gasped; then, squatting with surprising agility, he flung out: “Then take a good look at it. This is his face, see – the boob’s face, the face of the poor fish – the – the – the—” his voice broke in a sob of rage – “the face of the sap-head. Take a good look at it.”

But Jo had looked at the man’s face once, and it was the last thing in the world she wanted to do again. It was nothing to see, that face. As a matter of fact it was too much to see. The girl closed her eyes, but that awful face still hung suspended in her memory. Then the face moved and brought its baleful influence directly to bear on Little Arthur, who recoiled in mortal terror. Still squatting and with hands extended, their fingers suggestively working, the owner of the face drew near to Little Arthur. In a surprisingly short space of time he was dangling in mid-air and then approaching both his mortal as well as rear end at a high rate of speed. With an effect of complete finality the small man made a large noise as he hit the deck and remained very much there.

Then, as if what had already occurred had not been sufficiently surprising, an even more surprising element literally mingled itself with the situation. Before the great face had time to pick up Little Arthur and do some more things with him, Bishop Waller, with a roar of righteous indignation, launched himself in defense of his so recently acquired convert. It was a magnificent and inspiring spectacle. It became even more stupendous when the bared ecclesiastical head established resounding contact with the ungodly abdomen of the truckman and sent him crashing to the planks. Outside, the fog horn told the fog what the ferryboat thought of it, waves splashed against the sides, and ghostly voices drifted past, but within the cozy cabin the truckman lay stunned while Josephine and Aspirin Liz took up positions and stood waiting for the kill.

In the meantime the highly edified passengers, feeling sure the truckman would never survive to drive his truck to its destination, made a general movement in its direction. One can gain no true conception of the rugged determination of commuters, of their resource and clever teamwork, until one has witnessed them in concerted action. Respectable husbands and fathers – not to mention business executives, clerks, and stenographers – literally swarmed all over the truck. Men accustomed to the feel of golf clubs now swung chickens aloft with equal dexterity. The backbone of the nation was looking for its grub and finding it in lavish quantities. Presently other trucks were attacked by fresh detachments of commuters unable to find standing room on the original one. Everyone seemed to have entered into the spirit of the occasion. Everyone was alert and eager, ready to do his or her bit. Outcries of gratification could be heard as new discoveries were made. In vain did the drivers of the trucks protest. They were borne down and walked over by the sheer weight of numbers.

It was upon this scene of pillage and confusion that the originator of the outbreak opened his shocked and amazed eyes. With dawning comprehension he saw several figures, each provided with one of his chickens, dart through the small door leading to the engine room. It was enough to drive the past from his memory. The present was all-important. With a wild cry he sprang to his feet and staggered to the defense of his truck which, by the time he reached it, contained little to defend.

Bishop Waller with a sigh of relief sank back on the seat and received the congratulations of the party. Loudest among these were those of Little Arthur, now partially recovered from his cataclysmic contact with the deck.

“I don’t know what has come over me,” the good Bishop observed rather sadly. “It must be this fog. First I lend my voice to an already sufficiently undignified and acrimonious dispute with an unseen ship, then calmly enter this cabin and assault one of our fellow creatures after having devoured his property. I have forsaken God, I fear.”

“But what that monster was doing to me was something fearful, yer reverence,” Little Arthur advanced consolingly. “You arrived in the nick of time. I was nearly jarred out, I was.”

“Granted,” responded the Bishop, “I had some slight provocation, but Little Arthur, for all of that, it would gall me immeasurably to lose my chance of salvation through saving your wicked life, as invaluable as it may be to you.”

Not knowing which end of this observation to accept, Little Arthur maintained a discreet silence.

In the meantime the situation was developing in the engine room. The man with the black face was telephoning passionately to the captain.

“Yes, sir,” he was telling him. “They’re stealing all my fire, every blessed damn coal.”

“What do they want with your fire?” the captain wanted, to know. “It ain’t as cold as all that.”

“They’re trying to cook some chickens,” the black face roared.

“Where did they find the chickens?” came back the skipper’s voice.

“How should I know that?” screamed the engineer. “And does it really matter? Maybe they flew aboard.”

“Did you say chickens?” asked the skipper. “Sure they’re not seagulls?”

“Think I don’t know the difference between a seagull and a chicken?” the other end of the wire inquired none too pleasantly.

“Not saying you don’t,” said the captain. “But a seagull and a chicken might look a lot alike when they’re skinned or unfrocked or whatever they are when all their feathers are off.”

“They look altogether different,” said the engineer with cold dignity. “And the word is ‘plucked’ in case you want to use it sometime.”

“How do they intend to cook these chickens?” asked the captain, a note of real interest creeping into his voice.

“Fricassee,” howled the engineer, his black face becoming swollen with anger.

“Not a bad way,” said the skipper thoughtfully. “Very fond of chicken fricassee. You know, Charlie,” – and here his voice took on a persuasive note – “you see, Charlie, I’ve been thinking. We’ve been a long time without food. The way things stand I don’t know where the hell we are and where the hell we’re going, and as long as that fire ain’t doing us any good we might as well be using it for something. What do you say, Charlie?”

For a few moments Charlie was unfit to say anything.

“I say,” he managed to get out at last, “that my engine room ain’t no damned galley for a flock of commuters with their goddam chickens. That’s what I say.”

“But listen, Charlie,” said the skipper, trying to reason with the man, “fricasseed chicken’s mighty nice eating when it’s properly done.”

“Should we be worrying about fricasseed chicken,” demanded Charlie, “when it looks like the fishes will be gnawing on our bones?”

“Might as well gnaw on the chickens’ bones first,” came the philosophic voice of the skipper. “Gnaw and let gnaw, say I. How about it, Charlie?”

For reply the telephone broke into an incoherent babble. The skipper hung up the receiver, called a weary-looking deckhand, and went below to deal in person with the situation.

It was a strange scene indeed that greeted the skipper’s gaze. Had it been not quite so small, the engine room or stokehold of the ship would have called to mind a prairie dotted by the fires of early American settlers engaged in cooking their rude evening meal. Perhaps it was because the place was entirely treeless that the captain gained this impression. One glance was sufficient to convince him it would be difficult to find a more unusual situation on any ferryboat anywhere. Commuters, squatting in all positions, were holding chickens or various parts of chickens above piles of glowing coals. So frequently were such figures encountered that the captain found it difficult to walk without stepping on one of his passengers. The room was pervaded with an appetizing aroma of sizzling fowl. It was enough to make his eyes as well as his mouth water. In a corner of the compartment the engineer was standing with a newspaper raised between himself and his uninvited guests. After his conversation with his superior officer he had apparently lost all interest in what was going on in his engine room.

“Hello, Charlie,” said the skipper smoothly. “Catching up with the news, I see.”

“Why not?” replied Charlie over the rim of his paper, “You seem to care more about chicken than running this here ship. I’m interested in racing, myself. Picking tomorrow’s winners.”

“Well,” observed the skipper, “from the way it looks now you’ll have to cable in your selection from mid-Atlantic. I don’t even smell land about, but I do smell chicken.” He smiled engagingly down upon his passengers. “You’ve taken things into your own hands, I see,” he continued in a not unfriendly voice. “Well, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. If you provide us with a brace of chickens, we’ll let you continue cooking yours.”

Several chickens were immediately produced and offered for the inspection of the skipper. Selecting two promising specimens of looted fowl, he turned to the newspaper.

“Charlie,” he began, “what do you know about cooking chickens? Here are two beautiful birds.”

“Everything,” replied Charlie surprisingly. “Slip me those chickens and I’ll show these home-loving train-snatchers how to cook. I don’t care what happens to this engine room any more.”

He rigged up his odd-looking oven and put the chickens through their paces. As he watched the expressions of envy on the faces of the pioneers gathered round him, his annoyance died away and he felt himself a little consoled.

“Can’t you cram just one more in that contraption?” a voice asked wistfully. “My fingers are better done than my chicken.”

Good-naturedly the black-faced man complied with the request. Sometime later when the skipper emerged from the stokehold on his way to the pilot house he was gnawing on a chicken leg and carrying various carefully selected parts in his other hand. The driver of the assaulted truck followed the happy man’s progress with gloomy, misanthropic eyes.

“Gord,” he muttered, “what a trip this turned out to be. Even the captain himself is no better than a thief.”

•   •   •   •   •

Quiet water and moonlight and a world lost in fog. Hardly anyone awake now. A few shadows by the rail. Sleep had overcome the commuters, their stomachs no longer empty. Back in the cabin they, the commuters, were draped and crumpled about in fantastic shapes as if a spell had been laid upon the ferry, its passengers turned to inanimate objects, inanimate save for the noises they made in their sleep. These are never attractive.

Moonbeams strained through fog – an eerie effect. It was like living inside a huge halo, its edges washed by black infinity. The ferry glided smoothly on, ever maintaining its position in the center of a white circle. It was as if New York had been packed in cotton and magically removed. There was no New York, no Jersey shore, no open bay slashed by the prows of ships. Only fog horns sounded remotely in the darkness, and the occasional warning clang of a bell.

“Sounds like a cow out there in the fog,” said Peter to the girl leaning on the rail beside him. “A lonely cow with a bell on grazing among the waves.”

“The old girl will get all foggy inside,” said Josephine poetically. “Maybe we’re scaling a Swiss Alp and are coming to a pasture.”

“Wouldn’t mind that in the least,” said Peter.

“But wouldn’t I be a drawback?” she asked. “A sort of depraved lady fly reclining brazenly in the ointment?”

Peter looked down into the face upturned to his. Full lips a little moist, and shadows round the eyes. Somehow she contrived to make herself every inch a woman. And she made every inch felt.

“You’re more like a wicked spider,” he told her thoughtfully. “A dangerously attractive spideress.”

He heard her laugh softly and did not dislike the sound.

“I cling to the words ‘attractive,’ ‘wicked,’ and ‘dangerous,’ ” she said. “They are more than I usually get from you. How about going inside and lying down?”

“A dangerous spideress would make a suggestion like that,” he observed.

“I mean on opposite sides of the ship,” she assured him. “Under the circumstances your interpretation would be madness.”

“Then I say, no go,” he said. “My head feels too giddy to park itself anywhere at present, and this damn arm keeps on throbbing. I like it out here with you.”

“Mean that?”

“Yes, strange as that may seem.”

“I don’t think it’s so strange. After all, I’m sort of nice.”

“Can’t quite see you as being nice, Jo. You’re not at all that way. You’re really a very bad girl.”

“That’s how I mean,” she agreed. “I’m nice and bad.”

“Just plain bad,” he said. “Why did you tell Aunt Sophie and Sanders and all those people that you were going to have a baby by me?”

“Well, aren’t I, sometime, maybe?” she asked. “I thought I could read the writing on the wall.”

“To begin with you’re not,” said Peter, “and in the second place if you were going to have one of my babies there’d be no writing on the wall about it.”

“All right, mister,” she answered with a little shrug. “Perhaps the wish was father to the thought.”

“Your prospective babies are none of my business.”

“You’re a hard man, Peter Van Dyck.”

“But a just one,” said Peter.

“Can’t you find a little moral weakness somewhere about you?”

Silence. Jo moved her tireless young body closer to the man’s good arm. She liked being there. He was such a clean man. Daring little dreams came to her across the water – half-formed hopes swaddled in fog. But deep in her heart Josephine did not have any too much hope. Her confidence was all on the surface.

“Peter.”

“Well?”

“You’re letting me stay mighty close to you.”

“Why bring the matter to my attention?”

“Do you like us this way, Peter, all scrunched up?”

“The way you phrase it hardly presents an idyllic picture to my eyes. Scrunched up – no. Make it better.”

“I suppose you’re such an old stick you just can’t help being a stickler. Scrunched up is a fine way. It’s so cozy.”

“Sounds almost immoral.”

“Your mind is much worse than mine, Peter.”

“Wouldn’t be a bit surprised, young lady.”

“I’m glad you told me, Peter. I like your mind that way.”

“You deliberately make it that way. I think I’ll call you a trull.”

“Oh, what a word to call me! I rather like it, too. I’d have done well in the days of Falstaff.”

“You’d have run the fat knight ragged.”

“Sir John was ragged most of the time – spiritually as well as sartorially.”

“You and Sir John have much in common,” said Peter, considering her thoughtfully. “Do you read books ever?”

“Mostly pornography,” she told him. “I read until I come to the nasty parts, then I stop to think of you.”

“Please spare me your thoughts.”

Silence again. The slow indolent churning of propellers and the crinkling splash of waves gossiping sleepily under the bow.

“Peter.”

“All right. What now?”

“Isn’t it funny about being in love and all?”

“I don’t know. What are you trying to drag me into?”

“I mean about being in love,” the girl went on in a small reflective voice. “When you are in love, I mean. It’s so swell if everything’s okay. Not quite so lonely any more, and everything takes on a fresh meaning – becomes much more interesting. Even dull things. Happy days waiting just round the corner. And all the time you’re kind of quiet and still inside. It’s like waiting for the curtain to go up or just after it’s gone down. And you have private thoughts about God, and wonder if you’re all right with Him and if He’s going to see you through. Whenever you pass a furniture store you stop to look at the beds. I like a nice bed, Peter. Don’t you?”

“I feared you would end up on some lewd note,” he remarked, secretly feeling the mood behind her words. “What have we in common with a bed?”

“I don’t mean right now, Peter. Not this very minute. But someday we might own a bed between us, don’t you think?”

“How should I know? We might own a flock of beds.”

“Oh, you mean the babies. About how many babies would you like?”

Peter grinned at the fog.

“Oh, anywhere between five and ten,” he told her.

“I might manage five,” she said, “but ten – oh, why bother about that now? We’ll see how we stack up after the first five.”

“Sure,” replied Peter. “We’ll take stock of ourselves then, but in the meantime, has it occurred to you that we’re not even married yet?”

“It has,” Jo said regretfully. “And what about Yolanda?”

“Yes,” said Peter in a flat voice. “What about Yolanda?”

“Is it all fixed about our loving each other?”

“You seem to have arranged it quite nicely,” said Peter.

He was more in earnest than he cared to admit even to himself.

“Go on, then,” she urged in a low voice. “Say it just once. You can lie a little if you have to.”

“You mean tell you in cold blood – in so many words – that I love you?”

“I don’t care how many words you use, but I would like you to do a little something about your blood. Can’t you warm it up a bit? I’ve been like that about you for a long time.”

“How do you mean like that about me?” he asked. “Go on and say it yourself.”

“I love you, Peter,” she said in a small voice.

Jo was no longer a bold girl. Rather crushed and subdued, if anything. A little timid. She had thought a lot about love, talked a lot about love, and practised it a little, but never before had she told a real live man she loved him and meant it as she did now. And Peter, looking down at her, whether it was because he was becoming a trifle delirious or just beginning to realize what previously he had vaguely suspected, decided it would not be at all difficult to tell Jo he loved her, provided he said it very quickly and slurred a little on the edges.

“IloveyouJo,” he said at full speed ahead. “Damned if I don’t.”

“God, how quick!” gasped Jo. “Where did it get to? Never mind. It sounded swell while it lasted. And now?”

She held her face up to his. Peter complied. He was at it quite a while. Long enough to let the freshly risen Yolanda witness more than enough.

“Peter!” she cried. “Are you mad?”

“Through and through,” he muttered, removing his lips from Jo’s slightly parted ones.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Six Characters Embark in More Fog

For a brief moment Peter stood confronting Yolanda, his face shocked expressionless; then, remembering her question, he actually feigned madness. Waving his hands about as if leading a multitude in song he burst out in a high, quavering voice with:

“My country ’tis of thee,

Sweet land of liberty –

God help the king.”

“Stop that awful noise,” Yolanda commanded imperiously. “It’s bad enough to be caught doing what you were doing without singing about it.”

“He’s a little light in his head,” Jo said in a quiet voice. “And he’s not singing about it.”

“He’s crazy in the head if he thinks he’s fooling me,” ripped out Yolanda. “He acts more like a drunken man than a delirious one.”

To force conviction home on Yolanda, the quavering voice redoubled its efforts, this time running short of words:

“I love your rocks and brooks

Gangsters and dirty crooks –

Who’s got the king?

I—”

“Peter Van Dyck, if you don’t stop making those sounds you’ll wake the whole ship up,” said Yolanda.

“Spangles,” said Peter inanely. “Pretty spangles and banners by the score.”

“Do you think he’s really gone?” Yolanda asked doubtfully.

“Must be,” Jo replied. “He mistook me for you. Didn’t you notice how he was acting?”

“I hope you don’t imagine I let him carry on like that?”

“I sincerely hope not,” said Jo. “But just the same, it was pretty nice. Hadn’t you better get him inside? He might suddenly take it into his head to go in swimming.”

“Heavens!” exclaimed Yolanda. “He appears to think he’s a seagull now.”

Josephine considered the man seriously.

“Either that or a dog,” she said at last. “Come here, Fido.”

“There’s not much similarity between a seagull and a dog,” Yolanda remarked in a superior voice.

“Not much,” replied Jo, “but a little – just enough to make it interesting. Couchez-là, Fido.”

“Avec vous,” snapped Peter. “I know French. Ha, ha! Thistledown!”

Yolanda took the fluttering man by the arm and led him babbling cheerfully into the cabin. Jo turned back to the fog. There was a happy mist in her eyes. If that kiss had lasted thirty more seconds she would have been sure of the man for life. As it was, she felt reasonably safe. She had even room enough in her heart to feel pleasurably sorry for Yolanda.

Dawn, instead of dispersing the fog, drew it closer together. From the air above her the voice of the fog horn sounded wearily. Josephine did not mind. The fog could solidify for all she cared. She felt herself authentically in love, and she was ready and willing to fight it out along those lines. She tossed all scruples into the face of the soggy day.

•   •   •   •   •

Morning became evening and evening became night and the commuters became bored. Beer seemed so far away to Aspirin Liz that she found it almost impossible to think of it in the abstract. Whatever good works the Bishop had set out to perform in New Jersey – a state which can stand a lot – remained unaccomplished. Drawers no longer played an important part in Little Arthur’s life. Even Yolanda had forgotten about the house party. She was in the presence of grim reality. Having slept in public, an object of desirous scrutiny from God knows how many pairs of vulgar eyes, the fastidious young woman felt herself slightly deflowered. As for Peter Van Dyck he was far from well. Unlike the others he had been unable to get any real sleep. His arm was swollen and feverish. The Bishop feared infection, but kept his fears to himself. Alone of the little party Josephine seemed unperturbed. Yolanda gained the impression that her fiancé’s secretary was actually deriving no little ill-bred enjoyment from the situation. Yolanda was not far wrong. Jo had decided that so long as she could be near Peter it did not make much difference what the ferry did on the surface of the sea. Her only anxiety was that the boat might take it into its head to do things beneath. The way the situation stood between herself and Peter gave her a strong desire to live. So she contented herself with bathing the man’s arm and enjoying the assaulted truckman’s attempts haughtily to disregard her hateful presence. She even grinned at him.

Commuters were spread out all over the place. The decks were littered with bodies in action or repose. Several packs of cards had mysteriously appeared, and little groups of gentlemen were playing pinochle as happily and as stolidly as if they had been seated opposite one another on the 5:15 or the 5:32.

Fresh water was running low, and faces were growing dingy. Yet it may be surprising to learn that many of the passengers on that long lost ferry were not so distressed as it might seem. Men and women with serious obligations to meet, debts to pay, dull engagements to keep, too familiar faces to look at and voices to hear, stockings to wash, furnaces to stoke, dogs to walk, and even letters to write found in the fogbound ferry a good excuse ready to hand.

In one quarter of the cabin a harmonica had broken out in spasm of lippy rhythm to which several stenographers danced from time to time. Jo finally succeeded in dancing with the assaulted truckman, a development which surprised the man as much as it pleased Bishop Waller, who enjoyed seeing people happy and on amicable terms.

The few encounters they had with passing but unseen ships led only to further unpleasantness and deepened the captain’s misanthropic attitude towards life in general and seafaring men in particular.

“What sort of ship are you?” he was once so ill-advised as to inquire of a wandering vessel.

“Oh, I’m just the loveliest sort of ship,” came back the derisive reply, and the captain almost swooned from humiliation in the privacy of his pilot house.

“Go to hell!” he shrieked through the fog as soon as he had collected his scattered faculties.

“Can’t even find that,” the fog retorted in tones of deep dejection.

“Have you no idea where you are?” asked the skipper, a little mollified by the other’s obvious discouragement.

“Yes,” came the ready reply. “I have no idea where I are. How about yourself?”

“I have no idea, too,” yelled the ferry captain.

A moment of brooding silence.

“Well,” came the voice from the unseen ship, “this conversation doesn’t seem to be helping either one of us. You have no idea and I have no idea. That makes two no ideas. Wonder who’s cornered them all?”

“God knows,” retorted the skipper.

“I guess He’d have a high old time putting his finger on me at this moment,” observed the other. “It’s a hell of a helpless feeling for a great big ship.”

“Think of me!” exclaimed the skipper. “I’m only a little ferry.”

Silence, then muffled laughter.

“You’re only a little what?” asked the fog.

“I’m only a little ferry,” declared the skipper in a voice soft with self-pity.

“Fancy that!” came back the other voice in most insipid tones. “I thought you sounded queer all alone out there in the fog. You poor dear! Just a little ferry – a pansy, as it were.”

The next minute a deckhand had caught the maddened skipper just as he was on the point of hurling himself from the rail of his ship. The man was blue in the face, and the fringes of the fog round him were curling up beneath the violence of his obscenities.

“Tell ’em you’re an ocean liner next time,” the deckhand said soothingly to his captain. “Don’t let on you’re a ferry.”

The captain turned on him a face in which remained only the remotest suggestion that it had once been human, then staggered to his pilot house.

“And so are you,” he mouthed as he slammed the door behind him.

Wondering so was he what, the deckhand sat down on a packing box and breathed heavily into the fog.

•   •   •   •   •

Josephine in the wet darkness was leaning over the rail of the slowly drifting ferry. Her ears and eyes were strained to the point of exhaustion in their efforts to tear from the fog the secrets that lay behind. Her eyes failed utterly, but her ears gave food for hope. From somewhere far away in that mysterious chaos of night and fog sounding vaguely like rustling leaves in a fast receding dream, came the faint, rhythmical cadence of water washing against rocks. From what great distance the sound came, the girl was unable to estimate, but that it came from land she was convinced. To Jo at that moment land was all-important. Peter was getting no better. If anything he was worse. She disliked the feverish glitter in his eyes and the tight discolored skin round the wound. Exhausted as he was, he had been unable to go to sleep. The realization of Peter’s condition had forced Josephine to revise her opinion of the ferryboat. It was no place for a wounded man. She wanted him safe on dry land, and in some desperate way, unknown at the time to herself, she intended to get him there. For a few seconds longer she listened. That distant murmur still crept to her through the fog. Rapidly she made her way to the pilot house.

“Captain,” she began without preamble, “there’s land somewhere about.”

“Yes?” grunted the brooding man. “About what – the North Pole?”

“Maybe,” said Jo. “But there’s land nearer than that. Listen.”

The captain thrust his head out of his door and listened. Several times he nodded, then closed the door and returned to his brooding.

“Well,” asked Jo. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing,” replied the skipper. “It ain’t near enough yet to do us any harm.”

“Harm!” cried Jo. “What do you mean, harm? Aren’t you going to land this ferry?”

“You mean run my ship aground on an unknown shore – maybe a reef or a mud flat? Don’t be silly, lady.”

“But if you don’t land somewhere,” Jo protested, “We may end up in Cape Town.”

“What’s wrong with Cape Town?” inquired the captain.

“Who said anything was wrong with Cape Town?”

“You don’t appear to want to go to Cape Town.”

“Would you want to go to Cape Town?” Jo flung back.

“If what?” asked the captain.

“If what?” she demanded. “How do you mean, if what?”

“I don’t understand the question,” the captain replied hopelessly.

“I didn’t understand yours,” she told him.

“Then let’s begin again,” he suggested. “You asked me would I like to go to Cape Town, and it seemed to me you hadn’t finished what you wanted to ask and that you meant to say, would you like to go to Cape Town if something or other happened, or words to that effect. Anyway, I’m tired of Cape Town now and I don’t want to go there any more.”

“Neither do I,” Jo agreed. “But that place we hear might be Atlantic City for all you know.”

“Well, I certainly don’t want to go to Atlantic City,” replied the skipper in exasperation. “Of all places to land up in!”

“Will you tell me, in God’s name, what’s wrong with Atlantic City?” she asked in a tired voice.

“Will you tell me what isn’t wrong with Atlantic City?” he retorted.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“It’s nice we agree about something,” he replied bitterly. “Some little thing.”

Jo felt inclined to ask him how he would like to go to hell, but instead she tried to find out where he did want to go.

“I want to get back to my slip,” the captain told her. “I’m not an excursion boat, lady. I’m a – —” He stopped suddenly, remembering his recent encounter with that tormenting voice in the fog.

Jo felt stumped and discouraged. It was not that she and the skipper spoke two entirely different languages. They spoke too much alike. That was the trouble. Probably the fog had driven both of their minds off on a spur line. Glancing through one of the pilot house windows, her eyes encountered a small boat lashed to the deck. And whether or not her mind was off the main line, it still continued to function.

“If you don’t want to go to Cape Town or Atlantic City,” she said in a stipulating voice, “or any other nice, reasonable seaside resort, will you let me borrow that little boat?”

“Anything to get you out of this pilot house, lady,” the captain replied with sincere dislike. “I’ll get her into the water for you and bid you goodbye with the best of feelings. As soon as the fog gets you out of my sight I’ll try to get you out of my mind.”

“You don’t have to go as far as that,” said Jo. “What’s to become of the rest of the passengers?”

“You can take every damn one of ’em with you if you want,” he assured her. “If not, they can stay here until somebody comes and drags me home.”

“I suppose you expect the grand fleet to escort your damn scow to its slip?” said the girl annoyingly.

But the captain was past being annoyed.

“I don’t care if it’s the grand duke,” he replied. “I ain’t going to endanger my ship for a handful of commuters.”

A few minutes later Jo addressed herself to Little Arthur.

“Can you row, shrimp?” she asked him.

“No,” replied Little Arthur. “I never learned how.”

“Only how to pickpockets, eh?”

“I’m trying to forget that,” he said.

“I used to row,” put in Bishop Waller. “Very fond of the exercise at one time.”

“You never will be again,” said Jo. “Not after tonight.” She turned back to Little Arthur. “Little man,” she continued, “if a man of God and honest ways is willing to row, you can at least try. And that’s just what you’re going to do if you want to come along with us. You’re going to row us to land if you have to get out and push.”

“I can bear a hand with one arm,” said Peter.

“It’s a silly-sounding sentence,” she told him, “but I guess your heart’s in the right place.”

“A sailor once rowed me round Central Park,” Aspirin Liz contributed reminiscently.

“Yeah, and after that treat what did he do – collapse?” Little Arthur inquired.

“Are you looking for trouble?” the lady asked with terrifying quietness.

“No,” said Little Arthur quickly. “We’ve got trouble. I was just thinking – —”

“Don’t,” Aspirin Liz admonished him. “That is, don’t think about me.”

Up to the moment of departure Yolanda Wilmont protested against this new and dangerous venture. She could see no good resulting from going rowing at night in a fog. However, as the others gave every indication of abandoning the ship as well as herself and the luggage unless she altered her attitude, Yolanda reluctantly tagged along with the strangely assorted party.

“If you hadn’t insisted on bringing that dangerous criminal along,” she told Peter, “you never would have been shot. Obviously the murderer was aiming at him.”

“Can’t say as I blame the murderer,” said Aspirin Liz, heaving herself over the side of the ferry to the small boat below her.

“I blame him for missing,” put in Jo, following the ex-model down into what impressed her as being illimitable space turned uncompromisingly black.

“Ain’t you all ever going ter stop nagging at me?” asked, Little Arthur. “Everybody should be friendly and all at a dreadful time like this.”

It required the close coöperation of both the Bishop and Peter, wounded as he was, to lower the small crook into the bobbing boat. Passengers shouted advice while from the upper deck the captain peered down at them sardonically.

“For a worthless thing, Little Arthur,” grunted Peter, “you place too high a value on that damned life of yours. Pardon the word, Bishop.”

“Perhaps it would make us all feel better if we called a temporary armistice on the niceties of speech,” observed the Bishop as his foot searched thoughtfully for something or anything in the darkness below him. “At the moment I feel like expressing myself in terms employed by only the most recondite students of obscene language.”

“So long, chief,” called Jo from the boat to the black-faced man who was looking gloomily over the side. “Next time I steal a chicken I’ll let you cook it for me.”

“Hope I never see a chicken again,” said the chief. “Good luck, lady.”

“Hope you never see one of mine,” put in the truckman. “Here, little miss,” he called down to Jo, and stooping, passed her several packages. “You forgot to take these when you and the rest of this ship’s company were robbing my truck. Thanks for the dance.”

“Thank you,” replied Jo. “How did you know I liked cheese and crackers?”

“I sort of hoped you didn’t,” said the man, grinning down at her.

“Shove off,” Peter sang out to the Bishop, who was resolutely manning the oars. “And, ladies, please stop milling about so blithely. The boat might lose its patience.”

As the little boat shoved off into the fog and darkness, a cheer broke from the passengers lining the rails of the ferry. Individual voices quickly became indistinct and merged with the general babble. Suddenly a parting impulse of malice warmed Little Arthur’s chilled breast.

“What did you say you were, Captain?” he called in a high-pitched voice. “Only a little what?”

Immediately the fog was made hideously vocal by the voice of the now invisible skipper. Jeers and catcalls broke from the passengers. They seemed to be directed against their own ship’s officer. The Bishop increased his stroke.

“If you’re trying to row us out of the way of all that bad language,” said Josephine, “you might just as well save your strength, Bishop. We don’t mind it in the least.”

“It’s odd, but neither do I,” Bishop Waller got out between strokes. “It gives me a kind of vicarious kick – I think that is the word.”

“Listen,” Jo commanded. “It would never do to lose that offshore sound or whatever it is.” For a moment the voluntary castaways held their breath in anxious silence. “All right,” said Jo at last. “It’s coming from dead ahead.”

“Can’t you say straight ahead?” asked Little Arthur, “We’re too close ter being the other.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

From the Nowhere Into the Unknown

“Things are not so desperate,” said Jo, breaking a heavy silence made a little less awe-inspiring by the heaving of the indomitable Bishop. “Here we all are, the six of us. Three men and three women – just as it should be. There’s Peter and myself, Yolanda and Little Arthur, and – —”

“Just call me Liz,” supplied the retired model. “Everybody does. Aspirin Liz – the former being one of my vices.”

“A name in a million,” said Jo. “I like it. Well, then, there’s Aspirin Liz and the Bishop. All cozy in a little boat.”

“With more than enough water under our feet,” put in Little Arthur miserably, “to swaller us all in the blink of an eye.”

“Are you by any chance bracketing my name with that unwashed mite of a criminal?” Yolanda demanded arrogantly.

“I knew he was a criminal,” replied Jo, “but I didn’t know he was an unwashed one. How did you find that out?”

“I am accustomed to clean men,” Yolanda asserted coldly. “Clean men with fresh linen.”

“Have you gone as far as that with Little Arthur already?” inquired Jo. “You must have worked fast and deftly.”

“One needs only to look at the man to get an unpleasant conception of what lies beneath,” vouchsafed Yolanda.

“Is that any way to talk?” Little Arthur was on the verge of tears. “Call yourselves ladies, do yer? If you’d like to know it, I am washed, and if I hadn’t been looking for a – a – —”

“For clean linen,” said Jo helpfully.

“Yes,” said Little Arthur. “If I hadn’t been looking for a fresh pair of those I’d of been taking the old ones off right now in the privacy of my own kip.”

“Do you?” inquired Jo.

“Do I what?” asked the pickpocket.

“Take ’em off?” the girl replied.

“Of course I do,” the small man lyingly stated.

“I didn’t know,” Jo told him. “Some men don’t. You impressed me as being such a type.”

“Don’t see why you should be discussing my habits at all right out loud in this fog and weather,” Little Arthur complained. “Ain’t we got no private lives?”

“Thus far,” observed the red-headed girl, “my life has been much too private. I have decided to take steps.”

“We won’t have any lives at all,” Peter put in, “if you two charming young things don’t abandon Little Arthur’s drawers as well as what’s in them, and listen like hell for the shore.”

“Well meant but indelicately expressed,” replied Jo. “In moments of great danger the mind has a way of fixing itself on trifles. Should we sing, perhaps? People always do in little boats.”

“Not a bad idea, that,” Bishop Waller pronounced. “Singing lightens the spirits. Why not try a snatch of a song while I row?”

“I know a song,” said Aspirin Liz.

“Let’s have it,” suggested Peter.

“Anyone got a pill?” she asked.

“Might have one in my bag,” said Jo. “I’ll look.”

The girl succeeded in finding a rather soiled aspirin tablet and passed it to Liz.

“What are you going to use for water?” Little Arthur asked.

“Never use water,” she said. “Keep it under my tongue. It’s better that way.”

Little Arthur shook his head in the darkness. This woman was hard indeed.

When the tablet had been satisfactorily adjusted under Aspirin Liz’s tongue, she broke suddenly into violent song, her voice floating mournfully across the water:

“O bury me not on the lone prairie-e-e

Where the wild coyotes will howl o’er me,

But lay me out in a quiet churchyard

In a grave dug six by three.”

So sang Aspirin Liz as a depressed silence fell upon the occupants of the little boat. Their spirits were not lightened.

“Golly,” said Little Arthur with a slight shiver. “That’s an awfully sad song. Them howling coyotes. I can hear ’em now.”

“Wish I could,” replied Jo. “I’d let a chorus of wild coyotes howl o’er me if they’d give me a prairie to park on. There must be something solid behind all this fog and darkness.”

“Wonder what it is,” said Yolanda in a subdued voice.

“Africa, maybe,” Jo answered.

“Wish it were the Riviera,” observed Peter.

“Ain’t we got enough water already without adding some foreign river to it?” the ignorant little felon demanded.

No one paid any attention to him, each being occupied with his or her thoughts.

“It’s a miscellaneous cargo we have aboard,” observed Aspirin Liz at last. “A bishop and a crook and a lady of fashion – what are you, Mr. Van Dyck? I’m a model, myself – that is, I was one before I lost my shape.”

“Don’t know what I am exactly,” Peter replied, somewhat in doubt himself. “What am I, Jo?”

“An indifferent coffee importer,” answered Jo. “And I’m his invaluable secretary.”

“He’s the only surviving male of one of New York’s oldest families,” Yolanda Wilmont proclaimed, not without pride.

“Go on! Is he, now?” said Little Arthur. “Well, I’m proud to be wearing his drawers, but if we don’t find a scrap of dry land soon it looks like that old family is about due to lose its last male survivor.”

“Right, Little Arthur,” Jo maliciously agreed. “Instead, they can lay claim to having the soggiest nonsurviving male of any old family anywhere.”

“That, at least,” remarked Peter, “would lend me a little distinction.”

“I like you better dry,” said Jo, “and very much alive – pulsating, in fact.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Peter.

“My dear,” Jo replied. “Spare the Bishop’s feelings.”

“You’re a wicked lady,” declared Little Arthur. “And you use horrid words – pulsating.”

“I’ll use horrid words on you,” Jo told him. “Change places with the Bishop or this skiff will ride higher from the loss of one feather-weight crook.”

“Which end of these sticks do you pull?” gasped Little Arthur after the perilous exchange of seats had been made, not without endangering the safety of all hands. “Just to hold ’em still is hard enough, much less waggling ’em about.”

“Don’t make yourself out any dumber than you are,” replied Jo. “Put the wet ends of those sticks in the water and pull your small but black heart out.”

“Sure, sonny,” said Aspirin Liz encouragingly. “Find a pocket in the fog and pick your way through it.”

“I can’t stand wisecracking women,” Little Arthur remarked to misty chaos. “Bad taste and worse manners.”

Slowly the rowboat moved ahead, but very slowly – too slowly. Peter critically watched his valet.

“Little man,” he said, “you’re not pulling those oars. They’re pulling you. Put your shoulders into it.”

“Put my shoulders into what?” groaned Little Arthur. “Wish I could put them into a bed.”

“Use your back, man,” the Bishop commanded somewhat impatiently.

Little Arthur laughed hysterically.

“Use my back,” he sneered. “Can’t even use the mere end of my back. Every time I try to put it down on the seat these here oars deliberately flip it off as if it was a moth. First thing you know I’ll be flying. And you ask me to use my back.”

“If you don’t use your back I’ll kick it,” said Jo.

“Want me to sit on your lap?” asked Aspirin Liz. “That would hold it down.”

“That would break it down,” he told her. “Let me alone for a minute. I’ll get the hang of it soon. What do you expect a pickpocket to be – a motorboat all of a sudden?”

“I expect you’ll be a sinking body if you don’t get a move on,” Josephine declared.

“Have a heart, lady,” he pleaded. “This was your idea, having me row. I didn’t ask for the job.”

“I think he talks too much,” said Peter. “Let’s gag the little blighter.”

“I’m gagging already,” the little blighter complained. “No need to help me. Fair sick I am, what with all this brutality and bobbing about.”

“Pipe down, everybody,” Jo commanded. “I hear something.”

Something was wallowing close by in the fog.

“Who’s there?” called Peter.

“Only us,” replied a familiar voice ironically.

“You mean the ferry?” Peter almost screamed.

“Yoohoo!” called the voice. “That’s who we are.”

“For God’s sake go away,” yelled Peter.

“What for?” said the voice. “We like it here. Want to come back home?”

“No!” shouted four voices from the rowboat, Little Arthur being too discouraged to answer and Yolanda too disgusted.

All sorts of unpleasant noises were launched from the ferry. Personal insults fell thick around them. Even Little Arthur was stung to life and action.

“How’s our dear sweet captain?” he inquired, with an astounding vocal inflection.

Immediately the captain told them not only how he was, but also how he hoped they were and where he hoped they would go. He referred individually and collectively to the characters, antecedents, and habits of everyone in the rowboat, and finished up by threatening to run the small craft down. It was too much for Little Arthur. He stood up suddenly, and like Ajax defying the lightning, impotently thumbed his nose at the fog in the direction of the ferry. There was a loud cry and a small splash. Little Arthur was no more with them.

It required some minutes to drag the wet snatch-purse back over the side. He was delicate about it. His fear of rough handling was equal to his fear of cold water. He was a small, soggy mass of moist lamentation, the utter futility of ever changing one’s undergarments being his chief source of complaint. At last he lay panting in a puddle in the bottom of the boat.

“Bruised, body and soul,” he muttered. “A nervous breakdown, no less. A mangled man.”

“If you ever try to give us the slip again,” Jo gritted at him between her small white teeth, “you’ll be a mutilated man.”

“What!” he choked. “Do you think I tried to do it?”

“Of course you tried to do it. Wanted to run away,” said Jo.

“Across the bottom of the sea, I suppose?” he retorted. “I ain’t no blarsted mermaid.”

“Well, if you’re not a mermaid,” she continued, “I’d like to know what you are. Certainly, you’re not human.”

“Might not be human,” the man admitted, beginning to doubt it himself. “Don’t feel like it right now. But I ain’t no mermaid, at any rate, and I ain’t no trained seal, either, like you think I am, making me do boat-racing all over the fog.”

“Little valet,” put in Peter with calm conviction, “if you don’t get up quietly and quickly and stop all that yapping, I’m going to put you beyond the reach of the law forever, and that with this one hand.”

Little Arthur took a look at the one clawlike hand extended over him and thanked his God it was not two.

“Yes, sir,” he muttered. “Can I sit down by you?”

“I’m going to row,” said Peter. “Rested up, Bishop? I’ll take the starboard oar.”

When this arrangement had been worked out, the rowboat once more got under way. The gratuitous but hardly constructive suggestions of the ferryboat’s passengers followed them through the fog, then gradually died away. Silence settled down on the occupants of the rowboat. Peter and the Bishop were too deeply occupied to speak. Little Arthur was too miserable, Yolanda too aloof. Josephine listened for offshore sounds, and Aspirin Liz seemed content to sit and do nothing. The minutes piled up and drifted by until time became as nebulous as the fog. Still the two rowers stuck to their oars. Peter was cracking under the strain. His face had grown a little more haggard, his cheeks flushed. Josephine quietly removed the oar from his hand and seated herself by the Bishop.

“Give way,” she said. “I hear waves washing on something more substantial than fog.”

Peter sank down by Aspirin Liz and again the boat moved forward, tunneling its way mole-like through the fog. Sounds of a chugging motor came from the port side.

“Who are you?” called the Bishop, resting on his oar.

“A group of American citizens, sir, running rum into their native land,” came the prompt reply.

“You’re frank about it,” Bishop Waller declared.

“We can afford to be in this fog,” the voice answered cheerfully. “We’re more than frank – we’re abandoned.”

“We’re abandoned, too, but without any rum,” Josephine informed the American citizens.

“That’s bad,” came the sympathetic reply. “Perhaps you would care for a bottle?”

“We’d devote our lives to it,” yelled Peter. “Dedicate them to the bottle.”

“Have you a corkscrew?” called Jo.

“You all can’t be American citizens,” came back the voice, “if you haven’t one of those things. Stand by to break the Eighteenth Amendment, and keep on shouting.”

The chugging of the motor grew nearer, and presently a hand holding a quart bottle, and reminding Peter of a picture of Excalibur in some long-forgotten book, was thrust through the fog.

“It is open,” said the hand cryptically. “Remove the cork and drink.”

“Awfully good of you,” said Peter, plucking the bottle from the fog.

“Don’t mention it,” replied the voice, equally courteous.

At this moment a stealthy breath of wind blew the fog aside. The moon swam through the mist. The night became vivid.

“Why, you’re all naked,” said Peter, too stunned to be surprised.

“Yes, quite,” said the man in the motorboat. “We all are.”

A synchronous gasp broke from the rowboat.

“God send back the fog,” prayed the Bishop, in a fervid voice; then added, with a note of prudence: “Temporarily, at least.”

Although there were only five naked figures in the motorboat, they were quite enough for those in the smaller craft. To them the motorboat was fairly swarming with naked figures. It was by no means difficult to distinguish between three men and two women. It is a singular thing yet nevertheless true that there seems to be a lot more to five naked persons than to five persons either fully or partially clad. There was certainly more than enough to those five naked bodies.

“Gord,” breathed Little Arthur. “How come you lost all yer clothes?”

“We didn’t lose them,” the naked spokesman replied. “We took them off.”

“Whatever for?” the crook asked incredulously.

“Don’t ask such silly questions of the gentleman,” Josephine primly told the pickpocket.

“I see no good reason for asking him any questions at all, silly or otherwise,” put in Yolanda, her eyes averted but not closed.

“Oh, don’t mind us,” said the man easily. “This is our way of doing things, that’s all.”

“It’s a poor way, indeed,” said Bishop Waller. “Wouldn’t it be more thoughtful to do such things elsewhere?”

“We don’t mind where we are,” declared the man.

“You seem to think we’re considering your plight,” replied the Bishop, “whereas in reality we’re considering only ours. It’s distressing enough to be investigating an unknown body of water without the enforced companionship of five naked ones.”

“Oh, you’ll get used to all that,” said the man prophetically.

“Do you mean by that,” inquired the Bishop, “that you plan to continue this close association?”

“If that great big strapping woman with the mole on don’t stop grinning at me,” chimed in Little Arthur, “I’m going to jump clean back in the ocean.”

“Where’s the mole?” demanded Jo.

“What a thing to ask,” the valet retorted indignantly. “It’s where nobody should see it, that’s where it is.”

“Then why look?” asked Bishop Waller.

“Nonsense,” Aspirin Liz observed with the utmost calm. “She’s a fine figure of a woman. I was very much like her myself in my day.”

“What do yer mean?” cried Arthur. “Mean ter say you ran about naked?”

“I usually stood or lay,” replied the imperturbable Liz.

“And you openly admit it in public?” the small crook got out in a scared voice. “Oh, you are a one, you are. A regular broad and no mistake.”

“Fiddlesticks!” snapped the retired model. “I made my living that way.”

“It ain’t a thing to dig up out of the past,” Little Arthur told her, “much less to brag about when we’re all in danger.”

The naked man and his companions had been enjoying this conversation. One of the women now spoke.

“Why don’t you get naked like us, midget?” she asked Little Arthur with a touch of malice. “Or are you afraid you’d fall apart?”

“Mind your own business,” the small man answered stoutly. “Should be ashamed of yourself.”

“I’ve lost all shame,” said the woman.

“Madam,” pronounced the Bishop, “if you’ll pardon me, you’ve lost a lot more than that, and if you don’t do something about yourself rather soon I’m afraid I’ll lose the training of years and go a little bit mad.”

What the woman could have done about herself will never be learned, because the fog intervened at that moment and devoured her nakedness.

“Mr. Van Dyck,” resumed the Bishop when the unique group had faded from view, “I think it would be just as well if someone else tried that bottle other than yourself.”

“Pardon me,” said Peter, passing the bottle to the Bishop. “The incident rather unnerved me.”

“I’m hardly tranquil myself,” replied the Bishop. “And then, of course, there’s the fog. That is equally or, rather, almost as dangerous.”

He raised the bottle and drank, then passed it to Jo, his rowing partner.

“My child,” he said in a hoarse voice, “this will strengthen your arms.”

It must have had that effect, for no sooner had the girl polished off her drink and passed the bottle to Aspirin Liz than she and the Bishop began to row with surprising speed and irregularity. The boat darted capriciously through the fog. Once it pivoted crazily round, then started off at its mad pace. Evidently Josephine and the Bishop were intent on seeing which side of the boat would get anywhere first.

“How far is the nearest land?” called Peter after the motor boat.

“That depends on which way you’re heading,” came the rather disturbing reply. “Not far in one direction, but thousands of miles in the other.”

“Which way are we going?”

“Just about the middle,” the voice drifted back.

“A lot of help that is,” grumbled Little Arthur. “Can I have some of what’s in that bottle?”

“Give the little convert a dram or so,” puffed the Bishop. “It will do him a world of good.”

“I don’t want to do him any,” said Aspirin Liz. “Here you are, crime wavelet, choke yourself to God while you’re still redeemed.”

“No need ter get nasty about it,” objected Little Arthur, accepting the bottle with an eager hand. “If a bishop can keep this stuff down I ought ter be able ter get it down, at least.”

With a feeling of fascinated revulsion Yolanda watched the Adam’s apple as it bobbed and quivered, paused, then bobbed again in Little Arthur’s throat.

“There seems to be even less sex distinction in this boat than in the other,” she observed bitterly.

Little Arthur took the bottle away from his lips and eyed the young lady reprovingly.

“Shouldn’t talk about sex,” he rebuked her. “We’ve seen too much of that already. Have some of this?”

“After watching you,” she informed him, “I find it easy to refuse.”

“Ain’t nobody civil in this here boat?” the small man asked hopelessly.

“I’m just sufficiently civil to accept a drink from you, Little Arthur,” Peter told him, reaching for the bottle.

“Even though I am trying,” remarked the Bishop, resting a moment on his oar, “still I can’t quite forget that singular encounter of a few minutes ago.”

“Wouldn’t have been more surprised,” remarked Aspirin Liz, “if that boat had been chuck-full of bounding lions.”

“No doubt we’ll never learn the beginning or end of that story,” Josephine said. “This whole business has a dreamlike quality.”

“I don’t mind it,” replied Peter drowsily. Fatigue, grog, and fever were assaulting him with sleep. Soon he was well off, half drunk and half in dreams.

“It certainly wasn’t no way for American citizens to act,” put in Little Arthur with an air of one who had always done a little more than his duty to his country.

“Look! What’s that?” cried Aspirin Liz in a startled voice pointing to a white strip lying pallid beneath the filtered light of a moon swinging high above the fog.

“That’s dry land,” Josephine informed her. “Ever hear of it before?”

“It seems to have been connected with my far-distant past,” said Aspirin Liz, her eyes devouring the smooth beach. “That and beer.”

A few minutes later the rowboat scratched its nose on the sand, but Peter Van Dyck never knew it. He was unconscious of what lay behind him as well as of what lay ahead. Had he not been so, he might have put back to sea.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Naked Physician

Peter Van Dyck awoke to find a naked figure standing by his bed. This hardly placed the figure in Peter’s mind. To him almost any naked figure would have been a considerable shock. This one was. In the course of his thirty-four years Peter had scarcely associated at all with naked figures. From what he saw of this one, he had no desire to take up the practice at this late date. Therefore it was with a feeling of mingled constraint and alarm that he swiftly cast his eyes over this unclad body before resolutely looking at something else. The man was carrying a small black bag. This added to the shock, this bag. Its owner was standing in an attitude of negligent but well-bred repose which struck Peter as being rather incongruous in view of his appalling condition.

Could this stranger be, by any remote chance, the telephone man gone a little mad, Peter wondered, or a skilled artisan subject to one of those embarrassing mental aberrations popularized by Freud? Could he possibly have called to do things to a typewriter or a drain pipe or to perform some other highly specialized operation involving the removal of his clothes? Far simpler it was to assume that the man had been on his way to take a bath when he had suddenly been seized by a desire to look on another human face. But why the black bag? Peter decided to ask rather than to wonder.

“Hello,” he said. “Who are you?”

The man smiled much more naturally than Peter had believed a naked man with a black bag could smile.

“I am the doctor,” he said in a well-dressed, cultured voice. “The doctor of the house.”

Peter gagged a little at this.

“What,” he began rather fearfully, “what sort of a house is it?”

“A delightful one, my dear sir,” said the doctor.

“In what sense?” asked Peter.

“In every sense,” the man assured him.

Suddenly Peter remembered. His arm. He must have grown worse during the night.

“Listen, Doctor,” he said anxiously, “I must be sick as hell, if you didn’t stop to put on your clothes.”

“Nonsense,” replied the doctor shortly. “Your arm is perfectly safe. I call on all my patients like this.”

Peter shrank back among the pillows.

“Oh,” he said faintly. “You do?”

“Why not?” snapped the doctor.

“Why not, indeed?” repeated Peter with a sick smile. “Being a doctor and being used to naked bodies and all, I suppose you don’t mind … much.”

“Much!” exclaimed the doctor, laughing scornfully. “Why, my dear chap, I don’t mind at all. Like it, in fact.”

“And your patients?” inquired Peter.

“They like it, too,” said the doctor complacently.

“They do?” asked the incredulous Peter.

“Certainly,” replied the doctor. “Why not?”

“I wish you would stop asking me why not,” Peter complained, once more running his eyes rapidly over the naked man. “From where I am I can see any number of reasons why not.”

“What’s wrong with me?” demanded the doctor. “Tell me that.”

“Merely that you’re as naked as the palm of my hand,” Peter observed. “Apart from that small item you look perfectly natural.”

“My patients don’t seem to mind,” retorted the doctor.

“I can’t understand that,” said Peter. “I should think they’d all pass out from sheer panic.”

“My dear young man,” said the doctor, striding over to the window with his little black bag, “don’t be childish.”

“Come away from that window,” cried Peter. “Don’t make this a public scandal.”

“Why worry about that?” said the doctor carelessly.

“Somebody has to worry about it,” replied Peter. “I have no desire to have you seen in my room. It’s not at all nice, Doc. Wouldn’t be quite so degrading if you happened to be a woman, although that would be bad enough.”

“Naked women,” answered the doctor, flexing his limbs by squatting suddenly. “You’ll have more than you want of those in here.”

Peter was too alarmed by the man’s words to be revolted by his actions.

“What!” he exclaimed. “Naked women in here?”

“Why not?” asked the doctor, turning from the window.

“Let’s be reasonable,” said Peter. “You know why not without asking me. You’re a bit of a joker, aren’t you, Doc?”

“Not at all,” the doctor answered coolly. “Some of my favorite patients are women, if you’d like to know.”

“You mustn’t get much work done,” Peter remarked thoughtfully.

“Just what do you mean by that, young man?” asked the doctor.

“Everything,” said Peter. “All.”

“You’re vulgar,” replied the doctor severely. “Lots of my patients are ladies, and all of them are naked.”

“I know,” said Peter, “but at least they have bedclothes over them.”

“I pull those off,” snapped the doctor.

“Good God!” said Peter. “What a doctor!”

“As a matter of fact,” the doctor went on meditatively, “the ladies seem to take to it quicker than the men.”

“Take to what?” asked Peter fearfully.

“Being naked,” replied the doctor.

“Do you mean to your being naked or to their being naked?” Peter wanted to know.

“To our being naked together,” said the doctor, neatly dislodging with his left foot a spring fly from his right shin.

“Well, that seems natural, at least,” went on Peter, “although I rather boggle at the term ‘ladies.’ ”

“That’s what they are,” said the doctor. “Perfect ladies.”

“Perfect in what sense, may I ask?”

“In the right sense, of course.”

“You seem to have a rather distorted conception of just what is right,” observed Peter. “For example, I don’t think it’s at all right for you to call naked on equally naked ladies.”

“Why not?” demanded the doctor. “I cure them, don’t I?”

“I know,” went on Peter reasonably, “but curing them of one complaint might easily give rise to another.”

“There are never any such complications, I assure you,” said the doctor with great dignity.

“Then there must be something funny about the whole business,” muttered Peter, thinking of Josephine’s legs. “Or else you’re a little more than human or ’way below par. I don’t understand it at all.”

“No,” replied the doctor. “You’re too much a creature of the flesh.”

Peter laughed sarcastically.

“You’re entirely a creature of the flesh,” he retorted. “I, at least, am part bed.”

At that moment, his troubled gaze straying through the door carelessly left open by this mad or abandoned doctor, Peter witnessed a little incident not given to every man to behold. A naked man, blithely carrying a ladder under one arm and swinging a pail of paint in his free hand, was footing it silently along the hall from one direction. From the other came a woman, equally innocent of clothing. She was bearing a breakfast tray. Peter’s natural assumption was that the woman upon seeing the man would drop her tray and run like hell while the man would do likewise. Instead, he was shocked to see them dexterously pass each other with an agreeable nod and continue calmly about their business. The man in the bed drew a deep breath, then his eyes sought the doctor’s.

“Do all the servants in this place go about like that?” he asked. “And for God’s sake don’t say ‘Why not?’ ”

“I feel like it,” said the doctor. “How else would you have them go about?”

Peter momentarily thought of the Bishop, then a small grin relieved the tenseness of his lips.

“Couldn’t you dig up a couple of towels for them?” he asked.

“And what, pray, would they do with the towels?”

“Hang them about themselves somewhere,” said Peter. “Even you should see a little sense in that, Doc.”

“ ’Fraid I’m a trifle dense,” remarked the doctor, now busy with Peter’s arm. “Can’t see it at all. Exactly where you would want them to hang the towels is beyond my comprehension. However – —”

“You are sadly lacking in imagination,” said Peter, a little bitterly.

He said no more for the reason that he had suddenly disappeared beneath the bedclothing. A naked woman, bearing bandages and a basin of warm water, had come briskly into the room.

“Here you are, Doctor,” he heard her say. “Sorry I was a little late. There’s a gentleman in Seventeen who refuses to give me his drawers.”

“Sit it down, sit it down,” replied the doctor testily, and Peter wondered under the blankets how a naked man was able to talk like that to a naked woman.

The doctor was struggling with the coverings. He was trying to pull them off.

“No, you don’t,” grunted Peter. “You didn’t give me any pajamas.”

“Have we any pajamas on?” cried the doctor, panting a little from exertion.

“No,” replied Peter. “You have not. You’re both naked as hell and you’re trying to make me like you.”

He heard the girl laugh horridly, then fresh hands were laid on the coverings. It was an unequal struggle. What with Peter’s wounded arm there were four hands against one.

“How far are you going to pull those coverings down?” he gasped.

“All the way,” gritted the doctor. “Clean off.”

And he did.

Peter, wild-eyed, gazed helplessly up at the two bodies bending over his. The girl’s eyes were merry while those of the doctor were mad.

“No more of this larking,” the man snapped, skillfully bathing Peter’s arm.

“Larking,” said Peter, amazed. “Did you think I was doing that?”

“Either that or making a lot of fuss over nothing.”

“Nothing!” cried Peter in a frenzied voice as he ran his eyes down over his body. “Oh, God, he calls it nothing.”

“Stop trying to attract attention to yourself,” rasped the doctor. “You’re not so hot.”

Peter was almost speechless with indignation.

“Call attention to myself?” he repeated. “I ask you – could I be any more conspicuous than I am?”

“Certainly,” replied the girl, her blue eyes dancing with unholy merriment. “In evening clothes you might pique my curiosity. Even in a pair of drawers you might give me a little thrill.”

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” he asked her in a wounded and wondering voice.

“Not a bit,” she replied. “It’s all in the day’s work.”

“Then God knows what you must do at night,” he answered. “There’s no use for me to try to look somewhere else, because wherever my eyes turn one of your naked bodies manages to get in the way.”

“Why not look at yourself?” suggested the doctor.

“That sight is even harder to bear,” said Peter.

“Funny,” remarked the girl. “I don’t seem to mind you at all.”

“Why don’t you both crawl in bed with me and make it a clean sweep while you’re at it?” Peter asked sarcastically. “You don’t seem to mind anything.”

“I’d hate to do that,” said the doctor fastidiously.

“Is that so?” said Peter. “May I ask what is wrong with me?”

“I believe you’re a thoroughly evil-minded man,” replied the doctor. “You’ll have to watch your p’s and q’s round here.”

“Strikes me I’ll have to watch a damn sight more than that,” muttered Peter.

“Don’t fret,” put in the girl soothingly. “We’ll keep an eye on you.”

“That’s just what I’m worrying about,” said Peter. “There’ll be too many eyes on me.”

“You’ll have quite a lot to do with your own eyes,” said the girl. “Don’t forget that.”

“Not for a minute,” Peter answered.

There was a scuffling sound at the door as Little Arthur, armed with a mop and pail, scrambled nakedly into the room.

“Boss!” he cried wildly, running up to the bed. “They’ve taken away all my clothes and I’m as naked as a babe.”

“Naked as a what?” asked Peter.

“A babe,” replied Little Arthur, a strange and awful sight. “A small child.”

“You impress me as being much nakeder than even the smallest child,” said Peter. “You’re simply epic.”

“Don’t know what that is, but how about yourself?” asked Little Arthur. “And look at that brazen hussy.”

“At least I’ve a bandage on,” replied Peter. “And don’t ask me to look at anything. Never thought I’d see so much in all my life.”

“What the hell good is a pickpocket in a nudist colony, I ask you?” the little man tragically demanded.

“That is something to ponder on,” observed Peter. “I should imagine you’d have to be far cleverer with your hands than you’ve ever been before.”

“Might just as well have no hands at all,” Little Arthur answered bleakly.

“So far as pockets are concerned,” added Peter. “However, I should imagine that many men in a nudist colony would find one pair of hands hardly enough. By the way, are we in a nudist colony?”

“Either that or among the white-slavers,” breathed the little crook. “It all comes to the same thing.”

“Which is?” inquired Peter.

Little Arthur blushed.

“Don’t ask that,” he stammered, “in front of this here woman.”

“Oh,” said Peter. “Have you met these nudes already?”

“If not them, I’ve met a dozen just as bare,” Little Arthur lamented. “Can’t keep my eyes in one place long enough to tell one of ’em from the other. Don’t know which way to turn.”

“Why not crawl into your pail?” asked Peter.

“Wish I could,” the naked felon replied. “If it wasn’t full of water I’d stick my head in it.”

“Do it anyway,” snapped the doctor, speaking for the first time since Arthur’s arrival, “and hold it there awhile.”

“Nice way for a doctor to talk,” said Little Arthur, offended. “It’s a murder house, that’s what it is, and worse.”

“I was speaking personally rather than professionally,” the doctor told him. “Speaking professionally, I’ll have to ask you to get about your business, whatever it may be.”

“They want me to swab up the bathroom,” the undernourished snatch-purse complained with a sob in his voice. “Think of it. Me swabbing up a bathroom the way I am.”

“I should think the way you are would be ideal for bathroom swabbing,” allowed Peter.

“You’re almost as bad as they are, boss,” the little man replied. “Don’t you feel sort of funny lying there naked and all?”

“Sure,” said Peter. “I feel so funny I think I’m going to cry.”

“Hurry,” commanded the doctor. “If you don’t want to get into any trouble, do exactly as you’re told. Otherwise, things will go hard with you, let me assure you of that. We stand for no nonsense.”

“If you ask me, that’s all it is,” said Little Arthur, moving slowly towards the door. “Too damn much nonsense. Running around naked and carrying on. I suppose you think that’s sensible? Well, it isn’t. It’s just plain childish, I calls it. It’s worse than that – it’s nasty, that’s what it is. It ain’t even human.”

The doctor pointed a sharp instrument at the scolding crook.

“Want me to operate on you?” he asked.

Little Arthur instinctively glanced at himself.

“Oh, no,” he breathed. “No indeed.”

Peter chuckled in spite of his own unprotected state. He had never seen this mite of a man so utterly sincere.

“Then be gone!” thundered the doctor.

“See here,” protested Peter. “You can’t talk to my man like that.”

The doctor looked darkly at Peter, then suddenly snipped the gleaming blade at him.

“How would you like that?” he asked in a gloating voice. “Or this?” Here the doctor made an even more excruciating snip at Peter as if visualizing the horrid deed.

Peter shrank visibly in every fibre of his body.

“There’s no need to be so vivid about it,” he muttered. “So garishly dramatic. I’d do exactly as he says, Little Arthur, if you want to remain intact. This man is sort of crazy.”

“Can’t I stay here with him?” pleaded the little man. “Naked as he is, I can at least recognize his voice.”

“Go,” said the doctor, and Little Arthur, mop and pail, disappeared from the room.

“Listen, Doctor,” began Peter when his valet had gone nakedly to whatever lay ahead. “I’ve been hesitating over this question for some time. Tell me honestly – am I in a madhouse or a socially prominent brothel, or in the shrine of some fanatical cult, or just where am I?”

“I am not in a position to satisfy your puzzling curiosity,” replied the doctor, repacking his little black bag.

“Then it certainly must be terrible,” observed Peter, “because you apparently stop at nothing.”

“Come,” said the doctor to the girl. “We must be skipping.”

“Don’t skip before me,” put in Peter. “I don’t think I could bear the sight and still retain my reason.”

“Your wound, which luckily is slight,” continued the doctor, ignoring Peter’s remark, “will be dressed again this evening.”

“Couldn’t you leave me a little extra dressing?” Peter asked. “Just a bandage or so? I’ve got an idea.”

“That would be cheating,” said the girl, following the doctor from the room. “Besides, it would look extremely silly.”

“I feel extremely silly,” Peter called after her as she left the room without closing the door.

No sooner were his two visitors gone than Peter sprang from the bed and tiptoed to the window. Protected by a curtain he discreetly peered out upon a green, rolling lawn splashed with sunlight and early flowers nodding up encouragingly at him in a breeze blowing fresh from the sea. And there was the sea itself, the sea looking a little unfamiliar now that it was clear of fog. Forever and forever it seemed to run, that flat, streaming surface, into a cool blue solitude untroubled by voice or wing. In his present naked predicament Peter very much wished he could enjoy a reasonable quantity of that solitude himself. Shifting his fascinated eyes from this ever-reaching expanse, he turned them on the dense, deep green of trees sweeping round the house in a half-moon of leafy protection. Branches waving in the wind, white clouds above, and white bodies on the lawn, white and gleamingly naked. An appalling sight, this, and yet not unpicturesque. Peter drew a deep breath. A little of his profound belief in the established order of things began to drop away from him. In the face of so much nudity he found himself doubting the reality of such terrifically reiterated facts as the Empire State Building, Tammany Hall, and crooning. Had the bodies been black instead of white, he would have felt a little better about it. Black bodies and brown ones had a way of getting naked. But, then, the black races were not essentially interested in things of the flesh like the white race. No. Black people took the flesh at a stride and passed on to the supernatural and other things of the spirit with only an occasional fleshly picnic – a good rough-and-tumble sort of orgy that cleared up a lot of nonsense and left their thoughts free for other and more important considerations.

A period was put to his confused meditations by a furtive sound in the room behind him. Turning, he beheld still another naked body. But this naked body was by all odds more disconcerting than those he had previously encountered, and this in spite of the fact that it was the most alluringly fashioned body it had ever been his good fortune to behold.

For a moment there was a tense, watchful silence in the room as wave upon wave of emotion dashed over Peter, but before he went down for the third time a bright little idea came to what he hoped would be his salvation. With nerveless limbs he staggered to the bed and disappeared beneath its coverings. However, the same bright idea seemed to have found an opening in Josephine’s demoralized mind. Stopping only to close and lock the door, she rushed across the room to the bed and, dragging the clothes off Peter, promptly emulated the example he had so brilliantly set.

“Give me those bedclothes,” grated the gentleman, laying frantic hands on the coverings, “and get out of my room and bed.”

Josephine hung on grimly.

“I won’t!” she gasped. “I won’t!”

“But you’ve left me naked as a coot,” cried Peter.

“That’s your worry,” she said. “Better you that way than me.”

“I don’t know,” replied Peter distractedly. “I can’t say. Both ways are pretty awful. I do know, however, I’m not going to lie here like this and argue about it with you.”

So saying, he gave the coverings a brutal tug, and Josephine’s naked body appeared as Peter’s burrowed under. It was a scene of desperate activity and concentration. Chivalry and gentleness were sacrificed to meet the demands of modesty.

“A nice man,” Josephine panted. “A lecherous little mole of a man. Snatch all the clothes from a naked woman, will you? Well, we’ll see about that. I’ll have you stripped in the shake of a lamb’s tail.”

“Mine’s shaking enough for a whole flock,” came Peter’s muffled voice. “Go away and stop all this talking.”

“I should worry how much it shakes.” Jo flung herself at the coverings and neatly twisted them from Peter, wrapping them round herself.

“This can keep up forever,” muttered Peter, “until we’re so exhausted we won’t be able to cover ourselves at all.”

“If you hope that’s going to happen you’re very much mistaken,” said Jo. “I’m under these coverings for good.”

“Don’t see why you’re under them at all,” he protested, churning the air with his hands. “An astonishing thing to do – crawling nakedly into bed with a man.”

“You crawled nakedly into a closet with me.”

“I know, but a closet’s different.”

“Why, may I ask?”

“Obviously a closet is not arranged.”

“What in the world do you mean?”

“I mean that a bed is always associated with vice and carrying on,” he told her. “You should know that yourself.”

“I sleep in my bed,” she replied.

“Well, you’re not going to sleep in mine, and that’s flat.”

“I’m not going to do anything else.”

“Who wants you to do anything else? Go on. Go back to your own bed and sleep.”

“I can’t,” she protested. “Perfect strangers keep coming in. I was looking for Aspirin Liz when I saw you. Then I said to myself, ‘Any port in a storm,’ and here I am.”

“Let me assure you, my girl,” said Peter, hoping to frighten her, “you picked far from a safe anchorage for your body. I’m drifting into danger myself.”

“With you, Peter,” she replied in a voice he both feared and suspected, “I can face any danger.”

“Sure,” said Peter, “you might even think up a few. No fooling now. Give me back those bedclothes. It’s your turn to be naked for a while.”

“Let’s compromise,” suggested Jo.

“We are compromised,” he retorted. “If this gets out we’ll be ostracized for life.”

“If what gets out?” asked the girl, popping up her head interestedly.

“This situation,” chattered Peter, flipping over on his stomach like a netted fish without having the comfort of knowing whether he had improved himself any. “Please throw some coverings on me.”

“He wants me to cover him, no less,” she said with nasty derision. “Cover your own vast nudity. I’m too busy with mine.”

By a miracle of contortion Peter succeeded in worming his body beneath the bitterly contested bedclothes only to find himself face to face with his disconcerting bedfellow.

“Aren’t we in a terrible fix?” he asked her in an awed voice.

“I don’t know,” said Jo. “Some persons might not think it so bad.”

“You’re awful,” he breathed, looking at her almost with admiration. “I can’t stand things like this. Actually, I’m nearly exhausted from excitement. Might swoon at any moment.”

“You’re far from complimentary,” she told him, her red head thrust out of the clothing within three inches of his. “What did you think of my one-piece, Peter?”

“From the glance I got,” he said, “you weren’t wearing any.”

“I certainly was,” she declared. “One piece of skin.”

Peter shivered at this.

“How you put it!” he muttered. “Would you ever have believed two days ago that we’d be like this in the same bed?”

“Yes,” she said without batting an eye.

“What!” exclaimed Peter.

“Certainly,” she replied quite calmly. “Why not? Other people have.”

“Not nice people,” he argued.

“Very nice people,” she told him. “Some of the best.”

“You mean married, of course.”

“Well, that would tidy up the situation a bit,” she replied thoughtfully, “but in view of the extraordinary circumstances in which we find ourselves through no fault of our own I, for one, am willing to waive certain little formalities, or at least to delay them.”

“You talk too much,” he answered, “altogether too much, and you don’t mean one eighth you say – that is, I hope not.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Jo. “Anyway, I know I love you.”

“Is this a nice place to tell me that?”

“If I didn’t tell you that,” she retorted, “the situation would be just plain wicked.”

“I’ve never been in a wickeder,” he confessed.

“Well, I’ve been a shade more remote myself,” she admitted. “When one’s in Rome, however, I suppose one might just as well make hay while the sun shines.”

“I’m under the impression these particular Romans don’t,” said Peter. “The doctor seemed very snooty.”

“Don’t what?” she asked.

“You’re always so damn blunt,” he complained. “I mean they don’t make hay.”

“Then they don’t sound like Romans to me,” said the girl. “Those old devils were always making hay.”

“You carry logic to the point of depravity,” he objected.

“I don’t understand,” said Jo.

“Well,” he began with an effort, “I don’t quite understand myself, but it’s like this: Logically speaking, this situation calls for a certain line of conduct, whereas – —”

“Almost demands it,” said Jo.

“Don’t interrupt. Whereas, morally speaking, if you were a lady you’d get the hell out of here and go back to your own bed.”

“But, morally speaking, suppose I wasn’t a lady?” she asked.

“Then naturally we couldn’t continue to speak morally,” he replied.

“I’m glad of that,” said Jo, running her fingers through his hair.

“Don’t do that,” he told her. “Don’t make the slightest move.”

“Shouldn’t I do this?” she asked, a white arm slipping snake-like round his neck.

“No,” he replied. “Not that nor anything like it.”

“What will you give me if I don’t?”

“I haven’t a damn thing to give,” gloomed Peter. “They didn’t even leave me a check book. If they had I’d tear out the checks and rig up a girdle for myself.”

“You’d look sweet,” said Jo.

“Might not look so well,” he told her, “but I’d feel a lot less public.”

“You know those women?” Jo asked in a conversational voice.

“No,” Peter replied. “I don’t. What women?”

“Those women,” Jo went on, “who claim that if their husbands came home unexpectedly and found them in bed with some man, the husbands would show how evil-minded they were if they thought anything wrong about it – do you know those women, Peter?”

“There may be longer and less ably stated hypothetical questions,” replied Peter, “but I never answered one. No. I don’t know those women, thank God.”

“Well, what I was trying to say,” she continued, her arm tightening round his neck, “is that I’m not at all like those women.”

“And if I happened to be your husband,” said Peter, “I wouldn’t believe you if you were.”

“Then that clears away a lot of obstructions,” she observed.

“May I ask what all this is leading up to?” asked Peter.

“To this,” said Jo.

She kissed the man and forgot to stop.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

In Pursuit of Privacy

“You have the most evil-looking head of red hair I ever saw,” Peter vouchsafed lazily some time later. “Just like some of the smaller flames of hell or those snake-like locks of Medusa. And your face is baleful, too, in a beautiful sort of way.”

He was lying on his right side, critically surveying the girl’s face, touching it here and there with an inquiring fingertip.

“I don’t know how I can lie here in bed and look at yours,” she told him with a small companionable yawn. “God must have run out of color or lost interest when He came to your hair and eyes. You’re merely tinted. To me you are singularly rabbit-like.”

“In what sense, may I ask?”

“In appearance,” she said. “I daresay you consider yourself the Casanova of the coffee world now.”

“No,” he replied. “I have no such exalted aspirations. I am merely a man who will stand for so much and no more.”

“It’s too bad you’re not the kind who will go just so far and no further,” Jo retorted.

“One can hardly do that with you,” he said easily. “You’d drag them the rest of the way.”

“Oh, so I’m the responsible party,” she observed, gouging him in the cheek, “while you, you poor dear, are the wronged one.”

“Exactly,” was the complacent reply. “I look upon myself, thank God, in the most detached light. Only in a remote way, like an extra on a crowded stage, am I connected with the drama of your inevitable downfall.”

“I don’t like that crowded-stage crack,” the girl replied sombrely. “You were the first player in my young life. And as for that downfall stuff, don’t confuse life with fiction. There’re more ruined women in the world today eating three square meals with an easy conscience than there are homes for wayward girls.”

“You’re hard,” said Pete.

“No, I’m not,” she retorted. “I’m reasonable. And I’m not at all unromantic. For instance, I think it’s quite beautiful being here with you like this. Won’t forget it for some time.”

“When you feel that you’re beginning to, just drop round when you’re not busy and I’ll try to refresh your memory,” said Peter.

“You see,” asserted Jo triumphantly, “you’re really the hard-boiled member of this team. Men usually pretend to make quite a fuss over the women they’ve ruined. You strike me as being a little proud, a little strutty.”

“I confess I don’t know,” he admitted. “No man ever attempted to ruin me, but as you say, I do suspect myself of a slight feeling of elation.”

“As much as I hate to take the wind out of your sails,” she said, “in justice to myself I must remind you that far from being your victim you’re jolly well mine.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” scoffed Peter. “You’re merely a butterfly on the wheel, crushed and broken – another conquest, no more and no less.”

“You’ll be crushed and broken, you little coffee bean,” she retorted hotly, “if you don’t watch your step. I ruined you, my lad. You didn’t ruin me.”

“It hardly seems sensible to be lying here disputing over which of us ruined the other,” he remarked. “It’s a highly technical question.”

“My eye, it is,” exclaimed Jo. “You’re damn well seduced and I did it.”

“Have it your way,” he said amiably. “Just so long as one of us was seduced, I don’t care much who it is.”

“Oh, you don’t,” she snapped. “Just like a man. Ruination means nothing to you.”

“Inasmuch as you insist on me being the ruined party,” he mildly protested, “I’m doing my best to be as cheerful as possible among all the débris.”

“And succeeding almost too well,” she retorted. “One would think you actually enjoyed it.”

“Well,” confessed Peter ruminatively, “you must admit it has its lighter side.”

“I admit nothing,” she said.

“Under the circumstances that would perhaps be best,” he agreed. “In fact, I’d deny everything, if you don’t mind an impersonal suggestion.”

“I’m telling Yolanda right off,” she told the man with malicious enjoyment. “Then I’m going to tell the Bishop, and after that I’m going to get him to marry you to me.”

“How are you going to manage that? Seduce him, too?”

“If necessary.”

“Rather than that should happen, I’ll marry you, if not of my own free will at least without public lamentation.”

“Then you do care!” cried Jo, impulsively flinging herself upon him. “How sweet!”

“I was thinking of the Bishop,” he protested, making a poor showing of warding off her flashing arms.

Fortunately for this record Josephine’s hoydenish activities were interrupted by a peremptory knocking on the door which was followed by the command of a stern voice. The sound of the knocking returned to Peter a terrible realization of the situation in which he found himself. And with the arrival of this realization his presence of mind departed. In a naked panic he sprang from the bed.

“Open the door!” cried the voice. “This is strictly against the rules. Open the door immediately.”

“I don’t know the rules,” chattered Peter.

“You should know enough not to do a thing like that,” the voice replied in high reproof.

“My God,” muttered Peter, his face blanching. “The whole world seems to know already. Like what?” he asked aloud.

“Don’t quibble with me, young man,” said the voice. “If you don’t open this door I’ll have it broken down. Is there a woman in there with you?”

“What made you get that quaint idea?” asked Peter, motioning Jo to silence.

“There’s a girl missing,” came the answer. “And sometimes new arrivals carry on.”

“Carry on how?” called Peter, sparring desperately for time.

“When were you born?” queried the voice.

“This is hardly the proper moment for vital statistics,” retorted Peter. “Go away and leave that door alone.”

Fresh voices could be heard in the hall – the patter of bare feet. There were sounds of suppressed laughter and giggling – frolicsome slaps on bare flesh. Peter closed his eyes and shuddered. He pictured a mass of naked bodies waiting outside the door to witness his disgrace. The pounding was resumed. In his desperation he forgot his wounded arm and began to tear a sheet in strips, thoughtfully putting one aside.

“What are you doing that for?” Jo asked in a low voice.

“Through the window,” he told her. “Tie the blankets together.”

“I mean the sheet you put aside,” said the girl.

“I’m going to wear that,” he replied briefly.

“What about me?” she asked.

“Haven’t time to think of that now,” he muttered. “I’m much too busy.”

“Sir Galahad in the flesh,” she said in an awful whisper as she sprang from the bed. “A little nude coward.”

Busily she began to tie the blankets together as the pounding was redoubled on the door.

“Open this door, I tell you!” cried the voice. “What are you doing now? What can you be doing?”

“Use your imagination,” snapped Peter.

“It seems fairly obvious,” shouted the voice on a note of bitterness. “Here goes the door.”

A resounding thud shook the door as Peter grabbed the blankets from Jo, added his strip to them, and, securing one end of the rude line to a leg of the bed, tossed the other end out of the window. Twisting the remaining sheet round his body in bizarre tufts and slashes, he hurried to the window.

“One moment, my small Mahatma,” said Jo in a low, unpleasant voice. “Are you planning on leaving me behind?”

“Not making any plans for you,” he replied. “I’m simply taking care of myself.”

Without even glancing down to see what fate lay below him, Peter seized the knotted bedclothing and disappeared through the window, his wounded arm paining unnoticed beneath its bandage.

“Damned if I’ll let him get away with that,” Jo muttered, her eyes searching in vain for some garment to wear in her flight. “Honor is lost, but pride dies hard.”

She ran to the window, and with a prayer in her heart to the god of impulsive maidens, lowered herself on the strip. Peter, glancing up with a strained face, almost lost his grip. More stunned by what he saw above than by what he feared below, he continued on his way, grimly wondering the while if the world had ever witnessed so indecent an escape staged in any language.

Jo speedily overtook the queer-looking object below her. Soon she was ready to pass him, but hardly in a position to do so.

“Can’t you find some place to sit on, other than my head?” Peter inquired wanly.

“How can I?” she called down.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “That’s what I’m asking you.”

“I’m doing my best,” she assured him.

“You’re doing too damn well,” he grunted, “if you want to know, you’re doing your best to crush me to earth.”

For answer Jo reached down with a momentarily freed hand and snatched the sheet from his body. Peter emitted a small shriek of dismay.

“There are too many people on the lawn,” she told him. “I need this.”

“Can’t see a thing for your feet,” he got out. “They’re dangling in my eyes.”

“You must look pretty from down there,” she retorted.

“From here you’re nothing to sneeze at, yourself,” he retorted.

“A lot of people are looking down at me,” said Jo. “A lot of faces from your window. They’re furious.”

“They’d be frozen from this end,” he assured her. “Wish I were back in the fog.”

His wish was almost granted, for Jo, twisting the ends of the sheet round her neck, allowed the covering to flow down over her body and continue on over part of Peter’s. The effect was astounding. It was that of a creature or thing that had started out in life as a red-headed woman and who at some time during the stages of a strangely attenuated evolution had decided to finish off her already sufficiently bewildering body with the long and skinnily dangling legs and feet of a man. The great expanse of mysteries that lay between the flaming head and shrinking feet was luckily more or less hidden from view by the frantically fluttering sheet. As this weird, synthetic figure crawled lumpily down the strip of bedclothing, new arrivals on the lawn were almost too frightened to ask what it was. They seemed to prefer to remain in ignorance rather than to face what could not be otherwise than a decidedly unpleasant fact.

“How much farther do we have to go?” asked Josephine, her strength rapidly failing.

“By this method not much farther, I fear,” Peter drearily communicated through the sheet. “I’m about ready to fall to my death at any moment now. And, by the way, before I go I’d like to say how greatly I’ve enjoyed your comfortable rest on my head. You seem to think I’m an elevator.”

“Hurry up!” cried Jo. “If I start to fall I’m going to take you with me.”

“There is a sea of faces below,” he informed her. “I’d like to fall on all of them, but their mouths are shockingly filled with teeth.”

“You mean dogs?” asked Jo.

“Worse than dogs,” said Peter. “Naked bodies that once were human.”

As if by special arrangement the sheet parted a moment, and Peter found himself gazing in through a window on a scene of domestic activity. A lady was drying herself with a towel while her husband, or rather, one whom Peter piously hoped was her husband, was busily combining the worst features of a setting-up exercise with those of an interpretive dance. Upon seeing Peter, they both nodded casually. Then as he seemed to continue on indefinitely they decided this manifestation was sufficiently interesting to justify closer examination. They hurried to the window.

“I thought you were one,” the man called down to Peter.

“Oh, no,” replied Peter, halting his descent. “I’m at least two.”

“I mean,” said the man, “there’s something above in a sheet.”

“There is, indeed,” answered Peter. “You don’t know what all there is in that sheet.”

“Are you exercising?” asked the dripping woman. “Is this some new wrinkle?”

“I’m wrinkled all over, lady,” came the voice of Jo, “and every wrinkle hurts.”

“If you really want to know,” called Peter, “we’re trying to escape.”

“From what on earth?” asked the man.

“Oh, everything,” said Peter. “All things on earth.”

“From our thoughts,” put in Jo.

“Just mentally run down,” said the wet woman to her husband. “This place will do them a world of good.”

Peter laughed wildly. “It’s helped us a lot already,” he said. “Morally as well as physically we feel like giants refreshed – like a couple of shooting stars, in fact.” Suddenly his voice took on a note of anguish. “I’m going, Jo,” he called. “Here drops nothing. My arm’s gone bad.”

As Jo reached down to grab him, she felt herself being dragged from the line, and even as she fell through space she managed to find some comfort in the thought of what a low hound Peter Duane Van Dyck was to have pulled her with him.

They landed amid a lot of naked bodies, bearing some of them with them to the ground, upon which they lay for one startled moment; then, springing up, dashed across the grass in the direction of the nearest trees. The naked bodies capered after them, laughing and shouting to one another like sportive maniacs. And that was more or less what Peter judged them to be, only he was not so sure how long they would remain in a state of amiable hilarity. The pack of them might undergo a sudden change of mood and rend him limb from limb. There was no room in his thoughts at the moment for the safety of Josephine’s limbs. Embarrassment added to fear forms a sufficiently strong combination to demoralize the stoutest of souls. Dressed, Peter might have been willing to turn and face the world. Naked, he had only one idea, and that was to let the world and all its works very much alone.

Peter might have achieved his burning ambition – the blessed protection of those trees – and so might Josephine, his nearest rival; this temporary relief might have been vouchsafed them had it not been for the intervention of an unkind fate in the guise of ebullient flesh and lots of it. It so happened that as Peter was passing a large, formal flower bed, a large but informal-looking gentleman materialized from it and with amazing agility set himself in motion to spoil Peter’s plans.

“A chase!” cried the man, dancing delightedly after Peter. “Watch me catch you.”

“Not for a moment,” Peter jerked out. “Go chase yourself.”

“This,” replied the man, leaving the ground and landing on Peter’s back, “is much more fun.”

“Damned if I see it,” muttered Peter as he fell earthward on his nose.

“Caught!” cried his excited antagonist. “Now you chase me.”

So saying, he sprang up and, taking a return pursuit for granted, sprinted busily across the lawn. Peter followed the man’s example but not his direction.

“If he’s foolish enough to think I’m going to chase him,” Peter reflected, “he’s due for a bitter disappointment.”

At this moment his speed was checked by the sound of a desperate cry.

“Help, Peter!” screamed Josephine. “If you don’t come back I’ll tell them what you did.”

Peter came back. In fact, he hurried back. Although he could not see Josephine, he had, from the noise she was making, a general idea of her whereabouts. She was under the large body of an exceedingly active woman. The mere thought of laying violent hands on so much bare flesh to which he had never been properly introduced somewhat retarded Peter’s celerity of decision. Tentatively he grabbed the twisting woman, then quickly withdrew his hand. The physical contact had been too much for his nerve centres.

“Come on,” panted the woman, seizing his ankles. “I’ll get you down, too.”

And get him down she did. She got him down and literally incorporated him into the gyrating mass of bodies, arms and legs. He had never realized before that there could be so much unclad flesh in any given quarter of the universe. Even then in this primitive struggle Peter strove to conduct himself as he thought a gentleman should under the circumstances, although exactly how a gentleman should accomplish this was beyond his conception. However, as the woman’s grabs and thrusts became more careless and at the same time more telling, Peter began to realize that if the last surviving male of one of New York’s oldest families desired to acquit himself with honors he must abandon the restraint of a lifetime and do his level best. He must fight fire with fire, which in this situation meant to seize upon whatever part of the woman lay most convenient to his hand. Comforting himself with the reflection that she had exercised little restraint in the handling of his body, he rose and, taking hold of the woman, threw her several feet away. She landed with a gurgle of laughter and promises of further endeavors.

“Listen, lady,” said Jo, hoisting herself up wearily from the grass by means of Peter’s leg, an action which in other surroundings would have filled him with consternation, but which in these he scarcely noticed. “Please, lady,” she continued, “we’re not playing. Honest, we’re not.”

“You give in?” cried the woman, gathering herself for a fresh assault.

Then the Van Dyck blood rose rebelliously in Peter’s veins. Naked or fully clad, a Van Dyck would never give in. Either naked or clad, it was a rare Van Dyck indeed who had ever given anything. Van Dycks always took. So would this one. He took to his heels without further parley, and Josephine took right after him.

“They’re trying to play with us, Peter,” she explained, a shade above her labored breathing. “It’s all a game to them.”

“It may be a game to them,” he flung back, “but it’s serious as hell to me. Hurry up. Get a move on. That woman was simply awful. She was all everything.”

“Wasn’t she lots?” agreed Jo. “Where’re we going, Peter?”

“How should I know?” he asked her. “By rights we should be dashing gayly from the wings of the Follies.”

“The seduction scene in this drama,” said Jo, “was enjoyable if not edifying. I can see some sense in a thing like that, but this naked chase is beyond me.”

“If you hadn’t sneaked into my room,” complained Peter, “this would not have happened.”

“Then do you admit you were seduced?” she asked.

“Is this a time to argue about that?” Peter demanded, glancing over his shoulder at their pursuers, now close at their heels. “It’s no go,” he continued, pausing to let the girl overtake him. “Those naked fanatics can run like hell. We’ll never make the woods.”

“I don’t see what good it would do if we did,” Josephine asserted.

“We could climb trees,” Peter suggested dubiously, “or dodge about behind them.”

“Playing Adam and Eve among the trees is about as comfortable as making love on a beach,” Josephine assured him crisply. “Both are exploded theories.”

“My education along certain lines is less extensive than yours, it seems,” was Peter’s tart rejoinder.

“Well,” replied Jo, “be that as it may, but if anyone had told me a few days ago I’d be spending the week-end arguing about such matters with a naked gentleman in the face of an onrushing multitude of naked lunatics, I’d have said that only the first part was either possible or desirable.”

“Occasionally I’ve dreamed about situations just like this,” said Peter.

“Was I along in those dreams?” Jo asked. “Don’t let’s run any more.”

“Those dreams were bad enough,” he replied, “without you making them any worse. And we’re not running, if you care to know. My arm hurts like hell.”

“It’s bleeding,” said Jo, a spark of concern in her eyes. “And the bandage is coming off. If I wasn’t so worried about my own condition I’d be worried about yours.”

“I’d like to wind the bandage around me,” said Peter.

“It’s not doing any good where it is,” replied Jo. “Want me to do it for you?”

“God, no!” exclaimed Peter, bending on her a pair of agitated eyes. “What a suggestion to make.”

“Why don’t they come and get us?” asked the girl. “Look! They’ve gone into a huddle.”

“A pretty sight,” mused Peter, gazing upon the nude grouping. “Wonder what they’re cooking up?”

He was not long in learning. Suddenly the intimate little mass of bodies resolved itself into individual nudes who galloped towards Jo and Peter. In a moment the two of them were surrounded by a dancing garland of men and women, all singing lustily a song which even in his own embarrassment made Peter feel a little embarrassed for the singers.

“I am coming, I am coming, for the dew is on my feet,” the singers informed the semi-crouching couple in the centre of the whirling circle of arms and legs and everything else.

“I don’t give a damn what’s on your feet,” Peter yelled back, “if you’d only let me stagger away on mine.”

“I am coming, I am coming, where the little birdies tweet,” the naked dancers went on melodiously to explain.

“Aren’t they silly?” Peter asked, turning to the girl beside him. “Honestly, they almost make me forget the figure I cut.”

“The trouble with this arrangement,” Jo complained, “is that when you turn your back on some of them you turn your front to the others. It’s the viciousest damn circle I’ve ever been in.”

“Then why not stand still?” said Peter.

“I’d like to lie down,” she told him.

“All right, let’s,” he replied. “Flat on our stomachs.”

“I think I’ll curl,” said Jo.

“I’d like to wither,” said Peter.

And to the surprise of their prancing entertainers, Jo and Peter thereupon lay down on the grass and arranged their respective bodies according to their conception of what the occasion demanded and what was best to conceal.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Bishop Insists on His Drawers

The naked people, when they saw their quarry go to earth, promptly lost interest in dancing and stood gazing down at the two strangely twisted figures with friendly concern.

“What’s the matter?” one of them asked, “Resting?”

Peter groaned aloud at this, and Josephine, a small white ball, giggled to herself at the questioner’s simplicity.

“No,” she replied. “We’re looking for edelweiss.”

“Edelweiss grows in the Alps,” the man informed her.

“Does it?” Jo said innocently. “Then if you’ll go your way we’ll go ours.”

“There must be something wrong,” another voice declared.

“I suppose it would be quite hopeless,” said Peter, bitterly addressing his words to a cluster of bare feet. “I daresay it would be positively ridiculous to try to make you understand even the most obvious things that are wrong with the situation.”

“Not at all,” a pair of feet replied. “We’re an exceptionally intelligent group.”

“I don’t see how that can be,” protested Peter. “Tearing about all exposed isn’t especially intelligent.”

“In pairs it might be, Peter,” said Jo, “but not in large, impersonal masses.”

“So that’s it!” cried a voice. “You don’t like being naked, eh? Embarrasses you?”

“Worse than that,” said Peter. “It paralyzes me.”

“If you can’t guess what’s wrong with us,” Josephine offered, “I’ll tell you under three separate and distinct headings so you won’t get confused. A: We’re naked. B: You’re naked. C: We’re all naked together. And if that doesn’t make it clear, I’ll toss in another letter. D: There isn’t so much as a doll’s handkerchief to cover a dozen adult members of the male, female, and indeterminate sexes.”

“There’s more of us than that,” someone remarked.

“Well, after you’ve reached a dozen naked bodies,” replied Jo, “it takes a cooler brain than mine to keep an accurate count.”

“Tell ’em to go away, Jo,” said Peter. “I don’t like it here.”

“Go away,” Jo told the naked people. “He doesn’t like it here. The grass tickles.”

“I didn’t say that,” said Peter. “However, it does.”

“What’s wrong with him now?” asked a female member of the party. “Has he lost his voice?”

“I’ve lost everything but an audience,” Peter retorted. “And I don’t want that. Honor, hope, and decency are gone, all gone. I wish you would go, too.”

“If you don’t like being naked,” inquired a hitherto silent member of the group, “why did you come here?”

“Didn’t know anything about it,” declared Peter. “I was partly drunk and partly delirious, and I wish to God I was in that happy state right now.”

“Yes,” supplied Josephine. “We were lured into this fix. A fully clad gentleman met us on the beach and offered us the hospitality of his home overnight. When I woke up, my clothes were gone. Immediately I suspected a bad house. I still do, a little.”

“Mine were gone, too,” proclaimed Peter dramatically, “and in their place was a man – a naked man with a funny little black bag. What a pretty sight that was, first thing in the morning! A naked man with a black bag. My word!”

“That would be our doctor,” a voice said proudly.

“He pretty nearly made a wreck of me,” snapped Peter.

“Yes. That was Dr. Wolf,” another voice declared.

“He looked like one,” replied Peter, “without the sheep’s clothing.”

“He’s a very nice doctor,” cried a girlish voice. “He believes in nuts.”

“So do I,” said Peter, “after this morning.”

“You’re actually brilliant, Peter,” Josephine told him. “If they’d provide us with a pair of blankets we could talk like this indefinitely.”

“Then you are not voluntary nudists, we take it?” a lady inquired.

“That’s right, lady,” put in Jo. “You can take it or leave it. Lying here naked like this is one of the most involuntary acts in my life. It’s almost instinctive.”

“Well,” announced a new voice authoritatively, “you’ll have to come along now voluntarily or otherwise. The leader wants to see you.”

“The leader?” laughed Jo sarcastically. “Do you mean that smooth little snake in the grass who lured us into his establishment? If so, I’m anxious to see him, too. I’ll claw the clothes from his body.”

“He doesn’t wear any,” continued the man.

“He did last night,” said Jo.

“I know,” continued the other impatiently. “He had just returned from a trip to town. Now he’s like the rest of us.”

“He won’t be long,” cried Jo, thoughtlessly springing up in her eagerness for action. “His skin will be in shreds when I get through with him – in tatters.”

“I won’t get up,” groaned Peter. “I can’t get up. It’s against every instinct in my being. Can’t we call on this procurer alone?”

“You seem to have got used to the little lady,” said an insinuating voice.

“She’s an old friend,” explained Peter. “She knew my father.”

“And I fancy he would approve of your conduct?” the voice continued. “You were in the same room together behind a locked door.”

“Sure,” retorted Peter. “My father used to do that himself.”

“How do you mean? He used to do what?”

“Why go into details?” cried Peter. “He was a man who craved privacy – liked naked bodies and everything behind locked doors.”

“We go in for naked bodies here,” the man replied, “and leave everything else alone.”

“That hardly seems logical,” said Jo. “If true, why the naked bodies? Strikes me as living in the lap of an anticlimax.”

“We dance and exercise as God intended us,” the man explained.

“Don’t tell me that,” declared Jo, warming to the argument. “When God made a man and woman He had a lot more in His mind than dancing and silly exercises. He might not have said it in so many words, being quite content to leave a few things to the imagination.”

“I won’t attempt to explain,” replied the man with offended dignity. “I fear it would be quite useless.” Here he paused and turned to two companions. “If you two,” he resumed, “will be good enough to drag that body up from the grass we will bring it along with us.”

“Keep your hands off of me,” cried Peter. “If I must get up I’ll do so under my own steam.”

Painfully Peter rose from the grass and stood huddled up beside Josephine, his eyes ruefully fixed on his feet. A realization of the ordered madness of life was growing in his mind. He had started this naked business himself by dashing unclad down his own stairs in pursuit of a siphon-squirting pickpocket. Destiny, seeing in him a willing subject, had since that unconsidered moment done with him as it pleased. What, exactly, would Aunt Sophie or Sanders do under similar conditions? It stultified his imagination to think of them standing naked on a lawn in the presence of a group of equally naked strangers. How was Yolanda taking it? Not at all well, he felt sure. Not nearly so well as Josephine, but then the latter was of different clay – much coarser and nicer.

The naked people gathered companionably round him – too companionably for Peter’s comfort. In spite of his morning’s introduction to the flesh he still shrank from promiscuous contact with it, still objected to being bumped and jostled by naked bodies. Such alarming experiences were occurring with increasing frequency as the party approached the long white house. Deep verandas flared from its sides upon the cool green of the lawn – deep verandas with well-tailored awnings picked out in stripes of white and orange.

“Not unlike your drawers,” observed Josephine, pointing to the awnings.

“Wish I had a pair right now,” was Peter’s wistful answer. “They would give me a slight shade of moral ascendancy at least.”

“If you can’t maintain your morals naked,” a tall scholarly individual cut in, “you will lose them entirely when dressed.”

“That,” said Peter, “would disturb me very little. I don’t care how many morals I lose so long as I retrieve my clothes.”

“Not an edifying attitude,” replied the man. “Why don’t you stand erect like the rest of us? Why not throw out your chest and shoulders? You walk like a man with knots in his bowels.”

“What!” Peter almost screamed, recoiling from the speaker’s side. “A man with knots in his what? No. Don’t speak. I’d rather you wouldn’t.”

“My friend finds your words even less comforting than your body,” Josephine informed the man. “And so do I.”

“It’s disgraceful,” muttered Peter, “the way these men and women strut along just as if nothing was wrong with them. They throw everything out – chests and all. Wherever I turn my eyes some horrid section of anatomy fairly leaps into view.”

“But you really are walking like a camel in labor,” Josephine reminded him.

“If I could walk with my head between my legs I’d feel all dressed up,” said Peter.

“That sight would be even more memorable than the present one,” his red-headed companion replied.

By this time they had reached the house, which they entered, only to find themselves in the presence of a fresh burst of nudity. Naked people were sitting, squatting, and reclining wherever Peter tried to rest his eyes from the sight of flesh. Had he been able to discover the Bishop bereft of garments he might have found some comfort there. Even an unclad Aspirin Liz would have provided a slight kick, but the only member of the party who was present was his valet-pickpocket, Little Arthur. This small individual was standing miserably behind a high-back chair, and Peter could not but envy the felon’s tactical position.

The room was long, low, and raftered. It was luxuriously furnished and decorated with quiet good taste. There was nothing mad about the room, a fact which rather than comforting Peter increased his sense of alarm. Perhaps these people instead of being crazy were merely depraved. A stout bronzed gentleman, Peter noticed, was reading the financial section of the morning paper with as much absorption as if he had been fully clad. Peter could not understand it. At a small table a huge gray-haired lady whose seemingly endless expanses of flesh should have been covered by yards of black brocaded satin was diligently cheating her way through some involved game of solitaire. True to form, reflected Peter, if not to convention. Still another figure – a sharp-cornered gentleman dressed only in a pencil – was engrossed in a crossword puzzle. He was entirely unconscious of his surroundings.

Scattered here and there on pillows, young women were combing each other’s hair and twisting it in odd fashions. A man wearing only a pink beret was making a sketch from which Peter promptly turned his eyes. Several men were standing in a group by a large buffet. They were engaged in drinking coffee, and one of them was asserting that Al Smith might still have a chance to be President if he would discard his brown derby. In view of the fact that the speaker had discarded everything himself, Peter decided he was exercising admirable restraint in regard to the ex-governor’s wearing apparel. Peter would not have been at all surprised had the man stated that if Al Smith discarded all his clothes he could walk into the White House, the unanimous choice of all parties. Through a long window he could see a number of naked children wandering about the lawn. They did not seem elated. Some of the older ones, Peter thought, looked far more self-conscious than their elders. Evidently they had not yet been entirely claimed by the general depravity. This was quite natural, children being instinctively conservative like all other self-respecting animals.

But by far the most arresting figure in the room was that of a young man reclining a little apart from the others on a large divan. Even in his unclad state there was a sense of satanic polish about this person. In his eyes dwelt a dangerously amused light, and his agreeable-looking mouth seemed capable of uttering quite acceptably the most objectionable blasphemies. Dark hair and dark eyes, remarkably fine, white teeth. The only suggestion of degeneracy about him, Peter concluded, was a duck, a large, self-possessed-looking bird squatting by its master, its long purple neck extended snake-like across the man’s flanks. This duck had a pair of the most disconcertingly probing eyes Peter had ever seen in the head of man or beast. These bright beady eyes were now turned on Peter, who felt with an uneasy pang that they were reading him through and through and not altogether approving of the subject matter. Nor was there anything degenerate in either the duck’s manner or appearance. It was the bond of perfect understanding that seemingly existed between master and fowl that impressed Peter unpleasantly. About both of them there was something severely sinister. For some reason the man’s naked body suggested a perfectly fitting dress suit, while the duck brought to mind visions of some especially discreditable form of witchcraft.

“My name is Jones,” said the suave-looking individual on the divan in a detached yet decently cultivated voice. “You are perhaps wondering, my dear sir, and also you, my red-headed young lady, how a person as naked as myself could bear such a simple name as Jones. However, as you grow to know me better you will understand that simplicity is the keynote of my character. My duck waddles through her days quite cheerfully with the name of Havelock Ellis. A pardonable whim of mine. Her attitude is so opposed to the Dance of Life.”

“All this information may seem important to you,” Peter replied in the true Van Dyck manner, “but to us it is ponderously superfluous. What is important to us is the whereabouts of our clothes and our friends.”

Jones made a smooth gesture in the direction of Little Arthur, while the duck, slightly elevating her sleek head, looked directly at the partly concealed criminal as if he were one bug too many.

“Is that one of your friends?” asked Jones. “Don’t hesitate to admit it if he is. Almost any peculiarity passes uncriticized here.”

“That’s just as well,” Josephine spoke up. “Otherwise you’d be too busy.”

“Yes,” agreed the gentleman called Jones. “We would. But to return to that strange, almost human object – —”

“Cut out yer wisecracking,” retorted Little Arthur. “You’re no better than a naked lounge lizard yourself.”

“If as good,” replied Jones easily; then, turning once more to Peter: “Your other three friends seem disinclined to leave their rooms. You two, I understand, succeeded in visiting each other. For your sakes as well as ours we won’t go into that. We will try not even to think about it. However, I see no reason why we should longer deprive ourselves of the company of your friends. We shall send for them.”

Jones clapped his hands, and two oppressively large-looking individuals appeared at his summons. They were innocent of garments but not unconscious of their absence. At that they were mere fully clad than the others, being decorated with light blue armbands, the uniform dress of attendants.

“Drag ’em down, boys,” Jones told them briefly.

The boys paddled heavily up a long flight of stairs, and presently sounds of vituperation were heard in the hall above.

“Keep your nasty talons off me,” came the voice of Aspirin Liz. “I’ve been naked in front of real gentlemen, I’ll have you to understand, and they never laid a hand on me unless – —” At this point in Liz’s narrative there was a momentary pause, then she resumed: “It’s none of your filthy business, I’ve learned some mighty dirty tricks in my time, you pot-bellied bucks, and unless you take your hands off me I’ll play them all at once.”

Apparently the boys must have doubted the extent of the model’s learning, for the next few moments were devoted to deep-throated cries of anguish and indignation.

“I wonder what she could have done to them?” Jones mused aloud to his duck, who significantly lowered the lids over two yellow eyes.

At this moment Aspirin Liz, shaking with coarse laughter, appeared at the head of the staircase. Holding with one hand to the banister, she slapped with the other enough thigh to make at least three of the average large woman, which, it must be admitted, is a stupefying amount of thigh.

“For once I don’t need an aspirin,” she announced mirthfully to the company below. “That did me a world of good.”

“May I ask what you did to my men?” Jones asked, considering the figure with respectful eyes.

This question produced in Liz another spasm of mirth.

“Better ask them,” she said at last, “but believe me, mister, I did plenty. And I’ll do the same to you if you lay a hand on me.”

Even the imperturbable Jones appeared to be momentarily disconcerted by this possibility.

“I shall endeavor to restrain my eager hands,” he assured her as the mountain of a woman moved down the stairs.

“Oh, dear,” she exclaimed, catching sight of Josephine and surveying her with critical approval. “What a glorious figure you have, child. Why, you should go naked all the time. And if it isn’t Mr. Van Dyck himself all undressed and no place to go.”

“That’s just the trouble, Liz,” said Peter. “There’s no place to go – nowhere to turn.”

“Cheer up,” Aspirin Liz replied in her hearty voice as she joined them before the divan. “Look at me. I’m three times as naked as you are – that is, I’m showing three times as much – and I don’t mind at all.”

“You’re fortunate,” Peter told her. “The relatively small amount I am showing bothers me a lot.”

“That’s because you never posed in the nude,” Liz assured him. “You’ll quickly get used to all this. It doesn’t matter at all. And who may this naked reptile be? Did he send those heels after me?”

“I realize my mistake too late,” murmured Jones. “I’m sorry, madam.”

“It’s too late for them,” Liz retorted. “They’ll never be the same.”

Looking as if Liz had spoken nothing but the truth, the two attendants weakly appeared on the stairs and stood looking down with pain-ravaged eyes upon the room below. The two men were in turn subjected to the interested scrutiny of many pairs of eyes intent on ascertaining the full extent of the calamity that had befallen them.

“The lady is locked in her room,” said one of the men in a hoarse voice, “and we’re too weak at present to drag her out, Mr. Jones. The other party who calls himself a bishop says he won’t come down unless we give him back his drawers.”

A lean, sun-tanned person bearing the head of a Greek philosopher now spoke.

“If the gentleman is a bishop,” he observed in a deep musical voice, “I think he should be allowed his drawers if only out of respect for his cloth.”

“It does seem as if the situation justifies a slight deviation from our usual custom,” Jones replied. “We have never had a bishop with us before, and I say better a bishop in drawers than no bishop at all.”

“Give the Bishop back his drawers,” several voices readily responded. “We want to see him.”

“It seems agreed,” continued Jones, “that the Bishop should retain his drawers. Very well, boys. Give him back his drawers and leave the lady alone until you feel a little stronger. Sorry about that other business. Women have rather – er – let us say, painfully primitive methods of retaliation.”

A short time thereafter the Bishop, clothed in jaegers and righteous wrath, stood at the head of the stairs and like Moses from the mountain looked scornfully down on his naked audience.

“Although they are only drawers,” Mr. Jones observed coolly, “there seems to be no end to them.”

“My dear Bishop,” exclaimed a lady volubly, “what a remarkable pair of drawers you are wearing. Tell me. Don’t they tickle?”

“Probably the Bishop is thick-skinned,” put in Jones, thoughtfully scratching his duck’s head. “Bishops usually get that way.”

“There is nearly enough material in those drawers,” drawled a voice, “to make all of us in this room feel almost overdressed.”

“There’s not enough material in all the world to make me feel overdressed,” said Peter. “As silly-looking as those drawers may be, I long to have them on.”

“If I ever found you in drawers like those,” Josephine declared, “there’d be no room for you in my life.”

“I’m not usually found in my drawers,” replied Peter.

“No,” Jo admitted with confounding simplicity. “I never found you in a pair except once in the office.”

“Don’t let them kid you, Bishop,” Aspirin Liz called encouragingly. “I’ve seen more peculiar-looking drawers than those in my day.”

“Thank you, madam,” said the Bishop icily.

“It must have been a mirthful day,” the philosophical gentleman observed.

“There ain’t a thing funny about them drawers,” Little Arthur suddenly and sincerely proclaimed from behind his chair. “If anyone gave me my choice of drawers, I’d pick out a pair exactly like them – only lots smaller!”

“Of course,” murmured Mr. Jones politely. “The mere sight of them makes me feel like panting.”

Bishop Waller cleared his throat and raised an admonitory hand. It was a gesture that had silenced many a godless congregation before as it now silenced this one spread out nakedly at his feet.

“It is a sad commentary indeed,” he said in a voice vibrant with emotion, “on your good taste as well as moral character that of you all only a recently converted criminal has sufficient discernment to recognize an honest pair of drawers when he sees one.”

“What did I tell yer?” put in Little Arthur complacently. “You said it, Bishop. Them are good, honest drawers, yer reverence.”

“Even better than that, Little Arthur,” amended Bishop Waller, his voice rich with pride and approval. “They are quality drawers, my man. No finer jaegers made.”

“And certainly no funnier,” a brazen voice put in.

“Don’t listen to them, yer honor – I mean yer reverence,” the small crook continued heavily on the side of righteousness. “They ain’t got a pair of drawers between ’em. Why, there ain’t even a blessed pocket in the whole horrid outfit.”

“Ah!” exclaimed the Bishop, beaming brightly upon his disreputable little convert. “No pockets at all. What a relief that must be for you, my fine fellow. No pockets at all – a blessing in disguise.”

“This lot don’t even trouble to disguise,” Little Arthur muttered as his glance drifted disgustedly about the room.

“Nevertheless,” went on the good Bishop, “God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.”

Little Arthur looked a trifle shocked. He hated to think of God as having had anything to do with this stark naked household.

“Perhaps,” he agreed rather gloomily. “He’s certainly made it impossible for me to perform any of my wonders. Yards and yards of naked flesh where pockets ought to be. What a place for a dip!”

“An ex-dip, Little Arthur,” heartily replied the Bishop. “Never forget that, my fine fellow. An ex-dip.”

At this point in the conversation Mr. Jones rose gracefully from the divan and, carrying Havelock Ellis carelessly under one arm, advanced to the foot of the stairs, where he stood looking courteously up at the Bishop, who in turn had descended a few steps.

“Bishop Waller,” said Mr. Jones in a voice of the most convincing sincerity, “believe me, sir, we consider ourselves greatly honored to add one of your exalted station to our little group.”

“Your naked rout,” the Bishop corrected. “I refuse to be added to it.”

“I hope you will later revise your judgment,” said Mr. Jones. “And I trust you will also believe me when I say that it was not our intention to imply that your drawers were not strictly honest.”

“Of course they’re honest,” exploded the Bishop. “But why waste time discussing my drawers when you are not wearing so much as a glove?”

“Quite,” continued the smooth nude known as Jones. “Naturally your drawers would be unusually honest. As you say, there is really no need to discuss them.”

“I don’t hold with you there,” broke in the man with the philosopher’s head. “To advance as a premise that, because a man is honest himself, the drawers he is wearing are equally honest, is entirely false and indefensible. In actual fact the wearer of the drawers may have a character of the highest integrity, whereas the drawers themselves may be utterly vile.”

“I beg your pardon,” expostulated the Bishop.

“By that I mean, my dear sir,” the philosopher continued, “the drawers may be the product of non-union labor, of intolerable factory conditions, of unfair price competition, sweat-shop methods, horrid industrial slavery – who knows? There are more ways of making drawers dishonest than one.”

“There’s only one really diverting way,” Josephine vouchsafed.

Aspirin Liz looked at the girl for a moment, then shattered the uncomfortable silence with her laughter. Peter sank down on the divan the impeccable Jones had abandoned and covered his face with his hands. He was too much of a coward to show in public his appreciation of Jo’s unconscious revelation. The duck was looking at Aspirin Liz with glassily staring eyes. As accustomed as the bird was to flesh, she found it objectionable to contemplate so much of it in one body, one huge, swaying, cascading figure.

“That last remark may be stricken from the records,” Mr. Jones resumed imperturbably, “if not from our minds. Let me go on to state, Bishop Waller, that the subject of your drawers would not have been brought up at all had it not been for our realization that to ignore totally a manifestation so peculiar – perhaps unique would be a better word – would have been so unnatural a suppression of emotion as to become in itself noticeable. You yourself, sir, might have experienced a sense of having been cheated, and that would have been too bad. Will you join our little gathering?”

Bishop Waller, not at all sure in what spirit to accept the invitation of the polished speaker, was about to comply rather than to stand isolated any longer on the stairs, when further independent action was taken out of his hands.

The wild cry of a desperate woman suddenly rang through the house. Turning, he was electrified to see Yolanda Wilmont, in a disheveled condition, appear waveringly at the head of the stairs hardly a foot in advance of an extremely active and naked man. After this the good Bishop saw nothing save a swiftly revolving universe composed entirely of stairs and contorted members of the human body. He was brought back to an unpleasant awareness of his surroundings by a sensation of insecurity round his waistline and a violent tugging at the back. Havelock Ellis, the duck, excited beyond endurance by the turmoil of the triple descent, had launched herself into action which centred itself on the rear part of the excellent Bishop’s jaegers. Also, in the course of his swift passage down the stairs the Bishop had sustained the loss of his most invaluable button. Unable to rise for fear of losing his only protection, yet disinclined to remain prostrated and endure the envenomed assaults of the duck, Bishop Waller found himself in the unique position of one being torn on the horns of a dilemma about midway between Scylla and Charybdis. It is a position that even a bishop can scarcely face with an overabundance of fortitude. Bishop Waller feared that his supply was being rapidly exhausted.

“Will someone give me a safety pin,” he asked in a weak voice, “and at the same time remove this infuriated duck?”

“Why, Havelock Ellis is actually pecking at the Bishop,” a voice exclaimed.

“Both actually and viciously,” gasped the Bishop. “And in an exceedingly mortifying spot, let me assure you.”

“There could be worse,” the philosopher observed.

“Let’s not become involved in a long academic discussion as to what part of one’s body is the most mortifying to have pecked by a duck,” protested the Bishop, becoming slightly involved himself. “Suffice it to say that the spot this duck is at present pecking with the utmost determination is both mortifying and painful enough to convince even the most skeptical observer that something should be done about it. And,” added the Bishop, “done without delay.”

“You have convinced me,” said the philosopher.

“Thank God for that,” murmured the Bishop. “And the pin? The pin is most essential.”

Now, to find a safety pin in a nudist colony is a task that would baffle the best minds of Scotland Yard. So hopeless was it that no one present made any attempt to look for one. Instead, Peter removed what remained of the bandage from his wounded arm and passed it to the red-headed girl who in turn conveyed it to the Bishop.

“Thanks, my dear,” said the Bishop, eagerly snatching the bandage from her hand. “God will forgive you much for this.”

“There will still remain plenty to be forgiven,” said Jo with a pretty show of humility.

“No doubt,” replied the Bishop, securing his jaegers with the bandage. “We will deal with that later if someone will collect this bird whose egg was indubitably hatched in hell.”

Mr. Jones thereupon collected the squawking Havelock Ellis and at the same time assisted the Bishop to stagger to his feet.

“There are holes in the back, perhaps?” the Bishop delicately suggested in a low voice.

Mr. Jones, cocking his head at an angle, took a quick survey of the recent scene of action.

“No holes,” he murmured to the Bishop.

“I find that difficult to believe,” said the reverend gentleman. “There would have been soon – a great many, I feel assured. These jaegers, my dear Mr. Jones, are but recently purchased.”

“They are exquisite,” replied Mr. Jones.

Yolanda furiously confronted the speaker. She had been too long neglected.

“Does it matter to you if I’m assaulted beneath your own roof?” she demanded.

“Not at all, my dear lady,” Mr. Jones replied with admirable urbanity, considering the nature of the question. “Make yourself entirely at home.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Advantages of Nudity

“Sir!” cried Yolanda. “Are you trying to insult me?”

“Far from it,” replied Mr. Jones, striving to bring his mind to grapple with the situation. “So many things are going on. Too many things. Aren’t you the young woman who wanted to be assaulted?”

“Certainly not,” retorted Yolanda. “This is too much. I was nearly assaulted.”

“And someone interrupted you,” exclaimed Jones, as if suddenly seeing a light. “How extremely trying! Who was the boorish party?”

“That man!” cried Yolanda, pointing to an excited-looking gentleman now being firmly held in check by two attendants.

Mr. Jones looked quickly at the man, smiled ever so faintly, then elevated his eyes.

“No,” he said. “You misunderstand. I mean the interrupter.”

“Heavens!” exclaimed Yolanda. “Have you taken leave of your senses? There was nothing to interrupt.”

“But my dear young lady,” protested Mr. Jones rather wearily, “I thought you said ‘nearly’?”

“Listen,” explained Yolanda, her own voice taking on a note of weariness. “That naked creature – that chattering baboon – climbed through my window and attempted to attack me. I fled down here. That’s all there was to it.”

“Not much, I’ll admit,” murmured Mr. Jones. “Scarcely anything at all.” He paused, then looked startled. “Is it possible,” he asked, “that you did not want to be assaulted?”

“Of course I didn’t,” replied Yolanda, too frustrated to be offended.

“Then why are you dressed?” asked Jones, elevating his upturned palms. “Don’t you realize that the presence of clothes here is an open invitation to assault?”

“Do you mean that to protect her honor a woman here must first abandon her modesty?” the girl inquired bitterly.

“From your point of view,” replied Jones, “you have stated the case concisely. Even those extraordinary garments the Bishop has on would make him subject to assault were it not for his high calling. Of course, in the case of the Bishop the assaultress would have to be a woman of great determination.”

“I don’t understand it at all,” Yolanda uttered helplessly.

“Then let me explain,” said Jones, leading her to the divan where they seated themselves beside Peter.

“Hello, Yolanda,” muttered that individual huskily.

“Don’t speak to me,” snapped Yolanda, “you naked little nitwit. Should be ashamed of yourself.”

“He’s not subject to assault like you,” retorted Jo, sitting down on a pillow at Peter’s feet and resting her red head against one of his shrinking legs.

“I’m not so sure of that with you around,” replied Yolanda.

“Well, just to add to your happiness,” Jo answered, “I’m not so sure of it myself.”

“Ladies,” Mr. Jones interrupted. “Please let me explain.”

“Go on, Mr. Bones,” said Josephine. “That’s about all you are – Mr. Skin and Bones.”

Jones looked at her for a moment with pensively elevated eyebrows, then cleared his throat as if to rid himself of some disturbing impression.

“Mr. Jones,” asked Peter, “can’t you do a little something about this arm? It’s had a hard morning considering it’s been shot full of holes, or practically.”

“Certainly, Mr. Van Dyck,” replied Mr. Jones in great concern. “Call Dr. Wolf,” he cried.

“Wolfie! Wolfie! Wolfie!” sang out a chorus of voices, and presently the naked physician, looking strangely out of place what with his professional air and incongruous little black bag, appeared, and with the help of a pretty assistant did things to Peter’s arm.

“Well, you see,” began Mr. Jones at length, “this little endeavor of ours, this small gathering of nudes, so to speak, is the result of too much reading, although the germ of the idea sprang from an age when books were not even printed.”

“I can well understand that,” rumbled Bishop Waller. “The history of the world is littered with examples of the most reprehensible attempts to imitate the more shady side of the Garden of Eden.”

“No doubt,” continued Jones smoothly. “All planets have had their pasts – their giddy moments in time. Yet, my dear Bishop, had it not been for such moments this world would not be populated today.”

“Is it the aim of this small gathering of nudes, as you put it, to add to the world’s population?” Peter inquired.

“Not its chief aim,” replied Mr. Jones. “We would rather raise the standard, but of course we haven’t got going in earnest yet. We have only been established a short time.”

“For a short time you’ve done pretty well,” interposed Little Arthur with a slight sniff. “There ain’t any more left to take off unless we skin ourselves alive.”

“Jean Jacques Rousseau, Havelock Ellis, Craft Ebbing, and even that indefatigable humanitarian, Mr. H. G. Wells, not to mention innumerable other great thinkers,” resumed Mr. Jones, ignoring Little Arthur’s interruption, “have all at one time or another been preoccupied with the idea of nudity.”

“If them guys you mentioned spent their time thinking about naked bodies,” Little Arthur declared, “they weren’t great thinkers at all. Just plain nasty.”

“It was not their desire, Little Arthur,” Jones explained patiently, “to think about nude bodies. Nude bodies meant nothing to them. They – —”

“Yeah,” scoffed Little Arthur. “They must of been old hands at it – all worn out. Why, I’m just as great as they are. Don’t even want to see nude bodies, much less think of ’em.”

“Sex is entirely forgotten here,” said Mr. Jones with crushing simplicity.

“With all the reminders on every hand,” observed Josephine, “you must have exceptionally short memories.”

“Sure,” agreed Little Arthur. “Ain’t we supposed ter use our eyes?”

“If you use no more than your eyes,” replied Mr. Jones with a significant look at the little crook, “everything will be quite all right.”

“Ain’t we supposed ter be even human?” protested Little Arthur.

“We are supposed to be,” said Mr. Jones coldly, “but I find it hard to believe that you are.”

“If you ask me,” put in Aspirin Liz, “when I look at some of the samples hanging about here I don’t want to remember sex at all. If I had my figure back for five minutes there’d be a riot in this room.”

“It ain’t patriotic,” the little thief asserted. “A lot of American citizens going around without even a pair of drawers.”

“Look at it philosophically, my man,” said the gentleman with the fine head.

“Look at what that way?” asked Arthur.

“At everything,” replied the philosopher. “Everything.”

“Well, if you can extract one grain of constructive philosophy from some of the things I’m looking at,” declared Josephine as she glanced round the room, “you’ve got a more godlike mind than I.”

“I have,” said the philosopher.

“Please, mister, give me a pair of drawers?” the snatch-purse pleaded.

“If a bishop rates only a pair of drawers in this outfit,” Mr. Jones replied, “where do you think you get off, you small unpleasant knave? Did you bathe this morning?”

What could be seen of Little Arthur was turning delicately pink. The small unpleasant figure was evidently engaged in blushing all over itself.

“What a question ter ask,” muttered the unhappy man.

“It was unnecessary I’ll admit,” replied Mr. Jones. “Will a couple of you girls take him away and bathe him?”

Little Arthur’s jaw fell, then disappeared with the rest of his head behind the chair. Sounds of merriment were heard in the room as several girls and a male attendant dragged the struggling figure up the stairs. Little Arthur did not contribute to these sounds. He was all for having the law on the sleek head of Mr. Jones. He went even so far as to assert that he would never rest easy until the police had raided the place. At last his threats became incoherent, and when finally seen he was babbling like an idiot and endeavoring to prostrate himself on the floor of the upper landing.

“Perhaps we may be able to talk now,” remarked Mr. Jones with one of his faint smiles when Little Arthur and his fair bath attendants had disappeared. “You see, Yolanda – I trust you will forgive me, but I cannot resist using such a pretty name – you see, my very charming young lady, I misunderstood the situation altogether. I assumed because you were dressed you naturally had certain ideas in your mind. So many women have, you know.”

“No,” replied Yolanda. “I don’t know. I don’t care to hear.”

“But you must,” persisted Mr. Jones. “It will do you a world of good.” Here he held out the duck to an attendant standing near by. “Will you kindly take Havelock upstairs and toss him in with the person being bathed?” he said to the man. “The poor bird dearly loves a little romp in the tub.”

A short time after the departure of the duck, screams of anguish drifted down to those in the room below. From the sounds Little Arthur was making, Havelock Ellis was having more than a romp in the tub. He was having a regular tussle.

“A lovable duck,” observed Mr. Jones with a smile of rare sweetness. “So fond of snapping about in a tub – catching things under water.”

With an expression of horror Peter gazed at the speaker, then looked down into Josephine’s amused eyes.

“Oh,” said Peter in a low voice. “Oh, for goodness sake! Poor, poor Little Arthur.”

“Don’t worry about that crook,” she said reassuringly. “He’s picked enough pockets in his time to be picked on a little himself.”

“The fact is,” Jones broke in, fixing the group with his enigmatic black eyes, “in this colony nudity leaves us emotionally cold, or should leave us cold. Of course there are occasional localized rises in temperature which are due, we hope, entirely to lack of training. On the other hand, the average well-built woman – and you are far, far above the average, my dear Yolanda – the average well-built woman, dressed as women dress today, which is a little more than demi-nude, arouse our gentlemen nudes to outbursts of simply amazing ferocity. To look at them now you would be surprised.”

“I would not,” Yolanda told him. “You forget I was the subject of such an outburst already.”

“To be sure,” exclaimed Mr. Jones. “It was fortunate indeed you managed to save as much of your honor as you did.”

“First time I ever knew a woman’s honor could be partially saved,” Josephine remarked. “I always thought it was something you either lost outright or just couldn’t give away.”

“Not only are your thoughts painfully crude,” Jones replied, “but also crudely expressed.”

“Listen here, naked,” Aspirin Liz asked from a pile of pillows upon which she was ponderously wallowing. “What’s so wrong about a man and a woman having a little fun when they feel like it?”

“Nothing at all,” Jones hastily replied. “I think it’s both commendable and diverting – essential, in fact. What we do object to here is the undue emphasis placed on sex. Sex preoccupation day-in-and-day-out. Sex consciousness morning, noon, and night. What is the dress of woman but an invitation and a challenge to the eye, to the senses? Do women dress to keep warm? Certainly not. Do they dress to cover their nakedness? Certainly not. They dress to reveal it, to suggest it, to enhance it. A pair of high-stockinged legs against a background of frills is a far more provocative sight, with a few exceptions, than the same pair of legs nude, hairy, and garter-stripped.”

“Say, young feller,” Liz put in, a shade of respect in her voice, “You’ve been round a lot.”

“And I hope to go round a lot more,” he assured her, “but I have no intention of forgetting the fact that there are ever so many other things to do. Nor do I wish to be constantly, reminded by fresh relays of sex-dominated women that there is only one inevitable end to social mingling of the sexes.”

“A guy like you doesn’t have to be reminded,” Aspirin Liz declared.

“That’s just the point,” agreed Mr. Jones. “I need no reminders of sex to be brought to my attention. Very few men do. What we do need is something to get our minds on other things.”

“How about drink?” asked Jo.

“Drink is a stimulant,” Jones replied, “and would therefore defeat its purpose.”

“I never expected to hear a naked man preaching to a naked audience words laden with so much practical morality,” observed Bishop Waller. “I almost feel like taking off my drawers and leading you all in prayer.”

“Let me ask you a question, sir,” continued Jones, turning directly on Peter. “What is the good of a woman spending hours and hours in scenting, anointing, and dressing her body only to undress it again in from three to five minutes – in some cases even less – for the sake of some damn fool man who probably never knew what she had on to begin with and who would have reacted the same no matter what she was wearing?”

“You said from three to five minutes,” Peter observed, musingly. “In some cases less.”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Jones. “Sometimes even less.”

“Have you gone round timing women at it?” asked Peter.

“That is neither here nor there,” Mr. Jones replied impatiently. “I make five minutes the maximum because I don’t think the average man will wait any longer than that.”

“I know,” agreed Josephine wisely. “Just great big, grown-up babies. After five minutes I suppose they begin to cry.”

“Should we continue this conversation?” interposed the Bishop. “Should we?”

“Why not?” replied Josephine innocently. “Didn’t you say he was speaking words of practical morality, Bishop Waller?”

“His words were safe,” said the Bishop, “but I very much suspect yours.”

“We order things better here,” Mr. Jones resumed. “By taking off our clothes we forget about our bodies.”

“What’s the fun in that?” asked Jo.

“I’m afraid you’d find it difficult to understand,” Mr. Jones replied, and this time his smile was a trifle too pleasant.

“I don’t want to understand,” said Jo. “Frankly, I’m very fond of my body. So much so, in fact, that if I did not have it I think I’d lose my mind.”

Mr. Jones restrained the impulse to inform the red-headed girl that her total disappearance would not be so great a loss that he personally would be unable to survive it. Perhaps, upon considering her delicate yet not reluctant proportions, as he did now, he decided he would not be speaking the exact truth. Few men could look on Jo and wish her absent.

“Here,” he continued, “we endeavor to retain both mind and body. However, we are making an attempt to give the mind for once an even break. In the old days when people went naked they were too busy either fighting things or each other to notice the absence of clothes. Today, when so many things are done for us, we have much more opportunity to take advantage of any sudden burst of nudity. Therefore, it is my belief that any attempt to introduce sustained nudity is as impractical as it is undesirable. In view of this we have made arrangements to enjoy at our little colony certain seasons and occasions. We have thought up names for them. They are to be called Seasons of Forgetfulness and Civilized Occasions.”

“Go on,” murmured Jo. “You interest me strangely, Mr. Skin and Bones.”

Now, strange as it may seem, Yolanda, upon hearing Josephine’s remark, allowed her eyes to pass swiftly over the tanned, youthful figure of Mr. Jones. Instinctively she felt inclined to take issue with the girl. There was something about Mr. Jones that pleased and attracted Yolanda almost too much. Perhaps it was because she was fully clad, or it might possibly have been because he was not clad at all. Whatever it was, the fact remained that Yolanda felt herself slipping, and for the first time in her life admitted to herself a sensation of healthy depravity.

“During Seasons of Forgetfulness,” Mr. Jones explained, “it is our intention to get all dressed up and to conduct ourselves as men and women ordinarily do now under this regime of prohibition. In other words, we intend to drink bad gin in garish and cleverly faked up surroundings. Women will dress as provocatively as possible and men will pursue them without stay or hindrance. The cost of destroyed garments during these seasons will be extremely high. Husbands and wives will fight with each other in the old traditional way and promptly console themselves with husbands and wives to which they are not entitled. And because I have noticed that at all rough parties pulled by nice people there is always a certain percentage of women who are not thoroughly happy unless they have attracted the eyes of all men by an exhibition of orgiastic dancing, a stage will be provided for this special purpose. Ladies suffering from exhibitionism which cannot be satisfied by one man alone can use this stage to their hearts’ content and be sure of an appreciative audience. During these little seasons, which should be limited to a week’s duration, we will all of us become highly civilized human beings such as exist in the world today. There will be very little reading except from delightfully illustrated pornographic books, no thinking whatsoever, no really constructive or artistic effort, no loyalties nor friendship. In place there will be a tremendous amount of smart talk and wisecracking in the accepted manner. Ladies will display their wit by saying brilliant things at the expense of each other and everything else. Men and women will make screamingly funny speeches and tell each other all about the plays they were unable to sit through. In short, every little cankerous growth will have its day, and when it’s all over and the attendants, somewhat wearied themselves, have dragged the exhausted bodies away we hope to be able to settle down to a period of calm, uneventful living in which the mind will have a chance as well as the body. When, after careful observation, I discover that the majority of colonists are becoming a trifle nervous and repressed from this sort of existence, we will declare another Season of Forgetfulness and return to civilized conditions.”

“You’re a bit of a wisecracker yourself, Mr. Jones,” Josephine remarked after a thoughtful silence, “but I don’t mind saying I’d feel a lot more at home if we had arrived during one of your Seasons of Forgetfulness than during this present one of embarrassment.”

“You don’t appear to be so desperately embarrassed,” Mr. Jones told her.

“No,” the girl answered. “I get used to things quickly.”

“As bad as this is,” said Bishop Waller, “I am heartily thankful we escaped arriving at a period such as has been described.”

“I am inclined to believe,” remarked Mr. Jones, looking with significant appreciation at Yolanda, “that a Period of Forgetfulness is rapidly approaching, or perhaps it may be merely a Civilized Occasion.”

“And what is a Civilized Occasion?” Yolanda asked under her breath.

“The same thing on a smaller scale,” Mr. Jones confided to her. “It’s more like an individual tour and is usually confined to two persons who find themselves unable to stand the strain of continuing under present conditions. You see, we have taken really every eventuality into consideration.”

“I think,” Yolanda murmured, the lids dropping demurely over her beautiful eyes, “that I might be able to understand a Civilized Occasion. The present one is extremely trying and I do so hate publicity.”

“Arrangements can be easily made,” replied Mr. Jones, in a low and hypocritical voice. “It is one of my duties to conduct ladies through such occasions when their companions do not feel up to it.”

What Yolanda would have said to this will never be known, for at this moment Little Arthur, pursued by a duck and a flock of women, leaped nimbly down the stairs.

“What do yer mean,” he cried out to Mr. Jones, “by having your nasty duck chucked inter my tub? It fair gave me gooseflesh, it did!”

“How can a duck give one gooseflesh?” the philosopher wanted to be told.

“Why did God give you brains?” Little Arthur tossed back.

“Certainly not to credit the ridiculous assertion that a duck can give one gooseflesh,” the philosopher replied impassively.

“What’s the difference between ’em?” demanded Arthur.

“I don’t know,” admitted the philosopher. “I have never compared the flesh of duck with that of goose. They don’t taste very much alike.”

“Well, drag the feathers offa this duck and take a taste of it,” Little Arthur retorted. “Gnaw its black heart out, for all I care. What’s it doing with feathers on, anyway? Ain’t we all naked?”

“Little Arthur,” put in Jones in his quiet way, “I urge you not to suggest liberties being taken with my duck.”

“The old hooker took liberties with me,” the little crook protested. “Just look at all them welts.”

Here Little Arthur turned and dramatically displayed the place of the welts. Even Mr. Jones was moved.

“There are some exhibitions,” he observed, “that are difficult to bear with even in a nudist colony. Take your welts away, Little Arthur. You are dripping all over the place.”

Little Arthur, looking as if knots had been tied in all parts of his body, moved painfully towards the door and God’s open spaces.

“Talk about being put on the spot,” he muttered. “Why, a machine gun’s a mere mersage compared ter the bill of that duck.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Reactions and Routine

Life in a newly established nudist colony is not so restful as one might suppose, especially when punctuated by various little infringements of nudist ethics such as those which it is only natural for ladies and gentlemen to make who have not become quite accustomed to the big idea. These infringements were at times sufficiently serious to cause nice-mannered spectators to hurry away from the scene of action. The sound of a great deal of unnecessary slapping was heard, usually followed by cries of indignation or gasps of sheer astonishment. Some men found pinching a playful habit very difficult to break. There was more or less unseemly giggling among the women. Innumerable tentatively advanced suggestions by enterprising males were being steadily rejected by the more conservative females. Man is an animal in which the most extravagant hopes die extremely hard. He is difficult to convince on certain points. He always tries.

The little party of involuntary nudes was more or less disconcerted all of the time. Even after the passage of several days Bishop Waller and Little Arthur seemed still inclined to keep their eyes steadfastly fixed on the relatively innocent reaches of the sea. Peter and Josephine were much together – too much together. Inseparable, in fact. Mr. Jones, who was liberal to a fault in such matters, and especially so where new arrivals were concerned, was forced to ask Josephine to be a little quieter about it when she called on Peter at night. Peter himself objected to the way the red-haired girl came thumping into his room. Of all the party she seemed to be enjoying herself the most. There was something either innocently pagan or healthily unmoral in the way she accepted the situation and contrived to take advantage of it. Jo was outrageously forthright. She seemed to consider this little interlude in the drabness of her circumscribed existence as a sort of virgin’s holiday – an escape from the conventions and inhibitions which to her way of thinking would never have been imposed on men and women in any normally constituted world. Her conception of a nudist colony and that of Mr. Jones were greatly at variance, for the simple reason that the colony had been established for the benefit of sex slaves instead of executives. Josephine was a past master at sex. That is, she was so frankly and honestly a creature of sex that its freedom of expression appeared to her as being neither especially wild nor wicked. To her it was merely a fact which, once accepted, did not require a lot of hypocritical trimmings and tortuous divagations to make it socially presentable. For this reason she was able to think of other things, which she did quite frequently. Life to Josephine was divertingly improper and more than a little grotesque. It was always amusing even at its worst moments, many of which she had experienced without too much self-pity during the brief period she had beautified the world.

While the ladies and gentlemen of the colony were engaged in performing esthetic dances on the lawn, Josephine would imitate their movements with contortions that caused them to pause in wonderment and disgust. Knowing she was already sufficiently beautiful, it was her desire to pass on to higher things and to make herself also funny. Women found this attitude difficult to understand, and the more the men were amused the less the ladies appreciated the object of their mirth. Mr. Jones was forced to withdraw Josephine from participation in the community dancing.

To the children of the colony Josephine was the most acceptable adult nude. It was strange to hear these small naked creatures trying to persuade their mothers and fathers to go back to the house and put on some clothing. The conservative attitude of children is strongly marked in a budding nudist colony. Here the disastrous results of endeavoring to inculcate the youthful mind with a sense of decency before a knowledge of indecency has been acquired became accusingly apparent. For the first few days the lives of the little people were quite miserable. They spent much of the time in hiding.

Josephine, however, they accepted at her flesh value. In her company they began to thaw out a little, to forget the shame of it all, and to take an interest in their naked world. And although the dances she created for them were far from being the seriously ludicrous affairs their elders fondly believed to be esthetic, they were danced with a great deal more enjoyment and a lot more noise. After telling them the story of Pandora as told by Mr. Eustace Bright in Hawthorne’s Wonder Book she eventually succeeded in reconciling the children to their own nudity if not to their parents’.

In short, Josephine was both busy and contented. And one of the reasons for this was that she was considerably in love with Peter Van Dyck and growing daily more confident of keeping what she had taken. That she had used shock-troop methods to achieve her ends did not trouble her in the least. Yolanda had enjoyed even better opportunities and had failed to take advantage of them.

In the nudist colony Yolanda had become the major exception to the rule, and the Bishop the minor. Mr. Jones, for reasons known only to himself, had allowed her to retain everything while Bishop Waller moved through his paces nattily attired only in his drawers. Whether Yolanda was deliberately inviting assault will never be known. It was a subject of open comment that both she and the suave leader of the colony appeared to find much in common. The degree or amount of commonness was also a matter of considerable speculation.

Aspirin Liz had settled comfortably into her niche, as that lady would have settled in either heaven or hell, or in any way station between those two points. And she had found certain cronies, as ladies of the disposition of Liz inevitably do – cronies who played cards and talked about little things having to do with this and that and mostly about food and drink. In spite of the vast expanse of flesh she presented to the world, when one saw Aspirin Liz engaged in a game of cards with her friends it was difficult to think of her as being naked, so casually had she accepted the situation. Mr. Jones, who seemed fond of exceptions – stimulants being prohibited save during Seasons of Forgetfulness – had managed some beer for Liz and supplied her with a quantity of aspirin. In view of these little attentions and because of the absence of her corsets life seemed good to Aspirin Liz. She was the only woman in the colony with whom the Bishop conversed with any degree of comfort or feeling of security. She was essentially a home body, even though a naked one.

Peter spent most of his time fluctuating between a sense of guilt and a mood of dark rebellion. Van Dyck bodies had been concealed beneath silk, satin, and furs for so many generations that sunlight and fresh air had become almost alien elements to them. He disliked exceedingly the idea of being peered at and scrutinized. His modesty was far less outraged than his personal dignity. He had soon discovered to his profound relief that he possessed no really decent scruples which could not be easily overcome. In this he was a true Van Dyck. But he did strongly object to being a naked unit in a seething mass of flesh – in a colony of what he stoutly maintained was composed of weak or simple-minded cranks. Pictures of himself in the paper surrounded by a flock of naked men and women kept reappearing before his mental gaze. He wondered what the captions beneath these pictures would be. “Head of Old New York Family Enjoying a Short but Naked Holiday With His Friends,” unreeled itself before his eyes. Or: “Peter Van Dyck Abandons Silk Hat for Simple Life and Naked Dancing.” Or – and this from the tabloids: “Mad Van in Naked Dance.”

“Pretty,” he muttered to himself. “They’d probably strike out ‘dance’ and put in ‘orgy.’ ”

He was especially annoyed with Mr. Jones because that gentleman would neither allow him his clothes nor appoint a definite date of departure. Nor would the naked leader permit any of the party to communicate with the outer world. For all Peter’s office or Aunt Sophie knew, he might be in China with Yolanda or at the bottom of the sea. Whenever he brought up with the unfailing attentive Jones the subject of departure, that gentleman looked hurt and then asked him with disconcerting significance if he was not having a good time.

As a matter of fact, had Peter been honest with himself he would have admitted he was having the time of his life. But he did not like Mr. Jones at all when the leader slapped him too low down on the back and assured him that he, Peter, was holding out splendidly under the circumstances and that many a man would envy him his good fortune. No. Such remarks were most decidedly in bad taste, especially when one was too alertly conscious of the thoughts passing through the other’s mind.

“The red-headed girl isn’t doing any complaining,” Mr. Jones once went so far as to remark, looking Peter in the eye with a subdued leer. “I should think you would find some comfort, not to mention cause for a little pride, in that. Now, from my experience with red-headed women …”

Peter did not stay to listen to what he had every reason to believe would be a highly objectionable recital of the leader’s amorous adventures with red-headed women. He had a red-headed woman of his own on his hands, and she was quite enough.

Of all the members of the band of castaways Little Arthur, surprisingly enough, was the most popular with the nudists. He was perhaps the noblest nude of them all – the most unimpeachable, the most impenetrably clad in the armor of righteousness. Although the object of no little jest and levity he was nevertheless held in considerable affection by his fellow nudes. He was always so ready and willing to explain to them just how depraved they all were and how especially depraved Mr. Jones was because he would not give Little Arthur back either one of the pairs of drawers he had been wearing when lured into this sinkhole of iniquity. If a bishop was allowed a pair of long drawers, Little Arthur argued, a retired pickpocket should be allowed at the very least a pair of short ones. As a matter of fact, a naked bishop most likely would stand more fully clad in the eyes of God than a pickpocket in a fur coat. The strength of Little Arthur’s claim on drawers was fully and freely discussed. Much sympathy was extended him, but no drawers. The small crook, because of his social triumphs, grew to enjoy the very indignities against which he leveled his artless tirades. Also, for the simple reason that the ladies and gentlemen whose morals and manners he so severely criticized invariably – almost callously – agreed with him, Little Arthur, after a few days, actually became quite fond of them. Without a naked body knocking about somewhere on the horizon to become moral about, Little Arthur would have found his life a dull thing indeed.

When the colony forgathered at the long tables in the dining hall, it was a sight to make the most daring producers of Broadway Glorifications think several times more than twice – to pause and rub their jaded eyes and wonder if they had ever before really witnessed life in the nude. Yet nothing more exciting happened than a tremendous consumption of food.

When Peter had first been induced to attend one of these communal meals he had cagily asked for a napkin, hoping to be able to cover some part of his body at least. His almost pleading request had been scornfully rejected.

“Napkin,” sniffed the maid. “They don’t even let us girls wear aprons, the nasty naked things. If it wasn’t for this depression.…”

The rest of the maid’s lament was drowned in a babble of hungry voices.

Peter, surveying the multitude, found it impossible to understand how all these people were able to sit thigh to thigh, rib to rib, and consume huge quantities of food without being convulsed by the severest pangs of indigestion. Seated between two blandly naked ladies, he was continually being forced to shrink fastidiously into himself to keep from being overpowered by their swaying torsos and gesticulating arms.

At that first meal Peter ate very little. He had accustomed himself in business to seeing a number of people use their jaws, temples, eyebrows, necks – in fact, their entire faces – when engaged in the horrid business of mastication. It had been not easy, but he had brought himself grimly to bear with this, realizing that time was short in a business day. But to see a gathering of naked individuals eating not only with their faces but also with their bodies was too vivid a demonstration of greed for him. He found his fascinated eyes dwelling on various parts of these bodies – on necks, diaphragms and stomachs – as if they were endeavoring to ascertain the exact location of the last mouthful of food the person under observation had swallowed.

The routine observed at the nudist colony was simple to the point of idiocy. At least it seemed so to Peter. In the morning the household was awakened by the tinkling of many bells which announced that everyone was supposed to spring out of bed, rush downstairs, and dash around the lawn in mad pursuit of Mr. Jones, who usually, because of pressing business, delegated the task to the philosopher, who seemed to extract from it a certain amount of sardonic amusement. Going downstairs late one morning, Peter discovered that Mr. Jones’s pressing business consisted of dashing from his own room to another’s. Peter put the man down as a thorough-going hypocrite. He would have put him down as even worse had he realized that the room into which Mr. Jones had so eagerly disappeared was none other than Yolanda’s. That unassailable young lady, under the direction of the leader, was beginning to take more and more interest in his Civilized Occasions.

On the other hand, had Peter been aware of the extra service Mr. Jones was performing to make Yolanda a thoroughly contented guest, he, Peter, might have felt grateful to the diligent young leader. Realizing how the situation stood between himself and Josephine, it was with a sensation of profound uneasiness that Peter considered Yolanda and the future. This sensation alone would have reconciled him to the nakedness of his life had not certain little indications warned him that the Season of Forgetfulness was rapidly approaching. Peter had no intention of being one of the colony during the festivities of this season. He had collected enough moral turpitude already to last him for a lifetime. He had no desire to join in a public demonstration.

Bishop Waller was equally determined to escape from the colony. Josephine, much to Peter’s surprise, showed no disposition to remain. It was her conviction that once a good man had fallen, one never could tell where he was likely to bounce. She did not intend to let Peter bounce into some other woman’s lap. He had in his composition all of the potential vices engendered by a clean past. It was well enough – in fact, it was a commendable thing – to share these vices with Peter, but it was not at all desirable to place them at the disposal of the temporarily dressed and drunken ladies of a nudist colony. Therefore Josephine had good and sufficient reasons to join with the Bishop in his determination to escape from the nudists no matter how difficult or embarrassing such an endeavor might prove to be. Little Arthur was of a similar disposition. So was Aspirin Liz, who in spite of her contentment still maintained that, of all the pleasant places in the world in which to drink beer, the Hoboken waterfront was by far the pleasantest. Yolanda alone seemed a trifle vague when approached on the subject of escaping. And this was exceedingly strange in view of the fact that she was the only member of the party who had been allowed to retain her garments and who therefore had nothing to fear from a flight back to the world of covered flesh. True, she was careful enough not to give the impression that she was anxious to remain where she was, yet even Bishop Waller suspected her of being more than a little on the fence.

And the exact location of the colony was also a subject of no little speculation among the members of the party. Mr. Jones had mentioned so many different places when questioned that even the most gullible person would have been forced to conclude that the man was a well-meaning but absent-minded liar.

“I feel we’re safe in figuring we’re somewhere on the seacoast of the North American continent,” Peter remarked to his fellow castaways.

“Wherever we are,” allowed the good Bishop, “somewhere else couldn’t be so much worse. We must get away at all costs.”

At this moment Yolanda, accompanied by Mr. Jones, strolled up to the group.

“Setting-up exercises in five minutes,” the naked leader announced with a bright smile in which Peter detected a glint of vicious amusement.

“I can’t join in today,” Yolanda murmured. “I’m too utterly weary. It must be the ocean.”

Josephine’s large brown eyes were fixed on the girl.

“I’m beginning to admire you, Yolanda,” she said amicably. “And that shows how bad I am.”

Even Peter wondered why Yolanda did not ask Jo exactly what she meant by that.

With a sigh Little Arthur uncoiled his thin body.

“Always setting-up,” he complained. “Always exposing something or other. Why can’t you let a guy crouch in peace by hisself?”

The naked party trailed across the lawn in the direction of even more nakedness – a multitude of prancing nakedness singing loudly about dew being on its feet.

“Look at ’em,” muttered Little Arthur. “All bare and all crazy as hell in the head – begging your pardon, Bishop. Singing about dew and their great feet. Who cares, I ask you? Who cares? I’m tired of naked bodies. They hurt my eyes.”

“Well spoken, Little Arthur,” said Bishop Waller, “in spite of your choice of words. If those bodies were only black or brown, I might at least succeed in getting drawers on them as I have in the past. With white bodies it is sadly different. Once they have abandoned their drawers, they seem also to have abandoned their reason.”

“You forget, my dear Bishop,” observed Peter, “that drawers are a bit of a novelty to your dark-skinned converts, whereas no drawers are equally novel to these deluded people.”

“No drawers aren’t novel to me,” remarked Aspirin Liz. “It’s an old, old story.”

“Well, no drawers ter me,” said Little Arthur earnestly, “is simply frantic.”

“Without my jaegers,” remarked the Bishop a trifle complacently, “I fear I would find it difficult to turn even to God in my distress.”

“I want my step-ins,” said Jo with devastating frankness, “more because I like their looks than because I feel their loss.”

Bishop Waller looked sadly at the red-headed girl, opened his mouth to speak, closed it again, then hopelessly shook his head.

His God was too greatly handicapped in the presence of so much beauty unadorned.

•   •   •   •   •

Peter and Jo on the sand dunes. Havelock Ellis had accompanied them for a little sunshine and salt air. The duck was actually trying to sleep on its side like a dog. It was not a pleasing sight. Nor was Havelock Ellis comfortable. No duck should be seen that way. She was clucking bad duck language deep down in her throat. Peter, taking advantage of the sand, had dug himself in. For the moment he felt almost well dressed. At the water’s edge the Bishop was conversing with the philosopher. The Bishop was dressed in his jaegers, which by now were looking sorely tried. The philosopher wore simply a pipe. Havelock Ellis flipped her wing disgustedly, sending a spray of sand across Peter’s face. Peter submitted patiently. He had grown fond of Ellis.

“It’s too bad you’re not married, Peter,” said the girl, kicking her legs up behind her, thus sending more sand in Peter’s face.

“Why?” asked Peter, still patient because he had also grown fond of Jo.

“Because,” she answered, “the situation would then be more desperate – more dramatic. You might even leave me with an unnamed child for which I would have to slave in silence while treasuring your memory deep in my heart.”

“You’re breaking mine,” Peter told her. “I’ve decided to marry you even though such a step is entirely unnecessary.”

“It would be far cheaper than keeping me,” the girl replied calmly. “I’d work for you for nothing and we could spend my pay.”

Peter thought this over.

“It’s too involved,” he said at last. “Yet I sense something in it somewhere.”

The Bishop strolled up with the philosopher. Both stood moodily looking down upon the couple in the sand. Then the philosopher turned to the Bishop.

“You, I contend, my dear Bishop,” he stated deliberately, “look more ridiculous in those weird pantaloons of yours than I do in my pipe.”

“But you look far more naked,” replied the Bishop. “Even though I cut a sorry figure in the eyes of man and God alike, I have the comfort of knowing I am not childishly exposed.”

“Do you consider me childish, Bishop?” the philosopher inquired.

“I endeavor not to consider you at all,” replied the Bishop, “although I know full well that the memory of your gaunt figure will haunt my dreams for years. I think it’s the addition of the pipe that makes you look extra naked.”

The philosopher smiled appreciatively.

“Not a bad point, Bishop Waller,” he said. “No doubt the pipe is an incongruous touch. However, I’d rather have my pipe than your drawers.”

“I wouldn’t relinquish these jaegers for all the pipes in the world,” the Bishop told him.

“Don’t you feel at all funny,” Peter asked the philosopher, “being naked like that before everybody?”

“How do you feel, my dear sir?” the tall man inquired.

“Like a suddenly evicted Turkish bath,” said Peter. “Even worse than that.”

“And the young lady?” the philosopher pursued.

“I feel great,” said Jo, “but I still find grounds for complaint. They’re not moral. Sorry, Bishop. I miss my nice things – silk stockings and all. You should know, Mr. Pipe, that all pretty women like to show their bodies but most of them prefer to select their audiences. Uniform nudity does not appeal to our sex.”

“A good point, too,” observed the philosopher. “Even the most primitive members of your sex instinctively decorate their bodies.”

“Also the men,” said Peter.

“Come,” said the Bishop hastily. “We must continue our stroll.”

The two strange figures walked off across the dunes. Suddenly the philosopher turned back.

“I forgot to answer your question,” he called. “I think this show is a lot of bunk, if you want to know my frank opinion. And if it wasn’t for a disciplined and inquiring mind, I’d feel simply awful. Good-day, sir.”

Peter waved a hand, and the two gentlemen continued on their way.

“I suspected that,” said Peter. “All the time I knew he wasn’t an honest nude.”

“Listen, sweetie,” replied Josephine. “Taking off your clothes doesn’t make you honest any more than putting them back on again makes you respectable.”

“Taking them off certainly did things to us,” he observed.

“Are you complaining because I ruined you?” Jo demanded scornfully.

“My dear girl,” said Peter wearily, “must we go into that again. You were putty in my hands. Putty.”

“You poor fish,” she answered angrily. “You haven’t nerve enough to seduce an alligator.”

“Not one man in a hundred has,” he assured her. “Not one man in a thousand. Even less have the inclination.”

“You are very fond of me, Peter – love me, in fact?” asked Jo.

“Oh, very fond indeed. I dote on you, Jo. Love you as much as a coffee importer can. I’ve a dull background, though.”

“But an aromatic one,” she said. “I’m deeply in love with you, too, but I feel quite ashamed of my lack of discrimination. You’re awful, Peter.”

“You’re not, Jo. You’re beautiful. When I think of those brown eyes and all that red hair and all – —”

“I suppose you’re quite overcome by the sheer quantity of things.”

“More or less. I just can’t see how you can care for me – don’t understand how you can do it, that’s all.”

“I don’t see how I can do it myself,” she told him. “When I see you lying there in that cowardly sand-draped position with your unlovely feet sticking out, all my finer instincts tell me to get up and walk right away, but just the same I stick around. Love must be able to stand for ’most anything, and I’m that way about you.”

“Does it come over you in waves?” he asked her. “You know, in – in waves. A lot of waves coming over you?”

“Do you mean do I feel as if I were drowning?” she wanted to know.

Peter shrugged his shoulders hopelessly. Romance did not seem to be in his line.

“Just waves,” he muttered moodily, wishing he had never attempted analogy. “Coming over one in waves, you know.”

Jo looked him steadily in the eyes. There was a strange glint in hers. Suddenly she grabbed his head in her arms and hugged it roughly against her breast.

“What a fool,” she said. “Inarticulate – driveling. No sort of a lover at all, but don’t worry about those waves of yours. I feel them, too.” She gave a sudden start and flung Peter’s head away. “You reptile,” she gasped.

“What’s up now?” he asked her.

“Why, look what you did,” and she proceeded to show him. “You pinched me with all your might – a regular nasty pinch, it was.”

“Nonsense,” he retorted. “I don’t do things like that – not in public.”

Jo regarded him intently, then unleashed a wild whoop.

“There you go again,” she cried.

From behind her came the exultant squawk of the duck, Ellis.

“Why, you old bitch,” exclaimed Josephine. “Let’s leave her flat. She’s pecking me.”

“Oh, let her tag along,” said Peter. “She’s a good duck in her quaint way.”

“Very well, then,” replied Jo, springing up from the sand. “But not if she bites my – me there every time I hug your head. That’s going from the sublime to the ridiculous.”

“Snap to it, Ellis,” said Peter, reluctantly removing the sand from his body. “Get a waddle on.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

An Unassaulted Lady

Facts were the only clouds that troubled Yolanda’s unextensive spiritual horizon. She was upstage about facts – arrogant. And this was just too bad for Yolanda, because these small wings of reality, even when far outstripped, have a nasty habit of overtaking the most evasive feet.

She was one of those imperious creatures, was Yolanda, who can face anything – and outface most things – except facts of the unpleasant variety. To her way of thinking, they did not belong. And naturally. All her years of maturity had been devoted either to distorting or sidestepping the less agreeable facts motivating her self-indulgent conduct. In this she had been ably assisted by fond parents and flattering friends. She alone was not to blame.

For example, Yolanda could never be wrong, and all the facts in creation were never going to make her wrong. They might make her angry, of course – shockingly and shrilly angry for a girl of Yolanda’s breeding – but certainly not wrong. Had she been confronted with the facts of her relations with Mr. Jones, rather than admitting them quite cheerfully she would have done an intellectual tail spin and laid the blame on Peter or God or her high-strung nature or on any other convenient person or cause. She had one of those twisty minds that find no difficulty in sublimating their meanest little impulses to almost dizzily ethical heights. So much for her mental equipment.

As she stood now a little apart from the others on the beach, following with clouded eyes the antics of the bathers, she found herself confronted by several facts she would much rather have avoided. However, even the slipperiest mind cannot easily get around the various glaring facts associated with a lot of naked bathers, especially when, as in this case, the men insisted in striking terrifically heroic attitudes as they leaped high in the air from the sand and the women kept dancing round jouncilly in almost human garlands, while a number of small children stood about and regarded the antics of their naked elders in bewildered disapproval.

If the truth must be known, it was not the fact of nakedness that disquieted Yolanda’s reflections as she stood there fully dressed on the sun-bright beach. It was the acceptance of the fact of nakedness that did things to her vanity – the incredible disregard of sex distinction all these naked men and women were displaying before her outraged eyes. The thing just could not be true. These people were pretending. Yolanda would not believe that a man could so far forget his place in life as to look on a naked woman with anything other than covetous eyes. Not that women desired this reaction – far from it – but men were that way about women. It was very annoying, but women had learned to expect it, some even endured it with a splendid display of fortitude. As a matter of fact, she herself had learned to endure the lascivious glances of men. Let the poor beasts ogle if it did them any good.

At this moment, confronted by factual evidence of her own eyes, Yolanda still refused to believe that these men would remain insensible to her fair body should she remove the clothes from it and display it along the beach. She did not go so far as to say to herself that a riot would break out, but she did admit the possibility of a series of serious assaults not to mention innumerable insulting invitations. How could it be otherwise? And the women. How annoyed they would be – how enviously sympathetic. It was a fascinating idea. It crept inside Yolanda and gradually took possession of her.

And in this the girl showed herself to be a little less than clever not to have realized the horrid fact that men, when engaged in striking heroic postures, cannot be induced to assume any others no matter how entertaining they promise to be. It is only after they have convinced all admiring females of their virility and physical perfection, of their masculine grace, fleetness, strength, and agility, that they will deign to consider the ultimate object of their peculiar behavior. Certain types of men when confronted by a beach suddenly become the silliest of God’s creatures, also the most annoying. Show them a ball of any size, and what was a moment ago a paradise of sun-warmed contentment becomes a living hell. Contemplation and repose are shattered, bodies are endangered, eyes, mouths, and ears filled with sand. One can only rise wearily and stagger away. Boyishness in man is a much overrated attraction. It is even less endurable than manliness. Both deserve capital punishment.

For the first time since she had become an involuntary guest of the nudist colony, Yolanda was moved by an impulse to emulate in public the example set by its members. She was more than moved by this daring impulse. She was actually impelled by it. As her dress fell to the sand and she stood in her low-cut slip for all the world to see, she felt herself on the threshold of a revolutionary experience. With the slip gone, little remained of Yolanda’s clothing, but what little there was, that went, too, falling like foam round her feet on the yellow sand. For a moment she experienced the sensation of being blind. The pores of her skin were startled by the light. She gasped. She shrank a little. Then, for a moment, before self-consciousness shut down on her, she raised her arms to the sunlight and gave herself to its warmth – one of the few honest, unstudied gestures she had made since she had last been unaware of her naked body some twenty-odd years ago.

This sudden, spontaneous gesture ended in a startled crouch as Yolanda realized her condition. Half frightened, half expectant, she glanced about her. As the warm air bathed her body and the shouts of the bathers drifted to her from down the beach, her thoughts were spinning dizzily. This was an even more difficult experience than any she had passed through under the skillful tutelage of Mr. Jones. Now she was so much alone, so definitely her own woman. Only her stockings remained between herself and complete nudity. Glancing down, she noticed that these sheer, well-filled sheathes of silk had become wrinkled since being detached from the garters. This would never do. Fastidiously she seated herself on her abandoned clothing and slipped off the stockings. Now she had done it, irretrievably committed herself to the official costume of the colony – bare flesh. Slowly she stood up, and as she did so the air and sunlight flooded round her body like the soft, clear waters of a pool. Dimly she felt all this, felt herself a living part of the beach, a little more intimate with the ocean and less remote from the gulls in the air. But dominating her consciousness was the thought of how she must look in the eyes of men, the effect she would have upon them. She knew she was fair to behold, a creature altogether lovely. Then another thought crossed her mind. Should she walk or run in her present nude state? Should she move along in maidenly aloofness, modest, subdued, and enticing? It was too bad they were all playing those silly games. All those men. All those naked men. Really, they were ridiculous. She would take their minds off their occupations. She would arouse them to an awareness of themselves. And the women? She would show the women that the feminine form was nothing to be taken lightly, to be accepted and dismissed by a flock of prancing males. For the life of her she could not understand why these women allowed themselves to be regarded as so many bits of landscape, why they seemed content to make garlands of themselves as indifferently as if there was not a man in sight. Surely this was depravity – this total lack of recognition of the difference existing between the sexes.

Haltingly the girl moved along the beach in the direction of the bodies. Each step cost her an effort. Mental readjustment was coming in fits and starts. At times she found herself timid, at others bold and challenging. Once or twice she was tempted to turn back and put on her clothes. So far no one had looked her way. She had not been spied. But had she? That was a nagging question. Suppose she had been seen and taken for granted? Impossible. At least out of mere politeness a new naked body in their midst should give rise to a little display of interest. A fresh nude female figure among all these men should occasion some slight comment, cause eyes to peer and heads to turn. She would see about that.

When she had approached still closer to the bathers, Yolanda decided she would feel somewhat more assured if she ran a little. Accordingly she gathered her courage and ran lightly and with heroically assumed casualness through the naked group, her eyes apparently fixed on space. Her first passage through failed to arouse the comment she had expected. She was still unassaulted as well as uninsulted. Had she imagined herself bathed in daring glances, or had her presence really passed unnoticed? She would try again.

This time as she ran back she unfortunately tripped over a gentleman’s leg and found herself sprawling in the sand. It was not a position in which she was anxious to be found. Certainly it failed to do her justice. Rather grotesque, she thought with a little shiver of revulsion. She was not doing well by herself. Before she could rise of her own accord, two huge arms picked her up and plopped her down again on the sand. The contact had been so forcible it made her teeth click. For a moment she sat there stunned. Was the assault about to begin? If so the aroused male was going about it in a surprisingly leisurely manner. She waited a few moments, then looked up over her shoulder. No one was paying the slightest attention to her. Strange – unbelievable. She rose and hurried through the group.

As much disgusted as she was disturbed, Yolanda braced herself and returned to the battle. This time her passage was interrupted by the arrival of a basketball in the pit of her stomach. It bounced off with surprising speed, and Yolanda found herself on her back, getting a crab’s eye view of seemingly endless nakedness.

“Lucky it wasn’t the medicine ball,” said a man’s voice above her. “That would have taken the wind out of your sails.”

Yolanda regarded the man hatefully even though she agreed with him. Lucky, indeed, it had not been the medicine ball. Its smaller and less weighty edition had been quite enough. Yolanda thought of the involuntary grunt it had surprised out of her. She found no pleasure in this thought. How horrid! Then, suddenly, it came to her that this was no way for a prominent young member of that high social circle, the Junior Daughters, to be found lying on a beach. She was altogether too prominent.

Once more she picked herself up and scurried to the outskirts of the nudists. She was on the point of abandoning the experiment. She was beginning to feel that the proof of her point might involve too much wear and tear on the flesh as well as spirit. Still she was not convinced. Her failure so far had been due to accidents and not to any fault of her own. She would try again. This time, rather grimly, she launched her body into the naked mass of humanity. An old gentleman pushed her rudely.

“There you go!” he exclaimed with the petulance of the aged. “Spoiling my One Old Cat.”

Vaguely Yolanda wondered what part of him he meant by his One Old Cat; then, as a tennis ball came flying through the air, she realized the old man was referring to some childish game.

“Why don’t you take your One Old Cat and play it somewhere else?” she inquired bitterly.

“Beach free,” grunted the old man. “Play One Old Cat where I like. You butted in.”

Obviously there was no danger of assault from this infirm direction, decided Yolanda. All that aged creature’s life seemed to consist of was his One Old Cat. She turned away and experienced the electrifying sensation of putting her foot down on a living being who had somehow managed to get itself tangled up with her legs. A yell of pain smote the air.

“For God’s sake, lady,” said the living being, “be more careful where you put your feet. That might have been very serious. As it is – —”

Yolanda turned away from the investigating creature beneath her feet, but his voice still pursued her.

“You’ve got to watch your step in a nudist colony,” he called after her. “If you think it’s any fun – —”

A sudden resounding and extremely smart slap from the rear made Yolanda freeze in her tracks. Perhaps at last this was the prelude to an assault. Rather a common way of going about it, but she understood men were that way. In spite of her pain and indignation Yolanda kept her poise. Assuredly that slap – such a familiar, whole-hearted slap – must have denoted some slight show of interest on the part of the slapper. She turned and looked. A large, splendidly proportioned gentleman was confronting her.

“Sir,” she said, “did you slap me?”

“Where?” he asked good-naturedly.

“Need we go into that?” she inquired coldly.

“Oh, there,” replied the man with a friendly smile. “Perhaps I did. I slapped someone a moment ago. Might have been you.”

“It was me,” said Yolanda.

“Do you mind?” he asked. “It’s a habit of mine. Sort of playful. I see something and I slap it. That’s all.”

“That’s all?” said Yolanda, greatly surprised. “Isn’t that enough – too much, in fact?”

“Sure,” agreed the man pleasantly. “If you want to get even I’ll let you slap me back.”

Here he turned round and waited expectantly. Yolanda, as she looked, felt strongly tempted to kick. In a sudden burst of exasperation she did kick. And this was her second honest and natural gesture in years. It was a terrific kick. Every toe on her foot was crumpled. Also it hurt the man, or at least surprised him mightily.

“That’s not fair,” he declared, turning round sharply. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

“Neither was I,” said Yolanda. “I wasn’t expecting what you did. I forgot myself for a moment.”

Upon hearing this, the man reached out and unceremoniously spun Yolanda about.

“Well, here’s one you won’t forget in years,” he assured her, and he gave her a smart kick with his foot.

Yolanda, whether she liked it or not, buckled outward and shot through space. She caromed off several naked bodies, barely kept her feet, and continued on to the outer fringe of the circle.

As she stood looking back at her assailant, she was surprised to find that the incident had passed unnoticed. Apparently these men and women were accustomed to indiscriminate kicking. She wondered how they could be. To her way of thinking, it was far worse than being assaulted, far more of a blow to one’s self-respect. Yolanda’s was completely gone. With a mad light in her eyes she hurried right back, and when the man was not looking she pounced like a cat into his flesh with her long, sharp fingernails. This was one of the most satisfying experiences in Yolanda’s life. The man uttered a scream of anguish and struck out instinctively. Unfortunately – that is, unfortunately for a small, thin lady, who chanced to be passing at that moment – the man’s arm caught her under the chin and catapulted her through the air into and upon the stomach of a reclining body which immediately became passionately active. It seized upon the thin woman and threw her in the general direction of the sea. She failed to attain her objective, however, because of a forest of legs into which she plunged forthwith, only to find herself being sat upon from several different directions.

From this moment on, the beach became the scene of the most irresponsible activity. It was nude against nude irrespective of sex or size. Yolanda felt herself rapidly being smothered by the dead weight of flesh bearing down upon her face. The girl was forced literally to bite her way to freedom and fresh air. As she rose weakly to her feet, her speed was accelerated by the feet of others pushing her violently from behind. As a result of this gratuitous boost she continued on in a graceful arc and landed on her face.

“Pardon me, madam,” said a courteous voice. “I intended that for someone else.”

“That’s no comfort to me,” replied Yolanda, grabbing the voice by its leg and giving it a vicious tug.

The leg straightened and a body followed it out of the struggling mass of humanity.

“Be careful of my scar,” said the small creature she was pulling over the sand. “My operation is scarcely ten weeks old.”

Wishing the operation had been performed on his throat instead of his appendix, Yolanda dropped the leg where it was and walked disgustedly away. She returned to her abandoned garments and wearily dragged them on her bruised and battered body. They could tear one another limb from limb for all she cared, those wild, infuriated nudes. Entirely disregarding the fact that she alone was responsible for making the nudes wild and infuriated, she hoped that the contest would spend itself in a homicidal draw, that it would end only because of a lack of live bodies. She was a bitterly disillusioned girl. Her experiment in public nudity had turned out miserably. She had discovered that there could be assaults and assaults. She had been subjected to the worst kind, the most unsociable and least flattering type. There had been no intent to please, but merely to maim. She would never attempt the experiment again, she decided, as she snapped the garters of her girdle to her stockings, flipped herself irritably into her brassière, yanked on her step-ins, dropped her slip over her head, and covered all with a dress.

Once more she was clothed and in her right mind. Her thoughts turned to Mr. Jones. She would return to the house and look for him.

•   •   •   •   •

When she entered the long, low lounging room she found herself plunged into a scene that rivaled the beach in indignation if not in action. Little Arthur appeared to be occupying none too happily the center of the stage. At least five excited nudes were pointing at him accusingly. Mr. Jones was endeavoring to bring the vociferating members to order while Peter, Josephine, Aspirin Liz, and Bishop Waller were lending attentive ears. As Peter regarded Little Arthur, Yolanda read in his expression a mixture of admiration and pride. What had the little man done thus to gain the approval of his master and the enmity of this small but earnest group of bodies?

One of the first things Yolanda noticed was that Little Arthur’s accusers seemed to be finding difficulty in putting their thoughts into intelligibly articulate words. It was as if they had found a bottle somewhere and punished it severely. An amazing amount of slurring and mouthing was going on. Several of these angry people were almost whistling. Some words never managed to get themselves pronounced at all, others only partially, imperfectly, much as if they were swimming under water.

Her interest in this little scene made Yolanda forget for the moment her own distress and indignation. That she was an unassaulted lady no longer seemed to matter. Here was real anguish. Here was the stuff of authentic drama. Mr. Jones was speaking.

“Little Arthur,” he was saying in a voice which strove to express patience, “because members of a nudist colony are required to remove their clothes it does not follow that they must also remove their teeth if they chance to be wearing the removable type.”

So this was the explanation of the mouthing. Yolanda shuddered a little. The five indignant nudes by sound and gesture made it clear that they were in complete agreement with their leader.

“Then why do they go sleeping about the place with their mouths open?” demanded Little Arthur.

“Little Arthur,” continued Jones, “you don’t seem to realize that a person has a right to sleep with his or her mouth in any desired position. Shut, of course, is more acceptable to the public, but the fact remains that an individual can sleep with his mouth set grim or gay, swinging like a gate or closed like a trap.”

“According to his theory,” put in a large gentleman indistinctly, “no open mouth in the colony would be safe.”

“Some of ’em weren’t open,” Little Arthur said, not without pride. “They was almost gritted. That’s where I showed my craft.”

Cries of rage greeted this bragging statement.

“No doubt you were deft,” agreed Mr. Jones equably. “I cannot help admiring your technique myself, but it was used in a very low, a very degrading manner. You should leave other persons’ mouths alone as well as what is in them, Little Arthur.”

“In Gord’s name, Mr. Jones,” exclaimed the exasperated little felon, “what’s a high-class pickpocket going to do with a lot of naked thighs? He’s gotter have some outlet.”

“As regards the naked thighs,” observed Mr. Jones, “your question rather embarrasses me. I would suggest that you consult the owner of the thighs. Mouths, however, are different. Once more I say, leave them entirely alone. I must protect my guests and their teeth.”

“I had ter keep my hand in, didn’t I?” demanded Little Arthur.

“You didn’t have to keep it in my mouth,” lisped a lady with artificially flaming hair.

“Nor in mine,” cried the large gentleman.

“Why don’t you keep your hand in your own mouth?” asked a third nude.

“What would be the fun in that?” retorted the small crook.

“You might snap your tongue out,” suggested Jo.

“Yes,” put in Peter, “or bite off your pilfering fingers. Like Mr. Jones here, I admire your craftsmanship, Little Arthur, but I’d hate to let it be noised abroad that I employed a tooth-snatching valet. A pickpocket is bad enough, but a pick-mouth is just too much.”

“You’re all against me,” Little Arthur replied sorrowfully.

“I’m not,” announced Aspirin Liz surprisingly. “Although I don’t hold with mouth-picking or tooth-snatching, I do know that a habit of years can’t be dropped in a day.”

“But teeth, my dear lady!” protested Mr. Jones. “Of all things teeth! Let him steal anything in God’s world but them. I’ll tuck coins about the place for him to snatch if he’ll only leave teeth alone.”

“I’ll give him five dollars if he’ll give me mine back,” said the large man.

“Don’t want money,” Little Arthur replied. “Don’t want teeth. Just a little sport.”

“It’s about the lowest form of sport ever indulged in by man,” commented Mr. Jones to the group. “In my mind it’s worse than body-snatching. He leaves his victims bereft of pride and self-respect. Listen to the inhuman sounds the poor things are making.”

“I wish we didn’t have to,” replied Jo.

“So do I,” agreed Mr. Jones, “but this question of teeth has to be settled for once and all.”

Bishop Waller spoke for the first time. It was clear to see he was deeply moved.

“Not only is the theft of the teeth a crime in the eyes of God,” he said, “but also it is in shockingly bad taste. Of the two, bad taste is the harder to forgive. Little Arthur, I thought you had resolved to mend your ways.”

“Bishop,” replied the little man contritely, “you don’t understand. You can no more keep from trying to save my soul than I can from picking your pockets while you’re doing it. Here’s one of your buttons.”

“Oh, miserable sinner!” cried the Bishop, snatching the button from the extended hand. “Now where does this belong?”

Jo promptly started to look.

“There, perhaps,” she said, pointing.

With a startled exclamation Bishop Waller turned sharply away.

“I will find the spot myself,” he said. “You take my question too literally.”

“It was merely a suggestion,” replied Jo.

“A most improper one,” muttered the Bishop.

“From where I was standing,” said Jo, “it was the most helpful one to make.”

“As bad as that?” murmured Bishop Waller, his eyes darting over his jaegers. “I must go in search of a pin. Perhaps I might even find a needle and a bit of thread. Pardon me.”

Stepping cautiously, the Bishop ascended the stairs to interview the housekeeper.

“To return to these teeth – —” began Mr. Jones.

“Must we?” inquired Jo.

“I wish somehow,” said Peter, “we could manage to drop the entire subject.”

“I say return the teeth to their various mouths,” suggested Jo, “and hang up an old pair of trousers for Little Arthur to play with. Put things in the pockets.”

“He might try to wear them,” said Mr. Jones doubtfully.

“Swear I won’t, mister,” Little Arthur pleaded. “I’ll just creep up on them, like. It will give a guy something to do. My eyes are fair tired of human flesh.”

“Will you restore the teeth to their rightful owners?”

“I’ll even put ’em back in their mouths,” replied the small dip eagerly.

Howls of indignation from the wronged nudes.

“I’ll click my own teeth back, if you please,” said the large gentleman with great dignity.

“Click,” observed Mr. Jones. “My God, how descriptive!”

He approached the silent Yolanda. “Come,” he continued. “I promised to show you the hot houses.”

As they strolled across the lawn, Yolanda made her protest.

“I undressed on the beach,” she told him, “and not a man made the slightest advance. They were very rough.”

“Don’t let that worry you at all,” said Mr. Jones smoothly. “I’ll see that something is done about it if I have to do it myself.”

Yolanda’s wounded vanity seemed somewhat appeased.

•   •   •   •   •

The breeze was warm that night. A moist breeze drifting in from the sea. It trailed scarves of mist behind it and was faintly edged with the tang of salt. The water breathed quietly against the beach. It felt cool to Jo’s feet as it stirred round them.

“So you still insist on making me an honest woman?” she said to Peter who was dawdling by her side.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to attempt that,” he told her, “but I am going to marry you good and proper the first damn chance I get.”

“In spite of my depravity?”

“Because of it, Jo.”

“But suppose you discover I’m not really bad?”

“By that time we’ll be too old for it to make any difference, my girl.”

“I really believe you’re a man of low moral worth, Peter. A wicked man – not good at all.”

“Maybe we’re both good and don’t know it.”

“Wonder how one ever finds out?”

“I don’t quite know, Jo. You just muddle along together. No divided loyalties. No cheap evasions. And when you’re through, you quit clean and cold if and when necessary.”

“But, Peter, a man and a woman never feel that way about things at the same time.”

“Then one of them has to stand the rap. It’s better than ducking down alleys – happier in the long run. Habit and self-interest are often mistaken for kindness, Josephine.”

“Perhaps we’ll last forever, Peter. It does happen, you know … at rare intervals.”

Peter looked thoughtfully at the girl, then turned his eyes to the dark water. They were a little sad, those eyes, and touched with premature wisdom. Love did not last like that – or rarely ever. Most men were on the prowl and so many women felt the need of the prowler. It was the old army game. Quite as it should be. Of course, some couples sat at home at night and hated each other and listened to the radio and went to bed quietly but bitterly, each wanting to be wanted, yet concealing their frozen longings behind commonplace remarks. This business of romance – Peter was unable to figure it out. It was like a moth in the house, only it made holes in human emotions instead of clothes and things. He turned back to the small white figure and dropped two hands on the cool shoulders.

Then quite suddenly Jo found herself sobbing quietly all over Peter’s shoulder. Perhaps he had communicated to her something of his feeling of the impermanence of things. Perhaps she felt, too, that desire itself had a longer life than passion between individuals – it was a ruggeder product, far harder to tame and forget. And somehow it made such a mess of things.

“I love you now, Peter,” she murmured. “That’s all I know.”

“That’s about all anyone can say, little chap,” Peter answered as he gently shook her. “I’m very much obliged.”

“You should be,” she retorted. “Haven’t I given you the best years of my life?”

“Those years are still to be lived, thank God,” said Peter. “We’ll wangle the best out of them – what say you?”

“I say you’re almost pushing me out to sea,” complained Jo. “Drag me back to shore or drown me and get it over with.”

As they walked back across the lawn, Jo asked a disconcerting question: “What about Yolanda?”

Involuntarily Peter glanced up at her window, then stopped.

“Why, there’s a man in her room,” he said. “Look, Jo.”

Jo looked. Outlined against the drawn shade were the figures of a man and a woman. They seemed to know each other quite well. Jo smiled cheerfully in the darkness.

“She seems to have solved your problem for you,” she said.

“Think I should do anything about it?” asked Peter. “This is more of a surprise than a blow, I confess.”

“What can you do about it?” asked Jo in return. “They seem to know what to do about it without your help.”

“Shouldn’t I at least shout?” said Peter. “Or ask them to move?”

“Forget it,” replied Jo briefly. “The leader of a nudist colony has his hands full.”

“Not to mention arms,” said Peter. “Just the same, Jo, I’m one hell of a chaperon.”

“Stupid,” she replied, “if you knew women as a woman does, you’d know that each one cuddles within her the sparks of her own ruination.”

Slowly they moved across the lawn.

“Is the dew upon your feet?” asked Peter presently.

“Great chunks of it,” said Jo.

“Sleepy?” asked Peter.

“Not a bit,” said Jo.

“Good,” the man replied. “Let’s turn in.”

“Why, Mr. Van Dyck, you say such things.”

“Yes,” replied Peter, “I am quite a card.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Sound and Fury

At breakfast the following morning Mr. Jones made an announcement. The nudists greeted it with cheers. Not so Peter and his party. They were considerably alarmed, especially Little Arthur and Bishop Waller.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” began Mr. Jones, rising and standing with one brown, slim hand resting lightly on the table. “Fellow nudists. It is high time we interrupted our nakedness and returned to the animalism of the conventional life we have abandoned.”

By this time a majority of the nudists in their spontaneous enthusiasm were stamping on the floor and tinkling their glasses with their knives. Mr. Jones waited modestly until the noise subsided.

“Spring is now well advanced,” he continued, “and in this connection it is generally agreed among poets that spring is the most immoral of the four seasons. Personally I have never found any great difference between them. However, there, might be something in it.”

“Mr. Jones,” called out the philosopher, whose name happened to be Horace Sampson, “spring is perhaps the most suggestive of seasons. It is not as immoral as summer. Summer is notoriously immoral. In the short course of a northern summer the Eskimos go mad with love, I am told.”

“If I had to love an Eskimo,” a slight blonde lady remarked, “I think I’d go mad myself.”

“The season’s so short up here,” stated a lean-looking gentleman, “I shouldn’t think they’d have time to get out of their furs.”

“They manage, nevertheless,” replied Mr. Sampson.

“Perhaps they start to undress somewhere towards the breaking up of winter,” someone suggested.

“I confess,” said Mr. Jones, “that I do not know the technique of the Eskimo in such matters.”

“You surprise me,” observed Peter. “It is difficult to believe that the women of any race or clime have quite escaped the liberating influence of your Civilized Occasions.”

“I can’t be everywhere at once,” replied Mr. Jones.

Color was mounting to Yolanda’s cheeks. She looked a little frightened.

“Well,” put in Jo, “when this place is pinched, as eventually it will be, you can hurry right up to Alaska and go mad with the Eskimos.”

“I shall bear that in mind,” replied the leader. “Thanks for the suggestion.”

“Not at all,” Josephine replied. “You probably had it in mind already.”

“Spring was always my most difficult season,” announced a still pretty woman with large dark eyes. “I never did succeed in getting through a spring season without saying yes to someone.”

“It was your generous nature, my dear,” said a lady sitting opposite her. “I always found summer almost unavoidable.”

“This is scarcely the time for tender confessions,” remarked Mr. Jones. “If there are no further suggestions, I’ll continue.”

“By all means,” rumbled Mr. Sampson. “Sorry I started the discussion.”

“I have noticed,” resumed Mr. Jones, “a growing tendency to nervousness and strain and an almost flagrant infraction of the regulations governing the conduct of our members.”

“I just couldn’t help it, Mr. Jones,” a young lady called out. “That man kept on pestering me until – —”

“No specific reference was implied, Miss Joyce,” Mr. Jones interrupted hastily. “But to continue. Quarrels breaking out between the male and female members of the colony have a way of ending up altogether too amicably. Of course, there are a number of you who could still hold out for several months.”

“Indefinitely, sir,” said an elderly gentleman.

“Splendid,” said Mr. Jones. “However, all things considered, I feel that it would be best to declare a one-week Season of Forgetfulness almost immediately. It will open tomorrow night at dinner and close, for those who have been able to stick it out, just one week later.”

More cheers and thumping. The elderly gentleman who could hold out indefinitely did not join in the applause.

“For those of you who don’t know,” continued Mr. Jones, “everything is tolerated – nay, encouraged – during the Season of Forgetfulness – everything save murder. It is, of course, understood that husbands and wives cannot base divorce proceedings on the grounds of each other’s conduct during this season. Nor can any member withdraw from the colony as a result of it. It is hoped, on the other hand, that all members will lend their willing support and do everything in their power to make this orgy a success. If each one of us does his or her bit, if each one of us gives the worst that is in him, if we all band together in a spirit of libidinous abandon, I feel that we cannot fail. Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you.”

Mr. Jones, his eyes flashing with the consciousness of duty well done, sat down amid wild applause. Already men and women were beginning to size one another up.

“My dear sir,” said Bishop Waller in a low voice to Peter, “I never heard anything like it. Why, one would think he was addressing a meeting of Rotarians or the members of a college football team instead of a group of eternally damned souls. Jaegers or no jaegers, accompanied or single-handed, I intend to make my escape tonight. I am determined to shake from my feet the dust of this terrible place.”

The excellent Bishop was not alone in this determination. When the small band of castaways foregathered some time later in a secluded part of the lawn, they were joined by the philosopher, who frankly stated his case and asked to be admitted to their number.

“I have finished my investigations here,” he said with a shrug of his fine shoulders. “All this forgetfulness stuff is an old story to me. And the way they go about it is far too collegiate for one of my temperament. Some still seem to enjoy it, but frankly I don’t. I am by nature an unmoral non-conformist. I can’t stand mob righteousness any more than mob depravity. I suggest we finish with them before they finish us. I say, clear out naked as we are and take a chance on finding something to drape over our bodies.”

“Listen,” put in Little Arthur. “I gotter pick up the lawn today, and that means sticking trash and papers in a bag. When they’re all down at the beach prancing, or in eating dinner, I’ll sneak some sheets inter the bag and drag ’em out to the woods. What do you say about that?”

“Merely this,” replied Bishop Waller. “It strikes me that we must all be saved from Sodom through the stealth of a converted pickpocket. In the light of this I feel that it would be difficult to accuse God of being altogether lacking in a slightly ironical vein of humor.”

“I trust you will use your influence,” remarked Mr. Horace Sampson, “to see that the situation does not become too funny.”

“If I ever get a sheet over my nakedness,” said Peter, “you can laugh yourself sick for all I care.”

“No doubt we will,” declared Jo. “I’m going to make a hole in mine and stick my head through.”

“I think I will swathe mine round the upper half of my body,” said the good Bishop reflectively. “The lower half still seems able to hold its own.”

“Oh, quite,” replied Peter, looking sharply at the Bishop.

“If we ever get back to civilization, Bishop Waller,” Aspirin Liz put in, “you should send those drawers to the Smithsonian Institution.”

“I wish you would give them their proper name,” Bishop Waller protested. “This garment is known as jaegers.”

“Don’t care whether they’re jaegers, jumpers, or jiggers,” the ex-model replied. “You’re wearing whatever they are where most men wear their drawers.”

Of all the party Yolanda alone remained silent. Why should she accompany a number of sheet-clad figures back to civilization? There would surely be a scandal.

“At nine o’clock in the woods,” said Horace Sampson. “Come singly or in pairs.”

The party then broke up, and for the remainder of the day its members went innocently about their separate ways. At dusk Little Arthur could have been seen, had anyone cared to look at Little Arthur, dragging an old potato sack disconsolately in the direction of the woods. But from a distance the observer would not have known that petty thief was sweating from his efforts to look as if he were not there at all.

•   •   •   •   •

At nine o’clock that night Yolanda was a greatly worried young lady. The spirit of the approaching festivities had entered into her blood. She felt that she deserved one Season of Forgetfulness. All her life she had been remembering herself. Now for once she would like to forget and to find out what happened. Yet she hated to admit this fact to the members of the party. She was standing deep in the woods with Peter and Josephine. The others had not yet arrived.

“Listen, Peter,” she began in an agitated voice. “I can get out at any time I want. Don’t you think it would be a good idea for me to return and cover your retreat in case you should be missed?”

“Do you want to go back?” he asked her.

Yolanda nodded her head in the darkness. She could not say it in so many words. When she spoke, her voice no longer carried its old imperious note.

“He comes of a fine old family, Peter,” she said.

“Would you like to increase it?” asked Peter.

“Don’t be common,” she retorted with a small show of spirit.

Josephine put her arm round the girl.

“Do you care for the suave Mr. Jones?” asked Jo.

For a moment Yolanda was suspicious, then she capitulated to the red-haired girl.

“You know how it is,” she murmured. “I – I think so now.”

“Then go back and land him,” said Jo, “but for the love of Mike keep your head.”

Yolanda squeezed Jo’s hand.

“I never knew life was so different,” she offered rather timidly. “So much better and so much worse. Goodbye, Peter. Do you mind?”

For answer, Peter tilted up her chin and kissed her lightly on the lips.

“It was a nice long engagement,” he said. “You deserve some compensation. Good luck, Yolanda.”

The next moment his one-time fiancée was slipping among the trees on her way back to Mr. Jones and the Season of Forgetfulness.

•   •   •   •   •

On the outer edge of the woods a high wall confronted the escaping party, all members of which were present with the exception of Yolanda, whose absence remained tactfully unobserved. As the six sheet-draped figures stood considering this obstruction, the scolding voice of a duck churning up last year’s leaves with its wings fired them into sudden action.

“My God,” said Peter. “Havelock Ellis is with us.”

“But not for long,” said Horace Sampson, scooping the bird from the leaves. “I’m going to wring her neck.”

Jo snatched the duck from the philosopher and thrust its jeering head under a wing.

“No bloodshed,” she whispered. “Get me over the wall, Peter. I’ll take care of Ellis.”

“Are there glass or spikes?” asked the Bishop when Jo had reached the top.

“The former,” replied Jo. “I am trying to sit as lightly as a feather.”

Little Arthur looked at Liz and tittered behind his hand.

“What a break,” he said, “for a fat lady.”

“If any glass gets into me,” she muttered, “you’re going to pick it out.”

“May my fingers wither first,” Little Arthur said in an awed voice. “They’ve picked a lot in their day, but they’ll never pick that.”

Aspirin Liz’s difficulty was obviated by the employment of a sheet as a buffer between herself and the glass. Soon the party was standing, a trifle torn and disheveled, on the other side of the wall.

“There is no doubt now,” said the Bishop, “about there being holes in my jaegers. I can feel them quite distinctly.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” said Mr. Sampson.

“Pardon an old man’s curiosity,” replied the Bishop. “These jaegers have served me well.”

A winding tree-fringed road lay in front of them. An occasional light shining through the branches marked the habitations of man. The moon was not yet risen, and the way was dark. From time to time a sleepy clucking issued from Havelock Ellis resting comfortably in Jo’s left arm. She had refused to abandon the duck. In this Peter had supported her.

“I suggest,” said the tall philosopher, “that we set off at a brisk trot. Mr. Jones’s attendants are many, and they are strong, rough men. At any moment we might be yanked back over that wall by a dozen or more ruthless hands.”

Accordingly the party set itself in motion, the philosopher setting the pace. Aspirin Liz and Bishop Waller brought up the rear, the Bishop being slightly in advance. He seemed to be experiencing considerable difficulty with his jaegers. His efforts to keep them from falling off impeded his own as well as his companion’s progress. The suspense was beginning to wear on the fat lady’s nerves.

“Bishop,” she panted at last, “you’ll have to do something about those drawers. Either take them off or keep them on. I can’t stand the strain.”

“After all the turmoil they’ve been through,” retorted the Bishop, “these jaegers stay on. It is the will of God.”

“He doesn’t seem to have quite made up His mind,” said Liz, “from the way those drawers are behaving.”

“Nevertheless,” replied the Bishop, giving the garment a violent tug, “at this late date you cannot expect me to abandon them.”

“From several views I got,” said Liz, “they seemed to be abandoning you.”

“Madam,” admonished the Bishop, “we’re in an extremely tough spot, as the saying goes. We have no time to discuss whether I am abandoning my jaegers or they are abandoning me.”

Liz heaved a vast sigh and paddled after the Bishop through the night. Suddenly the headlights of an approaching automobile threw the party into sharp relief. Without a moment’s hesitation the philosopher, Sampson, turned off the road and led his followers behind a billboard.

“This is the first time,” he told them, “I ever saw any good reason for a billboard. Usually I consider them the most insulting form of advertising.”

“It would be pretty,” observed the Bishop, “if those motorists happened to be among my parishioners. The headlights caught my jaegers at a rather daring angle.”

“One moment,” whispered Peter, holding up an arresting hand. “Those motorists have stopped to investigate.”

Silence behind the billboard. Voices from the road.

“But if you do find a lot of naked bodies,” the party heard a woman say, “what on earth are you going to do with them? Can’t ask them to take a ride.”

“I can ask them to go home,” came the voice of the woman’s companion. “Don’t know what this part of the world is coming to if a man can’t go driving without running into a flock of nudes.”

“You’re not so upset as you’d have me believe,” sniffed the lady. “You’re looking for that girl.”

“Nonsense,” retorted the man. “She was nearly wearing a sheet. All of them were, in fact.”

“Sure,” scoffed the lady. “Nearly but not quite.”

The man disappeared behind the billboard, and in a surprisingly short time reappeared totally naked save for his shoes and socks. The philosopher was a fast worker. With the assistance of Bishop Waller they rapidly stripped the man and distributed his garments among them. To Peter’s lot fell a shirt and vest. The philosopher got the trousers, which first had been unsuccessfully attempted by Aspirin Liz. Little Arthur fell heir to a pair of shorts, and Jo to the man’s coat. Bishop Waller dragged a sleeveless undershirt over the upper half of his body. The frail garment came to about his fifth rib before it split up the middle. The Bishop looked disappointed.

“If we had to strip a fellow creature,” he observed, “and send him back naked into the world, I wish God had seen fit to make him several sizes larger.”

“He must be quite the smallest man in the world,” replied Mr. Sampson. “These trousers haven’t the slightest intention of meeting in the front. Just take a look at them.”

“If you please,” protested Bishop Waller, “my eyes have seen enough. The attempts of Liz to squeeze into them took ten years off my life.”

“The seat of those pants is no bigger than a dime,” Aspirin Liz put in. “Never knew they came so small. Let’s take a look at the little shaver.”

The assaulted motorist could not stand for this. He tore off the sheet which had been wrapped round his head by the astute Sampson, and dashed back to the car. A slight scream greeted his appearance.

“Give me the lap robe, quick!” cried the man. “They’ve taken all my clothes.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” said the lady. “If you get in this car, I get out.”

“But I can’t stand here naked in the middle of the road,” he protested.

“Neither can I go driving on a public highway with a stark naked man,” came the reasonable reply.

“But aren’t we engaged?” the naked man pleaded.

“I wouldn’t even do it,” he was firmly assured, “if we were married by the Pope.”

“Catholics,” reflected the Bishop, finding comfort in the thought. “Just the same, I hope God in His wisdom will be able to find some slight justification for my ruthless conduct tonight.”

It will never be known how the naked motorist and his fiancée settled their little difficulty. He may be standing there yet trying to persuade her to let him get into the car. The fugitives did not linger to listen to the discussion. Down the road they swarmed in the wake of the sprinting philosopher.

“The way that shirt flares out from your little vest,” observed Jo, “is a sight to behold. You should be jumping through hoops.”

“Glad you find it amusing,” said Peter. “You are protruding in various spots yourself, my sweet.”

“Bishop,” remarked Aspirin Liz, “I’m afraid you are not improved. That shirt does no earthly good.”

Little Arthur dropped back behind them.

“What do you think of the drawers, Liz?” he panted.

“Too athletic for words,” said the lady. “How did you manage to get inside them?”

At that moment they caught up with the grotesque figures ahead of them. Jo, Peter, and the philosopher were peering into the back of an empty truck. Peter climbed quickly in and helped Jo to follow him. Darkness swallowed them. The philosopher sprang aboard. Rather than be left behind, the Bishop, Liz, and Little Arthur scrambled into the truck. Two men tramped from the woods and, mounting to the front seat, set the truck in motion.

“This will give us a breathing spell,” Horace Sampson whispered.

“We will need it,” replied the Bishop, “when those gentlemen ahead discover what they have behind.”

“I have nothing behind,” muttered Peter. “Forgot my sheet.”

For a quarter of an hour they bumped along in silence. Suddenly and to their great consternation the truck shot through a high gate and they found themselves looking out on a brightly lighted street. The transition was so startling that even the duck awoke and began to squawk a volley of evil language.

“What’s wrong with your horn, Bill?” asked the man sitting beside the driver. “Sounds sort of strange to me.”

“That ain’t my horn,” said Bill. “Must be some guy behind us.”

The squawking continued in a hoarse but muffled voice.

“Damned if that ain’t the queerest horn I ever did hear,” remarked Bill’s companion.

“I’m going to get out and knock the block off whoever’s blowing the thing at me,” declared Bill with determination.

The truck drew up, and the two gentlemen descended to the street. No other car was following. Bill’s friend listened intently.

“It’s coming from inside,” he said in a low voice.

“From inside who?” asked Bill, somewhat startled.

“From inside us,” replied the other.

“Not from inside me,” declared Bill. “I couldn’t make sounds like them even if I did my best.”

“I mean inside the truck,” said the other man.

“Oh,” replied Bill. “That won’t be hard to find out.”

They approached the back of the truck, and Bill thrust in a grasping hand.

“I’ve got hold of a leg,” he cried in a shocked voice.

“You’ve got hold of mine,” came the voice of Aspirin Liz. “Is that any way to act?”

“Golly,” said the friend. “The whole truck is full of them – a lot of funny people.”

“Get out of there,” roared Bill, who at heart was not a kind man. “Get out or I’ll call a cop.”

“If we get out you won’t have to call a cop,” said Peter bitterly. “Any number of cops will come of their own accord.”

“Let us depart in peace,” said the Bishop in a hollow voice, “and put our trust in God.”

“I’ll never put my trust in a duck again,” Josephine told the world as she followed the others into the light of the street from the comfortable darkness of the truck.

Bill and his friend stood speechless. This moment was one of the really few high spots in their lives, one which they realized at the time would never grow stale or lose its wonder.

“Shouldn’t we call the cops anyway?” the friend at length found words to ask.

Bill shook his head.

“That guy without the pants said it,” he replied. “They’ll get plenty of cops without our help.”

As the fugitives, now a compact mass, trotted fearfully down the street, several policemen were already following them unbelievingly. As accustomed as they were to the strange sights of Coney Island, they were nevertheless shocked by this one. Some side show had gone mad or was openly defying the law. Whistles sounded, and pedestrians stopped in their tracks. Traffic became snarled, and two automobiles collided owing to the preoccupation of their drivers.

“We are being followed,” gasped the Bishop.

“I’d be amazed if we weren’t,” Josephine replied.

“Turn in here,” commanded Mr. Horace Sampson. “And stick together. We might find some place of concealment.”

But the amusement park into which the party dashed over the prostrate body of the ticket collector offered no place of concealment, although for a moment several of its members disappeared from view down the smooth, steeply slanting sides of a wooden bowl.

“I have never been able to see the fun in this sort of thing,” observed Mr. Horace Sampson as he painfully collected his scattered limbs.

“What sort of thing is it?” groaned the Bishop. “And how does one ever get out of it?”

“One claws one’s way up the sides,” Jo remarked, “only to be hurled back by some sportive reveler, several of whom are already peering down at us and waiting for the kill. Anyone seen a duck, and where might Peter be?”

A long arm with a torn shirt sleeve reached down as the girl spoke, and pulled her up the side of the pit.

“I was just asking about you,” Jo said coolly to Peter. “Where’s our duck?”

“She’s knocking about somewhere,” Peter answered. “Do you realize we’re in one of the most fiendishly playful amusement parks in the world? It’s not officially open yet according to the signs.”

“Well, it is now,” said Jo, glancing about her. “We’ve opened it officially, although I am not amused. I don’t want to play with this park.”

The Bishop looked miserably up at them.

“I very much fear God has withdrawn His protection,” he called to Peter. “Maybe you could help.”

As Peter drew the Bishop up the side, the philosopher almost bounded out. He had figured out the theory of the thing, then put it to the test. Unfortunately he overshot his mark and was carried by his terrific speed onto a flat surface composed of innumerable large disks spinning in opposite directions. For a moment sheer surprise overcame his philosophical resignation as his feet went up in the air and he found himself revolving in what he felt convinced could be nothing less than five different directions at the same time. Bishop Waller, blindly following the leader, promptly found himself in similar circumstances and breathed an urgent but dizzy prayer for divine intervention.

“This one is even less diverting,” shouted Mr. Sampson as he was whirled into the orbit of the Bishop.

“How does one get off?” called that good man.

“I suppose one eventually gets flung off,” Mr. Sampson called back. “Either that or one keeps on spinning hither and yon until the park closes for the night or season.”

Bishop Waller did not hear the end of this speech, but he heard enough to remove all doubt concerning God’s indifference to his lot. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he saw a policeman standing at the border of the spinning plane, and this policeman, to the Bishop’s horror, had his cynically amused eyes fixed on the lower half of his, the Bishop’s, person. Too late he realized that he and his long-suffering jaegers had come to the parting of the ways. Other policemen collected and stood watching the twirling bodies.

“I’ve seen some strange sights down here,” said one of them, “but this takes the cake. Naked they are, no less. What Judge Wagger won’t do to them!”

As Peter and Jo stood clinging to a rustic bridge gone violently mad in every plank, they had the pleasure of seeing Little Arthur dangling in the air from the cross bar of a flying trolley. Elevated as he was from the ground, the small creature presented neither a picturesque nor modest figure to those below, especially now that he was wearing the stolen shorts upon his feet. As he sped through the night on the trolley, two large uniformed officers sped beneath him. They were waiting for him literally to drop into their hands, which inevitably he would be forced to do.

“Wouldn’t like to be in his shoes,” Peter chattered.

“We’re not occupying a bed of roses,” Josephine told him. “There is more than one policeman waiting for us at either end of this infuriated bridge.”

“I suppose we’re through,” said Peter.

“I’ve been through for quite some time,” came Jo’s broken words. “Life goes on inside, but it is a purely mechanical arrangement.”

“I wonder if I could manage a kiss on this bucking span?” said Peter.

“Come over here on my side,” she told him, “and we’ll swing in the same direction. I’d hate to have my teeth knocked out from too violent a contact.”

Peter moved over and took the jouncing figure of Jo in his arms and in so doing succeeded in pulling her with him to the floor of the bridge.

“We’re going, Jo!” he cried.

“Then go ahead and kiss me,” she called out in jumping accents as she pressed her lips to his.

“Be God if they’re not love-making on that dangerous contraption,” said an officer in an awed voice. “And in their terrible condition and all.”

Still clinging desperately together, the two bodies rolled and jostled into the arms of the law. A policeman tossed a raincoat over Jo and helped her to arise. For a moment she leaned dizzily against him, and during that moment he became a trifle dizzy himself. Peter rose more slowly and fastidiously readjusted the tails of his flaring shirt.

“Will you look at that, I ask you,” breathed a policeman.

They all did.

The philosopher and the Bishop, having been tossed out of the officers’ reach by some caprice of the flying disks, were now doing their utmost to make good their escape. The philosopher was bounding up a high flight of spiral stairs, and the Bishop, clinging to his jaegers, was doing his best to bound after his friend. For a moment they stood poised on the summit of the stairs; then, with two hoarse cries of defiance, they launched themselves down the slide that snaked away from their feet. It was a short slide but an impressive one. Several policemen picked them up, then stood looking at them curiously.

“Well, you’re a couple of rare birds,” one of the officers said at last.

“You’re wrong there, my man,” replied the Bishop. “We’re a couple of raw birds. Have you by chance a pin?”

“You know, my dear Bishop,” said the philosopher as the policemen hustled them along, “I could almost grow to like that last thing we did.”

“I very much fear,” said the Bishop, “that it’s the last thing we will ever do of our own free will.”

On their way to the patrol wagon they were joined by the captors of Jo and Peter. At the same moment another diversion claimed the attention of the consolidated party. From the bowels of a frantically revolving barrel came the agonized voice of Aspirin Liz.

“Will one of you cops for God’s sake come in here and arrest me?” the ex-model managed to get out between twirls and bounces. “I’d rather stay in jail for life than in here for another minute.”

An officer reached in the barrel and dragged the lady to safety. She still had her sheet, but it was serving no practical purpose, being wrapped round her head. Another raincoat was called for and tossed over Liz.

“One solid mass of bruises,” she muttered. “I wonder what black-hearted torturer ever thought out this place.”

While the officers were concentrating on Aspirin Liz, a familiar drowsy clucking issued from a near-by trash receptacle. Swiftly Jo reached down, seized the nodding duck, and concealed it under her coat.

“She’s a very adaptable duck, isn’t she, Peter?” Jo said with a smile to the man at her side.

“If she’d kept her damn mouth shut,” he replied, “we wouldn’t be where we are now.”

“We might have been in even a worse place,” she answered, “though I can’t think of one at the moment.”

Through two solid walls of humanity they were ushered into the patrol wagon, where Little Arthur sat huddled in the gloom. He brightened up considerably at the appearance of his friends.

“Some night,” was his inclusive greeting. “What do yer say, folks? Hasn’t it been some night?”

“It has indeed been some night,” agreed the Bishop, “and unfortunately, Little Arthur, it is not at an end.”

“We’ll have to come back sometime,” said Jo, “and do it all over again.”

“I’d rather be hung,” put in Aspirin Liz, “than give that barrel another chance at me.”

“One end at least we’ve achieved,” declared Horace Sampson, a philosopher to the last. “By getting ourselves in the clutches of the law we are safe from those of the overhospitable Mr. Jones and his minions.”

“It looks like a Season of Total Obscurity to me,” observed Peter, pressed closely against Jo.

“We’re far better off where we are,” said the Bishop. “Far better off, my boy, and that is none too good.”

As the patrol wagon clanged down the street between blaring and brightly lighted show places, Josephine felt around her more than the arms of the Law. With a happy sigh she settled back. She was both loved and in love. The Law did not matter.

“May I kiss my young man?” she asked one of the officers seated near the door.

“Might as well, baby,” he told her. “You won’t be seeing much of each other for a long, long time.”

“Little Arthur,” said Aspirin Liz sadly, “I think I could almost like you, I feel so sorry for myself.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Magistrate Wagger Hears a Lot

Magistrate Wagger suffered from insomnia, so he occasionally held court at night. On these occasions the delinquents brought before him did considerable suffering on their own account. Whenever the good magistrate found himself unable to sleep, he began to think of his prisoners. It galled him exceedingly to visualize them peacefully slumbering in their various cells. Why should Guilt wallow in smug repose while Justice lay haggard and stared into the darkness? Wagger could see no logical reason for this. He would give those sleep-sodden malefactors something to keep them awake for a long, long time. He would share his insomnia with them.

Of course, it may be argued that a man poisoned by the venom of Magistrate Wagger’s mental outlook at these moments was in no condition to dispense justice – to hold in his hands, as it were, the fate of erring humanity. But when a judge or a magistrate has already decided to send someone to jail, the method of procedure really does not matter. Whether it is done with a cheerful smile or a dark frown makes very little difference to the prisoner. Three months are three months, regardless of how one is given them.

Withal, Magistrate Wagger’s manner on the bench was not as sinister as one might expect. It was not nearly so sinister as was the man himself. Inasmuch as the night meant nothing to him, he did not care how long he sat up in court himself or others sat up with him. Here there were lights and company – conversational opportunities to bring relief to the weary mind. After he had put half a dozen offenders definitely behind the bars, Magistrate Wagger usually was able to sleep like a top.

He was a small, thin, wiry individual with a mop of gray hair that gave the impression of having been unpleasantly startled. His face was small, too, and looked like a mahogany-colored mask of enigmatic expression. If one decided that the black eyes that snapped and burned beneath the gray bars of his eyebrows were a trifle mad, one would not have been far from wrong. They were mad usually and could easily become furious.

Tonight as the six bruised and battered, not to mention almost naked, fugitives from the nudist colony were ushered into his presence, he failed to witness their demoralizing entrance, being engaged at the moment in studying some court records. When he did look up, his mind filled with other things, he did not at first appreciate the magnitude of the scene he was beholding.

“What have we here?” he began in a preoccupied voice. “What have we here?” Gradually his eyes widened and his mask of a face twisted itself into a spasm of sudden anguish. “I should have asked,” he continued in a voice barely under control, “what haven’t we here?” He looked about him sharply. “Who brought me all these horrible objects?” he demanded. “I want to know that.”

“We did,” said several policemen proudly. “There was a lot of us in it.”

“Oh, there were,” resumed the magistrate, insanity simmering behind his words. “Well, I see where I’ll have to get me a new police force. The officers responsible for showing these obscenities to me might just as well turn in their badges and snip off their buttons.” He paused; then, leaning far over his desk, addressed himself bitterly to the unhappy policemen. “Why,” he exploded, “the mere sight of them has driven all thought of sleep forever from my mind. Was it your intention to kill me? Did you deliberately set out to break my health and shatter my reason? I sense a conspiracy here. You must have made them like that and then dragged them in to torture my eyes. Don’t say a word. I’ll find this out for myself.” He scanned the group of prisoners with his mad eyes. Suddenly his hand shot out, and he pointed a finger at Peter. “You, there, in the shirt and vest. Don’t lie to me now. How many degrees did these men put you through before they made you like that – or did they bribe you to do it?”

“Can’t I lie?” asked Peter.

“Of course you can’t lie,” said the magistrate. “Did you intend to lie?”

“I had thought of lying a little,” Peter admitted.

“You had?” reflected Wagger. “That’s bad. But you’re not going to lie now? Why not?”

“I’m too darned scared,” said Peter. “My brain isn’t working.”

“Mine is absolutely atrophied,” confided the gray-haired justice. “Come, speak up – how did you get all naked?”

“We ran away naked,” Peter told him.

“What!” gasped the magistrate. “What hideous crime had you committed to make you run away in the condition you are – you and your companions?”

“They were playing all over an amusement park,” an officer put in here. “Steeplechase, it was.”

“That’s a lie,” snapped the red-headed girl in the raincoat. “We were suffering all over an amusement park, your honor. Almost dying.”

The magistrate looked for a long time at Jo. She had never encountered such concentrated vindictiveness.

“When the conversation becomes general,” he said in a bitterly polite voice, “we’ll let you in, too. Maybe we’ll all talk at once.” Suddenly his jaws snapped. “Until then, hold your tongue.” Once more he turned to Peter. “What were you running away from?” he demanded.

“From a lot of naked people,” said Peter.

“Why should a person in your condition run away from others who, so far as I can see – and I can see much farther than I ever thought I’d be called upon to do from this bench – were no whit worse?”

“If you were naked yourself,” asked Peter, “wouldn’t you run away from a lot of other naked people of mixed sexes?”

The magistrate gulped, then placed a firm check on his indignation.

“I’d crawl away,” he answered in a low voice, “even as I would like to crawl away from you. But I don’t care for the turn this talk is taking. Ask me no more nasty questions like that last one. Why, if you were running away, as you state – why, may I ask, did you and your friends stop to play on a lot of slides and things? Have you no concentration?”

“We were looking for a place of concealment,” said Peter, only too keenly aware of the utter inadequacy of his statement.

“And so you picked out one of the most popular amusement parks in the world,” the magistrate observed with a sneer in his voice, “in which to hide your nakedness. Listen to me, young man. Even if I ask you questions in a moment of abstraction, don’t answer them. I am trying to keep quite calm about all this, and you upset me.” He paused, cast his eyes over the group, and let them finally rest on the abashed pickpocket.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” the magistrate began, “but I have to talk to someone. Please refrain from being trying, and do a little something about those drawers while I am forced to look at you.”

Arthur picked up a corner of the raincoat that stood between Aspirin Liz and decency, and draped it over his shorts. The result was that much of Liz became exposed – too much. The magistrate closed his eyes and looked as if he were going to faint.

“Make him put it back,” he muttered. “My eyes are destroying my brain.”

When the raincoat had been properly rearranged on Aspirin Liz, and the magistrate had gulped down a glass of water, he once more addressed himself to the cowering prisoner before him.

“Don’t ever do that again,” scolded Magistrate Wagger. “Not even if you think it amuses me. It doesn’t. Now tell me who you are.”

“I’m Little Arthur,” faltered the small crook.

The magistrate blinked his surprise.

“Little Arthur,” he repeated. “Is that a proper name for a fully grown man? Do you hope to soften me by baby talk? Little Arthur! – just how much does that mean? Nothing! Suppose I should refer to myself as Little Wagger, or Little Alfred, which happens to be my first name – would you like it?”

“I wouldn’t mind,” replied Little Arthur.

“You wouldn’t, perhaps,” snapped the magistrate, “but think of my friends and associates. Would they like it?”

“I don’t know none of yer friends, yer honor,” Little Arthur stammered.

“Thank God for that, at any rate,” muttered Wagger, mopping his forehead with a large white handkerchief. “Answer the question,” he roared suddenly. “Little Arthur what?”

“Little Arthur Springtime,” answered the crook.

“Springtime,” grated the magistrate. “Why Little Arthur Springtime? Was that when you were born?”

The other members of the detained party looked upon their companion with reawakened interest. They had never stopped to consider that he might have another name, especially such a lyrical one.

“No, yer honor,” replied Arthur. “I was born in the wintertime.”

“Then why in God’s good name did your mother call you Springtime?” demanded Wagger. “All this is a sheer waste of energy and breath.”

At this point Mr. Horace Sampson felt himself called upon to clear up the confusion.

“Perhaps, Magistrate Wagger,” he said in his deep voice, “perhaps the illiterate little beggar means that certain things happened in the springtime that made it possible for him to be born in the winter.”

The magistrate eyed the philosopher darkly.

“How do you mean?” he demanded. “What things?”

“The usual ones,” said Sampson.

“Oh, that,” murmured the justice. “My brain is quite addled. That would be it.”

“You see, yer honor,” volunteered Little Arthur, “the firehouse moved away and Mom never could tell which, although she knew it was one of ’em.”

“What has a firehouse got to do with it,” asked the magistrate, “and where did it move to?”

“Don’t know,” replied Arthur sadly. “I wasn’t born then.”

“I wish you never had been,” rasped the magistrate. “Do you mean to imply you’re the results of an assault?”

Little Arthur dropped his eyes.

“I have been since, yer honor,” he said, “but not then. The boys just used ter drop in social, like.”

“Why, this is the most disgraceful story I ever heard,” exclaimed Wagger. “Why are you telling it to me?”

“You kept asking me questions,” the crook answered simply.

“Well, I won’t ask you any more,” declared the magistrate. “Decidedly not. I should think I’d go quite mad listening to all this. Can’t see why I’m not.”

“Not what?” asked Jo.

“Not mad,” said the magistrate, not thinking.

“Not mad at who?” asked Jo.

“I’m not mad at anybody,” he retorted.

“Aren’t you mad at Little Arthur?” she continued.

“Stop asking me questions,” he suddenly roared at the girl. “I hate the very sight of Little Arthur. My God, I’m nervous. Any of you boys got an aspirin?”

A clerk passed a box of aspirin tablets up to the magistrate. He tried to open the tin container, but somehow failed to manage it.

“Can’t do it,” he said hopelessly. “Never can. Never have been able to. Why do they make them that way?”

“Let me try,” offered Liz. “I know how.”

“It’s irregular,” said the nervous man, “but I must have a pill.”

Deftly Liz opened the small tin container, removed a tablet, and passed the open box back to the magistrate. The tablet she placed under her tongue. Magistrate Wagger was following her movements with fascinated eyes.

“Don’t you take any water?” he asked her.

“I like ’em better dry,” said Liz. “Under my tongue.”

Wagger looked slightly shocked.

“I should think it would be uncomfortable,” he ventured. “Can you talk all right? No impediment at all?”

“You get sort of used to it,” she told him.

“Well, I won’t try now,” said the magistrate. “But I will later.” He popped the tablet into his mouth, drained another glass of water, then glared hatefully at the Bishop.

“You’re old enough to know better than to be going round like that,” he said. “Just drawers and a split shirt, and the drawers are coming down in my face. Yank ’em up!” The Bishop complied promptly, and the magistrate continued. “That’s better,” he said. “And remember, if you don’t care what you show, I care about what I look at. I’m very nervous now, and I want you to tell me exactly who you are. Don’t try to say you’re Little This or That, because I won’t be able to stand it.”

“My name is Waller,” replied the Bishop in his most impressive voice. “Bishop Waller.”

“Is the first part a name or a title?” asked the magistrate.

“It designates the office I hold in the Episcopal Church,” said the Bishop calmly.

Magistrate Wagger never knew how he overcame the confused, distorted impulses that beset him at that moment. From mahogany his face turned purple. His eyes grew and grew until they ached in his head. Several times he swallowed. Finally he spoke.

“I don’t believe you,” he said in a cracked voice. “And you can’t say I didn’t give you a fair warning.” He turned to his clerk. “When I come to sentencing this mob,” he said, “remind me to tack on some extra time to this ruffian’s term for attempting to hide behind the skirts of the Church.” He rested a pair of weary eyes on Liz. “Will you please show me what you are concealing beneath that raincoat?” he asked.

“Not on your life,” said Liz. “I knew the legal mind was accurate, but I didn’t know it was nasty.”

“Are you calling me nasty?” Wagger asked in a voice hushed by incredulity.

“I was referring to the legal mind,” hedged Liz.

“Well, my mind is legal,” snapped the baited jurist.

“So is mine,” replied Liz. “It’s perfectly legal to have a mind, isn’t it?”

“It all depends on how you use it,” he told her. “How did we get on this subject?”

“I don’t know,” said Liz.

“Neither do I,” admitted the magistrate. “I’m feeling terribly baffled by all these digressions. Will you tell what you have concealed under that raincoat if you won’t let me see?”

“Everything I’ve got,” said Liz, “is underneath this raincoat.”

“And what have you got?” asked the magistrate, not to be outwitted.

“What would you expect?” the lady demanded. “Fish scales, or feathers?”

“How do you mean, feathers?” the magistrate stubbornly persisted. “Or fish scales, for instance?”

“Oh, God,” breathed Liz, casting her eyes to heaven. “Take a look for yourself.”

With this she threw open the raincoat, and the magistrate, after one dazed look, uttered a wild cry and collapsed on his desk. For a few moments there was confusion in the court, but Wagger did not care. At last he raised a stricken face and looked severely at Liz.

“That was a terrible thing to do,” he told her. “You nearly gave me a stroke.”

“You were asking for it,” said Liz.

“Perhaps,” he admitted fairly. “But I never thought it was possible for a woman to be so – so much, if you get what I mean.”

“Without any trouble at all,” she replied. “You’d be surprised to know that once I had a very lovely figure.”

“May I ask,” put in Horace Sampson, “is this a trial or an informal gathering?”

“You may not,” retorted the magistrate. “Keep a civil tongue in your head. I’ve got enough on my hands.”

“Enough what on your hands?” asked Jo.

“I don’t know,” said Wagger.

“I understood you to say you had enough tongue on your hands,” persisted Jo.

“My dear young woman,” the magistrate almost pleaded, “how could I possibly have enough tongue on my hands?”

“Oh, so you like tongue?”

“I didn’t say so.”

“But,” protested the girl, “you just asked me how you could ever possibly get enough tongue on your hands.”

“I meant just tongue,” he explained. “Not enough tongue. As a matter of fact, I’d hate to have tongue on my hands. Don’t fancy the idea at all.”

“How about a dog’s tongue?” she asked him.

“Whose dog?” he wanted to know. “I have no dog.”

“That’s too bad,” said Jo. “Well, then, the tongue of any dog you name.”

“Good God!” cried the magistrate, suddenly realizing the lengths to which this girl had led him. “Is this tongue discussion going to continue on indefinitely? I don’t care if it’s a dog’s tongue or an elephant’s tongue. Keep them off my hands.”

“I’m not going to put tongue on your hands,” Josephine replied defensively. “I was just asking.”

“All right. All right,” Wagger said in a weary voice. “Now let me ask you some questions. To begin with, how did you get that way?”

“Well, your honor,” began Jo easily, “it was like this. You see, there was a fog and – —”

“What fog?” interrupted the magistrate.

Jo looked puzzled.

“How do you mean, what fog?” she asked. “You can’t name a fog or bring along a sample.”

“Where and when was this fog?” he demanded.

“All over,” said Jo. “I forget just when.”

Magistrate Wagger looked thoroughly disheartened.

“Tell it your way,” he muttered. “I won’t believe you anyhow.”

“And there were a lot of naked people, your honor,” the girl continued.

“There still are,” he said moodily.

“And these naked people,” went on the girl, “took off all our clothes.”

“Just where is the fog at this point?” asked Wagger, not caring whether she told him or not.

“There isn’t any fog any more,” she replied.

“Then I don’t see why you introduced the fog in the first place,” he answered. “Are you trying to interest me in a dirty story, young lady?”

“It isn’t so dirty,” protested Jo. “Just in spots, your honor.”

Suddenly the magistrate’s eyes dilated. He leaned far over his desk and fixed his wild bloodshot eyes on the middle section of Jo’s raincoat.

“Why are you doing that?” he asked in a hushed voice.

“Doing what?” demanded Jo.

“You must know what you’re doing,” he replied.

“Occasionally I don’t,” she told him.

“Why does your coat go like that?” demanded the magistrate. “I insist on knowing.”

Glancing down, Jo was interested to observe that from the appearance of her raincoat she had suddenly grown very fat. Jumping to conclusions, she looked reproachfully at Peter.

“Peter,” she said, “we’ll have to make that wedding snappy. This looks like a rush order.”

“It’s not that,” he assured her. “Your stomach is a little upset.”

“Your coat,” said the judge, almost whispering. “It thrusts itself out, then suddenly collapses. Are you doing it?”

“No, sir,” replied Jo. “I mean, yes.”

“Then don’t,” pleaded the magistrate.

Jo gave Havelock Ellis a vicious squeeze, and the duck gave an equally vicious squawk. Magistrate Wagger looked startled, then peered searchingly at the prisoners before him.

“Who made that offensive noise?” he wanted to know. “It constitutes contempt of court. Come! Speak up!”

“I’ll readily agree,” rumbled the long silent philosopher, “that the noise was both offensive and contemptible, but I assure you, sir, I wouldn’t have made it if I could, which I greatly doubt.”

“How you go on!” the magistrate complained. “Who made that unusual noise? I want to know.” At this moment the squawk was repeated and Josephine’s stomach gave a brisk outward lunge. Wagger’s eyes were popping. He had partly risen from his chair. “There it goes again,” he breathed. “It went ’way out this time.” He sank back in his chair and once more mopped his forehead. “Young lady,” he resumed, “are you deliberately making stomachs at me?”

“Not deliberately,” answered Jo, finding it increasingly difficult to restrain the aroused Ellis. “My stomach is just on its own. I have no control over it.”

“I’ll have no control over mine if this keeps up,” he assured her. “That aspirin didn’t do a bit of good. I …” His voice died away in his chair. “For the love of God, what’s that?” he cried, pointing at Josephine’s stomach.

Jo looked at her stomach, as did everyone else within peering distance. Officers and court attendants moved a little away. Under the circumstances they were not to be blamed. Braver men than they have been unnerved by lesser sights. Protruding from the raincoat at Josephine’s stomach was a long, purple, snake-like head which was looking fixedly at Magistrate Wagger out of two yellow, malevolent eyes. With her free hand Jo thrust the head of the duck back beneath the coat. The air was filled with squawks. Ellis was protesting in the worst language she knew how to use.

“That,” said Jo at last, feeling somewhat confused herself, “that was merely my handbag.”

“Merely,” wheezed the haggard Wagger. “Just a simple little handbag, eh – a mere trifle?” Then his indignation got the upper hand. “Does a handbag hurl maledictions in a foreign tongue?” he thundered. “Does a handbag peer at one out of fierce yellow eyes that look as if they had brooded on the flames of hell itself? Does a handbag have a long, death-dealing beak?”

“Yes, sir,” cut in Jo. “It’s a novelty handbag – a funny one. I open the beak and put things in – small change and lipstick and all sorts of things.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” demanded Wagger, “that you actually open that beak?”

“Why not?” Jo replied with a shrug.

“Well, I wouldn’t do it if they made me a justice of the Supreme Court,” he said decisively. For a moment or so he tapped nervously on his desk with his skinny fingers. “Young lady,” he resumed, “I don’t believe that handbag story at all. I can’t believe it. There was too much life and animation in what I saw – too much noise. Are you by any chance an unfortunate freak? That head seemed almost a part of you to me.”

“Not at all,” replied the girl. “We are quite independent, I assure you.”

It was at this point that Havelock Ellis took it into her head to prove the accuracy of Jo’s words. She had been missing things too long, had the duck, Ellis. She would find out for herself what all this was about. With a vicious tug and a beating of wings, she burst Jo’s coat asunder and with a wild cry of triumph fluttered to the magistrate’s desk. But her cry was not nearly so wild as the one that tore itself from Wagger’s throat as he abandoned the dignity of his office and sought safety behind his chair. Ellis made a vicious snap at the rear part of the departing man. Contact was established and Wagger’s speed increased. After this gesture of contempt the duck settled down on the desk and remained perfectly still.

“It bit me,” chattered the magistrate. “I’m poisoned perhaps! What’s it going to do next?”

“Maybe she’ll lay an egg,” was Jo’s calm reply. “She’s done about everything else.”

“Do you mean that duck would have the temerity to lay an egg on the desk of a city magistrate?” quavered the little man behind the chair.

“She never has yet,” said Jo, “but when that duck makes up her mind to lay an egg, I feel convinced she’d produce it on the desk of the mayor himself.”

“Oh!” lamented the magistrate. “Oh, dear, oh, dear! What a way for a girl to talk! What are we going to do? I won’t touch that duck.” Suddenly he was stung by a new and fearful consideration. “Lock all the doors,” he cried. “Don’t let a reporter out. If this gets into the papers I’ll never hear the end of it. ‘Duck Lays Egg on Magistrate Wagger’s Desk’ – I can see it already in headlines.” He looked at the demoralized policemen. “If you boys will take that duck away, back go your badges and buttons,” he promised them.

“That’s my duck,” said Jo, sweeping the squatting bird from the desk. “I’ve had a lot of trouble with that duck. If she lays an egg, that’s going to be mine, too.”

“Keep both the duck and her egg,” screamed Wagger. “Do you think I want them? I wish I could tell you what to do with the damn duck.”

“I’m afraid you’d be asking too much, your honor,” Jo replied demurely.

At this moment a reporter approached the magistrate and spoke rapidly to him in an undertone. Slowly the little man’s face cleared.

“You won’t mention the duck?” he asked the reporter.

“Not a word,” the other declared. “We’ll stick to the straight story.”

“And how did you get the story?” Wagger wanted to know.

“Why, if that gentleman in the drawers is Bishop Waller,” the reporter said, “then naturally the people with him must be those who left the ferry in the fog.”

“I wish they’d never been found,” Magistrate Wagger replied. “I wish they’d been lost at sea forever and forever.”

“I recognized Peter Van Dyck myself,” the reporter went on, “in spite of his informal appearance.”

“If you write a funny story about us,” Peter spoke up promptly, “I’ll call in a flock of reporters and tell about the duck and what the magistrate wanted the young lady to do with it.”

“I didn’t say it,” shouted Wagger. “I only wished it.”

“Then I’ll tell the world what you wished she would do with the duck,” said Peter.

“Don’t do it, Mr. Van Dyck, I beg you,” the magistrate pleaded. “This reporter is going to be nice. You be nice, too. That’s a good chap.” For a moment the courtroom was still as Wagger sat at his desk and brooded upon the many wrongs that had been done him. His indignation rose. He could contain it no longer. He spoke.

“Are you Bishop Waller?” he asked in a voice of velvet gentleness.

“I assured you I was,” said the Bishop.

“A bishop of the Episcopal Church?” continued the magistrate.

“I am, sir,” the Bishop replied.

“Then I have made a slight mistake,” said Wagger, his voice still soft and sweet, “and I hope you won’t mind if I ask you to take your naked gang and get the hell out of my courtroom.”

His voice ended in a snarl, and he sank back in his chair, his eyes tightly closed.

“Have they gone?” he asked at length, pressing a hand to each temple.

“They have, sir,” answered an officer.

“Thank God for that,” muttered Wagger.

•   •   •   •   •

They had gone. They were in a taxicab with the reporter headed for the Half-Moon Hotel. As they drove away from the court, an expensive-looking car of foreign make followed them down the street. The philosopher glanced through the window and studied the imposing tower of the hotel they were approaching. It was capped by a replica of the adventurous ship from which the hotel derived its name. Many windows looked out upon the sea from the mounting structure standing out picturesquely against the blue.

“An altogether charming seaside caravansary,” murmured Mr. Sampson. “I think we should do well there. It does justice to Hendrik Hudson.”

“Who did he ever lick?” asked Little Arthur from his seat on the floor of the cab.

“Oh, he just knocked about the river in a boat,” said Josephine.

“A ferry captain,” concluded the hopeless dip. “I don’t want ter hear another word.”

“He was a Dutchman,” put in Peter proudly.

“I’d try to keep that quiet,” said Jo.

Arrived at the Half-Moon, the reporter considerately led them through the street entrance, which fortunately for the guests as well as themselves was a large secluded hall cut off from the lounge and lobby above. Here they were met by the manager, who, although warned over the telephone by the reporter, could not repress a look of astonishment when he gazed at his prospective guests.

“We need a flock of rooms,” said Peter.

“You need much more than that,” the manager replied with a gracious smile. “If you meet any of my guests in the hallways, I hope you won’t mind if I ask you in a loud voice if you enjoyed the masquerade.”

“My dear sir,” replied the Bishop, “if you get us to our rooms you can ask us if we enjoyed the murder for all I care. Have you a pin, perhaps?”

The manager had no pin, but promptly obtained one from the near-by beauty salon. The Bishop accepted it gratefully and did things to his jaegers. At this moment the lift door opened and several passengers stepped out. When they gazed upon the huddled party they almost stepped back again.

“Did you enjoy the masquerade?” asked the manager in a loud false voice.

“No!” cried Little Arthur. “It was punk.”

“Why, you low thief,” boomed the philosopher, “you had the time of your life.”

The people hurried on and the party hurried in. The dusky, good-looking girl responsible for the lift was responsible for it no longer. She uttered a frightened cry and turned her back on the worse than naked throng.

“I should have warned her,” said the manager of the Half-Moon. “She probably thinks you are ghosts.”

“I feel like one,” declared Aspirin Liz.

“You don’t look like one,” said the manager.

A chauffeur in splendid livery was hurrying towards the party. When he reached the elevator, he offered a large bundle to Peter.

“Mr. Jones sends his compliments,” he said in a smooth voice. “He hopes you enjoyed yourself in court as much as he did. He further hopes that you put on these clothes as speedily as possible. He himself will bring Miss Yolanda back to town shortly. He desires to meet her parents, and suggests great discretion be used on all sides.”

The chauffeur paused and winked. Peter almost dropped the bundle. Quickly the uniformed man turned away.

“You can tell Mr. Jones for me,” Little Arthur called after the rapidly retreating figure, “that if I ever catch him wearing pockets I’ll pick ’em clean as a hound’s tooth.”

“You missed your chance,” said Peter as the elevator shot skyward under the hand of the recovered operator. “That was Mr. Jones.”

EPILOGUE

A Farewell to Drawers

Bishop Waller, clad only in a towel, stood in the center of his newly acquired room at the Half-Moon. A majestic figure, the Bishop, now that at last his jaegers were off. Bishop Waller was waiting for the hotel valet. On the bed lay an orderly row of garments but recently returned to him by the considerate but reprehensible Mr. Jones. In his heart the Bishop could not thoroughly disapprove of the man. Mr. Jones had his points.

However, before the Bishop could don his rightful attire and mingle once more with his kind, he felt it essential to procure at all costs a new pair of jaegers, the extra pair having been left behind in his suitcase on the abandoned ferry. The old ones had served their purpose. They had outworn their usefulness. Yet Bishop Waller did not despise the abandoned jaegers. Far from it. He regarded them in the light of a religious relic. They deserved to be framed tastefully and hung in a church.

“Jaegers Worn by Bishop Waller in Defiance of the Nudes,” or some other such terse, dignified explanation would do quite nicely, for, of course, the presence of those jaegers in a church would have to be explained.

A knock sounded on the door.

“Come in,” said Bishop Waller, an invitation he would not have extended in his present condition ten days ago.

“Can I be of any service?” the valet inquired.

“Of invaluable service,” replied the Bishop, tossing the jaegers over the man’s extended arm. “Go out into the marts and highways of this city and see if you can match those.”

The valet raised his eyebrows and considered the garment dangling from his arm a little more distastefully than the Bishop would have liked.

“It will be difficult at this hour,” said the man, “to match these er – —”

“Jaegers,” supplied the Bishop.

“Exactly,” agreed the valet. “But I think it can be done, sir. I know of one store that sells almost anything at any time of night. It’s such an odd store, I’m sure they must have things like this.”

“Excellent,” said the Bishop, “save for the last sentence.”

Half an hour later the valet returned with a neatly tied package. Eagerly the Bishop opened it and extracted the garment within. The valet produced the odd pair from another package not nearly so neatly tied. In fact, it was in an old bag that the battered jaegers had been returned. Evidently the shopkeeper regarded them even more distastefully than did the valet. Bishop Waller let this pass.

The valet held up the old pair while the Bishop held up the new. Together they compared the garments.

“To a buttonhole,” cried the Bishop at last, beaming upon the valet. “Splendid work, my fine fellow. A perfect match to the last, least buttonhole. I would have said button, only there aren’t any buttons on the old ones. I must have been a sight.”

•   •   •   •   •

Aspirin Liz and Little Arthur had shifted into their respective drawers with precision and despatch. Little Arthur, as he got into his ancient pair, mutely promised the patron saint of all good pickpockets that he would never take them off again nor desire those of any other man. With Liz he had dined in regal splendor – far better than he had ever dined before – in the long, restful dining room of the hotel. Soft music together with a knowledge of his companion’s alert scrutiny had so conquered his spirit that he left the silver intact. After dinner they had strolled along the boardwalk for the sheer pleasure of experiencing the sensation of being fully clad in public.

At the moment Liz was engaged in utterly demolishing Little Arthur. Seated in a tiny but apparently indestructible self-propelling vehicle, known as a Dodge-’em, she was pursuing him – likewise ensconced – round an enclosed surface presided over by a tolerantly benign Japanese. Every time she drove her midget motor into that of her light-fingered playfellow, her titanic laughter drifted far into the night. It tickled something savage and destructive in her soul to crash into Little Arthur and to shatter virtually every bone in his frail body.

“It ain’t fair,” screamed the small crook, purple in the face. “You’re carrying too much fat.”

“Oh, dear,” sighed Liz weakly, tears streaming down her cheeks, “this is more fun than a kettle of fish.”

She pressed her foot on the pedal and launched herself into Arthur as if she would totally destroy him. There was the sound of a mighty impact, her victim’s head jerked crazily backwards, his car twirled impotently across the floor, and Liz’s wild laughter drew fresh spectators from the boardwalk.

Never, decided the Japanese, had he had such a wholly satisfactory nest egg as Liz. She overflowed her car and gave the almost deserted floor the appearance of being crowded – of literally throbbing with gayety and life. The lookers-on regarded her with wonderment and respect and Little Arthur with deep commiseration.

Crashing, dodging, and steadily insulting each other, Aspirin Liz and Little Arthur spin dizzily from the page.

•   •   •   •   •

In the quiet, gracious lounge of the hotel filled with comfortable divans and armchairs and generously supplied with ashtrays – a stroke of sheer genius – Mr. Horace Sampson was sitting with the reporter. Sampson was in the philosophical pink. He was wondering idly what the guests of the hotel would do if suddenly deprived of their drawers – everything, in fact. He was endeavoring to imagine the reactions of the various ladies and gentlemen under his observation. That old lady with the pearls round a high stiff collar would never survive the shock, whereas there were a couple of girls over there who after a little parleying might take to it like ducks to water. It was difficult to tell at a glance. He turned to the reporter seated in a chair beside him.

“What do you think of drawers?” asked the philosopher.

“Personally,” replied the reporter, “I admire them less than any garment I wear – even less than my undershirt.”

“Yet,” pursued the philosopher, “if you had to choose between them, the drawers would win the day.”

“Naturally,” retorted the reporter. “An undershirt merely keeps one warm, whereas drawers keep one decent. A man looks less ridiculous in a pair of drawers than when he is clad only in an undershirt.”

“I’m not convinced,” the philosopher replied thoughtfully. “Some drawers can be singularly ridiculous. For example, those worn by the good Bishop still amuse me even in retrospect.”

“After your experience, Mr. Sampson,” inquired the reporter, “what is your opinion of the nudist colony from which you escaped?”

“Not high,” replied Sampson, “but of this I am convinced: to endeavor to conquer the flesh is a profitless undertaking. Before a man or a woman can arrive at any degree of spiritual tranquillity, he or she must give flesh the rein. Whether one is clad in bare flesh or fur makes very little difference.”

“How about the health angle?” asked the philosopher’s companion.

“Fiddlesticks!” he snapped. “The benefits derived from mixed nudity are far offset by the mental agitation it entails. When men and women deliberately set out to attain a state of purity and so-called innocence, they are endeavoring to capture something that never existed. And if they did succeed, they would be greatly disappointed people. Purity, my friend, is simply an escape from the obligations one owes to one’s own body as well as to others much more attractively fashioned.” The philosopher turned and considered the radio darkly. It was a splendid radio. A lonely little gray-haired man was clinging to it like a drowning man to a straw. “Tell me,” resumed Mr. Sampson, “what is that sick sound issuing from that box?”

“That sound,” replied the reporter, “is made nightly by one of the nation’s most popular crooners.”

For a moment the philosopher considered this in silence.

“You see,” he said at last, “how difficult it is for a man of my views to live in harmony with his fellow men. To me that noise is more degrading to humanity, more destructive to the morale, more morally and spiritually enervating than strong drink and weak women – I mean by that, accommodating women.” He stretched his long legs and knocked the ashes from his pipe. “The chap making that noise deserves no drawers at all,” he said reflectively. “He should be clad in scanties.”

•   •   •   •   •

A full moon over the Half-Moon. Its ship-crested tower mounted high above the boardwalk and looked far out to sea. Lights on the dark ocean moving along to Europe, to the tropics and distant ports. High up in this tower Jo and Peter were standing in the moonlight. And remarkable as it may seem, both of them were dressed. Probably not for long.

“Are you going to keep this up indefinitely?” asked Peter. “You have a room of your own.”

She disregarded his question, knowing he did not mean it.

“I had hoped,” she said, “that Bishop Waller would marry us in his jaegers.”

“And what would we be wearing?” he inquired.

“Simply ourselves,” said Jo.

“All marriages should be made that way,” Peter observed surprisingly. “It would save a lot of time.”

“I’m afraid there’d be fewer marriages,” said Jo, “if couples undressed first.”

“Not at all,” retorted Peter. “Many a plain face surmounts a lovely body. And you must remember, Jo, the latter is very important.”

“I never forget,” breathed Jo.

“Tomorrow the Bishop will marry us,” he continued. “Aspirin Liz and Little Arthur will be the worst man and woman. I have decided to take them into my employment. You will be engaged in the capacity of wife.”

“No longer your concubine,” Jo said somewhat sadly. “I’ll sort of miss that. It’s been so good being bad.”

She turned away from the window and went into her room. It adjoined Peter’s, and the door to it had been locked when they had first arrived. Not wishing to disturb anyone, Peter had bribed Little Arthur to pick it.

“It’s the most shameful thing I’ve ever done,” the little crook had protested. “I feel like a white-slaver.”

A ten-dollar bill had done much to make him forget this unpleasant feeling. Before he had left the room he had convinced his dishonest little mind that he was a public benefactor.

“I guess it’s better this way after all,” he had admitted as he pocketed the money. “It will keep you from running up and down the halls, so people can get some sleep and you can keep yer shame to yourselves.”

“Peter,” Jo called from the next room, “do you like my body?”

“Sure,” replied Peter. “I think it’s just great.”

“Then I’ll tell you what let’s do,” she went on. “You take off your clothes and I’ll take off mine and we’ll play matching bruises. I got a lot in that park.”

“I have so many they’re merging,” Peter informed her, turning from the window. “How is Ellis?”

“She’s gone to sleep in the bathtub as happy as a lark.”

“If Sampson were present he’d want to know how a duck can be as happy as a totally different make of bird,” observed Peter.

“I’m glad he’s not here,” said Jo. “Wonder if Ellis is the first duck ever to have occupied a bathtub at the Half-Moon.”

“I guess we will never know that,” said Peter, taking off his shoes.

And in a little while Josephine and Peter were matching the various bruises they had collected during the sound and fury of their flight. They were almost like little children about it, but … not quite.

— THE END —

RAIN
IN THE DOORWAY

DESCRIPTION

A cuckold husband, Hector Owen, inadvertently becomes a partner in a big-city department store. The bulk of the action involves the inebriated adventures of Owen, his three partners (Mr. Horace Larkin, a man called Dinner, and Major Barney Britt-Britt), and a salesgirl from the pornographic books department, Miss Honor “Satin” Knightly.

Dedication

For
HELEN, KATHLEEN, and LILLIAN,
for whom Allah be praised.

CHAPTER ONE

Waiting

The rain falling not more than a foot and a half from the geographical tip of the nose outjutting from the face in the doorway had in it a quality of falsely apologetic but, nevertheless, stubbornly persistent despair.

It seeped under one’s nerves, that rain, and left them uncomfortably soggy.

“Like a hypocritical old woman selfishly enjoying her misery all over the confounded house,” reflected the face in the doorway. “That last drop actually sighed quaveringly on my nose. It’s quite wet, my nose.”

The face produced a handkerchief which had withstood, not without scars of service, the onslaughts of numerous laundries, and the wet nose was solicitously patted back to a state of dryness.

And when the face itself was once more disclosed to view from behind its crumpled concealment, no pedestrian on that rain-simmering street paused to view it. Not one pedestrian gave it so much as a passing glance. This universal lack of interest was apparently accepted by the face without bitterness or regret. It seemed to appreciate the fact that it was the type of face at which few persons ever troubled to look, and even when they did look they found no difficulty in pursuing the even tenor of their thoughts, assuming they had any to pursue. The face was well accustomed to being not looked at. Of late it had much preferred being not looked at. It had felt rather retiring and undressed, as if uncertain of the expression that might be surprised on its unremarkable surface.

This face was the exclusive property of a Mr. Hector Owen. At the moment its moody eyes were staring from lean, bleak features through a vista of rain-drenched twilight upon the untidy prospect of Sixth Avenue at Fourteenth Street. The rumble of the elevated trains on the tracks above formed a monotonous background to his thoughts. Without his realizing it, colored electric lights were flashing in his mind. Eva Le Gallienne’s theater kept reminding him that it was still there. A little farther down the street the stones of the armory bunched themselves together in the wet gloom as if desirous of a blanket.

Mr. Hector Owen’s chief occupation in life was that of a sort of urban bailiff for a wealthy estate, the owners of which, so far as he could gather, spent nearly all of their time either in jail, in bed, or intoxicated, or in any combination of the three, such as intoxicated in bed, intoxicated in jail, or just simply intoxicated somewhere in Europe, and always in trouble.

There had been times – usually when Mr. Owen was reading letters from the heirs in difficulties or depositing untoiled for funds to their accounts – when he had secretly wished he too were intoxicated in bed or in jail or even right there at his desk. Any one of these places of intoxication would have been a welcome relief to Mr. Hector Owen of the legal profession if not of the legal mind.

Recently there had been increasing agitation on the part of the heirs – probably the disgruntled result of an especially virulent hangover – to transfer the estate from the conscientious hands of Mr. Owen to the less human but more efficient management of a trust company. And this agitation had been augmented by the fact that he was unreasonably held accountable for the strange disappearance of one of the estate’s most invaluable heirs, one who had mysteriously ceased to offend the public eye. The remaining drunken or bedridden or incarcerated heirs were considerably worked up over this. In the absence of anyone better to blame, they became indignant at Mr. Owen. They demanded that he return to them at once the missing heir. They desired this missing heir not because they had affectionate natures or felt in the least responsible or were in any way decent minded or public spirited. Probably they would have been gratified had Mr. Owen returned the missing heir to them quite dead. In lieu of a death certificate or a dead body, they earnestly desired the signature of the missing heir in order to dispose of enough real estate to enable them to pursue uncramped their lives of lavish debauchery.

Accordingly the shadow of the trust company lay across Hector Owen’s business like a threat of suffocation. It lay across more than his business. It darkened his entire life, for without that estate to manage there would not be enough left of the Owen law practice upon which even the thinnest shadow could sprawl with any measure of comfort. That missing heir was essential to the man’s continued existence. Also, in a lesser degree, it was essential to the happiness of Lulu Owen, his wife. Of course Lulu had money of her own, but of late Hector had rather begun to suspect that his wife regarded her money as entirely and exclusively her own while the money he made she considered in the light of a joint income in which he held the short end.

This was by no means the only thing he had begun to suspect of Lulu, and these suspicions served to intensify the steadily deepening shadow through which he had been laboring during the last six months of depression. Only this morning a tentative draft of the estate, or trust, transfer had been laid before him together with a covering letter signed somewhat shakily by all of the heirs but one, and that one was still missing.

Inwardly, as he stared misanthropically at the rain-dimpled surface of the street, Hector Owen cursed the missing heir. The fact that the missing heir was a girl, a girl, young and beautiful though no better than she should be, if as good, diminished neither the size nor sincerity of Mr. Owen’s oaths. He cursed her sexlessly and selflessly like God berating the world. While the missing signature of this loose creature prevented him from carrying out the wishes of the other heirs to their entire satisfaction, it did not prevent them from carrying off their estate to some trust company to his utter and eternal undoing. Mr. Hector Owen was not temperamentally equipped to compete for business in the modern marts of law. The estate business upon which he depended had been a legacy from his father, who in turn had received it in the same convenient manner.

Standing there in that doorway, Hector Owen had much more than enough to think about. Any one of his thoughts would have been sufficient to send a heart far stouter than his down for the third time. Especially the one about Lulu and Mal Summers. That was a black thought indeed. A man could not very well walk up to his wife and say: “By the way, darling, yesterday you spent a pleasant but nevertheless highly adulterous afternoon with a dirty snake in the grass by the name of Mal Summers.” His wife would promptly accuse him of having an evil mind, after which she would throw things at him and end up by packing her suitcase during a protective fit of hysteria.

Nothing could ever be settled that way. Nothing ever was. Although he was morally certain of his facts, he could confront her with no shred of actual proof. And even had he been in a position to say: “Yesterday, my dear, I enjoyed the somewhat doubtful privilege of being present though concealed while you and one of my alleged friends conducted yourselves in a manner which, to say the least, was disillusioning” – even had Mr. Owen been prepared to make this statement he would have balked at it like a nervous horse. In spite of his legal training his reticent nature, inhibited as it was by all sorts of gentlemanly instincts, would have pleaded with him to remain silent. Mr. Owen had one of those visual minds that beheld in graphic detail the things of which he spoke. Anyway, he was sufficiently well acquainted with his wife to forecast the nature of her reply. That good lady would indubitably have told him with bafflingly feminine sophistry: “In the first place, you wouldn’t have been there if you hadn’t an evil mind, and, in the second place, if you hadn’t an evil mind I wouldn’t have been there myself.”

It never occurred to the less quick-witted Mr. Owen to admit quite frankly that he had an evil mind. For some strange and unexamined reason it is an admission few persons care to make, even those whose minds are a great deal more than evil. Yet, if the simple truth were known, everyone has an evil mind when it comes to such matters, and if they have not, they are extremely dumb, or indifferent to a fault.

Hector Owen was neither dumb nor indifferent. His face, such as it was, had looked out on the passing of thirty-eight neat, orderly, uneventful years. Although it was not a face to attract at first glance, it was one that amply justified a second. It was a keen face in a quiet way, keen, thoughtful, and sentient. A trifle long, with high cheek bones, and lips of a rather attractively unplanned pattern. It could look exceedingly mournful, as it did now, this face, and even when the lips arranged themselves in a smile, the blue eyes above responded slowly, as if skeptical of the levity taking place below. This gave to Mr. Owen’s smile a sort of double emphasis, and made it something to be pleasantly remembered. It was such a slow, well considered smile that the observer found himself, or herself, in a position to get to know all of it. One felt that one had played a helpful part in this smile – participated at its birth, so to speak.

Among his various other incongruities was the studious dignity with which he moved his five feet eight inches of slim body from place to place. He was by nature a jointy sort of an animal whom God or evolution had designed to assume a lounging attitude towards life, yet Mr. Owen, for some stuffy reasons of his own, had seen fit to set these intentions aside by imposing on his person a bearing of austere restraint. This made it all the more alarming when Mr. Owen, unexpectedly seized by some lighter impulse, was discovered in the act of twirling experimentally on his toes or thoughtfully moving his feet to the rhythm of some secret melody. In spite of the rigorous restraint he placed upon his actions, he was occasionally subject to these seemingly frivolous seizures. Those who beheld them carried away the impression that they had witnessed something only a little short of a resurrection, and were for the rest of the day depressed by the instability of matter.

In private life Mr. Owen, with the tactful aid of his wife, had come to regard himself as one who danced uninspiredly, mixed even worse, and who understood the social amenities not at all.

However, he had his moments of rebellion – moments when he refused to accept his wife’s valuations either of himself or of life, and when he gave inner voice to the opinion that Lulu’s friends were for the most part common, coarse, uninteresting men and women who upon the loss of their sexual powers would have nothing else left in life. These moments were not so rare as they were self-contained. Leading so much as he did through his professional activities the lives of others, he had developed an elaborate private or secret life of his own. And this secret life was composed of many and various lives which fortunately for society, but unhappily for himself, he would never live in reality. Of course, it was nothing less than a system of escape set up to provide Mr. Hector Owen with the excitement and self-esteem his days so sorely lacked.

For example, there were mornings when he arose with the well considered opinion that had he the time and opportunity he could become a moving-picture actor of no mean ability. On other mornings he was content to be merely an inspired director. There were other moments when he quite modestly decided that if he only set his mind on it he could dance with the best of them and sleep with the worst. The detached manner in which he arrived at this last conclusion softened somewhat its lewd character. On occasions Hector’s suppressed ego would be satisfied with the part of a victorious general leading his troops not only into battle, but also clean through the lines and out on the other side while even the enemy cheered. The safe arrival of himself and his troops on the other side pleased him a great deal more than the actual shedding of blood itself. The enemy cheering, he thought, was a nice touch. He had no desire to shed the blood of those brave and cheering soldiers.

As a matter of fact, he had no desire to shed any blood at all save that of the missing heir and Mr. Mal Summers, who had become such a humid friend of the family. Mal’s blood he would have gladly extracted with an eye dropper. To have observed him seated solemnly at his desk earlier in the day, no one would have suspected that Mr. Hector Owen, the third in an honorable line of lawyers, was happily watching himself in his mind’s eye as he busily went about the business of extracting drops of Mr. Mal Summers’s blood, searching with diligent patience from vein to vein until not a drop of the unfortunate gentleman’s blood remained to foul another nest.

In his more serious moments Mr. Owen saw himself in the flattering rôle of a leader and liberator of men, swaying them by the sheer intellectual vigor of his reason and the measured eloquence of his winged words. That he was not and never would be even the least of the characters he felt himself so well qualified to become occasionally depressed him. However, owing to the fact that even while envying the good fortune of one of his creations he was already arranging for himself another career of equal honor and distinction, his moods of depression were of short duration. And inasmuch as no one suspected the man of entertaining such mad thoughts of self-aggrandizement in his seemingly sober mind, no harm was done to anyone, and Mr. Owen was better able to struggle through the day, scrutinizing bills and speculating idly as to the number and quality of the mistresses jointly maintained by the heirs. It faintly amused him to reflect that although he knew none of these women he could walk into their apartments at any time of the year and tell them where their underthings came from, how much they cost, and give each article its technical classification. Occasionally he toyed with the idea of calling one of them up and inquiring how she enjoyed her last selection of Naughties or if she was making out any better in the recent delivery of Speedies.

Yes, Hector Owen’s life was extremely secret and, it is to be feared, not always nice, which is, of course, part of the fun in having a secret life. Good clean thoughts no doubt have their place in the scheme of things, but there is nothing so satisfactory as a good evil one unless it is the deed itself. And this is especially true when the evil thought can be hurled with crackling vigor into the innocuous ranks of a lot of neatly dressed clean ones.

Of Mrs. Lulu Owen it would be perhaps more charitable to say that she was merely a female member of the race, and let matters stand at that. In so far as she presented to the world in the form of an agreeable body those time-honored dips and elevations so commonly found diverting by members of the opposite sex Mrs. Lulu Owen was every inch a woman. True enough, the elevations were threatening to become immensities and the dips were gradually growing less alluringly pronounced. Still, with regular exercise and careful dieting, the charming creature had at least ten good years of sheer animalism ahead of her. After that she would probably become active in a movement whose aim was a constructive criticism of the morals and manners of the young.

Lulu was such a creature of sex that she never found time to stop to have a baby, which shows that the modern conception of the cave man and woman is a totally erroneous one. Cave people got busy about sex only by fits and starts, and these opportunities were much rarer than is commonly supposed. One cannot become very sexy in the presence of a frowning Ichthyosaurus, while one glance at an enraged Mammoth is quite sufficient to make the ruggedest voluptuary forget all about sex save perhaps his own, which, if he is in his right mind, he will remove from the scene of danger as speedily as possible.

Lulu was not at all like a cave woman. She was impurely a modern creation. There was nothing frank about her. Nor could it be said of Lulu Owen that she was lacking in mentality. She had a mind quite definitely her own. It was one of those small, unimaginative, competently dishonest compositions that can twist its owner out of all tight places while others are left stupidly holding the bag. It is an exceedingly valuable type of mind to have if one wants to live comfortably in the world as it is constituted today. Although adept in the art of registering all the nicer and more conventional emotions, she was capable of responding sincerely to only the most elementary, such as hunger, cold, heat, anger, greed, gratified vanity, fear, and, of course, all sorts of sex stimuli in little and large degree. In short, she was no better nor worse than thousands of other men and women who for lack of a more accurate name are loosely classified as human beings in contradistinction to their betters, the brute beasts.

And the irony of it was that Mr. Hector Owen had always considered her just about the finest woman, the most desirable creature and the loveliest spirit that had ever sacrificed herself to the coarse and selfish impulses of man. Thus it has always been.

As a lover his wife had always found Mr. Owen far from satisfactory. To her way of thinking the bed was no place for vaguely poetic fancies or idly philosophical discourses such as her husband habitually indulged in as he eased his various joints and members into what he fondly hoped would be both a pleasant and comfortable ensemble. It was all quite simple to the lady. One went to bed either to sleep or not to sleep.

It is to be feared that Lulu Owen was not much of a companion. Of recent months her husband had come to suspect as much. Although they carried on more or less as usual, their words ceased to have any special value or meaning. They were merely words dropped at random like so many scraps of paper about the room, then later collected and carelessly tossed away.

Hector was not the man to thrive under this sort of existence. His wife was indifferent to it. As long as men continued to inhabit the world she would have enough food for thought to occupy her mind. Hector was not so easily satisfied. He was growing afraid to think at all. He was still sufficiently old-fashioned to want his wife to be exactly that, to want her also to be a companion, an audience, admirer, and what not. He did not demand so much in the line of admiration – merely an occasional word or so, a small scrape to make a man feel a little less grim and alone.

When eventually it was borne in on his consciousness that in Lulu he could find none of these sources of comfort, he was surprised no less than distressed. He had married her under the impression that she was a delicately complex creature of many charming moods and fancies. Now he found her no better than a sleeping and eating partner. He might just as well have a great big beautiful cat in the house. A cat would be an improvement, in fact. Cats did not give utterance to hateful, goading remarks and pack suitcases and slam doors and hurl books and talk for hours of their sacrifices in life and the innumerable stitches of clothing they did not have to their backs. Yes, taking everything into consideration, a cat would most decidedly be a welcome relief.

Yet, in spite of this knowledge, there he stood waiting in the rain for this very wife to whom he would have preferred a cat. Certainly, he decided, he would not have stood there waiting for all the cats in the world. Why, then, should he wait for his wife, who was not as good as any one of all these cats? It did not seem reasonable. Why not tell her to go incontinently and blithely to hell for all time, and then walk diagonally across Sixth Avenue to that speakeasy where he could get himself as wet inside as most people seemed to be outside? Better still, why not grab off some wench and ply her with gin and improper proposals? Why not make a night of it? It had been years since he had made a night of it. And then it had not been a whole night, nor had he made so much of it. He still had money enough in his pocket to buy the companionship he lacked at home. Some of these Greenwich Village speakeasy girls were good sports, he had been told – rough and unreliable but good hearted and regular. They understood men and knew how to please them. He would get himself one of those.

Strangely impelled by the fascination and the prospect of immediate release presented by this daring idea, Hector Owen’s secret life was about to merge for once with his real one. He cast a swift, bright glance across the street and was on the point of directing his feet to follow the path taken by his eyes when a face peered in at him through the curtain of the rain.

CHAPTER TWO

In the Doorway

Ever since he had arisen that morning Hector Owen had been increasingly aware of the presence of his head – unpleasantly aware of it. The roots of his fine, light, strailing hair seemed to be unduly sensitive today. Each root prickled ever so faintly. Taken collectively these insignificant individual manifestations formed an irritating whole. And the scalp in which Mr. Owen’s various hairs were somewhat casually imbedded according to no plan or design hitherto devised by God or man showed a decided disposition to tightness. Farther back a dull buzzing like the far-away droning of bees, or more like a wasp in a hot attic, had been accompanying his thoughts with monotonous, regularity. Taking it all in all, it was a peculiar sort of head for a man to be lugging about with him on his shoulders, Mr. Owen decided. There were too many thoughts in it beating against his skull in fruitless effort to escape. He heartily wished they could escape and give him a moment’s peace – especially those thoughts associated with his wife and Mal Summers, the rebellious estate and the trust company, his automobile and its overdue payments, certain life insurance premiums, and, finally, a neat sheaf of bills for the various stitches of clothes that Lulu tragically told the world she never had to her smooth, well nourished back. Yes, there were far too many thoughts.

Also, there was another source of worry in Mr. Owen’s mind. This last one was especially upsetting. So much so that Hector Owen almost feared to admit the truth of it even to himself. The fact is, all that day he had been mysteriously experiencing the most confounding difficulty in recognizing faces which from long years of familiarity he had come to know, if anything, too well. At breakfast that morning Lulu’s face had presented itself to him as a confusing smear; which was not at all unusual for Lulu’s face at breakfast on the rare occasions of its appearance there. What had worried Mr. Owen, however, was the fact that, so far as he was able to make out, there had been nothing reminiscently characteristic about this particular smear moving opposite him at the table. It might just as well have been made by a demon or an angel. There was nothing definitely Lulu about that smear. And even before breakfast his own face, as he had studied it in the bathroom mirror, had struck him as being only faintly familiar. There had been a dimness about its features and a strangely distressed expression round the eyes.

Disconcerted, he had glanced over his shoulder to ascertain if some perfect stranger had not by chance strayed into the room and become absorbed in watching Mr. Owen shave. Some men were like that, he knew – fascinated by anything pertaining to razors and their use. There was something in it. The sandy, crackling sound emitted by severed whiskers was not unpleasant to the ear. He had always enjoyed it himself. The thought had even occurred to him sardonically at the time that this strange person behind him might be one of the more daring of Lulu’s many callers who, unable to wait longer, had preferred to risk the displeasure of the master of the house rather than to offend the laws of common decency. The situation had tickled some low chord in Mr. Owen’s nature until he had discovered he was quite alone in the room. For the sake of his reason he would almost have welcomed the presence of a lover.

This difficulty about faces had continued with him throughout the day. At the office his clerks and stenographers, even old Bates, his comfort in times of storm, had displayed only the remotest semblance to their former selves. Then, too, why had he suddenly and amazingly asked himself, or rather his secret self, who for the moment seemed to be sitting unobserved beside him in the elevated train, what business had they on that untidy, jarring conveyance, and why were they worming their way downtown with a lot of damp, uninteresting people? Why had he unaccountably questioned the almost ritualistic routine of a lifetime? Was the world receding from him, or was his mind gradually growing dim, so that only faint traces of the past remained? Something was definitely wrong with his usually clear head.

Now, when this face unexpectedly thrust itself through the curtain of the rain, Mr. Owen was seized with the conviction that he was going a little mad.

Involuntarily he asked: “Do I look much like you?”

“Huh?” replied the face, startled, then added gloomily, “It’s wet.”

“What’s wet?” asked Mr. Owen.

“Me,” said the man in a husky voice. “Everything – the hull world.”

“You’re right there,” Mr. Owen agreed. “The world’s all wet.”

The moist, unadmirable figure that had materialized out of the rain thrust forward a head from between shoulders hunched from sheer wet discomfort, and two gin-washed eyes studied Mr. Owen humbly.

“Yuss,” said the man emphatically, but without much expectation. “And I want a nickel.”

“What for?” Mr. Owen inquired, more for the purpose of holding his thoughts at bay than for the gratification he would derive from the information.

“Wanter go ter Weehawken,” replied the man.

“You want to go to Weehawken.” Mr. Owen was frankly incredulous. “Why do you want to go there?”

“I’ve a flop in Weehawken,” said the man in the rain.

“I’d rather die on my feet,” Mr. Owen observed, more to himself than to his companion. “As a matter of fact, if someone gave me a nickel, that would be the last place I’d think of going.”

“Is that so!” replied the man, stung to a faint sneer. “Where do yer want me ter go?”

“Away,” said Owen briefly.

“I will,” answered the man, “if you’ll slip me a piece of change.”

“All right,” agreed the other, “but tell me first, is there any faint resemblance between my face and yours? I have an uneasy impression there is.”

For a moment the man considered the face in the doorway.

“Maybe a little round the eyes there is,” he admitted.

“Only round the eyes?” Mr. Owen pursued with rising hope.

The man nodded thoughtfully.

“Well, thank God for that,” said Mr. Owen in a tone of relief. “Here’s a whole quarter.”

The man accepted the coin which he scrutinized in the dim light.

“It’s a new one,” he observed. “All bright and shiny, ain’t it? One of them new Washington quarters.”

“Do you like it?” asked Mr. Owen politely.

“Yuss,” replied the man, still scanning the face on the coin. “That must be old George hisself – a fine American, he was.”

“Sure,” agreed Mr. Owen. “A splendid chap, George, but I’ve a sneaking feeling that if the father of his country came back thirsty he’d jolly well disinherit his child and start a private revolution of his own.”

“How do yer mean, mister?” the man asked suspiciously.

“Simply this,” Mr. Owen told him. “If you spend that quarter for a couple of shots of smoke, as your breath assures me you will, there is a strong possibility that you will go blind and won’t be able to admire the face of the man who fought for your rights and mine.”

The wet figure considered this a moment.

“You must be one of them reds,” he voiced at last.

“If you mean one of those snotty little teacup radicals who mutilate horses with nails stuck in planks, I’ll take that quarter back,” Mr. Owen declared. “As a matter of fact,” he added, “I’m feeling blue as hell.”

Once more the soggy man studied the face in the doorway. When he spoke there was an altered quality in his voice.

“It’s the eyes,” he said slowly. “I can always tell by the eyes. Yours don’t look so good – look like they might hurt yer even more than mine – inside.”

It was an odd remark. Mr. Owen thought it over.

“You have little left to lose,” he told the man. “I am still watching everything slide down the skids.”

“When it’s all gone,” the man assured him, “it won’t seem so bad. I stopped minding years ago. Didn’t have much ter begin with. All gone and forgotten. Don’t know where the hell she is or they are or – —”

“Please don’t,” said Mr. Owen firmly. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather you wouldn’t today. Why don’t you go to the Zoo with some of that quarter and see if you wouldn’t rather exchange your liberty for the life of a caged beast? I envy the life of a yak myself.”

“What’s a yak, mister?”

Hector Owen made an attempt, then abandoned the effort.

“It’s too hard to describe in the rain,” he said.

“Guess yer don’t know yerself,” allowed the man.

“Are you trying to irritate me into describing a yak for you?” Mr. Owen inquired. “That’s childish.”

“No,” replied the man. “I was just wondering why, if yer so mad about yaks, yer didn’t go and look at some yerself.”

“I didn’t say I was mad about yaks,” Mr. Owen retorted. “And, anyway, I’m waiting.”

“Yer mean, waiting for a better day ter look at yaks?” the man persisted.

“No,” said Mr. Owen with dignity. “Let us not pursue yaks. Sorry I brought them up. I’m waiting for my wife.”

“Are the skids under her, too?” asked the man.

“I’m not worrying so much about what’s under her,” replied Mr. Owen.

“Oh,” said the other. “So it’s like that. Guess I’ll be shoving off.”

“Wish I could,” observed Mr. Owen moodily. “I object to waiting here like the very devil and all.”

“That’s all I seem ter be doing,” said the other, merging once more with the rain until his voice came back only faintly. “Just hanging about waiting for something to happen, and nothing ever does. I’ll drift along.”

And the figure, looking strangely disembodied, moved off wetly down the glistening street. Deprived of the conversational relief afforded by the soggy man, Mr. Owen turned to examine the door in which he was standing. He had examined it many times before, but always with an idly inattentive eye. Now, in order to occupy his mind, he looked about him with almost desperate concentration. He would think about that doorway and not about all those other old unhappy things. Inevitably they would return to claim his entire attention, but not now. He would look at things – at anything.

It was a deeply recessed doorway formed by two jutting plate-glass windows. The windows were filled with a discouraging array of uninspired looking commodities, so uninspired looking, in fact, that Mr. Owen would almost have preferred his thoughts. He found himself almost surrounded and borne down by an avalanche of men’s clothes in the worst possible taste. They were cheap, they were false, they were fancy. Yet, strangely enough, amid those flamboyant ranks of sartorial futility would appear with puzzling incongruity a stout pair of overalls or a rugged group of roustabout shoes. A wasp-waisted dress suit would find its shoddy shoulders rubbing against those of an uncompromisingly honest union suit, a fancy shirt would be forced to endure the presence of one made of sailcloth or khaki. A display of dress studs and cuff links would have as a background a grim row of tin lunch boxes. It was as if the individual who had decorated those windows had endeavored to keep an impartial mind concerning the relative importance of the laboring man and that of his more frivolous brothers who habitually loafed along Fourteenth Street and infested its gaudy dance halls, burlesque shows, and Chinese restaurants.

For some reason the sounds in the street were growing dim in his ears. Gradually the familiar scene around him was becoming strangely altered in appearance. Mr. Owen was giving credence to the belief that he was standing in a new city, in a different doorway, and that nothing and no one in this city bore any relation to him. The buzzing in his head had increased to a torrential roar. He was tingling with a feeling that something not far off now was going to happen most amazingly. Whether it was going to be in the nature of a rescue or a disaster he did not know, nor did he greatly care. He was mortally tired of thinking about himself, his wife, and those confounded heirs.

A heavy-lidded woman sinfully trailing the scent of moist but dying camellias drifted up to the door. For a moment she raised her shadowed lids and looked up at Mr. Owen. Then she spoke to him in a low voice.

“Hello, sad eyes,” she said. “What are you doing tonight?”

Mr. Owen was startled by the sound of his own voice no less than by the readiness of his reply.

“Nothing to you, sister,” he answered. “I’m waiting for my wife.”

“Just a home body, eh?” observed the woman. “A clean little home body.”

“The body’s clean,” agreed Mr. Owen, “but it isn’t so very little. And why shouldn’t it have a home?”

The woman looked a little downcast.

“I was a home body myself,” she said, “once upon a time, but now I just taxi about.”

“Well,” Mr. Owen told her, experiencing a sudden pang of fellow feeling for this creature out in the rain, “if it’s any consolation, you’re playing an open game, which is a damned sight cleaner than cheating.”

“They’re the worst kind,” replied the woman wisely. “The only way to get the best of a cheater is to cheat her first yourself. Sure you won’t give her a stand-up for once?”

“No,” said Mr. Owen. “That’s just the trouble. I’m not at all sure. Be a good girl and hurry away without looking back.”

Mr. Owen’s eyes, a study in conflicting impulses, gazed through the rain after the heavy-lidded woman as she disappeared down the street. Idly he wondered what sort of man she would meet up with that night and what sort of time they would have.

“She seemed to take to me rather,” he mused to himself, not without a small glow of inner warmth. “If I stand here long enough I’ll become a well known figure,” he went on. “I’ve met almost everybody except my wife.” He took out a cigarette and lighted it, his hands cupped against the rain. “The trouble with me is,” he resumed to himself, “I let myself get drawn into things altogether too easily.”

Slowly the door behind him opened. There was no sound. An immaculately clad arm with a carefully starched cuff at the end of the dark sleeve drew nearer to the figure standing in the doorway. A strong, brown hand, its nails meticulously groomed, politely but firmly took hold of Mr. Owen and deftly withdrew him from public circulation.

Ten minutes later when Lulu Owen arrived at the spot with her excuses already straining on the tip of her glib tongue she was greatly chagrined to discover that Mr. Owen was gone. And only the butt of his still smoldering cigarette gave evidence that he had once been there.

CHAPTER THREE

Snatched Through

To be unceremoniously snatched through a doorway is almost invariably a disconcerting experience for anyone – especially when the person snatched has every reason to believe that the door was securely locked, with no living creature behind it of more sinister aspect than a cat, a large store cat whose business lay chiefly with mice. Now, the surprising feature of Mr. Hector Owen’s experience was that he felt no sensation of disconcertion at all, or hardly any. His first reaction to the sudden change was one of profound relief. There was an immediate dropping away of anxiety and responsibility, a sort of spiritual sloughing off of all moral obligations. In their place flooded in a glorious feeling of newness, freedom, and rebirth, that buoyancy which comes when one awakens fresh on a fine morning with the knowledge that one has something especially agreeable to do that day. In his quiet, self-contained way Mr. Owen was convinced that he not only felt younger than he had for many a year but also that he was actually younger and looked it.

Quite naturally he was surprised by the size and magnificence of the establishment in which he found himself. He thought at first, from its noble proportions, that he was standing in some celestial railway terminal. The vast space was diffused with a soft yellow radiance shot with currents of sheer elation. There was a fascinating fragrance in the air about him, tantalizing in its diversity. The aroma of coffee, the scent of soaps, spice and perfumes, the vague, indefinable breath given off by new materials, rugs, and furniture, and the pleasing tang of leather goods drifted past his keenly alert nose like so many little unseen sails on a calm, invisible sea.

Only gradually was it that he became aware of the fact that he was standing in what could be nothing in the world other than a spacious and admirably planned department store, but such a department store as he had never been dragged through at the heels of a ruthlessly spendthrift Lulu in some dimly remembered reincarnation.

From a large central plaza broad aisles between handsome rows of counters radiated in all directions like spokes in a giant wheel. And Mr. Owen’s roving and rejuvenated eyes noted with a thrill of gratification a number of remarkably good-looking salesgirls standing in happy profusion behind the counters. From any one of these young women Mr. Owen would have eagerly purchased practically anything he could have induced her to sell.

The roof of the store was lofty. Like the sky itself, it curved out from a dim central dome and seemed to run away into mysteriously shadowed infinity. Balcony upon balcony, with gay and graceful balustrades, circled round the huge hall and mounted dizzily skyward, each balcony presenting itself to Mr. Owen’s fascinated eyes as a fresh plane of discovery in an altogether new universe. Through wide doorways opening on gracious vistas Mr. Owen caught glimpses of a broad boulevard spiritedly splashed with sidewalk cafés at which men and women were eating and drinking and reading the newspapers and making improper proposals to each other, as men and women will upon the slightest provocation and even without. And who would not make improper proposals in such a delightful atmosphere, Mr. Owen asked himself? He himself would like to make some perfectly terrific ones right there and then to any number of salesgirls. And surely improper proposals were the only proper ones to make when surrounded by so much beauty. Chivalry was taking a new lease on life in Mr. Owen’s breast. He would bide his time, however, before risking any of the proposals he had at that moment in mind.

From the street scene his eyes were attracted by an unprecedented burst of activity taking place at one of the counters near which he was standing. As he watched this activity he decided to defer his proposals indefinitely. It was activity of a decidedly unpropitious nature. Mr. Owen was vaguely aware of the presence of a gentleman standing beside him. This gentleman seemed also to be absorbed in what was going on. His being exuded an atmosphere of pleasant anticipation. Mr. Owen could hardly understand the reason for this because what he saw going on struck him as being anything but pleasant. In fact, it was the very last thing he would have expected to witness in such an obviously fashionable and well regulated establishment.

What Mr. Owen saw was bad enough, but the sounds that accompanied it were even worse. A young and beautiful salesgirl had reached across the counter separating her from her customer and had angrily seized the customer’s nose in a grip of eternal animosity. The customer, one of those large, officious, disagreeably arrogant ladies who infest department stores, was emitting a volley of objectionable and highly unladylike noises. But above her voice came the clear, crisp, furious words of the salesgirl.

“You mean-spirited, over-stuffed, blue-faced old baboon, you wicked-hearted old cow walrus,” said the salesgirl, “take that and that and that.”

The that and that and that designated three separate and distinct tweaks administered to the nose of the customer. Mr. Owen was faintly surprised and not a little relieved that the appendage did not come away in the salesgirl’s fingers. He turned to his companion, and was even more surprised to find him murmuring delightedly to himself.

“Good!” the gentleman was ejaculating under his breath. “Oh, very, very good, in fact, capital. Titanic tweaks. By gad, sir, they fairly sizzle.”

He smiled upon Mr. Owen, who stood regarding him with dazed eyes.

“Are we both seeing the same thing?” Mr. Owen asked somewhat timidly. “A lady being assaulted by one of your salesgirls?”

“The same thing, my dear sir,” replied the man proudly in a voice of polished courtesy. “The same thing exactly. Isn’t she doing splendidly?”

“Splendidly!” gasped Mr. Owen. “She’s doing it brutally. Nearly murdering the woman.”

The gentleman regarded the tweaking scene with an air of professional detachment.

“But not quite,” he commented. “Do you see the woman whose nose is being tweaked? Well, she’s a most pestiferous old bitch.” Mr. Owen drew a sharp breath. “Yes, yes,” the gentleman went on almost gayly, “most pestiferous old bitch describes her nicely – a regular she-dragon. And a bully. Attend a moment and you will see something amusing. Watch how she gets hers.”

To the accompaniment of chuckles and muttered exclamations of encouragement from his strange companion, such as, “Boost the old bird in the bottom,” and “I fancy that old fright will never show up here any more,” Mr. Owen watched the she-dragon literally get hers. And he was forced to admit to himself that from the looks of the lady she was getting no more than she deserved. From all directions sales attendants were rushing down the aisles, converging en masse on the assaulted woman and showering her with a deluge of violent language. Everyone who could find space on her person to grab laid violent hands on it, whatever it chanced to be, and the lady was hurtled through the store and hurled out upon the street. Upon the completion of this apparently popular task the group of attendants broke up into individual units and returned quietly to their places as if nothing had occurred. The salesgirl who had started the trouble, now all smiles and helpfulness, promptly began to assist another lady, whose gentle manner, Mr. Owen decided, belied an intrepid spirit, to match a length of ribbon.

Turning once more to his companion, Mr. Owen was momentarily upset to find himself being happily beamed upon from that direction. What manner of man was he, Mr. Owen found himself wondering? Externally, the man appeared to be a person of refinement, not to say distinction. He was no taller than Mr. Owen himself, and of the same general physique, although he carried himself far more debonairly than Mr. Owen had ever dreamed of attempting at his most heady moments.

The gentleman’s complexion, Mr. Owen noted, was darkly olive and smooth. Two brown eyes of a subtly insinuating cast, but now eloquent with well being, sparkled and snapped beneath fine, graceful eyebrows. About the man there seemed to hover a faint suggestion of danger, recklessness, and unscrupulous enterprise. Behind the brown eyes glittered, or seemed to glitter, an inner preoccupation with affairs not generally considered nice. The man’s hair was smooth, like the rest of him, smooth and black. There was just a touch of scent – not bad – and at the temples a sprinkling of gray. Two rows of white, even teeth formed a background for a pair of firm lips which to Mr. Owen seemed capable of uttering the most hair-raising blasphemies with all the unconscious charm of a child murmuring to itself in its sleep. He was faultlessly attired in a morning coat and striped trousers. There were spats. This last item strengthened Mr. Owen’s conviction that he was standing in the presence of a person whom one should meet with reservation and follow with the utmost caution. The gentleman now addressed Mr. Owen in an engaging tone of voice.

“You are, my friend, I see,” he said, “somewhat puzzled by the little affair you have just witnessed?”

Catching the rising inflection in the other’s voice Mr. Owen assumed his words to be couched in the form of a polite but superfluous inquiry.

“Quite naturally,” he replied a little sharply. “I am not accustomed to seeing respectable-looking ladies set upon by a howling mob, and violently flung out of doors. Who wouldn’t be surprised?”

“I wouldn’t, for one,” the gentleman answered equably. “And I could name thousands of others. We’re quite used to that sort of thing here.”

“Do you mean to say,” demanded Mr. Owen, “that you permit your sales people to toss perfectly respectable customers out ad lib?”

“More at random,” the gentleman decided, eyeing Mr. Owen with an amused smile, “although your ad lib is pretty close to the mark. Furthermore, respectability doesn’t count with us here. We find it exceedingly trying.” With a shocked feeling Mr. Owen found himself unconsciously agreeing with the speaker. Respectability could be trying. “And anyway,” the gentleman was running on, “that old devil wasn’t really respectable, not honestly so. She derives her income from some of the most unentertaining resorts – you get what I mean (Mr. Owen was afraid he did) – in town, or rather I should say from some of the least entertaining, for none of them is really unentertaining. Like whiskies, some are merely better than others. I never visit hers myself, but I’ll take you to some dandy ones I’ve recently discovered.”

“Aren’t we getting a little off the point?” Mr. Owen hastily put in. “We were talking about the lady.”

“What?” said the gentleman. “Oh, yes, I forgot. Well, remind me about the other things. We’ll take those up later together with several other delightfully vicious resorts you’ll find amusing. Now, about that old sea cow – that walrus woman. We simply loathe her. On and off, she’s been annoying us for years.”

“I doubt if she does any more,” commented Mr. Owen, smiling in spite of himself.

“I hope, I hope most sincerely, she does not,” the man continued quite seriously. “You see, my dear sir, it is an old trade custom of ours – a tradition, in fact – that whenever customers become unendurably overbearing with any member of our sales force we throw ’em out on their ear regardless of the sex of the ear. It makes no difference with us whether it’s a man’s ear, a woman’s, or a child’s. I’m told my clerks call it the ‘bum’s rush,’ but of course I make it a point to frown on the use of such expressions. I find them unnecessarily crude.”

“But scarcely any cruder than the actual deed itself,” Mr. Owen observed.

“My dear fellow,” the other hastened to explain, “that’s where you err. That’s exactly where you err, if you will forgive my saying so. The action itself was justified. Neither my partners nor I can stand having our store cluttered up with a lot of rattle-brained, vacillating, self-important time wasters and ill-mannered bullies such as, unfortunately, so many persons are who habitually frequent department stores. You must be familiar with the sort I mean,” the man went on. “She bustles into the store with seventy-nine cents in her purse and a parcel of goods to exchange and thinks she’s God Almighty’s social arbiter in the presence of a group of slaves. We chuck ’em out here before they can upset our salesgirls. We don’t like upset salesgirls unless upset in the right way and in the right place.”

“What’s the right way to upset one of these salesgirls?” asked Mr. Owen.

“How charmingly put!” the other exclaimed. “I see you’re a bit of a one yourself. Frankly, though, you don’t need to upset most of our salesgirls. They seem quite willing to upset themselves with the most alarming alacrity. If anything, they’re a little too eager, let us say, for the lack of a better word, to upset.”

“I should think,” interjected Mr. Owen in an attempt to change the subject, “you’d lose a lot of customers by such drastic methods.”

“Oh, we do!” the gentleman exclaimed enthusiastically. “You have no idea. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons we’re tearing along into bankruptcy. I don’t quite know. On the other hand, we believe in giving our customers an even break. We always inform them that they are at liberty to hit any member of our sales force with any object handy whenever the sales person shows the slightest inclination to gratuitous incivility, stupidity, or lack of interest. Whenever we find that a clerk has been knocked cold by several customers in the course of a few days we naturally decide that the clerk is not qualified to deal with the public and so, accordingly, we chuck the clerk out, too. We find it much more natural and efficacious to allow our clerks and customers to settle their little difficulties and differences among themselves. Besides, I find it rather amusing. I do so loathe monotony, don’t you, Mr. – er – —”

“Mr. Owen,” the other replied hesitantly. “At least, I think it is – Hector Owen it was or used to be.”

“Well, it really doesn’t make a great deal of difference,” said the other. “Nevertheless, it’s convenient to know. Now, unlike you, I’m almost certain that my name is Horace Larkin – Horace and Hector, quite a coincidence, what? Oh, very good. Am I veering?”

Mr. Owen was looking at his companion with growing alarm and suspicion. The man was giving signs of mental instability which, added to his obvious moral looseness, did not make an admirable combination. Before he could find a suitable reply to Mr. Larkin’s childish inanity his attention was diverted by the sight of a large, sinister, wild-eyed individual rushing down one of the aisles in the direction of the nearest doorway.

“Yes, yes,” Mr. Larkin was murmuring contentedly, “I do so hate monotony. Now, what can this be about? That desperate-looking chap seems to be in a great hurry to get somewhere else.”

The desperate-looking chap was, and as he dashed past the spot where they were standing a glittering object, falling from his pocket, rolled up to their feet. Quickly Mr. Owen’s companion stooped and picked it up.

“Dear me,” he said in a distressed voice, “someone’s been stealing diamonds again. Now, isn’t that too bad. No wonder we’re going bankrupt. Diamonds are very valuable, you know. The things cost no end of money. Why can’t they steal something else for a change – groceries, for instance?”

A large blond gentleman wearing heavy black eyebrows and a fashionably tailored suit of tweeds, and a small, meek-looking individual who in spite of his faultlessly cut morning attire impressed Mr. Owen as being a trifle drunk, appeared in the open plaza and, spying Mr. Horace Larkin, marched up to him with gestures of agitation. Following them was a clerk who appeared totally disinterested.

“I know,” began Mr. Larkin without giving the others an opportunity to speak. “And here I was just saying how I loathed monotony. Don’t tell me about it. I also loathe being upset and I am going to be upset whether I loathe it or not. You know – that luncheon. Presently we all must go to it. All of us. Even you must go to that luncheon, Dinner.” Here Mr. Larkin pointed to the smaller of the two men and added parenthetically for the benefit of Mr. Owen, “His name is Dinner. It really is. Makes things confusing when luncheon comes before or after it, but I can’t help that now. Don’t tell me,” he went on to the others. “We’ve been robbed again, haven’t we? Thieves shouldn’t take diamonds. It’s not at all sporting. They’re too damn easy to carry.”

“But don’t you think we should induce someone to pursue this beggar?” the large blond gentleman mumbled. “Offer a sort of a bonus thing?”

“Yes,” piped up Mr. Dinner, producing a gold flask of beautiful design and helping himself to its contents. “Yes,” he continued over the crest of a slight huskiness. “Shouldn’t we send somebody after this beggar to shout out in a great voice, ‘Stop thief! Stop thief!’ and act excited and all?”

Mr. Larkin gazed at the little gentleman with pity and affection, then his expression became serious.

“Why do both of you keep on calling this chap a beggar,” he asked irritably, “when most obviously he’s a thief of the worst character? Let’s get this straight – did he ask for the diamonds, or did he take them without asking?”

“He took ’em without a word,” said the clerk in a bored voice.

“There,” resumed Mr. Larkin after a thoughtful pause, “the man must have stolen the diamonds. He’s not a beggar.”

“He certainly did,” owlishly proclaimed the one known as Dinner, once more producing the flask. “And I think someone should scream about it.”

“I very much feel like screaming about it myself,” observed Mr. Larkin. “I really do. Anyway, we haven’t anybody who is especially good at doing that sort of thing – screaming, you know. This chap was running very fast, very fast indeed – tiresomely so. None of us can run very fast, and we all loathe running.”

Although the sensation of freedom and well being still persisted with Mr. Owen, he felt, nevertheless, as he listened to all this, that he was going not a little but definitely and completely mad. And the strange part of it was he did not seem to care, rather enjoyed it, in fact. However, he did think it time to interpose a slight suggestion.

“How about the police?” he asked. “Shouldn’t someone scream after them?”

Mr. Horace Larkin hopelessly shook his head.

“We also loathe the police,” he replied. “In all probability that chap was the police. By this time he has tucked those diamonds in the safe at headquarters. Did he steal many of them?”

“Almost a handful,” answered the clerk. “Big ones.”

“That’s a lot of diamonds,” Mr. Larkin murmured regretfully. “I feel very low about losing so many. They were good big diamonds. Is anyone minding the rest of the jewelry?”

“Not a living soul,” breathed Mr. Dinner, his eyes growing large. “The counter is all alone. You see, we brought George, here, along to tell you all about it.”

Mr. Owen was frankly stunned. These three men must be figments of his own disordered mind. Such simplicity was impossible.

“Dinner, put that flask back or we’ll have to carry you to luncheon,” Mr. Larkin commanded, then fell silent to ponder upon this fresh problem. “Well,” he resumed at last, “that’s not at all right. That’s almost sheer carelessness. If someone doesn’t watch all those precious stones we won’t have any left, and that wouldn’t look at all well for a big store like this.” He turned to the clerk. “George,” he said briskly, “you’d better hurry back to those jewels, what there is left of them, and make out a claim for the insurance company. Add as much as you think is safe to the value of the stuff stolen. Don’t scrimp. I can’t stand scrimping. We may be able to make a not inconsiderable piece of change out of this regrettable incident after all. Waste not, want not. You get what I mean.”

Mr. Owen was appalled by the callous dishonesty of Mr. Horace Larkin. Up to this point he had looked upon him as something extra special in the line of lunatics. Now he regarded him in the light of a menace to society in general and to insurance companies in particular. Once more he felt himself called upon to project his greater wisdom and ethics into this mad discussion.

“But such an action,” he protested, “would not be at all right.”

The suavely polished Mr. Larkin nodded a reluctant agreement.

“It’s not right, I know,” he said. “I think it’s simply terrible myself, but you know how it is. Everybody does it, almost, literally everybody – really nice people. You’d be surprised.” In spite of his legal experience, Mr. Owen confessed he was. “And then again,” Mr. Larkin added confidentially, “none of us likes insurance companies very much. It’s such a bother to pay their premiums, and they get so annoyingly stuffy about it when you don’t. You can see for yourself, if we don’t cheat the insurance company, we won’t make any money on all those lovely diamonds, and that wouldn’t be so good for us, would it?”

“But wouldn’t it be better,” pursued Mr. Owen, “to arrange things so that your lovely diamonds wouldn’t be stolen?”

“That’s an idea worth thinking about,” the gentleman in tweeds put in, his deep voice carrying a serious, labored note. “How about shooting a couple of customers suddenly just as a bit of a warning?”

Once more Mr. Owen was unpleasantly impressed with his company. Were all these gentlemen dangerous maniacs?

“If we did that,” Mr. Dinner objected, “we might find it difficult to induce any of our customers to go near the diamond counter at all. I wouldn’t go myself. People don’t like to be shot for no reason.”

“People don’t like to be shot for any reason,” Horace Larkin corrected, as if depressed by the unreasonableness of the human race.

“Why shoot ’em, then?” continued Mr. Dinner triumphantly. “Especially since they don’t like it.”

“But,” contributed the blond gentleman, “it wouldn’t do any good to shoot them if they did like it.”

“It seems,” observed Mr. Larkin, “that somebody has to be shot at some time, but don’t ask me why. I don’t know, and I don’t like revolvers. In fact, I simply—”

“Loathe them,” Mr. Owen supplied, in spite of himself.

“Yes,” continued Mr. Larkin, “I loathe a lot of revolvers knocking about the store. Dinner, here, might take it into his head to shoot up the place during one of his drunken orgies. He’s like that.” Mr. Owen gazed at the meek Dinner with increased alarm and respect. “How’s this for an idea?” Larkin went on, and at this point he fastidiously shot his white cuffs, waved delicately to a passing salesgirl, then turned briskly to his companions. “Suppose,” he said, “we run a full-page advertisement in all of the better newspapers stating in bold face type that our diamonds and other precious stones are false as hell and hardly worth the effort to carry away. Someone can think up the right words. This gentleman here, perhaps,” he indicated Mr. Owen. “He looks as if he knew a lot of words.”

“Wouldn’t that be a better advertisement to run about someone else’s store?” Mr. Dinner suggested, blinking thoughtfully. “About some competitor, for instance.”

“Sure thing,” chimed in the gentleman in tweeds enthusiastically. “If we ran a whole series of them we might ruin their business.”

“No go,” replied the suave gentleman. “We can only do that by spreading rumors. If we print advertisements about our competitors we might get into trouble. You see, it’s all very well to print lies about our own store, but if we print them about our competitors, they might sue us for libel.”

“Be just like ’em, too, the dirty crooks,” said the tweedy giant. “Well, here we all stand waiting.”

At the mention of waiting Mr. Owen experienced an uneasy feeling that the past was creeping silently up to surround him and carry him off. When had he last been waiting and where? To escape the memory, dim as it was, he turned to his three companions almost eagerly. He would cling to them and go mad in their own peculiar way. Anything would be preferable to that dull, anxious depression lying somewhere behind him in the shadows. He did not feel low any more and for so many months he had felt low – low, spiritless, and disillusioned. Here was no sadness, and certainly it seemed almost impossible to keep these men depressed for more than the lengths of an inane sentence. And surely for their own sakes as well as for the public’s, some sober mind should stay with them. For a moment Mr. Owen was seized with the fear that they might forget all about him in their charming way, and walk off, leaving him alone. They needed a sympathetic companion no less than he needed their companionship – someone like himself to see that they did injury neither to themselves nor to anyone else. That idea about shooting customers – now, that was all wrong. It was not a right idea. Although he realized they were not quite sane, Mr. Owen found something insidiously appealing about their special brand of insanity. They seemed to be so perfectly happy in their madness, so contented and busy about it, so full of daft ideas and unhelpful suggestions. Perhaps, after all, they were sane and he had been mad all his life. What did it matter? However, as the deliberations progressed he found it difficult to entertain this idea. These men were mental cases, or else they possessed an altogether new type of mind. Of that there could be no doubt. Mr. Owen became aware that the blond gentleman was asking questions.

“But look here,” the man was saying, “isn’t this a bit of a hitch? If we print an advertisement saying that we have a lot of bum jewelry, won’t that keep customers away as well as burglars?”

“Not necessarily,” Mr. Larkin replied. “I thought that out, too. We can station attendants at the doorways to tell customers not to pay any attention to the advertisement because we were only fooling.”

This answer apparently satisfied the objections of the tweeds. Mr. Dinner, however, was stubborn about it.

“But suppose one of the attendants tells a burglar?” he inquired. “We can’t very well ask our customers as they come in if they are burglars or not.”

“Not very well,” Mr. Larkin replied slowly. “That wouldn’t put them in the proper mood to buy. Maybe no burglars will come in on those days.”

“On what days?” asked the gentleman with the eyebrows.

“On the days when we have to tell our customers who are not burglars,” patiently replied Mr. Larkin.

“From the way things keep disappearing in this store,” the blond man moodily commented, “I suspect all our customers of being burglars.”

“Of course,” observed Mr. Larkin, “we steal some of the things ourselves and then pawn them when we’re short of cash.”

“And we make presents, too,” added the blond man. “Fur coats and such like to women.”

“I know,” Mr. Larkin agreed, “but in one way that saves us a lot of money. I think we’re very fortunate to have a nice department store. There’s hardly a woman in town who will say no for long with a whole department store to choose from.”

“In all the world,” supplied the meek Mr. Dinner.

“Then I guess we’ll have to let this burglar escape?” said the large man.

“We don’t have to let him escape,” replied Horace Larkin. “He will take care of his own escape. In fact, I suspect he already has.” He broke off and concentrated his gaze on one of the broad aisles. “But what new diversion have we here?” he asked. “You know, running a store like this keeps us dreadfully on the dash. I’ll be glad when lunch times comes, and then again, I won’t.”

Following the direction of Mr. Larkin’s gaze, Mr. Owen watched the new diversion approach with increasing interest. Four beautifully formed girls clad in the sheerest underwear were speeding down the aisle. Behind them sped four decidedly determined gentlemen almost, but not quite, draped in towels. As unprepared as he was for this sort of thing, Mr. Owen was even less prepared for what followed. One of the girls, when about three feet off, flung herself upon him and as far as he was able to establish began to climb up to his shoulders. He had a confused picture of bare arms and legs busily doing things with his body, and even at that moment he could not help wondering if the young woman thought he had a pair of stirrups strapped round his waist. Ducking his head momentarily beneath an energetically upraised knee he caught a glimpse of his companions and discovered with some satisfaction that they were similarly occupied. Mr. Owen’s profession had made him more or less familiar with the various physical indications of assault. He found these distressingly present with the difference that the tables were now turned. Even while he was struggling, his legal mind was engaged with problems of what chance a man had for a successful verdict when suing a lady for rape. In a criminal action the man, he decided, would have no standing at all. A man could be so assaulted almost repeatedly without altering greatly either his social or physical status whereas with a woman it might make a lot of difference. On the other hand, no woman would want a husband who was going to be raped all the time. There might be something in that. He did not know. He was much too busy. To steady himself, he involuntarily thrust up an arm and laid a hand on the young lady who was by this time somewhere in the neighborhood of his neck. He could hear the deep breathing of his companions who were laboring with their respective burdens. No sooner, however, had he seized his fair rider than his hand was smartly slapped.

“Don’t grab me so careless-like,” she told him.

Mr. Owen was upset.

“How shall I grab you?” he faltered.

“Do you have to be told how to grab me?” she demanded. “Where would you grab a lady?”

“I never grabbed a lady,” replied Mr. Owen. “That is, not one in your condition.”

“Well, brother, you’ve missed a lot,” said the girl pityingly.

“If you’d stop shoving down on my belt,” Mr. Owen complained, “I might barely be able to keep my trousers up.”

“I can’t,” gasped the girl. “If by shoving myself up I happen to shove your trousers down, it’s just too bad.”

“It’s more than too bad,” Mr. Owen told her. “It’s far more serious than you think. The trousers are not all. In some strange manner you seem to have got your toes locked in my shorts.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” the girl admonished. “I don’t want to fall off now that I’ve got myself comfortably up.”

“Ruthlessly up, I’d say,” muttered Mr. Owen.

To save his trousers he placed his hands on his hips and stood swaying in front of a number of spectators, many of whom received the impression they were witnessing an act put on by a slightly out of practice acrobat and his partner for their special edification. Strange things were always taking place in this store. Those four men in towels – what were they doing there and why were they being restrained by so many attendants?

“It’s all right, girls,” Mr. Owen heard Horace Larkin saying reassuringly. “You may come down when you like. The gentlemen are being held. What is it all about, anyway?”

Fortunately for Mr. Owen’s trousers his burden was the first to hit the floor.

“Those four would-be cave men wouldn’t believe we were working,” she exclaimed furiously. “They insisted on playing with us, and they began to take it too seriously. We got frightened and ran. Besides, it’s office hours.”

“A most commendable attitude to take,” replied Mr. Owen, “especially during office hours. Perhaps, only in office hours. Where did this action take place, may I ask?”

“In the swimming pool,” said another young lady, springing lightly up from the small body of the prostrate Dinner. “We came in to give our review and found them swimming about without a stitch. They wouldn’t believe we were models. Started in right there and then. Would you believe it, Mr. Larkin?”

“Yes,” answered Mr. Larkin. “From my point of view, it seems almost inevitable, under the circumstances. You know how easily one thing suggests another. May I ask why you were staging your delightful review in the swimming pool?”

“Major Britt-Britt told us to do it,” chimed in a third young lady in scanty attire. “Last night he told us. He said that our department would be closed for redecorating and that until further notice we should hold our fashion reviews in the swimming pool, didn’t you, Maj?”

“Call him Major, call him Major,” said Mr. Larkin in a low voice. “There’re a lot of customers knocking about.” He turned smilingly to the Major, who was looking a little uncomfortable under his furious mop of blond hair and heavy black eyebrows. “And I fancy, Major,” Mr. Larkin continued, “that from the pressure of business resulting from the universal popularity of this magnificent yet essentially reasonably priced modern mart of merchandise you overlooked the slight detail of notifying the proper authorities that the swimming pool should not be used by our naked customers during the period of the review?”

“It slipped my mind,” muttered the Major.

“You big stiff,” surprisingly observed Mr. Dinner, rising from the floor and instinctively reaching for his hip pocket, an action which Mr. Larkin was prompt in intercepting, “there’s not enough room on that mind of yours for anything to slip off of. That girl nearly tore me to pieces with her great clutching hands. Can’t tell me she was as worried about her confounded honor as all that.”

“Don’t be disagreeable,” Mr. Larkin told the little man. “And don’t talk so lightly about a lady’s honor in public. It may be a confounded nuisance and a terrific social handicap, but some women still cling to it. What are we going to do about these four gentlemen, now? They strike me as being more offended against than offending. Under similar circumstances, I would have made the same mistake myself.”

“You’d have acted worse,” proclaimed one of the girls. “Don’t I know.”

Mr. Larkin coughed loudly.

“Not here,” he said rapidly under his breath. “Not here. These people won’t understand how we run this store. They’re quite, quite narrow, my dear.”

“But we told them to wait,” one of the girls protested. “We kept telling them we were busy and asked them if they wouldn’t wait.”

“And they didn’t want to wait?” Mr. Larkin asked, interested in spite of himself.

“No,” said the girl. “They claimed they couldn’t wait.”

“They must be in a bad way,” Mr. Larkin remarked as if to himself. “We seem to be doing everything in this store this morning except selling goods to customers. Another day like this, and we’ll be in the hands of the receivers.” Producing a notebook he hastily scribbled an address on a leaf, tore the leaf out, and handed it to one of the toweled gentlemen. “Sorry about all this,” he continued easily, “but if you pop off right now I’m sure you won’t have to wait. Better get dressed first, though – at least temporarily.”

Eagerly making plans among themselves, the four gentlemen hurried off. When a safe distance had been put between them and the models Mr. Larkin sent the girls about their business; then, locking arms with Mr. Owen, he walked off down an aisle in the direction of his private office. Mr. Dinner and Major Britt-Britt followed in like fashion. Thus they made an impressive and dignified exit from the eyes of their admiring patrons, who seemed still somewhat puzzled over what it had all been about. As soon as the door to Mr. Horace Larkin’s amazing office closed behind the four backs he turned courteously to Mr. Owen and took one of that gentleman’s hands in his.

“My dear sir, I’m sorry,” said Mr. Larkin. “I’ve been neglecting you terribly. What would you like to sell this morning?”

“What!” gasped Mr. Owen. “Do I have to sell something?”

“Certainly,” replied Mr. Larkin gently. “We all have to sell something. You’re a full-fledged partner, you know.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The New Partner

“No,” said Mr. Owen vaguely when he had recovered a little. “I didn’t know.”

“Neither did we,” both Mr. Dinner and Major Britt-Britt said in unison. “Is this man our new partner?”

“Yes,” replied Mr. Larkin in the manner of one taking a new automobile out for a spin. “Do you like him?”

Mr. Owen would not have been greatly surprised to hear himself referred to as Model A.

“How did it happen?” he asked.

“Well,” began Mr. Horace Larkin, “last night it occurred to me that we could do with a new partner – some congenial chap to share with us our many responsibilities. Do you like my office?”

“What?” gasped Mr. Owen, startled by the abruptness of the question. “Oh, yes. It’s lovely.”

“I rather fancy it myself,” confided Mr. Larkin, gazing appreciatively about him at the huge pillow-heaped divans, the colorful oriental hangings, and the gleaming rug-scattered floor. He even delicately sniffed the scented air. “Isn’t that nude stunning?” he continued. “The one with the man.”

“They both look nude to me,” observed Mr. Owen, glancing at the painting indicated, then hastily averting his eyes in holy horror.

“Yes,” said Mr. Larkin simply. “That’s what’s stunning about it. They’re both nude together – mother naked. I do a lot of business here, a lot of interviewing. You understand, with my staff, of course.”

“I’m afraid I do,” replied Mr. Owen. “If you’ll pardon my saying so, there’s an unmistakable suggestion in this office of an old-time barroom.”

“Is there, now?” said Mr. Larkin, greatly pleased. “Well, isn’t that a coincidence? Because this room is literally alive with liquor. Let’s all have a drink.”

“Would you mind going on about how I became a partner?” Mr. Owen asked. “I can’t help feeling curious.”

“Yes,” rumbled the monumental Major. “How did you pick him out?”

“Pardon me,” said Mr. Larkin. “Pardon me. My thoughts veer so, I’m surprised I don’t have a stroke. So I just made up my mind that the first likely-looking gentleman to enter the store in the morning should be our partner and have the privilege of sharing with us our many – —”

“We know,” interrupted Mr. Dinner rather cynically. “Heavy responsibilities. That, no doubt, will enable you to devote more of your priceless time to your staff work.”

“How did you guess?” beamed Mr. Larkin. “Exactly what I had in mind.”

“But wasn’t I snatched through a doorway?” pursued Mr. Owen. “Or was I snatched through a doorway?” He was groping desperately in what remained of his memory. “Was it raining when I came in?” he continued. “I’m quite sure I remember the rain – steadily falling rain and a woman with heavy-lidded eyes.”

“There was rain out there,” Mr. Larkin replied, vaguely waving his hand as if in the general direction of some unknown shore. “But I’m sure I saw no woman with heavy-lidded eyes.”

“Lucky for her you didn’t,” observed the Major, “or you’d have snatched her through, too.”

“Is that nice, gentlemen, I ask you?” Mr. Larkin asked in gentle reproach. “I am sorry, however, about this heavy-lidded woman. I am fond of heavy-lidded women. They are born without morals and acquire them very slowly – if ever. Tell me, was she worth while?”

“Seemed like a good sort,” said Mr. Owen. “A lonely sort. She was standing out in the rain. I don’t think she’d have minded if you had snatched her through. She seemed to be looking for a place to go – a cheerful place.”

“We all need cheerful places to go at times,” observed Mr. Dinner in an odd voice. “Someone to snatch us out of the rain.”

This unexpected contribution from Mr. Dinner gave Mr. Owen to feel that he might just possibly be somewhat dead and standing in the presence of the latest thing in angels. He could not, however, quite accept Mr. Larkin as God. That would be painting the lily.

“What door did I happen to come through?” he asked a little uneasily.

“I don’t quite remember which door it was,” replied Mr. Horace Larkin, and this time Mr. Owen was convinced that his vagueness was deliberately assumed. “Some door – one we very rarely use. Saw you standing in it looking rather at loose ends so I took the liberty of dragging you through. The door is not an exit.”

For a few moments no one spoke. Mr. Owen was wondering with mingled emotions about the door that was not an exit. Did he really want an exit? Was there a single thing to which he cared to return – a single person or place? All washed out with the rain. There was a woman. He could not altogether forget Lulu. No one who had been forced to live with her could altogether forget Lulu. But what he remembered was bitter and distressful. To visit Lulu was an event; to live with her a disaster. She was a woman like that – popular only on occasions one had no desire to recall.

“I’m glad,” he said at last, “you did pull me out of the rain. Your intervention was providential.”

“Then everything is quite all right, isn’t it?” cried Mr. Larkin. “But you haven’t told us what you would like to sell. First, however, let me officially introduce you to your partners – our partners.” He turned to the two gentlemen and eyed them with a faintly ironical glitter, then turned hastily back to Mr. Owen. “A thousand and one pardons, your name has entirely escaped me. My thoughts veer so it’s a wonder I don’t have convulsions.”

Mr. Owen thereupon designated himself with that self-conscious feeling of deficiency characteristic of men when forced to pronounce their names in public.

“Owen,” murmured Mr. Dinner. “That’s an appropriate name to add to this firm. It’s all we ever do.”

“How clever he is,” said Mr. Larkin, as if speaking about a dog. “By the way, you won’t mind if we tack it on last? It will save us from changing the sign. It will read simply, ‘Larkin, Britt, Dinner and Owen.’ We’ll have to shift the ‘and’ and squeeze up ‘Britt.’ He needs a little squeezing. Ha! Ha! It’s quite jolly having a new partner. I feel better already.”

“You’re looking well,” observed Major Britt-Britt caustically. “A regular human banquet.”

“Do I now? That’s splendid,” replied Mr. Larkin. “Mr. Hector Owen, this is Major Barney Britt-Britt. He gambled his way out of the army. And this is Mr. Luther Dinner, an odd name and an odder type. He is a young and, I suspect, an intellectually feebler son. Myself, the senior partner in everything save sin and age, was once in the show business. We won this store at a poker game.”

“Then you weren’t trained in the business,” said Mr. Owen.

“I should think not,” replied Mr. Larkin, as if stung by the very idea. “We’re really supposed to do nothing, that is, little or nothing. And we don’t do much, really. Running a store like this is a very simple matter. Buy and sell, buy and sell. You’ll enjoy it.”

At this moment a studious-looking individual hastily entered the room and began to speak without ceremony.

“The accountants for our stockholders,” he announced, “have uncovered those hidden assets you told me to hold out on them. They’re raising hell about it.”

“So would I,” replied Mr. Larkin in an unperturbed voice, “if I were silly enough to be a stockholder. Don’t blame them. Can’t you hide those assets somewhere else?”

“You talk as if you could tuck assets up your sleeve like rabbits,” complained the man.

“Do I now?” exclaimed Mr. Larkin. “I must be veering again. Anyway, I never knew you could tuck rabbits up your sleeve. Always thought it was hats. Can’t these accountants be bribed?”

“They can,” answered the man, “but it’s too late now. The cat’s out.”

Mr. Larkin looked surprised.

“The cat’s out,” he repeated. “What cat? Didn’t know we had one. I’m immensely partial to cats.”

“I mean everyone knows,” the man exclaimed. “There isn’t any cat.”

“Oh, then there isn’t any cat,” Mr. Larkin went on in a disappointed voice. “I’m sorry, but you keep talking about cats and rabbits and things until it’s really no wonder I veer. Surprised I’m not revolving.” He turned abruptly to Mr. Dinner. “Take a note,” he said. “Remind me about cats.”

Mr. Dinner promptly produced a notebook and stood waiting with pencil poised.

“What shall I remind you about cats?” he asked.

“To have some,” said Mr. Larkin Napoleonically.

Mr. Dinner wrote laboriously in his notebook.

“How’s this?” he asked reading aloud. “Remind H. Larkin to have some cats.”

The senior partner considered this effort for a moment.

“It’s very nice,” he said at last, “but it might lead to a misunderstanding in case you were found dead some morning, which I for one hope you are. Change ‘have cats’ to read ‘get cats.’ I couldn’t very well have cats even if I wasn’t so busy. Where were we now?”

“It was about those hidden assets,” ventured the man.

“But they’re not hidden assets,” replied Mr. Larkin, “God pity us all. It becomes harder and harder to get away with a thing. Tell me, don’t we owe a number of bills?”

The man merely laughed, but that was as good as an answer.

“I don’t see how you can laugh about it,” Mr. Larkin complained, “because now we’ll have to pay them. Take those unhidden assets and pay a lot of bills. Don’t give our stockholders a penny. Ask them if they think this store is a bank, and tell them that once more Horace Larkin has saved them from bankruptcy – no, say, a pauper’s grave.” Dismissing the man, he turned once more to Mr. Owen, who was looking slightly dazed. “But you haven’t told us what you want to sell,” continued the senior partner.

“No, I haven’t,” said Mr. Owen dizzily.

“But you will?” coaxed Mr. Larkin.

Mr. Owen thought rapidly. Toys were rather cheerful things. They might be amusing.

“I might do well with toys,” he suggested. “Toys of the mechanical sort.”

Mr. Larkin’s eager expression fell a little.

“I’m afraid you won’t fancy our mechanical toys greatly,” he remarked. “Do you want to play with them yourself, or sell them, or does it matter?”

“I don’t know,” replied Mr. Owen. “Does it?”

“If you want to play with them, it does,” said Mr. Larkin. “You see we sell mechanical toys on the theory that they are made to be broken. So we buy only broken ones.”

“But what good is a broken mechanical toy?” Mr. Owen protested.

“No earthly good,” Mr. Larkin readily agreed. “No earthly good at all, but children seem to enjoy them. However, we can get you some unbroken mechanical toys.” He cupped his lips in his hands and suddenly called out, “Horrid! Horrid! Where is that boy? And you, too, Green Mould.”

Mr. Owen was certain that the senior partner’s mind had slipped completely off its frail hinges until he saw two figures dart into the room from opposite directions and dash up to Mr. Larkin. One was an exceedingly horrid-looking boy and the other was an aged man, strongly suggestive of his name.

“They’re mine,” said Mr. Larkin with a note of pride, pointing to the pair. “All mine. Nobody else wants them.”

Mr. Owen, surveying the unadmirable-looking pair, saw no reason why anyone else should. However, he kept his opinion to himself.

“I can’t see that,” he replied. “They’d make splendid museum pieces.”

“They’d do much better in a graveyard,” observed the Major feelingly.

“Or in jail,” added Mr. Dinner.

“Give them time,” said Mr. Larkin, “and they’ll probably be in both. Horrid,” he continued, addressing the younger of the two, “I want you to induce Green Mould to go down to the Galleries de la Lune and bring back lots of mechanical toys. Charge them to my account. I buy all my things there, anyway. They have better stuff than we have, and the prices are much more reasonable.”

Mr. Owen looked at the speaker in amazement. The man was as great a danger to himself and his store when honest as when unsuccessfully hiding assets.

“And Blue Mould – or is it Green? I forget which – don’t let the grass grow under your feet,” Mr. Larkin continued severely to the old man.

“Wot!” piped up the ancient one in a shrill voice. “Right through the pavements?”

“No,” scolded Mr. Larkin, “through the floor of the taxi cab. You’re going to ride. Won’t that be nice?”

Green Mould considered.

“Oo pays?” he demanded. “Ther last time I took er cab fer you it cost me all me cash. God knows when I’ll ever get it back.”

Mr. Larkin coughed delicately behind his hand.

“Is this the time to speak of trifles?” he demanded, reverting once more to his Napoleonic mood.

“When is?” asked the old man.

“Not now,” Mr. Larkin replied.

“Nor ever,” muttered Green Mould, shuffling from the room after his companion, Horrid. “Me own money is trifles. His is worse than counterfeit. It don’t exist. Oo ever sees it? Yer can play with false money, but yer can’t even smell his.”

“This is one of those days,” said Horace Larkin sadly, “when everyone in the world wants to take our money away from us. I don’t like such days. By the way, my dear Mr. Owen, did you ever work for a living?”

“I’m a lawyer of sorts,” Mr. Owen admitted modestly.

“Splendid!” cried Mr. Larkin, immediately regaining his blithe spirits. “Fancy that, a lawyer. You should be able to hide practically all our assets.”

“He might even find a few,” Mr. Dinner suggested hopefully.

“In the meantime,” continued Mr. Larkin, “how would you like to sell some books? That’s always fun. You’d be surprised at the great quantity of odd people who read books. Some even buy them. I wonder why? Major, will you take our new partner to the Book Department? Let him knock about there until luncheon.”

At this moment there sounded a furious bang on the door. Mr. Dinner moved to open it, but was arrested by the voice of Mr. Larkin.

“If you open that door,” he said, “a wolf might walk in – a wolf with a bill in his mouth.”

A wolf did walk in, and it was not dressed in sheep’s clothing. She was hardly in any clothing at all – a tall, good-looking woman artfully draped in a bolt or so of some clinging material. For a moment she stood arrogantly regarding the partners, who returned her gaze uneasily.

“Am I to fall in a stupor of exhaustion?” she demanded in a deep voice, advancing into the room.

“I hope not,” said Mr. Larkin nervously. “Are you? I hate stupors of exhaustion. Why not lie down? There’s lots of room.”

“Nobody else is lying down,” retorted the woman.

“Do you want us all to lie down?” Mr. Larkin asked her rather helplessly. “Of course, we all could if it will do anything about that stupor of exhaustion.”

“Why should I wish all of you to lie down?” the woman coldly demanded. “All of you?”

“We don’t know,” replied Mr. Larkin. “Have you any reason?”

“What reason would I have to lie down with all of you?” went on the woman.

“Oh, my God!” exploded the Major, then made a violent sound deep in his throat.

Mr. Larkin started nervously.

“Don’t be like that, Major,” he pleaded. “You veer me.” Turning once more to the statuesque woman, he asked, “Have you any reason to want to lie down with all of us?”

“I see no reason why I should lie down with any of you,” she replied in measured tones.

“Oh,” said Mr. Larkin, a little set back. “You don’t? I thought you did.”

“Do you realize what you’re asking me?” the woman continued inexorably.

“No,” answered Mr. Larkin hastily. “Or, rather, yes. But for goodness’ sake, don’t tell us. I feel quite driven to the wall as it is.”

“I’d like to drive you through the wall,” the woman replied without any show of feeling.

“Would you now?” asked Mr. Owen, glancing round at the walls as if gauging their resistance. “Through the wall. Fancy that.”

“I put it up to this gentleman,” the woman cried, advancing languorously on Mr. Owen.

“Don’t put it up to me,” he protested hastily. “I’m new at this business. And besides I have a feeling I’m married.”

“What’s that got to do with it?” the woman asked scornfully.

“With what?” gasped Mr. Owen as the woman draped two arms round his neck and leaned so heavily against him he was forced to brace himself as if slanting against a gale.

“You know,” murmured the woman with a feminine sort of leer.

“My God!” cried Mr. Larkin. “She’s coming unwound. In fact, she’s nearly finished. Gentlemen, you must leave at once. This is a most important interview. I could never sit through that luncheon unless I got this off my mind.”

“It seems the senior partner gets all the breaks,” Mr. Dinner observed as he and the Major escorted Mr. Owen to the door. “She’s the head of our Designing Department. An excellent piece of goods.”

Mr. Owen was not sure whether the man was referring to the body or to the material she had been wearing when she had first entered the office. His parting glimpse was epic. Mr. Larkin was holding one end of the material while the lady, now completely herself, was clinging to the other. Mr. Larkin seemed to be veering again, but this time in the right direction.

CHAPTER FIVE

Pornography Preferred

Mr. Owen found himself caged behind four counters. He was literally surrounded by books. As far as his gaze could reach, there were books and still more books. The mere thought of reading even a fraction of them numbed his literary faculties. All the books in the world seemed to have been gathered into that department. He found himself unwilling to open the cover of even one of them. He thought of giant forests denuded for the sake of these books; of millions of publishers and editors crushed beneath the weight of their spring and fall lists, of numberless bookstore owners resorting to theft and murder or else going mad in their efforts to keep from sinking in seas of bankruptcy beneath the steadily rising tide of current fiction. He thought of haggard-eyed book reviewers turning their bitter faces to those strange and awful gods to which book reviewers are forced to turn in the affliction of their tortured brains. He heard these abandoned men calling in loud voices for a momentary recession, at least, of the soul-rotting flood of books. He even thought of authors, and his heart was filled with indignation against that indefatigable, ever hopeful tribe of word vendors. If it wasn’t for the diligence of authors so many hearts would remain intact and so many hopes unblighted. Mr. Owen decided it would be better not to think of authors. No good would ever come of it. Also, with a feeling of shame, he thought of the reading public, and his mind began to veer very much in the manner of his senior partners. Luckily his thoughts were taken off the reading public by the conversation of two gentlemen who were fingering various volumes in a decidedly furtive manner. One of these gentlemen was tall, hungry-looking, and artistically untidy. The other was exactly like the first only not as tall. Feeling themselves under scrutiny, the pair looked up guiltily.

“How is The Broken Bed going?” the tall one asked in a diffident voice.

“What?” replied Mr. Owen. “I don’t sleep in a broken bed.”

“No. No,” said the other in tones of pain, “I was referring to Monk’s latest. I don’t care where you sleep.”

“Nor do I care where you sleep,” replied Mr. Owen tartly, “or if you ever sleep. Please stick to business. You were referring to Monk’s latest what?”

“I was referring to the works of Monk,” answered the tall person in the manner of a god offended.

“Oh,” said Mr. Owen, momentarily stunned. “You were? Well, we don’t refer to them here. You must be in the wrong department.”

“Do you mean to stand there and tell me to my face,” cried the man, “that you don’t sell The Broken Bed here – not one single Broken Bed?”

“I’m rather new at this business myself,” Mr. Owen explained, thinking it better to be patient with the man. “But I know they sell broken mechanical toys. They might even sell broken beds. Why don’t you try the Furniture Department? If they haven’t one there they might be willing to order a broken bed for you. They might even break one of their good beds. Almost anything can happen in this store.”

“My dear sir,” said the tall man, evidently deciding to be patient himself, “it seems you don’t understand. I am referring to Monk’s works.”

“I know,” put in Mr. Owen, “but I do wish you’d stop.”

“One moment,” the man continued with a wave of his hand. “This may jog your laggard wits. They recently made him into an omnibus.”

“Who?” gasped Mr. Owen, starting back.

“Monk,” replied the other triumphantly. “There! They made Monk into an omnibus.”

“How could they do that?” Mr. Owen wanted to know.

“Why, they make all the best ones into omnibuses nowadays,” he was told. “It’s being done.”

“But I don’t see,” answered Mr. Owen. “How could they possibly make this chap Monk into an omnibus?”

“He became so popular,” replied the other simply.

“Still I don’t see it,” pursued Mr. Owen. “Just because a man is popular, why should they make him into an omnibus? Doesn’t it hurt terribly?”

“Why should it hurt?” exclaimed the other fiercely. “They just take him and squeeze him together tight and compactly, and there you are.”

“I know,” said Mr. Owen, unable to keep the horror from his voice. “But look at him. The poor fellow must be in an awful condition. I don’t even like to think of it.”

“No, he isn’t,” replied the other, frowning dangerously. “Not if he’s properly done. There you have him for all time conveniently at hand – the best of his works. The rest of him that doesn’t matter you can toss aside.”

Mr. Owen shivered and stared at the speaker with dilated eyes.

“Will you please go away,” he said quietly. “I don’t care to hear any more.”

“Nonsense,” spoke up the smaller of the two madmen for the first time. “They made him into an omnibus. He’s Monk.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Owen, speaking gently as if to a child. “He’s Monk and he’s an omnibus, too. What might you be, a tram car?”

“No,” the little chap replied in all seriousness, “but I hope to be an omnibus someday. You know, if they don’t make you into an omnibus you’re simply no good.”

“I shouldn’t think you’d be much good if they did,” observed Mr. Owen. “Why don’t you run along now and play in the Toy Department?”

“What do you think we are,” cried the tall lunatic, “children?”

“Not at all,” Mr. Owen said soothingly. “You’re an omnibus all right. I can see that at a glance. But don’t you think you’d be happier in our Motor Vehicle Department? You might run into a Mack truck there. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

Upon the reception of this suggestion the tall man uttered a loud complaint and dashed off wildly through the store, pushing and being pushed. The little chap followed him. A good-looking salesgirl sidled up to Mr. Owen and invited incredible confidences with her wickedly shadowed eyes.

“You’re the new partner,” she began, “aren’t you? What was troubling those two half-wits?”

“One kept telling me he was an omnibus,” faltered Mr. Owen. “And when I admitted he was – called him one, in fact – he started in screaming and ran away.”

The girl smiled sympathetically and patted Mr. Owen’s arm.

“Don’t mind them,” she replied. “They’re just a couple of authors. You know, they come around here and innocently ask how their books are going, and then get mad as hell because we haven’t even heard of them. They should tell us they’re authors, in the first place. Then we could think up some comforting lie.”

“But this chap insisted he was an omnibus,” Mr. Owen continued. “Said they did things to his – his – I forget now, but however it was, they did things to the best of him and then he was an omnibus.”

“This is an omnibus,” the girl explained, picking up a stout volume. “It’s one of those quaint ideas that occasionally get the best of publishers. Whenever an author isn’t good enough to have his old books bought individually and still isn’t rotten enough to be taken off the list entirely they publish an omnibus volume of his stuff, and surprisingly few people ever buy it.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Owen. “Then I was a little wrong. He started in with asking for a broken bed.”

“That’s Monk’s latest drip,” the girl told him. “It doesn’t matter, though. He didn’t want to buy it. He was seeking information.”

At this moment a middle-aged lady sailed up to the counter and knocked off several books which she failed to replace. The salesgirl eyed her.

“What would be nice for a young lady sick in bed?” she demanded in a scolding voice.

“How about a good dose of salts, lady?” the girl replied promptly out of the side of her mouth, and winked at the shocked Mr. Owen.

“Or a nice young man?” chimed in another salesgirl.

“I’ll have you to know this young lady comes from one of the best families,” the woman retorted indignantly.

“Why did they kick her out?” Mr. Owen’s companion wanted to know.

“They didn’t kick her out,” cried the woman.

“Then how did she get to know you?” the other girl inquired.

“Are you deliberately trying to insult me?” the woman demanded in a voice of rage.

“I was,” said the girl with the shadow-stained eyes, “but I’ve given it up.”

“I asked,” said the woman, struggling to control her words and mixing them completely. “What would be nice to give to a sick book in bed?”

“A worm, lady,” replied Owen’s friend. “A bookworm – a nice, succulent bookworm.”

“But can’t you understand?” cried the woman. “I don’t want worms.”

“Neither do lots of other people,” the girl replied philosophically, “but they can’t help themselves. I didn’t know you had worms.”

“But I haven’t any worms,” said the woman.

“Then why don’t you want some?” she was asked.

“Who wants worms?” snapped the woman.

“Perhaps this woman is trying to sell you some of her worms,” Mr. Owen suggested.

“That’s an idea, too,” agreed the girl. “Say, lady, are you trying to sell me some worms?”

“Certainly not!” expostulated the woman. “I don’t want to sell some worms.”

“See?” said the salesgirl with a hopeless shrug of her shoulder. “She says she won’t let us have any of her worms.”

“But I didn’t have any worms to begin with,” cried the woman.

“Oh,” replied the girl, with ready understanding, “you picked them up as a hobby.”

“No,” declared Mr. Owen. “She means, she wasn’t born with worms.”

“It’s a pity she was born at all,” observed the salesgirl. “She and her old worms. Who brought up these worms, anyway?”

“You did,” the woman told her. “I asked for a book, and you brought up worms.”

“And where did the young lady in bed go?” the girl asked. “Is she still sick?”

“You told me to give her a dose of salts,” the woman retorted furiously.

“Did I?” replied the salesgirl. “Well, give her a couple of doses and worm yourself off. This is a book counter and not a worm clinic. I’m tired of you and your worms and your dying young women and all that. Besides, I want to talk to this gentleman. You’re in the way. Come back tomorrow when you’ve made up your mind.”

“The management will hear about this,” the woman threatened.

“The management has heard,” the girl replied. “This gentleman is one of the owners. Isn’t he lovely?”

Impotent with anger the woman rushed away.

Owen looked blankly at the salesgirl.

“Is there anything wrong?” he asked her.

“Oh, no,” she replied, her eyes gleaming with unholy amusement. “There’s nothing at all wrong. Can’t you read?” Here she pointed to an overhead sign. “That damn fool came to the Pornographic Department. Take a look at this book.”

She selected a book at random, turned the pages until she found an illustration, then passed the book to Mr. Owen. He glanced at the picture, gave one frantic look about him, then turned his back on the girl. The poor man’s brain was paralyzed by the picture the girl had put under his nose, a picture she should not have looked at herself and which most certainly she should not have shown to him. With the book still held forgotten in his hands, Mr. Owen strove to think of other things. It was obvious to him that he was never going to turn round and face that girl again. What disturbing eyes she had! He wondered whether it would not be better for him to crouch down back of the counter and to wait there until one of the partners came to take him away. Dimly he realized that someone had been asking him a question, the same one, several times. He looked up and discovered he was being glared at by a thin, bitter-faced lady who gave the impression of being mostly pince-nez.

“Do you have the Sex Life of the Flea?” the woman asked sharply.

Mr. Owen now noticed that the woman held a slip of paper and a pencil in her hands. “My God,” he wondered, “is this horrid old crow trying to interview me on my sex life? What a place this is.”

“No, lady,” he answered disgustedly. “I don’t have the sex life of a louse.”

“But I must have the Sex Life of the Flea,” the woman insisted.

“I hope you enjoy it,” he retorted, “but I shall play no part in it. None whatsoever. Personally, I don’t care if you have the sex life of a mink.”

“I’ve finished with minks,” snapped the woman. “I’m doing fleas now.”

“Have you mistaken me for a bull flea or whatever the he’s are called, by any chance?” he shot back. “Or have you gone batty like everyone else? If you want a flea’s sex life why not take up with some unmarried flea and have done with it?”

“You’ve gone batty yourself,” retorted the woman.

“Madam,” he replied, “I certainly have. Now, run away and look for this flea. I’m busy.”

The woman sniffed, tossed back her head, and subjected Mr. Owen to a parting glare.

“You,” she said witheringly, “would not even understand the sex life of the Bumpers – Chloroscombrus chrysurus.”

“I doubt it,” admitted Mr. Owen. “It doesn’t sound very restrained.”

“And as for the courtship of the Squid,” she tossed in for good measure as she prepared to march away, “I know you are ignorant of that.”

“I’m not alone in my darkness, madam,” he told her a little nettled, “and, furthermore, I’m not a Peeping Tom.”

“Will you kindly hold that book a little higher?” a fresh voice asked at his other side. “I want to study the detail of the illustration.”

Mr. Owen wheeled and found himself confronting the gravely critical face of a lovely young girl. With his last shred of chivalry he endeavored to remove the book from view, but the girl hung on gamely.

“What’s the matter?” she asked innocently. “Don’t you want me to see it?”

“Of course not,” he scolded. “I don’t want anybody to see it. Can’t look at it myself.”

The girl took the book from his now nerveless fingers and studied the picture intently. Fully expecting her to shriek and hurry away as soon as she understood what it was all about, Mr. Owen watched with fascinated eyes.

“Those Arabian lads certainly had some quaint ideas,” she observed in a casually conversational voice. “So complicated – almost too elaborate, I would say, but perhaps they had a lot of time on their hands and nothing better to do. And after all is said and done, what is there better to do?”

“Don’t ask me, lady,” said Mr. Owen hastily. “I wash my hands of the whole affair.”

“You seem to find something wrong with this picture,” the girl went on. “Is it out of drawing?”

“It’s out of reason,” he answered coldly. “Please stop memorizing it.”

“I don’t have to memorize it,” the girl replied proudly. “I’m thoroughly conversant with the technique of Arabian erotology.”

“Oh,” replied Mr. Owen feebly, then prompted by the belief that anything would be better than this clutchingly graphic illustration which they were shamelessly sharing between them, he asked, “would something in Squids interest you, or Bumpers, perhaps?”

The young lady judicially considered this proposal.

“No,” she said at last. “I don’t think I’d get much of a kick from the erotic life of the Squid.”

“Sorry,” said Mr. Owen, and he really was. “Then how about something especially filthy in the line of Bumpers? That might tide you over.”

“Hardly,” replied the girl. “Haven’t you a dirtier book than this one?”

“My dear young lady,” said Mr. Owen with deep conviction, “they don’t print any dirtier books than that one. Even to be standing together in its presence makes me feel that for all practical purposes you and myself are nine tenths married.”

“Does it affect you that way?” the girl inquired with professional interest.

“I don’t know what way you mean,” he replied cautiously. “But I do know I’ll never be quite the same.”

“You’re too impressionable,” the girl assured him. “Now, I ran across a book the other day that would have opened your eyes. It was ever so much dirtier than this – to begin with it described – —”

“Don’t!” cried Mr. Owen, clapping both hands to his ears. “Are you proposing to stand there in cold blood and describe to me a book even dirtier than this one?”

“Perhaps when I’ve finished,” smiled the girl, “your blood won’t be so cold.”

“Oh,” muttered Mr. Owen, panic stricken by the implication in the girl’s words. “Oh, dear. Oh, dear. I want to get out of this department. How can I do it? Where shall I turn?”

His hands fluttered helplessly over the books, and all the time he was painfully aware of the fact that the salesgirl with those eyes was observing his distress with quietly malicious amusement.

“Tell that creature all about it,” he said to the young lady distractedly and pointed to the salesgirl. “She’ll probably cap your story with the Nuptials of the Whale or Everyman’s Manual of Rape, for all I know. Don’t hang around here any more. I’m in no mood for any monkey business.”

“Then I’ll call on you when you are,” the smiling young, lady replied. “I like that sort of business, and it’s so refreshing to find a man who is still fresh and unspoiled – you know, not blasé.”

“Don’t you dare come back,” Mr. Owen called after the girl as she gracefully swayed away. “My sex life is null and void.”

Apparently the girl did not hear, but various other customers did, and stopped to stare interestedly at this man who was thus publicly proclaiming his truly lamentable condition.

“I hope you don’t mean that,” the salesgirl murmured, undulating up to him with her trim, flexible torso.

Mr. Owen, after recovering a little from the effect of the torso, noticed for the first time that a small section of hell had crept into her hair and left its flames glowing among the waves. A dangerously alluring girl, he decided. She was certainly not the proper person to team up with when selling pornographic literature. Especially when illustrated. Or maybe she was. He did not know.

“I wish you’d stop sidling up to me like an impassioned and overdone piece of spaghetti,” he complained. “And what has my sex life to do with you, I’d like to know?”

“That’s rather a leading question, isn’t it?” she answered, a challenging glitter in her eye.

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Owen. “If it is, don’t answer.”

“I feel that I must,” she told him gently.

“Oh, God!” breathed Mr. Owen.

“So far,” said the girl, “our sex lives have never crossed, but they might at any minute.”

“What!” cried Mr. Owen. “You mean right here and now? Oh, no they won’t, my girl. Nobody is going to cross my sex life in the middle of a department store. You keep your sex life and I’ll keep mine.”

“But you seem to have no sex life.”

“Then don’t worry about it. Let the sleeping dog lie.”

“What sleeping dog?”

“Don’t ask me,” Mr. Owen told her bitterly. “Any sleeping dog.”

“Oh,” said the girl. “I thought you meant your sleeping dog.”

“Well, I didn’t,” he retorted irritably. “I never had a dog either sleeping or awake.”

For a moment she studied him appraisingly.

“Did you ever have a girl?” she asked.

CHAPTER SIX

Satin

“I’m somewhat hazy on that point,” Mr. Owen replied. “Seems as if I had. Why?”

“Nothing at all,” she answered. “I was merely wondering if your sex impulses had ever been thwarted.”

“What’s that to you?” he asked.

“Again, nothing at all,” she assured him. “Only it makes one a little cracked when that happens.”

“You don’t look so seamy,” Mr. Owen was ungallant enough to observe as he considered the girl’s gracious moulding.

“Why should I?” she demanded.

“Don’t ask me,” he answered defensively. “I don’t know whether you should or shouldn’t. It’s none of my business.”

“It certainly is some of your business,” she told him, returning his gaze with an appraising eye. “You don’t think I’m going to let you or any other man thwart my sex impulses, do you?”

“I don’t give a hang about your horrid old sex impulses,” he retorted. “Have I tried to stop you?”

“From what?” she wanted to know.

Mr. Owen looked blankly at her.

“From whatever you want to do when you carry on like that,” he answered lamely.

“Well,” she snapped, “you haven’t been any too encouraging. You haven’t puffed or panted or rolled your eyes or tried to find out things like other men do.”

“Do you want me to rush about after you like an exhausted masseur?” he demanded.

“No,” she replied, “but you haven’t even insulted me so far.”

“Would that be possible?” he asked.

“No,” she replied dispassionately, “but it’s nice, just the same. A girl gets to expect it. Your partners make indecent proposals whenever they get the chance. Nothing discourages them.”

“Do you try?” Mr. Owen asked quickly, surprised by the keenness of his interest.

“Why do you want to know?” she demanded, drawing near the man.

“I don’t,” he disclaimed hastily. “I don’t care if you encourage the War Veterans of the World.”

“Who are they?” she asked with sudden interest, then her eyes snapped dangerously. “Oh,” she continued, “so you don’t care, do you? Well, I’ll fix you. I’ll damn well lay you out with the dirtiest book I can find.”

“Then what will you do?” Mr. Owen inquired.

“Lay myself out beside you,” she fumed.

“With an equally dirty book, no doubt,” he caustically added.

“Yes,” she said, snatching up a heavy volume of A Thousand and One Nights. “This ought to settle your hash.”

It probably would have, had not Mr. Owen ducked at the last minute. A Thousand and One Nights consequently descended upon the head of a near-sighted but otherwise unremarkable gentleman, whose nose, previously nearly buried in a book, was now completely interred. When presently the nose found strength enough to rise from its lewd resting place, the gentleman behind it glared at the innocent Owen through tears of rage and pain.

“That,” said the man, as if explaining the incident to himself, “was an unnecessarily dirty trick.”

“It was an unnecessarily dirty book,” Mr. Owen replied soothingly. “It barely missed my head.”

“Well, here’s one you won’t miss,” grated the gentleman, and before Mr. Owen could duck he received full upon the top of his skull the entire contents of Fanny Hill, illustrations and all. As he staggered back from the blow he felt a heavy tome being slipped into his hand. Several other salesgirls were arming themselves with erotic literature for the defense of their assaulted leader.

“Pat him with this,” a voice said in Mr. Owen’s ear. “It’s a bronze-bound Boccaccio. If that doesn’t settle his hash I’ll have a swell Rabelais ready.”

“You’re bound to settle somebody’s hash,” Mr. Owen muttered with a grunt as he drove Boccaccio down upon the other gentleman’s head. “Better his hash than mine. I hope that did it!”

Apparently it had. The twice-flattened nose descended to rise no more of its own volition. Boccaccio had made a lasting impression. The body was speedily removed, and business went on as usual. Mr. Owen thanked the salesgirls for their ready support, then turned back to the one who had made him her special province.

“Just where were we?” he asked, then remembering that they had not been at such an agreeable place, added, “Let’s begin a little farther back.”

“How much farther back?” she asked. “Before all this rotten pornography?”

“Oh,” said Mr. Owen hopefully, “then you’re not so fond of pornography yourself?”

For a moment the girl looked at him defiantly.

“Suppose I’m not?” she demanded. “I can take it or leave it, just as I like. You don’t have to wallow in pornography to be pornographic yourself. I’m a very erotic woman, I am. So erotic I can hardly stand being in the same section with you. I don’t know what might happen.”

“Don’t let it,” pleaded Mr. Owen. “I haven’t quite found my sea legs yet.”

“You haven’t even looked at my land ones,” the girl shot back.

“Let’s not go into that any more,” he begged her. “Do you mean that you find it difficult to be caged in here with me, or would you experience the same feeling with just any other man?”

“With any other man,” she replied, “so long as he wasn’t dead or too badly damaged.”

Mr. Owen’s face fell. His disappointment was obvious.

“Oh,” he said somewhat flatly, “that’s nice if you like it.”

“Not that you don’t affect me differently,” she went on, smiling up at him. “I find my sex life rapidly approaching yours. It may be today. It may be tomorrow. It may be the next day at the very latest. Whenever it is, they’re going to meet like a couple of ten-ton trucks.”

“Does it necessarily have to be as violent as all that?” he asked uneasily. “Sounds sort of rough to me.”

“It will be rough enough, no fear,” she replied. “There’s something about you that arouses my most primitive instincts. I don’t know what it is, but it makes me simply filthy. Feel as if I want to shock you out of your wits.”

“You have already,” said Mr. Owen, “and I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Honor Knightly,” she told him, “but people call me Satin because of my skin. I’ll show you that later – all of it, if you like.”

“No,” said Mr. Owen, a little terrified. “Only some. It is like satin, though, all smooth and everything.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” she boasted. “I’ll open your eyes to something extra special in the line of skin!”

“You’re too good to me,” murmured Mr. Owen unenthusiastically, as he thought of the tremendous amount of skin he was slated to see on or before the day after tomorrow at the latest.

“Oh, I get fun out of it, too,” said the girl almost gloatingly. “I get a lot of fun.”

“I’m sure you must,” remarked Mr. Owen. “But, tell me, Satin, do all young ladies about here talk like you?”

“Oh, no,” the girl declared. “Most of them are not at all afraid of calling a spade a spade – perfectly unrestrained, they are.”

“Not like you,” he suggested.

“Not a bit,” she admitted. “I like things clean but nice. You know – ladylike.”

“Have you a decent dictionary?” a studious-looking gentleman inquired, leaning over the counter towards the girl.

“No,” said the girl briefly. “All our dictionaries are indecent. Full of obscene words.”

“I know all those,” said the man.

“You do like hell,” snapped Satin. “How about this one?”

She leaned over and whispered a word in the man’s ear.

“What does it mean?” he asked in an awed voice.

Once more she whispered in the man’s ear.

“My word,” he said, his eyes growing round. “Does it mean all that?”

“And more,” the girl replied. Turning to Mr. Owen, who was curious in spite of himself, she added, “Now, if I wasn’t a lady I’d have said all that right out loud.”

“Thank God you didn’t,” murmured the gentleman. “On second thought, I think I’ll buy one of those dictionaries.”

“It’s called the Little Gem Desk Dictionary Of Obscene Words,” she told him, passing him the book. “It’s standard. You’ll find it quite a comfort, especially when you’re mad.”

“I’ve a friend on the faculty who loves indecent words,” the studious gentleman informed her, tucking the book in his pocket. “Of course, when nicely used.”

“Most members of faculties love indecent words,” Satin declared. “It comes from dealing with the young.”

“What are you doing for luncheon?” the gentleman asked her, to Mr. Owen’s annoyance.

“Too bad,” said Miss Honor Knightly with sincere regret. “I’m dated up today. You see, among my other means of making extra pin money,” and here Mr. Owen found himself wondering about those ways, “I act as executive secretary for the Kiarians. They’re holding their monthly luncheon today, and I have to take notes of the proceedings. It’s an awful trial. I’m glad I know a lot of dirty words. One needs them at a Kiarian meeting, I assure you.”

“I should imagine,” replied the gentleman, “it would be even worse than dealing with the young. Some other day, perhaps.”

“You’d be surprised,” Satin informed Mr. Owen, when the gentleman and his dirty dictionary had taken themselves off, “how many invitations I get since I’ve taken charge of the Pornographic Department.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Mr. Owen assured her.

“Yes, yes,” Honor went on, happily reminiscent. “I’d never suffer from insomnia if I took advantage of all my opportunities.”

“Do you ever suffer from insomnia?” he asked, white nights from the past dimly stirring his memory.

“Terribly,” said Satin, “when I’m all upset and erotic. But I won’t any more now that you are here. There’ll be no need of insomnia to keep me awake. I like things clean but nice.”

“Oh, you like things clean but nice,” Mr. Owen observed moodily. “I’ll admit you make them clear enough. I’d never mistake one of your spades for a teething spoon, by any chance. But don’t delude yourself. I’m not going to be here for long. I’m going away.”

“Then I’m going to ask the partners if they won’t give you to me,” the girl declared.

“Oh, they’ll say yes,” Mr. Owen told her, “but it won’t mean a thing. They’re like that – impulsive. Then they forget.”

“But I don’t,” said the girl. “And your number’s up. Don’t you forget.”

“It must be a high one,” Mr. Owen answered in a really mean spirit.

She looked at him.

“When my sex has dominated yours,” she told him, looking rather mean herself, “I’m going to make you suffer for your rotten little wisecracks. See if I don’t.”

A page boy appeared to inform Mr. Owen that the partners were awaiting his pleasure. As he prepared to follow the boy he observed with some satisfaction the expression of irritation on Miss Honor Knightly’s undeniably pretty face.

“You haven’t told me that word,” he tossed at her casually. “You know, the one you whispered in the man’s ear.”

“No?” she replied. “Well, lean over and I will.”

Mr. Owen leaned over and waited. Why did he want to know? he wondered. His orderly mind assured him it was because she had told the other man. Was it possible he was morbidly jealous? He felt her breath fanning lightly on his cheek. Her lips brushed the lobe of his ear. Then her teeth seized it and, so far as he was concerned, bit it off. In his anguish Mr. Owen involuntarily released several of the dirtiest words he knew.

“It was none of those,” she told him. “And now you will never know.”

“How can you talk so clearly,” he asked her huskily, “with the lobe of my ear in your mouth, or did you swallow it?”

“How common you are,” she remarked coldly. “I don’t like vulgar men. The boy is waiting.”

Tenderly feeling his ear, Mr. Owen followed the boy to the senior partner’s private office. Here he was enthusiastically received and escorted up to one of the largest cocktail shakers he had ever seen. The Major, owing to his strength and size, was wrestling with this frost-coated vessel.

“It’s nice to drink a lot of cocktails before luncheon,” Mr. Larkin was telling everyone. “Of course, if you drink a whole lot of them you get quite drunk, but then, getting drunk is sort of nice, too.”

Mr. Owen received this surprising shred of information with a proper display of interest as he accepted a glass from the hands of the hovering Dinner. After he had swallowed its contents he was inclined to agree with Mr. Larkin.

“It’s nice to get drunk before dinner, too,” quoth the Major, his deep voice rumbling pleasantly through the room.

“One can’t get drunk before Dinner,” the senior partner put in. “Dinner is always drunk.”

“No,” the small man objected. “He’s always getting drunk, but he never quite is – not dead, I mean.”

“Come! Come!” cried Mr. Larkin hospitably. “Drink up, everybody. To the new partner and the old ones. We simply have to get a skinful to stand that Kiarian luncheon.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Owen, visions of Satin in his mind and prints of her teeth in his ear. “Is that where we’re going?”

“It is,” replied the Major gloomily. “I’d much rather take you to a sporting house or a gambling dive.”

“So would I,” agreed Mr. Larkin. “I told him to remind me about brothels. Now, don’t forget everybody, bring up brothels.”

Mr. Dinner produced his notebook and made a painstaking entry.

“I have it down in black and white,” he announced, looking up from his book. “Here it is,” and he read: “Everyone is to remind H. Larkin about brothels.”

“That’s almost too black and white,” observed Mr. Larkin. “In case you were found dead, I wouldn’t want people to get the idea I had to be constantly reminded about brothels. No normal man should be as absent-minded as all that, should he? I know I’m not.”

“No,” said Mr. Dinner, his eyes blinking thoughtfully. “What you need is someone not to remind you of them. Suppose I put down a note like this: Everybody is to try to keep H. Larkin’s mind off brothels. How would that do?”

“It won’t do,” Mr. Larkin replied after a thoughtful pause. “People might get the impression I thought altogether too much about such places, and I wouldn’t like that, would you, Mr. Owen? You wouldn’t like it noised abroad that you just couldn’t think of anything else even if you seldom did.”

“Certainly not,” Mr. Owen agreed, and tossed off another cocktail. There was nothing out of the ordinary about this conversation. They were all jolly good fellows, sound, sensible men, and they drank delicious cocktails.

“You see?” cried Mr. Larkin. “He agrees with me. Put that notebook away, Dinner. There are some things I should be allowed to handle for myself. Besides, after we’ve finished that shaker, I think we’ll all be primed to call on Hadly at the bank and demand a line of personal credit for our new partner. He has to have some money, you know, or else he’ll be spending all of ours.”

The two other partners looked at Mr. Owen with frankly alarmed eyes. Evidently it was a decidedly disagreeable possibility.

“No,” murmured the Major, “that wouldn’t be so good.”

“Good,” gasped Mr. Dinner. “It would be just awful. Let’s rush to the bank.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Establishing a Line of Credit

By the time the last quartet of cocktails had been drained from what Mr. Owen had at first feared was going to be an inexhaustible shaker but which now he regretted was not, the partners felt themselves suitably set up to call on Mr. Hadly, the president of the bank with which the store did business in its casual way.

“We’ll establish a line of credit for you, Mr. Owen,” growled the Major like a jovial thunderstorm, “or I’ll tear the hinges off the safe with my own two hands.”

“And I’ll help you,” vowed Mr. Dinner. “What good is a bank unless you can establish a line of credit with it, I’d like to know?” As no one seemed prepared to tell him, he added, disgustedly, “They’re so drunk I can’t even hear them.”

“I do feel so good,” exclaimed Mr. Larkin. “I believe the four of us could establish a line of anything if we set our minds on it. What say you, Mr. Owen?”

“I say stick to credit,” said Mr. Owen wisely. “Once we have our credit we can set about establishing other things – a reign of terror, for example. Some sadistic strain in my composition has always craved for a reign of terror. Also, I’ve always wanted to carry a cane.”

“Let’s all carry sticks,” cried Mr. Larkin. “Heavy ones. They might intimidate that skinflint, Hadly.”

He rang a bell on a flower-heaped desk, a girl entered, received the order together with various flattering but uncalled-for observations from all the partners, and in a surprisingly short time returned with four heavy sticks, so large and heavy, in fact, that Mr. Dinner experienced some difficulty in handling his and himself at the same time.

“Speaking of sadism,” remarked Mr. Larkin easily, slipping on a pair of light yellow gloves, “did you ever beat a defenseless child?”

In spite of the cocktails, Mr. Owen shuddered as he vigorously shook his head.

“Neither did I,” went on Mr. Larkin, “but I’ve heard it’s lots of fun.”

“You might try it on my nephew,” volunteered the Major. “He’s an exceedingly snotty child. Last time I played cards with his father the young scamp pulled four aces from my sleeve.”

“Any child should be beaten who does a thing like that,” observed Mr. Dinner. “Maybe his father put him up to it.”

“Quite possibly,” replied the Major. “There always was a mean streak in my brother. Anyway, he’d been losing heavily all evening, what with one thing and another.”

“If you’ll give me a little room,” put in Mr. Larkin, “I’ll make an honest effort to veer myself through that door. We really must be going.”

The senior partner thereupon veered through a private door giving to the street. Behind him veered his three companions, diligently swinging their sticks. Mr. Owen could not remember ever having veered onto so pleasant a thoroughfare. He drew a sharp breath and tried to remember all the things he had ever heard about Paris. This street, he felt sure, was far better than anything Paris had to offer. Surely there had never been such inviting-looking women seated at such convivial-looking tables. And as he walked past them he became inwardly elated on discovering that the women gazed at him with eyes of undisguised approval.

It was jolly to be looked at that way for a change. He could not help wondering if the cocktails had not only improved his mental outlook but also his physical appearance. If they had, he decided to become a confirmed drunkard. Too few women had paid any special attention to him in the past. Only the out-of-luck souls had seemed to drift his way. Now he was coming into his birthright. He was being admired by the opposite sex. And he, in turn, was admiring. He was returning these women’s glances with brightly acquisitive eyes. He was lusting after them all. The world at last was his barnyard. Why didn’t everyone get undressed and start in to chase one another? He could not decide which one he would chase first. Probably he would try to run in all directions at once.

It was a friendly sort of day, with a fair blue sky overhead. Beneath it the boulevard gave the impression of running away into friendly places. Other streets branched from it. He caught glimpses of spacious parks and plazas and lovely, interesting buildings. It seemed to be the sort of city he would have built himself, had he been given a free hand. Even the theaters wore an especially attractive aspect. One announcement read: “The only piece of cloth in this show is the curtain.” Another play was called Just As We Are, and Mr. Owen, looking at the photographs of the girls, decided they would be just like that in this wholly desirable metropolis. He was very favorably impressed with everything. Delighted.

Their progress was necessarily slow, owing to the wide acquaintance of the three partners with various ladies and gentlemen they encountered in the course of their walk. Even Mr. Dinner, as small as he was and as drunk as he was, appeared to be greatly in demand. At one table Mr. Owen was introduced to a lady who in his exalted state impressed him as being the most beautiful woman in the world. When he extended his hand to take hers she deftly slipped her café bill into his.

“Pay that and I’m yours,” she said in a thrilling sort of voice.

Mr. Larkin took the bill from the amazed Mr. Owen, scrutinized it closely, then clapped his hand to his forehead.

“Do you mean for life?” he asked the woman.

She shrugged her handsome shoulders eloquently.

“Nobody wants me for life,” she replied.

“They might want you,” the senior partner declared gallantly, “but, my dear, only a few men could afford to feed you. Is that just this morning’s bill, or have you been living here for years?”

“You know how it is,” she smiled. “Just dropped in and felt thirsty. Got a bit hungry. Ordered a few things. That’s all.”

“The way you say it sounds cheap as dirt,” Mr. Larkin said, returning her smile with interest. “If you hadn’t let us see this bill we’d never have suspected you were sitting there filled to the scuppers with five quarts of champagne – of the best champagne, let me add, not to mention various other small but costly items.”

“I know,” protested the woman, “but I have to act this afternoon.”

“What in, a free for all?” he inquired. “Or are you fortifying yourself for the entire chorus?”

“Oh, of course,” retorted the woman, “if you don’t care to pay it – —”

“But we do,” broke in Mr. Owen.

“You mean you do,” the Major amended.

Mr. Larkin quickly passed the bill to Mr. Owen.

“I don’t know how much money you have,” he observed, “but you’d be simply mad to have as much as that.”

Mr. Owen did not have as much as that. And it was such a nice day too. A man should have no end of money on such a day as this and in the presence of such a woman. He looked about him helplessly. Mr. Larkin took the bill and called for the captain.

“Charles,” he said smoothly, “this is our new partner, Mr. Owen, Mr. Horace Owen – no, I mean Mr. Hector Owen. I grow confused in the presence of so much beautifully concealed champagne. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. They both begin with H. Why did I call you, Charles?”

Charles, who was evidently both fond of Mr. Larkin and quite familiar with his ways, bowed and smiled quite happily.

“Has it to do, perhaps, with the presence of Madame Gloria?” he asked.

“Tremendously, it has,” cried Mr. Larkin. “The very woman herself. Now Mr. Owen, our new partner, desires very much to sign her check. He will sign the store’s name and his own initials, H. O. Even I can remember them. As this bill stands now, it is a worthless scrap of paper. Signed, it becomes even more so. If it doesn’t bring money, we may be able to outfit your staff. Is everything understood?”

“Fully,” the captain replied with another bow.

“And Mr. Owen gets the woman,” went on Mr. Larkin. “Remember that, Charles. She’s his until bent with age. This is a monolithic bill. It makes one crawl to think of it. Sign, Mr. Owen, sign.”

Mr. Owen signed the bill, and Charles, still smiling, departed with a generous tip provided by Mr. Dinner, who seemed to be the senior partner’s peripatetic desk and cash register.

“You owe the firm five dollars in cash,” said Mr. Dinner, making a note, “but you might as well give it to me.”

“When he gets that line of credit,” Mr. Larkin told the small man. “Which reminds me, that line is yet to be got. We must spurt. We must actually tear along.”

“Thank you,” said Madame Gloria sweetly to Mr. Owen. “I am yours for life.”

It was exceedingly indelicate, thought Mr. Owen, the way everyone kept referring to his ownership of this woman, including the woman herself.

“We’ll take that up later,” he explained to Madame Gloria.

While pondering upon how fast they must tear along, Mr. Larkin had fallen into a mood of deep abstraction. At Mr. Owen’s words he looked up thoughtfully.

“Did you say up or off?” he inquired. “The size of that bill makes off almost obligatory.” He paused and beamed upon the fair lady. “You may call your friends back now,” he said. “I’ve detected them hiding about in places for quite some time. You’ve established your line of credit. We must now establish ours. The next time you give a barbecue I hope it will occur to you to stick one of our competitors, or at least wait until we’ve collected the insurance for some diamonds we lost this morning. Don’t know which damaged us most, you or the thief.”

As they hurried from the presence of this adorable woman, Mr. Owen was dismayed to see four gentlemen and three ladies converging upon her table from various places of concealment. Then all of them sat down with cries of gladness and anticipatory expressions.

“That’s the way we do things here,” Mr. Larkin explained. “We boggle at nothing and nothing boggles us. A nice word, boggle. I’m fond of the two g’s.”

Mr. Larkin said so many things that made any sort of answer seem hopelessly inadequate. Hector Owen was not prepared to commit himself about boggle. He had never considered the word. However, almost any word was a good word on a day like this.

A short time later, in the office of the bank president, Mr. Owen found himself being presented to a large but florid gentleman whose impressively worried expression concealed a weak but generous character. Although habitually called a skinflint by the partners, the appellation had no justification as applied to Mr. Hadly. Anyone who did not immediately respond to the amiable proposition of their inflamed imaginations was automatically classified as a skinflint or worse.

“Well, gentlemen,” he began fussily when they had seated themselves in his luxuriously appointed office, “I suppose you have called to see me about those bad checks we took the liberty of informing you about in this morning’s mail.”

“The liberty!” exclaimed the Major aggressively. “I call it decidedly bad taste. An imposition! Checks can’t stay good forever. I say – —”

“One moment, Major,” cut in the suave voice of the senior partner. “Save that for later. Your words might befog the issue – even sink it entirely.” Here he turned to the president and literally showered him with smiles. “You’ll forgive the poor dear Major,” he continued. “He’s such a God damn fool. You were saying in your nice, friendly way something about checks. Ah, yes, I remember. It was something about bad checks, wasn’t it? Well, let’s not talk about them. We would never get anywhere that way. They’re like spilled milk, no good sobbing over them. Let the dead bury the dead. And another thing, we omitted the detail of opening the mail this morning. You see, we take turns, and this morning we forgot whose turn it was. So we didn’t open the mail at all. There it still is. Quite unopened. Naturally, we can’t go on. You can see that for yourself, my dear, good Hadly.”

“Although for the life of me I can’t,” his dear, good Hadly replied in a weary voice, “I’ll try to if you’ll endeavor to bend your brilliant faculties on this.”

“Did you hear that, gentlemen?” Mr. Larkin demanded proudly. “For once a bank president has spoken the truth.” He addressed himself to Hadly. “If you’ll overlook those checks I’ll do more than bend my faculties. I’ll wrap them about anything you may have to say.”

“Good!” exclaimed the president. “Wrap ’em around this. Your stockholders have placed in my hands for collection all of the guaranteed coupons for dividends due them since you first took over the store. Naturally, I must do something about it.”

“I should say you must,” remarked Mr. Larkin, deeply moved. “You must throw those coupons right back in their double faces. Those coupons are not worth the paper they were printed on. Never were. If the truth were known, the words printed on them are not worth as much as the paper. I didn’t make up the words, anyway. As I remember, Dinner did, and he was drunk at the time. Everyone should know that a drunken man’s words shouldn’t ever be taken seriously. If we believed what you said when you were only half drunk you’d be owing us the bank.”

“As it is,” replied Mr. Hadly, unable to keep a note of bitterness from creeping into his voice, “I’ve practically given it to you.”

“Well, we’ve given you things, too,” put in Mr. Dinner hotly. “Shirts and socks and even the drawers to your legs. And you still owe us for a mink coat you gave to that foreign – —”

“One moment,” Mr. Hadly interrupted, glancing uneasily at the door. “Let’s save our recriminations for the barrooms. I give you boys credit – —”

“How did you know?” the Major asked in surprise. “That’s just what we came for. We wanted to establish a line of credit for our new partner. And here you go giving it to us before we’ve even asked.”

“I wish the Major were dead,” said Mr. Larkin, gazing dreamily into space as if seeing laid out upon it the large, dead body of his partner. “Everything would be so much simpler then. And if Dinner would only sicken and die, I might even yet be able to snatch a few moments of happiness from life. However – —” He broke off with a shrug and turned to Mr. Hadly. “I didn’t want it to sound so bald when the matter was first presented to you. It wouldn’t have sounded nearly so bad the way I was going to put it – the way I am going to put it, in fact. You see – —”

“I’m not going to do it, whatever it is,” the president broke in desperately. “And that’s flat.”

“I should say it is,” Mr. Larkin agreed. “So flat it’s silly. Now, listen, if you please. No more temper. I don’t like it. You know how I am about temper. Easy on, easy off, or whatever you say.”

Mr. Larkin stopped and looked at the president as if expecting an answer. Not knowing what else to do, Mr. Hadly nodded, although he obviously hadn’t the remotest idea what he was nodding about. However, he had always found things went better if he nodded occasionally when Mr. Larkin was in full cry. The nod seemed to satisfy the senior partner, for he continued in his best manner.

“You see,” he said, “Mr. Owen here, as our new partner, quite naturally has at heart the best interests of the bank with which we do business. Just how we do business and what business it is we do, need not enter into this discussion. We must all remember that. For it is very important that we should not embarrass the issue with facts. As soon as we talk facts we get to calling each other nasty names which are even harder to stand than the facts themselves. Is that understood?”

From the various expressions on the faces he inspected it was almost impossible to ascertain whether it was understood or not. Nevertheless, it was not denied.

“Very well, then,” he resumed. “To continue. Mr. Owen, being who and what he is, does not want to give the wrong impression of the bank to our innumerable important friends. He does not want people to think he is dealing with a stingy bank, a penny-pinching, close-fisted, blood-sucking institution such as any bank would be that refused him a line of credit. I hope I’m not boring you with these obvious little details?”

“Not at all,” said the president politely. “You’ve merely sickened me.”

“Good!” exclaimed Mr. Larkin. “That’s one way of breaking down resistance. But don’t start me veering. I’d hate to begin rotating like crops.” He paused and cleared his throat. “Nor,” he resumed, “does our Mr. Owen want it to get about among his friends and influential business connections that the president of his bank is a man of low character, with the appetite of a swine and the instincts of a torturer. He doesn’t want people to say as he passes them on the street, ‘There goes old Owen, poor fellow. It’s a damned disgrace how that chap’s bankers keep him short of cash. I wouldn’t deal with bankers like that if I had to go out of business. Hadly, from what I can learn, is a big hunk of cheese.’ It would hurt him to hear things like that. It would hurt us all. But most of all it would hurt the bank. Most of all it would hurt Hadly, here, the president of the bank. And we don’t want to do that.”

“May I ask,” inquired Mr. Hadly in a weak voice, “what you do want to do?”

“Merely to establish a line of personal credit for Mr. Owen,” replied Mr. Larkin, “that would enhance the prestige of the bank we honor with our account. I will not permit it to be said that we do things on a small scale.”

“You have, of course, collateral to secure this credit?” Hadly inquired more for the pleasure he would derive from infuriating the partners than from any hope of security.

“Are you mad?” three voices screamed in varying degrees of rage.

“You’ve already got in those beastly vaults of yours,” boomed the Major, “practically everything we own in the world save our women and personal attire.”

“Let’s beat him up with our sticks,” suggested Mr. Dinner, almost in tears. “He’s gone too far this time. He’ll be asking us for our list of telephone numbers next.”

“No,” said the senior partner. “I’ve got something that will hurt him more than that. When my new yacht goes into commission next week we won’t invite him to come along. That will break his heart. That will simply burn him up.”

“How much does he want?” asked Mr. Hadly wearily.

“How much can you spend?” Mr. Larkin promptly demanded of Mr. Owen. “I mean without stinting – without giving the wrong impression?”

“I don’t know,” faltered Mr. Owen. “I don’t need a great deal. Never had much to spend.”

“He doesn’t know what he’s saying,” Mr. Larkin said hastily to the president. “Your sordidness has deranged him. I think he should have for his personal use about fifteen hundred a month.”

“Fifteen hundred!” gasped the president. “What does he intend to do – drink, gamble, and run around with women?”

“What would you want him to run around with?” the Major demanded. “Cows?”

“I don’t know,” muttered the president. “I don’t want him to run around at all.”

“No,” observed Dinner scornfully. “You want him to stay home and grow old economically.”

“No, I don’t,” retorted Hadly. “I don’t mind a man having a bit of fun now and then, but with fifteen hundred dollars a man can’t have anything else but fun. Wouldn’t one thousand be enough to keep up the prestige of this bank? We wouldn’t expect too much, you understand.”

“Let’s toss a coin to see whether it’s a thousand or fifteen hundred,” Mr. Larkin suggested.

“All right,” replied the president. “A gambling chance is better than no chance at all.”

For a few moments the five gentlemen waited uneasily to see who would produce the coin. They waited without result. No one produced the coin.

“Go on,” said the Major at last to Mr. Hadly. “You furnish the coin, or isn’t there such a thing knocking about this dump?”

“I do wish you’d prevail upon your partners,” Mr. Hadly complained to Mr. Larkin, “to moderate their manner of address somewhat. After all, I’m not quite a dog, even though I am the president of a bank. They really do owe me something.”

“They owe you everything,” Mr. Larkin replied hastily. “As I remarked before, it would be better were they dead and buried in their graves.”

“You didn’t say a word about graves,” said Mr. Dinner.

“No?” asked the senior partner. “Well, I don’t greatly care whether they bury you or not, so long as you’re dead. However, I can’t expect to get everything at once. Give me that coin, Hadly, and we’ll toss for this line of credit.”

“It’s half a dollar,” said the banker, looking closely at the coin before handing it over. “I shall expect it back.”

“God,” muttered the Major. “You’re so damned cold-blooded you could freeze ice cubes in the hollow of your tongue.”

“Gentlemen,” cried Mr. Larkin, tossing the coin in the air, “I cry tails.”

“You would,” declared the Major. “How does she lie?”

“Who?” asked Mr. Larkin, forgetting to look at the coin he had deftly caught in his hand.

“The coin! The coin!” cried the Major.

“Pardon me,” said the senior partner, gazing down into his hand. “I was thinking of something else. Dear, dear me, now isn’t this odd. It fell tails up. Mr. Owen, you’re lucky.”

“So are we,” declared Mr. Dinner. “We can all borrow from him.”

“But first he must have a check book,” said Mr. Larkin. “Hadly, that’s a dear boy, send for some check books. We all want some check books. And ask the head teller to step in. He should meet our new partner.”

When the teller appeared, armed with a stack of check books, he was introduced to Mr. Owen. He was a sardonic-looking person with a pair of glittering eyes and a tongue that was awed by no man, regardless of how much he was worth.

“Not at all sure whether I’m glad to meet you or not,” he told Mr. Owen. “Your partners’ checks are bouncing all over the bank, and now I’ll have to play leap-frog with yours, I suppose. Don’t you birds ever get tired of spending money? I know I am, of trying to find it for you.”

“Our new partner has lots of money to spend,” said Mr. Dinner proudly. “He’s just established a splendid line of credit, and he owes me five dollars already.”

“Write him a check,” put in Larkin, “or you’ll never hear the end of it.”

“And while you’re settling up,” Mr. Hadly suggested, “you might as well let me have that half dollar back.”

“I’d like to sit next to you in hell,” said Mr. Larkin admiringly to the president, “but I fear you would pick my pockets even while we shivered.”

“Our hands would probably become entangled,” replied Hadly, smiling at last, now that the unpleasant business was over. “Glad to have met you, Mr. Owen. Bear in mind that just because you have fifteen hundred a month you don’t have to spend it all.”

“Certainly not,” said the Major. “We don’t expect him to. We have all sorts of ideas about the disposition of his funds.”

“I want a check for five berries,” Mr. Dinner dully declared.

“Give him his check and let’s pound along,” put in Mr. Larkin. “That damned Kiarian luncheon has to be outfaced. Come along, gentlemen. We must thud. Drop round to see our new partner, Hadly, old crow. You’ll find him immersed in a book in the Pornographic Department.”

And with this merry leave-taking Mr. Larkin hustled his partners from the presence of the president of the most powerful bank in the city. At the door Major Britt-Britt paused and looked back at Mr. Hadly.

“When people come to see us,” he announced, “especially old and valued friends, we’d consider ourselves lepers if we didn’t give them a drink.”

The door closed on the president’s unprintable retort.

“Oh, dear me, yes,” Mr. Larkin murmured happily as they strolled down the street. “That’s how we do things here. It gives me a deal of pleasure to do old Hadly in the eye. Just the same, I don’t believe all bank presidents are conceived in cold storage. Hadly really is a charming fellow.”

“How long does this credit last?” asked Mr. Owen.

“Indefinitely, my dear fellow. Indefinitely,” the senior partner assured him. “Forget all about it. We can do anything with that bank except dynamite the vaults. They wouldn’t like that.”

“Let’s catch a spray of drinks before we join the Godly,” Mr. Dinner suggested.

“Not a bad idea,” said the Major.

“A good idea,” agreed Larkin. “Then we’ll feel better equipped to establish a reign of terror among the Kiarians.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Burning Beard

“There’s no doubt about it, I do feel giddy,” said Mr. Larkin, giggling behind his hand as the partners pushed their way through the crush of smartly dressed gentlemen in the get-together-room of the Kiarian banqueting quarters. “At any moment now I may begin to veer like a tidy little typhoon. Don’t see a face I like. They’re all smug and acquisitive. Look! What is Dinner doing?”

Mr. Dinner was merely doing what appeared to be the normal thing to a drunken mind. Unable to attract the attention of his friend the Major, the little fellow, stooping over, was vigorously jabbing his cane at his huge partner between the legs of a stout gentleman. This endeavor to establish contact by means of a short cut proved effective but disconcerting. The stout gentleman, looking down to see what was disturbing him, uttered a cry of frightened amazement. What incredible metamorphosis was he going through, he wondered. In his endeavor to get away from whatever the thing was, he turned sharply and thus entangled the cane between the legs of another earnest Kiarian. The Major thereupon seizing the free end of the stick gave it a violent upward tug. The shrieks of the two impaled gentlemen rang through the room. Mr. Dinner, now deeply absorbed in his occupation, which had become in his addled brain a battle of wits and deftness, yanked up his end of the cane with equal determination. The noise the gentlemen made merely whetted his enthusiasm. Even at that late date the situation might have been saved had the two Kiarians not attributed their unhappy plight to the other’s deliberate intent.

“Is that a nice thing to do?” one of them demanded furiously, endeavoring to ease himself on his objectionable as well as painful perch.

“Nice,” grated the other. “You’ve nearly ruined me, and still you keep on doing it. Do you want to get poked in the eye?”

“I don’t much care where I get poked now,” the other man said in a hopeless voice. “Please stop doing it.”

“I’d rather have been stabbed than to have had this happen,” his vis-à-vis retorted. “If you don’t take that stick away I’ll do something to you.”

“You are doing something to me already,” cried the stout man. “You’re doing plenty. Don’t twiggle it like that.”

“But he isn’t doing it at all,” a Kiarian spectator helpfully informed the speaker.

“Oh, dear,” Mr. Larkin observed reflectively to Hector Owen. “Dinner can think of the damnedest things to do with a stick. Those gentlemen must be in great distress.”

“I hate to think of it,” said Mr. Owen. “Look how the Major’s pulling. He’ll cut those men in two.”

From the sounds the men were making this was not difficult to believe. Drink had lent strength to Dinner’s arms and added to that already possessed by the Major’s. The gentlemen, turning on the stick, were imploring their tormentors to abandon this contest in which they themselves had never expressed the slightest desire to participate.

“Oh, very well,” said the Major to his small partner. “You can have your old stick.”

With this he abruptly released his hold, and the two gentlemen fell weakly to the floor, from which they were presently assisted by a number of sympathetic Kiarians.

“Certainly I’m going to have my stick,” little Dinner declared stoutly. “And no big bully is going to take it away from me either.”

“May I ask,” inquired Mr. Larkin, “how you managed to get two Kiarians on the end of your stick?”

“They got themselves there,” said Dinner. “I didn’t get them there. Must have thought they were playing horse. I think some of these Kiarians drink too much. Come along. Let’s get our badges.”

Without even so much as glancing at the tortured men, Mr. Dinner led the way to a table at which an official was importantly giving out badges bearing the Christian name or the nickname and the occupation of the member presenting himself. The senior partner received one that informed the world he was “Larkie” and that he passed his days as a merchant. This trophy he immediately pinned on the back of an innocent bystander. Mr. Dinner’s was affixed with strategic craft by the Major to the seat of another gentleman’s trousers. Whenever he bent over, this gentleman announced to the gathering at large that he made a practice of referring to that section of his body simply as Lu. The Major, with much unnecessary adjusting, pinned his badge on the breast of a pretty cloakroom girl who did not seem to mind. Taking it all in all, Mr. Owen decided his partners were men with excessively puerile minds and futile ways. Why they had insisted on their badges and waited in line to get them only to make them objects of ridicule and derision was more than even his somewhat confused mind could understand.

On the way to the luncheon room they were accosted by numerous members who, in spite of the absence of badges, addressed the partners in cloyingly familiar terms, anyway.

“Well, B. B.,” cried one gentleman, clapping the Major on a shrinking shoulder. “It does my eyes good to see you, old boy. How’s the Little Lady?”

“You must be not only dumb but also blind,” the Major told him. “If you ever saw my wife you’d damn well know she wasn’t little, and if you’d ever heard her line of talk you’d never call her a lady. Go fawn on somebody else. I don’t like that way of talking.”

As surprised as he was at this display of brutal frankness on the part of the Major, Mr. Owen was even more so by the language of Mr. Dinner. A gentleman named Buddy was addressing the small man in hearty accents.

“Hello, Lu,” this person cried. “Tickled to death to see you.”

“You’re a liar,” said Dinner coldly. “You know you hate my guts.”

And with this he turned his back on the much discomfited Buddy. Another well meaning Kiarian had cornered the glowering Major.

“It isn’t the heat,” this man was saying, “it’s the hu – —”

But the man never finished his sentence. The Major knocked him down with a single blow, wiped his hand with an expensive silk handkerchief delicately scented with eau de Cologne, and deliberately walked away.

“We can’t let them get too friendly with us,” Mr. Larkin informed the astounded Owen. “If we did, they’d ruin our lives.”

“I don’t see why they want to know you at all,” said Mr. Owen, “if you treat them that way.”

“You don’t know Kiarians,” the senior partner replied. “They’d forgive a murder for the sake of prosperity and sell their wives for a boom in business.”

“What do you think of our city, Mr. Owen?” a person calling himself Benny wanted to know a few minutes later, during the course of an introduction.

“Tell him it smells,” whispered Mr. Dinner, at Mr. Owen’s shoulder. “I want to watch his face.”

“It smells,” said Mr. Owen obediently, and he, too, watched Benny’s face. It merely became more foolish, if possible, than it had been before he asked the question.

“You should never have brought him along,” Benny told Mr. Larkin when he had recovered from the shock. “He’ll never mix with the boys.”

“Go away,” said Mr. Larkin in a dead voice, “or I’ll pull your inquisitive nose.”

“But I didn’t mean it smells, really,” Mr. Owen explained when the man had tottered off.

“I know,” replied Mr. Larkin, “but it does when he’s around. If you say the first thing that comes into your head at one of these luncheons you’re pretty sure to be right.”

“Why do you ever come?” asked Mr. Owen.

“To annoy people,” said Mr. Larkin, “and to be annoyed in turn. It’s good for everybody. Yet sometimes, when I come away from one of these luncheons, I get the feeling it must all have been a dream – that these people didn’t really exist but were culled up from a fit of depression. Why, they even sing at one. All together they sing – boosting songs, patriotic songs, mother songs. You’ll hear them soon yourself.”

Mr. Owen did, and although there was too much of it and the songs were either too optimistic or sentimental, he had to admit to himself the singing was pretty good. Nevertheless, he wished it would stop.

Mr. Larkin enlivened his table by surreptitiously pouring some essence he had purchased for his cigarette lighter into his neighbor’s glass of water. The other partners were as innocent of this affair as was the owner of the water himself. And the owner was a personage of note, a man high up in the deliberations of the Kiarians. His inspirational speeches were listened to frequently and indefinitely. He was a man with a long square beard, lots of white to his eyes, and a deep, beautiful voice. He was large and he was lofty. He was the president of one of the most progressive advertising agencies in town and had grown used to having himself referred to by his initials which through some trick of fate chanced to be W. C. Just previous to the serving of the soup this magnificent gentleman felt himself called upon to discover how well his voice sounded in public today. Accordingly he rose, and with a fat hand holding an unlighted cigar, silenced the singing mouths.

“Kiarians!” he cried. “I am no longer your chairman, your leader.”

“Good!” croaked a disguised voice from somewhere in the neighborhood of the sleepy-looking Mr. Dinner.

The bearded gentleman paused, frowned heavily, then filled his lungs with air.

“Kiarians!” he burst forth again, and Mr. Dinner, who had been perfecting the art in secret, promptly began to quack like a duck.

“Kiarians!” cried the man. “Is there a duck in this room?”

“You haven’t begun on your soup yet,” said the Major in a loud admonitory voice. “What do you want with a duck?”

“I don’t want a duck,” thundered W. C.

“But you did ask for a duck,” said the Major, stubbornly sticking to his guns.

“I asked if there was a duck,” the man retorted.

“Well, is there?” Mr. Larkin inquired pleasantly.

“How should I know?” snapped the great man. “There were duck-like sounds in the room. If it wasn’t a duck I’ll eat it.”

“May I eat it if it is?” the Major asked brightly.

“What!” exploded the man. “I have no duck for you to eat. I want to get rid of this duck.”

“Will somebody please throw that duck out,” Mr. Larkin called in a voice of authority, then murmured to Mr. Owen, “Isn’t this amusing? It’s better than I hoped.”

“What duck?” asked several earnest voices.

A volley of unpleasant sounds shattered the brooding silence of the room. Mr. Dinner, startled himself by his remarkable performance, appeared from behind his napkin and looked about him with an innocent face.

“Kiarians!” called W. C., now at the end of his patience. “You speak as if I personally knew this duck, as if deliberately I had brought this duck among you, as if this duck were my boon companion.” He paused, then flung at them, “How should I know what duck?”

“Lord love a duck!” cried Dinner for no apparent reason.

W. C. shivered. His temper was out of hand.

“I hate a duck,” he shouted. “I’d like to wring its neck.” A fresh burst of protesting quacking from Dinner greeted this impassioned avowal.

“There it goes again!” cried W. C. “Am I to be mocked by this pest of the barnyard?”

“Maybe he’s in your beard,” suggested Major Britt-Britt in a penetrating voice, “and is squawking to get out. I know I would if I were a duck.”

“I wish to God you were,” thundered the incensed Kiarian, “and in the barnyard, where you belong.”

“You’d be the first worm I’d gobble,” said the Major with surprising self-control, and added thoughtfully, “Even if it killed me.”

“Kiarians!” once more cried the bearded gentleman, who had never before been talked down by any man and who proudly refused to be defeated at the bill of a fowl. “Now that the duck has stilled its brazen voice I will again raise mine.”

Mr. Dinner was quacking tearfully behind his napkin, but the great man pretended not to hear the sounds. Mr. Larkin was watching him closely, waiting for that inevitable moment when the hand would raise the glass of water to the bearded lips. That moment was not far off. The senior partner held a match pressed to the side of a match box.

“Kiarians!” thrilled the orator’s voice, his hand reaching for the glass. “I no longer govern your deliberations.” The glass was raised slightly from the table. “I no longer give you the light – —”

Mr. Larkin struck, and as if performing some well polished feat of legerdemain W. C. lifted a flaming glass which promptly ignited his beard. The applause in the room was tremendous. Kiarians rose and cheered. They had never before suspected good old W. C. of such ability in sleight-of-hand. Admirers in the room cried out, but none cried louder than W. C. himself.

“Don’t applaud, you damn fools!” he shouted through the fumes and smoke. “Somebody put me out!”

“Do you mean throw you out?” the Major inquired lazily. “Like the duck, for instance?”

Mr. Dinner, in his drunken excitement, was quacking unrestrainedly. Mr. Owen, still undecided whether he was witnessing a trick or a burning Kiarian, remained quietly in his seat. The senior partner had risen and was holding a bowl of soup carefully poised beneath the burning beard.

“Now,” he said in a voice of great composure, “if you’ll be so good as to lower your head a trifle, then plunge the beard in this bowl of delicious soup, I think we’ll have you extinguished in a jiffy. It would be better if you closed your eyes. The fumes will be terrific, I fear.”

But before closing his eyes W. C. caught a vivid picture of the city’s greatest advertising leader solemnly dipping his glorious beard into the depths of a bowl of soup. What an imperishable memory he would leave in the eyes of the assembled Kiarians! This was the end of his career as a public character. He could never hope now to complete the autobiography which one of his copy writers was doing for him on office time and without extra pay. The eyes he turned on the senior partner were filled with rage and hate.

“What do I care,” he growled, “if the soup is delicious?”

Making a virtue of necessity, he bared his teeth in the semblance of a smile for the consumption of the watching Kiarians, then plunged his beard in the soup. Even as he did so, thoughts of moving-picture comedies of the slap-stick variety flashed through his mind. There was a sizzling sound and a burst of smoke and through it all gleamed the white teeth of the advertising genius whose lips were contorted in a maniacal grin. Strong men caught their breath, while weak ones turned away. Mr. Dinner quacked like a duck and sleepily rubbed his eyes. One especially enthusiastic Kiarian cheered in a loud voice, a well meaning display which only seemed to increase the mental anguish of the smoldering man.

“The beard is now extinguished,” Mr. Larkin announced. “Pardon me if I cry a little. W. C.’s personally conducted bonfire has made my eyes water.”

“It’s fairly sickened me,” commented the Major in a rough, coarse voice. “Barring none, that beard is the worst I’ve ever smelled. I’ll bet it hasn’t been dusted off since Queen Victoria died.”

This observation on his personal habits of cleanliness was too much for W. C. He raised his massive head and glared at the Major. The beard emerged from the delicious soup tastefully garnished with vegetables and spaghetti. Mr. Owen, for the sake of his own sensibilities, was moved to offer the gentleman a napkin.

“You wouldn’t look quite so awful,” he said in a sympathetic voice, “if you used this on what’s left of those whiskers.”

Automatically W. C. accepted the napkin and thoughtfully applied it to his damaged beard.

“May I do it for you?” Mr. Larkin asked, advancing on the man. “I’d dearly love to dry your poor dear beard.”

The advertising genius started back with a cry of horror. The sparks of madness were gleaming in his eyes.

“I’ll dry my own beard,” he cried through wisps of smoke still straining through the hard dying tangle of hair. “Keep your hands off it. Don’t come a step nearer.”

“You wouldn’t have to ask me twice,” Major Britt-Britt informed the world. “It certainly is a mess.”

“About the most revolting beard I ever saw,” claimed little Mr. Dinner. “I wish he’d hide it somewhere.”

“And I wish the lot of you would stop saying things about my beard,” the great man retorted. “It’s bad enough to have it burned, without having it discussed.”

“That’s right,” agreed Mr. Larkin. “No beard looks its best immediately after a fire. We expect too much of W. C. He’s done enough as it is.”

At this point Mr. Mark Crawly, universally known as Big Boy, presiding officer of the local Kiarians, deemed it expedient to introduce some semblance of order into all this acrimonious chaos. Mr. Crawly was a nice chap. One could not help liking him a little. He possessed what all Kiarians loved most – a fine front. Inside, Mr. Mark Crawly was just plain dumb, which was no handicap among his fellow members. He could say stupid things in a firm, manly voice and get away with them. Years ago his firm had recognized the value of his smile as a business getter and had elevated him to the position of general sales manager. It occasionally took new members of his staff almost a month to discover that he had only a vague idea of what it was all about. He smiled business in and competition down. Above his desk was a Keep Smiling sign. In the Nut and Bolt Trade Journal his words were often quoted. “ ‘Meet depression with a grin and smile a boom into being,’ says Mark Crawly at the Tenth Nut and Bolt Convention.” Had it not been for his hard-working subordinates he would have smiled his firm into bankruptcy, but that, of course, was not generally known. Big Boy Crawly now addressed the still slightly smoldering W. C. in particular and the room in general.

“Gentlemen,” he began, “we all like and respect our W. C.”

Mr. Dinner giggled a little at this, but Mr. Crawly frowned.

“We are sorry about his beard,” he resumed, “yet even now I’m not sure whether he did it on purpose or not.”

An animal-like howl burst from the advertising man’s singed lips.

“Do you think I’d deliberately set fire to my beard,” he asked in an impassioned voice, “to amuse you damn fools?”

“I assumed you were trying to amuse us,” Big Boy Crawly replied good-naturedly. “It was funny, you know. How did it catch?”

“It was very dry,” announced Dinner in a solemn voice. “That beard was a public menace.”

“It was nothing of the sort,” shouted W. C. “I’ve worn that beard for years.”

“When was it last dry cleaned?” Major Barney inquired.

“It never was dry cleaned,” retorted the other.

“I feared as much,” said the Major. “The damn thing burned of its own accord like a heath fire. Spontaneous combustion sort of – that’s how I figure it out.”

“The Major means,” Mr. Larkin explained to the room, “that the regrettable fire which broke out in the beard was due to the accumulation of years of débris. Am I right, Major?”

“As always,” the big chap replied. “Wonder if he had it insured?”

“Was the beard insured, W. C.?” the senior partner inquired, turning politely to that infuriated gentleman. “Not against theft, of course, but for fire?”

“Bah!” ejaculated W. C. “Bah!”

“He’s bleating like a sheep,” cried Mr. Dinner, who was professionally interested in animal noises. “There’s no end to the things the man can do.”

“One moment,” called Mr. Crawly. “I asked W. C. a simple question, and you gentlemen have made the thing seem terribly involved. W. C., can you tell us how your beard caught fire?”

“How should I know?” shot back the mighty man in the agony of his soul.

“Aren’t you even interested?” Major Barney asked innocently. “I know if I had a beard and it happened to go off like yours did, I’d never rest until I’d discovered the cause. The damn thing might do it again.”

“It would be awful to have it happen in bed with a woman,” Mr. Dinner observed reflectively. “What would she think?”

W. C. sprang to his feet. Beard or no beard, he would put a stop to this. These people were not going to continue talking about himself and his beard as if neither of them were present.

“Kiarians!” he cried, showing the whites of his eyes. “Let’s abandon this talk about beards and turn to other things.”

“We haven’t settled that matter of the duck yet,” Mr. Dinner suggested. “We might take that up.”

“Someone was making duck noises,” W. C. replied. “I’ve thought that out, too. There is no duck.”

The volley of quacking and squawking that greeted this denial far surpassed all previous demonstrations. W. C. paused and shook himself like a punch-drunk fighter.

“I may as well sit down,” he observed at last in a hopeless voice, “if that duck is going to interrupt every word I say.”

“It seems to be coming from the direction of your table,” a Kiarian called out.

“You look under the table, Dinner,” the Major commanded, “and I’ll look under whatever remains of his beard. That duck must be one place or the other.”

“If you touch my beard I’ll cut your throat!” cried W. C., grabbing up a knife.

“A pretty way for a man to talk,” complained Mr. Dinner. “We were only trying to help.”

“I wasn’t going to touch his old beard,” explained Major Barney in an injured voice. “I was just going to peep under it.”

“Kiarians!” almost screamed the distracted man. “Are you going to allow these ruffians to turn this dignified meeting into a discussion of my beard? Are you going to permit them to torture me about it – to throw my beard in my face?”

“Better than burning it in ours,” put in Major Barney.

“Very well, then,” called out the senior partner in a conciliatory voice. “Let’s table the beard now that he’s finished souping it.”

“How do you do that?” asked the unintelligent Dinner, “Do you mean flatten it out and iron it?”

“Bah!” exclaimed the great leader. “And bah again.”

“Why again?” asked Major Barney. “We heard the first bah, and it didn’t mean anything either. I like the duck better.”

Mr. Dinner lifted his napkin and behind it quacked his thanks. W. C., with a despairing cry, flung up his hands and sank heavily to his chair. Then he brought his hands down and rested his head in them. He would never appear in public again, he vowed to himself. But he did. He appeared many times until at last he died in public and had a public Kiarian funeral and then was promptly and publicly forgotten as such men should be.

He could never have been tolerated in private.

CHAPTER NINE

The Kiarians Continue

Almost coincident with the collapse of the excellent W. C., as that gentleman was commonly called, was the arrival of Honor, or Satin, Knightly. As she walked the length of the hall the eloquent sheen of her frock quoted faithfully the lines of her body. And by the time she had seated herself at a small desk near the speakers’ table there was not one of those Kiarian boys who had not committed sin in his heart save, perhaps, W. C., who was muttering things in his beard.

Having been penned up with this girl at close quarters, Mr. Owen now had the opportunity to study her from a distance. He found Satin exceptional in every detail. To be too close to the girl destroyed one’s critical faculties. At such times there was room in the masculine mind for the entertainment of only one thought. And Satin herself did not make things any easier. She was far too vividly aware of herself and her quarry for relations in the abstract. She had her lips and her eyes and various other things. They were at their tireless best now. Why let them go to waste? Why let time gather in an unused credit? Satin saw no reason. She was also convinced that her creator never had any reason in mind.

As Mr. Owen studied the girl, he felt as if he were wandering through the fragrance of an old lost orchard in search of the shadow of his youth still lurking among the trees. He could appreciate keenly what the years of soured domesticity had done to him by the very freshness and harking back of his present vision. Old scenes, old songs, and lost impressions came welling up from some long neglected depth of his being. At the moment the desire to be loved was more urgent than to give it. He had done enough of that and found it unrequited. This had left him somewhat uncertain of himself in the rôle of a lover. He needed to be convinced, and he had a strong, happy conviction that Satin Knightly could be most convincing when once she set her mind on it. He had begun to feel that falling in love was a sort of automatic process that functioned only when one was young. He had doubted up to now the recapturing of those poignant, all enveloping emotions, those sensations that seemed to be tangled up with every reaction to one’s surroundings, one’s private thoughts and aspirations.

Now he was not so sure. Satin was working strange magic in him. And if it chanced to be black magic, he did not greatly care. He felt all the better for it – all the younger. He wished, however, that she was not in the Pornographic Department. In such surroundings it was difficult to sustain for long the preliminary stages of romance on a decently exalted plane. In the Pornographic Department they began low and ended even lower. He doubted if there were any preliminary stages in Satin’s conception of courtship. She seemed to believe that a lavish display of skin constituted the normal wooing. Should it prove too difficult to guide the young lady’s conduct into the channels of conventional decency, he would be forced to conform to hers, which, when all was said and done, amounted to the same thing. As for his partners, they were simply animals. He liked them, but could find no good in them. They were animals, simple and impure, and would always remain animals. He pitied them a little in the generosity of his newly born emotions.

In the meantime the animals were enjoying themselves according to their fashion. The senior partner had collected the ashes of W. C.’s beard into a neat pile which he now scraped into an envelope and politely offered to their rightful owner.

“Wouldn’t you like to keep these?” he asked in his suavest tones. “They’re the ashes of your beard – about a foot’s worth in all.”

“Take ’em,” Mr. Dinner urged. “You’re about one tenth cremated already, you know.”

“Sure thing,” contributed the Major. “He should send them to the family vault as a sort of first shipment. The rest of him can come along later, either whole or part by part.”

“I want to be an urn when I die,” declared Mr. Dinner. “Can I be an urn?”

“No,” replied Mr. Larkin. “You’d go much better as a flask or a cocktail shaker.”

“Let the Major be a cocktail shaker,” the little fellow pleaded. “I want to be an urn, a nice urn in a niche.”

“You won’t make enough ashes to use up a thimble,” Major Barney remarked.

“All right,” declared Dinner. “I don’t care. Just tuck me in a thimble and stick that in an urn, because that’s what I want to be, an urn—” then he added thoughtfully – “in a niche.”

“I do wish you’d stop repeating that word over and over again,” came the gloomy voice of the advertising man. “I don’t know why they ever placed me at this table. The lot of you are no better than idiots.”

“You can’t be any better than an idiot, can you?” asked the Major. “Unless, of course, you’re a maniac, and they’re just plain crazy.”

“I wonder what he’d like to be?” continued Mr. Dinner, pursuing his mournful topic. “Ask him if he’d like to be an urn along with me. I don’t care what company I keep once I’m safe in an urn.”

“I don’t think W. C. wants to be an urn,” put in the senior partner consideringly. “I have a feeling he’d rather go as a gas tank or even a bathtub. Either would be more suitable for a public character.”

“Then why not let him go as an ash can or just simply as a kitchen sink?” persisted Mr. Dinner.

“By God!” cried W. C. “I’ll not stand for that. No, sir, I won’t. You’re irreverent, sacrilegious vulgarians. I’ll not sit another minute at this table. Let me out of here.”

The great man rose unsteadily, stepped on the plate of soup Mr. Larkin had thoughtfully placed on the floor, then staggered away to the speakers’ table, where a place was quickly made for him.

“I guess he didn’t want the soup anyway,” said Mr. Larkin, looking thoughtfully at the mess on the floor. “It was all full of beard.”

Mr. Owen shuddered fastidiously. The partners obviously were not at their best at meal times.

“Wonder how soup would go with beard?” wondered the inquiring Mr. Dinner. “I shouldn’t think I’d like it.”

“Not with that beard in it,” agreed the Major.

“I don’t think I’d care for soup with any beard in it,” vouchsafed the senior partner.

“You haven’t seen all the beards in the world,” Dinner shot back in a challenging tone of voice.

“I don’t care to taste any,” Mr. Larkin replied with dignity. “I am not a beard taster.”

“Is there such a thing as a beard taster?” asked the Major, who was easily interested.

“I don’t see why there shouldn’t be,” Mr. Larkin replied with more confidence than he felt. “There are coffee tasters and tea tasters and wine tasters. It seems only reasonable there should be beard tasters.”

“It may seem reasonable and all to you,” Mr. Dinner persisted, “but what I want to know is, what do they want to taste these beards for?”

“They might not want to taste the beards,” replied Mr. Larkin. “They might have to taste the beards.”

“Why?” asked Mr. Owen, drawn in, in spite of himself. “Why should any man be forced to taste beards?”

“Simply as a means of livelihood,” said the senior partner triumphantly. “Necessity – economic necessity.”

“You mean as professional beard tasters?” the astonished Major demanded.

“I can’t think of anyone being mean enough to beard-taste for pleasure,” replied Mr. Larkin. “That would be the same as taking the beard out of honest men’s mouths.”

“I’m an honest man,” Mr. Dinner declared, “and I’d consider it a favor if anyone yanked a beard out of my mouth.”

“No self-respecting man would let you taste his beard,” replied the senior partner cuttingly.

“Oh, I don’t know,” retorted Dinner. “I guess I could taste a beard as well as the next.”

“But what I don’t understand is,” deliberated the Major, “what’s to be gained by tasting a lot of beards?”

“There you have me,” agreed Mr. Larkin. “That’s the one weak point in the argument.”

“Not at all,” cried Mr. Dinner, suddenly switching to the side of the beard tasters. “A man might want to have his beard tasted for any number of reasons.”

“Name me one,” demanded the Major.

“Well,” replied Dinner, floundering a little, “it is easily possible that a man might like to have his beard tasted to see if it’s getting brittle or to see if it’s getting tough or to remind him of what he had for the previous meal or to discover lost collar buttons and neckties and other misplaced articles – —”

“Men with beards don’t have to wear neckties,” the Major interrupted.

“Men with short beards do,” argued Dinner.

“They can claim they’re wearing bow ties,” shot back the Major.

“Ah, Dinner,” interposed the senior partner. “He has you there. A very good point.”

“Of course, if they want to lie about it they can,” said Mr. Dinner moodily.

“May I ask,” put in Mr. Owen, “what in the world is all this coming to?”

“We don’t know,” replied the Major, “but don’t interrupt.”

“I feel I’d be neglecting my duties if I didn’t,” said Mr. Owen. “You’ll go clean off your heads if this keeps up much longer.”

“Nonsense,” snapped Dinner impatiently. “We often go on for hours like this at the office.”

“When there’s too much to do,” Mr. Larkin explained.

Mr. Dinner’s flask, which had been going the rounds during this conversation, was now empty. Accordingly, Mr. Larkin produced his and passed it to Mr. Owen.

“Drink some of that,” he said, “and everything will seem much clearer.”

Mr. Owen drank and discovered to his delight that Mr. Larkin had spoken the truth.

“I defy Dinner to tell me,” resumed the Major, “of one single instance where beard-tasting has served a useful end.”

Mr. Dinner took a pull at the flask and pondered over this challenge.

“I can conceive of a case,” he declared at last, “where an especially adept beard taster simply by tasting a beard could tell whether it was going to rain or not.”

“Brilliant!” exclaimed the senior partner. “Dinner, that was brilliant – oh, very good. Very good indeed.”

The Major looked momentarily discomfited. He turned hatefully upon his small antagonist.

“Where would you find such a sensitive beard?” he growled. “One so delicately attuned to nature.”

“On a prophet,” retorted Dinner without batting an eye. “You know, one of those birds that never shaved.”

“You mean a rabbi,” snorted the Major. “Who’d want to taste a rabbi’s beard?”

“Maybe some especially devout member of his congregation,” replied Mr. Dinner. “Who knows?”

“You don’t, for one,” said the Major. “And I don’t care.”

“Then,” Mr. Larkin suggested smoothly, “it’s about time to change the subject. Perhaps we may be able to annoy a few of these damn Kiarians.”

Big Boy Crawly, the chairman, was once more on his feet. He was preparing to launch himself forth on a wave of oratory having to do with the character and accomplishments of the speaker of the day, a powerful figure in the automobile world, an entire trade journal in himself, not to mention a couple of house organs.

“Kiarians!” cried Big Boy Crawly. “Need I introduce to you the speaker for today?”

“Not so far as we’re concerned,” the senior partner consented agreeably, rising to his feet and confronting the room. “And besides, I have a few words to say myself.”

“Mr. Larkin,” replied Mr. Crawly, the smile flickering on his face, “you are out of order, I fear. The questions and discussions come after the speech.”

“Please sit down,” said Mr. Larkin in a pained voice. “You know how I am about interruptions. They make me veer most noticeably – fairly spin on my axis. Already I feel like a revolution. I might even do a little foaming on the side. You look as if you were going to do considerable foaming yourself, Big Boy. Do sit down.” He paused, then continued rapidly, as if fearing another interruption. “Kiarians!” he suddenly bellowed in a fair imitation of the great voice of W. C. “No one regrets more than I do that a familiar landmark has today been destroyed before our very eyes.”

“Please sit down,” cried Mr. Crawly.

“Be still, you,” shouted Mr. Larkin, “or I’ll cut your smiling heart out. This is sacred. Kiarians!” he unleashed again. “No one regrets more than I do, and in this I include my slightly drunken partners – —”

The enthusiastic quacking of a duck greeted this pronouncement.

“No one regrets more than we do,” continued the senior partner, “that the magnificent beard of W. C. – the only beard we had among us – should have taken it upon itself to catch fire and burn up, virtually in our laps. I would suggest that in future our great advertising play boy, instead of depending entirely on soup, be provided with a neat pocket fire extinguisher of his own, suitably engraved with the Kiarian emblem and some nice little sentiment such as, the Beard that Burns at Banquets Lights the World.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” cried Big Boy Crawly, “Mr. Larkin, won’t you please sit down?”

“No, I won’t,” snapped the senior partner. “I won’t sit down. I’ll veer round this room like a jolly old whirling dervish. By rights you should be doing what I’m doing for you – saying a few kind words about that poor, dear beard of our excellent W. C. You all seem to have got used to addressing him that way. As for me, I frankly confess I still feel a little embarrassed whenever I have occasion to say it. You know what I mean. However, I’m nearly finished now, anyway. I merely wanted to say it was a good beard, but better soup. The soup was delicious. It was better than the beard because it put the beard out. Anyone can see that.”

Dignified Kiarians in various parts of the room were now on their feet. Why had not the Lord God of Business and Boosting struck this man dead as he blasphemed? “Sit down! Sit down!” they hurled at the senior partner as he calmly stood his ground and with a coy, friendly hand waved back to them.

“You Kiarian boys are acting simply childish,” he chided them gently. “Do keep still. I want to talk about this beard. For some reason, to talk about this beard fills a fundamental craving in me. I’m frantic about it. Never did I see anything work so perfectly. It was splendid. You know, I’m told that when that beard was quite itself W. C. used to use it to measure the length of advertisements. He’ll use it thus no more I fear, unless on very small advertisements. And right here and now I suggest we give a standing vote of thanks to W. C. and his beard for the splendid entertainment they have provided. You will forgive me if I don’t join you in this, because I am dying on my feet. I thank you.”

The senior partner sat down amid a profound silence, which was rudely broken by the din raised by the members of his party. Mr. Owen and the duck led all the rest.

“You certainly are a pretty talker,” Major Barney assured Mr. Larkin heavily. “All those words – all spoken aloud. Think of it.”

“This isn’t a bad luncheon,” Mr. Dinner observed, apropos of nothing. “I find I’m actually enjoying myself. I hope you all realize that I’ve been doing the duck.”

“No!” cried the senior partner delightedly. “Have you been, now? Splendid! Major, you kiss him. You’re sodden with drink. No fooling, though, I’m glad you can do a duck. I wish you could do a braying ass for the benefit of our next speaker.”

Mr. Crawly was on his feet, but his smile seemed to have slipped, giving him something of the appearance of a saint with a tilted halo.

“Kiarians!” he bawled. “Now that I’ve been informed that Mr. Larkin was trying to be funny – I mean, to amuse us – I am sure we will all forgive the high spirits of one of the most influential merchants in our city.”

“Sure they will,” interpolated the cynical Mr. Dinner. “They still owe us for their drawers.”

“Knowing that you agree with me in this,” the speaker continued, “I will now give you one whose vision, whose courage, whose industry have placed his name among the leaders of our great progressive nation. With such a stout defender of our time-honored traditions in our midst, the snarling wolf of communism can go and – and – —” the speaker paused in search of something sufficiently painful and demeaning for the communistic wolf to do.

“Sit on a tack,” suggested the Major.

“Exactly,” agreed the speaker lamely, “that’s what it can do. Kiarians, I give you that great man of wheels – that automotive giant, Thomas W. Spratter of Sprattsburg, Sprattsylvania!”

The lull was filled with a deafening din as Mr. Spratter arose. It was plain to see that these men were basking in his success and power, that they were hoping to grab off a little of their own simply by being in the same room with him. Later they would refer to him casually as, “My old friend Tom Spratter.”

“Why doesn’t someone laugh?” Mr. Owen asked most surprisingly. “Now, I think that’s funny. That man has a funny name, and he comes from a lot of funny places.”

“At last Owen has joined us,” observed the senior partner complacently. “He too is a little drunk. Soon he’ll become disorderly.”

Mr. Spratter, too, was a large, square man, and everything about him was square, save, perhaps, his dealings. He had a square head and a square chin and a square carriage to his shoulders. He stood squarely on his feet and looked his inferiors squarely if arrogantly in the eye. Few persons on seeing him for the first time would have suspected that here was the greatest trafficker in muscle, brains, and souls the world had ever produced, a man who would have sent Attila home in tears to rock the cradle, an almost omnipotent enemy of the spiritual and intellectual life and aspirations of a nation. Even had the observer known all this, it would not have greatly mattered. The man had made good. What more need a man do? And then, of course, he was very rich. That was nice, too.

“Gentlemen,” began Mr. Spratter, in a voice like a rough, square brick, “I will not mince matters.”

“There,” exclaimed Mr. Larkin nervously. “I knew he wouldn’t mince. That’s bad. That’s very, very trying. He should mince a little, if only for my sake. I don’t know how people get through the day without mincing a lot.”

“Are there voices in this room?” demanded Mr. Spratter.

“If the speaker is hearing voices already,” Mr. Larkin called back with the utmost urbanity, “I fear he will be seeing things soon. Mental cases usually do, you know – angels and what not. Let’s stick to burning beards. That’s preferable to madness.”

If anything, the rugged industrialist settled on his track more firmly. There was a nasty smile on his lips.

“I’ll handle this,” he said. “If the communist or the socialist or even the single taxist who has just spoken will step up here, I shall take pleasure in knocking him down.”

No sooner was this invitation released than the four partners, led by Mr. Larkin, elaborately pulled the tablecloth over their heads and sat crouching beneath it. Frightened cries mingled ironically with the vociferous lament of a duck.

“Gentlemen,” continued Mr. Spratter, utterly unperturbed, “my subject is Progress and Prosperity as opposed to Economics and Science.”

The burst of approval that greeted this was loud and universal save for the four drunken partners and the duck.

“Gentlemen,” resumed Mr. Spratter, “I think at my time of life I have the right to say, I have toiled mightily and wrought in full measure.” Mr. Spratter’s publicity man had a forgivable yen for the Bible. “Yet in all the years of my struggling and success,” the square voice went on, “never once have I lowered the knee to the narrow, unpatriotic dictates of science and economics. Gentlemen, do you know who the greatest scientist is, who the greatest economist is, who the greatest philosopher is?”

In the rhetorical pause that followed, Mr. Owen’s timid voice made itself heard.

“Professor Snozzle Durante,” he offered.

“What!” thundered the automobile man scornfully. “That murderer! That monster! That socialist! Never! The greatest of them all is Old Man Common Sense. Hear me, everybody! Old Man Common Sense – horse sense, if you like.”

“I think of the two,” vouchsafed the senior partner, poking his head out from under the tablecloth, “I like horse sense the better. It’s more playful, but I bet you’d have said best, and you’d have been wrong, as usual.”

“Yes, sir,” went on the great man, ignoring this interruption. “Old Man Common Sense can chop a lot of kindling and make the chips fly.”

“There’s something infinitely precious to me about dear old homely language,” said Mr. Dinner affectedly. “Let’s spit and swap horses. We’ll make believe the horses.”

“I wouldn’t take all the Stuart Chases in the world, all the John Deweys, all the Thomas Hunt Morgans,” cried Mr. Spratter, “for one grain of common sense.”

“Where wouldn’t you take them?” the Major wanted to know. “And how do you know those lads would go with you?”

“Shut up!” cried Spratter. “Gentlemen! These men would deny that our great spirit of rugged individualism, our hail fellow, knock-down game of competition, our inherent confidence in the survival of the fittest have produced a race of industrial giants and two-fisted business getters.”

“This makes me sick,” said a voice that sounded surprisingly like Hector Owen’s. “Give me another sip before I kill that butcher in human guise.”

“Gentlemen, I say,” the great voice boomed on, “rather than knuckle under to the findings of modern science, the advice of malicious economists, and the destructive drive of red-tainted philosophers, rather than do that, let’s turn back the hands of the clock! Let’s turn ’em back, I say!”

“Oh, good!” cried Mr. Dinner. “That’s something to do. Let’s all turn back the hands of the clock and keep on turning and turning until they come off.”

“No!” protested Mr. Larkin. “Don’t let’s turn back those hands until after he’s finished talking. He’s simply trying to trap us into giving him more time.”

“If I had those interrupters out at my plant,” shouted the speaker, “I’d starve them into submission and – —”

“Sell their families into slavery,” Mr. Owen helped out.

“Can John Dewey build an automobile?” the speaker wanted to know. “Can Stuart Chase quell a mob of infuriated workers? Can – —”

“Can you do card tricks?” demanded Mr. Dinner.

“That’s a logical critical method,” put in Mr. Larkin. “Let me ask one. Could Abe Lincoln change a tire? No. Very well, then. The man was a washout.”

“Silence!” roared the speaker, “or I’ll have you jailed for disorderly conduct.”

Once more the four partners sat huddled at their table, Dinner quacking pitifully in a subdued voice.

“Men,” continued Mr. Spratter, “the Spratters have been fighters from way back.”

“Right!” once more Mr. Owen interpolated. “From way back behind the lines.”

“During the last war,” the great man snarled at his tormentors, “the Spratter poison dart killed more men, women, and children than any other offensive weapon used.”

“On which side?” someone wanted to know.

“On both!” retorted Spratter, forgetting himself for the moment.

“Wish I had one now,” said Major Barney.

But Mr. Spratter had no intention of letting the discussion be taken out of his hands.

“Kiarians,” he broke in, “I am the guest of your loved and respected W. C.”

“You should be,” said the Major disgustedly.

“And an insult to me,” boomed Spratter, “is an insult to him.”

“Which is a convenient and time-saving arrangement,” commented Mr. Owen who felt himself getting better and better.

“I will not let anyone insult our W. C.!” cried Spratter doggedly. “Therefore I’ll ignore these ruffians. And now, men, now, Kiarians, now I come to the burden of my message. Prosperity is with us here and now! She has always been with us! The dear little lady has never left our side. She is waiting for us all both individually and collectively. Her arms are wide open. On her lips there is a smile. Invitation glows in her eyes.”

“Wow!” exclaimed the licentious Major. “This is getting good. Wonder what part of her he’s going to take up next?”

“Yes, sir,” the speaker went on gloatingly. “There she lies, the – —”

“He’s got her down now,” muttered Mr. Dinner in a voice loud enough to be clearly heard, and it must be said for the credit of the Kiarians that a few of them giggled nervously, as they contemplated the recumbent figure of the lady in question.

“Yes, sir,” repeated Mr. Spratter with passionate conviction. “There she lies, ready and waiting. All you need to do is to step up and tinker with her engine – —”

“What!” cried out the senior partner. “My God, what a thing to suggest!”

“I said tinker with her engine!” Mr. Spratter shouted back.

“I know you did,” replied Mr. Larkin, getting control of himself. “That’s just the trouble. Don’t you realize what a terrible thing you’ve said?”

“I find the word tinker especially objectionable,” put in Mr. Owen with legal distinctness. “I suggest the speaker be requested to moderate his language.”

“Sounds fairly brutal to me,” observed the Major. “Not a thing to do to a lady.”

“Nonsense!” cried Mr. Spratter. “There she lies, I tell you. All you need to do is to – —”

“I can’t stand looking at her,” wailed Mr. Dinner, putting his hands over his eyes. “The poor, poor thing. What is he going to do to her now?”

“I will speak,” thundered the automobile man. “All you need to do is to tinker with her engine – a slight adjustment here and there – and then step on her gas. Put your foot down hard.”

The last words were said in a voice of grating triumph. Once more the senior partner was on his feet.

“Step on her gas,” he repeated in a voice trembling with incredulity. “Am I hearing his words aright? Does he really suggest that?”

“Why not?” demanded the manufacturer. “Why not step on her gas?”

“Why not?” cried Mr. Larkin witheringly. “Are you so utterly lost to chivalry and common decency as to ask me that?”

“How would you like to have someone step on your gas?” asked Mr. Dinner. “Put their foot down hard, as you said?”

“I don’t need to have anyone step on my gas,” Mr. Spratter retorted proudly. “I’m always pepped up.”

“May I ask,” demanded Mr. Larkin coldly, “if myself and my partners are to be debased by such bawdy proceedings? We have stood for having her engine tinkered, but, by God, as a loyal Kiarian, I will not allow anyone to step on her gas – to put his foot down hard.”

“Who is this woman, anyway,” asked a kindly old gentleman, “to whom all these things are going to be done? I’m afraid I’m a little deaf.”

“I’ve forgotten, myself,” called Mr. Larkin, “but it doesn’t matter who she is. It’s a damned dirty trick.”

“The woman is Prosperity!” called Thomas W. Spratter, grimly sticking to his unhappy personifications. “That’s who she is.”

“I know,” persisted the old gentleman, not knowing at all. “But what is she going to be doing about it all this time? Won’t she act up and call for help?”

“You don’t understand,” cried Mr. Spratter. “She isn’t a real lady at all.”

“She wouldn’t be,” observed the old fellow, “if she let you do all those things to her.”

“Nevertheless, I protest,” put in Mr. Larkin. “On behalf of myself and my partners, I protest. Just because a woman isn’t a lady, I see no reason why she should be stepped on and tink— I just can’t say it,” he broke off. “If the rest of you want to do it,” he added, “I can’t stop you, but we will have no part in such ungentlemanly conduct.”

“All I said was to tinker with her engine and to step on her gas,” said Mr. Spratter, feeling rather hopeless about it all. “You’d think I was suggesting a crime.”

“Oh, yes,” retorted Mr. Owen with fine irony. “To you it may be an every-day occurrence. To you, Mr. Thomas W. Spratter of Sprattsburg, Sprattsylvania, it may come under the head of pleasure. All this stepping on and tinkering with ladies may be your quaint idea of fun, but, answer me this – what would your wife say? What would any decent woman say? You may get away with it in Sprattsburg, but I dare you to try it out here.”

“Gentlemen,” called Mr. Spratter, appealing to the room. “My time is greatly limited. This fruitless argument has taken nearly all of it. Soon I must hurry with our excellent W. C.”

“I can’t stand any more of this,” Mr. Dinner complained to Mr. Owen. “I’m going to put an end to it all.”

And with this he bent over and struck a match to the nearest portière.

“Sheer genius,” murmured the Major, setting fire to the tablecloth. “I’ll forgive you, Dinner, for that beard-tasting fiasco.”

Mr. Owen, not to be outdone, ignited his napkin and tossed it under the nearest table, where it started to burn merrily among the frantic feet of the Kiarians. Mr. Larkin promptly lost interest in speaking in the face of this fresh diversion. Taking an envelope from his pocket, he lighted it with great care and deliberately held it to another hanging. Then he arose and calmly addressed the assembled Kiarians, who were already uneasily sniffing smoke.

“I’m afraid we’ll all have to go,” he said. “It seems that some sparks from the late beard of our excellent W. C. have been smoldering in the hangings and things for some time. Emulating his spectacular example, the room has broken out into fire in several places. It’s no longer a question of whether Mr. Spratter needs to go or not. He’ll damn well have to go. Sic semper tyrannis! I am greatly pleased.”

It is doubtful if the Kiarians either heard or cared about how much Mr. Larkin was pleased. By this time the room was filled with smoke and flames. It was not so well filled with Kiarians. Mr. Spratter evidently had needed to go because his square figure led all the rest. In their anxiety to depart, the business getters had overlooked the fact that a woman was in their midst. Hector Owen, however, had not been so forgetful.

“I’m going to save Satin!” he shouted, staggering among the tables.

“We’ll all save Satin,” boomed the voice of the Major.

“My God, yes,” cried Mr. Larkin. “She has the most thorough knowledge of indecency of any woman in our Pornographic Department.”

Together the four partners laid violent hands on the young lady and, using her as a battering ram, drove their way through the milling Kiarians.

“Don’t worry,” Mr. Owen told her. “We’ll get you out unharmed.”

“And also undressed,” she responded. “There’s little under my skirt, but what there is I’d hate to show in public.”

However, she had spoken too late. In their anxiety to do the right thing the four partners were tugging altogether too hard for the resistance of light summer attire. As a result, their burden’s garments parted in various quarters so that when the partners passed through the lobby of the hotel they gave the appearance of four gentlemen diligently engaged in carrying away a naked but unprotesting woman. Once on the street they set her on her feet and started to brush her off here and there, as men will.

“Heavens!” exclaimed the senior partner. “What happened to her clothes? She didn’t come like this, I hope.”

“You have part of my skirt in your hand,” Satin casually observed. “The others have other things.”

“Put them on, my dear child, at once,” continued Mr. Larkin. “It’s a sight to make one veer. Besides, this is no place for frivolity. The hotel is on fire. We can’t drop back in there. A taxicab would do nicely at this moment.”

The Major stopped a cab, and the partners piled in behind the thinly disguised Satin.

“We’ll all be late at the store,” lamented the senior partner. “It always happens this way. Something inevitably breaks out and this time it was a fire. I like a good fire. We’ll be able to watch it from the roof.”

As the taxi turned a corner it nearly ran into a fire engine. There were much cursing and shouting and clatter.

“I’d love to be a fireman,” Mr. Dinner observed wistfully.

“So would I,” agreed the senior partner. “The engines seem to veer nearly as much as I do.”

There was a smothered scream from Satin.

“Why, Mr. Owen,” she said. “I’m more surprised than insulted.”

CHAPTER TEN

From the Roof Top

“Horrid!” called Mr. Larkin the moment the partners and Satin had reached his private office. “Horrid! Take Blue Mould up to the roof, but don’t let him fall off. He’d splash all over one or more of our customers. If they were going out it wouldn’t matter much. If they were coming in it would make a lot of difference. Is everything clear, or have I failed at some point?”

“Don’t know about that,” said Horrid. “What do you want us to do on the roof, old Blue Mould and me?”

“Look for a fire, of course,” Mr. Larkin explained with a show of impatience. “Naturally. What does one go to roofs for? Where’s your native sagacity?”

“Me native what?” asked the horrid office boy.

“It doesn’t matter,” explained Mr. Larkin hastily. “You haven’t any. Will someone please throw something over that nude girl? Bare flesh burns me up. If it’s a good fire, let me know. If not, I don’t care to hear a word about it. If she sold books the way she is in the Pornographic Department we might be able to make two ends meet. What a luncheon! Well, gentlemen, to your places. We must make up for lost time. Dinner, wherever your place is, have someone bring you a chair. You’ll look better off your feet. Breathe into space, if at all.” The senior partner paused for breath in the midst of this executive outburst and surveyed Honor Knightly. “Splendid legs!” he said, as if to himself. “Oh, legs, legs, legs, what would we do without them?”

“Drag ourselves along,” replied the Major laconically.

“Or walk on our hands,” added the senior partner. “But I really wasn’t asking for information. I was merely exclaiming, rather ecstatically, I thought. Do something about her legs. She owes us her life, and we owe her a dress. Someone figure that out. It doesn’t seem right. Have we made up any lost time yet?”

“All,” asserted Mr. Dinner. “Or nearly. May I have a slight pick-me-up? The stuff is dying on me.”

“You should die with it,” exclaimed Mr. Larkin. “Give him a great drink, Major. It may paralyze him. Give us all a drink – even those legs.”

“Those legs would like a drink,” said their fair owner. “What with smoke and Kiarians and nudity, my mind is all agog.”

“I’m very much agog, too,” asserted the senior partner. “It’s a good word. Two g’s in it like boggle, only in different places. Put something on.”

The Major passed the drinks around, and everybody sat down to enjoy them, Satin draped in a Spanish shawl snatched from one of the divans.

“Of course,” observed Mr. Larkin, frowning worriedly into his glass, “I hope you all realize that this is rather a poor way of making up for lost time. If anything, it’s a better way to lose a lot more of it. I would be a great deal better off without any partners at all. Then I would have more money to spend and very much less lost time. Do I hear any resignations?”

“Horace,” the Major assured him affectionately, “you’d be lost yourself without us.”

“Would I, do you think?” Horace inquired rather anxiously. “Well, don’t leave me, then – not for a moment – although, damn me, I sometimes wonder if we are running this store quite right. It’s such a very big store, I should think there ought to be a great deal more bustling about and rushing places, more orders issued, and all that. It would be nice, too, if one of us knew something about figures. Our books are far more mysterious to us all than a set of detective novels. I fear our accountants cheat us terribly. You see how it is. I have to think of these things occasionally, but not, thank God, very often.”

“Mr. Larkin,” Satin asked him, “may I have Mr. Owen?”

“What an extraordinary request, my child,” Mr. Larkin answered. “What do you want him for?”

Satin, holding the shawl tightly about her, hipped herself across the room and, bending over the senior partner, whispered into his ear a few moments. Mr. Owen did not greatly care for this sort of thing. He looked about him uncomfortably.

“Oh!” exclaimed the senior partner at last. “For that! I might have known.” He paused and glanced consideringly at Mr. Owen. “Of course,” he continued, “the dew is no longer on the rose – the first blush is gone, but a slightly faded man is preferable to a fickle one. How is your health, Mr. Owen?”

“You talk of me as if I were a horse,” Hector Owen protested.

“Oh, no,” replied Mr. Larkin. “If you were a horse we’d talk about you in an entirely different way. We might even go so far as to examine you. People do, you know. The horses never mind. They have no shame. I admire and envy horses. They have four legs. Miss Knightly doesn’t want a horse. She’d rather have you. I don’t know why.”

“I have my suspicions,” said Mr. Dinner. “Want me to air them?”

“No,” cried the senior partner hastily. “Fumigate them instead. It happens you’re right. She does – and for that.”

“Not a bad break,” observed the Major, looking the girl over from head to toe. “Not a bad break at all. Think you feel up to it, Owen?”

“For God’s sake!” exclaimed Hector Owen. “Why consult me? Wouldn’t it be better to drag my clothes off and auction me on the block?”

“It might be at that,” Mr. Larkin declared. “Wonder how much you’d knock down for? The women in this town are simply mad about new faces and all. You know what I mean?”

“I fear I do,” said Mr. Owen. “Let’s change the subject.”

“And you must not forget,” went on the senior partner, “you own Madame Gloria for life. That’s a lot of woman to own.”

Upon the reception of this information Satin swung about and furiously confronted Mr. Owen.

“Has he had relations with that trull?” she demanded.

“Only such as are possible at a sidewalk café,” Mr. Larkin explained rather nervously. “They were in the presence of the public all the time. There weren’t any beds about or anything like that.”

“Was there an undercurrent of beds?” the girl wanted to know.

“Merely a slight strain,” said Mr. Larkin. “You know how Madame Gloria is – one never gets very far away from a bed with her. I’m surprised at times she doesn’t go about in one.”

“I know how she is,” Satin pronounced coldly. “And I know how she will be if she tries to drag a bed between me and him.”

“If it were exactly in the middle,” Mr. Larkin remarked thoughtfully, “you might both race for it. He’d be in the bed.”

“Do you think I’d stay in the bed?” Mr. Owen demanded.

“I don’t see why not,” said Mr. Larkin, “if it were a comfortable bed. You’d be sure to have one of them.”

“You might even get both,” put in the Major. “It might be a dead heat.”

“I could beat that old trollop to bed,” cried Satin, “with a suit of armor on. But there’s not going to be any race. That man, such as he is, is all mine, and may God pity both him and that Gloria wench if I ever catch them together.”

“Haven’t I any voice in the matter?” Mr. Owen asked. “No locus standi?”

“I don’t know what your locus standi is,” she retorted, “but it doesn’t sound very decent to me. I’ve practically reared you in pornography, and I certainly don’t intend to let another woman reap the benefit of my teaching.”

“Has he picked up much dirt?” Mr. Larkin asked with interest.

“Not as much as he’s going to,” the girl replied. “The trouble with him is, he hasn’t the right kind of mind.”

At this moment Horrid stuck his head in at the door.

“There’s a lot of smoke,” he said.

“Then there should be some fire,” commented the senior partner. “Or maybe it’s the other way round. Let’s go up and see.”

“I want a new dress,” declared Satin.

“You need a new dress,” agreed Mr. Larkin. “Have we any decent dresses in this store? If not, send out to some other shop and charge the stuff to us. I’ll send Mr. Owen down to the Pornographic Department as soon as we’ve had a good look at this fire.”

“If he doesn’t come down,” said Satin, “I’ll come up and drag him down.”

For a few moments after the partners had left, the girl wandered restlessly about the room, picking up this object and that, examining it curiously before casting it aside in favor of another. She went to the table and poured herself a fresh drink.

Meanwhile, the partners were comfortably seated on the roof of the store, looking at a lot of smoke. There was little else to look at. From time to time the ancient Green Mould, who Mr. Larkin suspected but was not sure should be called Blue Mould, filled their wineglasses from a bottle selected from several others set in a large tub of ice. The partners did themselves well.

“It’s a nice idea to sit on the roof of one’s store,” observed the senior partner gently, “and contemplate fires while quaffing champagne. There should be more fires.”

“Or at least some fire,” put in Mr. Dinner in a small, complaining voice.

“If the three of you sent down to the Musical Department,” remarked Mr. Owen, “for some fiddles, your happiness might be complete.”

“We should have done better than that,” complained the Major. “We started four separate and distinct fires in that hotel. Not one of them is making out worth a damn.”

“I doubt if an honest fire would burn in such a thick Kiarian atmosphere,” Mr. Larkin asserted. “Does Owen want some fiddles? He can have some if he does. I find phonographs much easier. Don’t have to use so many fingers and hardly any ear.”

Knowing he would miss nothing if he never listened to any of these conversations, Mr. Owen was gazing out over the city. Everywhere he saw broad, tree-shaded thoroughfares linked together by parks and plazas. Through the green of the trees he caught splashes of black, crimson, tan, and orange – vivid bursts of color from the awnings and parasols flanking the graceful streets. Over the hotel they had so informally quitted, a plume of smoke hung in the light, clear air. Smoke still trailed from the windows of the banqueting hall in which high-pressure salesmen had given place to high-pressure hoses. Through the main avenue of the city a body of bright jacketed troops, their accoutrements flashing in the sun, moved rhythmically to the music of a glittering band.

“They never fight, those soldiers,” the Major explained regretfully. “Can’t get them to fight. All our troops are like that – too fond of clothes. You see, we’ve changed our mind about fighting here. Decided to give it a miss. Only sworn and accredited pacifists are allowed to join the army. When other nations get mean about things, our standing army of pacifists can talk them deaf, dumb, and blind before they can even get mobilized. Of course, a lot of sweethearts, wives, and mothers don’t like the idea. They can no longer heroically sacrifice their sons, lovers, and husbands for the sake of their country. So many women are such gluttons for death and bloodshed. Frankly, I don’t see a thing in it, and I’ve killed lots of men in my time. It’s a thoroughly ill-tempered occupation. In the place of sacrificing their men folk we allow women a little more latitude in betraying them. We don’t even call it betraying any more – merely changing their luck. Naturally, we must have soldiers, bands, and uniforms. Such things fill a fundamental craving. I like a parade myself as well as the next.”

It was a long speech for the Major, but inasmuch as he was a military man Mr. Owen listened with interest. His eyes were fixed on the hills which, breaking here and there, gave glimpses of the sea. Gazing down on this beautiful city Mr. Owen found it difficult to think of war. Surely here was a place made to order for peace and play.

“Those palaces over there on the hill,” said Mr. Larkin, pointing to a magnificent row of buildings in the distance, “are the homes of our retired mayors and political leaders. All built by graft. Graft, you know, my dear Owen, is also a fundamental craving. Self-interest is its brother. We used to attack graft in the old days. Now we encourage it. The only stipulation the voters make is that our grafters must share enough of their spoils with the people, spend enough on public welfare, roads, construction, amusements and holidays to keep us all happy and contented. Thus we have all the fun of being dishonestly yet well governed. Dishonesty is so much more positive than its opposite, don’t you think? I love to steal watches. Have you one?”

“No,” replied Mr. Owen, “you just took it. I felt you.”

“Then you can have it back,” declared the senior partner. “There’s no fun in it if you know.”

Instead of returning Mr. Owen’s inexpensive watch, however, he presented him with a handsome new one.

“It’s a better watch than yours,” Mr. Larkin explained. “Got it at luncheon from our excellent W. C. You can have it if you don’t mind about the initials.”

“What happens to your politicians when they fail to share their graft?” asked Mr. Owen, gratefully accepting another man’s property.

“What happens?” repeated Mr. Larkin in surprise. “Naturally, we run them out of town. They bore us. We don’t find them amusing. You can see that for yourself. Everybody likes to eat, drink, run about with women, and have a good time. As soon as the majority of people find themselves being cramped, we have a bloodless revolution and get bad friends with the government. It’s lots of fun.”

“And those buildings down there in the valley,” broke in Mr. Dinner, his voice embodying the satisfaction he felt, “belong to the prohibitionists and other like vermin who endeavor to thwart nature. They’re jails. Very uncomfortable places.”

“Do you put all prohibitionists in jail?” asked Mr. Owen.

“Not all,” replied Mr. Dinner. “Not the honest ones, but there are not very many of those. These chaps down there are mostly political hypocrites, professional reformers, people with weak stomachs or otherwise mentally or physically incapacitated for enjoyment. There are a lot of anti-vice boys and girls down there. No end of them. People who would rob us of our sex. That’s not right. We got to have our sex. A few years back we weren’t even allowed to travel with it. Now we can take it anywhere. We found it was making woman dumb, keeping them in one place all the time. Now they can see things. And they do.”

“I can imagine,” said Mr. Owen.

“I’m convinced you can,” commented Mr. Dinner.

“How long are these prohibitionists and reformers in for?” asked Mr. Owen.

“Most of them can come out any time they want,” was the surprising answer, “but they don’t want to. They’re ashamed. They get laughed at so much. You see, a person who votes one way, then goes home and acts another is not only a damn fool but also a damn fraud. Such people have no standing in this community. Anti-enjoyment people don’t mind jail so much, anyway. There’s something sadistic about jail routine that appeals to their perverted instincts.”

“I see,” said Mr. Owen. “In your madness there is a grain of sense. May I ask what that great walled enclosure over there is used for?”

“It’s seldom if ever used,” explained the Major, “but we keep it just the same. It’s for the exclusive enjoyment of diplomats and statesmen either foreign or domestic. As a matter of fact, the grounds are open to all patriotic people and munition manufacturers. Whenever they get especially bloodthirsty we invite them to go in there and blow their Goddam heads off. Yet in spite of the fact that we have stocked the place with all sorts of flags and guns and gases – the very things they love so dearly – they seldom if ever can be induced to go in. We have to pitch them in whether they like it or not. Then we take pot shots at them from the walls. After that we bury them upside down and declare a public holiday.”

“At the same time,” observed Mr. Larkin, “it’s good to do a little work, isn’t it? We don’t seem to be able to get around to doing any. For the last half hour I’ve been wondering if sitting on this roof can, by any stretch of imagination, be called attending even loosely to business. I’ve about come to the conclusion it can’t. We’ve merely gone from one way of not making up for lost time to another. That isn’t right. That’s very, very bad. People might get the impression we were loafers. Let’s go in and look at the store for a change.”

“All right,” agreed Mr. Dinner. “It’s not such a bum shop.”

“I like it,” declared the Major. “We’ve ever so many things to sell that nobody wants to buy. There are always enough left overs for all of us.”

Tossing their wineglasses to the roof, the four partners rose and departed to look at their store. Green Mould and Horrid gagged down the remains of the wine.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Partners Are Helpful

In the toy department they naturally lingered a little – which one of them started the lingering it would be difficult to decide. Probably it was by general consent. It is almost impossible not to linger in a toy department. They lingered long enough in this one for a lady, who seemingly had just remembered something, to accost Mr. Larkin.

“Have you something for a mechanical boy?” she asked, all of a breath.

Mr. Larkin looked puzzled.

“A mechanical boy?” he asked politely as if to give the woman another chance as well as himself.

“Yes,” almost panted the woman. “A mechanical boy he is.”

“Is he, now,” murmured Mr. Larkin. “Too bad – too bad. A mechanical boy. Fancy that. How mechanical is he, madam?”

“Oh, very,” replied the woman proudly. “Entirely.”

“God spare me,” breathed Mr. Larkin. “An entirely mechanical boy. What does he run by, madam, steam?”

“What?” cried the woman. “He doesn’t run at all.”

“Oh,” exclaimed Mr. Larkin, his face lighting up. “I see it. You want this mechanical boy repaired, is that it?”

“It is not,” said the woman coldly. “I want a mechanical toy for the boy.”

“Does it play with mechanical toys?” asked Mr. Larkin, greatly interested.

“Naturally,” replied the woman.

“Must be a remarkable sort of a mechanical boy,” observed Mr. Larkin with a sigh. “I’ll have to admit that. Will someone else talk with the lady? We’re not getting along so well.”

“Certainly,” volunteered the Major, stepping forward. “Is this a clockwork boy, madam, or an electric one?”

“Both,” said the woman promptly. “He’s good at both.”

“Oh, he is,” muttered the Major, slightly taken back. “I never saw one of those.”

“You never saw this boy,” said the woman. “Never saw the likes of him myself.”

“You must be right,” admitted the Major, then turning to his senior, added in a low voice, “Shall we go? I’m afraid she’ll get angry soon. I don’t seem to understand either.”

“You great big dummy,” said Mr. Dinner, in turn confronting the woman. “Madam,” he continued with great assurance, “you just can’t have a mechanical boy that works by both clockwork and electricity, and if you have, it should be solving the fourth dimension instead of playing with toys. In other words, we place little reliance in what you have told us. Please come to the point. Make it snappy.”

“All I want to do is to buy a mechanical toy,” said the woman in a hopeless voice. “Here I’ve been talking to three grown men, and I don’t seem to be any further along than if I’d been talking to three stuffed owls that had never – —”

“Don’t let her go on,” interrupted Mr. Larkin anxiously. “She’ll never stop if she once starts going on. They never do. I know them. The stuffed owls are very bad. God only knows what she’ll take up next. Get her mind off us. Ask her how she feels – anything.”

“Would you like a broken mechanical toy, madam?” asked Mr. Dinner.

“What would I want with a broken mechanical toy?” demanded the woman.

“We don’t know,” said Mr. Dinner, stepping back among his larger partners. “If that boy is such a wonder he might like to find out what’s wrong with this mechanical toy. No one round here seems to know.”

“A good idea,” put in Major Barney. “I’ve been told on reliable authority that it’s more fun to get mechanical toys to work than to watch them do their stuff. Don’t you think so, madam?”

“No I don’t,” retorted the woman. “I think you should have your minds examined – all of you.”

“Does she now?” Mr. Larkin murmured thoughtfully. “All of us. That’s a lot of minds to have examined. It would take so long to find Dinner’s, if ever. And then it would be such a great disappointment when found.”

“Don’t want it examined,” said Mr. Dinner. “If they found anything wrong with it, I’d go crazy wondering what it was.”

“You don’t have to wonder,” replied the Major. “It’s merely an alcoholic husk.”

Mr. Larkin stopped a salesgirl.

“My dear child,” he began gently.

“Don’t call me that,” she tossed back. “I believed you once when you did, and now I have one of my own.”

“Oh, dear,” said Mr. Larkin. “How unfortunate. Now I remember your face.”

“You should remember much more of me than that,” the salesgirl flung back.

“Goodness gracious!” exclaimed the senior partner, looking anxiously about. “What a sale this turned out to be! Mechanical toys, at that. Imagine!” He turned back to the girl. “We’ll have a nice long talk,” he told her, “all about infant mortality. But not now. I must think. This woman wants a mechanical boy, but I fancy she’d be glad to take a stuffed owl in its place. Give her anything she wants or she’ll never get home.” He now addressed himself to the woman. “This perfectly charming girl will fit in just splendidly with your plans. Her mind is good and her memory altogether too good. Good-night, madam. I hope we’ll all feel better tomorrow.”

Once more he turned and walked rapidly away. By the time he had reached the end of the Toy Department he was almost running. His companions were close behind. A floorwalker looked after them and sniffed the air enviously.

“I hope we make that sale,” said the senior partner, leading them down a flight of stairs to the next floor. “To my dying day I’ll never be sure in my mind about that mechanical boy – whether he was or wasn’t, you know – not even sure what the woman wanted.”

“Simply a mechanical toy,” replied Mr. Dinner, in a superior sounding voice. “I would have fixed her up in a minute.”

The Major looked at him scornfully.

“She was preparing to tear you limb from limb,” he said.

“And I for one wouldn’t have lifted a finger,” Mr. Larkin asserted impersonally. “Now, look here, Mr. Owen, this is the Fur Department. Women come here for furs, but most of the time men come with them. It’s a very important department. Events leading up to the loss of more honor are initiated here than in any other department in the store. It’s remarkable the things women will do for fur. As a matter of truth, I’ve never found out what they won’t do for fur, and I’ve suggested about everything. Yes, yes, indeed. Women are savages for fur. If our present race of women had lived in the prehistoric days there’d be no fur-bearing animals left at all. Give a woman a piece of fur – —”

“They’re very much like that where I come from,” Mr. Owen broke in quickly, as a picture of a fur coat which he had never bought flashed disturbingly through his mind.

“It’s the competitive instinct,” contributed the Major with a surprising display of philosophy. “What one woman wears the other woman wants until she has it. Then she wants something else. And if the price of the best fur coats were reduced to five dollars you wouldn’t be able to drag one on their backs. Yet the fur would be just as good.”

“They don’t wear them to keep warm,” observed Mr. Dinner. “That’s one sure thing. If you gave some of ’em a snout they’d look just like animals.”

“Men are quite as bad,” said the senior partner. “Especially young men who don’t have to work for their money. At football games and other mob activities I’ve seen hundreds of young chaps overtaxing their maturing strength and spoiling their chances in life beneath the weight of strange-looking garments that would give a bear the creeps, assuming they ever crept, which I doubt.”

“But women have to have something to give in for,” suggested Mr. Dinner.

“Why don’t they give in for an orange, as they used to when I was a boy?” demanded the Major.

“There we go,” remarked the senior partner with a shrug to Mr. Owen. “Always getting personal. Now these furs all come from the best animals.” Here he indicated the Fur Department with an inclusive wave of his eloquent hand. “All animals of the better class. I’ve often thought that if you could prevail upon elephants to grow hair everything would be much nicer. It fills me with regret to think that every piece of fur here displayed represents another step in the gradual extinction of animals whose only fault is that they have never learned how to shave.”

“I wonder,” mused Mr. Dinner, “what women would do if men suddenly began growing fur? Think they’d murder us all?”

“No,” replied the senior partner quite seriously. “They’d hardly go so far as that, but I do think they’d try to drag us about on their backs with our arms tied around their necks.”

“Why couldn’t they tuck ’em in – our arms, I mean?” asked Mr. Dinner.

“That would never do,” replied Mr. Larkin. “The furs would begin to pick the clothes off their wearers. A pretty sight that would be.”

“How are we going to keep our hands warm, then?” persisted the small Dinner.

“Your hands would be covered with fur,” the senior partner told him.

“Ugh!” muttered Mr. Dinner. “I wouldn’t like that. Great furry hands like a beast’s.”

“It will probably never happen,” interposed Mr. Larkin in a quiet voice. “There’s no good building bridges before we’ve burned them, is there?”

Mr. Dinner and the Major looked uneasily at one another. This sort of question invariably set them puzzling – taxed them, as it were, beyond their capacity.

As they rounded a corner they came upon a scene of domestic discord. The partners stopped, enthralled, their worst instincts delighted. Two couples, the female members of which were exceedingly pretty women, were facing each other in battle array.

“May I ask why you are buying a fur coat for my wife?” one of the men demanded in a deadly cold voice.

“Apparently for the same reason you are buying one for mine,” the other man smoothly replied.

“I’m buying a coat for your wife to keep the poor woman warm,” replied the other with withering sarcasm.

“I don’t have to buy a coat for your wife to keep her that way,” retorted the other husband, growing a trifle common.

“Is that so?” was the brilliant rejoinder. “Well, your wife is hot stuff herself – once she gets away from you.”

“Yeah?” shot back the other. “Well, your wife told me that to live with you was the same as living with an eating cadaver – a snoring dead man.”

“That’s funny,” laughed the other nastily. “Your wife told me much the same thing. She said if it wasn’t for the neighbors she’d have a hearse parked permanently at your door.”

“At that,” declared the other proudly, “she said it nicer than your wife did.”

“Your wife can’t say anything any nicer than my wife can!” was the perplexing reply to this.

“I do think,” interposed one of the women involved, “that Jane would have shown better taste had she gone to another store. She knows very well that I always deal here.”

“So sorry,” said the one called Jane in a sweet voice. “I should have remembered meeting you here with still another woman’s husband.”

“I was selecting a coat for his wife,” lied the first woman glibly.

“My mistake,” replied Jane. “You wore one just like it all last season.”

“We had planned to dress as twins,” said the other lady.

“And doubtless were so successful her husband couldn’t tell you apart,” Jane remarked with a killing smile.

“Are you accusing me of improper conduct?” the other demanded icily.

“Why, no, my dear,” said Jane. “Merely complimenting you on a long and successful career.”

“Do you know what they’re talking about?” one of the husbands asked the other.

“No,” replied the man. “I’m getting tired as hell. They always go on like this.”

“I’m dying on my feet,” admitted the other. “Let’s give them the air.”

Fearing the loss of two simultaneous sales, Mr. Larkin felt himself called upon to exert a soothing influence. Leading the gentlemen aside he spoke to them in a low voice.

“If you gentlemen will step down to our Refreshment Department,” he told them, “I’ll send word that the drinks are on the house. In the meantime, I will take care of the ladies. They can charge the coats either to their own husbands or – if they find it more amusing – they can stick to the present arrangement. I’ll see that neither of you gets done in the eye.”

“What’s the Refreshment Department like?” asked one of the men suspiciously.

“Dear me, don’t you know?” exclaimed Mr. Larkin. “Why, there’s nothing like it in any store in the city. It’s a real innovation. It’s run especially for gentlemen who are mad enough to go shopping with ladies. You’ll love it.”

“Why?” asked the other husband.

“I forgot to say,” the senior partner apologized. “It’s a sort of alcoholic harem with a continuous burlesque show. You won’t find a decent woman in the place.”

“Then don’t tell our wives,” said one of the men. “They’d break their necks getting there.”

The two men hurried away, and Mr. Larkin turned to the ladies.

“Now that they’ve gone,” he said, smiling dazzlingly upon each, “we can all get together.”

“Where?” breathed one of the women so readily that Mr. Larkin put it down as an instinctive response to any agreeable suggestion.

“My office is busy now,” he hedged, glancing at his watch, “but any morning in the swimming pool would make a good beginning.”

“Are all men bad?” the one called Jane asked coyly.

“Not bad enough for you, I fear,” Mr. Larkin answered gallantly. “Now, if you ladies will just step into those curtained enclosures, I’ll take your lines for the fur coats. Dinner, you and the Major can have the one named Jane. Owen and myself will handle this beautiful blonde.”

For a few minutes strange noises came from behind the enclosures. A series of giggles, small shrieks and startled ejaculations filled the air. Customers of both sexes paused and looked enviously at the curtains. Even the salesgirls, as accustomed as they were to the enthusiastic methods of the partners, did not remain unmoved.

“My God,” came the voice of Jane. “The way these men go about it you’d think they were measuring one for a pair of tights instead of a fur coat.”

Presently Mr. Owen came staggering from his booth and stood outside mopping his brow with a handkerchief.

“It’s too much for me,” he admitted to a salesgirl. “I know nothing about measuring.”

“Neither do they,” said the salesgirl.

“I’m not at all used to this sort of thing,” Mr. Owen continued.

“No?” said the girl with interest, favoring him with an insinuating eye. “How’d you like to practice?”

“My God,” muttered Mr. Owen, “what a store!”

The senior partner came bustling up to Mr. Owen and the salesgirl. He handed the girl a slip of paper on which some figures had been hastily scrawled.

“Give those women a couple of coats,” he said. “Make the price right. It was worth it. These figures might help, but I doubt it. I was veering slightly when I jotted them down. Charge them. And,” he added, looking severely at the girl, “that is the way to make sales. Remember – on your toes.”

“I think I see what you mean,” replied the girl. “Thank you very much.”

Gathering his partners about him, Mr. Larkin moved away with dignity and aplomb.

“Let’s collect Satin,” suggested Mr. Larkin, “and ask her to buy us a drink.”

And thus ended Mr. Hector Owen’s first working day in his new occupation. Most people are of two minds. Hector Owen was of many. Of one thing, however, he was sure. He did not want to find himself on the other side of that dimly but hauntingly remembered door – waiting there in the rain.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Satin Slings an Eel

Many little difficulties never get themselves quite ironed out. Gangsters, judges, and other disturbing elements have long been aware of this. But women are even more so. As a matter of fact, women seem to glory in it. And of all things in the world, a great many of their little difficulties have to do with men, actually with men who are notoriously not worth the snap of one’s fingers, especially a woman’s fingers.

Nor do women need to be particularly interested in the same man to precipitate a deluge of these little difficulties – to arouse emotions of jealousy. Far from it. Both of them may heartily detest the poor beast, as they have no hesitancy in telling him the first moment they get him alone. The more women fight over a man, the more that doomed wretch eventually suffers. He pays for all their trouble. He suffers if they do and he suffers if they don’t. For him there is no escape. If women don’t fight over him, his market value declines. His wife grows restless – she becomes cold and unduly critical. On the other hand, many an odd fish with nothing in God’s world to recommend him save his trousers has found himself the center of the most alarming competition, merely because one woman has conceived the idea that another woman wants him.

For this reason it is barely possible that jealousy between women is not such a personal manifestation as is commonly supposed. With men it is entirely different, entirely personal – too personal, if anything. Men know exactly what they want, and although their motives are generally of the lowest, they usually know what they are getting at. With women, jealousy has more of the professional quality. It is the jealousy of the artist. It springs not so much from a woman’s love of a definitely selected male as from the disinclination to see one of her sex get away with anything, no matter how undesirable it may be. In other words, women have a proprietary interest in the entire class of males, whereas men, in their casual and shiftless manner, follow the female of the least resistance.

It so happened that Mr. Hector Owen, seated with Satin Knightly and his three partners at a table in a smart sidewalk café, found himself the unwilling center of one of these distressing conflicts. He was not greatly amused. Few men are, to hear themselves boldly discussed as if they were not present. Nor was he, as are so many of his sex, conceited enough to take any credit for the unbecoming conduct of the ladies.

Madame Gloria played a prominent part in this action. She made her entrance while Honor Knightly, pornographic expert, was buying the four partners a drink and, in turn, was being bought drinks by them. There had been lots of drinks already. There were prospects of lots more. Madame Gloria, accompanied by several ladies and gentlemen of her profession, wearily seated herself at the next table. This was unfortunate, for the moment Satin’s madly bright eyes rested on Madame Gloria and noted that she was good, they began to snap and sparkle dangerously – venomously. The fact that Madame Gloria was a truly beautiful woman, although perhaps a shade faded, did not soften the quality of Satin’s hostile gaze. She had, however, the grace to allow her enemy to seat herself before opening the attack.

“I understand,” began Honor, her voice unrelieved by the slightest inflection, “that this person owns you for life. What about it?”

Satin indicated this person by leaning so heavily against him that Mr. Owen found it wiser to cling to his chair rather than to be pushed off it to the floor. In a small flurry of panic the senior partner, whose experience in the past with women gave him small hope of the immediate future, fluttered his hands nervously and rolled his eyes to heaven.

“Here,” he predicted in a low voice, “is where we all begin to veer like a series of cock-eyed gyroscopes.”

Madame Gloria observed Satin with one of her most perfectly refrigerated smiles.

“Are you personally interested in the answer, my dear?” she inquired.

“I am,” said Satin distinctly. “And that lets you out. This man is mine. Understand that – all of you. He’s mine. Of course, I don’t want him much, but just the same, I’m going to have him. One encounters new faces so rarely.”

“Very well, my child,” Mr. Larkin proposed in a fearfully soothing voice. “Excellent, excellent, my dear girl. You take his face, and Madame Gloria can have what’s left of him, although I very much fear that with her much won’t be left of him long.”

“Come! Come!” muttered Mr. Owen ineffectually, then added, by way of emphasis, “I say now – come, come!”

“No,” replied Honor firmly, utterly disregarding the weak objection of the gentleman under discussion. “I’ll have little use for his face unless I find it necessary to slap it occasionally. I want all.”

“Couldn’t some mutually satisfactory division of the man be arranged?” interposed Major Barney, pursuing the senior partner’s difficult anatomical compromise.

Once more Mr. Owen was moved to objections as he gulped down a strong drink.

“Why not draw and quarter me?” he suggested. “Or put me on the spot? From the way things are going, I might as well be hanging in cold storage. Am I some butcher’s chunk to be sliced and hacked at the convenience of two women?”

“You’d be better off if you were,” Mr. Dinner uttered gloomily. “They’re going to do you no good, those two trulls.”

“I find this conversation jarring on my artistic sensibilities,” put in Madame Gloria languidly. “Why drag it out here of all places?”

“Why drag it out at all?” demanded Mr. Owen in a shocked whisper.

“Now that we’ve started,” replied Mr. Larkin sadly, “it has to be dragged out.”

“What has?” mumbled Mr. Owen.

“It!” cried Madame Gloria dramatically. “Everything! We must know all, see all, and hear all.”

“Not about me, you don’t,” exclaimed Mr. Owen, rising from the table. “I’m leaving now. Oh, yes, I am. I’m going right away.”

“Sit down!” Satin snapped at him. “And don’t mind that woman. I’ll drag it out as much as I want. This – —”

“Do you think I’m worrying about which one is going to do the dragging?” furiously interrupted the indignant man.

“Will you please be still?” the girl demanded. “This matter must be settled here and now. Drag it out, say I!”

“How do you mean?” asked Mr. Owen, now thoroughly aroused. “Who are you talking to anyway?”

“My good woman,” explained Madame Gloria with softly malicious patience, “it has been settled already, this little affair. Can’t you get it through your silly head that I am his for life and he is mine?”

“What fractional life interest can he possibly have in you?” Miss Knightly wanted to know. “You’re an over-subscribed issue already. For years you’ve been floating yourself all over town.”

“Really,” protested Madame Gloria. “This is too insulting. When I give myself to a man I give myself entirely. Everybody knows that.”

“Everybody should,” Satin tossed back with a smile. “That is, every able-bodied member of the male population, not to mention a few cripples. When you give yourself, lady, you give yourself like a ton of bricks, you horrid old hooker!”

“Oh!” gasped Madame Gloria, not a little offended. “Is that so?”

“Yes, it’s so,” Satin informed her. “And here’s something else: If he’s yours for life, he’s not going to live very long.”

“I don’t care how long he lives,” Madame Gloria replied most convincingly. “I wouldn’t mind killing him myself the way he sits there without a word to say in defense of the woman he owns.”

“But, my dear lady,” protested Mr. Owen, “you gave yourself to me of your own free will.”

“That’s a rotten thing to say,” cried Madame Gloria, appealing tragically to the members of her party. “You were with me, all of you. Tell them it’s a lie. He had no chance – no opportunity. Out here on the sidewalk – think of it! The man’s quite mad.”

“Why get so technical, Gloria?” asked a gentleman at her table who was obviously all for peace. “Frankly, I can’t see what either of you two women want with him at all.”

“I don’t either,” replied the lady of the stage, “but that doesn’t matter. It’s not as if I belonged to myself. I don’t. I belong now to my public. I have that to think about, and my career, my reputation. Would it look well to see in the papers, ‘Gloria Loses Her Man’? Wouldn’t that burn you up? Why, I’ve never lost a man to any woman.”

“I wouldn’t mind it so much,” the gentleman replied, “not when you consider the man.”

“I know,” went on the actress. “He’s admittedly a flop and all that, but I don’t want my public to get the impression that the first overripe tomato that comes along can drop in the lap of one of my interests.”

“I’ll be damned well damned if I’ll stand for all this!” Mr. Owen exploded, gulping down another drink. “That man has insulted me twice.”

“Insulted you, hell!” exclaimed Satin. “That bedridden trollop of an actress called me a tomato – an overripe one, at that. If it wasn’t her stock in trade I’d tear her clothes off!”

“Are you afraid, my dear,” asked the bedridden trollop sweetly, “that my figure would put yours to shame?”

Satin rose furiously and began to unhook her dress while the three partners beat desperately at her hands.

“Come on!” she cried to Madame Gloria. “I’ll make your body look like a mal-conditioned cow’s!”

“Why, if I did such a thing in public,” scoffed the lady, “men would hang diamonds round my neck.”

At this tense moment a waiter, having proudly exhibited a moribund and loathsome eel to some strong stomached patron, passed by Satin on his way to the kitchen. Mastering her instinctive repulsion in the magnitude of her rage, she seized the snakelike object by its tail, twirled it expertly above her head, then gave it with a lashing motion to the actress, horror-riven in her chair.

“How do you like that round your neck?” Satin asked her, sitting down and fastidiously dipping her fingers in a fresh highball, then gulping it down considerably less fastidiously.

An eel is not so much a matter of character as it is of feeling. This is especially true of an eel wound round one’s neck. One may have no character at all to speak of and yet object strongly to having an eel like that. Although Madame Gloria’s character was far from good, she had every justification in assuming that the eel was not going to improve it any. Satin had asked her how she liked the eel round her neck. Madame Gloria was far too busy to give her an individual answer. However, she did make a fairly convincing public protest. Emitting a piercing scream, she clutched with both hands at her neck, only to encounter eel. Immediately she uttered another scream and decided she would rather be strangled to death than risk a similar experience. Thereafter she moved her hands impotently in the air and from time to time made noises. Mr. Larkin was of little help in this crisis. He was sitting with a napkin pressed delicately to his eyes.

“That was a decidedly offensive thing to do,” came his awe-touched voice. “How can people think up such things? Just imagine – an eel round one’s neck. What retribution!”

But by this time the eel was no longer round the fair neck of Madame Gloria. The eel was in quite a different quarter of the lady. It had slid down the neck of her dress in the general direction of her stomach, where it was much worse not only for itself but also for Madame Gloria. People who have had eels in both places claim that an eel on the stomach is, if anything, more undesirable than the same eel round the neck.

Such people would have experienced no difficulty in getting Madame Gloria to subscribe to their views. In the past she had electrified many an audience by the abandon of her dancing, especially in and about the present locality of the eel. She now cast aside whatever little restraint she had exerted over her movements and did some really shocking things with her torso. At various tables patrons unacquainted with the circumstances leading up to the gratuitous demonstration, cheered the gyrating woman on to even more devastating endeavors. For the first time in her life Madame Gloria was deaf to applause. It was not until the cause of her anguish fell with a moist flop at her feet that she desisted from her abdominal revolutions and rushed shrieking down the street in the direction of her automobile. After her trailed her party, leaving Satin and her horrid weapon in full possession of the field.

Madame Gloria had departed, and the first round had gone to Satin, yet deep in the heart of the actress burned an intense desire to rehabilitate herself in the eyes of her audience to which she owed so much. And she swore to herself that at a time no later than that night would she assert her rights to the body and person of one Hector Owen. She would watch for her opportunity.

“Now,” said Honor Knightly, looking coldly upon Mr. Owen, “you’re mine tooth and nail. Make no mistake about that. If it hadn’t been for your cowardly vacillation all this would never have occurred. You’ve succeeded in making me extremely nervous and jumpy, you and your horrid old eel between you.”

“It wasn’t my eel in the first place,” disclaimed Mr. Owen. “I wouldn’t lift a finger for all the eels in the world.”

“Oh, no!” shot back Miss Knightly in a nasty voice. “Well, what would you do for this one?”

With a vicious lunge she recaptured the fallen eel. Once more the air whistled as the flashing body became the radius of a circle. Patrons at near-by tables buried their heads in their arms and waited for the inevitable crack. Fortunately for her intended victim, but not so for an unknown drunkard, the eel escaped her clutches and landed without warning in his soup. Drunk as he was, the man had enough sense left to know that he had not ordered eel with soup on it or soup with eel in it or eel in any other form. Therefore, putting the worst interpretation on this sudden appearance of reptilian life in the first thing he had attempted to eat for days, he broke into a cold sweat and collapsed to the sidewalk, where he lay calling on God until dragged off by the waiters. Henri, the head deity of the café, approached Mr. Larkin’s table and deferentially registered a mild objection.

“Is it,” he said, more in the nature of a suggestion than a request, “that the eel, you could let him rest tranquil for a small little? To our patrons he is more than enough already.”

“Count me among the strongest objectors, Henri,” Mr. Larkin replied with feeling. “I think it’s simply disgusting myself.”

“What’s so wrong with a little eel?” asked Major Barney.

“I can’t begin to tell you,” Mr. Larkin replied. “As Henri says, he is simply more than enough. Please, Henri, hurry back with at least two quarts of champagne. And keep all eels away from this young lady. It’s not her fault. It’s a weakness – like a red flag to a banker, or is it a bull? I’m forever getting them mixed – bulls and bankers, you know. Not red flags. Anyway, what does it matter? And Henri, for God’s sake, draw a sheet over the body of that eel, either dead or exhausted, on the table. He is doing no one any good where he is. He is an eel the most depressing, is he not, my old?”

My old, with a dazzling smile, showed the stuff that was in him by departing with the eel mercifully swathed in a tablecloth. Mr. Larkin breathed a sigh of relief and beamed upon his companions. “What a lot of things life is full of,” he observed, “and what a lot of liquor we are.”

“And we’re going to get even fuller,” gloated Satin, “and then I’m going for him in a big way.”

Once more Mr. Owen braced himself against the pressure of her body. The situation was growing serious. By the time they had completed the ruin of the first bottle of wine he had formulated a plan of action.

“You’ll have to excuse me a moment,” he said, rising from the table.

“Why?” demanded Honor.

“Is that necessary?” he asked, elevating his eyebrows.

Mr. Owen had been absent less than five minutes when she sprang to her feet and seized a passing waiter.

“Where’s the gentlemen’s room?” she demanded.

“You’re a lady,” the waiter informed her. “It’s another room, madam.”

“At this moment I’m not a lady,” she told him. “And what is good enough for a gentleman is good enough for me.”

“I know, madam,” said the waiter, who evidently had ideas of his own on the subject. “It’s maybe all right for you, but what about the gentlemen? Are they to enjoy no privacy at all?”

“If a man’s a gentleman,” declared Honor, “he shouldn’t want to enjoy privacy with a good-looking girl about. Anyway, I don’t want to annoy your blessed gentlemen. I merely want to stand outside.”

“Very good, madam,” said the waiter, “but I don’t see what that’s going to get you. All the way back to the right.”

Satin hurried away and took up her position by the door where she stood her ground in spite of the curious glances of various gentlemen passing in and out. After she had waited what she considered was a reasonable time she sent for Mr. Larkin. That gentleman appeared nervously with his partners.

“You’re the most restless woman to take places,” he complained. “Never a moment’s peace and quiet. If it isn’t an eel it’s a gentlemen’s room. What won’t you be wanting next?”

“I want that partner of yours,” she grated. “And I want him quick. I don’t care what he’s doing. You go in there and tell him if he doesn’t snap out with a click I’ll go in and drag him out.”

Mr. Larkin departed on his mission, only to return within a few minutes a much puzzled man.

“He’s not there,” he said. “He’s not in the gentlemen’s room.”

Satin made a dash for the door, but the partners held her back.

“Think!” cried Mr. Larkin. “Think of what you’re doing.”

“If I can stand the Pornographic Department,” she retorted, “a gentlemen’s room should be child’s play to me.”

“But the gentlemen take it quite seriously, I assure you,” protested the senior partner. “And besides, Mr. Owen is not in there.”

“Then where is he?” she demanded.

“Gone,” said Mr. Dinner.

“To a hotel, perhaps,” supplied the Major.

“A stand-up, eh?” muttered Satin. “I’ll cook his goose. Let me out of here.”

With a sigh of relief Mr. Larkin watched the girl hurry from the café. Then he turned to his partners.

“Let’s finish that other bottle of wine,” he suggested, “and then go and collect what she has left of our new partner. He’s a very foolish man if he entertains the idea he can get the best of one woman, not to mention two.”

“That’s a funny thing, too,” quoth Mr. Dinner. “A woman doesn’t mind giving you her best but hates like hell to have you get the best of her.”

“Splendid, Dinner!” cried Mr. Larkin, leading the way back to their table. “Write it down in your little book. Even the fact that it’s true cannot rob such an utterance of its brilliancy.”

A few minutes later another cork popped. The partners, minus Mr. Owen, were industriously at it again.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Mr. Owen’s Buff

Mr. Owen did not know the first thing about this city into which he had so recklessly thrown himself. He was not even sure that he had made good his escape. Had he seen the closed automobile draw up in front of the hotel into which he dodged he would have been somewhat skeptical on the point. And had he seen Madame Gloria, her fair face set in lines of grim determination, emerge from the car and sequester herself in the lobby of the hotel, his skepticism would have increased to the conviction that from the trap he had crawled into bed with the trapper.

A short time after these two seemingly unrelated arrivals the hotel was treated to a third. Satin, with blood in her eyes and champagne almost everywhere else, rushed impetuously through the wide doors, caught sight of Mr. Owen’s unassuming back, and ducked behind the nearest convenient chair. This happened to be occupied by a nervous gentleman whose sole desire in life was to be left alone. Satin was breathing hard. Feeling a draft on the top of his head the gentleman reluctantly put on his hat, a precaution which annoyed him a little owing to the existence of a headache directly beneath it. The draft ceased, but the sound of wind – a small, self-contained and irritatingly spasmodic wind – continued. Satin had been covering considerable ground. Beneath her fine upstanding chest her lungs were carrying on. The gentleman’s annoyance increased. He arose and peered over his chair.

“Why are you breathing on me?” he demanded.

“Got to breathe somewhere,” the girl explained.

“But not on me,” said the gentleman firmly.

“If you put your newspaper over your head,” she told him, “you won’t feel it.”

“I’ve already put on my hat,” he replied with a suggestion of bitterness. “Isn’t that enough?”

“Apparently not,” said Satin. “Do you want me to explode back here?”

The gentleman considered this possibility dispassionately.

“I wouldn’t mind,” he told her at last. “Better to get it over once and for all.”

“I’ve finished panting now,” she assured him. “Do me a bit of a favor, and I’ll send you a dirty book.”

“How did you know I like dirty books?” asked the gentleman in some surprise.

“You look it,” retorted Satin, not thinking.

“Mean I look dirty?” demanded the man.

“No,” explained the girl impatiently. “Just nasty. You know how.”

“How dirty is this book?” inquired the gentleman, deciding to let the point rest.

“Have we time to go into all that now?” expostulated Satin. “It’s got pictures.”

“All right,” said the man. “Here’s my card. Don’t forget the book. What do you want me to do?”

“See that chap at the desk,” she told him. “He seems to be having some trouble. Find out what room they give him and let me know.”

The gentleman departed in the direction of the desk. Satin turned her back and stood looking out on the street.

Mr. Owen was experiencing no little difficulty with the clerk, a man of apparently the loosest morals and the most astonishing propositions. Had the escaping partner known that he was endeavoring to book accommodations at the city’s most modern hotel, one which insisted on providing everything that would make for the comfort and entertainment of its guests, he would, perhaps, not have been so far at sea. As things stood, however, and in his somewhat confused mental condition, he was having a hard time in battling against the hospitable suggestions of the clerk.

“I don’t want to talk to you any more,” he said at last to this puzzled individual. “You seem able to think of only one thing. Will you please send me someone else – someone with some faint conception of propriety?”

Another clerk smilingly appeared and presented himself to Mr. Owen.

“Anything I can do for you, sir?” he asked in a confidential voice that gave Mr. Owen little hope.

“Yes,” he answered wearily. “I want a room and bath.”

“Do you want a double room with a single woman, sir?” inquired the clerk smoothly. “Or would you prefer a nice, cozy room with two of them?”

“Two of what?” asked Owen unwisely.

“Two of women,” replied the clerk.

“Haven’t you any rooms without women?” Mr. Owen asked rather hopelessly.

“None for gentlemen, sir,” said the clerk blandly. “It’s a depression measure, you know. The hotel provides accommodations for certain members of our indigent female population while they in turn provide companionship for our male guests. We consider it an exceptionally sensible arrangement.”

“I don’t know how sensible it is,” observed Mr. Owen, “but it certainly is good and immoral.”

“Not necessarily, you know,” replied the clerk. “Some men enjoy being read to, or waited on, or entertained in various other ways. It’s merely a matter of individual preference.”

“Well,” said Mr. Owen, “from what I’ve been able to learn of this town, people seem to think of only one form of entertainment.”

“That holds for every town,” the clerk replied philosophically. “You’ll always find it so. The only difference between this town and others is that here we make a virtue of what they make a vice.”

“A startling conception,” admitted Mr. Owen. “Doesn’t anyone ever sleep alone?”

“There’s no scientific basis in fact that a man should sleep alone,” replied the clerk.

“Is there any that he should sleep double?” asked Mr. Owen.

“No,” admitted the clerk, “but it seems more natural.”

“I didn’t come here to argue,” said Mr. Owen. “All I want is a room and bath.”

“I know,” said the clerk, growing a little impatient himself. “And all I want is to get you to commit yourself to some reasonable arrangement. Do you want a single lady and a double room or two of them in one?”

“How about a double woman and a single room?” Mr. Owen shot back, spitefully giving the clerk a little something to think about.

“A double woman,” murmured the clerk, running the pen through his glistening hair. “A double woman, you’re wanting. We’ve never had one of those. Isn’t it rather abnormal?”

“No more than a double Scotch and soda,” Mr. Owen replied.

“Isn’t it?” observed the clerk. “You must come from a rugged country. Wouldn’t two single women do as well?”

“I always take my women double,” retorted Mr. Owen. “It’s the only way.”

The clerk regarded him admiringly.

“It’s a new one on me,” he said at last, “but it does sound dandy. Where do you get these double women? It might be a good thing for us to know.”

“We breed them,” Mr. Owen replied in a hard voice. “In fact, I’ve got so used to double women that I don’t think I could stand ’em single. I’ve a couple of singles already knocking about somewhere. I’m trying to give them the gate.”

“Well,” said the clerk, once more referring the pen to his hair. “The women go with the room, you know. There’s no extra charge. Of course, you’ve got to feed them, and they don’t like being left alone.” He paused and looked perplexed. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” he went on. “You let me talk to the women. I’ll explain it to them. Trust me to handle them all right. You go on up to your room, and I’ll see what can be done about it. Don’t worry. And by the way—” here he paused again and leaned confidentially over to Mr. Owen – “when you have a double woman, what do you do with the other one?”

“Chloroform her,” said Mr. Owen briefly. “Or put her in a straitjacket.”

Without a word, but looking many, the clerk handed a key to room 707 to the waiting page boy, and a few moments later Mr. Owen was elevated by the lift to his room on the seventh floor.

“For you, sir,” said the boy, opening a door to a bathroom, then added, laconically, opening a door on the other side of the room, “This bath is for your women.”

“There’ll be no women,” replied Mr. Owen. “What’s behind those other two doors?”

“Guests, probably,” replied the boy. “They belong to the rooms on either side of this one. They can easily be unlocked, sir, should you desire larger quarters.”

“All I want is this room,” said Mr. Owen. “Just this room and a bed and a lot of privacy.”

“What about the women?” asked the boy.

“I’ll ring for them,” he was told.

“Sometimes they don’t even wait for that,” the boy remarked. “If you ask me, this place is a hotel in name only. Never saw such goings on.”

Mr. Owen regarded him nervously.

“Bring me a whole, full bottle of Scotch,” he said at last. “I’m going to make myself so that I won’t know that there’s such a thing as a woman within ten miles.”

“It’s the only way,” approved the page boy, departing with his tip. “Sometimes we have to drag our guests out by sheer force, the women take such a fancy to them. It’s hard to work with women – they don’t follow any rules.”

When the boy had gone, Mr. Owen walked to one of the windows and stood looking out over the city. Night had fallen now. Lights in rows and in clusters illuminated the darkness. Rivers of radiance flowed through the streets and boulevards, and occasionally splashed over their boundaries in great bursts of color in the parks and plazas. Faintly on the night air floated the strains of an orchestra embroidering the deep overtones of the city. In the park facing his window men and women were dancing while scarlet-jacketed waiters sped about between the trees with gleaming buckets of wine. A man in a velvet blouse was bending to the voice of his violin, his fingers stinging the strings along its shaft. The bare arms and shoulders of women attracted and tossed back the lights trickling through dark leaves.

Was everybody happy in this city, Mr. Owen wondered, or was this only a superficial glamour such as any city could show? He felt inclined to doubt it. As far as he had been able to discover during the short time he had been there the entire populace seemed to be much more interested in the way to enjoy life than in how to earn a living. This was how things should be, yet never were. Perhaps the encouragement of political graft and grafters was the solution. In a way it seemed logical. Political grafters usually took care of their friends. If the same benevolent attitude were extended to include the entire population, then everybody would be happy and no bad habits broken. It was a reasonable arrangement, after all, for instead of wasting a lot of time in attacking a system or a moral code as wrong, it took advantage of its wrongness and developed it to the point of perfection.

The boy, entering with the bottle and a bucket of ice, interrupted Mr. Owen’s musings. He was tired and needed a drink. He took several and no longer felt tired. Without a blessed responsibility in the world, either moral or financial, and with no fear of the morrow, Mr. Owen sat down and faced the bottle. It was remarkably good whisky, he decided. What was he going to do without a lot of responsibilities to shoulder, payments to meet, obstacles to overcome? How in the world was he ever going to get through the day without a swarm of worries nagging at his mind? Would his character become weak and flaccid? Would he lose his moral standards?

To keep himself from spiritual decay, would he have to start in and endeavor to reform this world? That would be a dreadful thing to do, but no doubt that was how, or rather why, so many reformers were always cropping up to trouble the peace of mankind. They wanted to save themselves rather than to save others. Why couldn’t a person be satisfied with his own ideals instead of trying to cram them down other people’s throats? God, if there was one, never got a chance. Humanity was formed and reformed and fumigated and eventually embittered before He even had an opportunity to find out what all the fuss was about.

It was not a good way to go on. Mr. Owen was convinced of that. He began to worry about God and humanity. He decided that neither would suffer and that he himself would improve greatly if he had another drink. He filled his glass and rang for the boy.

“I want the largest box of the largest cigars in the house,” Mr. Owen told him. “And I want some very large matches.”

“Yes, sir,” said the boy, apparently not surprised by such an order. “That whisky makes a body feel that way.”

Perhaps the boy was right. Mr. Owen did not know. He was feeling better now about both God and humanity. They would pull through somehow. In this town they put reformers in jail, which was a good thing, yet it went to show that the only way to fight intolerance was with intolerance. And just what did that prove? There could be no such animal as complete tolerance until people learned to mind their own business. And when would that be, might he ask? He laughed aloud sarcastically and was startled by the sound of his own voice. Another drink fixed him up. He was glad to see the boy.

“Those certainly are big matches and even bigger cigars,” he told the boy. “Where did you get such big matches, boy? They must be all of six inches long.”

“Yes,” agreed the boy. “They are very big matches, but they’re not the biggest matches.”

“No?” said Mr. Owen. “Have you ever seen bigger ones?”

“Sure,” replied the boy. “Out in the country they make ’em so long a man has to climb a tree to strike one on the seat of his pants.”

“Is that so?” replied the astonished Owen, thinking he understood, then suddenly realizing he did not. “How does that help?” he added. “How can he strike a match on the seat of his trousers way up in a tree?”

“He doesn’t,” replied the boy, “but the man on the ground does.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Owen, then looked suddenly at the boy. “Will you please go away,” he told him. “I hate stories like that. I hate even to think of the inane mind that conceives them. Imagine a man being so damned accommodating as to climb a tree— No,” he broke off, “I don’t like to think about it. You’d better go.”

The boy left, and Mr. Owen complacently resumed his drinking, a faint smile on his lips. He contemplated the twin beds and tried to decide which one he would choose. That double woman idea of his had been a good one. It had worked. The clerk had been greatly impressed. He, Mr. Owen, would not be troubled by a lot of loose women.

As he sat there drinking he wondered why he had run away from Satin. He suspected that she had been too bold, too sinister about her intentions. After all, he did really want her. He wanted her more than any woman he had ever known. He could not say why he did unless it was because she gave him a feeling of youth and expectancy. He wondered where she was now and what she was doing. That was too bad, too. The moment a man got interested in a woman he began to wonder where she was and what she was doing instead of just being satisfied when she happened to drop in. Still, if people did not remember each other they would get dressed in the morning, then rush out and forget to come back. Perhaps that would be a good thing, too. No lasting affiliations. Just a good time always.

He pulled his thoughts up with a start. Already his character was slipping. Depravity was setting in. He hoped a complete moral collapse was not far off. One could not arbitrarily dispose of one’s inhibitions. They had to be drugged first, then knocked over the head. Still smiling faintly, he rose and ambled, glass in hand, to the bathroom. The tub looked inviting. A man could almost swim in it – a man and a woman. Once more he wondered where Satin was. Then he wondered why it was that a lovely bathroom with lots of mirrors and gadgets in it always evoked indecorous, if not indecent, thoughts.

Perhaps the human mind was so constituted that it involuntarily rebelled against the idea of absolute cleanliness. Lots of people – nice ladies and gentlemen – must look at lovely bathrooms and think bad thoughts. A woman looking at this luxurious bathroom, for instance, just could not help seeing herself in it, and as it was a well known fact that a woman cannot enjoy seeing herself alone, she would naturally have someone else along with her, and, he supposed, that was not a very nice thing, or, at least, lots of people said so. He himself had better stop wondering about so many stupid things and turn on a few of those gleaming faucets before going to bed.

What a day it had been! Now that he came to think of it, the day had almost been a life – an entire life behind which his brain refused to penetrate. There had been other things once, but at the first suggestion of them his thoughts turned and wheeled about like a drove of frightened horses. A bath would be refreshing. It might improve his character; then again, it might not. Anyway, good people bathed occasionally as well as bad. Who was he to snap his fingers at a bath? He was glad there was no eel in it. Where was that girl now that he was all ready to take a bath? He would take a bath without her. He always had in the past. Why not now? He turned on his heel and began to undress in the casual fashion of the brooding male.

What with one thing and another, Mr. Owen became so preoccupied with his undressing that for the moment he lost that awareness of his surroundings which all males, either brooding or otherwise, should exercise when performing such a delicate operation. So deeply engrossed was he in some knotty moral problem that he failed to hear the stealthy opening of the door to one of the guests’ rooms.

Nor did he see the red head of a woman thrust itself through the aperture while two bright eyes studied his sparsely clad figure with frank but unladylike interest. He did see, however, just at the critical moment when he was about to attack the business of doing away with his drawers, the other door fly open and Madame Gloria, in almost as bad a fix as he was, standing resplendently in it.

“I see it all now!” cried the lady in a voice choked with emotion. “Everything is clear.”

Hearing the dazzling creature for once speaking the truth, Mr. Owen became convulsed.

“My God!” he exclaimed. “What a fix! I can’t stand looking even at myself, and I certainly shouldn’t look at you.”

“Gaze over your right shoulder,” Madame Gloria commanded, “and you will see something else again – something that will cause you to swoon in your tracks.”

“I need little help in that direction,” he muttered, glancing over his shoulder, and at that moment the room leaped into darkness.

In this comforting concealment Mr. Owen stood, undecided as to his next move. As he listened to the strains of the orchestra drifting in from the park, he wondered how God could permit people to dance and enjoy themselves while his plight received no attention.

“Quick!” came the penetrating whisper of Madame Gloria. “Leap into my room. We can carry on there.”

“A nice lady,” observed Mr. Owen aloud to himself in the darkness. “If that woman doesn’t go away they’ll have to carry me out on a stretcher.”

Whether he thought it was more impersonal or more forceful to address his remarks to Madame Gloria indirectly, Mr. Owen was not sure himself. For some strange reason it gave him the feeling of being less physically involved in the situation.

“I am still here,” called Madame Gloria sweetly.

“I feared as much,” said Mr. Owen. “But you shouldn’t be. Can’t you realize, Madame Gloria, that I am stripped to the buff?”

After this announcement there followed a long, pregnant silence which was finally broken by Madame Gloria’s voice.

“Listen,” she said with a trace of humility. “I’ve been acting all my life and I’ve missed a lot of words. What’s your buff?”

Mr. Owen thought about this for a moment, and while doing so became convinced that he heard someone giggling softly in the room. Was this implacable woman advancing noiselessly upon him to make her kill?

“You should know that as well as I do,” he exclaimed impatiently.

“Should I?” she asked. “Have I one – a buff?”

“How should I know, madam,” he asked wearily, “whether you have a buff or not? I suppose you have, but is this any time to enter into an academic discussion of buffs? Maybe it’s a state of being and not a thing at all.”

“It would be better so,” said Madame Gloria dryly. “Whenever I’m like this my audiences are in a state of frenzy.”

“So am I,” retorted Mr. Owen. “But you don’t hear me clapping unless it’s with my knees. Don’t creep up on me and spring without warning.”

“You looked cute with your buff,” came the musing voice of Gloria.

“In my buff, madame,” Mr. Owen corrected her. “It’s not with. I’m sure of that.”

“But you didn’t seem to be in hardly anything at all,” the woman protested. “Did you get them off?”

“What off?” asked Mr. Owen.

“Your funny little drawers,” replied the lady.

“Why do you want to know?” he demanded nervously.

“Who has a better right?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he retorted. “I can’t think clearly. I don’t even know if anybody has any right to know anything about my drawers.”

“That’s a pitiful condition to be in,” she observed sympathetically, “but cheer up. I won’t leave you long in doubt.”

This threat – or promise – left its hearer so unnerved that he was seized with a desire to drink. The inhibitions he had thought he was losing had flocked back to him from the past. A bathrobe would have saved his end of the situation. There was none. In the darkness he could not even find his trousers. As he reached out to grasp the bottle a shriek broke from his lips as his hand felt a bare arm. His fingers slid down it only to encounter a firm hand clutched round the object he was seeking. This time his shriek embodied a note of bitter disappointment. He had needed that drink and he still did. Was he surrounded by naked women? Was the darkness cluttered up with bodies? Abandoning his attempt to possess himself of the bottle he raced for the nearest bed, and jumping in, encountered a body in the flesh. This hotel must be used to shrieks, he thought to himself, emitting another one and reversing the direction of his jump like a diving figure in a playful newsreel. As he crawled towards the other bed the room was filled with sound. There was a scampering about in the darkness and a vigorous banging of doors. Fumbling greedily with the coverings of the second bed, he was about to crumble beneath them when the gentle voice of Madame Gloria turned him to a graven image.

“I’m here,” said Madame Gloria, “if you’re looking for me.”

“Will you tell me where you aren’t?” he chattered. “Only a second ago you were in the other bed.”

“Oh, no, I wasn’t,” came the playful reply. “That was the other one.”

“What other one?” he asked in a dazed voice.

“The other woman,” the lady explained.

“Holy smokes,” faltered the man, reverting to the vernacular of his youth like a person approaching the end. “Are there two of you in this room?”

“At the very least,” replied Madame Gloria.

“Two women and one buff,” came a voice from the other bed. “Who gets the buff?”

“From the way he’s acting,” complained Madame Gloria’s bed, “a person would get the impression it was a blind man’s buff.”

“There’s none so blind as will not see,” observed the other voice, which he recognized now as that of Satin. “This chap won’t even feel.”

“Are you two going to chat there comfortably in my beds,” demanded Mr. Owen, “while I crouch here in the darkness?”

“Why not transfer the scene of your crouching to my bed,” inquired Satin, “and then we can all chat together?”

“If you get in bed with that woman,” cried Madame Gloria, “I’ll damn well drag you out, buff or no buff.”

“I heartily hope you do,” said Mr. Owen with all sincerity.

“That works both ways, mister,” Honor told him.

“You don’t have to worry,” said Mr. Owen, “neither of you. I’d rather crawl in bed with a couple of bears.”

“No animal could be barer than I am,” commented Satin thoughtfully. “Not even a billiard ball.”

“For shame,” reproved Mr. Owen.

“That’s right,” said Satin. “For shame, it is. What would a girl do if it wasn’t for her shame?”

“I thoroughly enjoy mine,” put in Madame Gloria. “Quite frankly, I admit it.”

“Well, I can’t bear mine,” declared Mr. Owen. “If you all don’t go away, I’m going to lock myself in one of the bathrooms.”

“Who’s got a match?” asked Satin. “I want to light a cigarette.”

“You do yourself well, don’t you?” Mr. Owen asked sarcastically. “Cigarettes and everything. I suppose you’ve got my bottle, too.”

“I have,” replied Satin. “I sip it from time to time. Crawl in and I’ll give you a swig.”

“If he does,” grated Madame Gloria, “I’ll yank him clean out of those funny little drawers.”

“You’d be one yank too late,” chortled Satin, and even Madame Gloria was forced to laugh softly to herself in the darkness.

“I don’t see how you can laugh,” Mr. Owen lamented. “Suppose the partners knew where you were, Miss Knightly?”

“They’d all be right in with me,” asserted Satin. “Pell-mell and topsy-turvy. They’re not sexually illiterate, like you – not those boys.”

“Sex! Sex! Sex!” cried Mr. Owen. “Sex morning noon and – —”

“What are you shouting about?” interrupted Honor. “You’ve got plenty of sex around. Aren’t the two of us enough?”

“The way that man calls for his sex,” put in Madame Gloria, “you’d think he wanted a harem.”

“I’ve met men like that,” commented Satin. “Never willing to start at the bottom rung.”

“I hate ladders in my stockings, too,” observed Madame Gloria, apropos of nothing as far as Mr. Owen could see.

A match suddenly flared in the darkness.

“There he goes!” cried Honor Knightly. “It’s hard to say whether it’s a man running away in drawers, or a pair of drawers running away with a man.”

“Looks like a running man in drawers,” replied the other lady as the match went out. “Wonder where he’s going?”

“Maybe he’s getting ready to spring on us,” suggested Honor.

“He’d have to be all spraddled out to land on us both,” observed Madame Gloria. “Doubt if he could make it.”

They were not long in finding out. Mr. Owen had dashed to the nearest bathroom and was clawing at the door. It flew open in his grasp, and he looked in upon a strange woman splashing busily in the bathtub.

“Come in,” she said calmly. “What’s your hurry?”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Hour Grows Late

“I’m not in a hurry,” gasped Mr. Owen, backing out of the room. “I’m in a whirl.”

“Come back!” called the woman as he sped in the direction of the other bathroom. “I won’t look.”

This invitation served only to increase Mr. Owen’s speed. He reached the door, flung it open, and dashed inside, slamming it behind him. Almost immediately the two ladies in the beds were treated to a series of animal-like cries such as they had never heard before. Mingled with them were the entreating notes of a woman’s voice.

“My God!” cried Honor. “A woman’s got him in that one. To the rescue!”

Merging the worst features of their seemingly one and only interest in life, the two women sprang from their beds and raced to the bathroom door.

“Come out of there!” cried Honor.

“What are you doing now?” called the more imaginative Madame Gloria.

“Wrestling with a woman,” came from Mr. Owen in grunts, “and she’s all wet and naked.”

“I’ll fix her,” grated Satin. “Which way are you wrestling – for or against?”

“Why don’t you answer?” cried Madame Gloria nervously. “We can’t see a thing. Why is the door locked? We want to know everything.”

“Well, you can’t be a Graham McNamee in the arms of a naked woman,” Mr. Owen panted as caustically as conditions would permit. “Especially a wet one with soap all over her. I can’t grab hold.”

“Of what?” asked Satin.

“Of anything,” called Mr. Owen.

“That’s just as well,” put in Madame Gloria.

“If you two molls would go away,” came the voice of the woman behind the door, “I’d soon have him eating out my hand.”

“I’d rather see him starve first,” said Madame Gloria in a tragic voice.

“I don’t give a damn about his appetite,” put in Satin. “I’m worrying about his buff, whatever that may be.”

“Yes,” agreed Madame Gloria. “He seemed to set a great deal of store by that buff. We have to get him out.” She rattled the door furiously. “Why don’t you come out?” she cried. “Unlock the door, and we’ll drag you out.”

“I’m trying to,” Mr. Owen called back, “but my hand is trembling so I can’t turn the key.”

“All right,” broke in the disgusted voice of his captor. “All right. Go on out. I don’t want a nervous wreck.”

In the meantime the lady in the other bathroom, hearing the noise, had emerged drippingly, clad strategically in a towel.

“Where’d he go?” she inquired of the other two. “I caught only a glimpse of him.”

At this moment the bathroom door flew open, and she caught another. Mr. Owen found himself between two fires with the light from behind flooding down on the scene. He took one paralyzed look at all the bare flesh by which he was surrounded; then, snatching the towel from the clutches of the first bathing woman, flung it over his head.

“Back to your places!” he screamed. “Back to your beds and baths, or I’ll throw you all out on your – —”

“On our whats?” demanded Satin.

“On your ears,” he retorted. “Make it snappy.”

There was a patter of bare feet, then quiet settled down.

“You may come out from under that towel now,” Satin’s voice proclaimed.

“I’m going to live beneath this towel for the remainder of my life,” he answered firmly.

“I think you’re about to lose a button,” Madame Gloria said comfortably from the pillow. “The button, I’d be inclined to suppose.”

With great promptitude Mr. Owen snatched the towel from his head and flipped it round his waist.

“You’ve got four of us now,” observed Satin. “What are you going to do with so many?”

“I’ll show you,” said Mr. Owen, striding over to the telephone. “I’m going to have you all chucked out.”

“On our ears?” inquired Honor.

“I don’t give a damn what they chuck you out on,” he retorted into the transmitter.

“And as for me,” came back a voice over the wire, “I don’t give a damn if they slit your throat from ear to ear.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Mr. Owen hastened to explain to the operator at the other end. “I’m sorry. Please give me the desk.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” the girl’s voice replied. “If you’ve no objection to my sex I’ll come up there and help you to chuck them out myself, whoever they may be.”

“For God’s sake, don’t,” he cried. “I’m oversexed already. I want the room clerk.”

“The room clerk!” exclaimed the girl. “What on earth does a man in your condition want with the room clerk?”

Mr. Owen emitted a howl of rage.

“Calm yourself, dearie,” came the voice of the operator. “I’ll give you the room clerk, though I must say— Hold on, here he is.”

“Hello!” cried Mr. Owen. “Room clerk? Good! I’ve got two beds and two baths, and there is a naked woman in each.”

“What more do you want?” asked the room clerk. “We haven’t any double women, if that’s what you’re after.”

“I’m not,” snapped Mr. Owen. “But where do you expect me to go?”

“I don’t know about you,” said the clerk, “but if I was fixed up as you are, I’d either go to bed or take a bath. You can’t lose.”

“Something has to be done about all these women,” fumed Mr. Owen. “And that without further delay.”

“I should say so,” agreed the clerk. “The night isn’t getting any shorter. By rights you’re entitled to only two women. How did you manage to smuggle the others in?”

“I didn’t smuggle them in,” Mr. Owen protested. “They smuggled themselves in.”

“Women are great hands at that,” philosophically observed the clerk. “You seem to be having all the luck.”

“Listen,” Mr. Owen pleaded. “You don’t seem to understand. There are two beds and two baths. So far I’ve got a woman in each.”

“Let’s see,” broke in the clerk. “If I remember your room rightly that leaves three chairs and one sofa unoccupied. Do you want a woman in each of those?”

“Are you mad?” thundered Mr. Owen.

“No,” replied the room clerk, “but you must be, not to be satisfied with a couple of beds and bathtubs filled with women.”

“I said you didn’t understand,” wailed Mr. Owen. “I’m more than satisfied. Much more than satisfied.”

“Ah!” exclaimed the gratified clerk. “I have been stupid, haven’t I? You want to compliment the hotel, don’t you? Well, I’m sure the management will be delighted to hear you’ve had a good time. Go right to it. What a stupid ass I’ve been.”

“You still are,” groaned Mr. Owen, and hung up the telephone, a beaten man.

Suddenly he was seized by a mad idea. Springing up from the telephone, he fled across the room in the direction of Madame Gloria’s door. Up from the beds and out of the baths like four naked bats out of hell the women raced after him. Across Madame Gloria’s room he sped and out into the hall, his pursuers close behind. Here his flight was arrested by the sudden descent of his drawers. Yet even as he fell he had time to thank his God he was landing face forward. When he did land, the women behind him passed over his prostrate body and became hopelessly entangled on the other side. Still in the clutch of inspiration, he sprang to his feet and, pulling up his treacherous drawers with one hand, dashed back to the room he had just quitted and locked the door behind him. Hurrying into his own room, he seized the bottle of whisky and took a deep pull. From the hall came the sounds of agitated female voices. Hands were beating on his door. Mr. Owen grinned and drank again. His telephone bell was ringing. Applying his ear to the receiver he listened blandly.

“Say!” came the voice of the clerk. “The floor operator tells me that there are four naked women beating on your door and raising howling hell in the hall to be let in.”

“Good!” cried Mr. Owen. “It’s music to my ears. I was expecting them.”

“But, man alive,” went on the clerk, “you’ve already got four naked women, and with these four it makes eight altogether. How many more do you want? People sleep in this hotel occasionally, you know.”

“No,” said Mr. Owen. “I didn’t know that. Well, I’m going to be one of them.”

He hung up the instrument and turned back with a satisfied smile to the room. Four indignantly naked women were watching him with glittering eyes.

“You forgot the other door, didn’t you, dearie?” said Madame Gloria in oversweetened tones.

“And that’s going to be just too bad for you,” added Satin, her small white teeth gleaming.

Mr. Owen made one dive for the bed. The women made four. All landed safely, Mr. Owen on the bottom. At this moment the partners, escorted by a page boy with a passkey, entered the room with the glacial dignity of the elaborately drunk.

“Dear me!” exclaimed Mr. Larkin. “What a bevy! And where can Owen be? Ah! There he is! Underneath the bevy, of all places.”

“Is he the one with the drawers?” asked Mr. Dinner.

“Yes,” said Mr. Larkin. “The only one with drawers, if my eyes do not deceive me.”

“He won’t have them on long,” Major Barney remarked placidly, “the way they’re going for him.”

The presence of the gentlemen spread consternation in the ranks of the ladies who, to Mr. Owen’s surprise, suddenly developed scruples hitherto unsuspected. In their own strange way these women had their standards. Up to this point each one of them had believed herself to be rightfully entitled to Mr. Owen. In the face of an audience they were willing to abandon their claim. And they abandoned it as energetically as it had previously been pressed. They literally took Mr. Owen up and tossed him at his partners’ feet. After that they divided the bedclothing and sat expectantly swathed.

“And now,” resumed Mr. Larkin smoothly, this time addressing the highly edified page boy, “if you’ll be so good as to hurry away and bring back leagues of sandwiches and oceans of strong drinks, we’ll see what can be done to make this evening pleasanter – or is it morning? I forget which. Does it really matter?” As the boy hurried away, he turned to Mr. Owen. “I ask you,” he resumed. “Does it? No. All that really matters is that you get some trousers on as speedily as possible. And that only matters to you, although sometimes I feel we are liberal to a fault.”

Mr. Owen rose and shook each of his partners by the hand.

“Gentlemen,” he said, looking vindictively at the ladies seated like so many Orientals on the beds, “you saved me from a living death.”

“I cannot think of a happier one,” Mr. Larkin replied, bowing to the four swathed figures. “Who are the other two? I don’t seem to recall their faces.”

“We go with the room,” explained one of them in a husky voice.

“And he didn’t want us,” said the other, “but we sneaked in anyway, just in case he changed his mind.”

“Conscientious to the last,” observed Mr. Larkin approvingly. “You seemed even willing to change his mind for him.”

“Let bygones be bygones,” said Mr. Owen with a grin as he collected his scattered garments and made for the bathroom. In a moment he reappeared and picked up the bottle. “You know,” he explained, “this bottle and these drawers and myself have been through so much together we can’t bear to be separated.”

“You almost were,” said Satin grimly. “And if you keep flaunting yourself before us I’ll snatch you as naked as a babe in arms.”

Mr. Owen departed, this time not to return until securely as well as completely clad. His bottle was now empty, but the room was full of drinks. As usual the partners had done things on a tremendous scale. Everywhere Mr. Owen turned, a glass or bottle was ready to his hand. Nor did it take long for them to find their way to his lips. On the two beds the ladies sat in their drapery and munched sandwiches. In their eyes was that knowing expression of women awaiting developments which experience has taught them were quite inevitable even when unsolicited.

“I’ve literally thrown away my night,” declared Madame Gloria, adding an empty glass to two others already beside her. “Simply tossed it away.”

“Why, my dear lady,” protested Mr. Larkin. “All is far from lost. Instead of getting one man, you’ve got the four of us. Think of that.”

“Yes,” replied Madame Gloria. “I am. Three old faces and one new but stupid one.”

“And lots of free drinks,” put in the practical Mr. Dinner.

“They make up for a little,” assented Madame Gloria, “but not for all – not for the new and stupid face. I’d like to slap it.”

“Why can’t you cultivate an attitude of indifference towards me?” asked Mr. Owen annoyingly. “My face may be new to you, but really it’s an old, old story.”

“But, my dear man,” explained Madame Gloria. “I haven’t seen the last chapter yet.”

“No, but you have almost everything else,” Satin lazily observed. “All of us have. Weren’t his little drawers enough?”

“Those drawers were almost too much,” Madame Gloria agreed reminiscently. “Especially when they tripped him.”

“Can’t you veer this subject, Mr. Larkin?” asked Mr. Owen, feeling that his once secret life had now become a public scandal. “Those drawers of mine are exhausted.”

The senior partner daintily shot back an immaculate cuff and examined a magnificent wrist watch.

“It is,” he said, “exactly three o’clock in the morning. At this hour people, if they sleep at all, are usually attempting forty winks – that is, if both parties are willing.”

“Which is ideal,” put in Mr. Dinner.

“It does make for party harmony,” agreed Mr. Larkin. “But to continue. The halls of this hotel are infinitely long, and broad almost to a fault. For gentlemen that stagger, as what gentleman doesn’t, they are occasionally discouraging. One either falls down or grows sober before hitting them. For a man who veers as much as I do, whether drunk or sober, this becomes quite a trial. It throws the responsibility for my progress on my own shoulders instead of on the walls. I mean, the walls themselves – not their shoulders. Anyway, that’s not what I’m talking about.”

“No?” inquired Honor Knightly. “Would it upset you greatly to veer round to what you are talking about?”

“Not at all,” was the ready response. “Only, my dear lady, don’t fly out at me. What I wanted to say was that I would like to have me a little foot racing done. There! I’ve said it.”

“You have,” remarked Major Barney, “but not very clearly. How do you mean, ‘I would like to have me a little foot racing done?’ It’s not even bad English. It’s worse. Something seems to be there, but one can’t quite find it. Do you mean that you would like to sit in a chair and watch others run foot races for you, or that you desire to participate yourself in some damn fool sporting event, or just what intelligence are you trying to convey through the medium of human speech?”

“I would like to run a foot race on foot,” said Mr. Larkin simply, but in a slightly offended voice. “But I’m getting a little exhausted about it even before it’s started.”

“Well, that’s clear, at least,” commented Major Barney. “Does anyone else feel like running a foot race on foot?”

“How?” asked Mr. Owen, who had secretly won tremendous races in the past.

“On foot,” replied Major Barney.

“Oh,” said Mr. Owen. “If it’s on foot, I’ll run one.”

“On what foot?” asked Mr. Dinner, blinking.

“On one’s best foot,” supplied Mr. Larkin. “One puts it forward, you know.”

“And drags the other behind, I suppose?” Dinner retorted with bitter sarcasm.

“No,” answered Mr. Larkin. “One gives the other foot every encouragement. Although, so far as I’m concerned, one can take it or leave it, as one likes.”

“I’m worried about my drawers,” said Mr. Owen.

“Take ’em off, man! Take ’em off!” the Major ruggedly exclaimed. “Your face is not the only old, old story about you.”

“No,” decided Mr. Owen. “I think I prefer to keep my drawers on. After all, a foot race is serious business.”

“Especially when it’s on foot,” added Mr. Dinner.

“Sure,” put in Honor Knightly. “If he were running this foot race on his hands, his drawers would stay up anyway, wouldn’t they?”

“How true,” remarked Mr. Larkin. “And how unnecessary.”

As a consequence of these elaborate preliminaries the two foot racers, Mr. Larkin and Mr. Owen, accompanied by their supporters, proceeded noisily to the hall, where they took up their positions. They were rather unsteady about this, but meticulous as to details. When they attempted to toe their marks in the conventional posture of the runner, both had to be lifted from their faces upon which they had slowly collapsed. The race itself started somewhat casually, both Mr. Owen and Mr. Larkin having to be pushed into operation. As they trotted down the magnificent hall their friends and admirers followed them at a respectful distance. As a matter of fact, they were forced to gear themselves down in order to keep from outstripping the contestants.

“I didn’t know you were a racing enthusiast,” observed Mr. Larkin, veering over towards his rival. “To be quite frank I never knew that I was one before. It is jolly if one doesn’t go too fast.”

“Well, I’m not sure even now,” replied Mr. Owen, “whether I’m a racing enthusiast or not. I’ve often enjoyed myself thinking I was one.”

“Are you like that, too?” exclaimed Mr. Larkin, barely getting his best foot forward. “So am I. I dearly love to think of things. Oh, yes, yes. I’m a great thinker. Once I thought I was the Sultan of Turkey and, would you believe it, before I could change my mind, I had dragged seventeen strange women into my house and was eventually discovered chasing a terrified Negro porter with a huge pair of shears. It’s amazing, isn’t it? I mean when one thinks deeply of anything. I was thinking almost too deeply. You see, I must have wanted a harem down to the last detail.”

“The Negro being the last detail,” observed Mr. Owen.

“Yes,” agreed Mr. Larkin. “It’s a good thing for him he could run so fast. He ran even faster than we are now, if anything.”

“He had something to run for,” commented the other competitor.

“Didn’t he, though,” agreed Mr. Larkin. “Under similar circumstances I’d have run, too. I’d have fairly torn along – much faster than this.”

“Has any special distance been thought of in connection with this race?” Mr. Owen inquired politely.

“None at all, so far as I know,” came the cheerful reply. “I guess we’ll just keep running round these halls until we get sick of it, or they get sick of us, or we think of something else to do.”

“But who wins?” asked Mr. Owen.

“That’s for us to decide,” Mr. Larkin said with some complacency. “That’s where we have the advantage. We hold the winning trick.”

“How do you mean?” Mr. Owen wanted to know.

“I’ll think that up, too,” he was informed, “and let you know later. At the moment everything is in abeyance. We’re coming to a corner.”

They achieved the corner with dignity if not with speed, and continued on in amiable conversation. And as they progressed, doors opened up along the hall behind them. People in various stages of dishevelment appeared in these open doors and wanted to know things. Not receiving a satisfactory answer, they joined the ranks of the following party to find out for themselves. Presently a considerable crowd of people, ignorant both as to why they were running and where they were running, were milling quite contentedly through the corridors of the hotel. Clerks and page boys arrived on the scene to inquire into the reasons for this unusual activity. Inasmuch as no one was able to enlighten them, they too joined the ranks and started running with the best of them. Presently this impressive body of guests, clerks and attendants overtook and passed the two innocent causes of its existence. They were too busy conversing to give any coherent answers to the questions put to them. They desired to be let alone, and had entirely forgotten why they were there themselves. Looking after the hundreds of figures disappearing down the hall ahead of them, Mr. Larkin’s curiosity was aroused in a refined, unobtrusive way.

“Goodness gracious,” he exclaimed. “Look at all those persons running round the halls. Wonder where they can be going at this time of night?”

“I don’t know about them,” observed Mr. Owen, “but I’m getting pretty tired and thirsty. There should be barrooms along these halls for long-distance runners like us.”

“Perhaps if we keep on running, we’ll come at last to your room, like Magellan – or was it MacFadden? – I don’t know which.”

At length, barely able to distinguish the best foot from the worst, they staggered through the door of 707 and fell panting on the beds, where they lay until refreshed by a drink. The others, who had lost interest in the race, sat around with glasses in hand and waited patiently while the athletes got their breath.

“Open a bottle of champagne,” gasped Mr. Larkin.

“Are you tired?” Mr. Dinner asked.

“Are we tired?” exclaimed Mr. Larkin. “My God, this hotel is endless. There’s absolutely no stopping it. It goes on and on and on just as I do at times. Only I’m never tiresome. We’re simply broken reeds, that’s all there is to it.”

“But who won?” asked Major Barney.

“Won what?” asked Mr. Owen.

“Make yourself clearer,” said the senior partner. “There’s not a veer left in my mind.”

“Why, the race, of course,” explained one of the ladies who went with the room. “Who won that?”

“Oh,” said Mr. Larkin. “We were running a race, weren’t we? That’s so, too.” He paused as if thinking deeply, then swung his feet off the bed. “From the speed the manager of the hotel was making when we last saw him,” he resumed, “I’d say he was making a strong bid for supremacy. We gave our places to him because, after all is said and done, it’s his hotel, and if he doesn’t deserve to get a little fun out of it, I’d like to know who does.”

As nobody else seemed to know, the party turned its attention to more serious matters.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Behind the Settee

Mr. Owen was never able to recall with any degree of accuracy all of the events leading up to the closing of that day. And that is, perhaps, just as well for the peace of his overworked soul. However, he was able to recall with almost too convincing vividness exactly how the next one began.

On the mezzanine floor of that splendid hotel there was a huge settee, cutting off one of the secluded corners of the balcony lounge. And this imposing example of opulent luxury had an inexplicably lofty back. It was in the corner behind this settee that the day of the debauched Mr. Owen began. He did not begin it alone. By no means. He shared it jointly with a woman who was lying in a state of appalling disorder weightily upon his chest. She was face down, and when he awoke and discovered her there he found himself wondering in a dim sort of way why she had not smothered.

Then, with less dimness, he found himself wondering whether she had smothered. Perhaps she had done that very thing and was lying there dead on his chest. To awaken with a dead woman on one’s chest is not an encouraging start for a new day. Had he not been rendered unfit by all the devils of a hangover, Mr. Owen would have been subject to panic. As it was he merely lay quite still and considered things. Should he push this dead woman off? No. If she were not quite dead, such a rude act might finish her. And if she were by chance alive, it certainly would enrage her. Far better to have a dead woman on one’s chest than an enraged one. It was quieter. Less disturbing. Less upsetting to a man in his delicate condition. A better thing it would be to go into the situation, to make some reasonable, tentative inquiries. He would do that. So he said in a thickly muffled voice: “Who are you?”

The woman stirred faintly. She was not dead but dying. Presently she spoke, and to the prostrate Mr. Owen it sounded as if she were using a large portion of her last breath.

“Just a nameless old moll,” she said, “cast up by the river.”

Having established Satin’s identity, Mr. Owen now attempted to do the same thing for their somewhat sordid locality.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“Your honor,” inquired Satin, “am I in the witness box?”

“No,” he told her. “You’re on my chest, most definitely and disastrously on my chest. I am deflated.”

The girl rolled off and looked up dizzily at the high back of the settee.

“We must have fallen down the sheer face of a cliff,” she observed. “What a way!”

Mr. Owen then put a third terse question.

“How did we get here?” he asked.

“Climbed over, I guess,” said Satin. “Or dived.”

“How pretty that must have been,” reflected Mr. Owen, “We didn’t even stop on the sofa proper.”

“It wouldn’t have been proper to stop on the sofa,” was Satin’s prim reply.

“With thousands of beds in this hotel at our disposal,” continued Mr. Owen bitterly, “we had to pick out a corner behind a damned divan.”

“At least it showed a certain amount of nimbleness and determination,” she reminded him. “That’s saying much for a couple in our condition.”

“Did you lure me here or did I lure you?” Mr. Owen wondered.

“As to that, I cannot say,” she replied. “Maybe we veered together, as Mr. Larkin would put it. Perhaps now I’m Honor in name only. A sorry business – what?”

“Let’s pass over that,” he suggested. “It now remains to be established, why did we get here?”

“In pursuit of privacy, I suppose. Or just in the spirit of fun. You know, romping.”

It must be mentioned that all the while this unedifying dialogue was progressing a solitary gentleman whose only distinctions in life were a long beard and an inquiring mind was sitting on the other side of the settee. He had come there to peruse his paper in peace and privacy. He had found neither. At first, when these muffled sounds had begun to rise weirdly over the top of the settee, he had not been definitely convinced as to their source. In fact, he had somewhat doubted their actual existence and rather suspected his ears. But as wonder gradually changed to conviction, his amazement and apprehension increased. Abandoning his paper, he listened with a feeling akin to awe. He was a harmless soul but a persistent one. All he wanted to do was to know and to understand. Such persons should more often be discovered murdered in lonely spots. His curiosity was rapidly becoming unbearable. Also he was a little alarmed. More than a little. He was absolutely confounded. Settees did not usually talk, much less converse. As a matter of truth, they never did either. Never at all. At no time and in no place. This manifestation was positively uncanny.

At this point in the gentleman’s reflections, Satin exhibited the bad taste to emit several low but penetrating groans of sheer bodily anguish. They sounded as if they had been wafted from some tortured spirit in hell. This was a little too much for the gentleman’s nerves, as well as his curiosity. He must look behind this loquacious couch. He must find out. To achieve this it was necessary for him to kneel on the seat and to peer over its high back. This action gave to the bearded head the effect of having been severed. That is, this is the way the head appeared to those lying directly beneath it. There it was, beard and all, perched gruesomely on the ledge of the settee. Which way it would topple God alone knew. And only He could divine what was the intent of the head, whether it was evil or otherwise. Obviously with such a head it could hardly be otherwise. These were the distressing thoughts that trembled through Mr. Owen’s mind as he gazed up for one horror-stricken moment at the apparition peering interestedly down on him. Satin failed to see it, having buried her head in her arms to suffer more privately. Mr. Owen decided to do likewise, and this with all possible speed. It was the only thing left to do, under the circumstances. Accordingly, after having satisfied the demands of his terror in one short, startled shriek, he too rolled over on his stomach and concealed his starting eyes in his arms. The head, equally startled, ducked quickly from view.

“God!” sobbed Mr. Owen. “What was that?”

“What was what?” inquired Satin.

“What I just saw,” quavered Mr. Owen.

“Describe it,” answered his companion. “In detail.”

“Don’t ask me to do that,” he pleaded. “To think about the thing chills my blood. To describe it would kill me outright.”

“Perhaps it will reappear,” Satin hopefully observed.

“God could never be so cruel, in spite of all the things I’ve done,” the man replied in a voice of prayer. “It was a terrible thing to see in the best of health. With a hangover, it was beyond – – Oh, let’s sing or pray or talk of other things.”

“Put your best foot forward,” urged the girl, “and tell us what it was.”

“It was a head,” replied Mr. Owen, almost in a whisper. “Just that. Don’t ask for more. Simply but awfully a head.”

“What sort of a head?”

“I knew you would ask that,” her companion whined. “Does it matter what sort? Just a head of anything is nothing to be sneezed at.”

“No,” came thoughtfully from Satin. “That wouldn’t be nice. That wouldn’t show good breeding. Nor would it damage the head greatly.”

“You shouldn’t jest,” declared Mr. Owen. “This was a most unusual head. There was a beard to it.”

“Then it must have been a man’s head.”

“Ha! Ha!” laughed Mr. Owen in hysterical frenzy. “Did you think I was talking of a pig’s head?”

“If you had been,” replied Satin, “I’d be able to see some sense in it, because I know that if I looked up and suddenly beheld a pig’s head peering down it would scare the lights out of me.”

“Rather the head of a pig,” declared Mr. Owen, “than this devil’s head I saw.”

“All right,” said Satin soothingly. “Now that that’s settled, will you tell me what sort of a beard?”

“How do you mean what sort of a beard?” he asked wearily.

“I mean, had it any points of distinction?” explained the girl.

“I don’t know the first thing about beards,” he moaned back at her. “It was just a beard, you know – all hair.”

“Oh,” reflected Satin. “I see. All hair. Not a mixed beard. Well, approximately, how long was this beard?”

“Don’t even know that, but it was quite long enough.”

“Long enough for what?”

“Long enough to upset me for the day,” Mr. Owen asserted. “It was a most disconcerting beard!”

“Too vague,” replied the girl. “I don’t quite see that beard. Now, had it been a long, strong beard you might have grabbed hold of it and pulled yourself up.”

Mr. Owen shuddered from both nausea and revolted sensibilities.

“I wouldn’t touch a hair of that beard,” he stoutly declared. “Not a hair.”

“What good would that have done?” demanded Satin. “And besides, it’s very hard to touch only one hair in a beard.”

“I know nothing about that,” Mr. Owen retorted with a feeble show of dignity. “Have you ever tried?”

“Never actually tried, but it stands to reason.”

“My reason totters when I think of that beard.”

“Well, let’s drop the beard,” the girl suggested briskly, “and take up the mustache. I suppose there was one?”

“The way you go on,” protested the huddled figure, “you’d think I’d studied with loving eyes every line in that horror’s face.”

“I’d loved to have seen that head with beard attached,” Satin observed regretfully, rolling over on her side. Suddenly she dug a finger into Mr. Owen’s ribs. He uttered a sharp yelp. “Room mate,” she whispered. “Hector! I see it. Roll over and look.”

“What! Me look?” chattered her room mate. “Don’t be foolish. I’ve seen it. You look, if you like. Feed your eyes on the ghastly object. Me – never.”

Then, with surprising naturalness, the head found voice and spoke.

“What are you doing down there?” it wanted to know.

“Swimming,” said Satin coolly. “Swimming. The water’s great.”

Mr. Owen nudged her frantically.

“Don’t go on like that,” he whispered. “You’re virtually inviting the thing to come down.”

“No,” said the head. “I mean it. What can you be doing down there?”

“Just flopping about in agony,” said the girl. “You know how it is.”

“Then why on earth don’t you get up and go to your room?” demanded the head.

“Oh, no,” replied the girl hastily. “We like it here. We always reserve this space whenever we come to this hotel.”

“You do?” said the head in tones of astonishment. “And they let you have it?”

“Swept and garnished,” Satin assured him. “With sofa back and rug.”

“Goodness gracious,” reflected Mr. Owen. “What a woman! She can actually kid that atrocity, while I can’t even look at it.”

“But I desire very much to read my newspaper,” trickled complainingly through the beard dangling above the two bodies. “It’s a morning one.”

“Then why not read it?” retorted Satin. “We don’t want your old paper.”

“But how can I do that,” the head wanted to know, “with a pair of strange voices directly behind me?”

“In the customary manner,” replied Satin. “Or in any way you like. Perhaps if you read aloud we might all be able to get some news.”

“Nonsense,” expostulated the head. “That would look silly. Suppose someone should come along? There I’d be sitting on the sofa reading aloud to apparently nobody at all. They’d think I was a little cracked.”

“Well, aren’t you?” inquired Satin. “Strikes me your mental hinges needed a spot of oil somewhere.”

“I’ll tell you this, my fine lady,” snapped back the head. “You’re the one who is cracked.”

“You shouldn’t say that,” said Satin severely.

“If not, then,” continued the head, “what are you doing down there and how did you get down there, may I ask?”

“You may ask,” replied Satin, “but ask someone who knows. Then tell us the answer. We’d be very much interested.”

At this point Mr. Owen, assured of the harmlessness of the once frightful object, raised himself feebly on an elbow.

“Will you please go away?” he coldly asked the head.

“Ah!” cried the head. “So at last your husband has the courtesy to address me.”

“Am I supposed to engage in conversation with every blessed soul that comes barging into my room?” the man below demanded.

“But it isn’t really a room,” protested the head. “Not properly speaking. It’s a public place, and you’re in it. That’s all.”

“Well, isn’t that enough?”

“It’s more than enough. It’s too much. I want to read my paper. I always read it here.”

“Then read it here, damn it,” grated Mr. Owen, “but leave us in peace. You have no idea how sick we are.”

Immediately Mr. Owen realized he had said the wrong thing. The gentleman belonging to the head was easily interested in almost anything, but nothing fascinated him more than the bodily ailments of others.

“You are?” he exclaimed. “Both of you? I didn’t know that. Just what is the trouble?”

“Cholera!” Mr. Owen flung at him.

“Listen, mister,” said Satin. “Is there a body attached to that bearded head of yours?”

“Oh, I’ve body enough,” the head replied. “Why?”

“I was only thinking,” the girl said, “that if you want to keep it intact you’d better collect its various members and carry them speedily away. This is a plague spot, and you’re right in it.”

The beard wagged its indecision.

“Although I don’t believe you,” came through it, “I’m not going to take any chances. I’m going right away and tell the manager.”

“Good!” exclaimed Mr. Owen. “He’ll love you for that.”

Like the sudden dropping of the moon the head slipped from view over the rim of the settee.

“Alone at last,” murmured Satin, and without rhyme or reason, placed her lips against the surprised but unreluctant lips of Hector Owen.

“What do you think of that?” she asked after she had finished kissing him as it is given to few men to be kissed, that is, by Satin.

“I’d think quite a lot of it,” he said slowly when breath had returned to his body, “if it meant a damn thing to you, but it doesn’t.”

“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “What do you think of it as a kiss pure and simple?”

“I think,” he replied with conviction, “that it was far from pure and it certainly wasn’t simple.”

“As to the first, you may be right,” she admitted, “but you’re wrong about the last part. For me, it’s child’s play.”

“Although you put it somewhat crudely,” said Mr. Owen, “you interest me strangely. Do you mean to lie there in shocking disorder and tell me that kiss was a mere sample of your latent powers to destroy the soul of a man?”

“I do,” she replied soberly. “Assuming a man has a soul.”

“My good, good God,” murmured Mr. Owen, brushing the moisture from his forehead. “It is obvious that this woman has no soul.”

“How about the body?” asked the girl. “We’ll take up the soul later.”

“No, we won’t,” snapped Mr. Owen. “We’ll take up the soul right now. As long as I’m behind this damned barricade in broad daylight the body is null and void. It ceases to exist.”

“Neither time nor place makes any difference to me,” observed Satin.

“Apparently,” remarked Mr. Owen dryly, “but in my life they play rather an important part. I don’t overstress them, but I observe, at least, a few of the less unreasonable conventions.”

“If I ever went gunning for you,” she assured him, “you wouldn’t observe even those.”

“I’ve no desire to argue with you on that score,” he replied hastily. “I know when I’ve met my master.”

“Mistress,” corrected Satin.

“Please,” protested Mr. Owen, raising an admonitory hand. “As I was saying, I know when I’m licked.”

“You weren’t,” put in the girl. “You weren’t saying that at all. And furthermore, you haven’t been licked. To hear you talk, one would think I was a cat or a dog.”

“I find all this very trying,” continued Mr. Owen with an attempt at dignity.

“But I’m not a cat or a dog,” insisted Satin. “Am I?”

“No,” agreed Mr. Owen without any show of warmth. “You have the worst qualities of both. May I proceed?”

“You mean, may you crawl away somewhere on your stomach?” the girl inquired. “Certainly not. I’d crawl after you on mine.”

Mr. Owen closed his eyes and shrank from the picture he saw. He was crawling snakelike through the lobby of the hotel, and behind him, even more snakelike, crawled Satin. People turned to stare after them. They remained turned, transfixed by wonderment. And wherever he crawled, still flat on his stomach, there also crawled Satin, still flat on hers. With a start he opened his eyes to free himself from the spell of this reptilian progress.

“No,” he replied in a dazed voice, “I did not mean that. Most decidedly, I did not mean that. I merely wanted to do a little more talking. That’s simple enough language, isn’t it?”

“I seem to understand it, so it must be,” said the girl. “Go ahead and talk if you like. I’ll think of something else.”

“And I wouldn’t give the pale shadow of a bad penny for your thoughts,” replied Mr. Owen with a touch of malice.

“All right,” she snapped, “but that wasn’t what you were going to say.”

“No,” said Mr. Owen uneasily. “It was merely about that gunning business. Don’t go gunning after me unless you really mean it. Somewhere inside I seem to be damn well fed up with that sort of thing.” He hesitated and became increasingly self-conscious. “You see,” he continued, “I realize I was never cut out to play the rôle of the casual lover. At times I’ve assured myself that I was – yes, I’ve kidded myself a lot. That’s the trouble with me. I’ve deceived myself so much I can’t bear being deceived by others, especially by a creature I seem to like far more than is strictly necessary.”

Once more he paused and looked hopefully at the unresponsive back of the settee as if in search of encouragement therein. Finding none, and refusing to glance at the girl beside him, he took a deep breath and continued. “Before I came here,” he said like one trying to recall some lost thought, to remember some forgotten face, “life had not been looking up for me for a long, long time. I can remember that much, at any rate. I must have been living in a depressed area, and it was filled with troubles – all sorts of things. It isn’t clear. There’s nothing definite, but I know how I felt, how hopelessly beaten I was in all departments. Don’t know why I’m talking like this unless it’s because all that grog and wine are still boiling in my veins – doing things with my tongue.”

He came to a full stop, and in a low voice the girl said, “Go on.” Again he started speaking, slowly and haltingly. “There’s not much in life for persons like me,” he said, “not much except security and sameness. There are dreams into which they escape – impossible damn dreams, dreams in which they are loved as they never have been loved and never will be. And the funny thing about it is no one ever suspects there’s enough material in their beings to scrape together the raggedest stepchild of a dream. They’re the steady men with unremarkable faces, the men whose wives other men take simply because the women get so damned bored they’d give themselves to the iceman for the sake of a change.”

Unconsciously he had clenched his hands. He seemed to have forgotten entirely that he was saying all these things lying huddled in a corner behind a hotel settee. “They believe in loyalty, and they believe in love – some sort of an honest, sporting love – and they are as silly and as stupid as hell. They never take chances, and yet they manage to lose. They never hit the high spots, and yet they land in the low. The poor, spineless saps.” The last was spoken in a whisper.

“When I came here,” he resumed in an altered voice, “everything was changed. My troubles were left behind and all sense of obligation. I even felt younger, though I don’t feel so young this morning. I became a different man, and yet always I must have been that man inside. I no longer want to be moral in the old sense. I no longer want to be steady, respectable, and smugly sober. And – and I no longer want to be so God damn lonely and uninspired. But I don’t want to be gunned at by you, because in spite of your low character and all your bad ways, you seem to mean something, and I just won’t have it. There was a woman once. That I know. I can feel it. Where the hell is she now? No more of that sort of thing for me. I’d much rather get tight with loose women and stay tight.”

He broke off abruptly and turned his pale, lean face to the girl. He grinned at her crookedly. “That’s the sort of chap I am, and you’ve helped to do it – you and my excellent partners.”

Satin’s eyes, as she studied the man’s face, were unusually bright. And behind the brightness lay other things which Hector Owen had not the penetration to see. There were a certain tenderness and an understanding. There were emotions that surprised the girl herself, but she only smiled half mockingly when she spoke.

“Nonsense,” she said, taking him in her arms. “What you need is a nice low-living, hard-drinking girl like myself, and I’m going to see that you get her.”

Mr. Owen did.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Calm in a Chapel

“I never knew I was like that,” Mr. Owen observed some minutes later.

“Neither did I,” said Satin lazily. “Like what?” She was sitting with her back against the wall. Between her lips was a cigarette she had borrowed from her companion. Mr. Owen was arranged in a similar posture, and he, too, was smoking.

“Why, so unremorsefully depraved,” he explained. “So ready to accept all the good bad things the moment has to offer.”

“I know,” she said. “The other things have been forced on you too long. It isn’t human to plod in harness, nor is it good for a man’s soul to stand too much frustration. God doesn’t like it.”

“Then you do believe in God?”

“In my God, not in the usual one.”

“What sort of God is yours?”

“A smiling God who can even laugh to take the edge off His sorrow. All His good intentions went by the board. He knows what failure is. Should have stuck to animals and left man uncreated. Too late now. He doesn’t know what to do about it any more than we do.”

“He sounds quite human,” observed Mr. Owen.

“How could He be otherwise? He’s supposed to deal with humanity.”

“I know, but we are given the impression that God is something aloof, remote, forever veiled from the eyes of man.”

“Sure. Women suffer even today from the same false rumor. Naturally, it isn’t true. If you treat a woman right nine times out of ten she’ll skip down from her jolly old pedestal and treat you right. The only reason a woman ever gets up on a pedestal at all is to be seen to better advantage.” Satin paused and smiled across at her companion. “Like it here?” she asked.

“It’s a swell place,” he admitted, “but we can’t just park here forever. I’m getting a little nervous about the time and the store and the state of being of my excellent partners.”

“Don’t worry,” she told him. “Things will begin to happen soon.”

They did. Hardly had Satin spoken than a sleek head appeared over the rim of the settee.

“Good-morning,” said the head.

“Thank God you haven’t a beard,” replied Mr. Owen.

“I beg your pardon.”

“It doesn’t matter. I beg yours.”

“Thought at first there was a bit of a fire back here,” said the head. “And that reminds me of something. The manager says I’ll have to ask you to come out now.”

“You’ll have to do more than ask,” Satin replied sweetly. “You’ll have to blast us out or rig up some sort of a derrick.”

“It is a problem,” admitted the head.

“What’s a problem?” boomed a familiar voice.

The next moment the heads of the three partners ranged themselves beside that of the sleek gentleman.

“I have been told you’re enjoying the cholera,” said Mr. Larkin. “Would you mind flicking us a shot? It might put us out of our misery.”

“Is there such a thing as time?” asked Mr. Owen.

“It isn’t late,” replied the senior partner. “Not at all late for a late morning. And besides, we can always make up for a lot of lost time.”

“Are you ready to emerge?” Major Barney inquired.

“Because, if you aren’t,” put in Mr. Dinner, “we can have some food lowered down to you in buckets.”

“We emerge,” declared Satin, getting up and stretching her disconcerting young body, “if we can.”

“Oh, that can be speedily arranged,” said Mr. Larkin. “In fact, I think it best you do come out, or up, or under, or whatever it is. The way business is at present we can’t possibly spare the head of the Pornographic Department and one of our most valued partners. Come along, Major.”

The heads disappeared. Mr. Larkin’s voice was heard issuing commands.

“You take one end, Major,” he was saying, “and this gentleman and myself will take the other. Dinner is worse than useless. Only he mustn’t expect a ride. Get off the sofa, Dinner. It’s heavy enough as it is, God knows. All together now. Heave!”

The edges of the settee parted company with the walls. Miss Honor Knightly stepped gracefully if a little untidily through one aperture while Mr. Owen made his exit through the other. Both joined the partners in front of the settee and received their morning salutations.

“Where’s Madame Gloria?” demanded Satin.

“Still sleeping, my dear, still sleeping,” said the senior partner. “Such a woman for sleep. She plays hard and rests hard, poor soul. What’s a stronger word than veer? I’d like to apply it to my head.”

“Swirl,” suggested Satin, “twirl, or spin.”

“Splendid!” cried Mr. Larkin. “It’s doing all three.”

“Once more on the road,” said Major Barney. “Time is tearing along. These people must wash and we all must eat. Then to the store. It can’t get along without us.”

“Exactly,” agreed Mr. Larkin. “I always like to be present whenever the place is robbed. Things seem to go better then. There’s less excitement and scurrying about.”

“I hope we’re not robbed today,” said Mr. Dinner in a bleak voice. “My nerves are jumpy enough as they are, without the added stimulant of thieves.”

“Spoken for us all,” declared Mr. Larkin. “Let us fly. This gentleman will push the settee back. He’s new on the managerial staff. It will be good experience. Good-morning, sir. Forward.”

With a slightly dazed expression in his eyes the sleek-headed young gentleman, so beautifully attired, gazed after the departing partners, gallantly ushering that stunning creature down the quiet reaches of the balcony lounge.

Half an hour later the partners and Satin, now spick and span, arrived at the store through the cool fragrance of a glorious morning. At the private entrance to Mr. Larkin’s office they paused and turned to look at it – the morning. In the eyes of each was a touch of wistfulness and rebellion.

“What a day!” sighed the senior partner.

“What a night!” said Mr. Owen.

“It’s too bad to know how to play,” remarked Satin.

“It would be worse to know how to work,” observed Mr. Dinner. “I mean, only how to work.”

“Don’t worry, my children,” consoled Mr. Larkin. “A plan is forming. Don’t ask me now. It is not quite ready. In the meantime, to your places, but don’t overdo it. Don’t strain yourselves. We are not in the best condition. And remember, there is always lunch. A cheerful thought.”

The Book Department itself was not an uncheerful place in which to spend a hangover, and the Pornographic Section was almost deserted, except for a clean little man in clerical garb who was approaching the counter. There was something about his clean neatness and his mild yet eager expression that made Mr. Owen wish he had lived a better life. Satin gazed on the little preacher with her usual cynical tolerance.

“I’m going to the Holy Land,” the preacher informed her happily, “and – —”

“My dear sir,” cut in Satin, “you were never farther away from that region than you are at this minute.”

“Perhaps a book with maps might bring me a little nearer,” suggested the little fellow with a disarming smile.

“Do you see that volume upon which your hand is resting?” said Satin. “Well, that’s called Strumpets at Dawn.”

“How beautiful!” cried the small, clean preacher. “It fascinates me.”

“What!” exclaimed Mr. Owen involuntarily, and glanced at Satin.

Even that imperturbable young lady appeared to be momentarily stunned.

“But the Holy Land first,” the preacher continued agreeably. “Have you such a book?”

“You will find no end of them,” replied the girl, “about three aisles farther down – in the Travel Section, sir.”

“How nice of you,” said the little chap, the eager light in his eyes increasing at the mention of travel. “I think I’ll take this one, too, before I go.”

“No!” broke from Mr. Owen’s lips as Satin selected the book and calmly wrapped it up. “You can’t do such a thing.”

“Nonsense,” retorted Satin. “It will do him a world of good.”

The little preacher accepted the package and turned away.

“Trumpets at Dawn,” they heard him murmur. “How beautiful! How deeply religious!”

Satin and Mr. Owen inspected each other.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” said the man.

“Why not give the little chap a break for once in his life?” replied Satin. “After he’s finished that book, he’ll need to go to the Holy Land. Now, there’s no particular reason.”

“After he’s read that book,” said Mr. Owen, “he may never go to the Holy Land but spend his savings in riotous living.”

“There’s no such thing as riotous living,” Satin retorted. “It’s merely a frame of mind. He was a nice little preacher.”

“I hope he stays nice,” Mr. Owen remarked skeptically. “I wouldn’t read that book myself.”

“If you did,” she told him, “you would find more beauty and tenderness in it than in a six-foot bookshelf of inspirational works. That’s the truth. Come along now. I want to show you a place.”

By way of a spacious lift she took Mr. Owen to the top floor of the building. They stepped out into the subdued, mellow atmosphere of the Music Department.

“It’s tranquil here, isn’t it?” said Satin, a new note in her rather husky voice.

“After life’s fitful fever,” murmured Mr. Owen.

Silently gleaming beneath artfully shaded lamps the pianos stood about on the heavy carpet. Between them lay shadowed spaces so that each instrument was isolated in its own pool of radiance. Looking at them Mr. Owen thought of lovely rooms in quiet homes.

“It’s awful to think,” observed Satin, cutting into his thoughts, “that many of these pianos are doomed to the grubby hands of rebellious little boys and girls. Instruments of torture instead of beauty.”

“You would have to say something like that,” Mr. Owen told her. “Always throwing flies.”

She smiled at him almost sympathetically.

“I must toughen you spiritually,” she said, “as well as physically. Come along with me.”

Noiselessly they made their way between the pianos until they came to a small stout door that looked as if it should have been set into the ivy-clad wall of a church. Satin opened the door and, passing through, they entered a chamber of utter quietness and peace. It was a long apartment with a high, raftered roof rather than a ceiling. The entire end of the room was occupied by an organ. The windows on either side were of richly stained glass. But for the absence of pews Mr. Owen would have thought himself in a church. The windows were partly open. There was a feeling of wings in the sky. Somewhere outside a band of small birds was chirping. The little chirps sounded speculative and decently modulated in this quiet place. The hum and drone of the city far below only added to Mr. Owen’s feeling of remoteness. Here they were entirely detached from life. It was as if this room might rise at any moment and float away through the blue.

Satin was moving slowly towards the organ. She turned back and smiled at the man behind her. He decided there was a quality exceedingly lovely in that smile.

“Bring your hangover down here,” she said, “and rest it comfortably by the organ. Whenever my breast becomes too savage I come to this place and play to it.”

In a deep chair near the organ Mr. Owen sat down and rested his head. It no longer seemed so hot and tired. Within him there was a sense of peace. Gradually little liquid notes began to splatter round him like refreshing drops of rain. Satin played. Time swept by unheeded on a tide of low, throbbing harmony. Thoughts strayed idly through Mr. Owen’s mind. They were vague, these thoughts, for he was unable to place himself. More like sensations they were – remembrance of things too remote to name. Far-away days and far-away feeling. Time when it was young, before it had grown a fretting beard. As the velocity of the notes increased from a shower to a flood of melody, Mr. Owen changed the position of his head the better to observe the figure at the organ.

“She might be a priestess,” he reflected, a little thrilled, “instead of a hard-boiled purveyor of indecent literature.”

There was an expression on Satin’s face he had never seen there before. Emotions seemed to be straining within her, crying to be released. As he looked at the girl he felt that one barrier had been removed only to be replaced by another. To him she was still as enigmatic and as baffling as before. There was beauty here unquestionably, but now it was beauty in pain, in conflict with itself. Through the medium of the organ her fingers were searching for something, for a completeness, it seemed, beyond life, beyond her days as she lived them. Suddenly she stopped. The sobbing notes fled through the stained-glass windows, but little wraiths of harmony still lingered in the hushed air of the room. She swung round on the bench and sat for a moment contemplating Mr. Owen. Her eyes were large and dark and touched with the spell of her playing. But her lips were disturbingly mocking.

“Suppose,” she said quite distinctly, “I should tell you I loved you. Would that do any good?”

“It would be better than a quart of aspirins,” he replied.

“Would it? Then consider it said.”

“Why?” asked Mr. Owen.

“Because I do,” said Satin.

“Still why?”

“Don’t ask me that. There is no special reason.”

“I can think of none myself,” Mr. Owen replied. “No good and sufficient ones. You can’t play away the years, you know. I own to a number of them.”

“Let me worry about your years,” the girl told him. “They’re none of your business so far as I’m concerned.” She hesitated, and for the first time Mr. Owen detected a suggestion of timidity in her bearing. “Think I’m a pretty hard girl, don’t you?” she advanced. “All sexed up and everything – an easy make?”

“Not all of that,” said Mr. Owen, “but I wouldn’t go so far as to call you sexless.”

“You’d better not,” the girl replied. “I’d consider that an insult. What’s all this noise about sex, anyway? Why make it a vice and keep it in the dark? It’s an amiable gesture, after all. Why not make nerves a vice, or egotistical talking, or patriotic speeches, or spying on one’s neighbors, or interfering with one’s personal liberty, attempting to supervise a person’s conduct, or any number of things beside which sex is a mere flash in the pan. As a matter of fact, sex is swell. I thoroughly enjoy it.”

“That makes us even,” admitted Mr. Owen, “but my greater wisdom tells me it can be misused. I mean, a man so often slips round the corner on his woman or vice versa. You know, not playing the game, and getting emotions all mucked up.”

“That’s just rotten,” said the girl slowly. “And it’s worse because it’s so unnecessary. People who cheat like that want two things at once. They lack in guts.”

“Forcefully if not nicely put,” observed Mr. Owen.

“Come over here,” said the girl.

He sat on a stool at her feet. She leaned over him and taking his head in her arms, held it against her breast. The moments passed and neither of them spoke. A still room. Only the notes of birds.

“Well, Mr. Man,” she said at last, “I’m not so sexy as you think. I’ve had only a few moments – never a real lover.”

“That, also, is none of my business,” replied Mr. Owen. “I suspect your good judgment far more than your morals.”

“Why?”

“For various reasons. I’m one of them.”

She pushed his head up from her and looked into his eyes.

“How long have you been lonely?” she asked irrelevantly.

“How do you know I have?”

“The look’s there. I found a lost dog once.”

“Thanks,” said Mr. Owen. “Aren’t we all?”

She was holding his head now rather carelessly in her lap, much as if she were holding a cantaloupe or a grapefruit. Above his head she was gazing dreamily through one of the windows at a small white cloud drifting past.

“Perhaps,” she admitted. “Yes. I’ve been, but I’m not going to be any more. I have you now.”

“Right,” said Mr. Owen. “But what about the head? Have you finished using it? I’m afraid it will roll off.”

“No,” she replied with determination. “I want the head. I feel like hugging it.”

“All right, but just don’t forget it. After all, it’s a head.”

Once more he felt his face pressed against the firm young breast of the girl. He cleverly contrived to breathe without thwarting her purpose. He liked it that way. He had a feeling of having come home at last. Peace entered into his so long troubled soul, or whatever it was that served for one.

“I can’t remember,” he told her. “And I don’t want to.”

“Good,” she said. “Do you love me?”

The head nodded vigorously.

“I guess that will have to do,” remarked the girl. “Then we’re sweethearts, you and I?”

This time the head nodded rather bashfully.

“Yes,” he said. “I guess that’s what we are.”

“How nice,” mused Satin. “Never had a sweetheart proper. Not a regular one. Are you glad?”

Then it was that Mr. Owen abandoned his passive rôle and took the girl in his arms with surprising zest and vigor.

“You must be glad,” she managed to get out at last. “Thanks. That was very nice. We must find a little place and begin to live very busily together. I have no ties.”

“My bridges are down,” replied Mr. Owen with a shrug. “Thank God they led to you. Don’t let me ever remember – only you, Satin.”

“That’s the decentest thing you’ve said. I guess that’s why you found me, or rather, why I found you.”

They were standing now, facing one of the windows. Below them throbbed the city and around them swam the sky. It was one of those moments. Both seemed to feel it. Mr. Owen did not know what it was, but it was there – all that his heart could carry.

“Of course,” he heard the girl saying, “you’ll have to be careful about beds – whose you get in. But I won’t be strict. Running around with those partners, God knows what might not happen.”

As if the mere mention of them was sufficient to call them into being, the little door opened, and the three gentlemen came swinging down the room. Mr. Owen grinned. They looked for all the world like God-fearing, sober-sided vestrymen. They should have held plates in their hands.

“At last!” exclaimed Mr. Larkin. “At last! Although, I must say, this is a far cry to the Pornographic Department. Can you imagine what I’ve done?”

“I don’t like to think about it,” said Mr. Owen.

“Well, you will,” proudly retorted the senior partner. “I’ve declared a holiday.”

“Go on,” said Satin. “For everybody?”

Mr. Larkin nodded.

“Even for Horrid and Blue Mould,” he assured her.

“Sweet man,” said Satin.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Lascivious Dancing

“Am I not?” replied Mr. Larkin. “All the girls are saying that today, at any rate. What a time we had getting our customers out of the store.”

“Never saw the place so full,” observed Mr. Dinner.

“One large lady came charging back at me three times,” declared Major Barney, “before I successfully repulsed her. Said she wanted to buy a bird cage.”

“The poor thing,” remarked Mr. Larkin sadly. “And the bird. I suffer for the bird, too. But still, all work and no play would simply be too bad. Besides, people buy too many things, anyway. Everybody wants to own something. Would you believe it? Frequently I haven’t a shirt to my back, and we have a counter devoted entirely to shirts – lovely ones. I rebel. I refuse to participate. I feel like giving my possessions away and running naked through the streets. Of course, I should wear shoes. Light ones.”

“Are we to spend our holiday mentally watching you run naked through the streets?” Mr. Dinner inquired.

“Naked save for shoes,” corrected the senior partner. “I have the most amazingly sensitive feet. They fairly shriek at the approach of a pebble.”

“I must confess,” observed the Major, “that your thoughts are veering today as they have never veered before.”

“But people do grab and snatch,” Mr. Larkin protested. “You’ll have to admit that. They do grab and snatch. Makes me so ashamed, I’m frequently reluctant to approach one of my own counters on some slight personal mission. Therefore, my back sometimes finds itself without a shirt.” He turned to Mr. Owen as if in search of an understanding heart. “You see how it is,” he resumed. “Our partners are too degenerate to care about backs and shirts. Drawers are a joke to them, if they ever think of them at all.”

“I thoroughly understand,” said Mr. Owen, “and sympathize deeply. Do you like to drink?”

The senior partner’s face brightened visibly. He clasped his hands.

“Immensely!” he exclaimed. “Copiously! How did you ever know? Why, you removed the very words from my mouth. I was going to suggest that we all go out and get ourselves rotten drunk, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

“God, yes!” cried the Major. “It’s the only intelligent thing you have said.”

“And then we’ll dance lasciviously with lewd women,” continued Mr. Larkin. “Oh, life, life, life and a whole lot of lust.”

“He’s outdoing himself today,” said Mr. Dinner in a low voice. “These poetic raptures of his will get us all into trouble.”

“Where shall we go?” asked Mr. Dinner.

“I suggest the Woods,” said the senior partner. “There’ll be a large, open taxi, and we’ll all get in it.”

“What’s the Woods?” Mr. Owen wanted to know.

“Oh, a jolly place,” replied Mr. Larkin. “There are woods, you know.”

“I know,” said Mr. Owen. “Just woods?”

“Heavens, no!” exclaimed Mr. Larkin. “What would we do with a lot of woods? There are other things – acrobats, for example. I know a couple of artists. They contort. We’ll have them to lunch with us.”

“I know the man who handles the bears,” announced the Major. “A sterling character.”

“It would be safer if he were of iron,” observed the senior partner, “or brass, if he associates with those bears. They’re a hard lot. I know them.”

“May I suggest,” put in Mr. Owen, “that we begin actively to enjoy these rare delights instead of merely discussing them?”

“You may and you shall,” Mr. Larkin declared. “Let us hurl ourselves into a lift and then debauch into the boulevards. Holidays come to us too rarely. We must take advantage of everything and everybody. Hats and sticks are in my office.”

As they left the little chapel, as Mr. Owen had come to regard it, he glanced back almost regretfully. It had been a pleasant retreat. He still saw in fancy Satin seated at the organ, playing away his hangover.

“It was quiet here, wasn’t it?” he said to her in a low voice.

“Yes,” she answered, “and eventful, but now the battle is on. These men are entirely mad, and we are not much better.”

“It isn’t such a thin way to be,” observed Mr. Owen philosophically. “There’s plenty of room in my system for a lot of madness.”

Satin made no reply but pressed his thin hand as the door closed behind them. A few minutes later they were debauching into the street.

“On such a morning as this,” declared Mr. Larkin, “an employer would be a criminal not to declare a holiday.”

“Especially when he wanted one himself,” remarked Satin.

“Exactly, my dear, exactly,” said Mr. Larkin. “The Major might know a sterling bear tamer, but he overlooks the fact that my heart is entirely of gold. I love to share my pleasures. Ah, yes, indeed, to share and let share. Taxi! I hope he stops. That’s just the kind.”

He did stop, and the party with much dignity and seemliness distributed its members upon the seats of the open taxicab. Soon they were speeding along the handsome boulevard in the direction of the Woods. Suddenly Mr. Larkin spied a café and became highly excited.

“We must stop there for a rest,” he proclaimed. “It’s simply filthy with lewd women – the lewdest and lowest in town. Also the most beautiful. Stop at the Wild House, taxi. We will break our journey there.”

The Wild House was doing good business for so early in the day. Already the tables were well filled, and the floor was sprinkled with dancers. Mr. Owen regarded the couples a little nervously in an effort to ascertain how lasciviously they were dancing. He did not know the first thing about it and was not at all sure whether he wanted to learn.

“Captain,” Mr. Larkin commanded, “we want something just a trifle better than the best table in the house.”

“Certainly, Mr. Larkin,” replied the captain. “Be seated right here at this one. It’s a new table.”

“How nice!” exclaimed the senior partner as the party arranged itself round the table. “I am greatly pleased. New tables affect me that way. Now, captain, we intend to get very drunk and perhaps disorderly. You know, the strain. It has been great. It has been terrific. One must relax with a crash. Bring us lewd women. We wish to dance lasciviously while we’re still on our feet.”

The captain understood perfectly. He was almost sympathetic about it. He glided away, as captains do. Presently the party was reinforced by four girls. Mr. Owen could not remember ever having seen such evil-looking faces. At the same time he had to admit that these women were not without an element of fascination.

“Don’t mind me,” Satin whispered to him. “You have to go through with it now. Dance with one of these molls when the time comes. I’ll stay here and pick up the pieces.”

“All this is very upsetting,” Mr. Owen complained. “I can hardly dance decently, much less the other way – lasciviously, as he keeps calling it in a very nasty manner.”

The drinks came thick and fast. Everyone began to feel better. The dark eyes of the senior partner were gleaming with infantile happiness. He rose abruptly from his chair. The orchestra had burst into a frenzy of syncopation.

“Now, ladies,” he said, “you must take us out there on that floor and make us dance lasciviously whether we want to or not. We are on a bit of a holiday, you know. The strain has been great. We must relax all over the floor.”

Before Mr. Owen knew what was happening, he felt himself seized, dragged from his chair, and whirled out upon the slippery dance floor.

“Darling!” breathed his woman, and, swirling suddenly, bent forward seductively and dealt him a terrific blow with the most prominent part of her body. Mr. Owen was entirely unprepared for this particular manifestation of lasciviousness. He was literally shot through space and would have fallen had he not slid into the senior partner, who seemed to be performing the same maneuver. In mutual protection they clasped each other round the neck.

“We seem to be alone,” remarked the senior partner. “God! My woman’s lascivious. She’s nearly killed me already.”

“What do they wear in their pants?” gasped Mr. Owen. “Horseshoes?”

“No, my boy, it’s training. They’re in perfect condition, these girls.”

“Must we go back?” asked Mr. Owen. “I feel shattered.”

“We can’t very well stand here embracing one another,” said Mr. Larkin.

With a wrench they were torn apart. Mr. Owen found himself once more in the arms of his lewd woman.

“Slow down,” he pleaded.

“Not with you in my arms,” she panted.

“Well, why the hell don’t you keep me there,” he managed to get out as they spun, “instead of buffeting me about?”

“This is the double rumba,” the woman told him, and thrust a powerful leg between his.

Once more they parted company. Mr. Owen’s legs were as tangled as human legs can well get. For a brief moment he gave the appearance of a man giving a solo performance; then as nature sought to readjust itself, he involuntarily spun about and dived on top of Mr. Dinner, who, very white in the face, was sliding on his back stiffly across the floor.

“Sorry,” said Mr. Owen. “Couldn’t help it.”

“How’s your woman?” asked Mr. Dinner exhaustedly.

“I don’t know how lascivious she is,” Mr. Owen replied, “but I do know she’s as tricky as hell.”

“Mine pulled a fast one on me with her stomach,” explained Dinner. “I fairly bounced off like a rubber ball.”

“Shall we get up?” suggested Mr. Owen. “Or relax all over the floor?”

“I suppose we better had,” sighed Mr. Dinner, “though we’re a great deal safer here.”

The two gentlemen arose painfully only to find their partners cutting various capers round them while snapping their fingers in the air. Mr. Owen regarded his woman broodingly. His manhood was stirred, but hardly lasciviously. Awaiting his opportunity, he made a sudden wicked lunge. He caught the woman about her revolving stomach and carried her halfway across the room. There, encountering an entangling foot, she went over backward with Mr. Owen on top.

“That’s the half Nelson,” he grated, glaring down in her face.

“Not here,” said the woman, game to the last.

“Do you think I did that for pleasure?” he indignantly demanded.

“Chéri,” she whispered.

“Chéri, hell!” exclaimed Mr. Owen. “I’m sick of this double rumble and the whole brutal business.”

He climbed to his feet and helped the woman to hers. With a crash the music fell silent. They made their way back to the table.

“Waiter!” cried Mr. Larkin, “bring me two collar buttons and one safety pin. What a dance! What a dance! So stirring. I fear I’ll never stop drinking.”

Satin was busy getting Mr. Owen back into some sort of condition. He was still eyeing his lewd partner with a dangerously hostile light in his usually mild blue eyes. It looked as if at any moment he might hurl himself upon her and pitch her across the floor. He felt very much like doing it, if only to ease his injured dignity.

“Want a rub-down?” suggested Satin.

“General overhauling,” he muttered. “Lay me up in dry dock like a battered old hulk. That little affair was worse than a bullfight.”

“Do you gentlemen wish to take further advantage of this splendid opportunity to dance lasciviously?” Mr. Larkin inquired.

Mr. Dinner laughed a shade hysterically.

“How beautifully you put it,” he said. “The answer is, no. I don’t intend to let any more lascivious dancing take advantage of me.”

“How about you, Major?”

“I managed to keep my feet,” that gentleman explained, “but I think I’m internally injured. I’m quite willing to declare the battle a draw.”

“Not today, thank you so much,” said Mr. Owen politely. “I didn’t manage to keep my feet, and I know I’m internally injured.”

“Then the lewd women may withdraw,” announced the senior partner. “I’m sure you did your best, and we’re all very grateful. The captain will give you your fee.”

As the girls filed away, Mr. Larkin looked fondly after them.

“Such nice, willing girls,” he murmured, “and so very, very lewd.”

“Hell hath no fury like the double rumble,” quoth Mr. Owen.

“Rumba, dear,” said Satin.

Beneath the table Mr. Larkin’s hands were doing things with the safety pin. On his face was an expression of profound concentration mixed with a shade of alarm.

“There!” he exclaimed at length in accents of relief. “They’re fixed. Shall we skip along to the next stop?”

The party rose and departed. Soon it was speeding merrily along in the direction of the Woods. Arrived at that gracious park they rushed to the nearest café, where they drank like men but recently rescued from the desert.

“A thirsty dance, the rumba,” breathed the senior partner, gulping down a champagne cocktail.

“Especially when it’s double,” put in Mr. Owen.

“Let’s all go swimming,” suggested Satin.

For a moment the partners paused and seemed to consider. Fresh cocktails arrived and were hastily dispatched. After this there was no more hesitation. They were enthusiastic about going swimming. Nothing could restrain them.

A short walk brought them to the pool. It gleamed beneath the sunlight, blue water caught in marble. Today the large pool contained a frolicsome rout of bathers. Mr. Owen looked at the women, and his heart went out to them. Never had he seen such lovely figures so satisfyingly unadorned. What little covering they wore literally hung on a thread. Many of them seemed to have clad themselves on a shoe string. At the sight of so much beauty the partners, like old war horses, threw back their shoulders and put their best foot forward. Satin remained undisturbed. She knew she had little to fear where figures were concerned. God had been gracious to her. She departed to the bath houses and bought a ravishing outfit, feeling the occasion justified the expense.

Mr. Owen, who seemed to possess an instinctive knowledge of bath-house technique, found the partners no end of a bother. The first thing they succeeded in doing was to lock themselves in their bath houses. The din they raised was deafening. Attendants came running from all directions while Mr. Owen vainly strove to appeal to the imprisoned gentlemen’s reason. Apparently at that moment they did not intend to exercise any reason.

“God Almighty by the score!” exclaimed the senior partner as he emerged. “What are they trying to do to us – give us claustrophobia?”

The attendants blinked.

“Wot’s that?” asked one of them.

“Don’t worry,” Mr. Larkin assured the man. “You’ll never get it. It has to do with the mind. Hurry away like a good fellow and bring us a swarm of drinks – champagne cocktails. I must and will relax.”

The next contretemps arose over the showers. The partners strongly objected to being forced to immerse themselves. Mr. Owen, who had returned to his bath-house to get his cigarettes, heard their voices raised in indignant protest.

“If I got under that shower,” Mr. Larkin was saying, “it would be tantamount to a public declaration that I was an unclean man. I’ll not do it.”

“And if I stepped under that shower,” rumbled the Major, “I would feel myself demeaned. I’m too big and too old to be forced to take a bath.”

“It’s an outrage, that’s what it is, an outrage,” vociferated Mr. Dinner. “I lost ten pounds I could ill afford to spare under a shower this morning. I’m as clean as a whistle.”

“Or a hound’s tooth,” added Mr. Larkin.

“I don’t care what the lot of you say,” put in the flint-hearted attendant. “You don’t go in the pool unless you take a shower.”

“We will and we won’t,” Mr. Larkin declared.

Mr. Owen decided it was high time to take a hand in the affair of the showers. He presented himself to the group. His partners were well crocked. He could see that at a glance. He himself was feeling a trifle giddy, but some sixth sense still held him to the rails.

“What do you mean, you will and you won’t?” demanded the attendant. “That don’t make sense.”

“I’ve forgotten,” replied Mr. Larkin. “It was just a thing to say.”

The situation seemed to be at an impasse, but suddenly Mr. Owen was seized by an inspiration. Without a word to his colleagues he deposited his cigarettes in a dry place, and hurrying to the nearest shower, began to splash water about with every indication of enjoyment. The partners looked at him in astonishment which gradually changed to simple-minded interest. They grouped themselves before him.

“Why are you doing that thing?” Mr. Larkin wanted to know.

“For no particular reason,” Mr. Owen replied in a careless voice. “I always do it before entering a pool. It takes the edge off of the first plunge.”

For a moment the three gentlemen eyed one another speculatively, then as if moved by a common impulse they dashed to the showers under which they furiously sprayed themselves.

“We always do it too,” shouted Major Barney, “but we don’t like to be told.”

“Oh, dear me, yes,” called Mr. Larkin. “Nothing like a shower before taking a swim. I’d simply be lost without one.”

“Tact is what they need, these attendants,” proclaimed Mr. Dinner. “Tact and a deeper understanding of the human soul.”

Eventually Mr. Owen succeeded in herding them to the deep end of the pool, where Satin, looking shockingly shapely, was waiting.

“My word!” exclaimed the senior partner. “Just to look at you makes me believe in God. You never simply evolved. Oh, no. You were most carefully planned.”

“Did they make you take a shower?” asked Mr. Dinner.

“No,” replied Satin. “I always take a shower.”

“Isn’t that splendid!” cried Mr. Larkin. “So do we, my dear girl, so do we. In fact, we’re seldom without one.”

Without a word of warning the Major threw himself away. For a moment he was seen scrambling hugely through the air, then the pool received his great body and concealed it. Mr. Owen watched with interest. The Major should be a powerful swimmer, but why was he not swimming? Why did he not come up? Presently his head did emerge. There was a frantic thrashing about. His face wore a surprised expression.

“I forgot – —” he gurgled, but the water once more claimed him.

“Now, what could he have forgotten?” queried Mr. Larkin.

“Perhaps he forgot he couldn’t swim,” Mr. Dinner suggested.

“Can’t he swim?” Mr. Owen demanded.

“Not a stroke,” replied Mr. Dinner.

“Then what did he jump in for?” Mr. Owen asked incredulously.

“Well, you see,” explained the senior partner, “just because he couldn’t swim the last time doesn’t mean that he couldn’t swim this time. People change, you know.”

“Then the man is actually drowning,” said Mr. Owen.

“That’s it exactly,” Mr. Larkin assured him. “You’ve sized up the situation nicely. The poor dear Major is drowning all by himself.”

Looking disgustedly at his associates, Mr. Owen, without a word, dived into the pool. As he did so the Major’s head reappeared and he finished his sentence in a great watery gasp.

“—I couldn’t swim,” he got out, and then he went down again.

Realizing the hopelessness of attempting to drag the Major ashore, Mr. Owen resorted to desperate measures. He took the drifting body on his shoulders and thrust himself upward and forward. Twice he emerged for air and left the Major to his own devices. Finally, after a series of plunges and pushes, he succeeded in bringing his cargo to shallow water, where he abandoned it. The Major clung to the side of the pool and made horrid noises. Mr. Owen did likewise, only his noises were not as bad as the Major’s. Finally, the big man quieted down.

“Thanks for the lift,” he said. “It’s so difficult to find out whether one knows how to swim or not.”

Mr. Owen had no decent answer to this. He pulled himself from the pool and rejoined Satin and Mr. Larkin. In the midst of their congratulations he remarked the absence of Mr. Dinner.

“Where’s Dinner?” he demanded.

“Dinner?” inquired Mr. Larkin as if hearing the name for the first time. “Ah, yes, Dinner. Why, the little fellow must have stepped off into the pool somewhere.”

“Does he know how to swim?”

“Even less than the poor dear Major,” said the senior partner, “but you know how he is – hopeful, always hopeful.”

“Has he been gone long?” asked Mr. Owen.

The senior partner considered this.

“Not quite long enough,” he said at last. “He should have a few moments left.”

“What do you mean?” cried Mr. Owen.

“Before he is dead, you know,” was Mr. Larkin’s bland reply.

“My God,” muttered Mr. Owen, desperately scanning the pool, “what utter irresponsibility!”

Suddenly he saw a foot thrust up through the water – a small, thin foot that was wiggling appealingly. As winded as he was, he dived back into the pool and made for the foot. Dinner climbed all over him. He was an exceedingly active small man. He appeared to be bent on drowning his would-be rescuer. Mr. Owen saw little hope as he fought with the man in the water. Just as he was about to pass out himself he succeeded in stunning Dinner and dragging him to the side of the pool. Mr. Larkin was bending over in an effort to be helpful. To his own surprise and horror he fell in with a protesting splash. Cursing as bitterly as his strength would permit, Mr. Owen passed the limp body of Mr. Dinner up to the strong arms of Satin and turned wearily to look for Mr. Larkin. That gentleman was just emerging.

“I’m an awful ass in the water,” he cried. “You’ll have to do – —”

Down went Mr. Larkin, for once unable to have his say.

Under ordinary circumstances the rescue of the senior partner would have presented little difficulty. In his present condition of exhaustion Mr. Owen was taxed up to and beyond his capacity. Nevertheless, he went for Mr. Larkin and seized him by his hair.

The space separating them from the side of the pool was not great, but to the spent Owen it seemed leagues long. At last, with the assistance of Satin, he got his burden out of the water.

“Any more?” he croaked, grinning ironically up at the girl.

Instead of answering, she reached down and pulled him over the side of the pool. He collapsed by Mr. Larkin, who had collapsed by Mr. Dinner. Several yards away the Major had collapsed by himself.

“Can you swim?” Mr. Owen asked Satin wearily.

The girl nodded.

“Well, will you please dive in there,” he went on, “and swim about a bit? Sort of represent the firm. I’m hors de combat.”

While Satin sported in the water the partners lay crumpled grotesquely round the edge of the pool. “A hell of a way to go swimming,” Mr. Owen kept saying to himself. He was bitter about it. Presently the senior partner weakly raised his head.

“The only way,” he said, “to rid ourselves of the memory of this horrid debacle is to have an excellent luncheon. At least we know how to eat.”

“And drink,” added Dinner faintly.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Partners Purchase a Whale

The party had now been augmented by the presence of two contortionists and one snake charmer. The contortionists were man and wife. The snake charmer was just man and snake, but that was enough. By his side was an old potato sack which Mr. Owen regarded with the deepest mistrust. He could not help wondering how the senior partner ever managed to meet such odd characters. Then he thought of the senior partner and ceased to wonder. The man himself was an odd character. They did not come any odder.

They were gathered round a large table in a large café. This festive establishment was situated in an amusement resort contiguous to the park. Merry-go-round music droned and shrieked through the air. The energetic voices of barkers, proclaiming the allurements of their respective attractions, could be heard. Occasionally the shattering sound of a scenic railway broke in upon them as the cars hurtled round the sharp curves. Everyone was apparently having a good time in a vigorous sort of way, but no one was having a better time than the partners themselves. Mr. Owen marveled at their recuperative powers. He was exhausted beyond measure, while they seemed as fresh as the dawn.

“See over there?” said the Major to Mr. Owen, pointing to a high wall in the distance. “Well, that’s where the bears live.”

“In happy amity with their trainer of sterling character,” Mr. Owen replied with a grin.

The Major thought this over.

“No,” he said at last. “They hate him. They even hate themselves, those bears.”

Mr. Larkin got up from his chair and raised his glass.

“To our savior!” he cried, indicating Mr. Owen. “Without him we would have been full of pool water instead of champagne.”

Everyone at the table save Mr. Owen arose and drank the toast. He regarded them with a caustic smile.

“I wonder,” he said when they had reseated themselves, “just what is going to happen next. This is supposed to be a holiday, and yet all we do is to punish ourselves almost beyond endurance. That lascivious dancing was a dangerous riot. The pool was a downright disaster. Are we going to settle down now and have a nice quiet time?”

As he spoke he glanced about the table, then became rigid in his chair. A six-foot snake was peering deeply into his eyes. Honor Knightly gave a small shriek and put her napkin over her head. Mr. Owen, considering it a wise idea, falteringly did likewise. The snake charmer was laughing heartily and with truly disgusting oiliness.

“Kim is hungry,” he gurgled. “Poor Kim.”

“Tell Kim he can have my steak,” replied Mr. Owen in tremulous tones, “if he’ll only go away.”

“But, my dear sir, Kim is quite harmless,” explained its owner. “He merely wants to play.”

“He isn’t harmless to me,” Mr. Owen assured the man, “and I’m far from feeling playful. I’ve been unhappy before in my life, but never quite as unhappy as I am at this moment.”

In a burst of affection Kim curled himself gently round Mr. Owen’s neck. The snake charmer roared his approval. Mr. Owen sat very still in his chair.

“Listen,” he said in a low voice, “I believe I’m going to die.”

“What’s it doing to you?” came Satin’s muffled voice.

“More than flesh can bear,” Mr. Owen answered, then laughed crazily. “Luncheon!” he said in a bitter voice. “A nice quiet luncheon.”

Kim, disturbed by the laughter, slowly uncoiled himself and returned to his master, who dropped him carelessly back in the sack.

“Has Kim gone away yet?” asked Satin in a hushed voice.

“Entirely,” Mr. Larkin assured her. “To the last inch. You may come out from under your napkin.”

Pale and wan, Mr. Owen’s face reappeared. He regarded the table feverishly, then gulped down a glass of wine.

“I hope that exhibition failed to amuse you,” he said to his partners. “You weren’t convulsed with mirth?”

“Not with mirth,” put in Mr. Dinner. “Kim did me little good.”

“I agree,” said the senior partner. “A mere fraction of Kim goes a long, long way.”

Mr. Owen returned to his plate and manfully endeavored to eat. He felt that he owed his stomach a little solid food. As he raised his fork to his mouth he chanced to glance across the table at the lady contortionist. His mouth remained open, but the fork refused to enter. In some weird manner the woman had contrived to dislocate her neck so that her head was hanging down between her side and her left arm. In this inverted position she was daintily sipping champagne while gazing unwinkingly at Mr. Owen. That gentleman was fit for the madhouse. His eyes bulged in his head. Never in all his life had he been so shockingly revolted. He tried to speak, but no words came. At last his tongue obeyed the dictates of his tortured mind.

“Is she going to be like that,” he quavered, “throughout the rest of the meal?”

“Why not?” inquired her husband.

“Can’t you see that for yourself?” muttered Mr. Owen. “Do you expect me to swallow food with that head dangling there before my eyes?”

“They feel that they owe us something for their luncheon,” soothingly explained Mr. Larkin.

“Her debt is paid with interest,” Mr. Owen replied. “Tell her she’s too kind. Tell her I’d be more than satisfied if she’d stick to cracking her knuckles or dislocating her thumbs. It takes so little to amuse me.”

The contortionist spoke to his wife in a low voice. The lady angrily shook her head. This gesture of negation had a devastating effect on Mr. Owen. He closed his eyes and clung to the table.

“She says,” came the voice of the contortionist, “that she intends to stay that way. She gets double the effect from the champagne with her head hanging down.”

“So do I,” muttered Mr. Owen. “In fact, I don’t have to drink at all.”

“Perhaps this will take your mind off the head,” suggested the contortionist. “It’s one of my favorite stunts.”

“What is?” asked Mr. Owen, clinging to a straw.

He opened his eyes, then almost fell from his chair. With unhurried efficiency the contortionist was feeding himself with his feet. The daintiness with which he did this only added to Mr. Owen’s feeling of horror and revulsion.

“My word!” Mr. Larkin exclaimed in a voice of awe. “That’s enough to take one’s mind off everything. I’m actually rotating in my chair.”

“If they’ll only stop what they’re doing,” said Mr. Owen, “I’ll let that snake sit on my lap.”

“Why, this is a cinch to do,” the contortionist proclaimed. “I can keep it up all day.”

“It must be easier to do than to look at,” Mr. Owen told him. “If you enjoy your food that way, won’t you eat it at another table? – at some table far back of me.”

“Nonsense,” scoffed the contortionist, deftly spearing a piece of steak with a fork held in his left foot.

With fascinated eyes Mr. Owen watched the leg as it conveyed the fork to its owner’s mouth. Then he looked at Mr. Larkin, who was feeling no little disturbed himself.

“Did I understand you to say,” asked Mr. Owen distinctly, “that we must all relax, that the strain has been terrific, and that we needed a bit of a holiday?”

Mr. Larkin met his partner’s cold eyes apologetically.

“Well, you see,” he began lamely, “I’m always hoping things will turn out for the best. It’s my nature.”

“If this keeps up much longer,” announced Mr. Dinner, “I’m going to put my plate on the floor and gnash my food like a beast.”

“The trouble is,” said Major Barney, “they get me all mixed up. I can no longer coordinate my movements. Only a moment ago I was deliberately trying to sip champagne with my ear.”

“I was searching for my mouth,” put in Satin, “and I jabbed myself an awful crack in the stomach. Bet you it left marks. Shall I look?” Here she glanced at Mr. Owen.

“Don’t begin!” he admonished her. “Don’t begin! We’ll take those marks for granted. There are enough public exhibitions going on as it is.”

At this moment Kim’s malevolent head slid stealthily between Mr. Owen’s frozen limbs and appeared at the table. For a long minute, during which the man was too petrified to breathe, the snake examined the contents of his plate. At length, having come to a decision, Kim selected the steak, snapped it up with a hiss of pleasure, and started to withdraw. Mr. Owen sucked in his stomach as the snake slid down the front of him. His eyes were tightly shut, and there was a prayer in his heart.

“Ah, what a pity,” came the solicitous voice of the snake charmer. “He has taken the gentleman’s steak. He must put it right back.”

“Oh, no, he mustn’t,” cried Mr. Owen with all possible haste. “Kim can have the steak. He’s entirely welcome to it. In fact, I’d buy Kim a cow if he’d keep away from me.”

A sudden burst of clapping startled his eyes wide open. Satin and the partners were also looking about with expressions of consternation. Mistaking the events taking place at the table for a public exhibition, the public had responded as only the public can. The party was surrounded by a wall of peering faces. Mr. Owen felt sorely tempted to hide his head once more beneath his napkin.

“Honor,” he said to the girl, “will you hold a glass of wine to my lips? My hand is shaking like a shuttle.”

As Mr. Owen was drinking his wine, a little boy pointed an unclean finger at him.

“Mom,” shrilled the little boy, “that must be the Bloodless Man. Take a look at his face. There ain’t nothing in it.”

“Guess you’re right,” agreed Mom. “And look at the other little feller.” Here Mom indicated Mr. Dinner. “He’s what they call a midget,” Mom explained, “and I guess the other one’s a jint. They always look so stupid, them jints.”

The Major looked at Mr. Dinner, and Mr. Dinner looked at the Major, then both of them looked at Mr. Owen. Across the table Mr. Larkin sat convulsed. Tears were streaming down his face.

“Oh, God,” he howled, “to think I have such peculiar partners.”

His voice broke on a high contralto note.

“What’s wrong with that guy?” a spectator wanted to know.

“I guess he’s what they call a half-and-half,” somebody suggested. “A weird sort of freak, he is.”

“What’s a half-and-half?” Mr. Larkin quickly asked Satin, his laughter stricken mute on his lips.

“I don’t know,” she told him, “but it must be pretty awful. Whatever it is, you’re it.”

Mr. Larkin looked dismayed, and for the first time in years, it seemed to him, Mr. Owen grinned maliciously.

“Go on, lady,” a coarse voice called out. “Give us a bit of the kooch.”

All four partners raised their heads at this insulting request. Without a word they rose from the table, singled out the speaker – a large, bull-faced individual – and knocked a hole through the crowd with him. Through this hole passed Satin. When the man was ready to rise she kicked him with brutal directness. The gross object doubled up in pain.

“I owed that to my sex,” she explained to the partners as they walked towards the place where the bears lived, “as well as to my self-esteem.” Then she added irrelevantly, “I can do the kooch.”

“A highly successful luncheon,” said Mr. Owen tonelessly. “Not a scrap of food passed my lips.”

“The contortionists and the charmer seemed to enjoy it,” remarked the senior partner, making an effort to glean comfort from something.

This unfortunate remark almost did for the Bloodless Man. Raising his clenched hands to heaven he confronted the senior partner, who stood regarding him with innocent interest. Sighing deeply, Mr. Owen let his hands fall to his sides. What was the use? He might as well strike an idiot child. The man knew no better.

“Holiday,” he muttered. “A good time was had by all.”

“Show him some bears,” said Mr. Larkin to Major Barney. “He’s all unstrung. Bears go very well when one is all unstrung.”

They found the bear trainer of sterling character, and they found him exceedingly drunk. He too seemed to be unstrung. He declared himself to be bored to tears by bears.

“It’s bears, bears, bears,” wailed the man, “morning, noon, and night. Great shaggy beasts. Loafers. They get treated better than I do.”

“May we look at some of your better class of bears?” asked the senior partner humbly.

“You may look at the whole damn lot,” the trainer replied, fumbling with a locked gate. “Not out there where all those people are, but in here where you can get a better view.”

With childlike confidence the partners followed the trainer and Satin through the barred gate, which locked itself behind them. The keeper, apparently losing interest, wandered off somewhere on his own affairs. The partners looked at a huge rock and beheld more bears than they had ever seen before or cared to see again. The bears in turn looked disagreeably down on Satin and the partners. Thus matters stood for a moment; then suddenly the air became charged with electricity.

“There’s nothing,” said Mr. Larkin vaguely. “Just nothing – nothing at all between us and all those bears.”

“What!” cried Major Barney. “Has that drunken sot locked us in with his vile beasts?”

Mr. Dinner tried the gate. It stoutly refused to open.

“He has,” he announced with the utmost simplicity. “They won’t get much off me. What little there was left I’ve lost during this day of giddy pleasure.”

“Dear considerate God,” murmured Mr. Larkin piously. “He might as well have let us drown if we’re going to be consumed by those shaggy monsters.”

“It’s a holiday,” observed Mr. Owen. “A feast day for the bears.”

“Didn’t the early martyrs do something in the line of song?” Satin asked coolly. “Who can dig up a snatch of a hymn? My business is pornography.”

“You can’t very well tell an infuriated bear a dirty story,” observed Mr. Larkin. “And as for those early martyrs, I don’t know how they did it. Why, I can’t even shout for that drunken trainer, much less sing a hymn.”

Apparently the bears had grown weary of watching this huddled conference. Behind their mighty leader they came lumbering down from the rocks. On the outside of the enclosure women were screaming frantically above the hoarse shouts of men. Looking decidedly sloppy, the bears lurched forward.

“Aren’t they untidy in their appearance?” observed Mr. Larkin.

“All except their teeth,” replied Mr. Owen. “They seem to be in perfect order.”

Major Barney lighted a cigarette, then tossed the match aside.

“We should stick closer to business,” he remarked. “All this gadding about doesn’t get us anywhere.”

“It has now,” replied Mr. Larkin. “Don’t be silly, my dear chap. It’s got us in a terrible place, and it’s going to get us into a worse one – inside those bears, you know.”

Satin pressed Mr. Owen’s arm as the bears came on. When she looked up at his thin, unremarkable face she did not feel afraid. She could see no sign of fear written on his features. He looked like a man who had been annoyed beyond endurance. And that was exactly how Mr. Owen felt as he stood there eyeing the bears with cynical animosity. To him they were not so much bears as fresh sources of irritation. And then an amazing thing happened – something that made the spectators gasp and the partners rub their eyes. Mr. Owen completely lost his temper, also his poise.

“I’m sick and tired of all this,” he exclaimed. “You all wait here. I’ll be back in half a moment.”

He took a few rapid strides forward, filling the air with sizzling obscenities, and with the heavy end of his walking stick struck the horrified leader a vicious blow across his nose. The great beast uttered a gasp of dismay and sat down stupidly. His followers did likewise. They had never heard of such a thing. Were they not bears? Certainly. This madman did not seem to realize it. Blow after blow from the heavy stick descended upon the unfortunate beast. Mr. Owen’s temper was far out of control.

“Heavens!” exclaimed Mr. Larkin. “My heart actually bleeds for that poor animal I disliked so greatly only a few minutes ago.”

“I hope he gets his temper back,” said Mr. Dinner, “after he polishes off that bear. If he doesn’t, he’ll disjoint us on our feet.”

With squeals of pain and anguish the stricken leader turned and lumbered off in the direction of his less enterprising associates. It was at this point that Mr. Owen really outdid himself. In the bitterness of his heart he made a dive after the retreating animal and seized him by one of his hind legs. This he proceeded to bite with the utmost ferocity. It is difficult to say whether the bear was more pained than surprised. He cast one frightened glance over his shoulder, made a pitiful noise deep in his throat, then fell swooning to the rock, his paws pressed against his eyes. At this stage of the game the drunken keeper came staggering up to Mr. Owen.

“You’ve got to stop knocking my bear about,” said the man of sterling character, smelling heavily of gin. “No more of this. Come away from that bear’s leg.”

Mr. Owen came away and attached himself to the trainer’s ear. Picking up his discarded stick, he dragged the drunkard to the gate.

“Open it,” said Mr. Owen, and the man obeyed as well as his fumbling hands would permit.

The partners, following Satin, passed through the gate with dignity and aplomb – as usual. Mr. Owen came last. The gate closed behind him. People were cheering on all sides, running from all directions. Mr. Owen, his good temper completely restored, turned to Mr. Larkin.

“Do you drink?” he asked the senior partner.

“Well, if I didn’t I’d be afraid to say no to you,” said Mr. Larkin, “but it just so happens I do.”

“How did that bear taste?” asked Satin, slipping her arm through Mr. Owen’s.

“Execrable,” he told her. “Far, far from pungent.”

“You should gargle with champagne,” suggested the Major.

“We all should,” put in the senior partner. “Facing a flock of infuriated bears is no way to spend a holiday. No way at all. I suggest we find comfortable chairs and refuse to be lured out of them. I’m veering more than that scenic railway. We’d have been dead twice over had not the lion-hearted Owen been along to save our lives. Too bad about that bear, though. The old boy actually fainted. Fancy that – a bear.”

The senior partner’s sudden burst of loquacity expressed the depth of his relief at having escaped from the place of the bears. Mr. Owen regarded him with mild affection. Perhaps after so much sound and fury the party might settle down now in some relatively quiet spot and keep itself out of trouble. And seemingly this is exactly what the party did for some few hours, but it could not be expected to keep out of trouble forever. Late in the evening, more or less wall-eyed from overindulgence, its members found themselves ranged before nothing less than a preserved whale lying at full length on a huge six-wheeled trailer. The owner of this preserved whale was sitting by it on a box. His attitude was one of listlessness and dejection.

“Dear, dear me,” observed Mr. Larkin, balancing himself on his stick. “Yards and yards of sheer fish. My eyes swirl in their sockets.”

“It’s a whale,” muttered Mr. Dinner. “A whale in the flesh.”

“Is it, now?” exclaimed Mr. Larkin; then, addressing himself to the dejected-looking owner, “That’s a very nice whale you have there, my friend.”

The man looked up with a spark of hope in his eyes.

“Thank you,” he said politely in behalf of his whale, “but you people are the only ones who have looked at her today. Something’s wrong with this town. It doesn’t seem to be whale-minded. I’m actually starving here alongside of my whale.”

“Can’t you eat a bit of the whale?” suggested Mr. Owen. “With so much whale about, no one would ever miss a bite here and there.”

“I couldn’t touch Minnie,” retorted the owner. “We’ve been together for years.”

“Under the circumstances,” observed Satin, “I wouldn’t eat a morsel of Minnie myself.”

“Minnie,” murmured the fascinated senior partner. “How chic. How very, very chic. It takes a man of vast daring to call a whale Minnie.”

“She’s a good whale, Minnie,” said the man with morbid pride.

“Do you mean, a virtuous whale?” inquired Mr. Larkin.

“She hasn’t had a chance,” replied the owner of the whale. “She’s preserved.”

“Poor, poor Minnie,” contributed Miss Honor Knightly with sincere emotion.

The partners turned and seriously considered that young lady. She met their gaze with large, innocent eyes. Mr. Owen looked at his partners, then shrugged eloquently. They turned back to the whale.

“She’s a sperm,” the man told them.

“Huh?” said Mr. Dinner. “I thought she was a whale.”

“She’s a sperm whale,” wearily replied the man.

“I see, I see,” said the senior partner. “How exceptionally nice.” He turned to his companions. “She’s a sperm, is Minnie,” he told them. “A sperm whale, no less.”

“And to think that she once sported in the ocean round her mammy,” murmured Mr. Dinner with a surprising burst of sentiment.

Mr. Larkin turned and looked deep into the eyes of his small partner.

“Mammy?” said Mr. Larkin with a rising inflection.

“Yes,” answered Mr. Dinner innocently. “Mother, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” pursued Mr. Larkin. “But this isn’t a negroid whale. From the way you talk you’d think she had been born and bred in the cotton belt. Don’t get silly about her. You must have been thinking of a black fish.”

“All right,” said Mr. Dinner. “Don’t go on about it. I was merely thinking.”

“Don’t,” the senior partner warned him. “It might throw you off entirely. Just be yourself.” He turned back to the owner. “Now, about this whale,” continued Mr. Larkin. “You were saying?”

“I was saying she was a good whale,” the man replied. “One of the best in the country.”

“Have whales taken up living in the country?” broke in the irrepressible Mr. Dinner. “I thought they lived in the sea.”

“This sort of whales don’t,” said the man. “This is a preserved whale.”

“Odd they don’t come in tins,” remarked Mr. Larkin. “Or in jars. However – —”

“My heart is fair breaking,” interrupted the man. “I’m afraid they’re going to attach Minnie. Nobody pays to look at her, and I can’t meet my bills.”

“It would be awful to let a whale fall into the hands of strangers,” observed Mr. Larkin in a serious voice. “Nothing less than a tragedy.”

“How much would you want for this whale?” asked Major Barney. “We would give her a good home. She’d be among friends – people of education and refinement.”

“You don’t know any such yourself,” put in Mr. Dinner.

“And I suppose you do,” snapped the Major.

“No, thank God,” the little man replied.

The owner of Minnie pondered several minutes, then mentioned a price.

“That’s a lot of money for a mere fish,” said Mr. Larkin.

“That’s a lot of fish,” the man replied, measuring the huge body with his eye.

“Come over here to this table and sit down,” suggested the Major, indicating a near-by refreshment hall. “One doesn’t purchase a whale every day in the week. The occasion demands a little thoughtful drinking.”

Eventually, after much give and take, the ownership of Minnie passed from the dejected man – now no longer dejected – to the partners. It was a joint enterprise. A truck was attached to the huge trailer and a sleepy driver provided. The partners and Satin swarmed somewhat unsteadily into the body of the truck. After taking an affectionate farewell of the whale’s erstwhile owner, the truck and trailer moved majestically through the broad gates of the amusement park. They had hardly proceeded a block before they were stopped by an outraged policeman.

“What are you doing with that great fish all over our streets?” he demanded.

“Nothing at all, officer,” Mr. Larkin called out cheerily. “Nothing at all. Merely taking Minnie home to bed. It’s a late hour for whales. Proceed, driver, proceed.”

The policeman was baffled. He had no precedent for the regulation of whales. The last thing the partners saw of him he was standing in the middle of the avenue, diligently scratching his head as it has been ordained that men should scratch when subjected to intolerable mental strain.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Dawn Breaks on Minnie

“What on earth are we ever going to do with this whale?” Mr. Larkin asked a shade nervously as the truck rolled along through the streets of the slumbering city.

“Search me,” replied Mr. Dinner. “What on earth does one do with whales? I never had a whale.”

“I never owned even part of a whale,” put in Major Barney. “I’m too astonished to think.”

“Imagine,” said Mr. Larkin. “Just imagine. Here we’ve gone and saddled ourselves with a whale – life is difficult enough as it is, without the added complications of a whale.”

“If,” observed Mr. Owen thoughtfully, “if forty-eight hours ago my closest friend should have assured me I was going to own one fourth of a preserved whale, I would have laughed at him tolerantly and invented a pretext to shamble away.”

“Life is so full of queer little twists,” said the senior partner, gazing moodily back at the partly opened mouth of Minnie. “Our whale,” he murmured. “Think of it. All that fish.”

“I never owned so much of anything before,” commented Mr. Owen. “Too bad it has to be whale.”

“The question still remains,” quoth Mr. Larkin. “What disposition are we going to make of the body and person of this female sperm whale, Minnie? We can’t dedicate our lives to her.”

“No,” agreed Mr. Dinner. “A flock of merchant princes can’t very well serve as nursemaids to a whale.”

“Why not put her in dead storage?” suggested Honor Knightly.

“How?” asked the senior partner.

“Why not take Minnie to a garage,” explained the girl, “and put her in dead storage.”

“She belongs in dead storage,” Mr. Owen contributed. “Properly speaking, the whale should be buried.”

“With full honors,” said Major Barney.

“Couldn’t we give Minnie to someone?” asked Mr. Dinner. “Someone wanting a whale.”

“Who wants a whale?” demanded Mr. Larkin. “One can’t walk up to any Tom, Dick, and Harry and say, ‘Drop round to my house this evening and I’ll give you a preserved whale.’ People would veer off. They wouldn’t come. They’d try to be polite about it, but they’d invent some excuse. ‘You’re so generous,’ they’d probably say, ‘but we’re not quite fixed for a preserved whale. We have no shut-off room.’ ”

“I hate to admit it,” declared the Major, “but already I’m sick of the very sight of Minnie.”

“So am I,” agreed Mr. Dinner.

“Driver!” cried the senior partner. “We’re sick of this sperm whale. Drive to the nearest garage.”

The driver obeyed, and Mr. Larkin descended from the truck. He approached the garage, hesitated, and came back. He wanted Miss Honor Knightly to accompany him. A woman, especially a pretty woman, might succeed in obtaining a haven for the whale where a mere man would fail. They found the garage in darkness, its doors closed. Mr. Larkin applied a finger to the night bell until a man appeared who looked upon the late callers with no show of favor.

“Good-evening,” began Honor Knightly winningly. “Will you take our whale into your garage?”

“No, I won’t take your whale into my garage,” the man snapped back in a disagreeable imitation of Satin’s dulcet tones.

Mr. Larkin laughed as if he knew perfectly well the man did not mean a word he said.

“We have the whale with us,” he told the man. “Perhaps if you looked her over you might take a fancy to the poor beast. Name of Minnie.”

“Mean ter say,” grated the man, “you want me to turn my garage into a bloomin’ aquarium?”

“Not at all,” replied Mr. Larkin. “This whale is quite dead. It’s preserved, or embalmed, or something.”

“I see,” said the man nastily. “You want to make my place a mortuary for dead fish.”

Satin felt that she had listened to just about enough of this sort of thing.

“Do you want that whale or don’t you?” she demanded. “Answer yes or no.”

“Don’t fly out at the man,” interposed Mr. Larkin. “After all, it’s his privilege not to want a whale.”

“How do I know whether I want a whale or not?” the man asked petulantly. “It’s not a thing you can decide offhand. I’ve never thought about whales, and it’s no time of night to begin thinking about them now.” The man turned on his heel and walked back to the door of the garage. “Besides,” he said surprisingly, “you’ve been drinking. Like father like son.”

He disappeared.

“Now what did he mean by that?” asked Satin. “I can’t be a father.”

“I can,” admitted Mr. Larkin. “Most disastrously, I can. But I don’t quite see where his remark fits in. The man must have been somewhat mad from the loss of sleep.”

Once more they climbed into the truck and started off down the boulevard.

“Wouldn’t the man take the whale?” asked the Major.

“No,” replied Mr. Larkin. “The man didn’t want a whale.”

“Isn’t there any place in our great social organization for a preserved whale?” Mr. Dinner demanded. “Surely one would think it would fit in somewhere.”

“A whale out of water is a square peg,” observed Mr. Owen. “It’s not unlike a bull in a china shop.”

At this moment an individual came staggering out of the shadows. Unsteadily he attached himself to the rear of the truck and wobbled along after it. With his free hand he made mysterious gestures over his shoulder. Obviously the man had been drinking. Mr. Larkin bent down to hear him.

“You’re being followed,” whispered the man, pointing over his shoulder. “Pursued.”

“What?” demanded the senior partner.

“You’re being followed,” whispered the man once more. “A great beast is stalking you on no legs at all.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Larkin, “I see. That isn’t a beast. That’s a whale.”

“Worse and worse,” the drunkard hurried on in a low voice. “It might be Moby Dick, and you wouldn’t like that.”

“Don’t worry, old chap,” replied Mr. Larkin, patting the man on the shoulder. “That whale’s name is Minnie. You wouldn’t like to take her home by any chance?”

The man looked bleakly over his shoulder into the half-open mouth of the whale.

“God, no!” he muttered. “I don’t think I’ll take up whales, but I’ve tried everything else. Forgive me if I stop off to catch a drink. The sight of that monster is driving me sober.”

The man veered off and disappeared into a near-by café. The truck and trailer with its amazing burden continued their stately progress down the street. When they came abreast of Mr. Owen’s hotel they were once more halted, this time by another policeman.

“What you got there?” the policeman demanded.

“Only a bit of a fish, officer,” Mr. Larkin told him. “A whale, you know. It’s a sperm.”

“Is it stuffed?” demanded the officer.

“What bearing has that on the question?” inquired the senior partner. “As a matter of fact, it is stuffed, or preserved, or pickled. You know how whales are.”

The officer’s eyes were popping out of his head. He had removed his hat and was diligently mopping his brow.

“This is the damnedest thing I ever saw,” he declared at last. “You should have better sense than to go knocking about the streets with a mighty creature like that at this time of night. I’ve a good mind to run you in.”

“Whale and all, officer?” Satin sweetly inquired.

The officer was stumped.

“No,” he reflected. “The chief would never be the same. He’s a nervous wreck as it is. The sight of that horrid creature would drive him mad. But, just the same, you’ve got to do something about that whale.”

“What do you do with whales?” asked Mr. Owen, thrusting his head from the truck.

“Damned if I know,” replied the officer. “I never had to do with a whale before, but if you don’t get this one off the streets I’ll have to run you in.”

“Listen, officer,” said Satin persuasively. “Can’t a lady buy a bit of fish in this town? You can’t eat meat all the time.”

An expression of revulsion took possession of the officer’s face.

“You’re not going to eat that thing?” he got out in a strained voice. “God, lady, don’t tell me that!”

“Why not?” replied Honor Knightly. “It’s merely an overgrown bloater.”

“Then, will you go away somewhere else,” the policeman pleaded, “and eat it by yourself? I can’t bear the thought.”

“Very well,” the girl replied. “An occasional chunk of whale never did anyone any harm. Drive on, driver.”

The policeman gulped as the truck got under way. For half an hour or more they drove undecidedly through the streets, the whale following after. Honor and her companions had seated themselves on the floor of the truck. They were weary and discouraged. Life to them seemed to consist entirely of whale. Far away in the east the sun was beginning to do things about a new day. Five pairs of moody eyes were fixed on the flanks of Minnie. They tried to avoid the mouth as much as possible.

“I can’t imagine whatever possessed us to purchase that whale,” observed the senior partner. “Had it been a goldfish it would have been different. But of all things, a whale.”

“I know a red-headed man who bought a circus once,” contributed Mr. Dinner. “He was drunk, too.”

“Don’t tell us about it,” said the Major. “Haven’t we enough troubles of our own?”

Suddenly Mr. Larkin rose with an air of determination and called to the driver to stop. Bidding Mr. Owen to accompany him, he descended from the truck.

“What are you going to do?” asked Satin.

“I’m going up to that house,” replied Mr. Larkin, pointing to a modest dwelling set back on a lawn, “and ask if they want a whale.”

“Nobody wants a whale at this hour of the night, or rather, morning,” declared Mr. Dinner.

“Nevertheless, I’m going to ask,” replied the senior partner. “Some people will say yes to anything if you let them go back to bed.”

Followed by Mr. Owen, the senior partner approached the house and rang the bell resoundingly. Presently a man appeared to them with an expression of great annoyance on his face.

“Good-evening,” said Mr. Owen easily. “We thought that perhaps you might like a whale.”

“It’s a sperm,” added Mr. Larkin.

“What would I want a whale for?” asked the man in a harsh voice.

“We don’t know,” came the hopeless voice of the senior partner. “What do people want whales for, anyway? They must be good for something.”

“A whale is good for nothing,” growled the man.

“Hen!” called a woman’s voice from the darkness of the hall. “What do those men want?”

“I can’t make out,” replied Hen over his shoulder. “One of them seems to want to give me a whale.”

“Tell them we don’t want a whale,” came the woman’s voice meditatively. “We already have a canary.”

“Madam,” called Mr. Larkin. “Why not have a whale and a canary, too? They don’t clash, you know.”

“What do you say, Father?” said the slow voice of the hidden speaker. “Do you think we should have a whale?”

“It would make an imposing lawn decoration,” put in Mr. Owen.

“Say, mister,” called the woman. “Do whales eat grass?”

“She wants to know if whales eat grass,” said Mr. Larkin to his partner in a low, nervous voice. “I haven’t the vaguest idea what the horrible creatures eat. You tell her something, like a good fellow.”

“Not this one, madam,” replied Mr. Owen. “This whale has been preserved.”

“I do very well with peaches,” the voice of the woman informed them, “but I’d hate to try a whale. I don’t think we would like a preserved whale, Father, do you?”

“I’d hate one,” he replied. “I’m dead set against that whale, Mother. You’ve enough things to dust off already.”

“Guess you’re right, Hen,” replied the woman. “Dusting all day long. Just tell the gentlemen we’re not fixed for whales and shut the door. It’s draughty in the hall.”

“We’re not fixed for whales,” said Hen, and slammed the door in the partners’ faces.

“Who is?” asked Mr. Owen bluntly, scanning the closed door.

“We’re not,” said Mr. Larkin. “Offhand, I can’t think of anyone who is fixed for whales. That’s just the trouble. Whales are so unexpected.”

They returned to the truck and bade the driver to move on. In one corner Mr. Dinner, his small body curled like a dog’s, was sleeping gently. The Major was nodding, his back against the side of the truck. Mr. Owen sat down, and Satin put her head on his knee. She looked up at him dreamily out of her great, deep eyes; then lashes slowly fringed them.

“I don’t care where I am,” she murmured, “as long as I’m with you.”

After that effort she slept. Mr. Owen gazed down at the girl’s face and felt himself compensated for the presence of the whale. Then he raised his eyes and gazed at the whale’s face. It was remarkable, he reflected, how different faces could be. He wondered who thought them up. He glanced at Mr. Larkin. That gentleman was standing with arms folded across his chest. About him hung the brooding dignity of Napoleon.

“If I don’t get rid of that whale soon,” he said, “I think I’ll go mad and fling myself upon it the way you did to that bear.”

“That’s an idea, too,” remarked Mr. Owen. “We might have to dismantle Minnie. Take her apart rib by rib.”

“It would be better to blow her up,” commented Mr. Larkin. “More fun.”

The truck was now rolling along through the spreading dawn. They were in open country with the sea only a mile or so away. Through the fresh morning air, birds flew down to look at Minnie. Some of the more daring perched upon the whale and made up songs about her. The road was steadily winding upward. An unusually enterprising farmer, his small truck laden with vegetables, tried to pass, then thought better of it. Throwing his gears into reverse he backed through a fence with the utmost expedition. With his eyes still riveted to the great fish on the trailer, he continued on backward down the field. The last glimpse they caught of him he was crashing through a corn field in the direction of a small forest.

“Probably,” observed Mr. Owen, “that man will never get up early again for the remainder of his days.”

“He certainly didn’t want a whale,” replied the senior partner. “I can understand that, though. It must be frightfully discouraging to see so much of anything at this time of day.”

A man with a hoe hailed them from the roadside.

“Hi, mister,” he called, “what you got there?”

“A very nice whale,” Mr. Larkin told him, a spark of hope in his voice. “Would you like it?”

“Nope,” replied the man. “I don’t hold with whales, but it sure is a dandy. It’s a big whale, ain’t it?”

“Whales are big,” said Mr. Larkin wearily.

“Yes,” agreed the farmer cheerfully. “Seems like they run to flesh. Well, so long. I’ve got some pertaters to hoe for Mrs. Mumpford. This is her farm. I only work here.”

“It’s amazing how much personal information one can pick up,” observed the senior partner, “when one really doesn’t want it.”

“You know,” replied Mr. Owen, “if we didn’t want to give this whale away, if we had our hearts set on this whale, people would beg us for it with tears in their eyes.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” commented Mr. Larkin, “but I’m so fed up with that whale I’d cross the street to avoid her.”

Gradually they approached the sea. The road was now sloping steeply. Less than a quarter of a mile away a white beach lay gleaming beneath the slanting sun. Suddenly Mr. Larkin clutched his partner’s arm.

“I have it!” he cried. “I have it! We’ll launch this infernal whale back into the deep.”

He shouted to the driver to stop. Everyone woke up and swarmed out of the truck. Stones were placed under the wheels of the trailer until the truck could draw out of the way. Ahead of them the road ran straight to the sea. A small wooden house was the only dwelling in sight. It stood by the roadside. There was a feeling of tenseness in the air as the partners rolled the stones away from the wheels of the trailer.

“Goodbye, Minnie,” murmured Satin, and waved a crumpled handkerchief.

The trailer gathered headway and rumbled down the road. Straight to its course it held, until it came to the house. Here it swerved horrifyingly from the road and bounded forward. There was the crash of snapping timber, and Minnie’s great head disappeared from view through the walls of the frail structure.

“It veered, my God, it veered!” sobbed the senior partner on Mr. Owen’s chest. “Oh, what a whale! I’d like to take a stick and beat it within an inch of its life.”

“What’s that?” asked the voice of a sleepy woman within the wooden house.

Her husband opened his eyes, then snapped them shut with a click.

“Don’t say a word,” he whispered. “Perhaps it hasn’t seen us.”

“What hasn’t?” asked the woman.

“The whale,” replied the man, his head buried under his pillow.

“The whale,” replied the woman. “Since when have whales taken to prowling round the countryside? Something’s got to be done about all this.”

“Well, don’t ask me to do it,” same the muffled voice of the man. “One look at that face and all ambition fades.”

“Just to think of it,” continued the woman. “Whales bounding about on land and visiting decent people in their beds. It’s an outrage.”

“It wouldn’t be any less surprising,” replied her husband, “if they bounded about the country and visited indecent people in their beds.”

The woman opened her eyes and looked reprovingly at Minnie.

“It’s a whale all right,” she said at last. “A great huge whale, but the blow must have killed it. There’s a glassy look in its eyes.”

“That whale has nothing on me,” replied her husband. “My eyes are burned out like a couple of bulbs, and it took only one good look to do it.”

“To be awakened at dawn by a whale,” mused the woman. “Who says that all the novelty has gone out of life?”

“You seem to take that whale with the utmost equanimity,” remarked the man, nerving himself to withdraw from his place of concealment beneath the pillow. “What are we going to do with the brute? Is it going to become a member of the household? Is it going to remain in our bedroom, watching our lyings down and gettings up? I’d hate like hell to undress myself before the critical gaze of those glazed eyes.”

“If we remove the whale,” said the woman, “we remove one side of our little home. Our bedroom stands disclosed to the world. The general public will be able to bear witness to our habits.”

“That would be almost preferable to the scrutiny of that monster of the deep,” observed the man.

“We could hang a sheet over its face,” suggested his wife.

“Two sheets,” amplified the husband. “One on either side.”

“There’s another thing to be said in favor of that whale,” went on the lady on the bed. “It will effectively keep from the house our old and rare relations.”

“I wish we could have Uncle Alfred down here and show him to that horrible head,” the man advanced suggestively. “One look, I think, would do the trick. His heart isn’t strong. We’d be on easy street then.”

“And it wouldn’t quite be murder,” added the woman. “Not quite.”

“Exactly,” agreed the husband. “All the old boy needs is a bit of a shove. That whale would do the trick.”

“One man’s whale is another man’s poison,” observed the woman, yawning daintily. “The wonder of it all, if not the beauty.”

“I fear we won’t sleep very soundly under the prow of that monster,” remarked the husband. “Our dreams won’t be so fragrant.”

“No,” replied the woman. “I must confess I hardly admire the perfume it is using.”

“I dare say,” her husband remarked, turning over on his side, “that one grows accustomed to almost anything in time.”

From the crest of a distant hill came the chanting of several voices. It was the triumphal song of the partners, reinforced by Satin. Farmers in the field paused at their honest labors as the truck rolled along in the direction of the town.

“You must all dine at my house tonight,” Mr. Larkin was saying in his great-hearted manner. “We want you to meet our wives.”

“Didn’t know you had wives,” replied Mr. Owen. “You act less married than any men I ever knew.”

“Isn’t it awful?” agreed the senior partner in a voice touched with sorrow. “From one excess to another – bounding always. The truth is, we’re miserable with our wives. How glad we would be to change them. You see, they don’t understand us, especially when we relax.”

“With a crash,” added Mr. Owen.

The senior partner endeavored to look pained.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Too Many Wives in a Bed

That same evening at nine Satin and Hector Owen had the somewhat dubious pleasure of meeting the wives of the partners. Mr. Larkin’s town house stood in a side street only a few yards removed from one of the main thoroughfares of the city. It was difficult to distinguish it from the neighborhood cafés, the senior partner having conceived the quaint idea of placing tables before his front door and shielding them from the sun with parasols of startling floridity. A waiter stood in attendance. The same festive atmosphere was maintained within the house itself, the dining room having all the earmarks of a first-class barroom.

In the hall a check girl was waiting to relieve the callers of anything with which they cared to part. She gave Mr. Owen a check and an after-hours smile. He felt at home immediately.

The reception room was wildly luxurious. It gave the impression of veering like its owner. In it awaited the wives. The introductions were almost touchingly simple.

“This is Nana,” said Mr. Larkin, indicating a small, dark woman of middle years with youthfully wicked eyes.

“Shall I kiss him on the lips,” asked Nana, removing a cocktail glass from hers, “or shake him by the hand?”

“Why not bite him on the ear?” suggested Mr. Larkin.

Nana looked for a moment into Satin’s glittering eyes. One look was sufficient. She shook Mr. Owen’s hand.

Dinner’s wife was tall and rawboned in a good-looking way. Although no longer in her first blooming, she was still in full possession of her sex and wore her blonde dye recklessly. She was referred to as the Kitten, for no reasonable reason at all. The Major’s source of dissatisfaction was undeniably plump. Snow-white hair fell round a pink, youthful face. There were dimples in the face. Her name was Aggie, and like Nana and the Kitten, she too, was a little drunk. The partners were surprisingly sober, a social error they made haste to rectify.

The party came to rest against the bar in the dining room. It occupied one entire wall. Behind it were two red-faced, benevolent individuals with the most meticulously brushed and parted hair Mr. Owen had ever seen.

“We’ve been running these poor men ragged,” the Kitten explained, “all day long. They’re exhausted mentally as well as physically. Can’t think up any more drinks. We’ve tried them all.”

“You know,” put in Nana, trying to look naïve and failing most lamentably, “we get so lonely when our husbands are away – —”

“As they always are,” put in Aggie.

“—that the only thing left to do is to drink like fish,” Nana concluded.

“Please don’t, my dear,” said the senior partner hastily. “Don’t mention fish in my presence. We had such an unfortunate time with a whale only last night. Stayed up with the monster till dawn. You can’t imagine how troublesome a whale can be until you’ve actually met one.”

“Good!” exclaimed Nana. “I like that better and better. One can hardly go to bed with a whale.”

“But if anyone could go to bed with a whale,” quoth Aggie, “those three men would be the ones.”

The partners looked distressed.

“Would it be possible to veer this conversation into more savory channels?” suggested the senior partner with a delicate lift of his eyebrows. “The mere idea of going to bed with a whale makes my reason totter. Harry, a triple Martini, if you please. Serve it in a stein.”

“And what do you do at the store, my dear?” asked Nana, turning to Satin. “Are you a model?”

“I sell dirty books,” said Satin, and Mr. Owen thanked his God she did not add, “lady.”

“Marvelous,” cried the Kitten. “Simply marvelous. And you go around with a lot of dirty men – our husbands.”

“Come, come,” put in Major Barney. “Take us off the pan for a while. There are worse husbands than we are knocking about this town.”

“A depressing thought,” said Aggie.

“Incredible,” added Nana. “Say something, Mr. Owen. We’ve hardly heard your voice. Do you lech, too?”

“Do I what?” asked Mr. Owen, shrinking a little at the very sound of the word.

“What I meant was,” explained Nana, “are you a lecherous man?”

“May heaven turn my toe nails blue,” exploded the senior partner. “What a question to ask a guest! Do you lech? Hold me before I begin to careen all over the room.”

“I wouldn’t call him overly lecherous,” answered Satin for the stunned Mr. Owen.

“Then you know, my dear. You’ve found out,” said the Kitten in tones of delight. “I do hope he’s promiscuous, at least. There are so few fresh faces. His is not unattractive.”

The three wives looked closely into Mr. Owen’s face, then nodded significantly at each other. Mr. Owen drank steadily and endeavored to appear at ease. Presently he succeeded far better than he had intended.

By the time they had finished with the bar the dinner was in even a worse condition than the diners, yet no one seemed to mind, as the courses were snapped through and set aside in favor of wine.

“He bit a bear yesterday,” Mr. Larkin announced, pointing at the guest of honor, “and the bear swooned.”

“If he bit me,” retorted Aggie, “I think I’d swoon, too – right in his arms. Will you bite me sometime, Mr. Owen?”

“Try not to be so mollish,” interposed the Major.

“And he saved our three lives,” put in the small Dinner from behind a large glass. “We were drowning and he saved our lives. All three of them.”

The wives looked reproachfully at Mr. Owen.

“Why did you do that?” demanded Nana. “Have you no consideration for us?”

“But my dear lady,” protested Mr. Owen, “I couldn’t let my partners drown right before my eyes.”

“We could,” said the Kitten. “We could even go so far as to help them to drown.”

“Pay no attention to them, my boy,” Mr. Larkin called out from the end of the table. “Our wives have a sense of horror instead of humor. If you want to make a hit with them, although I can’t understand why you should, just take them to the morgue for an outing. They’d love it dearly.” He glanced at his watch, and uttered an exclamation. “What do we do with time?” he said. “It’s eleven o’clock already.”

“We tossed time over the bar in great handfuls,” his wife told him, “and besides, we didn’t begin operations until well after nine o’clock.”

“I must get in touch with the Mayor,” continued Mr. Larkin. “Something has just occurred to me. Owen, I loathe policemen. They’re always under one’s feet. I feel so splendidly now I’d like to assault a cop.”

“It’s been a dream of mine,” replied Mr. Owen, “a beautiful dream unfulfilled.”

“Well,” said the senior partner, “it’s become a mania with me. Therefore, I suggest that by way of entertainment we indulge in a little concentrated cop baiting. The Mayor is my brother-in-law. He is putty in my hands as well as in those of his bosses. I must make some arrangements with him for the protection of our various bodies and persons.”

“It would do me a lot of good to bash a cop in the eye,” Mr. Dinner declared as the senior partner left the room to arrange things with the Mayor.

“It would do the cop no harm,” his wife replied. “You’re such a little man.”

“And it would do me even more good,” the little man went on dispassionately, “to bash you in the eye.”

“Is that so,” replied Mrs. Dinner. “I’d have to sit on the floor, my midget, to give you a chance.”

Mr. Dinner’s bitter retort was interrupted by the slightly swaying entrance of the senior partner.

“It’s all arranged,” he announced. “Larry, the Mayor’s secretary, is going to sit by the wire. We will be permanently connected.”

“What did you tell his honor?” inquired Major Barney.

“Merely that we were going to have a bit of a lark,” replied Mr. Larkin, “and we didn’t want any police interference. Larry has been instructed to take care of that side of the business. All we have to do is to assault or insult an officer, then run like hell to this house. You see, we must lure them in.” He paused and thought deeply for a moment, then addressed himself to his wife. “Nana,” he said, “as I remember it, you have somewhere about the house a sort of a heavily stuffed leather bar we foisted off on the women of this city under the guise of a flesh-reducing device. Will you get it? While not being exactly lethal, it will make a decidedly effective weapon.”

The senior partner, with all the solemnity of a chief of staff giving instructions for an approaching engagement, turned to Major Barney. “Major Britt-Britt,” he began, “on our first sortie from the house you are to remain behind and close to the door. When we lure a policeman in, you whack him with the leather bar with the object in view of reducing his flesh to atoms.”

Nana, who had left the room, returned with a long, felt-packed leather bar. The Major took it and swished it through the air. Then he smiled a trifle grimly and sat down, looking infinitely pleased. It was going to be a good evening.

Then began one of the maddest and most undignified adventures in which either Mr. Owen or his partners had yet taken part. It was reprehensible in every detail, in conception as well as in execution, and yet like so many reprehensible exploits it was entirely and most satisfyingly successful. It was not that these thuggish gentlemen had any personal score to settle with the minions of the law, but merely that as private citizens they felt it only fair that they should get their innings once. And in extenuation of their conduct it must be borne in mind they were still suffering from the effects of the previous night as well as from an overdose of Minnie, the female sperm whale.

Leaving the Major at the front door, Mr. Larkin led his two partners from the house. They looked about at once for a policeman. Unfortunately for him one was standing on the corner. As Mr. Larkin approached the officer he, the senior partner, thought of the lowest and most objectionable word he could fling in the man’s face. When he found this word Mr. Larkin shivered a little himself and wondered if he could get it out.

“Can you pretend to laugh?” asked Mr. Larkin of his partners in a low voice. “Irritatingly. You know – tauntingly?”

“I’ll be able to make some sort of offensive noise,” replied Mr. Owen, “although I still find myself a trifle awed by the majesty of the law.”

“You must both wait until I’ve done my stuff,” continued the senior partner, “then, like a Greek chorus, you’re to come in with peals of taunting laughter. After that we must run like hell.”

“That part I will play to perfection,” Mr. Dinner muttered.

Walking snappily and with every indication of purpose, the three men swung up to the unsuspecting policeman and confronted him.

“Officer,” said Mr. Larkin in a businesslike voice, “are you listening?”

“No,” snapped the officer. “Whatta you want?”

“Officer,” continued the senior partner quite distinctly, “listen well. Officer, you’re a punk, and I’m going to tweak your repellent nose.”

Before the policeman could recover his stunned faculties Mr. Larkin’s hand shot out and affixed itself to the man’s nose which he proceeded to tweak with both skill and vigor.

“Laugh,” murmured Mr. Larkin to his partners. “Tauntingly.”

Weird noises issued from the throats of Messrs. Owen and Dinner. They sounded more terrified than taunting, yet they served one purpose. They brought the assaulted policeman back to life and fury with a snap.

“You’re a low punk, officer,” Mr. Larkin assured the appalled policeman in his rather precious accents. “Try to paddle those great flat feet.”

It is needless to say that the policeman did try. He tried his level best. Down the street he pounded after the flying heels of the partners. At the door of the house they paused and looked back. The officer was close at hand.

“Here we are, low punk of a policeman,” called the senior partner, then ducked into the house, his companions close behind him.

“Be ready, Major!” Mr. Larkin cried, darting for the telephone. “The blow is intended to outrage more than it is to maim.”

The officer did not hesitate until the resounding whack from the stuffed leather bar brought him to a full stop. As the weapon struck him across the stomach he exhaled vastly great quantities of air, then sat down on the floor. His face was working furiously, while inarticulate sounds issued from between his lips. Presently, as he pulled himself together, these sounds formed themselves into words.

“A punk, am I?” he was heard to mutter. “Holy Saint Patrick preserve us, they’ll never get over this. Never. I’ll tear them all to pieces. I’ll torture them for years.”

Mr. Dinner glanced at Mr. Owen and discovered that he too was taking the policeman’s words very much to heart. By the telephone Mr. Larkin was calmly sitting, the receiver in his hand. Slowly the officer rose from the floor and advanced into the room, his eyes alight with the fires of madness. Before he could bellow his rage, the senior partner addressed him in a voice of authority.

“Officer,” he said, “you’re wanted on the telephone. The Mayor’s office speaking.”

The officer paused and glared at the speaker.

“If this is some more monkey business,” he muttered, “I’m gonna drag your insides out by their roots.”

With this dire threat he seized the telephone and applied the receiver to his ear. And as he listened the red flush of his face changed to a light green.

“Donovan speaking,” he began. “I’ve just – —”

“It doesn’t matter what you’ve just done,” came the voice at the other end of the wire. “I’m speaking for the Mayor. This is Larry. The boss says you’re not to lay a finger on the four gentlemen in 33 Harvest Street. There’s no harm in them.”

“What!” almost screamed Donovan. “No harm in them. They’re dangerous maniacs, I tell you. Do you know what they did?”

“What did they do?” asked Larry, who liked to be entertained.

“They called me a punk,” Donovan whispered into the telephone. “A low punk of a policeman. That’s what they did.”

“Well, aren’t you?” asked Larry easily.

The officer gasped and strangled. Finally he collected his voice.

“And – and,” he continued, “one of them tweaked my nose right in front of everybody. A mighty tweak, it was. And his accomplices laughed at me, very nastily they laughed. And that’s not all. For Gord’s sake, Larry, can’t I do a thing? I’m that upset – all aquiver.”

“What would you like to do?” inquired the voice at the other end of the line.

“Shoot ’em,” replied Donovan without a moment’s hesitation. “Shoot ’em in painful places.”

“You can’t do a thing,” said Larry, “except to go back to your post. Hurry away now, Donovan, and don’t keep me here all night.”

With an expression of incredulity in his strained eyes the policeman put down the receiver, and regarded the occupants of the room. Coolly the partners returned his stare. The women looked sympathetic. Suddenly he uttered a wild scream and, springing from the chair, seized Mr. Dinner by the nose.

“Mayor or no Mayor,” he grated, “you’re going to stand for this.”

Mr. Dinner stood for it with fortitude and calm.

“It didn’t hurt at all,” he announced to the interested gathering. “This punk cop hasn’t the strength of a flea.”

Donovan’s lips were mumbling as he looked hatefully at the telephone. Then with a sound like a sob he staggered from the house and arrested the first citizen he saw on a charge of criminal loitering. From this point on Mr. Owen was scarcely in a condition to remember the remainder of the evening with any degree of clarity. The assault of Officer Donovan had moved him deeply. It had addled his brain and doubled the potency of the drinks he had already consumed. The fact that an officer of the law could be so treated with impunity filled him with a sense of loss. It was like some great upheaval in nature – a fundamental change in the structure of the universe. His amazement temporarily outstripped his satisfaction.

After the crazed departure of the policeman the air was filled with the sounds of popping corks and general jubilation. Some time later he became hazily aware of a terrific battle taking place between the partners and their respective wives. He was impressed by the extreme bitterness and vitriolic quality of this brawl. They were reviling one another with recriminations of the most shocking nature, in the midst of which he fell asleep, his head on Satin’s shoulder.

When he awoke the following morning, he was not in bed with one woman as he had expected, but with three, his partners’ wives in the fullness of their rage having left their husbands more or less flat. On a day bed by the French windows through which the sun was streaming, Satin was sleeping with the confidence and grace of youth.

There are men who, upon finding themselves so well placed, grow both elated and grateful over their great good fortune – three women in bed and one in reserve. Mr. Owen was not one of these men. He was panic stricken and fearful. For one awful moment his heart stopped beating, then frantically leaped into action. He himself was unable to move, being wedged in between Nana and the plump person of Aggie. And while he was considering the situation with all its shocking implications, his consternation was further intensified by the inquiring scrutiny of three pairs of eyes.

“Look!” exclaimed Aggie. “There’s a man in bed between us.”

“I know it,” was Nana’s gloomy reply. “I don’t have to be told when a man is in bed with me. He’s the new partner.”

“First drunkenness,” came the sleepy voice of the Kitten, “and then dishonor. It always works out that way. Sordid, I call it.”

“It’s lucky,” resumed Nana, “that this is an oversized bed. Otherwise we would have had no sleep at all.”

“I don’t even remember the name of this threefold seducer,” the Kitten observed.

“It’s Owen,” replied Aggie. “Hector Owen.”

“Mr. Owen,” inquired Nana, “would you mind giving us a brief résumé of what has gone on in this bed?”

“I can’t tell you,” said Mr. Owen, a weary groan escaping his lips. “All I can say, ladies, is I’m shocked to the quick.”

“To the what?” exclaimed the Kitten, her head popping up.

“Don’t ask,” replied Nana. “We don’t care to know.”

“Do you all remember anything?” asked Mr. Owen timidly. “No details, of course.”

“I don’t, worse luck,” replied Aggie, “but I can draw my own conclusions.”

“Oh-h!” exhaled Mr. Owen. “What have I done?”

“Use your imagination, my dear sir,” said the Kitten from her side of the tremendous bed. “It is only too clear to me.”

“But couldn’t I have slept steadily through the night?” pleadingly asked the man.

“That would have been an insulting thing to do,” observed Nana, “as well as foolhardy.”

“Rather dishonor,” said Aggie, “than such gross neglect.”

The Kitten laughed shortly.

“No fear of that,” she told them. “A man might neglect one woman, but he could hardly keep out of the way of the three of us, especially a man who bites bears and saves lives and deals in pornographic literature.”

“And to think,” murmured Nana, “I wanted to know if he leched.”

Once more Mr. Owen groaned.

“Don’t use that word,” he pleaded. “It isn’t a verb, anyway. People can’t lech.”

“Then how would you put it?” snapped Nana.

“I wouldn’t even bring up the subject,” Mr. Owen replied.

“He must have started over here,” the Kitten reflected aloud, “and grimly worked his way across. I’ve just found one of his socks.”

“Have you anything on, Mr. Owen?” asked Aggie, fumbling with the bedclothes.

“Don’t!” cried Mr. Owen. “Don’t look underneath. I’ll find out for myself.”

He ducked his head under the bedclothes, then immediately popped it out.

“Little,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Very little.”

“I’m amazed you made that concession,” declared Nana. “How are we fixed for garments?”

“Not at all,” replied Mr. Owen. “My God, ladies, this is terrible. I kept one of mine, at least.”

“Meaning, we didn’t?” inquired Nana.

“I’m very much afraid not,” said Mr. Owen in a low voice. “There seems to be nothing as far as the eye can reach.”

“What did you do with our clothes?” demanded Aggie.

“I don’t know,” replied Mr. Owen hopelessly. “I can’t remember.”

“That will sound good to the judge,” put in the Kitten.

“What a man!” observed Nana. “What thoroughness and determination!”

“Come out of that bed at once,” commanded Satin from across the room. “What are you doing in there with all those women?”

“Nothing, dear,” replied Mr. Owen placatingly. “I’m doing nothing at all.”

“Not now, he isn’t,” sarcastically commented Nana.

“Satin,” called Mr. Owen nervously. “All I have left are my drawers.”

“They’re poor protection against the attack of three full grown women,” said Satin with a dry laugh. “I’m surprised they left you with those.”

“Don’t blame us,” the Kitten protested. “He didn’t leave us a scrap – not a blessed shred.”

A smothered ejaculation turned Mr. Owen’s eyes to the door. The partners were standing in it, their eyes fixed on the bed.

“Heavens!” exclaimed Mr. Larkin. “He’s slept with all our wives.”

“Our partner,” said Mr. Dinner. “Our dear brother in arms – in our dear wives’ arms.”

“But I don’t understand it at all,” protested the senior partner. “I asked him only to dinner, and here I find him in bed with every wife we have. Isn’t that going too far?”

“Owen,” said the Major sternly, “what are you doing in bed with our wives?”

“Not a thing, Major,” answered Mr. Owen. “Just lying here talking.”

“The chat after the storm,” observed Satin.

“That’s not the way to ask it,” Mr. Larkin said to the Major. “Ask him what he has been doing in bed with our wives.”

“That would make good listening,” Satin commented lazily. “I like droll stories.”

“Listen,” said Mr. Owen earnestly. “This is God’s own truth. I don’t know how I got here, why I got here, or what I did when I did get here.”

“I never thought a man could cram so many unchivalrous statements into one short, compact sentence,” remarked the Kitten indignantly.

“Three fair names dishonored at one fell swoop,” mused the senior partner. “It’s almost like magic. You know, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he had the cook and the check girl under the bed and the maid tucked in the closet.”

“A new broom sweeps clean,” Honor Knightly tossed in. “I’m actually proud of the man.”

“I admire him a little myself,” admitted Mr. Larkin. “Such industry. Such enterprise. Such dogged perseverance. I’d like to exhibit him in a show case.”

“Madam,” thundered the Major, “have you dishonored my name?”

“Search me,” Aggie answered. “I don’t believe your name was mentioned.”

“It would hardly have been in good taste under the circumstances, Major,” put in Mr. Larkin. “I think she was right about that.”

“Mrs. Dinner,” demanded the small partner, “what have you been doing all night long?”

“Trying to get some sleep,” the Kitten answered sulkily.

“My God!” exclaimed Mr. Larkin. “Was he as bad as all that?”

“Ask him,” said the Kitten.

“I shrink from the very suggestion of such pell-mell activity,” the senior partner declared. “This room must have been a bedlam. I’d actually wring my hands if I thought it would do any good.”

“We can’t stand here discussing this triple adultery all day,” the Major broke in. “You three women are as good as divorced already.”

“Of course,” agreed Mr. Larkin. “A divorce is most necessary. We can’t afford to be dishonored en masse, especially by the same man. Owen, my boy, do hurry up and dress yourself and you, too, Miss Knightly. People buy pornography at the most amazing hours.”

“Divorce and be damned,” snapped Nana. “To live with you is about the same as staying single. If your face wasn’t so silly I’d forget what it looks like half the time.”

“It looks just the same during the other half,” Mr. Larkin assured her. “We’ll wait for you downstairs, Owen. Your night’s work should earn a day’s repose and all that, but we can’t spare a man of your unflagging energy from the store. Hurry down.”

As the door closed on the partners Mr. Owen, casting modesty to the wind, lunged out of the bed and wearily began to dress. Satin did likewise. The three wives watched them with interest, and then calmly went back to sleep.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Triple Co-respondent

The partners sat at one table, their wives at another. Mr. Owen, the co-respondent, and Miss Knightly, the chief witness, occupied a smaller table between the two. Looking down on them from behind his elevated desk sat Judge Hampton, who knew nothing at all about the whys and wherefores of divorce procedure. He had been appointed to handle the case in the absence of the official referee. The wives did not like his looks. Neither did the partners and, from the expression on Judge Hampton’s face, he failed to like anyone’s looks. Disgust with mankind ran eloquently through all the wrinkles of his rage-punished face. The iron-gray hair on his head seemed to bristle forward in a gesture of contempt for humanity. So light blue were his eyes that they gave the impression of being sightless. This peculiarity made the good Judge all the more disconcerting. One was never quite certain upon whom those eyes were fixed.

Never had Mr. Owen been so popular with the partners. From their table they gazed across at him with eyes overflowing with gratitude and affection. Not only had he twice saved them from extinction, but also he was now about to liberate them from their wives. In celebration of the auspicious occasion they had succeeded in getting themselves comfortably yet still competently inebriated. The pitcher on the table, supposed to contain fresh water, had been cleverly filled with gin by the crafty Mr. Dinner. In the folly of their childish confidence they had dispensed with the services of lawyers. They would conduct their own case.

Satin, motivated by some misguided impulse, had dressed herself so deeply in mourning one could only conclude she had lost an entire family. It made Mr. Owen feel partly buried merely to sit beside her.

The courtroom was packed to the rails, moral turpitude still being the greatest show on earth. Judge Hampton’s head was turning in the direction of the partners. His misty eyes seemed to be weaving a curse around them.

“The air from the plaintiff’s table,” he said, “has an unpleasant suggestion of a barroom. It makes me blink. Charlie, turn on the fan before I begin to dance and sing.” Charlie, an aged court attendant, directed the full power of an electric fan against the indignant partners. “That’s better,” continued the Judge, “but not, I fear, for those sitting behind them. Did not this paper tell me differently” – here the Judge raised an official looking sheet – “I would come to the conclusion that these ladies here were quite rightly endeavoring to divorce themselves from a trio of alcoholics instead of serving as defendants.”

“Your honor,” Mr. Larkin politely replied, “the ladies, as you inaccurately called them, have the capacity to drink this trio under the table.”

“They should add another bottle,” his honor retorted in a cruel voice, “and drink you under the sod.”

Mr. Black, attorney for the wives, rose to his feet.

“In denying the plaintiffs’ implications, your honor,” said the suave Mr. Black, “my clients wish me to remind you that no fan was needed to be turned against them.”

“Back in your chair,” snapped Judge Hampton sharply. “The torrents of so-called perfume deluging me from your clients’ table suggests another resort of vicious amusement the name of which I will leave to your imagination. Between these two tables I find myself leading a life of vicarious depravity. Such tactics will have no effect on me save an unpleasant one.”

Upon the reception of this remark, derogatory to their wives, the partners broke into a volley of spontaneous clapping.

“You will either be quiet where you are,” the Judge told them, “or raving in your cells. Take your choice.” He paused and frowned down at the paper on his desk, then he both shook and raised his head as if suddenly coming back to life. “I did not come here,” he said, “to discuss the various odors of those before me. Suffice it to say both are thoroughly obnoxious. As I understand it, Messrs. Larkin, Dinner, and Britt-Britt charge their wives with excessive adultery and on those unsavory grounds submit a plea for a divorce.”

“Quite correct, your honor,” replied the senior partner. “Those three women do nothing else but.”

“But what?” demanded his honor.

“You know,” Mr. Larkin answered significantly. “That word you used. It began with an ‘a’.”

“Do they now,” murmured the Judge, a small spark of interest faintly illuminating his eyes as he fixed them on the wives. “Aren’t they getting a little old for that sort of thing?”

“Your honor!” cried the Kitten, stung to a disregard of the good offices of Mr. Black. “We look ten years older with our clothes on.”

“Madam,” replied Judge Hampton, “are you arguing for or against yourself and your companions? As I interpret your remark you are deliberately attempting to convey to me the disgraceful information that when your clothes are off you look ten years younger. Just where does that lead?”

“Well, your honor,” faltered the Kitten, “you know how women are.”

“You mean with their clothes off?” interrupted the Judge.

“I mean,” the Kitten struggled on, “no lady likes to be told she’s too old to be otherwise, if you get what I mean.”

“I do,” put in the Judge. “You have just told me, and it hasn’t done any of you a bit of good. Please sit down and cease from disgracing yourself.” Again the Judge paused and passed a hand across his eyes. “Owing to the sudden calling of the case and the suspicious circumstances surrounding the whole sordid affair, it has been deemed expedient to have the three co-respondents in court. Will they now come forward?”

“Your honor,” announced Mr. Larkin, “there is only one co-respondent.”

“What!” exclaimed the Judge, his blue eyes swimming in his face. “Only one man for these three women? My word, has he no other occupation?”

“He’s our partner,” Mr. Larkin answered, a little proudly.

“Do you mean to say this frantic adulterer is still your partner?” the Judge demanded incredulously.

“We never confuse business with pleasure,” was the senior partner’s hypocritical retort. “The gentleman’s name is Hector Owen, and he is one of the busiest and most progressive men in town.”

“He must be,” commented the Judge. “Will Mr. Owen please stand up? I can scarcely wait to see him.”

The entire courtroom rose as Mr. Owen got to his feet to confront the Judge. Here was a man worth looking at – a man of solid achievement.

“Mr. Owen,” began the Judge, “if what I hear about you is true you must be a very horrid man indeed. Who is that woman beside you? She’s all in black. Did you happen to murder her husband?”

Before Mr. Owen could reply to these questions Satin’s voice was heard.

“No, your honor,” she announced devastatingly. “I’m only his mistress. I was there and saw it all.”

“I had hoped not to veer,” muttered the senior partner to his companions, “but that girl’s candor is simply muscle binding.”

Upon the reception of Satin’s information the Judge’s eyes seemed to die in his face. For a brief moment he gave the impression of a man withdrawn from life.

“Good God,” he was heard to remark to the courtroom at large. “What an amazing character. What an unregenerate soul. He wrecks three homes, then drags his mistress into court. And although she saw it all they are still as thick as thieves.”

At this point Judge Hampton clasped his hands and leaned across his desk. Mr. Owen received the uneasy impression he was being most disagreeably scrutinized. “Hector Owen,” resumed his honor in a meditative voice, “you’re not an especially powerful man and most certainly not a handsome one. I must confess, I don’t understand how you get away with it. If this were a criminal court I’d greatly enjoy putting you away for life. As it is I can only ask you to confirm the charges, but, for God’s sake, don’t tell the story in what I can well imagine would be your own words. A few of us present still have a shred of decency left.”

“Your honor,” replied Mr. Owen, “I am happy to say I don’t remember a thing.”

“You are happy to say that, are you?” observed the Judge with biting sarcasm. “Well, I’d be ashamed to say it. Do you mean to tell me that you’ve grown so accustomed to your misconduct that it leaves no impression on your mind?”

“No, your honor,” put in the helpful Mr. Larkin, “he doesn’t mean that. Our partner was drunk at the time. You must forgive him. Also, he’s been extremely busy selling pornographic literature.”

Judge Hampton was seen to sway a little in his chair. His mouth opened and closed, but for a few moments no words issued therefrom.

“I have never,” he got out with an effort, “I have never in my life encountered so disreputable a character in human form. He gets himself drunk, ruins a lot of women, and then pops off and sells dirty books to the general public. I’d prefer to deal with a poisoner. Owen,” he suddenly thundered, “tell me when and where these several incidents took place. What period of time did they cover?”

Satin was on her feet now, standing loyally by the wretched Mr. Owen.

“Your honor,” she answered for him, “it all happened at the same time and at the same place. You see, the three wives were occupying the same bed and – —”

“Have you by any chance mistaken this courtroom for a stag party?” interrupted the Judge. “We don’t care to hear any vile stories, if you please.”

“But it’s true, your honor,” Satin insisted. “I was there at the time.”

“Cheering him on to further endeavors, I suppose,” observed the Judge icily. “Why didn’t you intervene? Why didn’t you raise a protesting hand?”

“I couldn’t even lift a finger, your honor,” the girl replied, with an engaging smile. “I was as drunk as a lord myself.”

Judge Hampton closed his eyes and sat like a man frozen inanimate with pain. Presently he spoke as if from a great distance.

“Merciful heavens,” he told all who cared to listen, “I’ll have to go into a retreat after this case is ended. Never have I been forced to hear such demoralizing testimony. There isn’t a scrap of fragrance anywhere. The indecency of it all is quite unrelieved. What were all those women doing in that one bed?”

“Well, you see,” replied Satin, “the ladies were drunk too – petrified.”

“It only remains now for you to tell me,” said the Judge in a dead voice, “that the husbands were smoking opium in a waterfront dive, and the whole vicious circle will be complete.” Here he looked scornfully upon the partners. “What I want to know is, how could so many persons and so much activity be confined to a single bed?”

“It wasn’t a single bed, your honor,” Mr. Larkin put in. “As a matter of fact, I had that bed especially made. It’s about twice the size of a double bed.”

“It must be a huge bed,” his honor reflected aloud, as if picturing the object in his mind’s eye.

“It’s a tremendous bed, your honor,” enthusiastically agreed the senior partner. “There would have been ample room for you.”

The Judge started in his chair as if suddenly and mortally stung.

“What would I be doing in that bed?” he gasped.

“Seeing life,” quoth Mr. Dinner with startling clarity.

At this his honor seemed to be deciding whether to burst a blood vessel or to faint dead away on his desk. Finally, after a desperate mental effort, he succeeded in pulling himself together into a compact mass of venom.

“Dinner,” he said, “if I had my way you’d be warmed over in hell. As it is, if you make any more remarks you’ll grow cold and stale in jail.” Here the Judge turned sharply upon the three wives. “Do you or do you not deny the charges of your husbands?”

“My clients cannot answer that question, your honor,” replied Mr. Black, rising. “They say they do not remember.”

“This,” commented the Judge bitterly, “is by all odds the most forgetful series of adulteries on record.”

“If you’d been in our place,” said Nana defensively, “you wouldn’t have remembered either, your honor.”

“Madam,” rasped the Judge, “you will kindly refrain from putting me in your place. I am a judge, you must remember, of long standing.”

“All the more reason for lying down in bed,” Nana retorted, “and getting a little rest.”

“Under the circumstances,” said his honor tartly, “I’m afraid there would have been little rest for me.”

“Oh, your honor!” exclaimed Nana coyly. “What a thing to say!”

The Judge looked shocked.

“I didn’t mean that at all,” he told her.

“Mean what, your honor?” she asked sweetly.

“Never mind,” retorted the Judge. “We will drop the bed and take up other things.” He turned back to the partners who, for the sake of verisimilitude, had been drinking gin like water. Mr. Dinner was now snoring gently with his head resting against the pitcher. “You gentlemen,” observed the Judge, “appear to be in worse condition than when this case started. Are these divorce proceedings making you drunker? Wake that little chap up. His noises make me nervous.”

Major Barney reached out and shook Mr. Dinner vigorously. The small man woke up and started to his feet.

“Are we divorced yet?” he inquired.

“No,” snapped the Judge. “You’re lucky you’re not hung. As far as I can see, we haven’t got anywhere except deeper and deeper into a morass of immorality.”

“Would you like me to tell you about it, your honor?” asked the senior partner.

“Go ahead,” retorted the Judge.

“Well,” began Mr. Larkin, “it was this way. When we came into the room, there they were in the bed – all three of our wives, and would you believe it, your honor, I don’t think they had a stitch between them. And there he was, too, plump in the same bed. Well, your honor, I almost screamed. You should have seen me veer. I had to be held to keep from spinning like a windmill. And he had on a pair of drawers – I didn’t actually see the drawers, your honor, and I don’t understand how he could have possibly kept them on when you come to consider everything, but he claimed he was wearing his drawers and so I let it go at that. And he was lying all squeezed up between my wife and Mr. Dinner’s wife – —”

“One moment,” interrupted the Judge. “You seem to be enjoying this so much, perhaps you’d like to draw a picture of it.”

“I could never do that, your honor,” said Mr. Larkin delicately. “It wouldn’t be at all nice.”

“I appreciate your scruples,” heavily observed Judge Hampton. “Sit down and keep quiet.”

“Your honor,” said Mr. Black, “one of my clients, Mrs. Larkin, to be specific, wishes me to state that her husband is not without blemish.”

“I should say not,” commented the Judge.

“Three weeks ago,” continued Mr. Black, “he, Mr. Larkin, spent the week-end with the wife of another one of my clients, Mrs. Dinner, to be specific, at a near-by watering resort.”

Mr. Dinner looked reproachfully at Mr. Larkin.

“What a thing to do,” he said, then fell asleep once more against the pitcher.

The Kitten, furiously angry, sprang to her feet.

“Your honor,” she cried, “the reason Nana Larkin is so sure of her ground is that she herself was stopping at the next hotel with no less a person than my shrimp of a husband, and I hope that’s specific enough to suit everybody concerned.”

It was difficult to judge whether the senior partner looked more surprised than amused. He aroused the slumbering Dinner and shook his limp hand.

“That makes us even,” Mr. Larkin said.

Aggie, the wife of the Major, was now confronting the shocked and astounded Judge.

“Your honor,” she proclaimed, “as you can easily see for yourself, I am not exactly a cripple. I don’t intend to be left out in the cold. I, myself, have spent some pleasant week-ends with both Mr. Larkin and Mr. Dinner. They are altogether different when they’re not with their wives. And as for my own husband – my word! He and Nana Larkin have been just like that for years.”

Before the shrinking eyes of the Judge she held up two fingers, eloquently pressed together. Even the spectators in the courtroom were too stunned by this unedifying expose of these extra-marital activities to create the usual buzz of satisfaction and surprise. Many of them were either too afraid or too well bred to look at the Judge.

“Tell that woman to sit down,” he croaked. “I don’t want to hear any more. Who was it mentioned veering? Well, I’m doing a lot of that myself. Of all the licentious groups this one wins the palm!”

Judge Hampton’s voice drifted away. He sank back in his chair and mopped his brow with a large tan handkerchief. The partners were exchanging apologetic glances. Satin and Mr. Owen smiled at them encouragingly. Mr. Larkin waved a debonair hand and raised his glass. When he had finished drinking he passed the glass to the Major, who in turn quaffed deeply, then passed it on to Mr. Dinner. Apparently it would take something far more serious than mutual infidelity to break up the entente cordiale. Suddenly Judge Hampton sat forward in his chair. The attorney for the wives received the chilly impression that he was under the observation of those faint blue eyes.

“Go on, Mr. Black,” came the spiteful voice of the Judge. “Why don’t you say it?”

“Say what, your honor?”

“That at one time or another you have spent week-ends with all these ladies,” replied the Judge. “That would bring in everyone involved in this disreputable case except myself. How those women must look forward to Saturdays.”

“Unfortunately, your honor,” said Mr. Black with a smooth smile, “my relations with my clients have been purely professional.”

At the introduction of the word purely Judge Hampton laughed shortly. To some of the spectators the jurist sounded common; to others, merely crazed.

“The criminal immorality of this case almost frightens me,” he said. “Here we have three husbands suing their respective wives for divorce. What do we find? A round robin of infidelity – a frantic scramble of corruption. No sooner have they unpacked their bags after one vicious week-end, than they begin repacking them again to pop off on another one with the wife of one of their dearest friends. They’re partners, no less. Look at them. They look like a glee club. Probably comparing notes. And why, may I ask, why did they deem it necessary to drag the man Owen and his mistress into court? Each one of those husbands can serve as a co-respondent for the other two. Each one of the wives can act in the same disgusting capacity.”

Mr. Larkin was on his feet. His face was flushed from gin, and his eyes were glittering.

“Judge,” he said, “we thought you would like to see him. You know, it is rather unusual. My other two partners and myself may have been a trifle informal as regards each other’s wives, but Mr. Owen was simply epic. He got all three of them. Imagine! All three. At the same time and in the same place, at that. And with his avowed mistress present. I wouldn’t have believed it possible if I hadn’t seen him with my own two eyes. The man should run for office. I’d vote for – —”

“Will you please stop going on like that,” interrupted Judge Hampton. “Someone might get the impression you knew me personally. I feel slightly tainted to be found in the same courtroom with you and your wives and your partners. Pass that pitcher up here.”

Mr. Larkin obediently gave the pitcher to the Judge together with the glass. His honor poured and drank, coughed and drank again.

“Even the water you drink is different,” he commented. “Is my face flushed?”

“It’s just beginning,” replied Mr. Larkin. “That’s powerful water, your honor.”

“The strongest I ever drank,” agreed the Judge. “Hope I don’t fall in the pitcher. Would you mind telling me how long you and your partners have been married to these women?”

“Well, your honor,” replied Mr. Larkin somewhat uneasily, “properly speaking, we never exactly married them – not legally, we didn’t. We forgot to tell you that. But they’ve been sticking round for a long time now. Nearly ten years.”

“Do you mean to say,” cried the Judge, leaning incredulously over the desk, “that the three of you are trying to get a divorce from women you haven’t even married?”

“Judge Hampton,” called Major Barney, “if you can’t exactly give us a divorce, couldn’t you help us to get rid of them? These women are awful. We want some more.”

As the Judge was collapsing in his chair another interruption called him back to life. No less a person than Madame Gloria had burst through the rails.

“Your honor,” she cried, pointing at the startled Mr. Owen, “I want to sue that man for breach of promise. I gave myself to him for life and he hasn’t even called to get me.”

“Do you mean,” asked the Judge in a weak voice, “he actually promised to marry you?”

“Oh, no!” exclaimed Madame Gloria as if shocked at the suggestion. “Nothing as stupid as that. I never marry, your honor, I just get kept.”

A wild scream rang through the court as the Judge tottered towards his chambers.

“I want to be alone,” he mumbled. “Send everybody away and tell them never to come back, especially those partners.”

In a compact and not unfriendly mass, wives, husbands, the co-respondent, Owen, with his publicly acknowledged mistress, and even Madame Gloria made their way to the street. As if by common consent they continued across the broad thoroughfare to the nearest café. Here, after much confusion, tables were arranged to accommodate the large party.

“What are we celebrating?” asked Mr. Owen as the senior partner ordered wine in lavish quantities.

“Our reunion,” replied Mr. Larkin, smiling across at Nana.

“If we want to get rid of these women,” observed Mr. Dinner, “I guess we’ll have to marry them first.”

“Oh, shucks,” said the Major indulgently. “Let them stick around. They’re not such bad women.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Fire and Farewell

Mr. Owen was awakened at midnight by the dream-shattering jangle of the telephone. He was just as well pleased, for in his current dream the unclad wives of his partners had been chasing him down the aisles of the courtroom into the arms of Madame Gloria, hiding coyly behind a whale. Reaching across a protesting Satin, he hauled the instrument to him.

“I’ve a big surprise for you,” came the casual voice of the senior partner. “The store is burning up, or down, or whichever way stores burn. It really doesn’t matter – the shop and all that’s in it are heavily overinsured.”

“Are you going down?” asked Mr. Owen.

“I thought I would,” replied Mr. Larkin. “People might think it unnatural not to watch one’s own store burn down. There’s a lot of good grog in my office I’d like to get out.”

“Are you veering any?” Mr. Owen inquired, knowing it would please his partner.

“Stupendously,” cried Mr. Larkin. “I’m simply a dance of flames.”

“Then I’ll meet you at the store.”

Mr. Owen had hardly hung up the receiver when the bell rang again.

“What do you know?” came the voice of Mr. Dinner. “The store is on fire. Isn’t that a laugh?”

“Are you going?” asked Mr. Owen.

“Sure,” said the voice of the little man. “Have to carry bottles. They belong to his nibs. He’d never stop veering if the fire got them. You know, Owen, I sometimes think he’s mad.”

“No!” exclaimed Mr. Owen. “You surprise me. See you at the fire.”

He hung up, then once more lifted the receiver as the bell gave tongue.

“This is Major Barney Britt-Britt speaking,” came the heavy voice of the Major. “Is this Mr. Owen? It is? Fine! Do you want to see a good fire, Owen?”

Mr. Owen did.

“Well, come on down to the store,” continued the Major, “and you’ll see a top-notch fire. Of course, inasmuch as we own the store, we’d get first-rate places.”

“I’ll be right down,” said Mr. Owen.

“Excellent,” replied the Major. “Thought you might like to see it. Don’t get a good fire often. Then there’s some liquor in the senior’s office that might bear looking into. The rest doesn’t matter. The whole damn place is criminally overinsured.”

“The store is going up in smoke,” Mr. Owen announced to Satin, who was flinging on her clothes, “and all those three maniacs care about is their private supply of grog.”

“That proves to me,” quoth Miss Honor Knightly, snapping on her garters with a businesslike click, “that their minds are in the right place. More people should be like them. Why not salvage the gay things of life instead of casting about for gloom? There’s plenty of that as it is.”

Leaving the hotel they hurried to the store and succeeded in gaining entrance through Mr. Larkin’s private office. Standing before a huge locker the senior partner and Major Barney were frantically extracting bottles.

“Good-evening,” called Mr. Larkin. “The fire is all inside. Flames no end. An inspiring sight.” He turned back to the locker. “Major, should we drink this liquor now or carry it away? It might be easier to drink it.”

Opening the door to the huge emporium, Satin and Mr. Owen hastened through. Immediately a curtain of flames rolled down and cut off their retreat. Columns of fire and smoke were rising and writhing down the full length of the vast hall. The galleries were filled with heavy clouds. The crackling was so intense that the place seemed full of machine guns. And above the sound of crackling roared the voice of fire rampant.

Glancing back into the senior partner’s private office they caught a glimpse of the three charming gentlemen in the act of removing bottles from their lips.

“We’ll build a bigger and better store,” cried Mr. Larkin, “on the money we’ll make from this jolly old conflagration.”

A low, ragged wall of flame ran swiftly across the floor, driving Satin and Mr. Owen before it. At the far end of the hall they were stopped by a partition.

“Doesn’t look so good,” panted Mr. Owen. “I might bite bears and all that, but I can’t swallow flames.”

“I feel sorry as hell for the devil,” she said, “if he has to stand for much of this sort of stuff.”

Mr. Owen put a hand behind him, then thrilled as it touched a knob.

“Quick!” he called to Satin. “Come with me.”

For a moment the girl hesitated, and Mr. Owen was surprised to see a look of unsuspected tenderness creep into her eyes. Then he opened the door and followed Satin back into the rain. And as an “L” train thundered overhead all that lay behind him seemed to flicker and die out. Dimly, but with desperate eagerness, he tried to recapture something, if only a little, of the past – the past behind the door. The other past was now his present. Once more he was plunged back into it. Raindrops splattered his hot face as he gazed down the glittering reaches of Sixth Avenue. Then he turned to the girl in the doorway, and, like a man still in a dream, he looked deep into her eyes as his lips tried to form a word.

“Don’t you even remember my name?” she asked in a low, strained voice.

“Satin,” he muttered, taking her face between his hands. “Satin. I remember. Is it all over now – everything? What has ended?”

Honor Knightly nodded.

“Everything,” she answered. “We’re through, the pair of us.”

He dropped his hands from her smooth, fresh face and fumbled in his pockets. His left hand encountered a key. He drew it out and looked at it, the key to his house. Then he looked down at the quiet figure beside him.

“Somehow I know you’ve been wonderful to me,” he said haltingly. “I don’t know how to tell you about it all. I’ll remember when I begin again – when I get back home.” He paused and repeated the word. “Home,” he muttered. “All married and everything. I’ll be using the ‘L’ in the morning – just like old times.”

Satin held out her hand.

“If you’re okay now,” she told him. “I’ll have to let you go.”

“I’m all okay,” he said in a flat voice. “Much too okay.”

“It’s goodbye, then,” said Satin, the torturing words scarcely audible. “Don’t ever grow too respectable again. I can’t help feeling you’re still partly mine.”

As Mr. Owen stepped out of the doorway back into the rain he was wondering to himself if her lips had brushed his cheek. His old inhibitions had conventionalized his own farewell.

Slowly he moved down the street, his shoulders gradually drooping as he walked. Everything was back with him now – every grim little detail of his days – Lulu, Mal Summers, the office, the threat of business extinction. Satin. Who was Satin? Satin was far behind. New York had swallowed her as soon it would swallow him. He himself swallowed several times. It was no easy matter. How familiar everything was. He wanted to get away. He stopped and gazed into the window of a florist shop. He tried to ease his mind by concentrating on the flowers. Slowly he lowered his head. The flowers grew dim, their color draining out.

From behind came the quick tattoo of flying heels. Small firm hands took hold of him and turned him roughly about. Then arms were around his neck.

“You poor lost soul,” he heard her saying. “You poor lost soul. Did you think I’d let you go? God, what a man, what a nice, clean little man! And just because he’s married he shakes hands and says goodbye.”

“What happened to me?” asked Hector Owen some moments later as they crossed Washington Square in the direction of his house.

“You’ve been on a mental binge,” said Satin. “I’ll give you the details later. I picked you up in a department store. You were dazed among a lot of books. Ever since then you’ve been mine to take care of – and you still are. Keep that before your eyes.”

“There seem to have been so many things,” he replied, “but a curtain lies between. I can’t get them back. Were they all batty, Satin?”

“Not all,” the girl told him. “Some of them were disrepeatably real – the best ones. At other times I didn’t know where your mind was straying. People get like that, then come back with a snap. There’s some sort of a name for it, I believe.”

“I came back with you,” he said; then, self-consciously, “Do you think I’m so old, Satin?”

“If you must get personal,” said Miss Knightly primly, “there were times when you acted so young I wouldn’t like to mention them. You were a mere babe in my arms.”

“Don’t,” replied Mr. Owen.

He opened the door to his apartment. The place lay in darkness. He must go and inform Lulu he was going away for good. She would probably wake the neighbors with her cheering. At the door of the bedroom he paused. Out of the darkness a man spoke to him. Mr. Owen shuddered.

“Is that you, honey-bunch?” asked the man.

Mr. Owen felt himself mortally insulted.

“Who the hell are you calling honey-bunch?” he growled snapping on the lights. “I’m honey-bunch’s husband.”

As the lights flooded the room Lulu, clad in a kimono, came in through another door. There was a song on her lips and a bottle of gin in her hand. When she saw Mr. Owen the song fell flat and she almost dropped the gin.

“I – I thought you were dead or something,” said the startled lady.

“It turned out to be something,” Mr. Owen informed her. “Is this gentleman the chief mourner?”

The gentleman might have liked that bed once, but now he was looking as if he never wanted to see it again.

“No,” faltered Lulu. “When he arrived from Europe he came here looking for you.”

“I see,” murmured Mr. Owen. “Did he think I was lost in the sheets, perhaps?”

Before Lulu could come back at this Satin popped her head into the room.

“Good God!” cried the man in bed. “That girl is my sister.”

“Two good Gods to your one,” replied Mr. Owen. “That woman is my wife. Also, I own the bed.”

“There’s something almost incestuous about all this talk,” Satin observed coolly.

“I’ve been looking all over for you,” continued the man in an injured voice. “You shouldn’t run off like that, Honor, and let the estate go hang. We wanted to change its management.”

“Over my dead body,” said Satin. “I’m very fond of its management. And as for you, Tom Knightly, isn’t it bad enough to ruin a man’s home without wrecking his business?”

Tom Knightly grinned.

“Forget it,” he said lazily. “Forget it. You fix things up, kid. I mean no harm. Just a good time Daddy.”

But Hector Owen heard none of this. He was in another room, cramming some clothes into a bag. This finished, he walked to the window and looked out across the park. So many things happened, he thought, and when they did happen you really were not as shocked as you had thought you were going to be. Satin came up behind him and slipped her hand into his.

“Isn’t it disgraceful?” he asked her.

“What is?” she asked him.

“All of us,” he answered.

“Nonsense!” exclaimed the girl. “It merely goes to show that after all two wrongs can make it right.”

A few minutes later, when Mr. Owen carried his bag away from his home, everyone felt good about it.

At the curb he called to a taxi. The cab drew up.

“Where to?” asked the driver.

Mr. Owen was much too busy to answer. He had never been clever with taxicab doors. He suspected a conspiracy.

“Just start in driving,” the girl sang out. “And keep on going. We might hire you for life.”

“I hate taxi doors,” Mr. Owen explained in an aggrieved voice. “Cabs should be built without any. They deliberately pick me out not to open for. They always stick, these doors.”

“And so do I,” said Satin, her bad eyes glowing with all sorts of uncensored enticements.

Mr. Owen, to say the least, was most pleasantly impressed. Scarcely a moment later so was Satin. Had she been a nicer girl, a wee bit more conventional and a little less impulsive, she might even have been shocked.

For Hector Owen’s inhibitions had passed beyond recall.

–  THE END  –

DID SHE FALL?

DESCRIPTION

A mystery novel admired by Dashiell Hammett.
America’s bawdiest, wittiest writer turns his talents to a startling novel of murder, suspense and brilliant detection. The story of Emily-Jane. When she was bad, she was very, very bad, and when she was good, she was luscious – until somebody killed her – or did she fall?

Dedication

For MOM and POP
sometimes, but rarely, known as
MR. and MRS. WILLIAM SULLIVAN
also for
MADELE WILSON
with gratitude and esteem.

CHAPTER ONE

Death’s First Selection

Sometimes a well-executed murder clears the air. This observation is in no sense suggestively advanced. But the fact is that in virtually all groups, communities, and gatherings of human beings there are certain members who would be far, far better out of the way … persons whose speedy absence would result in more actual good than would their continued presence.

It is even doubtful if the introduction of reason, which immediately suggests all sorts of inhibitions, would produce any permanently ameliorating results.

More than one poor mortal has decorated a rope end, sat fleetingly but finally in a hot chair, or moldered for life in a cell, whose single act of violence has really benefited society or some part of it. The worst that can be said of him is that he has set it a questionable example. Of course life could not continue to muddle along under a régime of murder at random, a system of salutary but unsolicited removals. This cannot be for the simple reason that almost every one of us during the course of his or her life deserves to be murdered at least once.…

The fact remains, however, that murder is not always just that – murder. Sometimes it is murder and more, such as the manifestation of inherent decency. Murder is not always so simple and explicable as a mere bash on the head, a knife in the neck, a shot from a gun, or a dose of poison. Nor can its germ always be easily isolated. Sometimes its motives are so remote and yet so urgent, so involved yet so delicately balanced, that it becomes the height of futility to expect twelve other potential but as yet uninitiated murderers to sit justly in judgment.

Impossible.

The situation – society itself – should first be judged before the murderer is even placed on trial. And a situation, an atmosphere, a hidden conflict involving the lives and happiness of human beings, is frequently as difficult to grasp as smoke … as dangerous to handle as dynamite.

•   •   •   •   •

So it well may be that in this particular situation things had got themselves so involved, so out of hand, that the death of someone was inevitable – that the sudden removal of some human obstruction was the only happy way out.

Yet, if so, it certainly seemed the least inevitable possibility in the world that that someone was destined to be so fair a creature as Emily-Jane Seabrook.

Most certainly no one seeing this young woman swinging her shapely legs over the smooth turf of the Coastal Golf Club would have suspected that even then the shadow of Death was settling round her feet, and that the eyes of Death were watching her intently as she teed off at the first hole. On this fair morning it would have been hard to convince anyone of her many friends and followers that within the brief span of thirteen hours the warm life would go shatteringly to fragments in the ruins of her highly desirable young body.

Who could have predicted such an ending for Emily-Jane? Who could have desired for her such a hideous fate? Had she not everything to live for, this girl, this child of fortune? Perhaps – perhaps; but also other persons had a little living to do for themselves, and perhaps this idea had not even occurred to Emily-Jane Seabrook. She would distribute happiness on all sides – up to a point, a point where the distribution interfered with the life of Emily-Jane.

This is a bad way to be.

Sometimes, but not always, does one get quite away with it. And in the case of Emily-Jane that quite made all the difference between her living and her dying. It made a lot of difference to Emily-Jane, and profoundly influenced the lives of several human beings. Of course, this was not new to Emily-Jane. She had always influenced human lives, but she would have never given her own to do so. The idea had never entered her competent little mind. Far from it. Her competent little mind was too firmly fixed on her body. It was a fine body. But, after all, the finest body can be broken most unattractively.

•   •   •   •   •

At the famous old Crewe mansion that night the engagement of Barney Crewe and Emily-Jane was to be announced. This did not matter much. The engagement had been known from the early days of the summer – exactly two weeks after Barney had met Emily-Jane for the first time.

What did matter, however, was the party. Masks and everything, the everything principally consisting of well-filled bottles and punch bowls. High revelry in honor of Emily-Jane, and perfectly promoted by that same efficient young woman. She did so enjoy seeing young people have a good time.

Barney, himself, would have been considered no mean catch for any other girl save Emily-Jane. In this event Barney was the lucky man. This, in spite of the fact that he was young, wealthy, interesting enough, and a painter who worked with such utter disregard of his medium that already he had won some degree of recognition among the more eccentric artists who created with fine but futile frenzy, yet who totally lacked the impish irrelevance that Barney brought to even his most abominable work.

What good, then, could result from the death of this fine girl? Who could be her enemy? Who could wish this apparently healthy-minded, stimulating, carefree creature anything but health, happiness, and success? To murder her would be an act of wanton vandalism. Brutal passion or jealousy could be the only possible motives for stopping her triumphal progress through life.

So thought the world after the event. Of course, no one could have thought it before. Yet several persons were thinking things right now.

Her light-hearted laughter floated back to the ears of Barney’s elder brother Daniel, who from his easy chair on the club-house veranda was following her every move. And Daniel Crewe in turn was being watched from a pair of dark, intense eyes set deep in the head of Scott Munson. This man’s intuitive suspicion of impending events had been keenly alert for the past six weeks of his stay with the two brothers. It was more than ever alert today.

Yet there was nothing occult about Scott Munson. Hard facts, a deep insight, and close observation ruled his judgment. He had watched human beings in conflict for many years of his life, and in this present situation he recognized all the elements of serious trouble.

Occasionally his eyes would shift to the girl on the golf-course, then return unobtrusively to the face and the hands of the man whose thoughts he was trying to read. Hands meant much to Scott Munson.

Daniel Crewe was his friend, his good companion and, at present, his greatest problem. A problem that filled him with a keen sense of trouble and regret.

All unconscious of the interest of these two motionless figures on the veranda – and a third, had it only been known – Emily-Jane tucked her arm under that of her partner and hurried him down the green slopes of the fairway.

Lane Holt looked down at her with admiring but frankly unwholesome eyes. He made a remark in a quick low voice, and the girl did not look at all displeased.

“Why, Lane,” she said, “what a thing to say!”

“But it would be, wouldn’t it?” replied Lane.

“Perhaps,” she answered. “And a great deal more dangerous.”

“That would add spice and relish, my dear.”

“Listen, statuesque slave of your senses, you must bear in that evil mind of yours that up here in my new environment you are not supposed to know me one-hundredth part as well as you do – even less than that.” Her laughter was not quite so innocent as she added: “You’re playing golf with me this morning merely as a favor to my beloved Barney, who is doing bad things with his brushes.”

“Damn Barney,” exclaimed Holt. “Damn him always and eternally.”

“Why damn Barney as much as all that? He does deserve considerable damning at times, but not such a generous portion.”

“Why the devil do you want to fling yourself away on him?”

“Oh, that!” said Emily-Jane carelessly. “Why not? He fills all the requirements. He’s dumb, rich, and idealistic – head over heels.” She paused a moment and looked enigmatically at her companion, then added: “And I’m clever, Lane my buck, but not quite so rich. Cheer up, life isn’t over yet, not by a long sight it isn’t.”

But in this Emily-Jane with all her youthful confidence was slightly in error, to put it mildly. Her life, had she but realized it, was almost over. The best or the worst part of it already lay behind. Little lay ahead save a crash, a moment of agony – and liberating darkness.

“Unscrupulous woman,” murmured Lane Holt, slipping his hand up her arm.

“Nice woman,” retorted Emily-Jane. “An exceptionally charming girl.”

She was just that. An exceptionally charming girl in many of the essentials. Beautifully built and alluringly poised. Hair of the sleek golden quality. It reflected light in yellow bars which slid attractively when she moved her head, so bobbed as effectively to show its shape. One felt like taking Emily-Jane’s head between one’s hands and holding it, feeling the smooth, fresh cheeks and looking into the large, blue, disarmingly innocent eyes. In the depth of those eyes lurked something slightly disturbing and exciting. Her face though small was broad. It ended in a surprisingly sharp little chin, lending to her a delightful impression of helplessness. Hers was that peculiar quality of innocence that subtly invited enlightenment. Her body, which at times could look so frail, was sinuous, swift with life and motion. Her torso moved with the endless variety of charm of a trained dancer. One could easily believe that Emily-Jane was completely unconscious of the effect she created when on the beach or dancing floor. She might have been. Grace, strength, and freedom characterized her every movement. She was tireless, resilient, yet possessed of an abiding languor, an altogether captivating promise of eventual capitulation.

Beyond doubt Emily-Jane had many things to live for, the most important of which were her senses and herself, but few realized this, for Emily-Jane had already lived and acquired wisdom if not merit.

Lane Holt knew and understood her. Seven years ago in the propinquity of a college town their interests had coincided. Emily-Jane had graced a school for young ladies at that time. Although Holt had been in his senior year at the college the discrepancy in years and educational progress had made no difference in their mutual attraction. It was of a biological nature which was simple if not pure. They had belonged to a select little group of, let us say for the sake of charity, high-spirited boys and girls who loved fun.

It was at this time and with these companions that Emily-Jane received the fundamentals of an exceedingly liberal education. It was at this time, likewise, that she had perfected the art of concealing an essentially vicious nature behind a refreshingly healthy and admirable exterior. A no mean art to master although it has a diversity of minor devotees.

At college, too, Lane Holt had come to know Daniel Crewe. Barney being several classes lower had known Holt only distantly yet devotedly, as under-classmen should and will, although the reason is rather obscure to appreciate in most cases.

The friendship between Daniel and Holt had been based on a mutual appreciation of literature and a bent for investigation which had carried them along on many an impossible intellectual exploration.

About Lane Holt there had been an atmosphere of romance and intrigue. His dark brooding silences, his splendid, careless carriage, his indifference to public opinion, and his quick brain marked him out from his fellows. In short, he had been a selfish poseur with an eye open for easy opportunity. Daniel had known and liked him. Even envied him a little. They had never been companions. Toward the close of their final year they had entirely lost track of each other without even being aware of the fact.

A few weeks ago they had met for the first time since those days. Since that meeting Holt, like Scott Munson and Emily-Jane, had become permanent if casual fixtures at the Crewe’s hospitable establishment. There were others there, too, who also became involved in the timely obliteration of Emily-Jane.

•   •   •   •   •

Far out on the links now the girl was saying to her partner in that lilting voice of hers: “And tonight, my fervid devastator, you must be more careful than you were in that last hollow.”

“You are losing your old fondness for taking chances. The approach of prosperity. What, my girl?”

“My life has been composed of taking chances,” she replied. “I love to take them, but also I detest being foolhardy except when I know I’m safe. There’s a difference, a vast difference.”

“Wisdom in wickedness,” suggested Holt.

“Makes wickedness a virtue,” added Emily-Jane.

“Safety first, then,” agreed Holt, “but keep your eyes on that Scott Munson chap and also on big brother. Both have a restless, inquiring air about them.”

“I can easily dispose of Daniel,” she observed. “In fact, I have done so quite effectively already. But Munson is a different matter altogether.”

“I’m told he’s a sort of super-finder-out-of-things. Too intelligent to be human. Is he?”

“All of that and more,” she replied. “Last year he was drafted to sit on some silly old national crime commission. He played the active part. He’s done things in this state – they’re called big. The governor and district attorney and all the powers that be just eat out of his bloodless hand and like it. He’s been resting up here with the brothers all summer on the strength of past relations in parts unknown.”

“I hope he continues to rest and does nothing more than that,” said Holt fervently.

If Munson had heeded this pious hope, Holt’s life might have been radically different.

“For some reason,” said Emily-Jane, “I’d like to break his resistance down and then torture him. Drive him mad. I can see it and feel it. God!”

Emily-Jane permitted very few persons to look upon the expression then on her face. It was hot, voracious, strangely cruel. Her teeth were a trifle bared.

And she was such a nice girl was Emily-Jane. Good company and all that. A real sport.

At that moment even Lane Holt was just a wee bit skeptical. He had his doubts about Emily-Jane – his fears, also.

CHAPTER TWO

Silent Watchers

Back on the club-house veranda Daniel Crewe was staring at the place where he had last seen the girl and her partner. All he now saw was an exceedingly exasperated fat man brutally assaulting a small white object that so far had successfully escaped any serious injury. The fat man was one of the club’s richest members, so he could well afford to be both exceedingly fat and exasperated. It was nothing much to see. And it is to be doubted if Daniel actually witnessed the titanic conflict, which is just as well, because the sight would have given him, at that moment, but scant relief from his thoughts.

His long, thin, tanned countenance was of a peculiarly friendly cast in spite of the trouble that now lay on it. There was a haunting suggestion of a misunderstood horse. A sort of protective expression had crept about his eyes, which were of an undecided gray. For a large, long, and apparently self-reliant man there was something unexpectedly speculative about Daniel Crewe, a sense of eternal sadness. It was as if the shadow of regret had settled lightly upon him, never to leave him altogether happy and at peace again. Life does such things to people regardless of their material circumstances.

Daniel was thinking now of his brother, thinking with more desperation and bafflement than he cared to admit to himself. Yet even as he thought, he little suspected that in a short while now Death would be sending its impulses through his strong arms and that only a few short hours separated him from tragedy, stark and ugly.

Interwoven in the thoughts of his brother were nagging thoughts of others – friends who held a place in his loyalty and confidence.

There was Sam Stoughten, for instance. He had never been long separated from Sam even after having had four years of him as roommate at college. And then there was Sam’s wife Sue. A good girl, Sue, sensitive as the devil beneath her apparent stolidity.

And how about June Lansing? Daniel loved June. Recently she had informed him that they were engaged. Daniel had not answered back. He knew June. They must be engaged if she said so.

He thought of these three oddly lovable individuals, then included himself and his brother. They were all involved, all a part of the picture. They were all actively engaged in the conflict that was taking place in his mind.

“Here we are,” he thought, “the five of us – all at the mercy of one girl, our happiness, our hopes, every damn thing.”

His eyes grew narrow, and there was a sudden hardening round his jaws. Scott Munson, silently watching, remarked this and pondered after his fashion.

But chiefly Daniel’s thoughts were with his brother Barney. Barney was a creature who deserved the serious thought of someone, and it was not the boy’s fault.

From the first this young man had always got the tough breaks. At birth he had lost his mother and thereby won his father’s unreasonable antipathy, one might almost say active antagonism. The old man had resented Barney. Dan had been the favorite. Nothing too good for the first and successfully born. And Dan had hated it. The harder the old man had ridden Barney the stronger was Dan pulled to his brother. A strange nature, Dan’s. What made it harder for him was his youthful realization that at heart his father was a good person and that perhaps somewhere hidden within his stubborn old heart was a sort of lonesome love for his younger son.

Whatever it was, Barney from the outset had never got what he wanted. At every turn the old man had thwarted him, trampled on his small aspirations as a child, opposed them when the boy had grown to manhood. It had only been through the active intervention of Dan that Barney had been given his chance to paint. Even then it had been a source of sporadic friction and ridicule.

Then the old man had died. After that life had taken on a different color for Barney – a friendlier warmth. The bulk of the estate had gone to Daniel. To Barney had been allotted the magnificent income of five thousand two hundred dollars per annum. Even unto the end – a typical gesture.

Promptly and without questioning his brother, Daniel had set about readjusting matters so that the valuable estate was equally divided even to the joint ownership of their picturesque old summer home on the Connecticut side of Long Island Sound.

In the simplicity of his soul Barney had been well satisfied with the original arrangement. He was pleased with his one hundred dollars a week – enthusiastic about it. No need now to swallow his pride and to wait for whatever small bits of change that might come his way. The experiences of his youth had left their traces.

“Now I’ll never have to work much,” he had confided to Daniel. “Just paint all the time, all the damn time. Travel perhaps. But of course I’ll live here with you, keep on living here just as always … it’s a nice old place … that is if you want me. When you get married I’ll paint a portrait of your wife. For nothing,” he added magnificently.

“Thanks,” said Daniel. “That will be great. Yes, you’d better keep on living right where you are. It would be safer. We’re used to you round here. Just sit down quietly somewhere and paint all the damn time.”

“And travel perhaps,” added Barney.

So that was all settled.

Then Daniel had gone about making Barney a rich young man and had understood perfectly when Barney had failed to be impressed with his newly acquired wealth. As a matter of fact, the whole strange business had made young Barney a little more than upset. He had not returned to his usual abnormal self until he had made an elaborate and illegal will in which he beautifully left all his earthly goods to Daniel, not omitting his paintings. They received special mention. For some reason rather vague in his own mind Barney seemed to believe that this will of his relieved him of all further interest in and responsibility for his fortune. He was now left free to paint all the damn time when not benignly contemplating his brother as his prospective heir.

These brothers, each in his own way, were strangely dependent on each other. Yet that did not prevent them from seeing clearly each other’s imperfections. For example, Barney could never quite forget how stupid Daniel had been about breeding foxes. Barney had made the suggestion after having read about fox-breeding in some Sunday supplement. It had resulted in one of those idiotic exchanges both enjoyed.

“And why in God’s name should we breed foxes?” Daniel demanded.

“We’d have more foxes then.” This with patience from Barney.

“What do we want with more foxes?” persisted the other.

“But we haven’t any foxes at all yet,” replied Barney, keeping a strong hold on himself.

“Yes, yes, I know, but suppose we had some foxes?”

“Well, we’d just have more, that’s all. We’d have more foxes. Isn’t that enough for you?”

“Too damned much,” scoffed Daniel. “What would we do with all these foxes knocking about all over the place? I ask you that.”

“We could sell them. Earn a good profit,” suggested Barney, who had not thought the idea quite through.

“And take the bread out of some other fox-breeder’s mouth,” countered Daniel.

“Why bread?” asked Barney mildly.

“Why not bread?” returned Daniel. “Don’t fox-breeders eat bread like the rest of us?”

“I don’t know,” said Barney stoutly. “I never met a fox-breeder. How did bread get into this argument anyway?”

“I don’t know, but let’s not go on about foxes any more,” pleaded Daniel.

“All right,” replied Barney, getting pretty well tired of foxes himself. “But we could give them away to our friends for Christmas or just any old time for that matter.”

“Who wants a fox?” asked Daniel.

“I don’t know who wants a fox right off,” cried Barney. “I don’t go round asking people if they want foxes. Let’s forget there ever was a fox. Sorry now I brought up the subject, sorry I even mentioned the name of fox. Thought it would be a thing to do, that’s all.”

“Yes,” grinned Daniel cynically, “a hell of a thing to do. You just stick to your painting, Barney. Why not paint yourself a couple of foxes and then breed ’em?”

Too full for words Barney went about his ways. He might yet breed foxes just to spite his brother. And in his dream he pictured the whole countryside swarming with foxes until at last they were trampled under foot.

Daniel was convinced, perhaps justly, that his brother needed the protection of a stronger mind. If not, why did the boy persist in painting red apples sky-blue and in giving to his nudes the unpalatable hue of a very old and dead fish?

“Because I see ’em that way,” the exasperated Barney had once explained under the fire of rude criticism.

“Well, it’s a terrible way to see anything,” observed Daniel, and added color blindness to his brother’s other deficiencies.

An aunt, Miss Matty Evans, often had to listen to this sort of stuff, and although she was mildly amused she wondered how men could be such fools.

“You two should go on the vaudeville circuit when you get to arguing,” she once remarked, “People are crazy enough to pay money to listen to that kind of nonsense.”

Until the appearance of Emily-Jane at the beginning of the summer the world had been a good place for the two brothers.

At the thought of this girl and her potentialities for harm, Daniel’s hands gripped the arms of his chair, gripped and held fast. The man who sat quietly watching him over the rim of his newspaper was quick to note this involuntary action. He wondered what he could do for Daniel – how he could force himself into his thoughts.

“What can I do?” Daniel was thinking. “Something must be done. How can I prevent that young idiot from going through with it? What can I tell him? She’s got me all tied up – cold.”

As his eyes stared unseeingly across the green expanse of the golf-course these questions went jabbing through his mind steadily, unceasingly like a physical pain. Scott Munson, observing the conflict, felt a growing excitement within himself, something undefinable yet filled with imminent danger. About Daniel as he sat there brooding there was an atmosphere of fatefulness, as if already he was on his way to some final yet inevitable act that would forever cut him off from old familiar ties.

Scott Munson sensed this and divined the source of Daniel’s trouble. He had watched his friend looking at Emily-Jane when that golden young slip had teed off at the first hole and he knew that although she was now no longer there Daniel was still seeing her in his mind’s eye. And Munson knew that to Daniel this girl stood for everything that was undesirable in life, everything that was disastrous.

Munson knew this much from his power of concentrated observation helped by his knowledge of Daniel. But there were many other things that Munson did not know, but which he would very much have liked to know.

For instance, he did not know that seven years past, when at college, Daniel had had intimate relations with Emily-Jane and that recently, even in the face of her approaching marriage with his brother, the girl had attempted to renew those relations. This was one thing that Munson did not know – one single scrap of concrete knowledge which might have done much to alter circumstances.

Nor did Munson know anything about the “Hush! Hush! Club,” an esoteric little organization that festered during Daniel’s later period at college and created no end of salacious speculation among certain members of the student body. The celebrations and rituals of this group were never mentioned nor could they be mentioned for the obvious reason that expulsion and disgrace would have descended swiftly upon its members. And even members of such little circles do not court this kind of public recognition.

And innocent Emily-Jane had been its high priestess and inspiration.

Into the inner circles of this group of girls and boys Emily-Jane had conducted Sam Stoughten. There she had dominated him physically, and Sam had gone through a very bad time of it before Daniel had succeeded in conducting him back for a breath of fresh air. But in doing so Daniel had momentarily come under the sway of Emily-Jane, who, to do her credit, appears to have been a specialist in her particular line.

Another thing Scott did not know was about the letters.

Sam had killed a classmate, killed him because of Emily-Jane. True enough, Sam had not meant to kill the boy. It had been one of those situations in which the loser died as the result of a fair fight. The authorities had never been able to trace the supposed murderer, but Sam had been silly enough and heart-broken enough to pour the whole story into a letter to Emily-Jane. In this letter written in a moment of self-loathing Sam shouldered the responsibility for the boy’s death. In the hands of a district attorney, it would be an extremely convincing confession.

Then there were other letters. Lots of them. Poor Sam had poured out on paper the ravings of a temporarily diseased mind, and Emily-Jane was in possession of the collected filth. Also she had a few rather revealing letters from Dan. More important still, Emily-Jane had told Daniel that unless he played hands off, those letters would find their way into the hands of Sue and June. Daniel knew that this was no idle threat. Emily-Jane was quite reckless enough to pull down the whole house of cards and involve them all in the crash. She had more strings to her bow than one.

Taken altogether it was a pretty situation. The happiness of more than one person was tangled up in it. In striking at one, Emily-Jane could injure them all – Sam, Sue, Barney, June and Daniel. She held all the cards and was playing them with the skill of an experienced player. But this is sometimes dangerous. It certainly was so in the case of Emily-Jane.

Finally, Scott Munson was not aware of the fact that through a window of the club-house at that very minute the amiable face of Sam Stoughten was also turned toward the links whereon Emily-Jane was sporting with Lane Holt. It would have given Munson more unpleasant food for mental consumption had he been able to see the expression lurking behind Sam’s horn-rimmed glasses.

For Sam those letters existed like some tangible defilement, some deadly, unclean threat. When he encountered Emily-Jane at the home of the brothers the weight of the ages again settled down on his sturdy shoulders. He longed to remove from the face of the earth this girl who was planning such an unfair enterprise as to marry Barney.

He did not blame her for the past. Sam took, as he should, full responsibility on himself for his own conduct. But to strike through him and through Daniel at others … well, yes, murder was not so bad after all in certain situations.

Then, there was Lane Holt. A chance encounter after years had led Daniel to invite the man to visit him – an idle invitation and a ready but graceful acceptance.

That did it. Lane Holt was among them. He, too, was a part of the picture. Quite an important part. He was on the side of Emily-Jane. He had a comprehensive understanding of the situation. Daniel more than suspected that he was taking full advantage of it right under the eyes of poor color-blind Barney.

It had all come about through the unfortunate oversight of allowing Barney at large unaccompanied. But who could have forecast the result? As a rule Barney never paid personal attention to women. In the abstract he had vague, fanciful ideas about them. In the flesh he loved to look at them when pleasing. But no one for a moment suspected he would drive home with one of them from the Coastal Golf Club and keep her there for lunch, later in the dusk of a summer’s evening driving off with her again. Only Emily-Jane could turn a trick like that. And Emily-Jane had done it.

Scott Munson had been present when Barney had introduced Emily-Jane to Daniel. From that moment on Munson had been aware of gathering forces, electricity in the air. And when, finally, Emily-Jane had landed the idealistic Barney and established herself as a part of the household under the skeptical chaperonage of Miss Matty Evans, Munson had known that things were all wrong with Daniel and that the situation was not going to improve until Emily-Jane was removed. Just how this was to be accomplished Munson failed to see. However, what he did see was that Emily-Jane in some peculiar way known only to herself had a strong hold on Daniel and that Daniel was unsuccessfully striving to break it.

Sitting there on the veranda, Munson felt that the situation, whatever it was, was rapidly coming to a climax – that the climax was at hand, right there among them all.

Munson looked as much like a detective as a detective will ever look like one. He had been a detective, actively and successfully. The government knew his work. But Munson was more of the scholar, more of the student. He was a living curiosity directed by intelligence and a power of observation that almost approached divination. He could feel a situation, anticipate a coming conflict. As a lecturer in criminology and psychological detection he had been much in demand among colleges that went in for that sort of thing. He had two passions – the study of human conduct, and travel, the latter running a poor second. When actively engaged on a case he was absolutely ruthless, attacking the minds of those he suspected with devilish ingenuity. He had, perhaps, his own private opinions about murder and other allied indulgences, but these were so clearly separate from his professional attitude that not even his best friend could count on the slightest latitude or show of grace.

And that is what troubled Munson all the more in this present situation. He feared for Daniel, and would willingly have sacrificed his own career to prevent disaster – to save his friend from the danger he felt was present. But once Daniel committed himself to a certain unlawful course of conduct, once he, for example, took a human life, Munson would be arrayed against him and would give Daniel no more quarter than he would have given any other individual who had placed himself beyond the pale of the law. Before the event, Scott Munson was human; after – well, he followed his own convictions, for which perhaps no one can blame him – much.

His large, dark, intense eyes; his sharp, determined features; his straight black hair, slightly streaked with gray, his slim, alert body, well poised and competent – all these characteristics of Scott Munson created an impression of a man not easily deflected from his course. About him at times there was something uncomfortably subtle, something Satanic. One felt that within him dwelt some hidden source of power waiting to be released. No doubt this impression was created because of the man’s abnormal interest in the mental processes of virtually everyone with whom he came in contact. People were never quite stupid to Munson. He never grew bored with the most banal individual, for the reason that he was completely engrossed in trying to sound and chart the substrata thought currents tunneling the mind of the person under observation. Many women hated him instinctively. More men would have done so, perhaps, were it not for the fact that even today men have a greater opportunity to live their dreams, to turn their currents of thought into active expression. Had Scott Munson suddenly found himself in a world of normal, well-adjusted, standardized minds he would willingly have exchanged his bodily comforts for all the torments of hell.

•   •   •   •   •

Eyes on the links, watching – three pairs strong. And even as they watched the object of their vigil came lightly across the green accompanied by her debonair partner.

At the sight of the two approaching the club-house with their open display of intimacy and understanding, a low sound of impotent anger involuntarily escaped Daniel’s lips, and he rose quickly from his chair. Munson followed his example, and in silence the two men walked down the veranda and stood together at its edge. Only Sam Stoughten did not move at the girl’s approach. He remained motionless at the window, his eyes alone moving, but their expression never changed. The sharp, concealed hatred never left them. It lived and darted there behind his slightly tinted horn-rimmed glasses.

Daniel stood gazing out at the quiet surface of the Sound upon whose blue waters, about three miles out, a group of fair green islands lay sprinkled in picturesque disorder, their shores rimmed in collars of cream-white sand. There was an expression of hopelessness in Daniel’s brooding eyes. June Lansing’s image was floating through his thoughts. She was mingling with bad company, for desperation was bringing to the surface in his mind a resolve it had long restrained.

Unexpectedly, a hand fell upon his shoulder. He swung round with a sharp start. Between himself and Scott Munson stood Holt.

“Will either of you gentlemen do me the favor of a flask?” he asked. “It was plenty hot out there. We cut our game short.”

“Don’t swing a flask,” said Daniel shortly. “I’m going home.”

He strode off down the veranda, knocking against a chair. Holt’s gaze followed the retreating figure, and the man who stood for a moment quietly but intently regarding Holt read in his eyes a mixture of malice, envy, and scorn, which is never a pretty thing to see.

“Half a minute,” said Scott, and doubled back of the club-house.

“Damn cads,” muttered Holt. He hated their guts. He wished to God they were well out of the way. Mr. Holt was quite sincere about this. For Daniel his emotion was mixed with sordid envy, for Munson with wholesome fear. To him Barney did not matter. The boy was growing a full set of horns even before he had a wife. That was funny in a way – funny to Lane Holt. He sought out Emily-Jane to tell her about it. The girl laughed merrily. It was pleasant to hear such laughter.

Munson, standing by Dan’s roadster, watched him thoughtfully as he approached.

“Well?” said Daniel, regarding Munson with a sort of rebellious interrogation in his eyes.

Although they had been sitting with each other practically all morning on the veranda of the club, this was the first word that had passed between them. The gift of silence is vouchsafed only to those who are either content with their thoughts or unhappily occupied with them.

“Well?” replied Munson, also with a rising inflection.

Daniel experienced a stab of nerves as Munson remained quietly looking at him. “What do you mean by well, Scott?” he asked.

“What did you mean?” replied Munson.

Daniel laughed uneasily. “Nothing much, I expect,” he replied. “Just wondering what you wanted – how you got here.”

“No, you didn’t, Daniel,” replied Munson seriously. “You meant, what was I thinking you were thinking. If you want to know, Dan, I’ve been thinking a damn sight more than I care to. I’d like to feel free to let your thoughts alone. I mean that, Dan, for you of all men. What’s on your mind? What’s burning you up? Hadn’t you better come across with me? Let’s face the trouble together. You know I can help at times. At least you won’t feel so confounded lonesome. Come on, Dan, old boy.”

Slowly Daniel climbed into his car. He appeared not to have heard his old friend. How tired and strangely remote he felt … old for his thirty years. When at last he spoke he did not look at Munson, but continued to stare vacantly ahead over the arc of the steering wheel.

“Scott,” he said, “there’s only one person can help now and she – I mean, that person won’t help. That person who could help, who could so easily help, only wants to hurt, to injure and destroy. I know that.” He drummed nervously on the wheel with the tips of his long brown fingers. “Yet something’s got to be done,” he added as if to himself. “Something … what?”

“Maybe together we could dope that something out,” suggested Munson.

Then Daniel turned and asked Munson a strange question, one that troubled his friend’s thoughts considerably throughout the tragic days to follow. “Tell me, Scott,” he began, as if he were inwardly puzzling over a certain problem, “tell me this. A man purchases deliberately a number of high-powered guns, arranges his business affairs, and, let us say, travels all the way to Africa at no small trouble and expense. Well, once there this man proceeds to organize and equip a small army of carriers and what-nots. Then, after several weeks of crouching, stalking, and false-dealing in general, he brings down a fine, great elephant or a tiger – animals that are minding their own affairs, keeping to their own land, and living according to their own savage code. What would you call that man, Scott? What would the world call him?”

“Why, don’t be childish, Dan!” laughed Munson. “At the worst he’s nothing more than a fanatical hunter, a waster of time, money, and animal life. Why?”

Daniel nodded appreciatively. “Just so,” he went on, “but the idea of it has always puzzled me somewhat. I know I’m a bit childish about wantonly killing things – always have been.” He hesitated a moment, then continued: “And suppose that same chap removes from the face of the earth a person who wrecks and strikes at one’s very being – one’s so-called soul, a person far more deliberately cruel and dangerous to society than the most treacherous beast or reptile that lurks in the jungle, a creature who is not only evil but also one who can create evil in others – what, Scott, would you call that person?”

There was fever in Daniel’s eyes as he turned and confronted his friend.

“I see what you’re driving at, Dan,” slowly replied Munson, “and I can’t say that in a manner of speaking I don’t sympathize with your point of view. But again you’re all wrong. You can’t trifle with human life—”

“How about human hearts and souls?” snapped Daniel.

“As things stand today the law fails to take them strictly into consideration,” said Munson, “although they play a part. But, by and large, it has a hard enough time dealing with the body. There are no doubt soul-murderers or heart-murderers or mind-murderers, but as a rule they escape unpunished in this world. Daniel, the man you spoke of, no matter what the circumstances, is in this world a murderer, and there’s no getting away from that. We’re living in this world, you see. Remember that, Dan, remember that.”

Again Daniel nodded agreement. “I guess you’re right at that, Scott,” he said with a twisted smile. “No doubt about it. But, after all, it does seem sort of goofy, doesn’t it? Damn goofy I’d call it, if you ask me. Murderer – a nice, bright, homelike word, that!” He paused and smiled at Munson, and this time his smile was natural and friendly. “Just like some of the crazy discussions we used to have back at college. Thanks, Scott. See you soon. You’re lunching at the club, I suppose?”

Without waiting for an answer he set his car in motion.

CHAPTER THREE

Daniel and Barney

For a moment Scott Munson stood poised in the driveway watching the gliding roadster until it raced round a curve, then, going swiftly through a rear door of the club-house, he reached the veranda just in time to see Emily-Jane Seabrook signal Daniel to stop. For a moment it looked to Munson as if Daniel were going to disobey the summons of the gracefully fluttering hand, but slowly the car slackened speed and came to a reluctant stop.

At that moment Munson became aware of a figure standing beside him, and turned to inspect the tense body and clenched hands of Sam Stoughten. Munson’s eyes swept to the other’s face and lingered there fascinated by what he saw written on the tight lips, the grim jaw, and the chin aggressively out-thrust. And behind the lenses of the glasses Scott caught a glimpse of the fires of hell itself. Stoughten stood there thus for a moment, his guard of reserve down, then his body relaxed as if defeated, the chin dropped, the hands swung helplessly, and the man turned back to the club-house.

In this brief flash of self-revelation Sam had furnished Scott Munson with still more food for thought. And Munson’s first thought was that Emily-Jane had more than one seeming friend who did not wish her any too well.

“Half a mo’,” cried that young lady, as she ran down the steps and gaily approached her prospective brother-in-law, now waiting sullenly behind the wheel of his car.

Munson saw that much, but what he did not see, nor did anyone else for that matter, was the swift change of expression that took possession of Emily-Jane’s features the exact moment she felt sure she was free from the observation of others.

No more of the frank-eyed Emily-Jane. Gone – vanished! Here was a new creature, a thing ridden by a hot venomous fury. Laughing Emily-Jane had become a hard-voiced, blazing young devil, something a trifle subhuman. At first she had nothing to say but much to look, then gradually an unpleasant smile rearranged the lines of her lips.

“Don’t do that again, Daniel,” she said evenly. “You wanted to make a fool of me in front of the whole damn club. Well, don’t do it, Daniel. Don’t do it, my ex-slave.”

She laughed, as Daniel’s face darkened. And had she but known it each ringing note was doing a terrible thing to her.

“Wipe that look off your face, Daniel,” she went on softly. “Look like you used to, or have you forgotten how?”

“Yes,” said Daniel at last. “It didn’t make sufficient impression, but you seem to remember.”

“You’re going to live to regret that, Daniel,” she said, leaving a pause of ice between each word.

“I doubt that,” replied Daniel, looking at her strangely. “But what do you want? I’m waiting.”

“Tell your brother I’m lunching at the club,” she said, “and explain to him in words of one syllable about tonight. You’re going to make the formal announcement and drink to our happiness. You’ll like that, won’t you, Daniel? You’re the head of the family, you know, such as it is. That’s about all for now,” she went on, after a short pause during which she had been enjoying the effect of her words. “That’s about all except that I suggest you stop treating Lane Holt as if he didn’t belong. He’s a particular friend of mine. I’m fond of Lane. Very. And, Daniel dear, you might as well make up your mind to be a good boy right now. We’ll be better friends that way … much better friends. If you don’t behave” – once more she paused and looked at him consideringly – “if you don’t, Daniel, I’ll kick over the whole damn apple cart. You have more to lose than I, you and your precious friends. And the harm that I can do can never be undone. Remember that, Daniel. Now you may go.”

Her silvery laughter fell pleasantly on the soft quiet air and brought a responsive smile to the lips of several sentimental dowagers clucking round their daughters on the veranda. Emily-Jane was always passing happiness along.

She had just passed great quantities of it to Daniel, but there was little suggestion of a smile on his lips as he sent his car, like a whirring curse, down the sweeping driveway of the Coastal Country Club.

Emily-Jane’s short talk with Daniel had done her small good. If she had not been altogether popular with him before, she was far less now. As he went brooding over the country road on his way homeward, Daniel Crewe swore both darkly and deeply in his heart that for once in her life Emily-Jane was not going to have anything like her way. She would never defeat him. He knew this now. And he also knew why she would never defeat him. But this knowledge, instead of bringing to him the relief one would expect, filled him with a sort of dull horror. He experienced a desire not to be alone with himself, and at the same time felt a strong inclination to lie down somewhere and hide like an animal – not like a man.

Already he felt the world withdrawing a little from him. Already he stood aside as if he were another person and criticized the determination that was solidifying in his mind. He had a strange feeling that within his very being he was hiding and protecting a stranger, a furtive, stealthy stranger with whom he must become friendly so that he should no longer fear his promptings.

This furtive stranger was assuring him in no equivocal language that he had been a damn fool to ask Scott Munson those revealing questions just now. That had been a decidedly false step. Daniel must be more careful. There must be no more false steps. From now on he must avoid arousing the slightest suspicion. Tonight, for instance, tonight of all nights, he must convince the world that he admired and respected his brother’s future wife. He must go through with it successfully. A man can do anything if he tries. Another thing, he must attempt to erase all traces of suspicion that might lie in the mind of his friend Scott Munson. No. Better leave Scott alone. Let that conversation pass. The harm had already been done.

Daniel stopped the car at the side of the road and wiped his forehead. Why was he sweating so? He held up his hands before his eyes and looked at them intently. Then for a long minute he studied his features in the driver’s mirror. Any change? No. None that he could see. Quite the same old Daniel. A trifle pale perhaps. Still, there was that unaccustomed sensation of trembling, of trembling inwardly. Better take a drink, suggested the stranger, and Daniel, acting on this never unwelcome suggestion, drew a silver flask from the side pocket of the roadster and helped himself.

As he did so a car, filled with acquaintances, flashed by, some of its occupants being just human enough to look back, as if to make sure of having seen something unusual.

“Strange thing for Dan Crewe to be doing,” said a man named Jackson. “Never saw Daniel drinking all alone before. Must have needed it badly. Had to stop his car and pull up at the roadside. The thirsty devil couldn’t wait till he reached home.”

But Daniel had not heeded the passing of the car. His nerves had ceased jumping. Yes, he would go home now and make one last effort. He would try his luck with Barney.

If he only could. If he only could. At the thought of possible success his world came back a little. Daniel almost prayed.

•   •   •   •   •

Back on the club-house veranda Emily-Jane was chatting spiritedly with young and old alike. That was one of her many charms. She always found time to be gracious to the mothers and fathers of her friends.

“If only the other young people would try to be more like her,” was a general observation.

“Dan’s such a lovable old bear,” she was saying, “but such a goose. He’s so fussy and nervous about tonight that he looks for all the world like an undertaker trying to sympathize with a corpse.”

Prophetic utterances not lost on the ears of two men who were standing a little apart from the group. Its effect was to cause the color momentarily to withdraw from Sam Stoughten’s ruddy face. He turned abruptly away and sought a secluded chair. Scott Munson idly moved in his direction.

“Yes,” continued Emily-Jane, “the poor man’s elected to make the formal announcement, and he doesn’t seem to have the vaguest idea how to go about it. He’ll probably begin with, ‘Come, all ye. Come, all ye. The honorable judge is now sitting’!”

Amid general laughter she escaped from the circle and flashed down the veranda. As she passed Sam Stoughten’s chair she paused lightly – tauntingly.

“Hello there, Sambo,” she said. “All alone and sullen. Where’s black-eyed Susan?”

“Why, haven’t you seen her?” asked Stoughten in a casually bitter tone. “Why not write to her? You admit yourself you’re good with letters.”

“Perhaps someday I’ll take your advice, Sambo,” she replied.

“Then you’d better be quick,” said Stoughten.

“Meaning what?” asked Emily-Jane.

Stoughten did not answer.

“Don’t be a fool, Sambo,” said the girl, after a moment of thoughtful silence. “And don’t try to frighten me. Admit you’re licked and behave yourself. Goodbye, Sambo, dear.”

She passed lightly on down the veranda.

Presently Scott Munson moved quietly from the shadow of an alcove near the water-cooler and, seating himself by Stoughten, deliberately lighted a cigarette.

“Smoke, Sam?” he asked, extending his case.

The hand that selected a cigarette trembled slightly. “Thanks,” said Sam, but for several minutes he made no attempt to light the cigarette.

•   •   •   •   •

Daniel found his brother contentedly at work in the dining-room, the last place in the world any normal painter would select for his efforts. The room was almost dark, the curtains being drawn, but Barney seemed to be either unaware of the lack of light or indifferent to it. Today he was engaged in seeing the most uncompromisingly yellow bananas in shades of girlish pink. On the table at his elbow was a bowl of fruit, pieces of which he had already partly eaten as if to make sure that his subjects were authentic. It would have been a pity to waste so much talent on stuffed fruit. Daniel stood looking down at the painting over his brother’s shoulder.

“Even the specks are wrong,” he observed at last, with a note of the old bantering challenge in his voice.

“Don’t take them too much to heart,” replied his brother, without troubling to look up. “They’re my specks, after all. I see ’em that way, so they are that way. Go paint some specks of your own. I’ll match my specks against yours, speck for speck, catch as catch can.”

“Oh, all right,” said Daniel. “It’s a wonder to me you can paint any specks at all in this light.”

He sat down at the long table and stretched his arms wearily across its deep, glowing surface.

“I’ve decided to accustom myself to painting in entire darkness,” announced Barney. “I may even start a new school of painting. It will be altogether intellectual, uninfluenced by externals, dependent on neither color nor form. Just pure thought – the brain transferred to canvas.”

“Yours transferred to canvas would leave it quite unspoiled,” observed Daniel.

“In that there would be some deep significance,” said his brother.

“When you paint in the dark,” asked Daniel, not in the least interested, “how will you know what you’re painting?”

“It is better not to sometimes,” replied Barney soberly. “Far, far better. But the real answer is, you won’t know.”

“Not even when you’ve finished?” asked Daniel.

“Probably not,” said Barney, “because in my proposed school all pictures will be not only painted in darkness but also hung in darkness. One will be expected to view them in pitch blackness and to criticize accordingly. Too many critics of pictures are influenced by what they see rather than by what they don’t see. That is a great mistake. Now in my school every artist will enjoy an equal advantage – complete invisibility. Of course there will be trained guides to lead people about. I’ve thought it all out.”

“To me,” said Daniel, “it’s about the most reasonable idea you ever had.”

“Thanks,” replied Barney. “Where’s the girl?”

“She told me to tell you she was staying to lunch at the club with the rest of the gang,” said Daniel, then added mendaciously, “She thought it would save a lot of fuss and bother in view of the doings tonight.”

“There’s a brain for you,” Barney remarked admiringly. “Thinks of everything and everyone. Well, it won’t be long now. I beat you to it, Dan, old son. And there’s a damn fine girl just dying to marry you. Why don’t you do something about June, Dan? Let’s all get married together. We’ll be tagged so we won’t get mixed up, as they always do at least once or twice in all good Franco-American farces.”

Daniel was beginning to feel his nerves quivering again. This was due to a sharp realization that perhaps never again would he and his brother be able to talk thus together. He rose and sought the sideboard where he poured himself a drink. Then he came back to the table.

“I say, Barney,” he began, and there was that in his voice that made Barney stop daubing and look up at his brother anxiously. “Listen here, Barney,” Daniel began again, “I’m not at all sure about tonight. Do you feel you’re doing the wisest thing? After all, you two have known each other less than a couple of months at the most. What I mean is, old man, you’re pretty damn happy as you are – we’ve been happy together. We can keep on being happy – traveling and all that sort of thing. No end of possibilities. I’m not going to get married for a long, long time. Why not wait a while longer with me? There’s a lot of things we can enjoy together. Don’t let’s go through with the formal announcement which actually is an open invitation to your wedding. Why, Barney, kid, in only a couple of weeks you’ll be a married man! What then? Let’s clear out. Let’s do anything. Call it off, will you … or … or … wait a little longer. Just wait and see what happens. Give me a chance, Barney. We’ll go right away. Just think—”

He broke off with the nauseating knowledge of failure. Barney’s face had fallen. The boy was amazed. Not unlike a too trusting pup that had been smitten suddenly by a cat that had led him to expect better things, he now looked up at his brother. Daniel’s gaze was filled with a deep entreaty. Then he looked away. Instinctively his eyes sought the shadows.

“Get yourself another drink, old boy,” said Barney in a quiet voice. “I know how you feel, but of course you’re all wrong about everything. My being married will make no difference at all. We can go on living just the same as ever and do all the things we’ve planned. I know how you feel. I’d feel the same. Don’t you think I haven’t thought about it myself? I have – lots. And of course you must marry June. The four of us will have one hell of a high time.”

“Guess you’re right, Barney,” said Daniel, but there was no conviction in his voice.

“Cheer up,” Barney said, and laughed light-heartedly. “Of course I’m right. I’m always right about everything. You’ve got to admit that. And anyway the cakes and everything are all ordered. Aunt Matty would have a horrible fit. She’d die, perhaps, or bust with a deafening report.”

Daniel nodded slowly and smiled. The Furies seemed to be jigging grotesquely on his grave. Reason was reeling drunkenly to bed. A crazy parachute was dragging him over a cliff. He would let go soon. Then the drop …

“No,” he remarked. “I guess it would never do, especially now that the cakes have been ordered, and all that about Aunt Matty. No, Barney, we mustn’t let her bust with a deafening report.”

“I merely mentioned the cakes in passing,” grinned Barney, now thoroughly satisfied that everything was once more as he wanted it to be. “They’re fairly good at that.” He extracted one from his pocket and popped it into his mouth. “Fairly good but lamentably small. Crisp! Have one. Besides we love each other.”

Daniel picked up the soiled-looking object his brother had tossed across the table and, after removing several adhering threads and a family gathering of tobacco crumbs, followed Barney’s inelegant example.

“There’s paint on it,” he said.

“I know,” agreed Barney. “There’s paint on all of them. Just slightly though.”

“You’re going to have a swell time of it tonight,” said Daniel, “if you don’t make yourself sick on a lot of truck beforehand. I’d better speak to Aunt Matty about you.”

“No, don’t,” put in Barney hastily. “Leave her entirely alone. She’s been watching me all morning as it is. And speaking of cakes, do you remember, Dan, when we were boys and I’d be locked in the room, how you used to put cakes and stuff in an old shoe and I’d pull it up to the window with a string? Well, ever since then I’ve never been able to enjoy an honestly acquired piece of cake. To be thoroughly enjoyable it must be pilfered.”

He paused and looked back on the past. Something in that old dark room seemed to evoke memories. He was secretly a little frightened himself about the party that night, and was unconsciously seeking escape in memories of the days when he and Daniel had been boys together.

“You know, Dan,” he went on wisely, “I don’t think father would have been half as hard-boiled if mother had been alive. He must have missed her like the devil … mother … not having her and all. Just a couple of damn disorderly sons. I can see things better now.”

From a sense of loyalty, a sensitive understanding of Daniel’s position, Barney always included him in the hard treatment he himself had received. It was almost as if he were trying to justify his father and at the same time to let Daniel know that he understood. Then, again, it made his childhood seem a little less unshared.

“You got all the raw deals, Barney,” said Daniel, not trusting himself to look at his brother, the closest creature to him in all God’s world. “All the tough breaks were yours, but the old man really wasn’t like that – not really.”

The room had grown quiet now. Daniel was standing at one of the windows. He had parted the curtains slightly and was looking out on the lawn. Then his gaze lifted, and he was looking out across the lawn to the far-away water-rimmed edge of the sky. And he felt himself out there amidst a vast silence and peace. He was alone out there between the sea and the sky. He was alone and resting, his problem forever solved.

What was he going to do about it? He shivered a little. Only too well he knew. He turned back to the room.

He stood contemplating the small, firm, and strangely lined face of his brother. Suddenly it came over him that this would be in all likelihood the last time he would ever see him so completely happy again. He wanted to retain that memory … to fix it in his mind.

“You’re sure about tonight, then, kid?” he asked diffidently.

“Sure, Daniel, dead sure,” said Barney.

“All right then,” said Daniel. “I think I’ll go and dig up June. She might do a little something about food. Get back to your leprous painting, Barney. Do your specks.”

But Barney did not return at once to his painting. He remained seated at the table running his fingers through the fine straw-colored hair that gave the appearance of straying casually about his head. From a nut-brown face, prematurely old yet hauntingly attractive, a pair of large, speculative eyes, touched with the wisdom of a child, stared into the darkness. He was repainting the years of his childhood in entirely fresh colors. He sat quite still, all hunched up and untidy, like an ancient gnome greedily poised above a bowl of fruit.

Dan had been strange just now, he felt. There had been something different about him. He had suggested a person who was going away for a long time to some shut-off place.

And Barney wondered why. Perhaps because of tonight, he decided. Daniel was all wrong. He would get over that.

CHAPTER FOUR

Dan’s Last Try

When Daniel left his brother he felt as if he carried with him his own as well as Emily-Jane’s death warrant. More than that, he felt as if he were holding in his hand the broken bits of happiness of several lives.

Like a cornered animal seeking refuge, yet knowing there was no refuge, he stood in a state of growing panic on the long, rambling front veranda of the old house. He craved yet feared the comfort of June Lansing’s presence.

Far away on the other side of the Sound he could see a few scraps of white jutting up from the water like jagged teeth. A few miles out lay three islands, bare rocks sprawled out on the surface of the water like dragons resting momentarily in their slow progress seaward.

Daniel knew all of those rocks intimately, their lobster-pots and the ashes of abandoned fires, their old tin cans and remains of rotted fish – unpleasant items, perhaps, until one became used to them, until they became familiar features and loved.

Thinking of those early days of exploration with the ambitious but unsteady Barney, Daniel moved restlessly across the wide tree-studded lawn until he came to the edge of the high bluff that dropped sharply to the smooth white beach below. To the right of him twisted the Cliff Path leading to High Rock Point. At this place the bluff came to its climax – assumed the proportions of a full-fledged cliff, at the base of which lay a broken floor of rocks. There were pleasant hollows in these rocks Daniel recalled. Some were always filled with water a little warmer than the sea. Some were filled with drifting sand. Altogether an attractive haunt for children, lovers, and straying artists. To descend the cliff was no easy matter, but could be achieved by the willing of spirit and bodily activity. Most reasonably minded persons found their way to this watery retreat by way of the beach. Up from the rocks reared the bitten face of the cliff to the summit of High Rock Point, a conservative but adequate name. And from the summit of High Rock Point grew sea-loving old pine trees, scrub brush, and wiry bushes.

High Rock Point was useful as well as ornamental. It served as a place to walk to, to linger at and leave behind. It was a landmark. Local residents were proud of it, as if that mattered a rap to the cliff. However people spoke well of High Rock Point and successfully managed to keep from falling off it, which was something.

Several homes lay between the Crewes’ house and the cliffs. Daniel could see their chimneys and gables now pointing through the green of the trees. He turned and looked back at his own home. Like its owner the old structure was friendly, brown, and rambling. It was a place of many large cool rooms and of many windows looking on the sea. Those in the rear gave view to an orchard that drifted away until stopped by the woods which bordered the marshes. A broad, irregular veranda virtually ran round the house and invited rest and contentment at any hour of the day. One could follow the breeze on that veranda as well as dodge the sun. On it opened at unexpected places little doors as well as large ones, and innumerable mysterious passageways invited exploration. On the ground floor no room appeared to be on a level with another one. In this house one was forever either stepping down into a room or up out of one. A large hall extended from sea view to orchard, the doors to this hall forming the frames of two charming pictures – the greens and browns and blossomings of an old orchard at the one end, while at the other, the blue reaches of the Sound glimpsed through a park of trees.

It was a house to live in, and Daniel had lived in it nearly all the years of his life. Now as he considered its familiar lines he had a feeling that the old place had about done with him, that their long term of companionship was just about at an end.

“Oh, well,” thought Daniel, “might as well look up June. She’s in for a tough time, too.”

•   •   •   •   •

June Lansing watched him coming toward her across the lawn. There was something radically wrong with this man, she decided. There had been something wrong with him for weeks. Of late he had seemed to be afraid to touch her. An invisible obstacle seemed to have raised itself between them. Yet it was not quite that. The obstacle was there for Daniel alone. He seemed to be exerting some inner restraint on himself. It was a hard thing to puzzle out, yet she could not help feeling the presence of some alien and inimical influence. Daniel had changed, there was no doubting that, no pretending it away.

Ever since the arrival of Emily-Jane, Dan had begun to freeze a little, as if the life within him were chilled. He had more and more taken refuge in his own thoughts, guarding them instead of sharing them as at one time he had done so generously. Intuitively June associated with the dazzling appearance of Emily-Jane the alteration of Daniel’s attitude, not only to herself but also to the world in general.

Now she watched the long, lounging figure out of troubled eyes and wondered much behind her placid countenance. She felt that this lover of hers owed it to their mutual confidence to let her help him. At least she could listen to his worries, or whatever it was that was plaguing his usually sanguine mind. She had always heard that a good woman can help a man. Yet here she had a perfectly good man who would not let her help him. June wanted to be with Daniel in whatever he was going through. Not for a moment did she suspect his loyalty. Dan was all right as far as that was concerned. It was something else, but what?

June Lansing was a loosely connected, sprawling creature, a big girl with big bones, but shapely withal. Unlike many of her sisters her well-developed bosom was no better developed than her brain. Above her ruggedly handsome face, sprinkled with a shower of freckles, lay interesting masses of flame-colored hair. She possessed a large humorous mouth capable of twisting itself into all sorts of eloquently expressive shapes. Her nose was fine but not small and her eyes, reflecting golden-brown – the shade of a proper ale – were flecked with little speckles, and were entirely her own. No other woman had eyes quite like those of June Lansing with their funny yellow specks.

Leggily ranging back in her deck chair on the lawn, she now looked quietly up at Daniel standing above her. For a moment neither spoke, then Daniel found an aimless-sounding “Hello,” which he offered her.

“Is that the way? Is that the way?” she remonstrated. “Can’t you manage something a little better than that?”

“How are you, June?” he asked woodenly.

“So well,” she said, “I do so well that if you don’t come out of your trance and give me a kiss I won’t forget in a hurry I’ll get up and give you such a sock with this chair that you’ll go sound instead of half asleep.”

Then Daniel knelt down beside her and gave her a kiss that she was destined not to forget in a long, long time, if ever. Into it went all of his love and longing for this woman, his pent-up misery and desperation. It was almost as if he were trying to lose himself in that kiss, to hide himself in her. When he rose she looked at him with pleased surprise behind which lay a shade of fear.

“Better and better,” she said at last. “One would think you’d been deprived of a woman’s kisses for years and years, and yet all the time you’ve had me. You should call more often, Dan. I like your visits.”

“I’m an accommodating sort of cuss,” he replied, striving to appear cheerful, “but exclusive, as you doubtless know.”

“I know nothing of the kind,” she answered. “For instance, where have you been all morning and why not at my side?”

“Been at the club most of the time,” he told her. “Sat out eighteen holes with Scott, then came home and badgered Barney. We had a talk or something approaching one. Since then I’ve been looking for you.”

“And I’ve been under your nose all the time.”

“I don’t like the way you put things,” he objected. “I don’t want you under my nose. Rather have you under my foot. It sounds more magnificent than nose.”

“Now don’t try to talk to me as you would to Barney,” she said. “It’s beyond my dim comprehension how you two lunatics ever manage to exchange thought. You seem to go strolling casually round the fringes of an intelligent conversation, then suddenly abandoning hope, seek out the nearest by-path to inanity. Is it that you feel obligated to amuse each other, or befuddle each other? He told me this morning that he suspected you were a mental case, but I told him you were merely growing.”

“I’m growing, sure enough,” said Daniel. “I’m growing old at a terrific speed, but Barney doesn’t amuse me any more, June. He’s got me worried, that boy has.”

“And you’ve got me no less worried,” she replied seriously. “You should let Scott Munson plumb into your mind and let in a couple of gallons of daylight or let out a flood of darkness. Just what is your guilty secret, Daniel Crewe? Out with it, man – out with it! Something is wrong with you, all wrong, worried, and unhappy. Don’t think for a second I haven’t known. Why don’t you give me a chance? I want to help. You know – kind of keep in touch with current events.”

She stopped and her eyes opened wide as she saw the color slowly drain away beneath his tan and noticed that for the first time since she had known him his eyes refused to meet hers.

“Guilty secret?” he repeated, laughing a trifle unsteadily. “Guilty, June? Why, I have no guilty secret. And as for Scott Munson, I haven’t joined the criminal class … yet. Not yet. Not yet. Not—”

He stopped suddenly when he realized he was needlessly repeating that crazy phrase. There was a tightness about his throat and a hot, empty sensation at the pit of his stomach. So it was already apparent, his guilt. He was branded before the deed. Good God! And Munson had seen it, too. Even Barney had looked at him queerly. He found a handkerchief and applied it to his forehead.

“Hot, isn’t it?” he said, but June did not answer. “Or is it?” he added lamely.

“Look at me, Daniel,” commanded June.

She said no more but strove to hold him with her golden-brown eyes. She seemed to be trying to draw from his brain the trouble that was there, for now she realized that there was something seriously wrong with Daniel, something that threatened their happiness. “Go on, Dan,” she said at length. “Tell me.”

“No, June, really,” he replied, endeavoring to drive off the suspicions he feared were forming in her thoughts. “Honestly, old thing, there’s nothing. What could there be? It’s just Barney. I’m worried about him – about Barney and this girl. Barney’s an awful kid, after all, while Emily-Jane – well, she’s quite a catch, I suppose, isn’t she?” He broke off lamely and looked hopefully at June.

“Is she?” asked that young lady. “Is she, Dan? What do you think, yourself?”

“Of course she’s wonderful and all that,” he replied. “I know everyone’s strong for her, but for some reason I don’t quite fancy seeing Barney attached to such a luminary, if you get what I mean.”

“Perfectly,” said June, dryly. “And a little more. I get that you think Emily-Jane is a lovely girl, but – you’d do anything in the world to get rid of her.”

She stopped suddenly and looked searchingly at Daniel, who in turn was looking at her with the fascination of horror. Deep in his eyes she saw something – what was it? What was it she saw there? It was furtive and dangerously driven, an expression she had never seen in the eyes of any man. And it was because she knew and loved this man so well, was so close to him in thought as well as emotion, that the terrible idea had come to her. From where did it come?

“You’d do anything to get rid of her,” she repeated slowly and as if to herself. “Anything in the world.” Her hands flew out and gripped him by the shoulders. She held him roughly. He could feel the strength of her fingers through his coat. “Oh, Dan, Dan!” she said.

“What – what do you mean, June?” he faltered. “What do you see?”

She gave him a push and laughed. It sounded a trifle strained. “A touch of sun,” she said. “Daniel, I believe you’d love to see Barney married to a younger edition of Aunt Matty?”

Daniel’s smile was a little more natural this time. “He could do a lot worse,” he admitted. “The two of them get along quite happily together what with her constant recriminations and preoccupation with food. A younger edition of Aunt Matty is just what Barney needs.”

June Lansing did not seem to be listening. Her eyes were leveled on the water. What was she thinking? What suspicion had suddenly come into her mind? June’s silence was making him nervous.

“Dan,” she asked at last, her voice steady, casual, only slightly interested, “did you ever know Emily-Jane when you were at college?”

“Never knew her … met her … danced with her … that sort of thing … heard of her, of course,” Daniel succeeded in jerking out, with a fairly convincing assumption of indifference.

“And what did you hear?” she continued.

“Oh, just the usual thing. Nothing that mattered one way or the other.”

“Delightfully vague and uninforming,” murmured June. “Tell me, Dan, did Sam Stoughten also know her?”

“No, I don’t think so. Why?” replied Daniel quickly. “What made you ask that, June?”

“Nothing in particular,” said June easily, “but a good many things in general. A few weeks ago I saw them together when they had every reason to believe they were unobserved. Sam looked as if he were being confronted by a ghost, and a most unpleasant ghost, at that. But you know how Sam is with women,” she continued on a note of reassurance. “He’s never entirely comfortable except when Sue’s around.”

“Exactly,” agreed Daniel. “Sam never was much of a ladies’ man. He’s a faithful old soul. Loyal to a fault, poor devil. Next to Barney—”

“Why ‘poor devil’?” interrupted June.

“I don’t know,” said Daniel. “Just thinking back, I suppose. He lost out a lot in college, but he never envied his friends.”

“And tonight you announce the glad tidings,” observed June for no apparent reason.

“Yes,” said Dan. “That’s just it – the glad tidings. If you ask me it’s all a lot of nonsense. Everyone knows they’re engaged already. It’s just an excuse to throw a party, as I look at it. And this stuff about switching off the lights for a minute just before the announcement – why that? All damn rot.”

“That,” said June, “was not Emily-Jane’s idea. It came from some member of the club crowd. A group of her admirers are going to present her with the most gorgeous Japanese kimono you ever dreamed about.”

“That well may be,” replied Daniel. “I never dreamed about a Japanese kimono.”

“Well you will when you see this one,” went on June. “When the lights flash on, there it will be – presto – all spread out on the table. Emily-Jane has many friends. Are you one of them, Daniel?”

“Of course,” said Daniel, striving to put a hearty note into his voice. “Of course, June. You know that as well as I do. She’s all right. It’s just about Barney, that’s all. Emily-Jane shouldn’t marry Barney. She shouldn’t do it. Of all the men in the world, why did she have to pick out him? I’ve nothing against the girl. Nothing.”

Silence once more fell between them. Both were occupied with thoughts too delicate or dangerous to be expressed. Furtively June was studying the tense, drawn face of the man she loved. A feeling of tenderness so poignant it was painful to bear came over her for him sitting there alone with all his lies and trouble.

“Come here, Daniel,” she said, and held out her arms to him. “Come here and put your head down on this businesslike bosom of mine. It was made for just such a head as yours, big, empty, and, oh, so dumb.”

Then Daniel knelt down beside her and his head was on her breast. On the green of the lawn and the blue of the open sky his eyes closed wearily. What had beauty to do with him? And he rested there. It was a moment of drifting peace. Perhaps the last one he would ever know. From her body came comfort and a sense of things, of life and what had been. How tired he was. How damned uselessly tired. Was there a chance that even now he could find another way out?

“Someday,” he said in a low voice, “someday, June, things will be all jake, won’t they? We’ll be all right, what? All of us? I’m worried, June, that’s all. It’s hell to have a damn fool brother.”

“I know, I know,” she answered. “I know, Dan.”

His weakness was so unlike him it struck her like a physical hurt. At that moment she would have done anything – given herself to him – just to have eased his mind. Anything to have kept him from thinking. Somehow she was going through with it. Even in the dark she would not leave Daniel alone.

This resolution formed she lifted his head and kissed him on both eyes.

“Hit the deck, sailor,” she said. “Let’s go and drag some food from Aunt Matty. She reluctantly hinted that there might be some sandwiches and tea for luncheon. You need food.”

•   •   •   •   •

Daniel had eaten and gone to his room, which held a corner position in the right wing of the house, if the rambling old dwelling could be said to have anything so conventional as wings. All the windows were filled with trees and with the Sound. The one at the side gave a long view of the Cliff Path and a glimpse of the orchard. Across the hall from him was Lane Holt’s room, while directly next to his own was the room occupied by Emily-Jane.

Daniel was standing now at the side window. He was idly contemplating the stout old limb of a tree. For him that limb had friendly associations. Ever since he could remember it had been trying to get in through the window as if curious to see what the room looked like inside. Many times as a boy he had climbed out along that inquisitive old branch and thus reached the ground. He had taught Barney to make use of this convenient exit, but only after several hairbreadth escapes. Barney had always climbed with too much confidence. He had proceeded as if he expected something always to be where he was, and when that something failed him Barney came to grief.

Daniel turned from the window and his thoughts. Restlessly he paced the room. Every now and then he turned his head as if looking for something. Suddenly he stopped dead still in his tracks. His chin went up, and he stood there waiting, thinking rapidly. Then he took a quick glance at his watch and left the room. The hall was empty. Taking a key from his pocket he let himself into the room next to his and quickly closed the door. Slowly his eyes traveled round the room. Now where would a person hide a packet of letters? Surely it would be under lock and key. Her trunk was locked. Hopeless. His long hands slid searchingly between the clothes in the bureau drawers. He turned to the suitcase and opened it. The letters couldn’t be here. They weren’t. He ran to the closet and flung open its door. Another bag. Daniel snatched it out and opened it. Quick, delving fingers. Nothing. Nothing! Goddamn! They must be in the trunk and that was locked. If he could only find those letters there still might be another way out. Once more he began to search the room.

On the bureau stood an antique box fashioned to resemble a row of books. Emily-Jane had brought it with her. It was a fairly common specimen. Daniel had seen them before, but to Emily-Jane it had probably seemed an exceedingly secretive hiding place. He slid back the base of the box and pressed the center volume. In a moment the thing was open. No letters of Sam’s, but three of his own and two addressed to him by Emily-Jane. Years ago she had cleverly regained possession of her own letters. He took them all and slipped them into an inside vest pocket.

Light feet falling in the hall outside. Coming closer. Daniel turned calmly and faced the door. He was leaning against the side of the open window when she entered.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he lied effectively. “Come in and shut the door. Lock it.”

Emily-Jane without a word did just that. Her eyes swept the room and discovered that nothing had been disturbed. Daniel had been careful. He had even taken the precaution of substituting a few business letters for those that had been in the box.

It was as well he had done so. Still without speaking she crossed the room to the bureau. Her hands idly shook the box, then she turned back satisfied. Peeling off her jersey, she stood before him half nude, a silken band across her breasts.

“Well, Daniel,” she said. “You’ve got yourself into this mess. Now get yourself out of it. My brain is quicker than yours, and Barney is at the foot of the stairs. If I call for Lane Holt he’ll swear to anything. He’s in his room now. Let’s talk business. What’s the bright idea?”

She searched for a cigarette, found one, lighted it, and seated herself on the bed. Daniel turned to the window to conceal the murder that blazed from his eyes. When he faced the girl once more he had regained his composure.

“Emily-Jane,” he said, “I’ve come in here to ask you to call it off. You have a chance now to do a good thing, a kind thing. Do it, won’t you? I’m licked. Give me Sam’s letters and chuck Barney. Let me look after him.”

“That would listen better from the bed,” she replied coolly. “Come over here and sit down.” Obediently he seated himself beside her. She flung a careless arm round his neck and blew a cloud of smoke in his face. “Now kiss me,” she said.

“Will you give me those letters, Emily-Jane?”

“No.”

“It’s as much for your sake as ours I am asking.”

“That’s a lie, Daniel, dear.”

“Money?” he suggested huskily. “For a great deal of money, Emily-Jane, will you?”

“No, you fool. I’ll get money and more. I can get all yours and his too if I want it. No, Daniel, I’m incorruptible. I’m far above money.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Emily-Jane,” he pleaded, “don’t go through with it. Give me those letters and lay off of Barney. Won’t you, won’t you, Emily-Jane?”

It was not an agreeable sight to see this big, hulking creature pleading thus with the girl. He had swallowed his pride. He was willing to go down on his knees to her.

“No,” she said. “I won’t.”

Then Daniel did go down on his knees before the girl.

“Those letters,” he said in a voice so low she could scarcely hear him. “I ask you now here on my knees to give them to me and to give up Barney. Think, Emily-Jane, think. You’ve got the chance now. Won’t you take it? Please. I ask you.”

For answer she tossed away her cigarette and crushed his face against her breast. Then she suddenly released him and sprang up, laughing tauntingly.

“Get up from there,” she jeered. “You’re making a tragic ass of yourself. Come over here and help me off with my shoes.”

She sank into a deep chair and extended her neat, slim legs. With lowered head as if stunned, Daniel got slowly off his knees. He felt heavy and dead as he turned to the door and fumbled with the key. A few swift strides brought her beside him, and he stood there a moment looking down at her in a dull, abstracted manner. Even now the voice of his pleading would not be stilled.

“No?” he said. “Won’t you?”

As he opened the door she once more threw one bare arm round his shoulder. Then she laughed softly.

“Gosh, you’re a glutton for punishment, Dan,” she said. “Sorry you have to leave so soon. Call again.”

The door closed on her mocking voice. Daniel was in the hall. He turned with hands hanging and came in contact with a figure that was standing perfectly still – frozen. The figure swayed slightly.

“Dan?” his name came in a whisper. “Dan?”

He took June’s arms in his hands just above the elbows. In the dim light of the hall he stooped and peered into her face. Then he shook his head slowly. Neither spoke. Again he peered down at her and shook his head. Releasing his hold on her arms he walked quietly down the hall and entered his room. The door closed.

Alone in the hall June Lansing stood looking at the door to Emily-Jane’s room. All the warmth had gone out of her ale-golden eyes. They were cold spots now, cold, hard, and bright. Then she, too, walked quietly down the hall, entered her room and closed the door.

From the shadow of an alcove used for trunks, Betty, the maid, emerged and went thoughtfully about her appointed tasks. It took all sorts of people to make the world, thought she, but here indeed was a pretty kettle of fish.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Searching Blade

Something was going to happen that night. Already things were going on, secret things in that old house. Scott Munson, slipping into his black robe, felt it in his bones. What was he going to do about it? How head this off? That well-known ounce of prevention – where could he find it? Should he keep his eye on Daniel or concentrate on Sam Stoughten? Should he divide his attention between the two? From his knowledge of men both had reached a dangerous pitch of desperation. Or would it be better to watch Emily-Jane, the object on which that desperation centered – the source of it?

To work on a case before it had actually broken was a new experience to Scott Munson. He sat down in a chair by the open window and looked out at the dark night. Perhaps he had read his characters wrong this time. Perhaps he had read into them meanings that were not there. Munson had no particular fondness for Emily-Jane. In fact, he considered her a beautiful but unpleasant little hypocrite, but surely she was not capable of creating all the strain and concealed animosity that were disturbing the atmosphere like a palpable thing. On the other hand why wasn’t she? In the forty years of his life he had seen the most insignificant women accomplish disasters far out of proportion to their individual importance.

That little byplay about letters between Emily-Jane and Sam Stoughten on the club-house veranda – what, if anything, was the meaning of that? Now was the time for someone to come out into the open and to speak a piece in no uncertain words. But the trouble was people seldom spoke at the right time and always at the wrong.

Scott Munson felt that if Daniel would only tell him what was on his mind matters could be straightened out. Daniel, he feared, no less than Sam Stoughten and everyone else involved, was exaggerating the seriousness of some situation to the proportions of a tragedy. If properly staged and directed it might well be turned into a farce, or at least brought to the level of plausibility. People did not react that way, however, under certain given circumstances. The situation itself had taken control, and the actors were merely following directions bereft of reason and volition.

Well, if things must be they must, he supposed. Perhaps it was written and could not be deleted. If people perversely insisted on making a hash of their lives there was little that he could do to stop them. Then a wave of human emotion for a moment smothered the cool, impersonal logic of Scott Munson. These people were his friends, and this old house itself was too homelike and friendly to be the scene of some stupid but irreparable tragedy. But damn it all, why were his thoughts constantly dwelling on tragedy even before a tragedy had occurred? There was a feeling in the air, or was he just giving rein to his imagination? That was not like him. Some mischief must be afoot.

He rose, dropped the black hood over his head, and left the room. In the hall he saw Sam Stoughten entering Daniel’s room. Sam was robed but not hooded. The expression on his ruddy, homely face was anything but festive.

“The uniform of the evening seems highly appropriate,” mused Scott as he passed down the hall. “I’d give a lot to hear the conversation between those two gentlemen.”

He paused, then shook his head, and swiftly descended the stairs.

•   •   •   •   •

Sam sat down on Daniel’s bed and looked at him. There was a mute inquiry in his mild blue eyes, an expression suggestive of a decent-spirited dog, one that wanted something very badly but was too considerate to ask for it outright. Daniel turned from the mirror and regarded the slightly upturned face. Then he shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I found mine, Sam – only mine.”

“No,” repeated Sam as if trying to puzzle out the exact meaning of the word. “Glad you found yours, though.”

Neither spoke again. Daniel turned back to the mirror and brushed a hand across his face. Ten years seemed to have been added to his face since he had left Emily-Jane’s room. He was trying to brush them away. It was fortunate they were wearing hoods.… All men would look alike tonight.

Sam rose from the bed and stood with idly swinging arms.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I just dropped in to ask. Be getting back to Sue now. She’ll be waiting. You’re looking tired, Dan.”

“Oh, I’m all right,” said the other. “Have a drink?”

“Yes,” said Sam.

Daniel swung up a bottle from the floor beside the bureau, and they drank the whisky neat. Their eyes met as they put down their glasses. A lifetime of associations mutually shared passed between them.

“I tried,” said Daniel. “She caught me at it, but I don’t think she suspected. They must be locked in her trunk. Couldn’t go that.”

“That girl’s a devil, Daniel.”

“She’s not so good, Sam.”

“And she’s got the two of us, not to mention young Barney.”

“Wish she were a man, Sambo.”

“Don’t see where that makes a hell of a lot of difference.” There was a new note of hardness in Sam Stoughten’s voice. “After a woman has passed a certain limit she has no sex.”

Their eyes met searchingly, but not frankly, then looked away. Daniel turned back to the mirror for no reason at all. He was tired of his face.

“We were damn fools, Daniel,” went on Stoughten, in a voice that seemed to be summarizing the past before writing finis. “But I was the damnedest. It was all my fault, old man. I dragged you in.”

“Shut up,” said Daniel, reaching for the bottle. “Have a drink.”

“I had one.”

“Have two.”

They drank neat again and larger.

“Somehow it doesn’t make me feel so good,” observed Sam in gentle complaint. “I used to love to get drunk.”

Daniel grinned. “And you did, Sam. You did. As a lord – as a whole houseful of lords, in fact.”

“Not going to get drunk tonight,” announced Sam. “Must keep a clear head.”

“Why?” asked Daniel curiously.

“The occasion calls for it,” said Sam. “One should keep a clear head tonight.”

“You’re not going to make some sort of a damn fool of yourself, are you, Sam?”

Once more their eyes studied each other.

“I’ve stopped making a damn fool of myself,” said Sam deliberately. “I might make myself something else, Dan, but not a damn fool.”

Dan was across the room and had seized Sam’s thick wrists. Sam refused to look up. He stood there stolidly.

“Look at me, Sam,” commanded Daniel. “This is my show. Understand that. My show entirely. You go back to Sue and stick by her. That’s your show, your job. Stick by Sue.”

“And let us all drift to hell, I suppose,” said Sam.

“Misery loves company,” replied Daniel.

“There should be one member less,” said Sam. Daniel released his grip. Sam looked up and laughed a little recklessly. “I don’t know what we’re talking about, Dan,” he said, “but don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right. Watch and see.”

“I shall,” said Dan grimly.

At the door Sam paused and looked back. “And, Dan,” he added, “I want to thank you for all you’ve done in the past and for what you just tried to do.”

“Remember,” called Daniel as the door was slowly closing, “don’t be a damn fool, Sam.”

“Not a chance,” came Sam’s voice.

•   •   •   •   •

A pair of slim provocative legs flashed down the hall. Emily-Jane seemed all legs. There was a skirt, a suggestion of a skirt. Some sort of momentarily interrupting flare of flounce, after which Emily-Jane continued once more somewhere in the region where the vertebrae either end or begin their business of being a spine, and up swept the beautiful back of Emily-Jane to her pert little neck and sleek golden hair. She was every bit as good in front – or nearly.

Emily-Jane intended to show the world just how lucky a man Barney really was. It looked as if she would experience little difficulty in establishing her point. She was supposed to be something along the general lines of a ballet dancer.

The legs carried what remained of her to June Lansing’s door, upon which she tapped lightly, then entered unbidden.

June looked up from the brilliant buckle she was attaching to her pump. Emily-Jane failed to detect the slightest sign of welcome in June’s eyes, but a little thing like that meant nothing to Emily-Jane.

“I thought we’d go down together,” she remarked. “How do I do?”

“Perfectly, as usual,” said June. “You know that even better than I.”

“Well, I’m glad you think so just the same,” replied the other.

“Emily-Jane,” said June, having affixed the buckle and disappeared into some sort of milkmaid’s costume, “Emily-Jane, you don’t give a damn what I think, and you know it.”

“Certainly, I know it, but it’s much pleasanter to pretend,” came the cool response of Emily-Jane. “We’re slated to be sisters-in-law, you know. Don’t you think we’ll make a happy family?”

“No,” said June, with equal candor, “I don’t. For some reason Daniel hates you, and you have some sort of a hold on him. I don’t know what it’s all about, but I do know that things aren’t right. The best I can do is to suspect that you are playing poor Barney for a gull. What is all this between you and Dan? Why doesn’t someone speak? I feel as if I were playing blind man’s buff with an electric fan. What was he doing in your room today?”

Emily-Jane smiled wisely.

“All men are creatures of impulse,” she answered. “Daniel is no exception. For the intimate details I refer you to him.”

“That doesn’t gall me at all, Emily-Jane,” June replied easily. “He was in your room for something, but you were the last thing in the world he wanted. I know that. What I don’t know is just what is behind it all. That’s what I want you to tell me.”

“Once more I refer you to Daniel,” said Emily-Jane.

“Do you think I’d be asking you if I hadn’t already asked him?” replied June. “He won’t say a word and he’s worried gray about something. What is it, Emily-Jane? Help me out in this, and I’ll try to make a go of things. It’s a business proposition.”

“One which I neither need nor care to accept,” said Emily-Jane. “I’ll make a go of things without your help. Apart from that I don’t know what you’re talking about. Are you nearly ready to go down?”

There was an ominous expression in the eyes that met those of Emily-Jane. “You’re going to marry Barney?” asked June.

“Certainly,” replied Emily-Jane.

“And nothing is going to stop you?”

“Not a thing that I can see.”

“Then God help you is all I can say,” said June. “Something tells me it won’t ever come off.”

“Then God help all of you,” replied Emily-Jane. “You’ll need Him.”

“I say that, too,” answered June. “I’m ready now. Let’s go.”

Together they left the room, Emily-Jane triumphant. Seeing them together it would have been difficult to detect that they were not the best of friends.

At the head of the stairs they masked and descended hand in hand. A lovely picture they made. In June’s loose clasp Emily-Jane’s hand lay unresponsive.

•   •   •   •   •

Bodies caught and swayed in a flood of music. Beautiful women, beautifully bare, disturbingly perfumed. Laughing couples along the rambling veranda, thirsty ones around the punch bowl. All the men in black dominoes and hoods. The hoods were easily lifted. Tonight the old house was seeing a bit of life. It was stepping out. Being gay for Barney.

“What do you think of me?” Emily-Jane asked that rather dazed young man.

Barney surveyed her from head to foot. “One doesn’t have to think about you,” he observed. “One knows at a glance. You’re all there. Degas should be with us.”

“Who is he?” she asked quickly. “Do I know him?”

“Apparently not,” said Barney. “Neither do I.”

“Don’t be a fool, Barney,” Emily-Jane told him. “With me at any rate.”

“Pardon me,” he replied. “Shall we indulge in a partial assault?”

Barney failed to notice the swift glance she cast about her as if seeking relief. Where the devil was Lane? No thrill in dancing with this crazy creature who was constantly making uncomfortable observations – the more uncomfortable because there was always a grain of truth in them in spite of their ambiguity.

The fact of the matter was that hardly a dozen guests had arrived before Barney began to wonder when everybody was going home. He did not hold with this party. It was too big and noisy. One never could find anyone who was not going somewhere or doing something. Everybody was so busy, so heady. He wondered if the swirling couples were happy, or if they just imagined they were having a good time. Perhaps they were, but damned if he could see it. And he was still young. What was wrong with him? Why was he not like these other perspiring and persistent young men who were constantly clutching at someone and making such a business of having a good time? He did like to dance with Emily-Jane though. She was different. She was heavenly.

“All right, then,” she said, reluctantly yielding to the situation. “Come on. Let’s try.”

“Let’s not try,” objected Barney. “Let’s damn well do it.”

They were in the midst of things now, twisting, swaying, jerking, gliding, doing all manner of surprising and inexplicable movements. It was all very odd, people disporting themselves in such a way. But he did enjoy dancing with Emily-Jane. She made it a point to see that he liked it, and Barney was only human. Emily-Jane’s body was pleasant to hold, particularly when in motion. She could cling without interfering, and before the dance was over he had begun to think he really knew how. But that was the last dance he had with her that night.

Lane Holt was on hand to claim the next one. Then Emily-Jane really did dance. Lane was worth it. He knew his stuff. Tall, graceful, perfectly poised, he carried her smoothly over the floor and away from the bemused Barney.

“I’ve been invited to join a party,” said Lane, “after this show is over.”

“Oh, you have?” answered Emily-Jane. “Going?”

“Why not?” he replied. “You’re being so damned discreet.”

“We might take a walk,” she observed, “after the household has dug in. Can’t tell what I will do after I’ve had a few more glasses of that punch.”

“Under those circumstances the party’s off,” said Lane, his arm tightening round her supple body.

“Easy there, Lane,” breathed Emily-Jane. “Turn those lips away. This isn’t an exhibition dance. Be nice. Be nice.”

“I’ll be nice,” said Holt. “Let’s try the veranda.”

“Punch first,” she answered. “It’s a warm night.”

“You shouldn’t mind it,” replied Holt, sweeping her trim body with caressing eyes.

And so the dance went on. Barney at loose ends wandered purposelessly about, looking speculatively at hooded figures and wondering which one was Dan.

•   •   •   •   •

It was Emily-Jane who found him. He was sitting in his room by the window, looking out into the dark, moist night. His hood was off and his head rested wearily back against the chair. From below came the strains of the orchestra. Voices floated up from the lawn.

Emily-Jane entered quietly and stood looking at him for a few seconds before he became aware of her presence.

“Snap out of it, Dan,” she said. “It’s time now to go down and welcome me to your family.”

No more pleading from Daniel. He realized the futility of trying to move this girl.

“You’re going through with it then?” was all he said.

“Right now. Pronto,” replied Emily-Jane.

He walked toward the door, but she did not move. She stood in his way, her young body tense. He looked down at her and her lips parted. An invitation lay in her eyes.

“Dan,” she said, her voice low and commanding. “Look, Dan. Here I am. Don’t be such a prig.”

“Prig?” he replied hoarsely. “I wonder what you’d call a cheat.”

She moved out of his way and they left the room. Thus did Emily-Jane lead her sacrifice to the slaughter.

The dancing floor was now sprinkled with tables. Everywhere food was in evidence. Also Aunt Matty. Hoods were off and mouths open. Barney was eating sandwiches with relief. It was something to do. Daniel without a word dragged him away from a fresh supply and lined him up against the heavy portières that cut off the library from the main reception room.

“Don’t forget the lights,” excitedly whispered a charming young thing in hardly enough to describe.

“I had,” smiled Daniel, looking down kindly at the lively little upturned face. “Run along, baby, and get ready to do your stuff.”

“It’ll be on a table right in front of you, Dan,” she said worshipfully.

“Very good,” replied Daniel, nodding approvingly.

Then he sought Sam Stoughten, who was looking anything but happy at the side of his wife Sue. She was overheated but still game. They were not passionately fond of dancing, these two. With them a little was almost more than enough. Where all the new steps came from, and why, was an unsolved puzzle to them.

“Sam,” said Daniel, “will you go into the library and switch off the lights when you hear a high treble and probably inarticulate voice make a noise in your direction?”

Sam disappeared into the other room.

“He’s been the very devil tonight,” complained Sue.

“He’s teething, perhaps,” smiled Daniel, and went in search of Barney, who, having grown tired of standing by himself, had drifted away to see what the salad was all about. This time Emily-Jane accompanied them back to the curtain, round which was the only cleared space in the room. Daniel had taken up his position on the left of the fair creature. Barney had tacked himself on her right. This was all very strange, he decided. All very uncalled for.

Scott Munson, his eyes fixed on the group, stood poised alertly as if trying to fix the situation in his mind.

“Friends,” began Daniel unexpectedly, and at the sound of his voice the room grew quiet, “I suppose it’s no use trying to keep it a secret any longer. Emily-Jane, here, has for some unaccountable reason consented to marry this brother of mine. Hence all the rejoicing. Let’s drink what we can grab and wish them happiness and a long life.”

“Lights out, Sam,” cried a high treble voice. “Lights out.”

As the lights flashed out Daniel’s ankle turned slightly on an uneven spot on the floor. He lurched against Emily-Jane, who lurched against Barney.

“What the hell?” said Barney. “Is this a free for all?”

“Not yet, Sambo,” called the little voice through the darkness. “Only a minute now.”

“Oh, my God!” muttered Daniel suddenly.

“What is it, Dan?” called Barney. “Where are you, old man?”

Daniel did not answer.

“Dan! Dan!” cried his brother.

“Shut up, kid. Stand by,” Daniel’s words came in a whisper.

Emily-Jane ran her hand up Daniel’s arm. There was a sharp cry in the darkness.

“For God’s sake put on those lights,” a man’s voice called.

“We’re ready now, Sambo,” came the high treble. “You can turn on the lights.”

“Right,” came the voice of Stoughten, and the room was promptly flooded with diffused radiance.

Scott Munson took a quick step forward, blotting Emily-Jane from view of the others, and with a pocket handkerchief wiped the blood from Emily-Jane’s hand.

“Say nothing,” he muttered. “Go and admire that damn kimono.”

He looked into the library. Sam was turning away from the switch. “Sam,” he said quietly, “one moment.”

Sam came to him quickly.

“Walk upstairs with Daniel, will you?” Munson said. “Take Barney with you.”

The three men left the room. Then Scott Munson, taking advantage of the general interest aroused by the kimono, walked back of the curtain and carefully withdrew a long knife. There was blood upon the blade. Holding it so as not to smudge the hilt, he walked through the library, entered the hall and ran quickly upstairs.

Below in the reception room Emily-Jane was strutting magnificently in her gorgeous Japanese kimono.

CHAPTER SIX

Death Takes Steps

Munson paused a moment before Daniel’s door and listened. Two persons were speaking, but he could hardly distinguish between their voices. He knew that one was Daniel’s, but which? Then suddenly for the first time he realized the remarkable similarity in the voices of the erstwhile roommates, Sam Stoughten and Daniel Crewe. During their four years at college one of them had either consciously or unconsciously taken on the vocal expression and mannerisms of the other.

“Soft pedal that stuff,” Daniel was saying, as Munson entered without knocking. “After all, you did make a damn fool of yourself, but things could have been worse.”

Appearing not to have caught the full significance of what Daniel had just said, Munson swiftly crossed the room. Opening one of the smaller drawers in the bureau, he unconcernedly tossed out its contents. Collars and handkerchiefs, incontinently bereft of their accustomed shelter, found themselves on the floor.

“I say,” cried Barney, sitting on the bed by his brother, “Daniel here has just been wounded, perhaps mortally, and you barge in and start a rough house. Why that?”

Munson merely smiled somewhat grimly and holding up the knife, still wet with blood, deliberately dropped it in the deflowered drawer, locking it and pocketing the key. Both Daniel and Stoughten watched him moodily from the bed.

Maintaining a preoccupied silence, Munson turned and keenly inspected Daniel, noting the drawn lines in his pale face. Sam had risen and was attempting to remove his wounded friend’s garments. Barney was doing futile things with his hands. Munson seemed to be totally unimpressed by the fact that Daniel had just been stabbed, an attempt made on his life.

“Just where did he get it?” he demanded shortly.

“In the arm, Scott,” said Daniel apologetically. “At least I think so. Feels more or less that way.”

Still Munson did not move.

“You should know if anyone,” he remarked. “Do you realize that I did my best to prevent all this? And do you further realize that the Scott Munson you have known is now gone? From now on I am out to get someone – anyone who attempts to arrange matters through a stupid and, I say, cruel recourse to bloodshed and brutality. I gave you all a chance, and you’ve treated me like a damn fool. I’m not a nice man.”

Sam Stoughten flinched at his words. Barney only looked slightly amazed. But Daniel regarded him out of stolid, indifferent eyes.

“In the meantime you’re going to let me bleed to death so you’ll have a nice little murder on your hands to solve,” he answered bitterly.

“Oh, you won’t die quite yet,” said Munson, “although that stab was intended to murder … someone. And that someone was not necessarily you, Daniel.”

He crossed the room quickly, and brushing Barney aside, ran his hand along the sleeve of Daniel’s domino. Looking at his fingers he found them red with blood.

“A nice piece of work,” he observed in a cold, impersonal voice. “Well conceived, but poorly executed. And it would be the left arm. Tell me one thing. After the lights went out did you move at all from your places?”

“We all seemed to lurch,” replied Barney innocently. “Not much, but I know we lurched.”

“That explains the mistake,” said Munson, addressing his remark to Sam.

Stoughten turned red and refused to meet his eyes.

“Well, Sam,” continued Munson, “let’s do our best to correct the error. Snap to it! If Dr. Manning is not too drunk by this time get him up here. If he is, telephone to Woods at the village. Use the phone in the pantry and don’t shout. Barney, do something else with your hands. Sit on them. Put them in your pockets. Go over by the window and take a chair. Try to think exactly what happened after the lights went out. And, Sam,” added Munson, “I want June Lansing. Send her here quietly, but quickly.”

He had already stripped off Daniel’s domino, coat, and vest. With a pair of nail scissors, snatched from the bureau, he deftly cut away the crimson sleeve and laid the wound bare. Casting one dismayed glance at the wound, from which the blood was freely welling, Stoughten hastened from the room, but not before he heard Munson remark, “Suppose it had found your back, Daniel, where would you be now?”

Munson found a towel and twisted it tightly round Daniel’s arm. “Faint?” he asked in a slightly kinder voice.

“A trifle light, Scott,” admitted Daniel. He hesitated a moment, then continued with an appealing glance at the impassive face of Munson; “I suppose you couldn’t forget all this, Scott? For old times’ sake couldn’t you let it drop?”

Munson looked at him thoughtfully. “Dan,” he said, “you’re not talking to a friend now, but to one whose offer of help you deliberately rejected. But maybe I could let it drop officially if this is the worst – the end.”

Hearing the word “end,” Barney turned from the window and looked tragically at the pair on the bed.

“My God, Scott,” he faltered, “what’s all this talk about the end? Is Dan really in a bad way?”

“You should be locked up, Barney,” replied Munson gravely. “Locked up or deported.”

“But I had no hand in the affair,” protested Barney.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Munson rejoined sarcastically. “I was sure you had.”

“Don’t let him kid you, Barney,” advised his brother weakly.

“Then you know who did do it.” Munson’s easy voice had grown suddenly hard.

Barney looked startled.

“Lay off Barney,” said Daniel. “He’s not in on this. None of us knows a thing about it. It was too damn dark. You know that yourself.”

“I think I know who did it,” came amazingly from Barney.

“Who?” inquired Munson.

“For God’s sake, Barney!” frantically interrupted Daniel.

“I’m fairly sure I can explain the whole thing,” went on the unheeding Barney, in a tone of complacency. “Aunt Matty did it. It was just a piece of carelessness. You know Aunt Matty always has a knife in her hand, always slashing at things. Well, she just passed by in the dark and happened to slash poor Daniel by mistake. That’s all.”

“And who had she intended to slash?” demanded Munson, showing no signs of astonishment.

“Who?” exclaimed Barney. “Why, no one, of course. A loaf of bread, or some sort of dead animal such as a ham, or chicken, or even a pâté de foies. The sandwiches were running low. I know that sad fact myself.”

“You would, Barney, you would,” said Daniel, grinning in spite of his growing weakness. “Stick to that story, boy. It’s a slick solution. What do you think, Scott?”

In Munson’s eyes there was a hint of good-natured disgust. “It all depends on what Aunt Matty thinks,” he observed dryly, and added, “after I have talked with her.”

“Oh, Aunt Matty will agree to anything,” said Barney cheerfully, as he rose from his chair and started for the door.

Munson smiled in spite of himself at this piece of effrontery.

“Wait!” he commanded sharply. “The ordinary criminal, the low-down type is merely immoral. He’s not such a difficult problem. But you people of some pretense to social standing are totally unmoral. You are the hardest class with which to deal. You band together and stick. Now, there has been an attempted murder here. If that knife had found its mark one of you three standing there in the dark against that curtain would now be dead. Quite bloodily extinguished. And,” he added slowly, “it’s by no means certain which one of you it would have been. That isn’t a nice thought to carry round with you, is it?” Without waiting for an answer he went on: “So please sit down, Barney, and do try not to complicate matters any more than they are. You might actually be helping to kill the thing you most love. There’s a potential murderer at large among us, tonight, and there may be more than one.”

Barney sat down promptly with a look of horrified amazement on his face. “The devil there is,” he said.

“Yes,” replied Munson. “Where the deuce is Manning?”

The door opened, and Manning, followed by June Lansing and Sam Stoughten, came into the room. Manning was by no means too drunk, but contained just the right quantity of liquor to lend inspiration to his hand. He was a man of some forty odd years, dapper, handsome, and possessed of a head of remarkably white hair. An unfailing attraction. Men could trust Manning, but not women, so they did and seemed to enjoy it. Manning, also. His practice had been so punctuated with scandals that he had practically abandoned the practice the better to apply himself to the scandals. A good doctor when he could be located. Independently rich.

“Sam had the devil of a time finding me,” he announced, “and when he did … well …” The doctor left his sentence eloquently unfinished.

Going up to Daniel he rapidly examined the wound.

“Clean enough,” he remarked, “but, Dan, my boy, you’re going to have one hell of a fine arm for several weeks. All the way through. A good jab, that. Required strength.” Turning to Munson, he added, “I thought something was up.”

“You called for the light?” asked the latter.

“Yes,” replied Manning. “Thought I detected a certain note in Daniel’s voice. Made me nervous. Hand me my bag, Stoughten.”

“Notice anything?” went on Munson.

“Altogether too dark. Not a cat.” Manning was busy with Daniel’s arm.

“It was an accident, doc,” said Daniel significantly. “A piece of sheer carelessness. Aunt Matty just happened to have a knife in her hand and—”

“I understand perfectly,” said Manning. “Those things happen every day, but” – and here he gave Daniel a look of comprehension – “Aunt Matty should not be allowed to play with knives.”

“It’s a habit,” proclaimed Barney. “A menace. One must keep dodging her all the time. A very careless and near-sighted woman, and has been so from birth.”

“Your nerves are shot to pieces, Dan,” said the doctor, stepping back and critically regarding his handiwork. “Here,” he went on, “I’m going to leave you a bottle of these. Take two in a half a glass of water in about half an hour. I always carry them to parties in case some woman gets laughing or crying or cursing too much. Nice girls we have with us these days.” With one of his rapid changes he turned to Barney and said: “Just slip down the back way with this bag and get it into my car as quietly as you can.”

A few minutes later the astute Barney had dragged Aunt Matty into the privacy of the pantry.

“You just stabbed Daniel in the arm,” he informed her. “It was when the lights went out. Then you stabbed him with a long knife through the curtain. All a mistake, you understand. No hard feeling, no fits of passion.”

“I’d rather have done it in a rage than through sheer carelessness,” complained Aunt Matty. “Then I wouldn’t have seemed such a fool.”

“Well, just say anything you like,” urged Barney. “Bayonet practice, for instance.”

“Or merely a girlish whim,” suggested Aunt Matty. “Is he really bad?”

“Not at all,” Barney assured her. “He’s just stabbed. That’s all.”

“Anything short of murder you can blame on me,” she said. “I’m too old for things to make much difference now one way or the other, but I draw the line at murder for some quaint reason.”

As Barney hurried away the old lady looked pensively at the gently swinging door. “There’s something wrong going on in this house,” she thought to herself, “but I can’t put my finger on it, although I feel I’m getting hot.”

Back in the room Barney assumed an unnatural and unconvincing air of briskness. “Got safely through the lines, Dr. Manning,” he announced, “without anyone seeing me.”

“Except Aunt Matty,” remarked Munson.

“How did you know that?” asked Barney, and was outraged when everyone laughed.

“All out now,” commanded Manning, “except June Lansing. Ever put a man to bed, June?”

“Yes,” she assented calmly. “Often.”

“Who?” demanded Daniel.

“Father,” smiled June. “At times mother would have nothing to do with him.”

Munson unlocked the bureau drawer and gingerly withdrew the knife. At the sight of the stained blade an inimical presence seemed to have entered the room. All pretense of light-heartedness died out. The little group looked serious and defensive. Scott Munson was no longer one of them, but to this attitude he appeared entirely indifferent. He confronted Barney and pointed with one long finger to the hilt of the knife.

“Aunt Matty’s,” he remarked unsmilingly. “Her fingerprints. Don’t mind if I just make sure? Hand me one of those glasses, Sam. I’d like a bit of a nightcap.”

Realizing how suspicious it would appear not to comply with Munson’s request, Stoughten obeyed. Scott Munson watched him closely, noting the exact position of his fingers. Then he poured himself a drink. With the glass in one hand and the knife in the other, he turned to the door. Then he halted and looked at Barney. That dismayed young man, as if fascinated, followed the direction of Munson’s eyes and obediently opened the door for him. With a curt good night, Munson left the room.

“That is what I call a real cheery exit,” remarked Manning.

“It’s his way,” replied Daniel. “When he’s once started he turns into a torturer. Seems to check his heart until called for. May I have a shot, doctor? I’m damn well tired now.”

“Haven’t the heart to refuse.”

“Pour out the drinks, Sam,” said Daniel.

“Come, cheer up everybody,” suggested Barney, trying to be helpful. “The worst is yet to come.”

Both Daniel and Stoughten looked at him with hostile eyes.

“What are you looking at me like that for?” he asked nervously. “Why the devil is everyone so subdued and jumpy? Feel like going down and getting foaming drunk myself.”

“Do,” urged Daniel smoothly. “Get good and drunk, and then go to bed. It wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

“Sweet advice from a brother,” retorted Barney. “Come along, Sam, and get me drunk.”

Stoughten finished his drink and followed Barney from the room. At the door Barney looked back.

“Too bad it wasn’t your throat,” he said.

“On your way, baby,” called Daniel. “Outside.”

•   •   •   •   •

For the past half-hour Daniel had been sleeping quietly. June attributed his restful slumber to the tablets she had given him. Had she but known it, the contents of the glass now lay on the floor in a neat little pool between the wall and the bed. Daniel had no idea of indulging in sleeping potions that night. There was still a thing to do.

Munson came quietly into the room and stood looking down at the sleeping man’s averted face.

“You gave him the tablets?” he asked.

“Half an hour ago,” said June.

“Then he’s through for the night,” he remarked in a tone of relief.

He departed as noiselessly as he had entered and sought the privacy of his own room. Yes, Daniel was through for the night, he reflected. This little stabbing incident had perhaps settled many problems. He was content it had been no worse. Lighting a cigarette, he sat down in a comfortable chair. Sam Stoughten had tried and failed. Apparently in addition to her other gifts Emily-Jane also possessed a charmed life. Munson wondered if she suspected the intended destination of that long searching blade or whose hand had held the knife. Stoughten would now be afraid to act further. Munson held the evidence against him. The fingerprints on the knife were identical to those on the glass. He had assured himself of that. Both exhibits were now locked up in a safe place. Scott Munson relaxed and enjoyed his cigarette.

•   •   •   •   •

June Lansing rose quietly and picked up Daniel’s vest, which had slipped to the floor from the arm of a chair. On the matting beneath the vest lay a scattering of letters. Without hesitation she opened one of the letters and began to read. Perhaps this letter might help her to discover what all the trouble was about. It was no time to stand on ceremony. As she read a slow red flush gradually mounted to her face. Seating herself, she glanced at Daniel and returned once more to the letter.

At the end of half an hour she rose slowly, slipped the letters into Daniel’s pocket and mechanically hung up the garment in the closet. The last lingering traces of girlhood seemed to have left her face. For a long time she stood looking down at the man she loved, whose secret she now held, whose problem she understood. A wave of sympathy for him went out from her. He was momentarily free from his burden. Peace after weeks of heart-eating worry was with him. Peace and helplessness. For tonight, at least, he was safe. But Daniel, she knew, would never let Barney marry Emily-Jane.

The orchestra was playing “Home, Sweet Home.” Its strains drifted up to the listening girl. She glanced at her wrist-watch … two-thirty. The close of Emily-Jane’s dance, a huge personal triumph and a greedily received display. Emily-Jane must be quite well satisfied. Pleased with herself, in fact. At the thought of the girl, June’s face became hard and set. In her eyes lay a frozen light, impersonal, cold, inscrutable. There was something about her at that moment that suggested the aloof, unapproachable magnificence of a statue of Justice. Something huge and unalterable.

Once more she looked down at the sleeping man, stretched out one hand, hesitated and withdrew it.

Then she turned slowly, very slowly away from the bed. And she left the room.

•   •   •   •   •

Daniel was at the door listening.

Just outside in the hall Barney was bidding good night to Emily-Jane.

“I love you, Emily-Jane,” Barney was saying, in a pathetically inadequate voice considering the depth of his emotions. “To me you are the most beautiful damn creature in the world.”

Emily-Jane laughed softly, a trifle impatiently, the listening man thought. “Be a good boy, Barney,” he heard her say. “Trot off to bed and go to sleep. I must run down now and see some of the gang off. You’re not so good at that.”

A moment later, when Barney thrust his head in at his brother’s door, Daniel was back in bed. Satisfied he was safely asleep, Barney’s head was withdrawn, and the door closed softly.

Daniel, in spite of his wounded arm, slipped into his domino. To hell with the pain. A drink, must have a drink. He found the bottle and drank. Then he went to the window and waited, looking out over the night.

A late moon, like an overripe cantaloupe badly damaged in shipment, was rising over the Cliff Path. Daniel regarded it without either interest or appreciation.

Presently he saw two figures detach themselves from the shadows and pass down the path in the direction of High Point Rock. One figure was unmistakable. Its slim legs flashed out from the kimono. An attractive effect in the moonlight. Still Daniel waited. At the end of ten minutes he rose from his crouching position and went to another window, climbed carefully through it and seized the limb of the old tree. Already his wound was open and bleeding. Along his left arm ran a moist, burning sensation. Daniel was indifferent to it. Indifferent now to everything. Once on the ground, he sought the protection of the trees and moved through the darkness in a direction parallel with the Cliff Path but more protected from observation.

But Daniel was not the only nocturnal stalker on that particular night; there were others, and Death was guiding their feet.

•   •   •   •   •

From behind a thicket of wind-worried bushes Daniel listened and watched. He saw Emily-Jane drink from a small container that flashed in the sad moonlight and he heard her reckless laughter as she returned it to her companion. Blood was now trickling from Dan’s fingers, but he was unconscious of it. The night wind was cool on his forehead, and from the base of High Point Rock the sea spread on and on to God knows where. How pleasant it was to be there and to smell the scent of the salt mingling with that of the shrubs and earth still moist from yesterday’s rain. For a moment Dan was once more a child with little Barney. They were looking for berries and birds’ nests, and Daniel did most of the finding. At the thought of Barney his eyes returned to the figures standing on the edge of the great rock.

They had become merged now. They were one. And Lane Holt’s triumphant laughter smote his ears. It was hateful to hear – unbearable. Then Daniel heard Emily-Jane speaking, unabashed and unafraid.

“No, Lane, no,” she was saying, “he doesn’t matter in the least. It will make no difference, my man. You are my man, aren’t you, Lane? My unholy, unfaithful lover?”

And Holt: “That last crack, honey, goes two ways.”

“In what else is the joy of life?” came the voice of Emily-Jane.

And that was the last word she ever uttered.

Breaking from the bushes Daniel slipped between them. Hot with drink, Emily-Jane flung herself upon the intruder. Daniel had her by the naked shoulder with his one good hand. His bloody hand smashed into the face of Holt. It was not a fist, just a red mangled flail. From the bushes another black figure came at the group. Its gaze was directed not at the swaying figures, but rather on the ground at the edge of the rock. Still violently holding Emily-Jane, Daniel turned to Holt. The man was no longer there. He was slinking along the Cliff Path, peering back over his shoulder. Then he vanished from view. The other black figure, sobbing quietly to itself, backed into the bushes. With a strange sensation of sudden release, Daniel turned back to Emily-Jane. She, too, had vanished.

And Daniel stood alone, peering down into the blackness where lay the great broken rocks upon which he and Barney had played in bygone years.

A lone, black figure in the dwindling moonlight, high up against an unresponsive sky … peering, peering, peering down to where a shattered figure lay all unheedful of the low nervous mouthings of the surf.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Down There

How he succeeded in reaching the foot of the cliff Daniel never remembered. For a short time his mind was blank, numb, incapable of recording external impressions. He wanted to know. He wanted to be sure. With his own eyes he wanted to see his terrible handiwork lying there in the darkness.

And as he staggered, bruised and aching, among the broken rocks, he found her, the shattered mass once known as Emily-Jane. Then, there alone in the darkness he knelt by the body of the girl and laid a hand on her upturned face. A bloody end of the bandage fell against her cheek. He was forgetful of his own danger. His only desire was to be alone with his victim … to brood there beside her in the damp and dark.

Sea waves washing and sea mist rising. A solitary figure crouched over the twisted body of a dead girl. Far, far away, over there somewhere in a clump of black trees, an old, weary moon, once as glorious as Emily-Jane, was going out, its pale face merely a memory of brighter nights gone by. And above all, the great black cliff, a threatening, watching mass of bitter stone.

God! What had he done? Put a period to an evil life. Yes, but perhaps even the most distorted life had rights of its own. Gone now his assurance of rectitude. Gone now the desperate courage that had seen him through the act. He was merely Daniel now, Daniel alone and afraid.

As his eyes grew accustomed to the shadows at the base of the cliff, he could see more distinctly the distorted figure of Emily-Jane. Her bare legs lay sprawled and twisted, lending to the nearly nude body a suggestion of obscenity. One arm was crushed unnaturally beneath the naked back, and Daniel saw with dilated eyes how frightfully the skull had been smashed. There was a black stain around the hair.

This thing he had done. This ruin he had created.

With back-drawing hands he did what he could for the grotesque body of the girl he had hated so intensely in life. Now that she was incapable of further evil, now that she was helpless, no longer an object of envy and admiration, his former loathing was gone. He straightened the outflung limbs and removed the arm from beneath the shattered back. It was a rough job, but at the end Emily-Jane looked a little more as she would have preferred to look when found. She was now not quite so defenseless.

Then Daniel did a strange thing for this age of rationalism. Moved by some unknown chord in his nature, he lifted up his hands to the dripping blackness and offered a numbed, formless prayer. He prayed for himself and for Barney. He prayed blindly, voicelessly, for all mankind and even for Christ himself, who must suffer along with man. Then he rose and left the rocks and walked through the sand. Emily-Jane lay behind him, beyond all good and evil.

He had done the thing he had planned. She was dead, and now Barney must suffer. The boy would suffer. Perhaps, if he ever found out he would come to hate the brother who had eternally sacrificed the peace of his soul to save him from inevitable sorrow and humiliation.

Daniel was mortally weak. The long beach stretched ahead of him. Beneath his feet the sand resisted his fumbling tread. If only June were there to help him on. Then silently out of the darkness, like black wings from the sea, fear came to Daniel. Panic-fear, blind and selfish, the fear of death, the fear of detection, and of the consequences of detection.

Like a wild, hunted thing he stopped and sought to penetrate the night with his terror-stricken eyes. A bloody, trembling hand smeared his lips. His head moved grotesquely from side to side, and slowly, as if reluctantly, he sank lower and lower until he found himself crouching in the sand like some hateful beast.

The body on the rocks whose blood he had splashed, was it following him silently down the beach? Hideous dead eyes that cared not for darkness. Reaching hands that plucked. And laughter! God! The laughter of the revengeful, maddened dead. He rose and lurched forward. But what lay before him? Discovery, capture, and death set by the dock. Not sudden death, but death that sits and waits with you and studies your face with assured but averted eyes. Yet, anything was better than this awful beach and the body on the rocks.

Daniel shambled onward, his red bandage slipping down his arm and trailing from his sleeve.

Would Barney ever know the deaths his brother died for him that night? Dazedly Daniel wondered if his own soul lay behind him, shattered upon the rocks with Emily-Jane.

“Peace, God, peace. For a moment let me forget.”

Daniel staggered and fell. The sand gave rest to his body, but God did not speak.

•   •   •   •   •

From a sound sleep Scott Munson suddenly awoke. He wondered why. What had called him? Looking at his watch, he placed the hour at three-thirty. Pitch-black outside. A silent house. Munson knew that for some good reason he was awake. Then he became aware of the reason. Through the open window a mist was driving in from the sea. His hair and face were wet.

Something else, however, had happened to claim his activity. Within the last few hours some new misfortune had come to the old house. Scott Munson felt this vaguely, as a person awaking suddenly in a dark room sometimes feels the presence of a stranger, unseen but close at hand.

He snapped a cigarette into action and tightened the belt of his smoking jacket. Yet even now, as he stood smoking reflectively before his door, Scott Munson was not sure of the exact nature of the trouble nor what line to take.

“Just smouse round a bit,” he decided, “is the best I can do at present.”

With this somewhat vague line of action in mind he opened the door he had been looking at as if for some helpful suggestion, and stepped out into the dim light of the silent hall.

From the head of the stairs he discovered Sam Stoughten on the point of making the ascent.

“Things are looking up,” was Munson’s thought as he studied Stoughten’s white face.

Sam looked as if he had just been tossed in a blanket by all the fiends in hell. The expression of strain and horror round his eyes particularly interested Munson, who was studying him intently behind a mask of genial surprise. Also, he noted that the longer he maintained that genial mask, the more Sam’s hand trembled on the banister below. So Munson maintained the mask and quietly took note until at last he feared his poor victim would fall in a swoon or else become an idiot, in either of which cases he would lose his usefulness for Munson.

“Well,” he said, as Sam was actually about to collapse, “why don’t you come on up? You look as if you’d seen a ghost.”

It was an unfortunate way to open a conversation with Sam that night.

“Ghost?” croaked Sam, promptly sitting down on the stairs with his back to Munson. “Ghost? I don’t understand. Don’t let’s talk. It’s much too late.”

“Never too late for ghosts,” observed Munson heartily. “Especially for new ghosts.”

He had the satisfaction of seeing Sam’s broad back give a violent lurch. Also, he observed that to the lurching back clung several wet leaves.

“Well, if you don’t want to talk with me about ghosts,” he continued, “why don’t you come upstairs?”

“Haven’t made up my mind,” Sam had the wit to reply. “I’ve been drinking and I’m a little worried about seeing Sue.”

“Sporting of you to admit it,” said Munson. “Where have you been holding your revels?”

“In there,” declared Sam, pointing to the dining-room. “Alone. Heavily. That’s why I’m this way. Goofy.”

“I hate to stand here talking to your back,” observed Munson, “so I think I’ll skip down and talk to your face until you’ve made up your mind.”

“Oh, I’m coming right up,” declared Sam, rising as promptly as he had sat down. “Don’t trouble yourself about me.”

But it was much too late. Munson had literally skipped down and seized Sam by the arm with a friendly but firm grasp.

“Too drunk to talk,” objected Sam, making a pretense of reaching for the stairs with a wavering foot.

“Not sure,” said Munson. “Let me smell your breath.”

Sam drew back as if the very idea revolted him to the marrow.

“I was merely considering your wife,” explained Munson. “Come in, and show me where dwelleth this drink.”

Attempting a crablike mode of progress, Sam allowed himself to be forcibly conducted to the dining-room where Munson gently eased him into a chair.

“Now, Sam,” he said cheerfully, “we’ll both have a slight nip. Where is the stuff?”

Receiving no reply, he searched busily round the room, then returned to the despondent Sam and stood looking reproachfully down at him.

“Why, Sam,” he said, “there isn’t a dram in the place.”

“Drank it all,” replied Sam moodily.

“What did you do with the bottle?”

“Threw it away.”

“Where, Sam?”

Sam was staggered. “Through the window,” he said at last.

“Which window?”

“That one,” replied Sam with a sweep of his arm that included all the windows in the room.

“You lush,” proclaimed Munson admiringly.

“It’s terrible,” admitted Sam.

“And where did all those leaves come from, sticking to your back?” suddenly demanded Munson.

Sam began to think he was really drunk. “Fell into a plant,” he offered.

“What plant, Sam?” Munson’s voice went on. “There isn’t a plant in the room.”

“Threw it away, too,” said Sam with decision.

“That was rather rough,” observed Munson. “Just where did you throw it, Sam?”

Oh, God, would this devil never cease?

“Through the same window,” said Sam in a whisper.

“Sure you didn’t carry it out?” continued Munson.

“Certain,” replied Sam.

“Then why the mud on your shoes? Look at them.”

Sam refused to look. “Mud from the plant,” he announced triumphantly. “I was watering it. Felt sorry for the thing.”

“And then you thoughtfully wiped up all traces of mud from the floor,” said Munson approvingly. “That was nice of you, Sam.”

“The least I could do,” modestly replied Sam.

“Too bad you split your domino while doing it,” observed Munson sympathetically.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Sam. “Sue’ll mend it.”

“Well, I wouldn’t tell her the same pack of lies you’ve told me,” said Munson, his voice losing its easy banter and taking on a keen edge of irony. “I wouldn’t do that, Sam, because it will only make matters worse. Make you look er – guilty, Sam, if you get what I mean. As a matter of fact, it’s none of my damn business … yet. You’d better go to bed, old man, and don’t worry about staggering.”

Sam raised an ashen face to Munson. His eyes were filled with fever. Tragedy lay therein, and looking at him Munson felt a twinge of pity. His heart was heavy, for to some extent, Sam’s lies had confirmed his worst suspicions.

Without attempting an answer, Sam rose slowly and left the room. He climbed the stairs and made his way directly to Daniel’s room. He opened the door and looked in. Daniel’s bed was empty. “Christ!” muttered Sam helplessly. “Oh, Christ, he’s done for!”

He sought his own room and sat down in the dark to wait. His door was slightly open to permit him to see the hall. Sue, the complete sleeper, continued her gentle tribute to one of her favorite occupations. Sam sat and waited.

•   •   •   •   •

Alone in the dining-room, Munson wandered about restlessly. He was deeply disturbed now. Sam’s conduct had sharpened the edge of his fear. As he passed the door to the pantry he stopped and peered through the glass. Suddenly he realized that there was a light in the kitchen. Why the light? More smousing.

Quietly he passed through the pantry, and standing in the dark, looked into the kitchen. No luck this time. It was only June Lansing sitting by the stove. With her usual composure she was sipping a cup of tea. The teapot stood on a near-by table.

Tea was a good idea. Why not some tea?

“May I have a cup, too?” he asked, entering the kitchen noiselessly.

For a moment June looked at him unseeingly as if still caught in the web of her thoughts. Then she shook herself slightly and smiled. “You’re just in time,” she replied. “The tea is in the full flavor of its youth.”

Munson drew up a chair and accepted the proffered cup. “How’s your patient?” he asked.

“Dreamless,” said June. “A perfect patient.”

“A strange happening,” suggested Munson.

“It’s one of those things that is better left untouched,” she replied, looking at him frankly. “Like a hot coal,” she added.

“But don’t you think attempted murder demands some investigation?” he asked.

“I prefer to regard it in the light of an accident,” said June enigmatically. “And accidents don’t count.”

For the first time he noticed that one of her slippers was missing. Interesting. June, following the direction of his gaze, smiled and extended her stockinged foot; at the same time withdrawing the other.

“Corns,” she announced briefly.

Munson smiled in turn. “These modern shoes,” he remarked. “Inventions of the devil.”

“They certainly play the devil with one’s feet,” agreed June.

“June,” said Munson after a meditative silence, “I’m worried. I’ve the strangest feeling something has happened.”

“Something always does,” she replied.

“But not something terrible,” said Munson. “What is it all about?”

For a moment or so she considered him thoughtfully, and Munson felt that he detected an unfamiliar expression in her eyes and a new maturity about her face. She was somehow different. “I’ve noticed it, too, Scott,” she replied at last. “I’ve felt things going on and remarked changes in people, but no one takes me into his confidence. I have my suspicions, and, Scott, I believe they’re the same as yours.”

“Emily-Jane?” said Munson.

June nodded.

“There’s more to that young lady than meets the eye,” observed Munson.

“Not much if you saw her tonight,” said June with a smile.

“Daniel is out of luck about something,” said Munson. “I’d do anything to help him, June.”

“So would I,” the girl replied. “And you know that, Scott.”

“I do,” he said, then added, “Damn that girl.”

“I guess she’s pretty well damned herself already,” said June, “but I doubt if she knows it.”

“That’s what makes me afraid,” said Munson, and the two of them sat regarding each other with thoughtful eyes.

•   •   •   •   •

When Daniel rose from the sand he had driven off his unreasoning, brutish panic. Fear was still with him, had been added to his other emotions, but it was the fear of the intelligent man calculating and weighing the chances of escaping the consequences of a rash and terrible deed.

His arm had not become stiff for the reason that he had given it no opportunity, but it ached and burned so intensely that he felt he was carrying a flame at his side. Stubbornly refusing to think of anything save ways and means of getting back to his room undetected, he plodded on down the beach and, circling the embankment, made his way into the security of the trees. He had decided to return to his room by the same way he had left it, regardless of the damage the exertion might do to his arm. Quietly he moved through the darkness, swaying as he went, like a drunkard trying to escape observation. He little realized that his brain was not functioning with its customary accuracy. It was skipping the essential details.

•   •   •   •   •

Munson, poised at the head of the stairs, drew back quickly. Someone was coming out of Emily-Jane’s room, and the person was not Emily-Jane. The watching man waited with indrawn breath as the door slowly opened. Lane Holt, after a quick look along the hall, slid through the partly opened door which he quickly locked behind him. Carrying the key in his hand he tiptoed to his room.

“If the door had been locked from the inside after his guilty exit, I could see some sense in the business,” thought Scott Munson. “As it is, I am greatly perplexed – deeply interested.”

From the darkness of his doorway Sam Stoughten was watching Munson. When he saw him approach Daniel’s room, his heart sank and his brain began to work at top speed. Anything to help Dan. He slipped from his room and locked himself in the near-by bathroom, where he waited. It was merely a chance, a futile attempt, perhaps, but it might give Daniel time or an alibi.

Munson looked into Daniel’s room and found the bed empty. Odd. How could that be? Perhaps the effects of the drug had worn off. Perhaps – He closed the door and walked down the hall to the bathroom. The door was locked.

“Dan,” he called in a low voice.

“Yes, Scott,” came Daniel’s voice.

“What the devil are you doing out of bed?”

“Don’t ask foolish questions,” came the reply.

“How do you feel … how’s the arm?”

“Both doing well, thank you. Want to come in and have a nice little chat?”

“No,” said Munson, slightly nettled. “But you’d better get back to bed as quickly as possible.”

“I never linger, Scott,” came the voice. “Good night, old man.”

Munson continued on to his room, where he sat down to consider things. He went over the scanty gleanings of the night, but some disturbing thought kept cutting across his reflections. Why, damn it all, he had it. Their voices sounded alike, remarkably so. And the similarity could be made almost perfect if deliberately attempted. What a fool he had been. Well, he deserved it. Only a short time ago he had rather shamefully made a fool of Sam. He had even decided from Sam’s futile attempts to lie that he really was a bit of a fool. Evidently not.

Munson rose swiftly and returned to the bathroom. It was unoccupied. Sam had returned to his own room after having waited a little more than a reasonable length of time. He did not know whether or not his effort had been of help to Daniel, but he hoped for the best.

When Munson opened Daniel’s door he experienced an odd conflict of emotions. He was both disgusted and relieved to find him back in bed. But as his eyes strayed to the open window, the feeling of relief vanished.

On the white woodwork of the sill was the mark of a bloody hand – four dark red fingers and the lower part of the palm. The missing section failed to show on the darker wood of the sill proper.

Sam had done his best, but his best had not been good enough.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Body on the Rocks

Through the slanting rays of a new sun that promised great things if given time, Pete Clark, occasional fisherman and confirmed seeker of solitude and rest, gently nosed his odorous old boat against the small beach just under High Point Rock. Pete had no reason in particular for this enterprising landing. As a matter of fact, Pete never had any reason for doing any of the things he did. Therefore he was a happy man. Realizing that his boat had found its way to a rather pleasant haven, Pete considered the advisability of entrusting his valuable person to the shore. It seemed the logical thing to do, and Pete did it, but not because it was logical.

In the course of his purposeless amblings, his speculative eye dwelt on a small bright object lying near by in the sand. Inasmuch as this object was actually near by, to be exact, no farther from Pete than three paces, this excellent navigator decided to pick it up. This he did, and after examining it with purely esthetic enjoyment slipped it into a trustworthy pocket, wondering as he did so just what the hell it was. As to wonder was to worry, that is for Pete, he gave it up and continued his snaillike tour of inspection.

Suddenly, that is if the arresting of so slow a progress could be called sudden, Pete stopped. His long arms froze to the seams of his trousers, and his eyes became glued to the mass of shelving, broken rocks. Altogether Pete was a most unpicturesque object. But Pete had one saving feature, developed from long gazings on distant horizons. Pete had good eyes, keen though disarmingly vague and mild. He was now using those eyes as he had never used them in all the years of their looking.

What he saw was the body of a girl, most improperly clad, lying on the rocks. And Pete’s eyesight told him that the body would never move again of its own volition. But Pete moved. He moved by slow stages as if fascinated, until at last he found himself standing over the body of the dead girl.

And so it was Pete Clark, of humble calling and few demands, who first found all that remained of the beautiful and highly admired Emily-Jane.

Just what was the nature of the thoughts that passed through the mind of Pete on that bright, fair morning, as he stood with the lonely sea as a background and contemplated the broken body of the beautiful girl, is not recorded, but awe was written on his seamed and sun-dyed face. Some minutes passed before the practical side of Pete’s nature asserted itself. Then it was that he began dimly to realize the fact that he knew this girl, for Pete was by way of being a local character, well received in the highest as well as the more modest kitchens. This girl was none other than Miss Emily-Jane Seabrook, Mr. Barney’s young lady.

Once this fact had become firmly fixed in the bemused brain of Pete Clark, his movements thereafter were merely automatic. With meticulous solicitude he beached his pride and joy, and after eying the results of his efforts with approval, departed down the beach at a pace which for Mr. Peter Clark was a trifle above terrific.

Thus it came about that at six o’clock Pete presented himself for the first time at the front door of the Crewe Mansion and commanded the infuriated maid to summon Mr. Barney with the utmost expedition. He intimated darkly that all was far from well. Dubiously and ungraciously the maid departed, and in a surprisingly short time for Barney he appeared on the scene and hurried to the door where Pete was unhappily lurking.

“Come in, Pete,” called Barney. “What’s all this about bad news? Anything wrong at home? How about a drink?”

As Pete stood listening to Barney and remembering him as a tumbling cub, his heart grew heavier and heavier and his tongue seemed turned to stone. Casual-minded as he was, Pete instinctively sensed the tragic irony of the situation. Young Barney offering him the sympathy that he himself soon would be needing.

“Mr. Barney,” he began, and halted.

“Yes, Pete, what is it?” asked Barney, reading the trouble in his old friend’s face. “Is it as bad as all that?”

“ ’Fraid it is, Mr. Barney,” said Pete. “It’s worse. Your young lady, sir, is lying at the base of High Point Rock and—”

Barney just looked at him with a question, a plea in his eyes. Just looked at him and waited.

“Yes,” said Pete. “Yes, Mr. Barney, she is.”

Barney stiffened as if a current of electricity had been suddenly shot through his body. Then slowly he began to sway. Pete was able to stand it no longer. He took young Barney in his arms.

“Boy, boy,” he muttered, “come over here and sit down. We’ll get Mr. Dan for you. He’ll take care of you now.”

“Yes, Pete, get Dan,” said Barney, forgetting his brother’s wound. “I think I’d like to have Dan.”

•   •   •   •   •

There it was! The knock! The fateful sound for which he had been waiting throughout all the years of his life, it seemed … waiting and preparing. During the early hours of the morning he had risen and cut away as much as he could of the red, frayed bandage. With his right hand he had encased his arm in a clean towel, pinned it somehow, and let it go at that. Now he was ready for the summons.

The knocking continued with increasing urgency. Weakly he rolled from his bed and went to the door.

“Yes,” he called. “What is it?”

“Oh, Mr. Dan,” came the voice of Dora, one of the maids, “Mr. Barney wants you bad. An awful thing has happened. He’s downstairs.”

“Tell him I’ll be with him.” Daniel’s voice was choked.

Barney wanted him. God Almighty, what irony! Barney wanted him. And he must face Barney with the accusing truth in his heart. He had brought this sorrow to his own brother by slaying the thing he loved. Thank God, the sincerity of his sympathy for Barney would help to carry him through the ordeal.

Daniel was an ill man, weak from fatigue and the loss of blood. The terrible strain of all that he had gone through already had ravaged his face. Devitalizing fever was burning in his veins. He realized that his arm was now in a dangerous condition. In spite of all this, some reserve of power, some force of pride lay within him and gave him strength – the strength that kills its possessor. But far above all other factors was his affection for his brother. The knowledge that Barney needed him at this moment urged him on.

He struggled into his dressing-gown. With one hand on the edge of the bureau he steadied himself and threw back his shoulders, his head well up, then like a man about to take a perilous plunge he made for the door. It was surprisingly opened for him by Scott Munson, fully clad and alert. For a brief moment their eyes met and Daniel’s threw back a challenge. Then Munson’s gaze shifted to the blood marks on the white surface of the window ledge. Daniel, following his gaze, received a shock so numbing that it left him outwardly frozen. Its effect was not apparent. He merely grinned back at Munson.

“No time for hound work, Scott,” he said. “Barney needs me.”

Munson bowed. He had asked for the slur and got it. “Sure you can stand it, Dan?” he asked.

“I have to stand it, Scott.”

“All right. Come on.”

Together they walked down the hall and descended the stairs, Daniel displaying no sign of weakness. Barney was sitting on a long bench in the hall, and Pete Clark, silently protective, was standing by. At the sound of his brother’s familiar tread, Barney raised his face, and slowly his chin and lips began to quiver until at last a gasp broke from him. He gripped the bench with both hands and dropped his head. Why was he such a baby? Daniel would know he wasn’t a baby and would tell the others so. It was all right now. Daniel had come. Daniel’s arms were about him and he hid his face in his brother’s robe.

“Go ahead, kid,” Dan was saying. “Go ahead, Barney. Do as you damn well please. Look, boy, look at me. See, I’m crying, too.”

And, in truth, Daniel was crying. Tears were running down his haggard cheeks, although he made no sound. Daniel was crying inwardly for the grief of his brother. Barney looked up at Daniel as if for confirmation. With a slender finger he touched one of the tears on his brother’s face.

“Don’t, Dan,” he whispered. “Don’t feel so sad.” He hesitated, then added in a voice of incredulity, “She’s gone, Dan, she’s … oh, Dan, she’s dead.” Then Barney broke, and the terrible sobs of a man wrenched themselves from his breast.

“That’s the boy, Barney,” Daniel murmured, holding his shaking brother and swaying gently. “Just like long ago, Barney, when things went wrong. But they always came right, didn’t they? And they’ll come right now.”

They were alone, each with a racked heart, and the years fell away. Once more they were boys together, sharing each other’s woes. But this time it was the elder brother who needed the greater comforting. And just as in those other days, a sea breeze passed down the hall and found its way to the old, drifting orchard.

“Don’t you mind, Barney. Don’t you mind.”

•   •   •   •   •

Munson slapped the telephone back on its fork and sat back in his chair, regarding the squat instrument gloomily.

“God damn everything,” he said quite slowly and distinctly, “including myself.”

His arrangements had been made. The district attorney, summoned from his bed at that early hour, had agreed to put him in complete charge of the case. The district attorney at that early hour would have agreed to anything – anything at all if he were only allowed speedily to return to bed.

“Play no favorites, Scott,” he had said, “and call on the local authorities.”

And when Munson had told him where to go, the district attorney had yawned. Two more telephone conversations had set the machinery in motion.

This was the first case in his career that Munson had approached with dread. He had insisted on taking it because he knew that things would be even worse if outsiders were let loose in that old, friendly house. Yet he roundly damned everything, including himself. His hands came down with a snap on the mahogany arms of his chair. He rose briskly and went to the open window of the library.

“Pete Clark,” he called.

Pete sped down the veranda at the rate of at least twelve miles an hour.

“Did you find the gardener, Griggs?”

“I did, sir, and I sent him to stand by the body.”

“Thank you, Pete. Do you mind standing by here for a short time?”

“Well, sir, if I could sit—”

“Certainly, Pete. Sit, collapse, or contort, but just stick around.”

“Thank you, Mr. Munson.”

“I thank you.”

Munson left the library and stood waiting in the hall. He had invited the household, exclusive of the servants, to confer with him immediately in the library. He now watched its various members descend the stairs and enter that pleasant room. There was a method in what he did. It interested him to note the manner in which each person looked at him as he or she passed by.

Sam Stoughten’s expression had been that of a rather anxious shamefaced boy whose sins had only partially found him out. His wife’s had been merely that of a very much worried wife who wished everything would settle down again so that she could deal properly with her fool of a husband. Lane Holt’s had been that of a man who hides his fear behind a swagger. Aunt Matty’s had been merely one businesslike question-mark – “What’s happened to our house, Scott?” June Lansing’s had been thoughtful and searching. Daniel’s expression had been that of a man so weary he no longer cared much. In Barney’s eyes Scott read the greatest trouble. Grief had left them a trifle wild and a trifle brooding. They were not the eyes of a sane man. He had been the only one who had looked at Munson and not seen him. Barney was turning in, trying to puzzle something out, to catch a lost impression or to map out some little plan of his own.

“You don’t have to go through all this, Barney,” Munson had told him, placing a kindly but restraining hand on his shoulder.

“But I must go in,” Barney had replied, and moved on with lowered head. “I might help you, Scott,” he had tossed back.

Munson entered the library and confronted the little group.

“I’m nervous,” he said, “and worried. I guess we all are. I won’t keep you long here because we have a harder task ahead. Here, then, is the situation.” He addressed himself to Daniel. “You can have me handle the case, for I have full authority already, or you can entrust yourselves to the usual agents of the law – the law which at present I represent. It is for you to decide whether you prefer me among you or some other equally distasteful person or persons. If—”

“Stay here and do your worst, Scott,” interrupted Daniel. “You can’t help it. In a way you’re doing us all a kindness, even if it hurts.”

“Thanks, Dan,” replied Munson. “You always were a sport.”

“See here!” Holt was on his feet, mouthing aggressively. “What’s all this about, anyway? You don’t know that a crime has been committed. What right have you to assume so? It’s the most irregular way of carrying on I’ve ever encountered.”

“A crime has been committed.” Barney’s voice came startlingly from a corner.

“Holt, in some respects, is justified in what he says,” continued Munson calmly. “My methods are somewhat unofficial, but they have a few saving virtues. They are quiet. They are intelligent. They are absolutely uninfluenced by self-interest or any desire to win official recognition. And that means a lot. As to the question of a crime having been committed, I think that most of us present will agree with me when I say a crime has been committed and that that crime is murder. Anyway I am already in possession of certain information conclusive enough to convince me. And by the way, Holt” – Munson stepped across the room and stood over the lounging figure – “may I ask for that key?”

Holt’s face grew white. He sprang to his feet. “You damned spy!” he cried.

Munson smiled pleasantly. “Please don’t keep us waiting,” he said. “We have other things to do.”

There was the sound of an automobile stopping at the front entrance. Munson, looking through the window saw several local constables alighting from a disreputable machine. Lane Holt, turning round, also saw them.

“Would you like to be searched?” asked Munson. “You see the law is already in operation.” Munson’s manner suddenly changed. He leaned forward and held the man with his eyes, eyes stinging with fury. “Hurry up,” he said in a low voice. “I want that key.”

Holt reeled back as if struck by a snake. His expression registered both fear and surprise. Was the man confronting him Scott Munson? God, no. He was a demon – hate in the body of man.

“I’m waiting. I’m waiting,” thrilled Munson’s voice.

Holt’s fingers fumbled in his watch pocket and withdrew a key which he extended to Munson with a shrinking hand as if in mortal fear of coming in contact with him. When Munson accepted the key it seemed as if every person in the room breathed easier.

“And did you get what you were after?” he inquired sarcastically.

“No,” came hoarsely from Holt.

“If you had,” went on Munson in an even, venomous voice, “I’d have got that too. Now, listen, Holt. Even before this investigation has got well under way you’ve made yourself liable to arrest for attempted theft. Sit down now and think that over. You called me a spy. Of course I’m a spy. At present that’s my one occupation, and I hate it. But it doesn’t take much of a spy to find out what you’ve been doing ever since you accepted the hospitality of Daniel and Barney Crewe.”

Munson paused and turned to face the others in the room. His eyes seemed to hold everybody in a spell like some bad dream.

“I’m a spy,” he announced. “Anyone who ever finds out anything is, in one sense or another, a spy – has to be a spy. That’s one reason why I asked all of you here. To me you are all suspects, and as suspects you naturally come under my espionage. I will play no favorites, nor will I shirk the most unpleasant duty. I ask you not to regard me as your friend any longer, but merely as a man out to get the truth, to exonerate the innocent and to confront the guilty. Quite a speech, isn’t it?” He paused, then hastened on: “Quite a speech, yes, but the situation must be made clear. It must be understood. If the guilty person can beat me, I for one won’t blame him. Let him do it. I’d escape the consequences of a murder myself if I could. So, I say, go to it and escape if and when you can. I’m here to do a mean job that does not appeal at all to me, but I’m going to do it, and I’m going to show no mercy. And to be entirely frank with you all, the only persons in this room who have nothing to hide are Aunt Matty and young Barney over there. You are all against me and I’m against you all. But just the same that fact does not prevent me from liking you all and from wishing that things were different.” He paused and turned to Holt. “Sit down!” he snapped. “I’ll talk to you later.”

Then he walked to his former position and half sat on a long table laden with books, magazines, papers, lamps, and ash trays – an untidy, comfortable table. Everyone present was amazed at the sudden urbanity of the man. He favored them all with a bland smile.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I made a mistake when I told you I liked you all. Personally, I never could bear the sight of Lane Holt, but just because of my feelings about him he will receive, if anything, more careful treatment than anyone else.”

He walked over to a window and looked out as if expecting something. Then he once more returned to his former place and looked thoughtfully at each one of the group in turn.

“There is a murderer present,” he said quietly, and the effect of that simple statement was horrible, almost beyond endurance. “A murderer,” he repeated as if to himself, “and he may be my friend. Funny. And even if I catch him I shall always regard him as my friend.”

Abruptly he ceased speaking and, turning his back on his listeners, idly sorted the magazines on the table. For a full minute the room was submerged in a brooding silence. Barney, who had been growing gradually more excited throughout the course of Munson’s talk, now began to tremble slightly. Daniel, watching him with solicitous eyes, was about to go to him when he was arrested by the sound of Holt’s voice.

“What right have you to say that a murderer is present?” he demanded. “What proof?”

Without troubling to turn, Munson answered: “That’s my business, Holt.”

“No, it isn’t, Scott,” came the excited voice of Barney, at the sound of which both Daniel and Munson started forward. “No, it isn’t. It’s my business. I know the murderer now. I’ve just figured it out. He always hated her … he didn’t want me to marry her … didn’t want me to marry Emily-Jane! There he is! Look at him! There is the murderer.”

Barney’s voice broke in hysteria and he pointed wildly at Daniel, who stood still with his hands hanging helplessly beside him. On his face there was an expression of profound sorrow as he said in a low, pleading voice, “Barney, kid. Oh, Barney, Barney, Barney.”

And Barney laughed crazily, his trembling arm still extended toward Daniel.

“I tell you my own brother murdered Emily-Jane,” he cried in a loud voice. “Look at him. Look at him. Doesn’t he look like a murderer? He killed her as sure as God.”

And Daniel still stood there like a man crucified, his tired, tragic eyes striving to reach the heart of his brother. It was not what Barney said that mattered, but that his brother for whom he had gone through several cycles of hell with many more to come should have turned on him at this moment – that was the final affliction.

“Barney, old man, Barney,” his voice called to his brother. “Come here, kid. Forget it. Don’t be like that.”

No one will ever know whether or not Barney was answering that call when he took two steps forward, then crumpled to the floor.

In an instant Daniel had gathered him up in his arms and carried him to a sofa. The pain caused by this action caused him to stagger back against Scott Munson.

“Get a doctor, Scott,” he said.

“He’s already here,” replied Munson. “See, he’s taking care of Barney. It was only a nervous outburst, Daniel. Don’t mind that. He knows you’re his best friend.”

He led Daniel to the pantry and made him sit down. Then he handed him a drink. Leaving him for a moment, he returned with Manning.

“My God, Dan,” said the doctor, “you shouldn’t have lifted your brother like that. Here, let me look at that arm.”

Then, carrying on a rapid-fire conversation, he dressed and bandaged Daniel’s arm, after which he took a drink himself and gave one to his patient.

Daniel, feeling his strength returning, followed Manning back to the library where Munson still held the group together. Barney, revived, had gone to his room under the care of Aunt Matty.

“Does he still believe?” Daniel asked as Scott Munson joined them.

“He’s not right yet,” said Munson, “but you mustn’t mind him. All sensitive, high-strung temperaments are like that when overwrought.”

“Then you’re not going to arrest me?” asked Daniel, with a broken grin.

“Not on that kind of evidence, Dan,” replied Munson. “Barney’s ravings are not relevant.” He looked Daniel squarely in the face and said: “We are all going to the rocks now. Are you strong enough to come? I had to talk myself hoarse this morning, waiting for that damn fool Manning. Of course we could have moved her before, but I’ve blocked off the entire point from cliff top to the beach. It’s essential that I should see things for myself. Would you like to see her?”

It was a challenge that Daniel feared not to accept.

Back down to the beach again. Daniel recalled all the terrors of only a few short hours ago. This time he was accompanied by nearly all of the actors in the drama. Thank God, Barney was not among them. Daniel could never have stood that. Those stretcher-bearers, two stalwart fishermen, they were to bring Emily-Jane home. And he must look at her in full daylight under the watchful eye of Munson. Was that why they all were there? Munson, the torturer, always got his way. Well, he, Daniel, would fool him this time. He had used up all his emotions of any kind. He was as dead as Emily-Jane so far as caring was concerned.

He was walking with Manning now, and the doctor was helping him along. “Munson’s a brute,” said Manning. “You should never have done this.”

Daniel began to laugh. “Done what, doctor?” he demanded.

He knew the doctor was looking at him curiously, and he pulled himself together.

They had reached the rocks now. Munson was carefully shepherding them. Something to do with footprints, perhaps, or perhaps not. Somehow, June was on his other side. She was holding tight to his hand. Raise your head. Look. Don’t laugh. For God’s sake, don’t laugh. “I did that.” Should he shout it?

Yes, there was Emily-Jane. A little figure on a large rock. He knew what she looked like. He had made her so for this public exhibition. Hold tight, June.

“Jesus,” muttered Manning behind them, “doesn’t she look lonely?”

CHAPTER NINE

From Beach to Cliff

Once more Emily-Jane was the center of all eyes. It almost seemed a pity that she couldn’t have arisen in her ballet dress and performed one of her innocently suggestive little dances. Instead she lay there cold, picked out by an early sun as golden as her hair. As in life so in death, eyes looked at her fascinated, but this time there was a different quality in her spell.

Munson mounted the rock. For some minutes he stood looking down at the girl. Dark, lithe, and inscrutable he was. The sun splashed against his straight black hair. He stood motionless, his intense gaze photographing every detail of the body and its immediate surroundings. Then, throwing back his head, he let his eyes travel slowly up the face of the cliff until they rested on the summit. There they remained fixed. He would have to go up there to the actual point of the departure of Emily-Jane from the world she had so successfully deceived. Once more he looked down at the dead girl as if trying to discover the reason for her existence.

“All right, Manning,” he said, in a low voice that carried its calm tones clearly to the silent group of watchers.

Dr. Manning left Daniel’s side and joined Munson on the rock.

“Manning,” Munson said, “I waited for you so that you could give evidence at the inquest. I can rely on your discretion when you are discreet, and I might as well tell you now that I want the inquest to be a mere formality – wilful murder with an open field. You understand?” He raised his dark eyes to those of the doctor.

“What a body, Munson,” murmured Manning. “What a figure. Too bad. Too damn bad. Wasted. Lost. I understand.”

The whole-hearted depravity of the man pleased Munson, who smiled grimly and said, “For the moment, Manning, I want your purely professional observations.”

“You have them, Munson. What is it?”

“The position of that figure and certain other details,” Munson continued, “tell me an interesting story. What do they tell you, Manning?”

For some time Manning’s eyes roved over the body, then he looked up at Munson with puzzled eyes.

“In the first place, Munson,” he said, “there’s the position of the body itself. Graceful as she was in life, she just couldn’t have fallen so gracefully. Impossible. She would have been all sprawled out or twisted. Somebody has fixed her. Decent of whoever it was. Then another thing, those blood smears on her face, they upset me. By rights they shouldn’t be there. The face, fortunately, is uninjured. There is no reason – no way that I can see, for blood being there at all. My conclusion is that someone put those marks on her face … in the dark. Probably it isn’t her blood, but that of some wounded—” He gave a slight start and ended up with, “That’s the way I see it.”

“Thanks,” said Munson. “Damned good. And that’s the story I want you to tell at the inquest with the exception, with the very essential exception, of the wounded part. Now just one minute and we’ll get this over. I want to let these people go back home to breakfast, if they can eat any.”

Once more his eyes traveled over the little group at the foot of the rock.

“Pete,” he called in a casual voice, “will you come up here for a moment?”

For the second time that morning Pete ascended the rock, on this occasion with the dignity and deliberation of a semi-official consultant.

“Now, Pete,” said Munson, with an indulgent smile, “you arrived at the Crewe house at six o’clock.”

“Did I?” said Pete, quite pleased and surprised.

“Yes, Pete, you did,” Munson assured him. “About how long were you on this beach altogether?”

“About an hour by the sun,” replied Pete. “What I mean is, one hour from the time I landed until I called on Mr. Barney.”

“So that puts you here just at about five o’clock,” observed Munson. “Was the body when you found it exactly as it is now?”

“Exactly,” replied Pete emphatically. “Just as she lays there now.”

“Not likely that anyone else would be wandering round here before five, do you think, Manning?” asked Munson.

“Most unlikely, I should say,” he replied.

“That’s all,” said Munson briskly. “The inquest will be held at ten o’clock tomorrow.”

As Pete was on his way down, Munson called him back.

“Did you see anything else down here,” he asked, “that might be helpful in clearing up this case? Any marks or objects – anything?”

And Pete honestly declared that he had not seen a thing, for he had completely forgotten the bright little object now resting in his pocket.

Alone on the rock, Munson knelt down and examined the girl’s dress. Suddenly he rose and called to June Lansing. Reluctantly she left Daniel’s side and mounted the rock.

“June,” said Munson, still preoccupied, “would you very much mind reaching your hand down in there and see what it is? I don’t like to do it myself for some reason.”

“You’re a terrible man, Scott,” replied June, “and I mean it, but you can’t help some of your finer instincts, can you?”

When she looked into his eyes she read there a deep, abiding sadness, and there was sadness in his voice, too, when he said: “June, you must believe me. This is the rottenest, the most heartbreaking task I’ve ever undertaken. But, June, I’ve got to go through with it to the end, and I must do it my way.”

Without another word, June did as she was bidden. The hand she withdrew held a packet of letters. She exchanged glances with Munson, and for the first time June’s eyes wavered. Silently and with a heavy heart she left the rock. When Munson rose and read with deep concentration one of the letters from the packet, Sam could not repress a gasp.

“What is it?” asked Sue, startled.

“Oh, nothing,” replied Sam, when all the time he felt like ducking and setting off hell-bent down the beach. “Nothing at all except that this place is getting on my nerves.”

He braced himself to receive the admonitory look that Munson was sure to bestow on him upon his completion of the beastly letter. Fortunately for the state of Sam’s morale, no such look was forthcoming. Instead, Munson looked up thoughtfully, then slipped the letter back into the packet. There was a new expression in his eyes when he glanced down at the still figure at his feet.

“Holt,” he called sharply.

As Holt approached the rock it became apparent to everyone present that he was in an abject state of funk. His swagger and self-esteem were gone, and with their departure the man became a lamentably deflated creature. His feet seemed to scrape along the rocks and his eyes strained away from the body of Emily-Jane.

Munson watched him silently.

“Go on and look at her,” he said harshly. “You weren’t so modest when she was alive.”

Lane Holt for a swift flash bared his teeth, then he looked uneasily away, his fingers nervously plucking at the flaps of his coat pockets. Munson seemed to be in no hurry. He was carefully, almost hopefully, examining the blood smears on the waxen face turned to the sky.

“What the hell do you want with me here?” Holt asked at last in a husky voice.

“Oh, yes,” replied Munson. “Thanks for reminding me. Were these, by any chance, what you were looking for in Emily-Jane’s room?”

He held out the packet of letters. Holt started visibly. Involuntarily his hand went out as if to seize the packet.

“Oh, no, no,” he replied. “I was looking for nothing – just to see if she was in, that’s all.”

“No thought of a little blackmail, Holt?” asked Munson. “Sort of a complete life of crime? No?”

“I didn’t do it, Munson. I didn’t, you know. I – I was fond of Emily-Jane. I really was.”

“That admission makes it all the more probable in view of the fact that she was soon to marry another man. Don’t try to convict yourself, Holt. You don’t have to.”

“May I go now?” Holt’s face was ghastly, his words trembled. He could feel Munson’s eyes burning into him. There was no escape. No hope of escape.

“Yes, go!” The words fell like a lash.

Munson turned back to his inspection of the blood smears.

“Dan,” he called in an absorbed voice, “do you think you could make the grade, old man?”

“Damn him and his old mans,” muttered Sam. “He’s trying to hang the lot of us. Why, old Dan can hardly stand on his feet. He’s been through enough for one day.”

But Daniel was moving forward, moving slowly and carefully, but well under way. There was no suggestion of hesitancy about his approach, no indication of guilt or dread. At the base of the rock, Pete Clark, who had remained to see whatever was to be seen, offered to lend a helping hand.

“Thanks, Pete,” said Dan. “I think I can still navigate.”

He climbed the rock he had played on so often as a boy, and stood gazing down at Emily-Jane. Not many hours ago she had been dancing and trysting. Enjoying both. It seemed such a great way off. Just a few hours. Most of the guests at the affair were still sleeping. Time had not even begun for them. How could she be so utterly dead, so completely remote from life? Why, she did not even know that life ever had been, that there was a world with golf links in it, country clubs, and dances. She was not even aware of the rock she was lying on. She was through, gone. And really it was a good thing, although even in death she still retained the power to wound and to destroy. What a fool he had been to hope otherwise. Munson had been repeating his name for some time. Why in hell couldn’t he keep quiet? Daniel wanted to think.

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently. “What’s on your mind, Scott?” His gaze was polite but abstracted. Scott was a good chap. A hard worker. At present, an awful pest.

“What do you make of these, Dan?” asked the awful pest, pointing to the blood smears on the face of Emily-Jane. “I asked Doc Manning, but I’d like to get your opinion.”

Daniel’s thoughts snapped back to the immediate present. “Are we conversing as equals, Scott?” he asked.

“As always, Dan,” replied Munson, a little puzzled.

“That being the case,” said Dan, with a smile, “my opinion is that you’re an extremely apparent hypocrite and that you don’t want my opinion at all. Scott, old dear, you’re just plain plain, if you get what I mean. Now let’s get down to cases. What do you really want? Do you want me to find the murderer of this girl here? Are you seeking my collaboration? If so, give me your confidences also. As you know, I’m a pretty sick dog at present. You can’t bank on my reactions, you know, because I’m not quite myself at the moment. Out with it, Scott. Don’t be a humbug.”

“Daniel,” said Munson, “you’re too much for me. As far as I’m concerned, your rather painful trip down here has been entirely wasted. I see now that I’ll have to work on you a different way. You know me too well. I’m at a disadvantage because of that, but time will tell. Good luck. I hope you win.”

“Same to you,” said Daniel. “I hope you choke.”

“Thanks,” replied Munson with a real smile. “Can I help you down?”

“No, thanks,” said Daniel. “I think I can make it, but why don’t you cover her up, Scott? She’s licked.”

“But don’t forget, Dan, she still possesses the power of death.”

Daniel turned and faced him squarely. “You mean you possess the power of death,” he retorted. “She’s ended.”

Thus, at the moment of triumph, Daniel made the mistake of emphasizing with obvious satisfaction the impotency of Emily-Jane. Munson was not the man to overlook such little slips. He dropped the sheet over the body and followed Daniel from the rock.

“We’ve stood about enough punishment for one morning,” he said to the little group. “You’d better get back now and try to eat something. When we bring home Emily-Jane, I hope you’ll keep young Barney out of the way. Don’t mind the presence of some minions of the law if you happen to see them. I’ve had to have a few photographs taken, but I’ve instructed the men to leave the members of the household entirely alone. Let’s try to carry on as usual. I’ll join you as soon as I can, if that prospect brings you any pleasure. I hope, Dan, young Barney has come to his senses, but don’t be surprised if he develops a fixed idea. It will have to wear itself out. It’s tough, but the kid’s had a shock.” He paused and looked down the beach. “At last,” he exclaimed, “here comes our honored coroner. I bet he’s had his breakfast.”

Munson was back on the rock when they last saw him. With the assistance of a short stout officer he was carefully painting the outline of Emily-Jane upon the rock.

•   •   •   •   •

Having settled his business with the coroner and that dignitary having departed, Munson turned to the two local officers who had come to relieve Griggs, the gardener.

One of these officers was a red man. That was the impression he gave. Red of face and hair and hand. He was short and rather stout. The other was a crushed individual. No stomach. A sad, broken sort of face, and great lengths of arms and legs – yards of them.

“Well,” thought Munson, considering the pair, “this is a well-balanced team they’ve given me.”

“What’s your name?” he asked the little red officer.

“Shay, sir,” came the piping reply.

“And yours?” Scott turned to the other, whose sad eyes were fixed dreamily on the sea.

“Shay, sir,” this one found the heart to say.

“I’m not asking to be introduced to my friend here,” said Munson. “I already know his name.”

The crushed officer looked even more sorrowful. “My name is Shay,” he replied, as if trying to convince himself of that fact.

“Oh,” suggested Scott hopefully. “Brothers, I take it.”

“We hardly know each other,” protested the crushed one. “He’s just joined. Been an officer somewhere else.”

In the face of this new complication, Munson came near to washing his hands of the case, but he rallied gamely. “What do they call you at home?” he asked the red officer.

“Tim, sir,” came the prompt reply.

The crushed man seemed to be having a terrible time with himself. He gave the impression of one preparing for a long, swift flight. When Munson turned to him he spoke quickly.

“Don’t ask it, Mr. Munson,” he said. “It is. It always was.”

They were now standing in a space where no one had been allowed to tread. The two fishermen were preparing to carry the body back to the house. Munson sat down on a rock and moodily considered the situation. Suddenly his eyes took on a new interest. About two feet away, in a patch of smooth hard sand, was an odd impression – a cluster of small pointed indentations, the whole being a little larger than a fifty cent piece.

Forgetting for a moment the stupendous problem of the two Tim Shays, he took out a notebook and made a careful sketch of the design. While doing so he noticed the mark of a man’s foot near by. This he carefully measured for length and breadth. Then he put away his notebook and turned to face the situation.

“Well,” he said, “I’m not blaming you fellows about the matter of names, but it does seem unfortunate. Any suggestions?”

“I’ve also been known as Shad,” offered the crushed man.

“And they used to call me Red,” contributed the other. “Red Shay,” he added, with evident satisfaction.

Munson beamed upon them.

“Well,” he said, “you can see for yourself how simple it is. It’s all settled. Now, boys, we’ll have to get up the face of that cliff somehow or other.”

His aids looked aghast. The man must be mad. If he started in like this, what would it be at the finish? Had the truth been vouchsafed them, they would have resigned en masse from the force.

Munson was back on the rock, superintending the removal of Emily-Jane, taking an active part in it.

“Careful, men,” he told the huskies. “She’s badly broken. Handle her gently.”

And the great men, with hard, rough hands, handled the body of Emily-Jane with all the delicacy of a woman. Munson stood looking after them as they plodded through the sand, bringing Emily-Jane home. Then he rejoined his waiting staff.

“All set,” he said briskly, and led the way to the path that twisted up the side of High Point Rock. At the foot of the path the staff halted smartly.

“They say I suffer from giddiness,” confided Red to Munson.

“Well, here’s your chance to show them they’re all wrong,” replied Munson.

“Mr. Munson,” quoth Shad, “I’m a good man on a flat. None better, but going up, no – not so good.”

Munson suddenly turned on them with what they later decided was nothing less than the fires of hell in his eyes.

“Do you see this path?” he asked them in a low voice, “Do you see how steep it is – how high?”

They readily agreed that they saw all that and more.

“Well, if this path were ten miles long,” continued Scott, “and twice as high, I’d make you sprint up it. Come on.”

As they fell in behind him, Red confided to Shad in a whisper, “There’ll be two deaths instead of one.”

“Three,” muttered Shad. “And he’ll be the murderer.”

As Munson made his way up the twisting pathway, he halted from time to time to chalk a circle round certain dark stains that occasionally appeared on the large rocks beside the way. He noted that the rocks bearing these stains were always those that would prove helpful in serving as brakes or braces for anyone descending the path. He took no pride in his discoveries. In fact they rather depressed him. Those blood smears on the face of Emily-Jane and a few dark spots on the rock had led him to expect the existence of these on the path. Once he stopped and picked from between two rocks, companionably leaning against each other, a torn piece of blood-stained lint, obviously a part of a bandage – Daniel’s bandage. The train was only too clear, yet it did not prove that Daniel had murdered Emily-Jane. Contributory evidence only. He might have been on the spot. He might have gone down the cliff after the commission of the act, and arranged her body. He might have seen the person who did kill her, but so far, Munson suddenly realized, he possessed no conclusive evidence. Daniel had the motive, and it could be proved he was at the scene of the murder, but was that quite enough? With some juries it would be if the case were properly presented. And then Munson remembered with a sinking heart their conversation at the golf club just before Daniel had driven off – that could be used to advantage by a skilful prosecutor, but still it was not complete. Even now Daniel might be safe if only nothing new were found against him.

Munson, poised in the path, with the piece of red lint in his hand, sweated not so much from the exertion of the climb as from the temptation to pervert the truth, to juggle the facts. Not for any friend in the world would he convict an innocent person, offer up a sacrifice. And this was only too easily possible. It could be done. On the night, or rather morning, of Emily-Jane’s death there was more than one person astir, and probably lurking round High Point Rock. He wiped his forehead and, after slipping the lint into an envelope, continued on his way.

Clawing up the path behind him, came the two exhausted Shays. When they spied the chalk marks on the rocks they became exceedingly perplexed.

“Looks to me like he’s playing games,” observed Red, quite seriously.

“He’s just mad enough to,” returned Shad. “Maybe he thinks he’s showing us the way.”

“That’s real nice of him then,” put in Red in his best sarcastic pipe. “As if there was a chance of ever losing this path. It would be just as hard to go back now as to keep on going up.”

“Then up we go,” groaned Shad. “This isn’t getting us nowhere.”

“No?” said Red. “Well, I’m telling you now, I’m scratching out my grave with my own two dogs.”

Munson was met at the top of the path by a tall bronzed man with startlingly pale blue eyes. He was neat of appearance, well set up, and had a brisk, businesslike way about him.

“Are you Mr. Munson?” he asked.

“I was before I started up that damned path,” said Scott, with a faint smile. “I’m rather less than Munson now. And you?”

The bronzed man with the pale blue eyes was indulgent enough to return Munson’s smile.

“My name’s Bennett, Mr. Munson,” he said. “I’m from headquarters. The district attorney instructed me to hot-foot it down here to help you. Now get me right on this. He told me to help you when and if you needed me, but not to butt into your operations. In other words, I’m at your disposal. I can come and go as needed. I’ve been here since a quarter to seven. Found two local men guarding the point. I’ve been standing by up here because from all I could learn, it seemed to me that this place was important.”

Munson extended his hand.

“I need someone like you,” he said. “Already I’ve felt the need of someone with whom to compare notes – someone to talk to – someone to listen to me. This is a family affair, you know, and that makes things difficult.” He paused to consider his words carefully, then added: “If I don’t take you entirely into my confidence it is not through lack of trust, but merely on the grounds of expediency. Unnecessary things need not be known.”

“I expect nothing, Mr. Munson,” said Bennett. “I’m really not on the case. As I said before, I’m merely standing by to be used when called for … to go here and there when necessary.”

At this moment two strained faces appeared round the edge of the rock at the head of the path. The faces were too tired even to sweat. They had merely congealed themselves into two molds of exhaustion. It looked as if for all eternity, even after eons of complete rest those faces would remain unchanged, never able to return to their former state of well-being. Bodies followed the faces, and these bodies promptly deposited themselves on the ground.

“Quite a climb,” came from one of the faces, with a feeble smile.

“Compared with that path, Mt. Blanc is a hole in the ground,” announced the other.

“My staff,” said Munson, pointing to the prostrate figures. Then he addressed himself to the faces. “Rest up, boys,” he said. “You deserve it. Rest up a few minutes, then we’ll get to work. Be careful where you walk.”

“Can’t walk,” said the redder face.

“Don’t have to worry where I put my feet,” said the other. “Mine stay right where they are … forever.”

As the two men walked away, Munson’s keen ear detected the sound of low but hysterical laughter. Munson, himself, was laughing a little inwardly.

“I feel sure I’ll be needing your help,” he remarked to Bennett. “My staff seems to be permanently damaged. Have you looked about any?”

“A little,” replied Bennett, “but touched nothing. There are certain things.” He did not continue.

“Yes,” said Munson, taking a quick step forward and pointing to a man arguing with the two local guards barring the way to High Point Rock, “and I’ll bet one of those certain things is the property of that gesticulating gentleman.”

“There is a silver hip flask,” suggested Bennett.

“Lead me to it,” said Munson. “I have an idea I know about where it is.”

“We must step carefully because there are also footmarks,” observed Bennett diffidently.

Fifteen yards farther on, close to the soggy edge of the great rock, Bennett pointed to a flask lying on the bare earth. Round about the flask was a frantic scramble of footprints now rapidly drying beneath the sun that had promised so much. Munson carefully picked up the flask and examined it for initials. They were plain enough – “L. H.” A pleased expression came to Munson’s face. Suddenly he waved the flask aloft.

“It’s all right, Holt,” he called. “I’ve found it.”

With an expression of the utmost dismay, Holt stopped arguing with the guards and fixed his eyes on the flask, gleaming like an accusing brand in the sunlight.

“Will you please go, Bennett,” said Munson, “and conduct that gentleman through our conscientious constabulary?”

Bennett soon returned with Holt in tow.

“Be careful how you step, Holt,” warned Munson. “You might spoil some of your own footprints. By the way, which ones are yours?”

Munson looked appraisingly at Holt’s feet, then pointed to a mark in the soil.

“I’ll bet that one belongs to you,” he said. “Of course, you were wearing dancing shoes. Put your foot in it and see how it fits.”

“Damned if I will,” replied Holt, his eyes on the flask. “And you haven’t the authority to make me.”

“You’re right there,” replied Munson, reluctantly. “Anyway, I don’t work much from footprints unless they are practically forced upon me. Nevertheless your refusal shows a decided disinclination to cooperate with the law. Oh, is this yours?”

Holt’s hand shot out to the extended flask, which Munson quickly drew back.

“I see it is,” he remarked dryly. “We found it here – right on the edge of the cliff at virtually the exact spot where Emily-Jane was pushed to her death.”

“Munson, I swear to God I didn’t do it,” said Holt in desperation. “In spite of that flask, in spite of everything you’ve got against me or may get against me, I tell you I didn’t murder Emily-Jane.”

“All right, Holt,” said Munson, in a voice a little less bitter than he customarily used when addressing him. “Go away now and don’t come back here. We’ll have a little talk soon. But keep your shirt on. You’re in a bad way.”

The man’s once jaunty shoulders sagged as he turned and retraced his steps. Munson looked after him for a moment, then sat down rather heavily on a convenient rock.

“The trouble with this case,” he said, “lies in the extraordinary circumstance that I have already three perfectly good suspects, three perfectly good motives, and three convincing sets of clues. Get me?”

Bennett nodded.

“If I worked hard enough,” continued Scott, “I might be able to convict any one of the three suspects, yet all three can’t be guilty.”

“It’s a matter of choice at present,” remarked Bennett.

“That’s just the trouble,” replied Munson. “It’s a matter of choice – my own personal feelings, and I don’t like that. If I followed them I’d go out and get that person who was just here, a most unpalatable character.”

“Why don’t you do it?” asked Bennett.

“No,” said Munson, with a shake of his head, “that would be a little too low down. I may get him in the end, but something, some small, still voice keeps telling me he’s not the man.”

He rose and walked restlessly about, his searching eyes taking in every detail of the setting. He noted the bushes, stopped to examine certain marks barely visible in the soil, then returned to the cliff’s edge and stood looking down at the confused grouping of footprints. The minutes passed unnoticed as he examined these. At length he returned to the rock and sat down.

“Had much experience with murder?” he asked suddenly.

“Some,” said Bennett.

“Any good on observation?” continued Munson.

“Yes, I am,” replied the other quite frankly. “I’ve a microscopic pair of eyes, and that’s almost a fact.”

“Good,” said Munson. “Now I’m going to make up a little story and after I’ve finished I want you to help me find out if there’s any foundation in fact in it.” He closed his eyes and settled himself on the rock.

“It’s getting damned hot,” he said, “and I’m getting damned hungry and sleepy. Can’t afford to be sleepy. Well, here goes. A girl and a man are standing right here near the edge of the cliff. It is three o’clock in the morning. An old slut of a moon is trying to display her vanished beauty. The man and the girl are drinking, perhaps. In those bushes over there a man is hiding. He watches and listens. And somewhere about, not quite sure where, another man is hiding. Now one of two things happens. I don’t know which. Either the couple near the edge of the cliff starts to quarrel, and the man tries and eventually succeeds in pushing her over in spite of the intervention of one of the hidden men, either that happens or the couple starts in love-making and one of the hidden men rushes out and confronts them. A fight follows and over she goes. In either case the second hidden man is a witness to the whole tragic, silly, sordid business. He sneaks away unseen and scared momentarily dumb.”

Munson stopped and opened his eyes.

“Now you study these marks here, wander round through the bushes and examine the ground as well as you can under the circumstances, then tell me what you’ve found out. I’m either too lazy or too tired to do it myself, but already I’ve seen some things.”

Bennett, without a word and with a display of modesty that did him credit, followed the trail of Munson’s previous investigations, only he was much more thorough and fared farther afield. He even disappeared into the thicket of bushes. When he returned he set about reading the riddle of the footprints. Munson seemed to be sleeping or thinking. Bennett was not sure which. Finally he spoke.

“Mr. Munson,” he said, “you’re about right, but it won’t work unless we can get that eye-witness of yours to come clean.”

“Oh, I know it’s only a story,” replied Munson. “A sort of a picture of what might have happened, that’s all.”

“What actually did happen, I expect,” said Bennett. “Let’s work backwards.”

“A good idea,” agreed Munson.

“Well, let’s begin with this mess of footprints,” went on the other. “Undoubtedly these are the girl’s. High heels and all. A small, dainty foot. Now, there are two pairs of men’s prints, one larger than the other. All that they actually show is that there’s been considerable stamping going on. There’s your scuffle part. But there’s one print that gives us our lead to the bushes, assuming the guy ran in a straight line. Take the last print in – the one on the outskirts, so to speak. Feel like moving?”

“No,” replied Munson, “but I will.”

“Then, we’ll use the center of that heel as a pointer and follow it to the bushes,” said Bennett.

The two men did so and halted at the line of the bushes. It hardly required a practiced eye to see that someone had recently broken through those bushes. The interlaced twigs were snapped in several places. Some leaves had been stripped from the branches. With the facts already in hand it was not difficult to reconstruct the scene.

“Want to go inside?”

Munson did. Here they discovered ample evidence to confirm whatever suspicion the snapped twigs and stripped leaves might have aroused. A large body must have crouched here. There were not many signs of trampling, but enough to show that the thicket at this point was unlike the thicket elsewhere. Not conclusive, perhaps, but sufficiently so under the circumstances.

“Satisfied?” asked Bennett.

Munson nodded.

“Then let’s go back,” said the detective.

They retraced their steps and followed the bushes round a bend. Bennett stopped and pointed. “In there,” he said briefly. “Same thing.”

“I hadn’t found that one,” said Munson.

“Here’s something,” said Bennett, “you haven’t worked into your story. It might have a bearing.”

This time Bennett took Munson to an isolated clump of bushes about fifteen yards from the edge of the cliff. The clump was composed of unusually high bushes. A tall person could stand beneath their branches. Even with the sun doing its best, the soil underneath the bushes remained moist. Bennett took no little pleasure in pointing out to Munson the prints of two different pairs of feet on the landward side of the clump. One pair was made by a man, the other by a woman, but the woman could not have been Emily-Jane, for these prints had been made by far less dainty shoes of an entirely different character.

“I wonder who they were,” mused Munson aloud.

“Of course they might have been here earlier in the evening and then gone away,” said Bennett, dashing cold water all over his discovery.

“I know, I know,” replied Munson impatiently. “But in a case of murder and with so many plausible suspects, a lead as hot as this might prove extremely helpful. … Not every witness of a murder is willing to come forward. It was a hot, murky, dark summer night. God knows how many couples were taking advantage of it to go the limit. You couldn’t drag ’em to admit they were out in the dark, dark bushes at three o’clock in the morning. A woman would have to be fairly seething with public spirit and pro bono publico to come forward of her own free will, and, of course, the escort would hold back for fear of involving the woman.” He stopped speaking and looked thoughtfully at the prints, particularly at those of the woman. He seemed to be trying to visualize the person who had stood in the shoes that had left their marks so clearly behind.

“Bennett,” he said at last, “a man spends all his life taking back something whether he knows it or not. I now take back what I said awhile ago about footprints. It is perfectly true that in the past I’ve never got all worked up over them, but these prints here interest me strangely. They might mean so damn much – not the prints, but the persons who made them. Now, as I read these prints – I refer to the smaller ones – it strikes me they must have been made either by a woman who prefers comfort to style or by one who has occasion to be much on her feet, a servant perhaps. I don’t mean one of your high-stepping, high-heeled, movie-mad girls, although she may easily be that type – Wait a minute.” Munson broke off, and returned to his inspection of the prints. “Let’s take up the man’s prints for a change,” he resumed. “What type of man left them here, do you suppose?”

Bennett studied the marks in the damp soil for several minutes. He, too, seemed to be endeavoring to give flesh and blood to the wearer of the shoes that had made them.

“For one thing,” he said, “he was far from being a dandy. The wide, flat heel and the broad toe, the nail marks in the heel and the full impression of the sole, all go to convince me that those are the working shoes of a working-man – an outside man.” He looked at Munson for confirmation, but Munson seemed to be miles away.

“All right,” said Munson unexpectedly. “How about this: A maid still wearing her service shoes snags onto the stable man, the gardener, or some other outside male servant, and takes him for a walk. No date, no dressing-up for the occasion, no thought one way or another. They come down here and eventually stand behind this bush. Now, I say this because I happen to know just such a likely pair. There may be a dozen of them on this point of land – all sorts of combinations of those pairs, but I know one pair. I’ve watched them. A maid and an outside boy who possesses both the inclination and the enterprise to come prowling down here on a dark night. Perfectly innocently, I mean, that is, within all reasonable expectations. I’m going to find out – Oh, hell,” he broke off, “all this is unprofitable speculation, but interesting. You got me into it, Bennett. I already know the murderer. Of that I’m fairly certain, but I wish to God I could find another one. I rather like this murderer, you see. Understand, Bennett, my remarks are unofficial now.”

“Perfectly, Mr. Munson,” replied Bennett earnestly. “It’s a tough situation.”

“It is. It is,” said Munson, walking absent-mindedly away. Presently he stopped and called back over his shoulder, “Have you had any breakfast, Bennett?”

“I could stand a cup of coffee,” he replied.

“Then let’s go back to the house. There are things to be done there and I’d like to have you along.”

A piping voice greeted them as they were about to leave the point. “What’s to become of us?” asked the piping voice.

Munson looked upon the intrepid Shays with a sardonic grin. “My staff seems to be partially resuscitated,” he said. “What’s going to become of you, did you ask?”

“Yes, Mr. Munson,” said Shad. “What’s to become of us?”

“One hell of a lot,” came the distressing reply, “if you stick around with me. Come along and I’ll show you.”

CHAPTER TEN

Care Sits on Crewe House

When Daniel and the rest returned from the beach, Manning, who had returned a little before the others, was waiting on the veranda.

“A nice, depressing morning,” he said in greeting. “Just the sort of a thing for a bright summer day. Invigorates the body and stimulates the nerves. Gives one an appetite.”

He was talking at random now, popping out anything in an endeavor to make these sad-looking, harried people a little less dispirited. Among Manning’s various vices was a genuine desire to see his friends happy, to open a bottle of any old thing and to help them to enjoy life. He was constantly fighting off the dread of depression. No one suspected how low-spirited he felt when alone at night he confronted himself in the mirror and thought, “Only a few more years left now and those not much good.” For this reason he made it a point to be alone at night as little as possible. In this he succeeded tremendously, but no one realized more keenly than he that within a few short years he would be able to share only his memories with the charming women he had once seduced. Therefore, when he saw the party from the beach come trailing across the lawn, he, too, felt as if the bottom had dropped out of things. Getting drunk, he reflected, was no worse than getting morbid. The only trouble about it was you couldn’t stay drunk indefinitely. And as soon as you got sober you became twice as morbid and no end sick. He voiced his thoughts tentatively.

“I think we should all get just a little bit drunk,” he suggested.

“And play going to Jerusalem,” added June.

“Or murderer, murderer, who’s got the murderer,” put in Sam bitterly.

“No,” protested Daniel, “Scott is playing that game, and it looks as if he’s going to win. How’s Barney, doctor?”

“Barney’s all right,” replied Manning. “I’ve seen the best-hearted people break out like that before. When they’ve had a shock they turn on those closest to them. Don’t worry, Dan. Something will come along and shock him back to reason.”

He led June aside and looked at her seriously and with kindly comprehension.

“Listen, June,” he said in a low voice. “I want you to know that I’m with the house in this affair. You know what I mean. I’m with you and Daniel and Barney, too, for that matter. A friend on the outside may prove very valuable in the near future. I’m that friend, and I want you to consider me so. Might not be so damned respectable, but I’ve still got a lot of influence round these parts with all kinds of people. They’ll do things for me. That’s all. You can count on me. Now I’m going to take charge of Daniel and put him to bed for a while. Send up some coffee and toast and” – he considered a moment, then continued – “yes, you’d better send up a bottle of well-selected wine. I’ve got to put some heart into Daniel. This thing is going to be a fight, June, and it’s only just begun.”

“It began a long time ago, Dr. Manning,” said June. “I’m afraid that this is the last act where everybody gets carried off the stage on stretchers and things. But it’s good to know we can count on you. Something keeps telling me we’re not licked yet. If I thought so” – she shrugged her shoulders – “I’d put an end to the misery.”

“How?” asked Manning.

“I don’t know right off, but I’d find a way.”

“Do you think he did it, that chap, Holt?”

June followed the direction of the doctor’s glance to an isolated corner of the veranda where Holt was sitting alone. Within the past few hours the man had altered shockingly. There was a crazy cast to his face. His eyes were all confused with conflicting emotions, hate and fear fighting for supremacy. June could find in her heart no pity for Lane Holt.

“I wish he had,” she answered. “I wish he had.”

“He damn well looks the part,” said Manning. “If he goes round like that much longer he’ll be slipping the noose over his own head. Come along, June. I must look after Dan.”

Together they walked down the veranda and joined the group. No one appeared to be interested in breakfast, yet no one could hit on anything better to do.

Before Daniel left with the doctor, he turned to his friends. “We should get this straight, I think,” he said. “Munson is not to blame. He did everything in his power to head off what has happened. I know that. Now he must go his way and we ours. I still consider him my friend, and you must admit that as a friend Scott Munson is, to say the least, a good egg.”

“And as an enemy he’s a pain in the neck,” said Sam doggedly.

“An unhappy selection of words to express your sentiments, Sam.” Daniel grinned at his friend from the doorway.

Sam looked back at Daniel and realized with a stab of impotent anger what a human wreck he was as he stood there grinning, or trying to grin. It was as much as he could do to keep the tears from starting to his eyes.

“Oh, hell,” he replied a little huskily, “what do words matter any more? What do they mean? I feel like Manning. Let’s all get a little drunk, and laugh a lot at nothing.”

“Or cry a lot for something,” surprisingly remarked Sue, who had never placed much confidence in her tongue.

One by one they drifted into the cheerful old dining-room, but Holt remained alone on the veranda. He was brooding, scheming, and fighting down his fear. Why couldn’t he tell? Munson wouldn’t believe him. No one would believe him, yet, by God, Daniel was guilty as hell. Holt had not seen his face, but there was no mistaking his figure, particularly that blood-wet hand. His fear was gaming ascendency now. All the world was fear. Everything was against him. Everyone. Hopelessly he slumped forward in his chair. His thoughts were like the haze on a tropic swamp … fevered, poisoned, drifting.

•   •   •   •   •

When Manning had finished with Daniel’s arm and got him into bed, he leaned back in an easy chair and sipped his wine with pagan appreciation.

“Ah, Daniel, my boy,” he said, “if we were only in Biarritz or Paris. I often think of those places.”

“Somehow I’d like to be in Montreux,” came rather wistfully from the bed. “You know, Manning … all of us … out of this mess … Barney better and everything.” A moment’s silence, then, “but that can’t be … ever.” The voice trailed off and finished with a decided, “Damn it all to hell!”

“It can be, Daniel.” Manning’s tone was tempting. “Listen, Daniel, it can be. I’m positive of that.”

“How?”

“You know my damn young fool of a nephew, Lambert? Rich as all outdoors. Mother’s side.”

“Know him well. He’s all right.”

“Glad you think so. Glad somebody thinks so. I like him, myself. Drink up, Daniel. It won’t hurt you.” Manning was working hard to put a little enthusiasm into his patient. He was waxing enthusiastic himself as his plan took shape in his mind. “Well,” he continued, “young Lambert has a yacht among many other things, a regular sea-going yacht. She’s anchored in a cove near Willow Point … not far off. And she’s ready for sea at a moment’s notice. Remember that. It’s a good point. Now, this damn fool nephew of mine has been just aching to take a trip round the world or to any spot between or thereon. All he’s waiting for is someone to go with him. Doesn’t care how many. It could be done quietly, Daniel, and if this mess, as you call it, keeps on getting messier, why, I say, let’s go.”

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” called Daniel.

“The doctor’s wanted,” one of the maids announced in an awed voice. “They’ve brought the body back.”

“Oh, damn!” said Manning, gulping down his wine. “It’s not my job, but anything to be obliging. Think it over, Dan.”

The door closed and Daniel lay there alone … thinking. He was too damn tired to think. He closed his eyes…

He must have drowsed off, for when he next opened his eyes, June was sitting by his bed. He had not heard her come in nor did he know how long she had been there. Her hand was lying on the coverlet, a strong but now pathetically listless hand, and he let his fall upon it.

“Hello, June.” He gave her hand a gentle squeeze.

“ ’Lo, Daniel. Any better?”

“Lots. How’s Barney?”

“He’s up and about. The poor kid seems to be lost.”

“He doesn’t come to me.”

“He’s thinking only of himself at present and of … her.”

“I’d like to spank his bottom.”

“Very pretty. Suppose I died. Would you go round visiting the sick and wounded?”

“If they’d been good to me, yes. I might get drunk and laugh at nothing.”

“Would you mind if I died, Daniel?”

“Quite a lot. Part of me is dead already. Do you want to kill the rest?”

“No.”

“Then don’t die.”

“But I might have to.”

“Same here. I’m pretty damn close to it now.”

“What do you mean?”

“What did you mean?”

Silence. A long silence, then Daniel, “Is she next door?”

“No, Dan. It’s in a spare room. There is no ‘she.’ ”

“It’s just as well, June. The trouble started with her, but it hasn’t ended with her.”

“Are you glad she’s gone?”

“Yes, glad.”

“Then so am I.”

“Munson thinks I did it, June.”

“Scott thinks everybody did it.”

“Sort of a mass attack, eh?”

“Or a series of individual assaults.”

“Each pushing her nearer the brink.”

“We shouldn’t talk like this,” said June.

“Why not? You never liked her.”

“I never liked her, no. Toward the end I hated her more than anything else in life. I hated her more than the filthiest vice or the most cowardly deed.”

“She deserved all that, June.”

“But what about God?”

“He wouldn’t have cared for her much.”

“Wish it could have happened some other way … wish he had done it instead of—”

“He did kill her, June, if there is a God. He killed her as much as – oh, well, anybody. Don’t doubt that.”

“You couldn’t get Scott to see it that way.”

“He’d have a hell of a time catching God.”

“He’d try to if he thought there was a ghost of a chance.”

“June?”

“Yes, Dan.”

“How’d you like to go away?”

“How go away?”

“On a yacht, a fine big yacht. All over the world. Everywhere. Away from this mess. Out of reach. New places. A new suit of thoughts.”

“God, Dan, I’d love it. Could I have a new dress of thoughts?”

“Yes, dear, and a hat.”

“Everything new from the skin out, Dan.”

“That goes with me as long as you don’t change your skin.”

“Do you like my skin?”

“The little I’ve been able to ogle.”

“We’ll like each other a long time, Dan?”

“Let’s do it, June.”

“No matter what?”

“No matter what.”

“And then we’ll go away to everywhere on that yacht, won’t we?”

“If you’ll slip me a kiss we will.”

“All right. I’m going now.” June bent over Daniel.

“Excuse me, can I come in, lady?”

“Great God, June, what’s that?”

A crushed face with desperate eyes was looking in at the window. It seemed to be suspended in space and terribly aware of the fact.

“What are you doing there?” asked June. “Just what are you doing there?”

“Damned if I know, lady,” spoke the face. “Risking life and limb, if you ask me, but Mr. Munson thinks I’m looking for clues.”

“Are you?”

“What, me, lady? Looking? I’m just clutching. Hanging on for dear life.”

“Well, you can’t come in. That’s that. Tell Mr. Munson so.”

“Oh, lady, I can’t get down. Come look how I am all scrunched up and perilous.”

“You should have thought about that before you climbed up here.”

“I did, lady. That was all I thought of. Couldn’t think of anything else.”

“Well, tell Mr. Munson you can’t come in.”

The face looked earthward cautiously. “Mr. Munson,” it wailed, “she says I can’t come in.”

“Then snap on down,” came the voice of Scott Munson.

“Did you hear that, lady?” asked the face. “ ‘Snap on down,’ says he. There’s a fair sample for you. I’d snap like a twig if I hit the ground. Do let me come in, lady.”

“Let him in, June,” said Daniel. “I’m interested to see just what is attached to a face like that.”

“You can come in,” said June.

“I’ll always remember this, lady, and you, too, sir, in the bed. I’ll always remember this and be grateful. Could you give me a hand, lady? It’s more for the sake of confidence. A man just can’t be courageous in the position I’m in. It would be foolhardy.”

June seized the outstretched hand and gave it a powerful pull. Face, body, and feet came clattering into the room.

“Lady, you saved my life,” said Officer Shad as he rose from the floor.

“Bring him over here, June?”

From the left knee of the man’s trousers Daniel picked a piece of red lint. Another piece clung to his elbow.

“Now an envelope and my fountain-pen, old dear.”

He placed the lint in the envelope and wrote:

Clues found on the body and person of one of your profession. With the compliments of
Daniel Crewe.

“Take that to Mr. Munson, officer, and call again at any time.”

“But not by the tree, sir. Never that tree again.”

“This is the way out,” said June.

“Where do I go when I leave here, lady?”

“Oh, just go wandering round, barging in anywhere. Someday we’ll find your body rotting in the halls.”

Officer Shad slid out with a shiver.

“He spoiled a perfectly good kiss,” complained June, returning to the bed.

•   •   •   •   •

Daniel dressed slowly and went downstairs. He was wondering what had become of Sam Stoughten. He hadn’t had a talk with Sam since the thing occurred. He would like to know what Sam was thinking. Munson had those letters.

As he stepped out on the veranda his eyes fell on Barney, sitting crouched before his easel. Then Daniel transferred his gaze to the canvas. He was shocked to attention. A great trembling emptiness took the place of all other emotions. His brother was painting the scene of the crime with the murderer on the spot. So much was apparent at once to the eye although the picture was little more than commenced. There was the Rock caught in a pale unearthly radiance, and caught in the radiance also was the vague, half-formed figure of a man in a black domino with the hood removed. The figure although hardly more than an impression looked tall and gaunt, much like his own. Its arms were upraised frantically, and the face, indistinguishable, was lifted to the hidden source of the light.

Daniel lost himself in the weird spirit of this terrible picture. Once more he was standing at the edge of the cliff with the first numbing realization of murder laying cold hands on his heart. He was alone there, sick and afraid. He had done it. He had murdered. He could feel again the flesh of the girl’s bare shoulder. He could feel her slipping from him, twirling through the night to death.

Daniel’s lips began to tremble. Sweat broke from his forehead. He tried to take his eyes from the canvas, but the fascination of horror held them fixed. It was as if he were calling to himself, accusing himself, demonstrating his deed before the eyes of the world. Nothing Scott Munson could do or say would have the same uncanny power as had this picture to move him, to break down his resistance and self-control and finally to cause him to confess his crime. Here was the highest refinement of torture, conceived by his own brother.

So absorbed had Daniel been in the picture that he had not noticed his brother’s curious gaze fixed upon him. Barney had been noting with the insight of an artist every light and shade of emotion that passed across Daniel’s face. He had been studying his brother’s expressions, his open display of dread and horror, with morbidly bitter enjoyment.

“I thought you’d appreciate it,” he said in a strangely hostile voice. “I am doing it for your special edification.”

Daniel started, came back out of the picture, and looked at his brother. “Don’t, kid,” he said. “It’s not like you.”

Barney laughed ironically. “It’s exactly like me. I am like that.”

“You never hurt a soul in your life, Barney … before.”

“No? Well, watch me from now on.”

Aunt Matty had come out and was standing by Daniel. She was staring at the picture with wide eyes.

“Oh, Barney,” she said, at last, “that’s not nice. Why don’t you paint something else – a rose or a rainbow?”

“Or a pickle or a sponge or a cabbage,” suggested Barney, with a sneer. “That picture isn’t intended to be nice. I prefer to paint murderers. My inspiration stands beside you.”

Daniel led Aunt Matty back into the house and sat her down on a sofa in the library. The old lady, usually so game, was weeping softly.

“There, there now,” murmured Daniel, putting an arm round the frail body. “Barney isn’t well yet. He doesn’t mean what he says. He’ll come back to us. Don’t take on so.”

“I don’t know what’s come over this old house,” said Aunt Matty. “It used to be a place of so much sea and sunlight, Danny. Laughter and comfort and the smell of the orchard. And you were both such good boys. All the time good. Why, you didn’t ever drink much and cut up, not even after you were grown men. Good friends and happiness, and the servants all satisfied. Where’s it all gone to, Danny? Overnight, all gone.”

“It will come back, Aunt Matty. We’ll bring it back somehow.”

Daniel lied to the old lady, but his lies had to wind their way around a sizable lump in his throat. Those days, he knew, would never return. When he thought of the days ahead his heart failed him.

“I think I could have stood anything,” said Aunt Matty, “if you two boys were as you’ve always been. Barney’s bitterness and accusations, Daniel, are breaking my heart. Why should he hold it against you?”

“He’s not himself,” replied Daniel, wearily. “He’ll come round presently. His nerves are shot, that’s all.”

Aunt Matty lowered her voice to a confidential whisper. Her bright eyes snapped. “Everything started with that Emily-Jane,” confided the old lady. “I wish I’d pushed her off that rock myself.”

Daniel derived no little comfort from the venomous wish of Aunt Matty. “I guess you’re back to normal now,” he said. “Let’s not worry any more, or better still, let me do all the worrying for you. I’m used to it now.”

He stood up, then on a sudden impulse, bent over the bewildered and saddened old lady, and kissed her cheek. Then he left the room. Straight past Barney he walked, his eyes avoiding the easel, and across the lawn to the beach in search of Sam. He must be about somewhere.

Then Daniel saw him. He was sitting on some rocks with Sue, and both looked miserable. When he joined them, the pair appeared relieved.

“How’s your arm?” asked Sam abruptly.

“Doc Manning is quite proud of it, Sam. No need to trouble about the arm at all.”

“That was a strange thing,” remarked Sue.

“Stranger things have happened, Sue,” said Daniel.

Sam showed no interest in the strangeness of the thing.

“Tell me, Dan,” continued Sue, “did Sam murder Emily-Jane?”

“Don’t mind me,” put in Sam. “I’m somewhere else.”

“Why do you ask, Sue?”

“Because I think he acts like a murderer. He’s been sitting here muttering and grunting and scowling into my face. Why, you’d think he was a couple of murderers at least.”

“Do murderers go on like that, Sue?”

“Well, they couldn’t behave any worse.”

“Then, Sam did it. The mystery is solved.”

“I hope they catch him and hang him good,” said Sue. “Then perhaps he’ll come to his senses.”

“It might be just the thing he needs, a good old-fashioned hanging.”

“Ha, ha,” – the sound startled Daniel – “you’re an amusing couple, you two. A regular pair of Neros, playing the fiddle while Rome burns. Munson will have us all hung if we don’t slip him some arsenic mighty quick.”

“What did I tell you?” said Sue. “Those are the words of the worst type of murderer – a poisoner, no less.”

For some time three pairs of moody, trouble-touched eyes did their best to discourage the glinting surf playfully belaboring the sand, then as if at some unspoken command, the owners of the eyes arose without expectation and, mounting the bluff, filed across the lawn to the house. Sue went on ahead, but Sam and Daniel were stopped by Munson.

“Thanks for your assistance, Daniel,” said Munson, tapping the envelope containing the lint strands plucked from the body of Officer Shad, “but I hardly feel like using these. Your action has tied my hands.”

“Stow that stuff, Scott,” replied Daniel good-naturedly. “You probably think you’ve got enough dope without them. You’ll use them if you think they’ll help you. My advice is to keep them, old man. You’ll need everything you can get to convict an innocent man. However, it has been done.”

Munson’s eyes snapped. “That’s not my game, Daniel,” he said. “And you know it.”

“Nobody seems to be running true to form these days, Scott,” remarked Daniel.

Bennett appeared at the corner of the house and approached them.

“Bennett, I want you to meet two of our best suspects,” said Scott, and he introduced them.

“We’re neck and neck,” said Daniel, “vying for the honors.”

“Well, I hope you both lose,” said Bennett, with evident sincerity as he shook hands. “I never heard of a murderer before voluntarily contributing evidence.”

“It’s my kind heart, Bennett,” said Daniel. “I like to see everybody happy.”

As Daniel and Sam walked away Bennett’s eyes followed them. “A cool customer,” he remarked, referring to Daniel.

“So damn cool,” replied Munson, “I expect him to crack at any moment now.”

Just before they reached the veranda Sam halted Daniel. “Sorry as hell about that arm, Dan,” he said rapidly. “I must have miscalculated. Daniel, I was desperate.”

“We won’t talk about that, Sam,” replied Daniel, “but isn’t it one devil of a mess?”

Barney was still painting, and in spite of every effort of will Daniel could not prevent himself from lingering over the picture. The old feeling gradually crept back, the old horror.

•   •   •   •   •

The inquest was over. Both procedure and verdict had gone according to Munson’s carefully laid plans. He had succeeded in protecting the family, sparing Barney’s feelings, and saving the reputation of the dead girl. At the same time he had got exactly what he wanted, a clear field.

The proceedings had attracted a little well-bred interest. About a dozen members of the Coastal Golf Club had motored over, more to pay their respects and to offer decently restrained condolences than to attend the inquest itself. Unalloyed astonishment seemed to be the prevailing mood. The thing was simply impossible. There must be some mistake. Then they had motored back; cocktail time was perilously close at hand. Daniel had been glad to see the last of them. Manning had proved helpful without appearing to be so. He had encouraged speedy departures and warded off embarrassing questions.

One small creature composed entirely of eyes and legs did nothing else but look at Barney. He had scarcely been aware of her gaze. Her name was Sally Brent. Before the advent of Emily-Jane she had secretly entertained certain vaguely defined hopes. They were all about someday. She and Barney had – oh, well, there had always been Barney. Where was Barney now? He seemed to be lost in some utterly remote region behind his brooding eyes. Little Sally smiled gamely and allowed old Brent to drive her home. Just the same, she felt sure that, given the right opportunity, she could have brought a little comfort to her erstwhile playmate and companion. And any female from the age of eight, obsessed with this fine fancy, is a constant source of danger to the object of her solicitude.

It was twilight now. Barney was sitting at his easel. All afternoon he had sat there, working away with crazy concentration. The painting on the large canvas was gradually beginning to take on depth and definition. Whatever genius Barney had was going into its creation. His feelings for the bizarre found expression here in a weird atmospheric treatment. It was as much a painting of a mood as it was of a place or person.

Several yards away Daniel was standing, his eyes burning into the picture. Although Barney was aware of his brother’s presence, he calmly continued with his brush. To Daniel there seemed to be something inevitable in the slow, unhesitating progress of the picture. It was like the sure-footed approach of Doom, dreadfully unhurried and confident. It was like a threat withheld until the time was ripe to strike. It was the face, the vague, cloudy, indistinguishable face of the figure that struck terror to Daniel’s soul. It was his face. Daniel knew it. It had to be his face. He could see it. He could see himself staring into the damp, murky night, filled with the skimmed, sick drippings of a dying moon.

Unconsciously Daniel’s face had taken on the same expression it had worn at the time of the murder. His features were tortured and drawn, his neck cords taut, his body strained and rigid. All unknowingly, Daniel stood there, a self-confessed murderer.

Scott Munson, appearing in the doorway, arrested his step, and took in the scene. From Daniel his eyes moved to the canvas, then back again to the agonized face. Munson received the impression that some terrible force, some impelling emotion, was goading Daniel against his will to offer himself as a model. Then a sigh escaped Daniel’s lips and his body relaxed. He passed a hand across his eyes and moved away like a man who had just gone through some exhausting physical test. Then he saw Munson for the first time and turned away. Barney’s bitter eyes looked mockingly into his. Helplessly he turned from side to side. He was trembling now, trembling inwardly. Every nerve in his body was lashing him with little nagging stings. In the back of his mind some dim glimmer of intelligence kept urging him to pull in, for the moment of danger was at hand. He breathed deeply and threw back his shoulders. His head went up. But he did not trust his tongue to speak. Silently he passed Munson and went upstairs to his room.

Munson walked over to Barney and looked sorrowfully into his eyes.

“No,” he said. “You shouldn’t do that. Daniel’s always been damn good to you. Someday soon, Barney, I’m going to hurt you badly if only to bring you back to Dan.”

He was thinking of five letters his searching hand had encountered tucked in a vest hanging under a number of other garments in a dark corner of Daniel’s closet.

The net was being drawn closer round Daniel. Munson was morally convinced that he had committed the crime. He knew that with the evidence he had already in hand he could make him pay the extreme penalty. Yet there had been other people out that night, people with both motives and opportunity. An altogether new theory of the murder was forming itself in his mind. He would hold his hand for a while.…

And all that night in Daniel’s room the light was kept burning. Whenever he turned it out the shadows of Barney and Emily-Jane kept flitting through the room.

Thank God she had not screamed.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Eyes That Looked on Murder

Scott Munson was on a spot that interested him strangely. It was a lone narrow ledge about three feet wide, jutting out from High Point Rock four feet from its summit. Officers Shad and Red, flat on their respective stomachs, were following Munson’s movements with eyes filled with alarm. Vicariously they were dying a thousand deaths as their chief, apparently indifferent to his unenviable position, twisted his way round the uneven face of the cliff. In some places the ledge narrowed to the width of a foot. When Munson approached these perilous crossings, the Shays automatically closed their eyes, and with indrawn breath listened acutely for the crash which to them was now merely a matter of moments.

“With all the places on this neck of land to investigate,” observed Red, “he would pick out this one.”

“I thought I’d pass out when he tried to lure us down there,” commented his colleague.

“My resignation was trembling on the tip of my tongue,” replied Red.

“He’s mad,” said Shad mildly, but with conviction.

“Mad Munson,” amplified the redder Shay, who had a flair for rugged names.

This was Scott’s third visit to the ledge, his third minute, inch by inch inspection. He had nothing to go on, nothing but his imagination, a memory that constantly eluded recapture, and a wild unsubstantial theory. And he had found nothing to justify his efforts. In one spot, which just so happened to be the right one, the moss had been disturbed. There were certain indentations. Along the ledge he found other similar marks, but these were so faint and undefined that he feared their discovery was due more to hope than to their actual presence. Nevertheless, this ledge and its possibilities fascinated him. It formed an essential part of this wild theory which in turn was based on nothing more definite than an unwarranted suspicion.

His staff watched him return from the ledge with mingled emotions. It had enjoyed being horrified and at the same time it was relieved to find their leader still among them.

“From now on,” said Munson, brushing the earth from his hands, “your business will be to watch. Got guns?”

“We have,” replied Shad. “Mine seems awful heavy.”

“Bear up under your burden,” said Munson, “and keep your eyes open. No one is to leave the grounds without my permission.”

It struck both Shad and his associate, who were at heart good-natured, sociably inclined spirits, that this new duty was going to be highly uncongenial. It presented so many opportunities for unpleasantness and friction, strained relations and mean looks. However, they accepted their new assignment with a fortitude worthy of the profession they so gracefully adorned.

On leaving the point, Munson spoke to the local guard.

“Bronson,” he said, “you can go home now, and stay there if they’ll let you. Tell them at the lockup. Mr. Munson suggested you take a couple of days off. Make sure that your chief hears you. I’ve finished with this place now. It’s open to the public.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Bronson, smiling broadly upon the Shays. “I’ll carry out your instructions to the letter.”

“A couple of days off,” muttered Red, as he followed Munson along the Cliff Path. “Did you hear that? What do we get? Nothing but dangerous and disagreeable duty.”

“After he’s through with us,” said Shad, “I’m going to put in for a life pension.”

“If you have any life left to pension,” amended his brother officer.

•   •   •   •   •

“Now,” said Munson to himself, “it’s high time I did the conventional thing. I am satisfied about her feet. They could easily have been the feet I’m looking for.”

He found old Griggs in the orchard, doing helpful things to a peach tree.

“Griggs,” he said, coming at once to the point, “was your helper out on the night of the murder or the accident or whatever it was?”

“He was, sir,” replied Griggs. “I’ve been waiting for this, Mr. Munson. He was out late, and he hasn’t been the same lad since. Got something on his mind, but I’d stake my life he had no hand in it.”

“Certainly not,” agreed Munson heartily, experiencing a strange sensation. Did he really want to hear the boy’s story? He had to hear it. Nothing left for him to do. “What’s his name, Griggs? I want to see him. Will you get him for me?”

“His name’s Tom,” said Griggs, as he went in search of his assistant.

Munson knew Tom although Tom was not aware of that fact. To put it accurately, Munson did not actually know the boy, but he knew the most important thing about him and that had to do with Betty, the maid. Tom was in love with this healthy wench, and very much in love at that. He was a boy with bangs, Tom. A boy with freckles and bangs. Good blue eyes that made up for everything, including a slight stoop and a pronounced tendency to stammer.

“Tom,” said Munson, leading the boy aside, “there’s no trouble in this for you unless you fail to tell the exact truth. Stick to that and I’m your friend. It’s all very simple and easy. All you have to do is to answer my questions. Here’s the first one. Why were you and Betty out so late on the night of the accident?”

“T-t-t—” Tom swallowed and began things afresh. “T-t-t-’t weren’t no accident, Mr. Munson.” His words fell out in fragments.

With one question Munson had covered a lot of ground. But Tom, willing as he was to talk, was handicapped by nature. Munson did not like to listen to him. It made him feel spasmodic. He considered the situation a moment, then looked about the orchard. Far down toward the salt marshes were a bench and an old battered wicker rocking-chair. A pleasant, secluded, unassuming retreat. There he would hear the story.

“Listen, Tom,” he said. “We all ought to be in on this, you, Betty, and I. It’s important. Now just run up to the house and bring Betty back to me. I’ll meet you down there.” He pointed to the bench.

Betty, her vital young eyes bright although her cheeks had lost some of their color, showed no reluctance to talk once she was assured that the state of her virtue was not under investigation, that it was, in fact, taken for granted.

“We were out late, Mr. Munson,” she admitted readily enough, “because the party didn’t break up until half past two, and I was helping to serve.”

Munson, sitting insecurely in the rain-warped wicker chair, nodded and continued to think. Might as well skip a lot of ground, he decided. Why lead up to it by dramatic stages? Get the worst over at once – the confirmation of his suspicions, of his convictions, by eye-witnesses. Then he would do what had to be done, and the case would be over. Over, yes, but not before he had had a talk with young Barney and brought him back to poor Dan. His brother would need him now.

“Then you actually stood under those high bushes?” he asked.

“We did, sir,” replied Betty, and Tom nodded. “We were afraid of being seen and misunderstood.”

“Go on, Betty,” said Munson in a low voice.

Betty settled herself on the bench and cast Tom a look of importance as if she suspected the poor boy of not understanding what it was all about. It was a look that meant, “What I saw you saw and there’s no two ways about it.” Tom seemed to understand.

“It was late,” began Betty, “and I was so hot from running here and there that I wanted to cool off before going to bed. Tom took me down to the Rock. We started out right away, about half past two. Well, we got there all right and the moon was just rising. Not much of a moon, though.”

“Meet anyone on the way?”

“Not a soul,” replied Betty. “We walked to the edge of the Rock and stood looking out awhile, looking and talking and wondering sort of. Then we walked round the point to get a view of the marshes. Terribly mysterious they looked in the moonlight. When we came back we were scared stiff to see Miss Emily-Jane and that man Holt—”

“Wait a minute, Betty,” Munson broke in. He had detected a note of anger in the girl’s voice. “You don’t seem to like Mr. Holt. Why?”

“He hasn’t let me alone since the first day he arrived,” replied Betty. “Doesn’t ever seem to get wise to himself. He just can’t believe I won’t fall for him.”

Tom shifted restlessly on the bench and muttered some brief, private observation about a dog.

“Well, you saw them standing there,” said Munson. “Then what, Betty?”

“We didn’t want to pass them,” she continued, “so we stopped behind those high bushes. They were having a long argument, and drinking. He was urging her to give up Mr. Barney and go away with him. She just laughed. Then, suddenly, his arms went out and he grabbed her. They were swaying there on the edge of the cliff.

“At that moment there was a thrashing in the bushes, and out comes a black figure with a hood on its head. It rushed over to Holt and tried to drag him away. Then out pops another black figure and starts for the scramble, but it stops, this figure does. Stops sudden, just like it saw something unexpected. From where we stood, looking round the edge of the bushes, we could see plain enough, but we didn’t see what that second figure saw. All we saw was the first figure slashing at that man Holt, trying to get him away from the girl, and Holt pushing with all his might. He swung round suddenly, and Miss Emily-Jane went over the edge of the cliff.”

“Did she scream?” asked Munson.

“She made no sound.”

“Funny, that,” thought Munson, “if she saw it coming.” Aloud he asked, “Did you recognize either of the hooded figures, Betty? Think well. It doesn’t mean anything, but I’d just like to get an idea.”

Apparently this question was not to Betty’s liking. She looked everywhere but into Munson’s dark, steady eyes, which never left her face.

“It can do no harm, Betty,” he said quietly, “and it might help me a lot.”

Betty considered. “It’s just a guess,” she said, “so you can’t hold it against me, and if it will help, I’ll tell. The figure that tried to save Miss Emily-Jane was just about the size of Mr. Dan. The one that scuttled back into the bushes was heavy like Mr. Stoughten. That’s the best I can do.”

“And after that, Betty?”

“Holt split off through the darkness,” the girl went on, “and left the tall black figure standing alone on the rock. And it stripped off its hood, Mr. Munson” – here Betty’s voice took on an overtone of awe and she hesitated a moment – “and it was Mr. Dan. I lied about that. It was Mr. Dan and I saw his face. It was terrible, so full of pain and suffering it was. Just like he was being nailed to some invisible cross. He just stood there all the while on the rock, then he left the rock and went down into the darkness below.”

“By the pathway, you mean?”

“Yes, Mr. Munson.”

The three of them sat in silence awhile, each one picturing the scene, then Munson spoke. “And after that, Betty?”

“We waited about ten minutes and went home.”

“Did you meet anybody on the way, or see anybody about the house?”

“Only Miss June. She was just coming out of the pantry. Said she was having a cup of tea for herself. Had one shoe off. Said her feet hurt her.”

“And was that what you saw, Tom?”

Betty’s glance seemed to set off some mechanism in Tom’s anatomy which in turn started his head nodding in violent agreement.

“All except the Miss June part,” corrected Betty. “Tom sleeps in one of the outhouses with the men. It’s the same house where you’ve lodged those two queer officers that keep following you about.”

Munson smiled. “And why didn’t you tell me about this before?” he asked.

“We were both afraid we might lose our places,” replied Betty. “We like it here together and all. It didn’t seem to matter much about Miss Emily-Jane. I didn’t like her.”

“But suppose we should have convicted an innocent man? What would you have done then?”

“I’d have snitched long before that,” the girl explained.

“And in the meantime you were perfectly willing to let me work my head off looking for the murderer?”

“We decided it would give you something to do. We were interested to see if you’d guess right. Did you?”

Once more Munson smiled, this time in spite of his irritation. “I don’t guess,” he said. “I have to know.”

“What are you going to do, Mr. Munson? Do you mind telling?”

“This,” said Munson. “I’m going to let you go now with the strict understanding that you’ll say nothing. You’ve really placed yourselves within the reach of the law by withholding this information. You’ll have to make up for it now. When I’m ready I’ll let you know and then I want you to repeat your story before Mr. Holt and probably in the presence of Sergeant Bennett. Will you do that for me?”

They readily agreed and departed almost on tiptoe, like sobered children. Munson remained where he was. He was lost in thought. He was very much afraid that Betty’s story wouldn’t quite wash. It was true enough as far as it went. She believed she had seen what she had told him, but unconsciously she had been biased in her vision.

As a result she had presented Lane Holt in the light shed by her own opinion of him. She had seen him as the murderer and Daniel as the hero rushing to the rescue. No, it wouldn’t wash; at least, Munson was not so sure. Her narrative of the actual killing had been too confused. Either one of them might have pushed the girl off, in spite of the fact that Betty claimed Holt had deliberately tried to do so, while Daniel had done just the opposite and attempted to save Emily-Jane. After all, Betty’s story might go with a jury, particularly when corroborated by the enslaved Tom. Strong evidence, if properly rehearsed and presented. Why not go ahead with it? Lane Holt was no good. What was his life worth compared with Daniel’s or Sam’s? Munson was sorely tempted. It would be so very easy with the clues he had in hand, and the situation would be saved. Certainly of the three Holt acted the guiltiest. Well, all he could do was to put Betty’s story to the test, to confront Lane Holt with it and to study his reactions. In the face of such overwhelming direct evidence he might, if he were guilty, break down and confess.

Rising from his chair, he walked slowly back to the house through the old orchard. He skirted the side of the house and came out on the lawn. He wondered if Emily-Jane’s body had been sent away yet, and seeing June Lansing sitting alone under the shade of a tree, he strolled over and asked her.

“Yes,” said June calmly. “Emily-Jane has seen the last of Crewe House. A most unbereaved-looking old lady arrived while you were off somewhere, and carried her back to Ohio. Strange thing, that. Never even knew she came from Ohio. Somehow she didn’t act as if she had come from there.”

“Did you receive the old lady, or Aunt Matty?”

“The pair of us did. She was an odd old thing. Some sort of an aunt or other. She didn’t seem to know what it was all about or to care a rap. Just duty. She was doing it.”

“Say anything about Emily-Jane?”

“Hardly knew her, she said. Emily-Jane rarely came home. Couldn’t drag her back except for a few weeks at a time.”

“How did Barney act?”

“He didn’t act. Just kept on painting. He’s mad.” June lit another cigarette. “He’s funny. The body was taken out the back way, so he didn’t even see it leave. Anyway he hasn’t been interested in Emily-Jane’s body since the life went out of it. Looked at it once, then hurried away. For him Emily-Jane had ceased to exist. The body didn’t matter. And all he said when he looked at her was, ‘And back of all that beauty—’ He never finished his sentence.” June tossed her cigarette away and lit another one. “Wish it was all over,” she said. “Our Emily-Jane left a lot of trouble behind. She ran true to form to the last, Scott.”

“You’re smoking too much, June,” said Munson. “I’ve been noticing it of late.”

He rose and walked away. June’s ale-colored eyes with their little speckles dwelt on him thoughtfully. She held out one hand and watched it. The fingers trembled slightly.

“Guess he’s right,” she said to herself. “My nerves are going, too.”

Munson started for his room. On his way up he met Aunt Matty, who had evidently sought refuge in trifles, for she was fussing about a lost domino, one that had never been worn.

“There were six of them,” she was telling Betty, who gave the impression of being only mildly interested, “and now there are only five. The new one’s gone.”

The old lady managed to cram so much tragedy into this last statement that Munson smiled as he mounted the stairs. Then suddenly he stopped, his foot half raised for the next step. Where was that lost domino, he wondered. That was it. Was that domino actually lost or – A great shouting somewhere outside interrupted this interesting line of thought. Munson ran down the stairs and out to the veranda.

At the far end of the lawn, the end nearest the road, he made out a long pair of legs frantically raised aloft. Upon approaching these legs he discovered they were joined to the attenuated trunk of Officer Shad. Clutched in the officer’s arms as if it were a pearl of great price, was the head of Lane Holt. On the fringe of this grotesque struggle, Officer Red was capering excitedly, revolver in hand.

“You hold him, and I’ll shoot him,” he was shouting for the benefit of the prostrate Shay.

“For God’s sake, don’t shoot,” cried Shad. “Things are bad enough as they are. This devil’s trying to bite my ear clean offen my head.”

Munson silently enjoyed the scene until he saw Officer Red take deliberate aim at the beautifully exposed though earnestly animated rear section of Mr. Lane Holt. It was an irresistible target. Munson appreciated the fact, but felt called upon to intervene.

“Sorry, Red,” he remarked. “I’d like to take a try myself, but the situation doesn’t justify it, I’m afraid. Put your gun away.” Then he addressed Officer Shad. “Let him up, Shad,” he said. “You have done well.”

Shad seemed to think so himself, as he released the head and arose from the scene of battle.

“He was trying to do a bunk,” he announced, pointing to a partially strangled Holt. “We told him to stop, but he wouldn’t. So,” concluded Shad with modest satisfaction, “we stopped him.”

“How about it, Holt?” asked Munson.

“They’re crazy as hell,” exclaimed Holt. “I was mooning about down here after Emily-Jane had gone – I’d seen the last of her going down the road – and I wasn’t paying much attention to anything, when all of a sudden these two lunatics rushed out from behind a bush and told me to stop. Naturally I told them to go to hell, and kept on walking. Then without word of warning they jumped on my back and down I went. Ever since then I’ve just been trying to get up. That’s all.”

“He damn well near bit my ear off,” said Officer Shad, applying a tender hand to the left side of his long head.

“You would have been well avenged if Mr. Munson hadn’t stopped me,” said Officer Red.

“There seems to have been a general misunderstanding,” Munson observed, “but I must admit you boys did well. I’m proud of you. Carry on.”

Taking Holt by the arm he led him back across the lawn.

“Holt,” he said, “if you feel up to it, I’d like to have you meet me in the little study at the far end of the house in about half an hour.” He looked at his watch. “It’s eleven-thirty now and luncheon is not until one. Think you can make it?”

The man shrugged his drooping shoulders rather hopelessly.

“Oh, hell, what does it matter anyway?” he said in a flat voice. “I’ll be there.… Might as well get it over. I don’t care a damn now one way or another but I suggest you have a little talk with your good friend Daniel.”

He broke away from Munson and went into the house. Munson found Bennett, who had just returned from making inquiries at the neighboring houses in an endeavor to ascertain if any of the servants had been near High Point Rock on the night of the murder. He had had no luck. When Munson told him his story his eyes lighted up.

“Then that settles everything,” he said. “We’ll drill a confession out of his hide and I’ll take him to the lockup right off. You’ve got the case on ice, Mr. Munson.”

But Scott only smiled wearily as he turned toward the house. “I’m not so sure, Bennett,” he said. “Sometimes you can’t depend on the accuracy of eye-witnesses even.”

“But their story would convince any jury.”

“Yes,” replied Scott, “and that’s what irks me.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Death Comes Indoors

Daniel’s study was like a happy thought on a dull day. It was an unexpected relief. At the extreme left end of the house, it was approached by way of a long crazy corridor that ambled past a series of pleasant rooms, each of which invited the passer to enter and linger awhile. It was not so much a study as it was a retreat – an escape from boredom when life turned drab. Here there were books and comfortable chairs and the smell of tobacco. Its front windows gave to the lawn and the broad sweep of the Sound; those at the side commanded a view of the orchard with the glinting streams of the salt marshes caught in the arms of the trees. From the study a door led directly to the veranda where it curved round the house, and here there were several easy chairs. It was like a private deck on an ocean liner, an essential part of the whole, yet cut off and remote.

It was by way of the veranda door that Munson and Bennett now entered. The room seemed lost to the world, so still and tranquil it was. And Daniel was a part of its stillness. At one of the side windows he was standing in an attitude of tense immobility. Deep in thought, he stood with his sunken eyes brooding out over the salt marshes where the sluggish streams twisted through the reeds. On his face was an expression of utter weariness and defeat. His was the face of a man who was very much alone with himself.

The two men were in the room before he turned from the window. He regarded them in silence for a moment; then an expression of resignation came into his eyes.

“Well, gentlemen,” he said in a quiet voice, “I suppose you want me?”

“Why should we want you, Dan?” asked Munson quickly.

“For murder,” he replied in level tones. “That’s all you want anyone for these days, Scott.”

“Well, this time, Daniel, we’re not after you, but your room. Mr. Lane Holt has promised to meet us here for a chatty half-hour. I’ve a feeling he’s got an interesting story to tell. I’ve the same feeling about you and Sam, and I’ve promised myself the pleasure of listening to those stories within the next few days.”

Daniel slightly inclined his head. “I shall try to make mine as interesting as possible and as unenlightening.”

Munson smiled rather sadly. “Things have gone far beyond that, Daniel,” he said. “We’ll have to have a showdown soon. You know I can’t keep stalling on the job forever.”

Holt entered the room by way of the corridor. Daniel faced him squarely. Their eyes met, and those of Holt were filled with an insane hatred. He looked upon Daniel as the cause of all the misery through which he had passed, the nights and days of cold, pursuing fear. But for Daniel, Emily-Jane would be alive today, and he, Holt, would be safe … and happy.

His lips bared his white, even teeth as he uttered one word, “Murderer!”

On the silence of the room the word fell jarringly, accusingly. Daniel received it with an expressionless face. He seemed to be considering the man before him as if he were some microscopic specimen. Presently he spoke. His voice was quiet and well controlled.

“I’m beginning to wonder about that,” he said, and walked to the veranda door where he stopped and looked back. “Holt,” he continued, “you don’t deserve to live, and I’ve a strange feeling that you won’t live much longer.” He grinned and passed through the door. His tall figure could be seen stalking across the lawn.

“What the devil did he mean by that?” asked Holt nervously.

“Nothing good for you,” said Sergeant Bennett, with a grim smile. “I wouldn’t be alone with him if I were in your place.”

Munson was looking worried. Just what had Daniel meant, anyway? His remark had made Scott feel jumpy. He shrugged his shoulders. Probably Daniel had only wanted to throw a scare into Holt. Well, Holt was scared enough as it was. No need to paint the lily. He turned to the rather pitiful object of his thoughts and studied his fear-haunted, feverish eyes with their thinly veiled depths of hate. His scrutiny convinced him that Holt’s mind was sick, that the man had already departed from the rational ways of thinking and was keeping to the tracks merely through fear and force of habit. A thin ray of pity momentarily touched Munson. Perhaps, after all, Emily-Jane’s going out had left an empty place in the life of this creature who stood dejectedly before him, as rotten as he was.

“Sit down,” he said in a kindly voice, for he realized that Lane Holt was about to be subjected to a test that would tax the strongest nerves, and he had grave doubts regarding the man’s ability to stand it.

Holt, without speaking, slumped lethargically into an easy chair and kept his eyes on the floor. The kindly tone affected by Munson had increased rather than diminished his fear. It was suggestive of a bountiful meal just previous to execution. Munson could afford to be kindly only when things were going his way. Holt entertained the morbid impression that the two men were looking at him as if he were already dead. He moved uneasily in his chair. His gaze strayed over the floor – anywhere but up.

“Well,” he said at last, irritably, “did you get me here just to look at me? Let’s get this over.”

“All right, Bennett,” said Munson. “You can bring Betty and Tom here now. You’ll find them at the back of the house.”

Bennett was not long in returning with the maid and her lumbering but obedient slave. Munson saw them comfortably seated and made them feel at ease. The expression of fear deepened in Holt’s eyes. He had given the pair one quick glance, but had refused to meet Betty’s accusing gaze.

“Now, Betty,” said Munson in an easy voice, “all you have to do is to sit there and tell your story just as if you were telling it to someone in no way concerned with the case. Understand? Make everything clear, but be sure about your details, and don’t for the love of Pete imagine things. Just stick to what you know, what you actually heard and saw.”

The girl had her story clearly briefed in her mind by this time, and she told it with a simple conviction that left no room for doubting her sincerity. As her participation in the events of the night unfolded, Holt’s eyes gradually crept up from the floor until they rested on Betty’s full red lips as if held there by some terrible attraction. Occasionally Munson interrupted the story to ask Holt a question.

“Did you quarrel, Holt, while you were standing there near the edge of the cliff?”

“No,” came Holt’s unsteady voice, “we didn’t quarrel at all. At first we argued a little, but after a while we gave that up.”

“All right, Betty, go on.”

And Betty went on to the ghastly climax, which seemed more ghastly still because of the stark simplicity with which she narrated it. Holt was on his feet, his face working and lips dry. There was a kind of hopeless desperation in his eyes. He spoke like a man who had no expectation of being believed, yet his words were urgent, pleading.

“She’s wrong,” he said. “They didn’t see that. The whole thing was confused. How could she tell what happened? Right up to the end of her story she sticks to the facts, except about our quarreling. Then at the most important part she deliberately reverses what actually happened. It doesn’t make sense. What reason had I for killing Emily-Jane? I tell you I was fond of her in my way, and she was fond of me. I had nothing to fear from her. You have Sam Stoughten’s letters. There’s a motive for you, stronger than any you can pin on me.”

“But you wanted those letters, Holt,” Munson quietly reminded him.

“Oh, hell, yes!” cried Holt. “Perhaps I did, but that was after the thing had happened. I only thought of them then. I’m a rotter, if you want to have it that way, but I didn’t murder Emily-Jane.”

“Then you mean you won’t confess?” asked Bennett. “You’re going through with it? What’s the sense, man, in the face of all this evidence – two eye-witnesses, your flask at the scene of the crime, your actions after the crime, and your admitted relationship with the dead girl? Why drag out the misery, Holt? It will come to the same thing in the end.”

Munson had remained silent. He preferred to let Bennett try his hand. He was more convinced than ever that Lane Holt was innocent, yet he could not brush aside the testimony of two obviously sincere eye-witnesses. Everything was unsatisfactory about this case. Munson heartily wished he was out of it. Holt turned to him.

“Are you going to arrest me on that?” he asked.

Munson considered while Bennett watched him eagerly. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I’m not sure, but stick around, Holt. We might be wanting you at any minute.”

Holt started to say something, then gave it up as if the effort were too hopeless. His whole being was dipped in a clinging hatred of Daniel Crewe. Everyone was on Daniel’s side. If he could only get back at Daniel. If he could only pin the guilt on him. Holt felt that he would willingly sacrifice anything for that. He left the room unsteadily, holding on to the frame of the door for support. In the library he sat down at Daniel’s great desk and thought. With the hounds of fear rushing across his brain he found that he could still think clearly and to some purpose. Gradually an evil smile twisted his white lips. “They’ll have to believe that,” he said to himself. “There will be no getting round it.”

•   •   •   •   •

Daniel found June in her favorite chair on the lawn. She was doing nothing, absolutely nothing. Her thoughts were adrift in space. And although her expression was calm and composed, Daniel felt that her spirit was tense and waiting. He could not account for this feeling. Yet he knew that June was passing through her own little private hell and that he was responsible. The realization of this was almost more than he could bear. How could he confess when she was fighting silently with the truth in her heart? What was Holt saying to Munson back there in the study? Was he telling what he knew, and would Scott Munson believe him?

June looked up and smiled. “There’s a chair,” she said, pointing to one with her foot. “Drag it over here and fold up your great length in it.”

“Munson has collared Holt,” said Daniel, doing as he was bidden. “They’ve got him in there now.”

“I’d like to hear his story, Dan.”

“So would I, and then again I wouldn’t.”

She turned in her chair and looked at him in a way that was unusual for her. Her eyes were so tender and unhappy … they were lonely, those eyes of June’s. Daniel felt himself powerless to help her.

“You have nothing to fear, Daniel,” she told him. “Don’t mind what lies Holt may tell. Munson will deal with him.”

“Do you believe that, June?”

“Yes, Dan. Stick it out.”

“Together we’ll see it through.”

“We’ll see it through and farther.”

“How about our yacht?”

“Is there such a thing?”

“Yes, June. It’s a swell yacht.”

“Manning?”

“Through Manning.”

She pondered awhile in silence, then, “Well, keep the yacht in mind, Dan.” Her voice broke and she turned her head away. “Although it may be only a crazy hunch.”

His hand was gripping hers. “Come back and fight, June,” he pleaded.

“Half a minute, old dear. I’ll fight.”

“And you know?”

Her head sank on her breast. “Dan,” she whispered, “I’ve always known.”

“Sorry, June.” His voice was dead.

She turned on him fiercely. “Then don’t be sorry. I’m only sorry for you.”

“And me for you, dear.”

A long silence, then June, “We’ll make the grade somehow.”

“In our yacht?”

“Sure,” she smiled. “That yacht’s gotten the best of you.”

“I’ve always been fond of the sea, June, you know.”

She was holding everything back now. Her teeth were set, and her hands gripped the arms of her chair. “I know, Dan. I like it, too.”

“All the world and places,” he murmured, his eyes on the broad blue Sound. “Clear of this dismal damn mess.”

“That’s the way I like to hear you talk. Your old face looks so worn.”

And he rested his head on her shoulder, but he wasn’t very comfortable. Neither was June.

•   •   •   •   •

Since the death of Emily-Jane, meals at Crewe House had been rather sketchy affairs. Attendance had been unreliable. For a long time now Aunt Matty hadn’t known what the world was ever coming to. And no matter how often and thoroughly she washed her hands of everything she was still very much involved.

At luncheon both Holt and Daniel were absent, which, according to Aunt Matty, made it a pretty state of affairs. The head of the house not sitting down at his own table, and his own blood brother gnawing away like a dog and saying never a word.

“But what’s the use of being head of the house unless you can do as you please?” asked June.

Aunt Matty cast her an indignant look. “There isn’t any head to this house,” she pronounced, “and still less tail.”

Sue Stoughten laughed so earnestly over this that Aunt Matty thought she had really been funny. The old lady felt much better.

Munson endeavored to lead Sam into the ways of speech, but Sam, suspecting a trap, was sparing of his words. Bennett, who had stayed for luncheon at Munson’s invitation, gave an admirable demonstration of well-controlled but effective eating. Barney, as Aunt Matty had put it, just gnawed away in stubborn silence.

Then came the shot – the sound of a shot.

White faces lifted and forks suspended. For what were they waiting? No one seemed to know. They were held there because all their instincts told them urgently that they did not want to know. There had been enough of tragedy – enough of death. Keep out of it. Don’t know. Don’t try to find out.

Bennett, however, wanted to know and intended to find out. The sound of the shot had hardly died away before he was out of the dining-room and up the stairs. For only a moment he paused, then ran down the hall to an open door. Daniel was standing in it, a piece of paper crushed in his hand.

“Come back in here with me, Mr. Crewe,” said Bennett in a quietly commanding voice, as he brushed past Daniel and entered the room. Daniel, like a person in a hypnotic condition, turned and followed the detective. Below at the foot of the stairs, Scott Munson sarcastically excused himself as he passed between Officers Shad and Red, each politely insisting that the other ascend first.

Bennett stood in the middle of the room and took in the situation. At a large table Lane Holt sat. He was sprawled out and his head was flung back and he was dead. In his right hand he held a pen, and in his left temple there was a hole made by a bullet fired at close range.

Munson was there now. Mechanically he felt the man’s heart. It would never again harbor hate or fear.

“Well, he’s out of the case,” said Munson, looking regretfully down at the grotesque figure. “This leaves us about half-way up a tree.”

For a moment he looked about him, then he deliberately placed a chair against the wall where he commanded a full view of the room, and sat down.

“Sit down, Daniel,” he said, his voice sounding tired and strained. “Bennett, go to the door and ask those two faces please to withdraw. They confuse me. Tell one of them to telephone the coroner and tell him to bring a doctor. Then come back here and stand by my chair. I want you to see with me.”

When Bennett had dispatched the stunned Shays he returned to Munson’s chair and once more looked about the room.

“Take notes,” said Munson. “I want you to remember everything. Daniel, you say, was just leaving the room when you reached the door. He had a piece of crumpled paper in his hand. Put that down. Now just make brief notes as I go along. Pen in dead man’s right hand. Wound in left temple fired at close range. Handkerchief on floor at left side. Ink bottle open. Service revolver at far end of room under window. Probably thrown there by murderer. Is it your gun, Daniel?” His eyes met Daniel’s and Daniel nodded. “Go on with the notes, Bennett,” said Munson. “Service revolver the admitted property of Daniel Crewe. Now draw a line.” Munson looked up. “All right, Daniel,” he said, then added, “Get this, Bennett.”

“My story’s so simple,” replied Daniel, “it sounds foolish.”

“Tell it,” said Munson.

“I was in my room.” Daniel spoke in a detached, matter-of-fact voice. “Lane Holt called me. His words were: ‘Daniel, please come here.’ He sounded urgent. I got up from the bed and walked across the hall. There was a shot. As I opened the door I thought I heard something scraping across the floor. I entered the room but saw nothing moving. Holt was as he is now. I went to him and saw he was dead. Then I saw what he had been writing and I took the sheet of paper, hoping to get away with it. Bennett stopped me at the door. And” – Daniel smiled sardonically – “that’s all.”

“Bring me the paper, Bennett.”

Daniel relinquished his hold on the paper. It dropped into Bennett’s outstretched hand. He brought it over to Munson, who smoothed it out and read:

Dear Munson:

I am going to hand you this statement to read, because whenever I try to tell you the truth I can see you don’t believe me and then I lose my nerve.

Everything that Betty said was true. I agree in every detail with two exceptions. We did not quarrel. I did not touch Emily-Jane. Daniel Crewe deliberately murdered her, and if you want to find out the facts I dare you to grill Sam Stoughten. At the same time ask him who did the stabbing.

If you’re so damned honest think this over. Daniel Crewe is the murd

At the point where the statement broke off there was a small splash of ink. The lower part of the letter was smeared where the writing had not yet dried.

“Are you ready to go, Daniel?” Munson’s voice was toneless.

“I didn’t do it, Scott.”

“It’s better to be arrested for this murder than the other one.” There seemed to be some hidden significance in Scott’s words.

Daniel left the room with Bennett. Munson sank back in his chair. When Judson, the coroner, arrived with the doctor he was still sitting in the same position.

“Another killing, Judson,” he said. “I’d like to hold the inquest at four tomorrow. Let me see.” He looked at his watch. “That will give me a little less than twenty-seven hours.”

“It looks like a fairly simple case,” Judson observed after he had heard the details. “I’m sorry as hell for Daniel Crewe. He’s a fine lad.” He paused and looked round the room, then said in a puzzled voice, “I wonder what the devil’s got into this old house anyway?”

“You tell me,” said Munson.

•   •   •   •   •

“I didn’t do it, June.” Daniel spoke rapidly while Bennett stood by. He admired Daniel Crewe.

“Can you prove it, Dan?” June’s face was deathly pale, but her voice was as calm as ever and her eyes held no hint of fear.

Daniel shook his head and grinned from complete frustration. “It’s silly,” he said. “It’s so damned pat. Why, it couldn’t look more convincing if I’d dragged him into the dining-room and strangled him before your eyes.”

“What does Scott think?”

“What can he think?” Daniel hesitated, remembering Munson’s words. “He acted sort of funny, though,” he added. “Seemed to have something on his mind.”

“It’s all right,” said June.

“Think so?” said Daniel.

“It’s all right,” she repeated, and kissed him. Then she turned to Bennett and smiled, “Take him away, officer.”

Daniel stepped into the waiting car and was driven down the road. June stood there waving to him until the trees closed over the car.

Barney at his easel watched his brother depart. Save for a slight tightening round the lips his expression did not change.

June sank into a chair and let the tears chase each other down her freckled cheeks. Barney tried to pretend he did not notice her. He began to fidget fretfully on his stool. Finally he put down his brushes and looked at her uncomfortably.

“Don’t do that,” he commanded explosively. “What are you doing?”

“I’m crying, you young fool. Crying like hell.”

“Why?”

“They’ve arrested Daniel.”

“Good. Why?”

“They claim he shot Lane Holt.”

“What’s he doing, anyway – making a hobby of it?”

“Barney, I could kill you.”

“Wish you would, June.” Barney’s voice was sufficiently bitter. He regarded June speculatively for a moment. “Did he do him in?” he asked.

“Holt’s dead,” she replied.

“Good,” said Barney, with undisguised satisfaction.

June smiled in spite of her tears. “You have no soul, Barney.”

For the remainder of the day Barney was unable to paint. He passed most of the time sitting on his brother’s bed.

Only June Lansing knew where he was. She left him entirely alone.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Obviously Murder

“Something scraping across the floor. Something scraping across the floor. Now what in hell did he mean by that?”

Munson, as he wandered about the room, was entertaining himself with the mumblings of his own voice.

“Scraping, scraping, scraping,” he continued under his breath. “What was scraping? Didn’t sound like a lie. Didn’t work in anywhere.”

Once more he returned to his chair and sat down. Why was he so convinced that Daniel had not shot Lane Holt? All the facts cried out against him. Less than three-quarters of an hour before the man was found shot through the head, Daniel had told him he did not deserve to live and had predicted his speedy death. “I have a strange feeling that you won’t live much longer” – those were the exact words he had used. Now, here was Holt dead, obviously murdered.

Then, there was the gun. Munson cast the revolver a disgusted glance. He knew what marks were on that gun – Daniel’s fingerprints. Munson would see about that later. But why had he tossed it over there by the window? Damn fool thing to do. And the bullet the doctor had extracted from Lane Holt’s brain had been shot from Daniel’s revolver. All the pieces fitted together perfectly. And Daniel had been caught with an incriminating statement written by the dead man crushed in his hand.

Judson had put it conservatively when he observed that the case looked fairly simple. It was altogether too simple. Either that, or Daniel, convinced that any moment he would be charged with the murder of Emily-Jane, had decided to make a clean sweep of things.

Munson got up and walked over to the table. He seated himself where Holt had sat, and leveled his eyes on the revolver on the floor twelve feet away, near the window directly in front of him. Munson noticed that the window was about two inches open from the bottom. This fact did not impress him at the moment. He closed his eyes and let the stillness of the room settle round him. He was not thinking now. His brain was merely receiving impressions. Over there on the bed lay a dead man. And just before he had become such a dead man something had happened to his mind. Munson could feel once more the crazy eyes of Lane Holt furtively looking at him. Yes, undoubtedly, the man had been mentally unbalanced, morally and mentally warped through a conflict of fear and hate. Made melancholy, perhaps, from brooding over the death of Emily-Jane. What did this mean? How could he work it in, use it to help Daniel?

Munson took Holt’s statement from his pocket and smoothed it out on the desk. For some minutes he studied the writing. There was something peculiar about that writing, a mechanical difference rather than an expression of the writer’s personality. Well, he’d have to see about that, too. And there was that handkerchief on the floor at the left side of the chair. Subconsciously Munson was laying the foundation of his investigations. Suspicions, impressions and questions were lying fallow in his mind. For the time being he had completely dismissed all consideration of the first murder. That would have to wait, although the motive for the murder of Lane Holt must have sprung from that of Emily-Jane. The two were inseparably linked, results of the same situation.

Leaving the table, he walked over to the bed and drew down the sheet. There was Lane Holt, the once jaunty and debonair lover of Emily-Jane. Shot in the left temple at close range. Why the left temple? Why not? Well, for one thing it was the side nearest the door. Yet because of that very fact it was the most awkward side to approach. Daniel would have been forced to squeeze himself in between the open door and the table. Much easier to go round the other way, much easier and more natural. But Munson was not greatly interested in the bullet hole in Lane Holt’s head. His eyes were intently studying every detail of the man’s hands now lying curled and useless on the spread. Munson bent over and scrutinized those hands. “An immaculate devil,” he thought as his eyes dwelt on the meticulously manicured nails. Then, carefully taking the dead man’s wrists he raised the hands and inspected each finger in turn.

Gradually, yet with increasing momentum, a grin, a grin of almost beatific proportions, broke the severe lines of Scott Munson’s lips. Then the grin, having achieved its triumphant climax, suddenly collapsed. Munson recovered the figure and turned away.

“Oh, hell,” he reflected, and a look of discouragement settled on his face. “What’s the good in getting him off one murder charge if only to bring another one against him?” Still, the other charge would be more difficult to prove than this one. Here everything was all set up. Just waiting for some jury to pounce upon. The murder of Emily-Jane was a great deal more complicated. There were other persons involved. No, he would have to get Daniel out of this scrape no matter what might happen in the future. Very easy to say, but how was he going to do it?

In the kitchen the Shays were hovering over a belated meal. They felt somewhat despised and rejected, having been so summarily dismissed from the scene of the crime. Their appetites remained unimpaired.

“And to think,” remarked Officer Shad impressively, arresting the upward progress of a skilfully laden fork, “just to think that only a few short hours ago I was locked in a desperate struggle with him. My ear will bear the marks of his teeth to its grave.”

“Well, the back of him just escaped bearing the marks of my bullet to its grave,” observed Officer Red. “If it hadn’t been for Mr. Munson it ’ud have gone in plop. I had a dead bead on it.”

“A dangerous case, this,” said Officer Shad. “I wonder who goes next? Looks to me like a sort of a general killing off.”

“They call it the process of elimination,” came sententiously from Red. “They go on and on and on, until only one is left, and then he gets all the money.”

“Whose money?”

“All the money there is.”

“In what?”

“All the money there is in the will.” Officer Red was quite convinced about this. “There’s always a will in cases like these, and that naturally leads to elimination.”

“Naturally,” agreed Shad.

“Now, the way I figure this case out, that guy Holt must have been a collateral cousin. Get me?” Officer Red fixed his companion with a politely skeptical gaze.

“He certainly was mean,” once more agreed Shad. “The way he went after my ear.”

“And being a collateral cousin he comes in under the will,” continued Red. “And that starts all this bumping off business. They’re all after the money, and” – he lowered his voice – “the old lady bears watching. From the way she bustles us about and keeps shooing us out of the house you can tell she doesn’t want us around. No, sir. She’s afraid of us. And did you ever notice how she keeps peering into things like she was looking for something? The will. That’s what she’s after, mark my words.”

He leaned back in his chair with a complacent expression on his face, which, if anything, was a few shades redder due to the exertion caused by eating and talking at the same time.

“I wonder where that will is?” mused Officer Shad. “It would be a feather in our caps if we could find it.”

“Then keep your eye on the old dame,” said the master mind of the pair, “and look in places whenever they let us in the house.”

“It must be a mighty valuable will,” said Officer Shad, “what with two killings and one stabbing already.”

Further elucidation of the case was interrupted by the appearance of Dora. This superior and comely domestic eyed the pair with a look of disgust that bordered almost on loathing.

“Mr. Munson wants you two,” she said. “He’s up in the room with the corpe.”

“The what?” from Officer Red incredulously.

“I said it,” snapped the girl. “The corpe.”

“No, no, my dear,” said the officer gently. “It’s not corpe. The word is corpse.”

“And,” put in Officer Shad admonishingly, “you certainly should get to know that word with nothing else but corpses knocking about here.”

“I wish you were knocking about with them,” retorted Dora, as the officers marched from the room.

Munson was back in his chair when the Shays answered his summons.

“The grounds are unguarded, sir,” announced Shad.

“Well, you can give the grounds a rest for a while,” said Munson. “No one is trying to get away now. I have more important work for you to do.”

Uneasy glances passed between the officers.

“Yes,” continued Munson, “I want you to watch me.”

“You mean,” Shad’s voice was uncertain, “to see that they don’t do you in?”

“Among other things,” replied Munson gravely, “but just now I want Shad to make a circle round that gun down there. Don’t touch it.”

Shad walked down to the gun, then gingerly circled round it, carefully placing his long feet the one in front of the other. Munson watched him abstractedly. Presently he asked, “Now what, may I ask, do you think you’re doing, Shad?”

Shad looked up from his delicate task. “Making a circle around the gun,” he replied. “Like you said.”

“Not like I said at all,” snapped Munson. “Here, take this piece of chalk and draw a circle round the thing.”

“A perfect circle?” asked the officer “or just rough?”

Munson looked at the crouching Shad a long time. No one will ever know what thoughts were passing through his mind, what violent impulses he was controlling. At last he rose wearily and walked down the room. With a piece of white chalk he carefully marked the position of the revolver, then thrusting a long pencil into its barrel he carried it back to his chair. Shad looked at Red with eloquently elevated eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders, then stood up and idly watched his chief.

Scott Munson was humming under his breath. Still humming he raised his eyes and looked so pensively upon the Shays that those two worthies began to shift about uncomfortably. “Come here, boys,” he said pleasantly. “I want you to see what I see in case my testimony requires corroboration.”

The officers allowed themselves to draw near.

“Do you see the trigger guard on this revolver?” asked Munson.

“We do,” vouchsafed Shad, hoping thereby to reinstate himself in the good graces of his chief.

“And do you see a small piece of thin, strong thread attached to it?” Munson could not keep an element of excitement from his voice.

“We do.” This time they spoke in unison.

“Well,” continued Munson, “what do you think it’s there for?”

A heavy silence, at last broken by Officer Shad.

“Maybe,” he said, “there’s two revolvers just alike in the house and they tied that thread on to one of them so they could tell them apart like they do with toothbrushes.”

“And you, Red. What’s your conjecture?”

“I conject,” replied Red brightly, “that the gun was hung on the wall somewhere.”

“Thank you both,” said Munson dryly. “You stay here until I return, and don’t go monkeying round with that body on the bed.”

Both officers hastily disclaimed any intention of so doing. As a matter of fact, since entering the room they had sedulously avoided even glancing at the sheet-covered body. They would have preferred not to have been left alone with it.

When Munson returned he had established the fact that the butt of the revolver bore three clear fingerprints made by Daniel. He had compared them with a set already in his possession. He wondered moodily how he was going to be able to laugh that off.

“Now for a look at the corpse,” he said briskly. “Come over here, boys.”

The boys approached the bed, but it was plain to see that their hearts were not in their feet. Munson pulled down the sheet.

“I want you to pay particular attention to the hands,” he said.

Munson raised the hands so abruptly that the officers started back nervously.

“Did you want us to sniff them?” asked Officer Red.

“That will hardly be necessary now,” replied Munson. “Just look at them. You observe that the two fingers next to the thumb on the left hand are slightly smeared with ink, don’t you?”

Yes, they observed that.

“Well, remember it,” said Munson. “Now, Shad, go over there by the table at the left-hand side of the chair and draw a circle round that handkerchief on the floor. Don’t cut up any more capers.”

This time Shad did splendidly.

“Now come with me,” said Munson. Followed by his staff, he left the room and locked the door. He hurried downstairs to the library and called up Manning on the telephone. Dr. Manning was on the point of leaving for the club, an attractive feminine voice informed Munson. She would get him. She did.

“Now, what is it?” came Manning’s voice.

“Have you heard our latest joke?” asked Munson.

“Oh, it’s you, Munson,” the speaker at the other end of the line replied. “Thought I recognized your voice. No, I haven’t heard a damn thing. Just got up. A swell night. What is it?”

“Lane Holt was shot to death in his room at about one o’clock today. Daniel has been detained at the village lockup pending the inquest. It will be held at four tomorrow afternoon.” Munson spoke tersely.

A series of “Good Gods” dropped heedlessly by the horrified doctor had accompanied Munson’s information. Now that Munson had ceased speaking, Manning had the field to himself. He proceeded to take advantage of it. Finally he drew breath and asked, “But did he really do it, Scott?”

“They have an absolutely water-tight case against him unless I can break it between now and the inquest. You’ve got to help me.”

“Anything. What do you want?”

“Did you ever play golf with Lane Holt?”

Manning’s answer to that and several following questions ended with: “I’ll be on the dot tomorrow to testify to that effect. Any reporters yet?”

“Thanks for reminding me,” replied Scott. “I have just the boys for them. Goodbye, Manning.” He snapped the instrument down and favored his staff with a broad grin. “I’ve a wonderful assignment for you,” he said.

Suspicion sullied the eyes of the officers.

“Yes,” continued Munson. “A wonderful assignment. You go out there on the lawn and keep your eyes open for newspaper men. Don’t let them near the house. They don’t wear badges on their sleeves or cards in their hat bands. They look very much like anyone else when they’re sober, but they don’t know the meaning of truth the way you and I understand it, and they’ll lie you into a cocked hat if you give them a chance. They’ll even go so far as to adopt disguises just to get themselves into the place. Now, I rely on you boys to stop all that. We’ve had trouble enough already. The women are in on this, too. Go out and protect them.”

“Oh, we know how to handle those birds,” began Officer Red. “I remember once—”

“March!” interrupted Munson, and the boys left the room.

Munson went to the window. He had caught a glimpse of June Lansing on the veranda. There she was, all sprawled out in a chair, the whole rangy body of her. And she was looking comfortably miserable. Munson was aware of June’s penchant for lolling away the hours doing nothing or as little as possible and enjoying herself hugely. Now, however, she did not look as if she were greatly enjoying her slothful repose.

Her eyes were open, those funny eyes of hers, but they did not see, or were not conscious of seeing. All receptivity to life and the movements of life seemed to have passed from them. Blankly and flatly they gazed at nothing.

Munson stepped through the French window and quietly approached her. “June,” he asked, “do you happen to know where Daniel kept his revolver?”

June did not stir. She was beyond being startled. “I haven’t the slightest idea, Scott?” she replied coldly.

“June,” said Munson. “Look at me.”

The girl raised her eyes to his.

“I’m working for Daniel in this.”

“Do you mean that, Scott?”

“I’m the only one left to do it, and I’m going to get him off. He’ll be a free man tomorrow.”

“Oh, Scott, are you sure?” She was not much at giving a public demonstration of her feeling, but in this instance she was unable to keep the depth of her anxiety from showing itself in her voice.

“Unless my mind has gone all bad,” replied Scott, “I’m fairly sure I’ll be able to throw a large-sized monkey-wrench into the works.”

“But things look pretty bad for him, don’t they?”

“Couldn’t look worse,” was Munson’s frank reply. “That’s what gives me hope. There’s such a thing as looking too damn guilty.”

“He always keeps his revolver in the right-hand top drawer of the library desk,” said June. “It was there only yesterday. I saw him handling the ugly thing and I made him put it away. Daniel is in no frame of mind to be handling dangerous weapons.”

“Did anyone else see him handling that revolver?” Munson asked quickly.

“No,” replied June. “That is, no one paid any special attention to him. Lane Holt passed the door on his way upstairs. He just glanced in and kept on going.”

“You’d swear to that?”

“Most certainly. Why not? It’s a fact.”

“Thanks, June,” said Munson cheerfully. “You’ve done me a world of good. Also Daniel.”

He returned to the desk in the library and sat down at it. For a long time he surveyed the smooth dark surface before him. There were the leather-tipped blotter, the scissors, and the paper-knife. Several books stood at one end, at the other a roll of blue-prints. Daniel was forever planning the building of something or other and not doing it. And there were the pens. Yes, there were the pens – three of them straying at random across the desk. Those pens. Munson became very still as he looked at them. There was something wrong about those pens. What was it? They looked lost and out of place. He never recalled having seen them that way before, or had he? Damned if he was sure. He reached out a hand and delicately felt the surface of the desk beyond the edge of the blotting paper. Something heavy had rested there once. There were faint scratches. He could feel them and he could see them. He closed his eyes and thought about the desk to the exclusion of everything else. There should be an inkstand. There always had been an inkstand, one with a place for the pens. Funny thing – with his eyes closed he could see it perfectly. There it was. A long flat slab of bronze pierced by two wells. And the base of the stand was grooved to accommodate three pens, to be specific, the three pens now lying in disorder on the desk.

Munson rose quickly and left the room. Betty was in the kitchen drinking tea, but at his request she willingly put down her cup and followed him to the library.

“Betty,” he said, “you take care of this room. I see you messing about here every day.”

“Yes, sir,” replied Betty. “Not exactly messing, Mr. Munson.”

“Of course not. Far from it.” Munson laughed with agreeable hypocrisy. “Just my way of putting it. Now where’s the inkstand, Betty?”

Betty looked at the desk in surprise, then her expression changed to one of indignation. She eyed the desk accusingly.

“Why, it’s gone, Mr. Munson,” she said. “It isn’t there. And it was there this morning.”

“You know that?”

“I know it, sir.”

Munson remained silent, then he turned and paced the length of the room and back. If Lane Holt had taken Daniel’s revolver he might have also taken the inkstand, but there was no proof that he had taken either. And what did he want with the inkstand? There was a bottle of ink in his room. Munson stopped in front of Betty.

“Where were you around one o’clock today?” he asked her.

“Standing out there in the hall,” replied Betty, pointing to a spot just outside the wide door.

“See anything of Lane Holt?”

“I certainly did, sir. From the time I told what Tom and me had seen down at the Rock before him in Mr. Dan’s study I kept looking out for that man. His eyes had scared me proper. So when I saw him coming out of this room, I just eased myself out of his way.”

“Where did he go after he left this room?”

“He went right on upstairs.”

“Was he carrying anything, Betty? Think hard.”

“No, sir. He had his handkerchief in his hand.”

“Was it a large handkerchief, did you happen to notice?”

“Yes, sir, now that you come to mention it, I remember how it hung down.”

“Do you think he could have been using it to cover something he was carrying?”

Betty gave a quick cry of triumph. “That’s it, Mr. Munson,” she said. “I should have known it right off.”

“Why?”

“Because his arm hung flat to his side like it was glued there.”

Munson’s smile of gratification was swiftly changed to one of consternation at the sudden sound of revolvers being discharged at top speed.

“Oh, mother!” cried Betty, flinging her arms round Munson. “We’ll all be murdered now.”

Munson disentangled himself from the throttling embrace of the girl and rushed out to the veranda just in time to see a black-clad figure disappearing down the road at great bounds. Its arms were waving wildly in the air. In the general direction of this industrious figure, Officers Shad and Red were merrily discharging their revolvers. Munson lost no time in reaching the scene of action.

“Now please tell me,” he said in a tired voice, “just what in God’s name is the meaning of this maddened fusillade?”

“A reporter,” said Red briefly, eying his smoking weapon with approval.

“Did he say he was a reporter?”

“He did not,” put in Shad with a sardonic laugh. “That’s the funny part about it. He said he was a preacher. And damned if he wasn’t disguised like one. White collar and all. Kept insisting on seeing Aunt Matty. Said that with all the sorrow that’s visited the house he thought he’d drop over and have a little talk with her. But he didn’t fool us. Not for a minute.”

At this point Officer Red laughed cynically. “No,” he said, “he didn’t get away with it. We told him to beat it, and then we pulled our guns and banged away.”

“Did you swear at him, perhaps?” Munson’s voice was almost timid as he put the question.

“Did we swear?” repeated Shad, and rolled his eyes at his brother-in-arms. “Did we swear? Mr. Munson, you should have heard us. We used every bad word we could think of. He’ll never come back here any more.”

Munson’s hand sought his forehead. “Oh,” he said, and, “Oh!”

“Anything wrong?” asked Officer Red solicitously.

“No, certainly not,” replied Munson. “Everything’s splendid – dandy.” He let his eyes rest on his staff. “Did this man happen to mention any name?” he asked.

“Sure,” said Red promptly. “He called himself the Reverend Williams. Horace Williams in full.”

Horace seemed to strike some responsive chord in both of the officers, for at the very mention of the name they started in laughing, and continued for some time with ever-increasing volume.

The Rev. Mr. Horace Williams. That was the name of the particular man of God Aunt Matty had been hoping would call. Munson remembered it distinctly. She had been expecting him to tell her just what the world was coming to, and now, no doubt, the Rev. Mr. Williams was wondering about that himself.

“Did we do all right, Mr. Munson?” asked Officer Shad, wiping the tears and sweat from his long, lugubrious face.

“Quite all right,” said Munson weakly, “but don’t mention the fact up at the house that you scared the Rev. Mr. Horace Williams out of ten years’ growth. It might get to Aunt Matty’s ears.”

“Then it was a real preacher?” asked Red, his eyes wide.

“I’m very much afraid it was,” Munson smiled faintly.

“Gord,” breathed Officer Shad. “And all those words we used.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

How One Life Went Out

Munson explained everything, but already everyone’s nerves were so finely edged that his words did little to dispel the tension gripping the various members of the household.

Aunt Matty retired flutteringly to her room. Sam, Sue, and June sat in a silent group at the far end of the veranda. Without Daniel they seemed to be lost. They missed his cynical voice and his rather grim banter. All of them were thinking of him sitting alone and worried in the hot, unclean village lockup.

“How’s he going to sleep tonight?” asked June of no one in particular. “He’s much too long.”

“Probably won’t sleep at all,” replied Sam. “He’ll have lots of things to think about.”

“Too many things,” said June.

“We all have,” said Sam. “Wish I could stop.”

“I’ve stopped,” announced Sue. “I can’t think any more even when I want to. My brain has crumbled.”

“He must have done it, June,” Sam’s voice was low, “but damn if I can see why.”

“There were plenty of good reasons for killing Lane Holt,” answered June in a dead voice. “I could have done it myself.”

Sam nodded his head slowly, then his eyes met those of June for one swift glance. The girl’s gaze dropped to the large solitaire sparkling on her engagement finger. Daniel’s last gift. She wondered if it would ever mean anything now. “I felt like that myself,” said Sam, “but I’m always too late it seems.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Sue.

“Oh, nothing much,” he answered. “Only, if Lane Holt had to be killed I’d rather have done it than Dan.”

“Do you enjoy murdering people?” asked his wife, slightly raising her eyebrows. “Must you go sticking your great nose into every murder? And are you anxious to make a widow out of your own wife, or would you prefer to see me dead at your feet, the victim of your own hand?”

This was a long speech for Sue, and not a very pleasant one under the circumstances. Sam smiled conciliatingly upon her.

“No, Sue,” he said, “but I can’t bear the thought of Dan sitting alone down there tonight. He’s done a lot for me – gone through hell and all.”

“Isn’t there any hope?” asked Sue. “What do you think, June?”

“There’s some hope, Sue.”

“What?”

“Scott Munson. He’s for Dan in this.”

“If he is,” put in Sam, “it’s because he has other plans for Dan. That guy’s going to hang us all, and he doesn’t need Lane Holt to help him do it, either.”

“If you keep on being so cheerful and optimistic, Sam,” said his wife, “I’m going to start in screaming and pulling my hair out by the roots.”

“Even that would be a relief,” remarked June.

They sat in silence as the shadows of the trees lengthened and dusk came quietly over the water and gathered round them. The old house was silent now, and in his room Lane Holt was silent, too. But there was no peace. The horror of murder and the fear of death and separation hung on the air. It would soon be night now – black night for Daniel.

•   •   •   •   •

Scott Munson was still thinking about scraping – something scraping across the floor. But that was only one of his perplexities. He was also thinking of inkstands, threads tied to revolvers, ink-stained fingers, dropped handkerchiefs, and left-handed golf players. They were all a part of the same thought. And occasionally across these thoughts bounded the disconcertingly active figure of the Rev. Mr. Horace Williams earnestly retreating down the road. An unfortunate occurrence.

One after another Munson eliminated the various units composing the structure of his thought, until only the bronze inkstand remained, that and the sound of scraping. Suddenly he sat forward in his chair as if listening, then gradually his body relaxed.

“Oh, what an abysmal, rank, noisome novice I have turned out to be,” he told himself. “It has to be there. By all the laws of man and God it can’t be anywhere else. And I should have known it. It was my job to know.”

He rose from his chair and casually collected his staff. The Shays were only too willing to be collected. They had grown weary of looking out for reporters, and were ready to do something else now – any old thing. The Shays were fond of change. Routine palled on their vibrant, sensitive natures.

“Come with me,” said Munson.

“What’s up, chief?” asked Officer Red.

“We’re going to look for an inkstand,” he answered.

The staff exchanged significant glances. What a silly occupation for three full-grown men. This Munson was mad indeed.

Munson led them across the lawn and round the house until they stood directly beneath the side window of the room in which Lane Holt lay dead. Here there was a brick-faced shaft running down against the side of the house about five feet below the surface of the lawn. A boarded-up window was set into the shaft. It opened up into the cellar and was obviously used at one time for purposes of ventilation, but as that section of the cellar was now no longer used neither shaft nor window had any particular reason for existing.

In the rapidly fading light Munson peered down into the shaft and saw that it was half filled with several seasons’ accumulation of dead leaves, a direct reflection on the executive ability of Griggs and the enterprise of Tom, his invaluable assistant.

“Couldn’t have been better suited to his purpose if he had dug the hole himself,” soliloquized Munson, as he inspected the shaft. “How dumb I’ve been! It’s a plain case of galloping senility.”

His inspection finished, he turned to the Shays and considered their unlovely figures.

“I imagine you’re better designed for shaft work, Shad,” he said. “Red would fill it up and wouldn’t be able to bend. So just get down in there and don’t come out until you bring an inkstand with you.”

“It’s a nasty-looking place,” observed the officer fastidiously. “Might be more than inkstands down there.”

“Well,” said Munson, “if you find a body or anything else interesting bring it along, too. In you go, my man.”

And in went Shad, his hearty disapproval of the entire procedure eloquently marked on his face.

“Now grope around in that rubbish and produce an inkstand,” commanded Munson.

“With my bare hands?” asked Shad in a tone of incredulity.

“I don’t care if you grope with your teeth, so long as I get my inkstand,” replied Munson. “Make it snappy.”

“Well, of all the things,” murmured Shad, as he shrinkingly bent to his task.

His groping was soon over. Virtually the first object his hand encountered was the heavy bronze inkstand, partially covered with leaves.

“Here it is,” he exclaimed with infinite relief, as he passed the stand up to Munson, who received it with a glow of triumph.

Round the bronze slab was tied a long piece of string on the free end of which was attached a strand of strong, thin thread.

“That pretty well settles it,” said Munson, winding the string round the inkstand. “Our day’s work is done. You two had better go back to the kitchen and rustle up some grub.”

This suggestion, the officers later agreed, was the only reasonable one they had ever heard Munson make. As they were about to follow it, Red stopped, unable to restrain his curiosity.

“Might I ask what you wanted with that old chunk of metal, Mr. Munson?” he asked.

“Nothing much,” replied Munson carelessly. “Just to keep an innocent man from being charged with murder and eventually going to the chair.”

With a half-frightened look at the object now safely tucked in the crook of Munson’s arm, the officers tiptoed through the darkness on the most cheerful mission of a long and trying day.

•   •   •   •   •

The inquest into the death of Lane Holt occasioned a wider show of interest than had the one caused by the shocking departure of Emily-Jane. And this hardly seemed fair. Certainly Emily-Jane would have held it against Holt had she been in a position to do so. However, it was not altogether Holt’s fault. He had not planned the inquest. The knowledge that Daniel Crewe was being detained pending the verdict of the jury had spread rapidly. The local inhabitants refused to consider the possibility of his guilt, and they attended the inquest for the sole purpose of showing that fact no matter what nonsense the coroner’s jury might be led to believe.

When Daniel appeared in the company of Dr. Manning, a low murmur of voices ran through the long library. Heads were thrust in at the French windows and sympathetic eyes followed the progress. Without any effort on his part Daniel had made himself a popular figure in the community. The loyalty of the two brothers and their life together at the old Crewe home had long been a subject of interest in many homes. The two of them were much a part of the place, very closely associated with the life of the countryside.

Tall and haggard, Daniel sat between June and Manning. He had not slept and his eyes were sunken, but they looked on Coroner Judson with interested composure, in which there was no suggestion of the anxiety he felt. He had thought the long night through and still was unable to see how he was going to clear himself of the murder of Lane Holt. There was not a scrap of evidence in his favor. Fate had stacked the cards skilfully against him. For some odd reason his position reminded him of “The Case of Sergeant Grischa.” It was so hopeless and at the same time so useless – so tragically inane.

At the back of the room Barney at the last moment slid into a seat and found himself dangerously within the influence of the large eyes of one small Sally Brent. Today, however, she contented herself with regarding the crumpled, untidy figure furtively. After the exchange of quick, shy smiles, both pretended the other had gone away. They were not successful at this.

Scott Munson had placed himself strategically the better to be able to confer with Coroner Judson, whose methods of procedure were inclined to be informal and rather absent-minded.

After Dr. Wood had finished giving his professional testimony, establishing the fact that Lane Holt had died as the result of a bullet from a revolver fired at close range, Judson asked: “Would it have been possible, Dr. Wood, for the deceased to have done it himself?”

“Easily possible,” replied the doctor, “but for two exceptions: the bullet entered the left temple and the revolver was found lying at least twelve feet from the body. Inasmuch as the deceased died instantly he could hardly have so disposed of the gun. Furthermore, a right-handed man would not have shot himself in the left temple.”

Dr. Wood stepped down and was followed by Sergeant Bennett whose story of the shooting was brief but devastating to Daniel. A little after one o’clock in the afternoon while at luncheon he had heard the shot. He had reached the scene so quickly that Daniel Crewe had been unable to escape from the room. This had obviously been his intention, for he, Bennett, had stopped him at the door. Bennett had found in Daniel’s hand an accusing statement written by the dead man. The statement had not been finished.

“Is this the statement, sergeant?” asked the coroner, extending the crumpled sheet of paper.

“It is, sir.”

The statement was then read to the jury, and at its conclusion a look of sorrow and consternation settled on many faces in the room. The case was now wide open. Scott Munson was evidently ready for a showdown. Daniel felt the walls growing higher and higher around him and above him. Soon he would be completely shut off and bricked in, yet he gave no indication of the hopelessness he was feeling.

“Sergeant Bennett,” asked the coroner, “did you ever hear Daniel Crewe say anything that would lead you to believe he had designs on the life of the deceased?”

Only for a moment did Bennett hesitate, then he answered clearly: “I did, sir. Within an hour of Holt’s death and in the presence of one other witness Daniel Crewe told Holt that he didn’t deserve to live and that he doubted if he would live very much longer.”

A feeling of even greater discouragement ran through the room.

“Are you convinced, Bennett, that no one else could have been with the deceased at the time of his death?” came the voice of the coroner.

“We were all at luncheon together,” replied Bennett. “The servants have been accounted for.”

“And you are equally certain the deceased could not have taken his own life?” continued Judson.

“I see no way he could have done it, sir.” Bennett spoke with quiet conviction.

“And you say Daniel Crewe admitted ownership of the revolver from which the bullet was fired?”

Many of the spectators felt like shouting or running away, so logically, so inevitably, was the coroner leading up to the only conclusion that could be drawn. Manning gripped Daniel’s right arm. “Hold hard, old sport,” he whispered. “They don’t know the half of it yet.” Daniel grinned appreciatively. June Lansing was white and rigid. Her eyes dwelt pleadingly on Scott Munson, who appeared to be entirely unmoved by Bennett’s evidence.

“He did,” said Bennett. “Mr. Crewe admitted ownership of the revolver from which the bullet was fired.”

“That will be about all, Sergeant Bennett,” said the coroner, looking a trifle discouraged himself. “Now I’d like to have Betty Harrison come forward.”

Betty faced the coroner and his gentlemen of the jury without the flicker of an eye. She was there to do her best. She was determined to do her best. Nothing could induce her to change the mind she had already so completely made up. Betty was going to lie like the very devil, and she did not much care who knew it. She was going to lie and keep on lying. To her it seemed the only honest thing left to do. Guilty or not guilty, Mr. Daniel was right whatever he did – right in the eyes of God as well as her own, which to Betty’s way of thinking, was equally if not more important.

Mr. Judson considered his notes for a moment. It was his duty to make the motive for the murder clear to the jury. This, thought Judson regretfully, was only too easy to do.

“One moment, Betty,” he said. “I want Sergeant Bennett back here for one more question.” Betty was given a near-by seat. Bennett took the chair by the coroner’s table.

“Bennett,” asked the coroner, “did you hear the deceased accuse Daniel Crewe of the murder of Miss Seabrook?”

“I did,” replied Bennett. “Holt accused Mr. Crewe of the murder of Miss Seabrook. There were three witnesses present. You have the names, Mr. Judson.”

“All right, Bennett,” said the coroner. “Come on back, Betty.” When the girl was seated he continued, “Did you hear the deceased accuse Mr. Daniel of the murder?”

“I’m not the one to put words into a dead man’s mouth,” answered Betty virtuously.

“But Sergeant Bennett was present at the same time, Betty, and he says he heard the accusation,” the coroner observed mildly.

“Then let him put words into a dead man’s mouth,” conceded Betty. “I won’t.”

It was a relief to laugh a little. The spectators took advantage of the opportunity. Mr. Judson looked perturbed.

“How far were you sitting from the deceased, Betty?” he asked.

“As far as I could,” came Betty’s prompt response, “but not far enough to miss a single word he said.”

“Then you didn’t hear him accuse Mr. Daniel of murder?” persisted the coroner.

“I did not,” replied Betty, and settled herself in her chair as if she were prepared to fight it out on that line until the Day of Doom.

Mr. Judson shrugged his shoulders and with baffled eyes looked out over the room. “She says she didn’t hear him,” he remarked to no one in particular. “Didn’t hear him.”

“He couldn’t have said it,” cut in Betty, “because I saw him commit the murder with my own two—”

“That will do, Betty,” Mr. Judson almost shouted. “You go right away now. Thomas Shanks.”

As Thomas Shanks passed the indomitable girl, she deliberately stopped and transfixed him with her eyes. The boy nodded violently and lumbered to the chair.

“Tom,” began the coroner in a kindly voice, “did you hear the deceased accuse Mr. Daniel of murder?”

“N-n-no,” chattered Tom, then after reorganizing himself, continued, “N-n-no.”

“Are you stammering now, Tom?” asked Judson, “or just trying to be emphatic?”

“I-I-I—” Tom was embarking on the choppy seas of speech when the coroner interrupted him.

“Let’s do it this way, Tom,” he suggested. “You just nod up and down for yes” – here Judson demonstrated and Tom’s head solemnly followed his example – “and sidewise for no.” Again the dumb show was repeated. “Good,” said the coroner. “Now. Did you hear the deceased – you know what the deceased means, Tom?” Tom shook his head. Judson reached in his pocket and produced a large handkerchief. He, too, seemed to be going through the process of reorganization. “Well, in this case, Tom,” he explained with admirable gentleness, “it means Lane Holt. Did you hear him accuse Mr. Daniel of murder? Up and down, yes, Tom. Sidewise, no. Remember.”

Betty had half risen from her chair. She was glaring at Tom and industriously shaking her pretty head. As if responding to some dynamic cheer leader Tom followed her example. With a satisfied smile she sank back in her chair, and the coroner instructed Tom to step down as speedily as possible.

“Mr. Daniel Crewe,” called Judson, and the room became hushed as Daniel took the chair.

“Now, Mr. Crewe,” said the coroner with a marked display of deference, “would you mind giving us your version of the death of Mr. Lane Holt?”

“Certainly not,” replied Daniel, smiling at the coroner, and when he had finished his story even his best friends found it difficult to place any great faith in it. Yet Daniel had apparently spoken with the utmost candor and had attempted neither to evade nor to stress any particular point. The jury looked unimpressed, and Mr. Judson gave the impression of an exceedingly dismayed man performing an unpleasant duty.

“Then you admit,” he said, when Daniel had finished, “that you appropriated the statement which the deceased was writing at the time he met his death and which specifically accused you of the murder of Miss Seabrook?”

“There’s no good in denying it,” replied Daniel, with engaging frankness. “It was both an unwise and unethical thing to do, but in the confusion of the moment my brain acted instinctively. The self-protection idea, you know. I was convinced that Lane Holt was not responsible for his actions at the time of his death, and I saw no reason for his written ravings to get into the hands of those who might attach undue importance to them. Frankly, I hardly realized the paper was in my hand, when Sergeant Bennett stopped me at the door.”

Daniel left the witness chair much worse off than when he had seated himself in it. There seemed to be no hope left. It was obvious to all now that the jury had no choice in the matter. It would have to return a verdict of murder, naming Daniel Crewe. In the back of the room little Sally Brent was weeping silently into her scarf. She had no handkerchief. She never had. Barney was looking at her uneasily and wishing she would go away. There was a pause in the proceedings while Scott Munson conferred with the coroner. Presently Judson turned to the jury.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I want you to give your undivided attention to some evidence about to be presented by the next few witnesses. Mr. Munson will please take the chair.”

“At the moment,” Munson told the jury, “I want to stress only two points and the first one is: the pen with which the deceased was writing was found in his right hand, yet there were ink smears on the two fingers nearest the thumb on his left hand. The second point is that the deceased died as a result of a bullet entering his left temple.”

“Mr. Munson,” inquired the coroner, “whose fingerprints did you find on the revolver that killed Lane Holt?”

“Those of Daniel Crewe,” said Munson calmly.

“Dr. Manning, please.”

Munson relinquished his seat to Manning, who included the entire room in his benign smile. He was attired as meticulously as if he were going to some delicate and difficult tryst at which a successful seduction might turn on the set of the shoulders of his coat or the stripe in his silk shirt. Even the bud in his lapel had been thoughtfully selected.

“Dr. Manning,” asked the coroner, “did you ever play golf with the deceased?”

“I did, sir,” answered Manning. “He told me the first time I played with him that he was left-handed.”

“And did you ever play bridge with the deceased?” continued the coroner.

“I did, sir. He held his cards with his right hand and played them with the left, which is just the reverse of the manner in which right-handed people play.”

“Did you ever see the deceased write?” asked the coroner.

“On several occasions, sir,” replied Manning, “and on each occasion he wrote with his left hand. He was signing his name to chits at the club.”

“Then, in your opinion, the deceased was left-handed?” inquired the coroner.

“Beyond any question of doubt,” said Manning.

“Thank you, Dr. Manning.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Miss June Lansing, please.”

When June had calmly seated herself, Judson turned to her and asked, “Miss Lansing, when was the last time you saw the revolver that killed the deceased?”

“Yesterday,” replied June. “Mr. Daniel Crewe had it in his hand. He was examining it in the library and I asked him to put it away.”

“Did he do so?”

“He put it in the upper right-hand drawer of his desk in the library.”

“Did anyone else witness him do so?”

“Mr. Holt was passing the door at the time. I remember he looked in.”

“Thank you, Miss Lansing. Miss Betty Harrison, please.”

Betty, formulating a lot of new lies to be used if and when necessary, took the chair.

“Betty,” asked the coroner, “when did you notice the disappearance of an object from Mr. Crewe’s desk?”

This seemed fair enough to Betty, so she answered truthfully. “Yesterday afternoon,” she replied. “Might have been about three. Mr. Munson called my attention to it.”

“Was the object on the desk in the morning previous to the death of Mr. Lane Holt?”

“Yes, sir. I saw it there myself.”

“And is this the object, Betty?” The coroner tapped the bronze inkstand with his pencil.

“It is, sir, but it didn’t have that string around it then.”

“Betty, do you recall when you last saw the deceased alive?”

“It was just before luncheon yesterday, Mr. Judson. He was coming out of the library and he went upstairs.”

“Did he have anything in his hand?”

“His handkerchief, sir.”

“Did he give you the impression of concealing some heavy object beneath the handkerchief?”

“He did, sir.”

“What gave you that impression?”

“The way his arm hung by his side. It didn’t move natural-like. Looked weighted down.”

“Sure about all this, Betty?”

“I’m sure,” said Betty, and the coroner excused her with a feeling of no little relief. “Officer Shay,” he called.

Two figures proceeded majestically down the room. They took their time about it, to enable everyone to have a good opportunity to gaze upon them. When they brought up against the coroner’s table the taller of the two figures uttered one pithy word, “Which?”

“Which what?” asked Mr. Judson, looking up from his notes.

“Which one?” explained Shad.

Munson leaned over the table and spoke in a low tone to the bewildered official. “The one known as Shad,” he said.

“But I know all about it, too,” protested Red. “Don’t you want me?”

“No,” said the coroner.

“Not at all?”

“No. Never.”

Officer Red, heavy with disappointment, turned away from the table, while the lucky Shad seated himself in the coveted chair and crossed his long legs. He gave the appearance of a man both ready and willing to discuss at length any topic the coroner might care to bring up.

“Officer Shad – I mean, Officer Shay,” asked Judson, “when did you find this object?”

“Well, it’s a funny thing, Mr. Judson,” began Officer Shad in a slow, reminiscent manner. “It’s a funny thing about—”

“It isn’t a funny thing,” snapped the coroner. “It’s an extremely serious thing. Answer my question.”

Shad looked terribly hurt. “About dusk, sir,” he answered. “It was yesterday.”

“Where did you find it?”

“In a shaft, sir, directly beneath the deceased’s window.”

“The window facing his table?” asked the coroner.

“The same, sir.”

“Was this string attached to it then?”

“It was, sir.”

“And the revolver, Shay,” continued Judson, “was this strand of thread wound round its trigger guard when you first saw it?”

“It was, sir.”

“That’s all, Shay. Thank you.”

It wasn’t much, thought Shad, but at least it was better than nothing. Munson returned to the chair.

“Go on, Munson,” said the coroner, “explain it your way.”

Munson turned to the jury. “It has been proved,” he said, “that the deceased was left-handed in spite of the fact that the pen was found in his right hand. It has been shown that he had a knowledge of the whereabouts of Daniel Crewe’s revolver. It is known that just before his death he was seen leaving the library carrying his handkerchief in his hand. Betty Harrison has testified that she gained the impression he was concealing some heavy object under the handkerchief. This heavy inkstand that vanished from the library was later found in a shaft directly below the window facing the desk in Lane Holt’s room. This long string was attached to the inkstand. At its free end there is a strand of thin but strong thread. The same kind of thread is wound round the trigger guard of the revolver. On the floor at the left-hand side of the chair in which the deceased was sitting at the time of his death his handkerchief was found. The fingers usually employed in writing by the deceased were smeared slightly with ink – but they were on his left hand. These statements are all facts. Oh, yes” – Munson paused and thought for a moment, then continued – “The window facing the table in the room occupied by the deceased was about two inches open from the bottom at the time of his death. Now, gentlemen, with these facts clearly in mind I will show you exactly how Lane Holt met his death if you will accompany me to the room he occupied.”

When the jury and several members of the press were assembled in the dead man’s room, Munson sat down at the table and with a new strand of thread joined the free end of the string to the trigger guard of the revolver. Making sure that the other end of the string was securely attached to the inkstand, he raised the window and carefully lowered the stand over the shaft directly below. He then pulled the window down within two inches of the sash. Holding the string made taut by the weight of the inkstand, he returned to the table and placed his handkerchief round the butt of the now unloaded revolver. He sat down at the table and, after a little manipulation with the handkerchief, placed the revolver against his left temple.

“Remember,” he remarked, “Lane Holt was left-handed, which I am not. He did this much better, much easier.”

Then he picked up the pen in his right hand, pulled the trigger of the revolver and relaxed his grip. The handkerchief fluttered to the floor, and the revolver, pulled by the weight of the heavy inkstand, went scraping across the matting until it reached the window, where the thread snapped, allowing the gun to fall back to the floor.

“A nutty idea, wasn’t it?” Munson’s voice broke the silence that followed this simple but convincing demonstration of how Lane Holt had died. “Well, over there on the bed lies all that is left of the crazy brain that figured it all out – but,” Munson added, “he didn’t quite get away with it, his last dirty trick.”

With an odd smile he rose and went to the door.

“I wonder,” he said, pausing, “who first told us not to speak ill of the dead?”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Munson Sits Alone

“Goodbye, Barney.” Sally Brent extended a timid hand. “Silly, isn’t it? We haven’t even said hello … and now it’s goodbye.”

The inquest was over, and people were flocking around them on the veranda. Barney was completely dazed. He was experiencing a high state of uselessness. He had to do something about this girl’s hand, but instead of doing anything he contented himself by peering at the small, outstretched palm as if it were some novel specimen of fish.

“It’s a hand, Barney,” said Sally solemnly. “You’re supposed to shake it.”

Barney knew all about shaking hands, but it struck him as being rather foolish to be shaking Sally’s. Sally was always around somewhere if he wanted her. Nevertheless, he permitted himself to be inveigled into accepting the proffered fingers.

“I’m glad about Daniel,” Sally went on, hoping she might at last hear the sound of Barney’s voice.

Barney stiffened. His expression, the girl thought, had suddenly grown a little bitter. “There are too many people,” he complained. “I don’t like all these people. How’s your motorboat?”

One might have thought he was inquiring about an ailing aunt or mother. However, Sally’s motorboat deserved a certain amount of respectful solicitude. It was one of the fastest on the Sound, and with little Sally at the wheel one of the maddest.

“Swell,” replied Sally. “Come over and take a ride with me soon.”

“Perhaps,” said Barney vaguely. “One of these days.”

“Well, goodbye, then, Barney.” Sally’s eyes were at their brightest.

“So long, Sally.”

The small creature turned away. Well, that was a start, at any rate. Not much, but a start. It would have to do for now. Barney was still woefully confused. She would have to wait until he was a little more like himself. Sally was quite willing to wait. Fundamentally she was a sensible girl. Most women are, when it comes to getting what they want. And Sally knew what she wanted. Also she knew how to set about getting it.

Barney looked after her as she threaded her pert little way neatly down the veranda. That was Sally Brent. Barney decided he did not dislike the girl. Rather a nice little thing. No brain, but harmless. Then he turned and regarded everybody reproachfully. “Please hurry away from here,” was clearly expressed in his eyes. And when at last the house had relapsed into its accustomed tranquillity, he hurried indoors and returned with his easel. In front of this he crouched, his eyes caressing the canvas. Presently he began to paint as if prompted by some inner voice.

•   •   •   •   •

When Scott Munson left the room after demonstrating the method and manner of Lane Holt’s death, he did not return to the library. At the moment of triumph he was in a bitter mood. There was still another murder to be solved, and this time he would not be on the side of his friend Daniel Crewe. He would be out to get Daniel, and Munson felt that the time was drawing near. A moment of freedom again, then darkness and despair. What a tough break. What a miserable situation.

He moved to one of the French windows and looked into the library. There was Manning, the libidinous old fool, looking as if he’d just swallowed the canary. What was he smirking at, anyway? Munson idly shifted his gaze. Oh, yes, that was it. Not a bad leg either. One could depend on Manning’s good taste in these matters. The jury was back now. There could be only one verdict. Evidently so thought the jury for, without any further taking of testimony, it attributed the death of Lane Holt to a self-inflicted wound from a bullet entering the brain through the left temple.

As Daniel’s friends gathered round him, extending hands and offering congratulations, Munson witnessed the scene ironically. He wondered what Daniel was thinking deep down in his heart. These good people believed that everything was over now, everything but the shouting, when in reality everything was just beginning. And there was Sam Stoughten, suspect number two. Sam was not looking so cheerful as the occasion might seem to warrant. As a matter of fact, Sam was relieved but feeling far from hilarious. “If that devil Munson is as clever as all that,” he was thinking to himself, “what chance have we got against him? He’ll have us all strung up before the end of the week.” He did not bother Daniel at the moment, but picked his way to the veranda, where to his ill-concealed disgust he encountered the object of his thoughts. Munson favored Sam with a long, deep, and penetrating scrutiny, under the intensity of which his depression became even more depressed.

“Been getting drunk lately?” asked Munson.

“Chuck it, Scott,” said Sam. “Don’t crow. You turned a neat trick this time. Things looked bad for Daniel.”

“Looked?” replied Munson.

To Sam’s relief he was joined by his wife, June, and Daniel. June Lansing was the happiest one of the group. Scott found himself wondering about that.

“Scott Munson,” she said, “you’re a wizard. I feel almost as if you’d saved Dan’s life.”

“Dan saved his own life this time,” replied Munson, looking unsmilingly at Daniel. “I hope he’ll be as successful in the future.”

“Thanks,” said Daniel dryly. “I’ll do my damnedest, Scott.”

“I’m afraid you’ll need it,” responded Munson. He was actually angry with Daniel for having placed him in the position in which he found himself. If Daniel hadn’t been so hopelessly pig-headed, everything might have been different. And Munson had given him every chance, practically begged him for his confidence.

June did not relish the element of grimness underlying the exchange of remarks between the two men. “How do you mean Daniel saved himself?” she asked Munson.

“He told me he heard something scraping across the floor,” replied Munson. “That piece of gratuitous information kept turning up in my mind. I was continually hearing that scraping. If I hadn’t been so dumb I’d have figured out the whole thing the moment I saw the strand of thread attached to the revolver. What puzzled me was that Daniel didn’t mention hearing a bump when the revolver fell back to the floor. You must have heard a bump, Dan.”

“I heard it,” said Dan, “but at the time I didn’t think it important. It was just by good luck I happened to mention the scraping.”

“Well, you scraped yourself out with your ears this time,” observed Munson sardonically, as he turned from the group. “And,” he added, looking back, “you’ve gotten to know what the inside of a cell looks like.”

“I can’t get over the feeling that he’s a mean man,” said Sam Stoughten. “A wise-cracking snake in the grass.”

After dinner that evening Munson sat alone. For his cogitations he had selected a secluded section of the veranda. When daylight came, a large collection of stubs from methodically and occasionally irritably smoked cigarettes could be seen sprinkling the lawn in the neighborhood of the chair in which Munson had sat.

Scott realized with a sinking sensation that the time for a final showdown was at hand. Yet some nebulous, vaguely revealed idea at the back of his mind was warning him to go slow. It was like a voice urging him to take one more look before he leaped finally and irrevocably.

Lane Holt was eliminated. That was flat. And the elimination of Lane Holt immediately suggested a simple, attractive, and highly dishonorable way out of an appalling situation, one that might eventually prove to be even more appalling than Munson cared to admit to himself.

Lane Holt was out of the way, but Tom and Betty remained behind to damn his name eternally. The story of these two eye-witnesses was made ready to hand for Scott Munson’s purposes, should he be weak enough to take the easy way out of his difficulties. However, Scott Munson was not so constituted. He had said he was going to go through with this case regardless of whom it affected. He had given his word to the district attorney he would play no favorites. But stronger than any promptings of honor, any considerations of friendship or professional achievement, was a grim element in his spiritual as well as intellectual composition that forced him to go through with a job once he had tackled it. Consequences did not count. If the true solution of a certain problem would have resulted in the destruction of the human race, Munson would have been an extremely uncomfortable person to have around. In spite of the restraining influence of common sense and kindness, his strongest instincts would have driven him at that problem even though its solution involved his own elimination together with the remainder of less inquisitive mankind.

Munson had never attached much importance to Lane Holt’s part in the tragedy of Emily-Jane. He had never credited the man with sufficient emotional drive to enable him to commit the act. The murder of Emily-Jane had been no easy task. It had been, as a matter of fact, far more difficult psychologically, far more opposed to a man’s natural instincts, than a murder done in the heat of passion. The cowardly element involved in her murder must have been recognized and overcome by the person contemplating the deed. The murder, when considered apart from the circumstances surrounding it and the motives leading up to it, was of a particularly cruel and brutal nature. Just the right kind of murder for such a creature as Emily-Jane.

Nor did Munson place any great reliance in the obviously biased story of Betty Harrison. Up to a certain point the girl had remained veracious, but at the critical moment her natural honesty had cracked under the strain of her loyalty to Daniel and her ill will against Lane Holt. Her vision had become considerably impaired. Tom Shanks, her slave, was hopeless. He saw through the eyes of Betty and thought with Betty’s brain.

Although Scott Munson was morally certain that Daniel had murdered Emily-Jane, he found it more difficult to eliminate Sam Stoughten from his thoughts. Sam had already to his credit one attempted murder. Beyond any question of doubt it had been his hand that had driven the knife through the curtain and into Daniel’s arm on the night of the dance. Sam had intended that knife to put a very definite and speedy end to the triumphal but ruthless progress of Emily-Jane. He had been alone and unobserved in the dining-room with immediate access to a diversity of knives. He had had control of the light switches. He had a clear mental picture of the group of three and of Emily-Jane’s exact position in that group. A long-bladed dinner knife had been used. Sam’s fingerprints had been found on its handle.

Sam had motives enough and more to energize his hand. His loyalty to Daniel was not the least of them. That motive was, perhaps, even stronger than any personal consideration. Stoughten was Daniel’s confidant. Better than anyone else he had known what dark, unhappy thoughts were troubling his friend’s mind. So strong was his affection for Daniel he had proved himself capable of attempting murder himself rather than to let Daniel become involved. He knew that his old roommate was snared in the net so skilfully cast by Emily-Jane. Sam further knew that Daniel would never let her marry Barney. Step by step Sam had seen the situation mounting to a climax. He had been on the inside all along. He had shared Daniel’s thoughts and had been aware of his unsuccessful attempts to persuade Emily-Jane to give up Barney.

Munson recalled that brief passage at arms between Emily-Jane and Sam Stoughten on the veranda of the club-house. That conversation had dealt with letters – Sam’s letters to Emily-Jane. The existence of those letters alone constituted sufficient motive for murder. As long as that slim packet remained in possession of Emily-Jane there would not be a carefree minute in Sam Stoughten’s life. And Sam had not been in his room at the time of the murder. He had been out in the night and had lied most uneffectually about his movements.

Scott Munson realized that he could present such a strong case against Stoughten to any jury that a conviction of first degree murder would result on the first ballot.

Yet, in spite of this, in spite of all the damning evidence Munson could so easily produce, he knew in his heart that Sam Stoughten had not murdered Emily-Jane. But he was also equally certain that Sam had been present at the time of the murder, that he had been close at hand and witnessed the whole thing. Sam had been the figure that had backed into the bushes. Munson was sure of this, and he was no less sure that within a few days now he would force Sam to say what he had seen.

With Sam out of it there remained only Daniel, and several times since the murder he had tacitly admitted his guilt. There was hardly anything left for him to do. The trail he had left behind him could have been picked up and followed by the veriest novice. Daniel had gone out of his way to supply an abundance of clues. His motive for murdering Emily-Jane had been even stronger than Sam’s. And ever since the murder Daniel had conducted himself like a man whose soul had been forfeited to the devil. Previous to the death of Emily-Jane, Scott Munson had clearly seen murder in Daniel’s eyes. After her death, Munson had seen in the eyes of his friend the tortured conscience of a man who had taken a human life against all his natural instincts; for no matter how strongly convinced of the rightness of his act Daniel might have been intellectually, it was plain to Scott Munson that his being cried out against it.

Once more Munson saw Daniel standing rigid and horror bound before that accusing picture being painted by Barney. There stood a murderer if Munson had even seen one. An open confession of his guilt was stamped on his drawn face.

Daniel Crewe a murderer! Munson rose abruptly and in the darkness paced the veranda. Murder with premeditation, and yet when viewed in a certain light Daniel’s mad act had been about the greatest sacrifice one man can make for another. It had been a sacrifice greater than death itself, for even if Daniel escaped the chair he would carry his guilt in his heart with him through life. And the awful memory of that night on High Point Rock would always linger in his eyes and dwell deep in his thoughts. There would be nights when Emily-Jane would return to Daniel to taunt and torture him, and Daniel in his dreams would become a murderer again.

Pacing there in the darkness, Munson realized all this, and he understood the subtle ramifications of this so-called crime. What a rotten hand for life to have dealt to a decent player like Dan.

The cigarette Munson tossed aside was one of those most irritably smoked. It had been a thoroughly unsatisfactory cigarette. Munson stopped pacing long enough to contemplate its tiny light glowing in the grass. He was well rid of that cigarette. He continued down the veranda to the far end. When he returned to his chair he found it occupied by a dark, motionless figure.

“Who’s that?” he demanded sharply.

“Stoughten,” came the quiet reply. “Didn’t know I had taken your chair, Munson. I wanted to be alone to think.”

“Well, you’ve a devil of a lot to think about, Sam,” said Munson. “I wouldn’t care to be entertained by the thoughts that are passing through your mind at this moment.”

“Nor I by yours,” rejoined Stoughten. “Draw up a chair and sit down, Scott.”

Munson found a chair for himself, and for some minutes the two men sat smoking in silence.

“Well,” asked Sam at last, “who did it, Munson?”

“Either you did it or Dan,” replied Scott bluntly.

“Any particular preference?” Sam inquired.

“I’m playing no favorites,” said Munson. “The both of you look guilty as hell to me.”

“Scott” – Sam’s voice was serious – “suppose I should tell you that Daniel had no hand in the affair. Suppose I could convince you that I was present at the time of the murder. Suppose I could prove to your entire satisfaction that, although he may have intended to murder Emily-Jane, he did not actually do it. Would you, under those circumstances, lay off of Dan?”

“You’d have some damn tall proving to do, Sam,” replied Munson, “and if you did succeed in convincing me, I’d have only one choice left.”

“And that choice?” Sam had lowered his voice.

“To arrest you on a charge of murder,” said Munson.

Sam stiffened slightly in his chair. When he spoke again it was almost as if he were speaking to himself.

“It would be the better choice, at that,” he remarked, “but perhaps there doesn’t need to be any arrest at all. I saw the whole affair and I’m not at all sure that the death of Emily-Jane wasn’t purely accidental.” Suddenly he came to life and regarded Munson triumphantly. “I think I’ve got you, Scott,” he continued slowly. “No matter which way you move I think I’ve got you blocked. Both Betty and Tom are ready to swear themselves blue in the face that Lane Holt did it. Now, I am the only other eye-witness and I can do either one of two things – swear that Emily-Jane’s death was due to an accident, or substantiate the evidence of Betty and Tom. In either case you’d be left high and dry.”

“You seem to have overlooked, Sam,” replied Munson quietly, “several small but important details. Earlier in the evening an attempt was made on the life of Emily-Jane, who later was found dead. I happen to know the person who made that first attempt. As for motive I have some letters. And just to give you a little surplus food for thought, I’m not at all sure that I may not be able to unearth still another eye-witness.”

Sam sank back hopelessly in his chair, his inspiration drained. For a minute he had been foolish enough to believe he had discovered a way out of the difficulty for both Daniel and himself. He saw now that there was no way out.

“What are you going to do with those letters, Scott?” he asked.

“We’ll talk about them,” replied Munson, rising from his chair, “when you are a little more willing to talk … sensibly.”

He left Sam sitting despondently in his chair and went directly to his room. Here he produced his notebook and thoughtfully studied the little design he had copied from the sand. Just what was he trying to prove and how was he going to set about doing it at this late date? He closed the book and slipped it back into his pocket.

“Another eye-witness,” he said to himself, “or the whole truth from Sam. Must get one or the other, and I might need both.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Inevitable Draws Nearer

Daniel and June were idling along the Cliff Path. They had little to say to each other. There was little that required saying. Both were smoking nervously. Daniel was scarring the toes of his boots by kicking stones from the path. He was conscientious about it. Apparently his idea was to leave no stone unturned. June was impartially slashing at weeds and wild flowers with a thin stick. It made a swishing sound that was satisfying to the ear. A serious, industrious pair they made … and miserable.

Ahead of them High Point Rock rose against the sky. Neither June nor Daniel turned to look in that direction. Instinctively their gaze avoided the spot from which Emily-Jane had dropped out of life. Daniel halted and leveled his eyes on the waters of the Sound. June came and stood beside him.

“It would be that way,” remarked Daniel.

“The old trail, the old trail, the trail that is always new!” she murmured. “I’d like to take it, Dan.”

“All the world and places,” replied Daniel. “Gad, if we could only make it!”

She took his hand, which was hanging impotently at his side. “Trust me, Dan,” she said. “I’ll get you by.”

He made no reply other than giving her hand a friendly squeeze.

“Wish Barney would give up that damn picture,” he said presently. “It’s got on my nerves terribly for some reason. Feel as if I wouldn’t be able to stand it much longer.”

“Poor old mule-faced Dan” – June’s voice was sympathetic – “you’ve been having a pretty tough time of late. For your sake I hope things look up a bit.”

“For the both of us,” he said, his eyes still straining out across the water.

As if by common consent they turned and started to retrace their steps. Neither of them had any desire to stand on High Point Rock. Then they stopped. Scott Munson was swinging along the path. When he drew up in front of them they noticed that his dark eyes were unusually sharp and searching.

“Come along,” he said in a friendly voice, taking Daniel by his uninjured arm. “I want you both to help me out with a little idea of mine.”

“More wizardry, Scott?” June inquired.

“No,” said Munson briefly. “Merely the application of common sense to a given set of circumstances.”

He was leading them in the direction of High Point Rock. Daniel moved with reluctance. His nerve seemed to have deserted him. The old inner trembling had returned. He felt that he would not be responsible for his actions if he set foot on that spot again. Little beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. He tried to force himself forward, but his feet dragged.

“It’s hot,” he said, stopping and fumbling for his handkerchief. “We were just going home, Scott.”

“Well, this won’t take you long,” replied Munson easily. “And I really do need your help.”

Daniel allowed himself to be led along. Under Munson’s hand his arm quivered slightly. June said nothing. She was furtively regarding Munson, and there was a strange probing expression in her eyes. It was as if she were endeavoring to read the man’s mind, to anticipate his next move.

“You’re getting lazy, Dan,” she remarked. “The walk will do you good – stretch those long legs of yours.”

They were on the cliff now, and Munson was directing their steps toward the exact spot on which Daniel had stood when Emily-Jane had gone twisting down into the black void opening up at his feet. They had reached the place. Daniel stood rooted to it. He felt that at any moment he would point to the bushes and explain to Munson exactly where he had hidden while watching Holt and Emily-Jane. The temptation was well-nigh irresistible. It would be a relief to get the whole thing off his chest, to be done with it and to know the worst rather than to be expecting it with every intake of his breath. The idea grew in fascination. It was as much as he could do to prevent himself from raising his arm and pointing to the bushes. Scott Munson’s face would make an interesting study. Daniel wondered what he would say, how he would look.

Munson was examining the ground with the professional interest of a stage manager. He had no eyes for either Daniel or June, and Daniel was just as well pleased. By this time Daniel’s state of agitation was only too apparent in his face. So greatly was he affected by the spot that he felt again the hot moist trickle of blood running down his left arm from the knife wound. All his previous sensations returned to him. He was unable to ward them off.

Scott Munson was speaking. His voice seemed distant and indistinct. “Now, June,” he was saying, placing the girl at the edge of the cliff, “you stand right here and hold that position. As I figure it out that’s where Emily-Jane must have stood.”

June’s face was colorless. Her eyes had taken on a hard, defiant expression. She looked steadily at Munson.

“You’re showing us a good time, Scott,” she said. “You wouldn’t like me to jump off, would you?”

Apparently too preoccupied to answer, Munson turned to Daniel. “Stand close to June,” said Munson, “and put your hand on her arm or her shoulder.”

Stiffly, automatically, Daniel did as he was bidden. Munson stepped back a few paces and studied the pair.

“Yes,” he said, as if to himself, “that’s just about how it must have been. Now please hold it, both of you, until I give the word.” He hurried away, and June found herself alone with Daniel, looking into his fixed, staring eyes. But Daniel did not seem to see her. Emily-Jane was standing there between them. Daniel could feel her presence.

Suddenly June screamed piercingly. She flung her arms round Daniel and for a moment they swayed at the edge of the cliff over which a hand had slid noiselessly and seized her by the ankle. A moment of cold terror. Then Daniel broke the spell, and dragged June back, breaking the clutch of the hand. Almost immediately Munson was with them. Solicitous apologies to June, to which she did not listen. She was leaning against Daniel’s breast. Her head was on his shoulder. Little shudders ran through her body. She was very still. Daniel’s lips were twisted in a white grin. His eyes, tired and sunken, never left Munson’s face.

“Scott,” he said, with a calmness that held a note of finality, “you excelled yourself this time. My congratulations and contempt.”

Munson was equally calm as he returned Daniel’s gaze. “I am sorry you feel that way about it,” he replied. He was angry with himself and the world in general. “Emily-Jane must have had an even more trying experience.”

“Emily-Jane deserved it. June has done nothing.” Daniel’s voice was harsh.

Suddenly Munson smiled and took a hesitating step toward them. He looked old and tired. “Forgive me, both of you,” he said, his low voice holding a note of warmth. “I couldn’t keep myself from making the experiment. It was devilish of me, I realize now, but I wanted to find out if it could have been done that way, and now I know that it could.”

June released herself from Daniel’s arms and turned to Munson with lips that were trying to smile.

“You’re a devil, Scott,” she told him, “a devil straight from hell, but I think I understand. You’re forgiven.”

“They don’t come any gamer than you, June,” said Munson.

June’s eyes were resting on Daniel, who was standing by lost in thought. This business couldn’t go on much longer. He would have to confess. June uttered a little cry.

A stream of blood was running freely down his hand and dripping to the ground from his fingers.

“Strip off that coat,” said Munson, and stepped quickly to Daniel’s side. As he stanched the flow of blood with a clean white handkerchief, his gaze strayed over the water. “Evidently,” he said rather bitterly, although his lips were smiling, “the gods don’t expect a man in my shoes to be much of a human being.”

•   •   •   •   •

When Munson returned to Crewe House he addressed himself to the Shays.

“It is more important than ever,” he told them, “that no one leave these grounds. You don’t have to worry about the back of the house, because in that direction escape is effectually cut off by the marshes. A person would be a damn fool to risk the quagmires and quicksand there. And you don’t have to watch the Cliff Path. Nobody is going to jump off High Point Rock, or at least I don’t think so. If they do” – he shrugged his shoulders – “we’re saved a lot of trouble and unpleasantness. Just keep your eye on the road and the gardens at the east end of the house, and for God’s sake don’t pull your guns unless you are damn well sure you can’t carry on without them. As a matter of fact, I don’t think anyone is going to try to get away, but we can’t afford to take any chances. We’re just about ready now to put the handles on this case.”

“Did you notice he said ‘we’?” asked Officer Shad, as Munson strode across the lawn and descended the steps to the beach.

“That’s as it should be,” replied Officer Red, “considering what we’ve been through.”

Munson laid hands on the first canoe he could find and unceremoniously dragged it across the sand to the water’s edge. He shoved off from the beach with a dexterity bred of experience and soon was paddling easily over the gently marcelled surface of the Sound.

Scott Munson was not at all pleased with the events of the morning and the part he had played in them. He had succeeded in throwing June Lansing, usually so hard-boiled and imperturbable, into a state of white terror, and he had been instrumental in opening the wound in Daniel’s arm. Funny thing about that wound. It was almost as if it had opened itself under the influence of auto-suggestion. Yet in spite of these contretemps, as regrettable as they were, Munson had proved to his own satisfaction that Emily-Jane could have been thrown off her balance by a hand tugging at her ankle from the ledge. To this extent the theory he had been holding in reserve was not so wild, not so impossible of practical application. He was now following up that theory – not hopefully, but with characteristic thoroughness.

About a mile and a half ahead of him, three low rocky islands lay somnolently in the water washing against them. Munson was bound for these islands, upon one of which he had good reason to believe Pete Clark was reclining in Olympian isolation. Munson skirted the outer island and found it unadorned by the picturesque person of his quarry. Neither had Pete Clark selected the second island for his philosophic repose, but upon the third and last rocky retreat there lay Pete Clark. He was resting easily. Beneath his head a gunny-sack, redolent of fish at their worst, had been nicely adjusted at exactly the desired angle, enabling the recumbent figure to view both sea and sky with the minimum of bodily effort and fatigue. Hard by on the rocks, within easy reach of the most languid hand, rested a battered tin box. Pete regarded with disapproval the method employed by some deep thinkers of conducting their meditations on an empty stomach. And from the position of the sun, Pete was seriously considering the advisability of disturbing himself to the extent of appeasing his appetite. He sighed and considered the box out of the corner of his eyes.

When Munson scrambled over the rocks and stood above him, Pete evinced no surprise. Maybe Munson would do something about the midday meal, open the box and distribute its contents, or something.

“Hello, Mr. Munson,” said Pete. “What brings you to this God-forsaken place?”

“You do,” replied Munson, sitting down beside him. “You do, Pete.”

The occasional fisherman looked a little disturbed. “And what can I do for you, Mr. Munson?” he asked.

“Nothing violent,” Munson hastened to assure him. “Just a little help, that’s all.”

He looked so long at Pete’s feet that their owner, as if for the first time in his life, became aware of their presence. He, too, regarded his feet with mild interest not unmixed with a little surprise. Those were his feet, those large, still objects down there. Well, they would never be able to say he had not spared them as much as possible. As far as use was concerned they were virtually new.

“Are these the same shoes you were wearing when you found the body of Miss Seabrook on the rocks?” asked Munson.

“I always wear the same shoes,” answered Pete with deliberation, “except when I go barefooted.”

“A good idea,” said Munson approvingly. “Makes everything so much simpler. I thought they were the same shoes because they’ve been in my mind a good deal lately.”

Pete Clark permitted himself a momentary glow of pride. He even went so far as to wiggle his feet almost playfully.

“The way it must have been,” continued Munson, as much for his own benefit as his listener’s, “was that you were walking along the beach just before you discovered the body of the girl lying on the rocks. And you weren’t thinking much, Pete, about anything in particular. You were just sort of grazing along. Then your eyes must have been attracted by some small bright object lying in the sand. After considering the pros and cons of the situation you no doubt decided that the object was sufficiently interesting to justify your picking it up. And you did pick that object up, Pete. You picked it up, examined it, slipped it into your pocket and forgot all about it. Am I right?”

“Where were you hiding?” demanded Pete.

“Under the bedclothes in my room,” replied Munson. “I was still sleeping, but it just had to be that way. I read the whole story in the sand, Pete.”

“Well I’m not cockeyed myself when it comes to seeing things along beaches,” said Clark, “but you’re a damned sight more seeing than me. That’s just exactly the way it was. I saw the bright little gadget sparkling there in the sand. I picked it up and slipped it into my pocket. When you asked me if I had seen or found anything, I’d clean forgotten about it.”

“And where is that bright little object now?” inquired Munson.

Pete thought for some time. Presently his contorted features relaxed, and his natural face, looking a little overworked, once more reappeared. “Last time I saw it,” he said, “one of the kids was playing with it.”

“Didn’t know you had any children, Pete. Congratulations.”

Pete accepted the felicitation rather cynically, Munson thought. “Oh, yes, I’ve got children right enough,” he replied. “Several sets of them.”

“Where do they live?” asked Munson.

“Different places,” was Pete’s evasive reply. “Round about. Might run into one of them most anywhere.”

“Oh, it’s that way,” said Munson. “I see.”

“Yes, it’s that way,” admitted Pete.

“And where does the child who was playing with that gadget live?”

“At home,” said Pete. “My regular home. She’s official.”

“That’s nice,” replied Munson. “Suppose you take me there.” He produced several crumpled bills, which Pete regarded without any great show of interest. “Some for you and some for her,” Munson added.

“Got to eat first,” Pete replied. “You eaten?”

“Not yet,” said Munson. “Lost my appetite this morning.”

“Well, try one of these,” the other suggested, as he opened the battered tin box and fingered out a handful of sandwiches, a suspicious-looking chunk of cheese, and two pitifully bruised peaches.

Munson gladly accepted the provender Pete allotted him with scrupulous fairness, and together they made a silent but satisfactory meal.

“Usually sleep after eating,” Pete observed tentatively, when the last gulp of food had ceased to distend his throat. “How about you, Mr. Munson?”

“Usually, Pete, but nothing doing today. Got a lot of trouble on my hands. No time for sleep now.” Munson helped Pete to rise, helped him to launch his boat, and virtually lifted him into it. After this he shoved off in his canoe and followed Pete’s leisurely progress landward.

The Clarks had a marsh exposure. A small, unlovely frame building housed an indeterminate number of them. Mrs. Clark gave the appearance of a woman who did as well as she could for herself and for anyone else who happened to be around at the time of doing. She showed no surprise at the unexpected return of her husband. She was neither elated nor depressed. He was there. She accepted the situation.

After a lame introduction Pete led Munson off to search for the child last seen playing with the gadget. She was found, and her name turned out to be May. She was playing with a new gadget now and she had no idea where the other one could be unless it had worked its way into the depth of a towering pile of oyster-shells to which she pointed with a languor characteristic of her sire. Munson regarded the pile and thirsted for his staff. The Shays would have been invaluable at this moment, but the Shays were otherwise engaged. The pile was up to Munson. After subsidizing both May and her father and intimating the probability of a suitable reward upon the successful conclusion of their joint efforts, Munson removed his coat, and the three of them became intimately involved with oyster-shells.

At the end of two painful hours, hours that always lingered in the mind of Pete Clark, the searchers among the shells were no nearer success, but much nearer total exhaustion.

“Never knew I owned so many shells,” said Pete at last, in an effort to look on the bright side of things.

“Well, you certainly own a lot, pa,” replied his daughter, not without satisfaction.

“If you ask my opinion,” announced Munson, his fatigue-drawn face appearing over the rim of the pile, “you own exactly one too many shells, Pete.”

Mrs. Clark issued from the back door and stood for a while contemplating the activities of the searching party. “What do you all want to be doing that for?” she asked.

“It’s a gadget, mother,” said Pete. “A bright little gadget with stones and all. May claims she lost it here or hereabouts.”

“Oh, that!” exclaimed the lady, with a depreciating wave of her right hand. “Why didn’t you say so before? I picked it up and tucked it away in my bureau drawer. You should of asked.”

Slowly Munson’s face once more rose above the shells. It was a sad face and a weary one. For a while he looked at May, then shifted his gaze to Pete. Finally he raised his eyes to the sky as if seeking strength and refuge in prayer. Apparently he derived some benefit from this, for when he spoke his voice was calm.

“She’s right,” he said. “I guess we should have asked.”

•   •   •   •   •

Barney’s easel was standing in the hall. A single lamp above it shed a soft glow over the canvas. Before the picture Daniel was standing, and in his hand he held a knife. The ship’s clock in the library had just sounded two bells – an hour past midnight. The silence in the old house was almost liquid. Like a stream it moved through the hall. From the beach came the slow, low, methodical break and wash of the surf. The sound rose and fell painfully in the back of Daniel’s mind.

And his face was like a mask of pain. The experience of the morning on the cliffs had left its traces there. Then to come home to this – this reproduction of horror. There it stood waiting for a few swift brush strokes – ten minutes’ work – to reveal his crime to the world, to perpetuate it.

Daniel’s eyes clouded as he raised the knife. It would be like cutting a part out of his own life, destroying something of himself. If he did it he might sleep. But he could not do it. His hand was powerless to strike. The picture was not completed. A low gasp escaped from his lips as the knife dropped to the floor. He turned away.

Scott Munson did not pause as he slowly descended the stairs. Across the silence their eyes met – a wordless exchange of mutual regret and understanding.

“You’d better get back to bed, Daniel,” said Munson quietly. “You need some sleep.”

“All right, Scott,” said Daniel. “I’ll try again. If I don’t get some sleep soon, something is going to crack.”

He passed Munson and continued on up the stairs. Gradually he merged into the darkness that lay on the upper hall. A low “good night” drifted down to Munson.

“Good night, Daniel,” he called back softly.

Daniel let himself into June’s room and lay down beside her on the top of the light coverings. Her arms drew him to her.

“Keep on fighting, Daniel,” she whispered. “We mustn’t give up now.”

Gradually Daniel’s inner trembling ceased, and presently he slept, but June remained awake, her wide eyes looking up into the darkness that lay upon them.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Lost Domino

When Daniel had mounted into the darkness of the upper hall, Munson approached Barney’s painting and stood regarding it with decidedly disapproving eyes. He realized that in a sense this painting was an ally of his, but he could not bring himself to consider it with any measure of appreciation. Young Barney should not be doing a thing like that. One inquisitor in the house was quite sufficient. He would have to have that little talk with Barney. High time he was given the low-down on the situation. Daniel might deserve to be smitten down by the impersonal hand of the law, but certainly not by his brother. Standing before the painting, Munson decided that Barney was due for a shock – a flock of shocks, in fact.

He turned from the picture and let his gaze wander round the long wide hall. Something was on his mind, something that had given him a shock. The wild theory he had been holding in reserve was gradually taking the sharp, definite outlines of a conviction. And that conviction was in some way associated with the kitchen and a nocturnal cup of tea. Aunt Matty had never found the lost domino. Neither had Scott Munson, although, unknown to Aunt Matty, he had added to her plaintively peering eyes the best efforts of his own.

Entering the dining-room on noiseless feet, he crossed over to the pantry door and glanced through its small leaded window. One glance was enough to attract and to hold his attention. He thrust his hands comfortably into his pockets and settled back on his heels like a man prepared to stay where he was for some time to come. There was a puzzled expression in his eyes and his lips barely betrayed the suggestion of a smile.

What he saw was nothing less than the Shays in united action. The light was burning in the kitchen and beneath its sharp radiance Officers Shad and Red were moving about contortedly. From their singularly unsuccessful efforts to walk on tiptoe Munson concluded their lives heretofore must have been open books, unsullied by deception. As if in atonement for an occasional collision with a chair or a table, Officer Red applied one finger permanently to his lips. Munson gained the impression that his stout, rubicund assistant entertained the hope of impressing the inanimate objects that seemed to bestrew his path with the urgent need of the utmost silence and secrecy. It was too much to ask of any kitchen furniture, and finally when Officer Shad, in stooping over, brought that part of his body which was opposite his head but at a slightly higher elevation smartly against the pointed corner of a table, the result was disastrous. Both Shad and the table vied with each other in making the air hideous with sound. A plate crashed to the floor, and Red became much redder. But as far as Shad was concerned, he was standing in a vast silence in which only pain existed, pain and outraged dignity.

“What did you want to do that for?” demanded Red in a low voice.

“Just to see how it would feel,” replied Shad, his usually mild eyes blinking with hostility. “You should try it. It’s a lot of fun.”

“I know,” said Red, “but there’s no need to make such a noise about it … breaking plates and everything.”

Shad laughed dramatically. “Did you ever bring yours up against the sharp point of a table?” he inquired softly. For a moment his gaze dwelt on a rather self-assertive section of his colleague’s body, then once more he indulged in unpleasant laughter. “But it wouldn’t hurt yours,” he added with brutal frankness. “Yours is too damn fat.”

Officer Red Shay did not exactly toss his head, but the dignity of his bearing eloquently expressed the fact that his mind was bent on higher if not larger things, and that there were some subjects he positively declined to discuss. Once more the search commenced, and the mildly diverted Munson found himself wondering what motive, if any, animated the activities of his staff. His curiosity grew to the proportions of a definite need to know. The Shays were stealthily peering into pots and pans, table drawers, and closets. Officer Red even went so far as to sound the walls with a delicate finger. This last was too much for Munson. He quietly opened the pantry door and, remaining in the unlighted pantry as he had done once before on the night of the murder of Emily-Jane, spoke to his staff from the darkness.

“Would you kindly try to tell me,” he asked in a quiet voice, “what the devil you two imagine you’re doing?”

The unexpectedness of this disembodied question completely demoralized the officers. Motionless they remained in exactly the same position they had been in when the voice smote their ears. They poised frozenly as if playing a tragically earnest adaptation of “still waters, no more moving.” Only their eyes moved and they were very busy as they darted about the room in quest of the owner of the voice. When Munson emerged into the light of the kitchen the tableau disintegrated, with twin sighs of profound relief.

“You gave us such a start, Mr. Munson,” Officer Red was honest enough to admit.

“Sorry, Red,” replied Munson, “but you haven’t answered my question.”

“I don’t rightly remember it, sir,” said Officer Red.

“Well, what’s the meaning of all this grotesque mincing about this kitchen like a couple of trick conspirators?” Munson demanded. “What do you hope to find here?”

“We were looking for it,” said Shad in a low voice.

“It?” repeated Munson. “What?”

“The will,” announced Officer Shad.

“What will and whose?” Scott Munson was becoming more and more perplexed.

“The will that’s at the bottom of all this trouble,” explained Officer Red. “It was my idea, the will.”

“Oh, I see,” said Munson, sitting down at the table and critically examining his finger-nails. “And it’s not here, perhaps?” He eyed his staff sadly.

“No, Mr. Munson,” replied Officer Shad. “It’s not here.”

Munson drummed on the table with the nails he had been recently inspecting.

“I hate to discourage initiative,” he said at last, “but in spite of my best efforts I can’t disabuse my mind of the belief that you two are about the biggest damn fools I’ve ever had the good fortune – mind me, I say, good fortune – to meet. Still, I may be wrong. Possibly there are two bigger damn fools somewhere hidden in an obscure crevice of this earth. If that is so I hope they stay there.”

He rose from the table and switched the light on in the pantry. Aunt Matty was a hoarding housekeeper. The pantry was filled with earthenware jars and tin boxes. It was a storeroom of pleasant surprises. In the past it had never failed to whet Barney’s curiosity and to stimulate his cupidity. There were many shelves and cupboards. Munson looked about him with interest. This was the only room in the house he had not searched. He had looked for that missing domino from attic to cellar. He had been through all the outhouses, and now he knew that if it was still in existence it must be somewhere in the room in which he stood. Well, he would give the boys a little encouragement, he decided. After his last remarks to them they deserved to be encouraged. He called them into the pantry.

“Now, I’m going to give you something to look for,” he promised them. “If your heads are so set on finding missing property, just swarm over this room and bring me back a domino.”

Blank amazement greeted his request.

“Doesn’t look much like a place where they’d hide games,” said Officer Shad skeptically, glancing at the shelves and cupboards.

“Perhaps he wants a piece of sugar,” suggested Officer Red.

“No,” said Scott. “And I don’t mean a domino either in the strict usage of the word. What I want is a large, floppy, black garment with a hood on it. If you want to save yourself a lot of unnecessary exertion, which I suspect you do, I suggest you look through those lower cupboards first. Take the one in the extreme corner.”

Officer Shad, remembering the painful if ludicrous injury inflicted on his person by the table, squatted with surprising compactness, and opened the door to the cupboard. “Nothing in here,” he announced, “except a lot of old stone jars. Seem empty to me.”

“How big are those stone jars, Shad?” asked Munson with sudden interest.

“A matter of some two feet, I’d say,” the officer replied.

“Will you yank the one out that seems hardest to get at?”

Shad inspected the jars with a calculating eye. “They’re all hard to get at,” he concluded.

“But I said the hardest.” Munson’s voice was sharper now.

With a grunt of utter weariness Shad thrust in a long arm and after a great deal of noise, succeeded in dragging forth a jar which obviously from his efforts must have been the hardest to get at.

“Now lift off the top,” said Munson.

Shad obeyed, and Munson bent down quickly.

“Now pull it out,” he continued, and there was no elation in his voice. It sounded rather flat and tired.

When Shad had drawn the crumpled black garment from the jar, he extended it to Munson. “You knew it was there all the time,” said Shad in an injured voice.

“No, I didn’t,” Scott hastily disclaimed. “Honestly, Shad, I didn’t. I just doped it out that the thing had to be there, or somewhere else close by.”

“Well, now that you’ve got it,” inquired Officer Red sarcastically, “what are you going to do with it?”

“Put those jars back exactly as you found them,” said Munson, “and keep this little incident strictly to yourselves. Don’t ask foolish questions, Red, but go upstairs and park yourself in the hall. Watch all the doors. At the end of two hours come down and wake up Shad. He’ll be making revolting noises on the couch in the library. We should have someone outside by rights, but I don’t think the people involved in this case are going to try to make a getaway. Snap to it.”

The Shays’ idea of snapping at that hour of the night was rather a languid stroll. Before the pantry door closed on them they glanced back at Munson.

“What’s he doing?” asked Red in a whisper. “Kissing it?”

“Looks more like his nose,” said Shad. “Perhaps he has a cold.”

Munson carried the domino to the kitchen and sat down. Again he sniffed at the neck band to which still clung a faint trace of scent, illusive, almost indefinable. Then he let the domino drop to his knees and sat staring straight ahead of him.

•   •   •   •   •

“Bennett,” said Munson on the following morning, when that crisp, self-confident officer put in an appearance, “it’s good to get you back. My staff is becoming almost too diverting.”

Bennett smiled appreciatively. “Have they been shooting up the countryside again?” he asked.

“No,” replied Munson. “Looking for lost wills this time.” He paused and passed a hand impatiently across his eyes. He had hardly slept at all that night. “Perhaps I wrong the Shays,” he resumed. “When I come to consider it, they’ve been the only bright spot in this whole tragic business. You know, Bennett, whenever I have any dealings with those two broken reeds of the law I get the same feeling of bewilderment and unreality that poor Alice must have experienced at the mad tea-party. If they were just a little bit better I’d see that they were damn well fired from the force, but they’re so dumb, so incredibly useless, I’m afraid to cast them adrift in this world of frenzied competition.”

Munson little realized as he spoke that despite his humane sentiments the Shays were destined soon to be cast very much adrift indeed.

The two men were walking round the west side of the house. They came to the orchard and continued on in the direction of the salt marshes.

“Yes,” said Munson slowly, in response to a question from his companion, “the case is about over as far as our end of it is concerned. Nothing remains to be done now save, perhaps, the most heartbreaking task that ever confronted a man. I’m such a coward, Bennett, that I’m tempted to clear out and let you take charge from here. I feel like an undertaker for broken souls.”

“If I can help to make things any easier, Mr. Munson,” replied Bennett, “I’m at your disposal, although I don’t like this business so much myself. They’re all nice people,” he added, with a backward jerk of his head in the direction of the house.

“Thanks, Bennett,” said Munson. “I’ll let you know. Let’s go over there and have a little talk with Betty. That girl, I suspect, is a mine of information if you can only make her forget to tell lies.”

Betty was sitting on the same bench at the end of the orchard where she had first told her story of the murder of Emily-Jane. As Munson and Bennett, apparently engaged in casual conversation, strolled past the bench, Munson stopped, and with an arresting hand on the officer’s arm, looked at the girl with a friendly grin.

“Isn’t that so, Betty?” he asked, hoping to arouse her curiosity.

“Isn’t what so, Mr. Munson?” asked Betty innocently, rising to the bait.

“Well, Mr. Bennett here was just saying,” Munson explained, absent-mindedly sitting down beside Betty, “Officer Bennett was just saying that it’s a downright shame so much fuss and worry should be made over the death of Miss Emily-Jane.”

For the peace of mind of one Thomas Shanks, it was fortunate he was not present to witness the look of warm approval with which Betty favored Bennett, who upon receiving it immediately felt compensated for the remark Munson had so callously put into his mouth.

“And he’s about right, too,” replied Betty feelingly. “All the trouble started the moment she set foot in the house. Before that this place was one of the happiest spots in all the world. You know that yourself, Mr. Munson.”

The girl’s words seemed to be stabbing the man who sat beside her. For a moment he forgot what he had come there for – the problem that was uppermost in his mind. He was thinking of life at Crewe House before the advent of Emily-Jane. He was thinking of the ideal understanding and comradeship that had bound the two brothers so closely together. He was thinking of the plans the three of them had made during the long, lazy summer hours. There was going to be a breakfast in Paris on a certain specified morning, followed by a flight over the Channel and several weeks in London. After that they had planned a walking trip in which ale had largely figured. Barney had insisted on making it a slouching trip, and from that had rapidly retrograded until the trip had become a “barely moving tour of some small and preferably level area of England.” Scott recalled his words. Where was all that now? Barney had ceased to be absurd. Old friendships were split and embittered. The breakfast in Paris had been shot to hell. Murder and suicide had come to spend the summer. There was no getting rid of them.

“Yes, Betty,” Munson replied. “That’s just about the way of it. This place here was one of the happiest and fairest spots on God’s green earth. Bennett, it would have done your heart good just to have been about for a while. There was something so damned restful and decent about the place and the people in it. I was a tired man when I first came here, but after a couple of days I wasn’t tired any more, and now” – he hesitated a moment – “well, now I’m tired again, tired as hell.”

“You can thank that girl for that,” said Betty, sticking to her original theme. “If she had never come here everything would be right now just like it had been before.”

“Did you feel like that all along, Betty?” asked Munson.

“I certainly did,” she replied. “Miss Emily-Jane never pulled the wool over my eyes, not for one second she didn’t.”

“Nor mine,” said Munson.

“But she fooled most everybody else,” the girl continued. “And she did it right in front of their eyes. It didn’t take me long to see what kind she was – always pawing the men-folks with her hands and laughing up into their silly eyes, and poor easy-going Mr. Barney thinking she was just grand. It’s a good thing for him she’s gone. Why, the very afternoon of the party she—” Betty broke off suddenly and failed to complete her sentence. “I’d better be getting back to the house,” she said. “They’ll be hollering for me up there.”

“Yes, I imagine you noticed a lot, Betty,” thoughtfully observed Scott Munson, rising lazily from the bench. “A girl like you with eyes in her head sees a great deal more than people give her credit for. Isn’t that so?”

Betty laughed knowingly. “I saw a whole lot more than Miss Emily-Jane ever wanted me to see,” she replied. “I know for certain she tried to make a go for Mr. Daniel. I saw her try it with my own two eyes.”

“But she was out of luck there,” said Munson encouragingly. “What did Mr. Daniel do, Betty? Did he give her the cold shoulder?”

“He did that,” Betty stoutly declared. “And she gave him the bare shoulder. I was standing in one of the alcoves and I saw the whole thing. I saw Mr. Dan pulling himself away from her. He was trying to get out of her room and she was holding him back with her naked arm. I’ll never forget the look on his face. It was awful. And she laughed and asked him to call again.”

“When did that happen?” asked Munson casually.

“Only a few hours before she was standing up before all the world, publicly engaging herself to Mr. Dan’s own blood brother,” she announced triumphantly.

“It was a good thing no one else saw it,” said Munson. “Mr. Barney, for instance, or Miss June.”

“It made no difference,” answered Betty.

“Then someone else did see it?”

“Miss June saw the whole thing,” Betty announced.

“I’d like to have heard what she said to Mr. Dan.” Munson’s laugh as he made this observation was just a trifle off key.

“She didn’t say a word, Mr. Munson, not a word. She and Mr. Dan just stood there looking at each other, and I remember he kept shaking his head slowly from side to side.”

“Then what happened, Betty?”

“Nothing happened,” replied Betty. “Mr. Dan just went on to his room, and Miss June stood looking at Miss Emily-Jane’s door with the strangest expression in her eyes. She just stood there staring at that door, and then she went to her room. I wouldn’t want anybody to look at me the way she looked at that door.”

As the two men walked back through the orchard, Munson turned to Bennett.

“Had Betty realized what she was saying,” remarked Munson, “she would rather have had her tongue cut out than to have said it.”

But Bennett did not answer. He was thinking over what Betty had just told them, and he did not envy Munson his successful solution of the murder.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Breaking Point

Sam Stoughten was sweating. Munson was sweating him. It was a cool evening. A fresh breeze fingered the curtains at the open windows and searched through the room. Yet Sam’s pale face in the lamp-light glistened with perspiration. Scott Munson, sitting idly in front of him, resembled some weird, sinister visitant from outer darkness. All his life-forces seemed to be concentrated in his eyes. Relaxed in his chair, he sat without moving. All power and energy had deserted his body and streamed upward to his eyes and to the brain behind those eyes.

For three hours now this thing had been going on. Munson patient and probing, bitter at times, mocking, cruel and unscrupulous. Then, suddenly, bewilderingly, another Munson – subtle, kind, almost sympathetic. Sam was unable to understand it. These swift changes confused him, upset the unstable balance of his already weary mind. For three miasmal hours the very core of his being had been alternately lashed and bullied by the tongue and eyes of this man who sat so untiringly before him. But Sam had not yet been broken. Stubborn, rebellious, and deathly sick, his stomach nauseated and his brain a ball of aching lead, he still stuck to his guns. He would not tell. No human being would ever torture from his lips the story of the murder of Emily-Jane. He no longer had the power to force his eyes to meet those of his inquisitor. However, he could still resist him. No agony of mind or body could make him speak, no fear of punishment nor hope of escape.

Sam sat with lowered head. He was like a spent and blinded bull unable to shake off his tormentor. His limp, moist hands were too spiritless now to grip the arms of his chair. And all the time he was conscious of Munson’s eyes watching him. A desire to drive the light forever from those eyes took possession of him. It would have to be something sharp – something thin and sharp and long enough to reach into the brain. Sam would be able to face him then … to look into his sightless eyes and laugh.

Munson was speaking now. That voice, always that voice, going on and on and on. Would Munson never grow weary of the sound of his own voice? Would he never stop asking the same monotonous questions, repeating them over and over? Would he never realize all his trickery was lost on Sam? He should know by this time that Sam had no intention of answering his damn questions. Why didn’t he let up and give a fellow a chance to rest, to gather his scattered wits and to think things out?

“Sam,” came the calm voice, “in your heart you know that you’re going to talk before you leave this room. Why not get it over?”

“Go to hell, Munson.” Sam spoke with lowered head. He would not meet those eyes.

“Sam, think.”

“Go to hell, Munson.”

“Sam!”

“Go to hell, Munson. Go to hell. Go to hell. Go to hell.”

Munson cast the lowered head a covert glance of admiration, then his face hardened. “You’ve asked for it, Sam,” he said.

From an inside coat pocket he produced a thin packet of letters. Selecting a letter, he opened it and began to read. At Munson’s first words a sensation of suffocation washed over the huddled figure. His body stiffened in the chair, and his hot eyes, filled with shame and self-loathing, darted from side to side as if seeking some means of escape. Scott Munson’s voice was quiet and unhurried. Sam shrank from the words. The girl was dead now. Why had she left her past behind her to confront the living? Why had she not carried it down into the oblivion of the grave? Surely, she could want no more of him.

Munson had finished the letter and now was opening another one. Sam could see from beneath his brows the man’s long, slim fingers sliding into the envelope. They moved with calculated deliberateness. Like snakes, thought Sam, those fingers. Then Munson’s voice again, but the words were Sam’s words and the thoughts were his. Poisoned memories winging about his ears, beating their way into his brain. And Munson’s voice, steadily sounding on, stripping Sam of the last shred of self-esteem as it picked its way fastidiously through filth.

Sam buried his head in his arms and tried not to hear. To drown out the words he kept repeating under his breath, “Go to hell. Go to hell. Go to hell,” but Munson’s voice went on, the words still drilled in Sam’s ears and festered in his brain. Then the reading ceased and Sam heard the faint rustle of paper. He waited. Would it all begin again? Yes, Munson was opening another letter. Sam’s endurance snapped.

“Damn your soul to hell,” he said, getting to his feet and confronting Munson. “Must you do that, Munson – keep hitting a guy below the belt?”

Munson considered him coldly. “Any worse than trying to stab a girl from behind a curtain?” he asked, and continued on with the reading.

“Stop,” pleaded Sam. “For God’s sake. Don’t do it, Scott.”

But Munson’s voice kept implacably on until he had read the letter through. Then he carefully replaced the letter in the packet, slipped it into his inside pocket and sat looking up at Sam with an inscrutable expression in his eyes. Sam sank back in his chair. For a blessed moment the room was still, then Munson began to speak.

“You wrote those letters, Sam,” he said, “and later you made a cowardly attempt to stab in the back the girl to whom they were written. You did that, Sam. I have the knife with your fingerprints on it. You had the motive and the opportunity. And there’s the letter about the kid in college. I can see pretty clearly what happened, but it might not be so clear to a jury. I could charge you right now with attempted murder if not something a damn sight more serious. Now listen, Sam.” Munson leaned forward in his chair and forced the other’s attention. “Have you any idea what that would mean? It would mean that those letters would pass into the hands of some jury. Your own defense would read them – Sue. Reporters would read them, mouth over them, chuckle over them, parts of those letters would find their way into every paper in this country. Millions of eyes would be looking – reading your letters, Sam. In railway trains commuters would be passing remarks back and forth about them. ‘Hot stuff, Bill!’ ‘Say, listen to this.’ Your name and Emily-Jane’s would be forever linked, and Sue’s life pretty much smeared. Get me, Sam? That’s just a part of the picture. I’m not laying it on thick either. You’re intelligent enough to know that. And all because you stupidly refuse to speak. Think it over, Sam. Your silence is helping no one, protecting no one. Just the opposite. It’s doing a hell of a lot of harm.” He reached in his pocket and brought out the letters. “Sam,” he went on in a matter-of-fact voice, “I’ll give you these letters if you will tell me what I want to know. What do you say to that?”

This time the silence lasted several minutes. Once Sam reached blindly for the letters, then slowly withdrew his hand. God, how he wanted to do it! The picture that Munson had partially painted danced before his eyes. He could hear people talking, whispering, and chuckling obscenely, as they read the papers in public places. Munson was not playing fair. He had no right to place a man in such a position. Then Sam thought of Sue. He saw her hurt, bewildered face. At this thought his anger surged within him, and he faced his enemy.

“Go to hell, Munson,” he said, steadfastly keeping his eyes off the extended packet of letters. “You can disgrace me, arrest me, and do any damn thing you please, but you can’t lick me. Keep your damn letters.”

He covered his face with his hands and tried to muffle the choking sounds which in spite of his efforts broke from his lips. Munson rose slowly from his chair and stood looking down at the stooped figure. For the first time in his life he felt himself defeated. Yet, as he stood there looking at Sam, a strange expression came to his eyes – a mixture of approval and regret.

“All right, Sam,” he said, his voice sounding unexpectedly natural and sincere. “I’ll give you these letters anyway. You’ve earned them, but I’m very much afraid you’re sending your best friend to inevitable death … and it’s not so nice to die, Sam.”

He tossed the packet to the floor between Sam’s feet and, crossing the room, quietly closed the door behind him. For a few seconds Sam looked uncomprehendingly at the letters. What was that Munson had just said? Something about death – death and Daniel … “it’s not nice to die.” And he, Sam, was sending his own friend to his death. Munson had sounded in earnest. No tricks this time. Suddenly Sam seized the letters and hurried down the room. In the hall he met Sue. She was just coming up to bed.

“What did Scott want with you?” she asked, half fearful and half suspicious.

“Nothing much,” lied Sam, cupping the letters in his hand as well as he could. “He just loves to hear himself talk. Did you happen to see where he went?”

“He’s in his lair,” she said, then placing a hand on his arm, added a trifle timidly: “You’re not looking at all well, Sam. I hope you’ll manage to get yourself back to a non-lying basis soon.” She paused and looked into her husband’s eyes. They seemed so world-weary and harassed. “Tell him to go away, Sam,” she added, and in spite of himself Sam smiled.

“That’s just what I’ve been doing,” he replied. “All night long I’ve been telling him. I even named the place.”

Munson was standing at the window with his back to the door when Sam burst into the room without stopping even to knock. The man at the window swung about sharply, then stood facing his visitor, a question in his eyes. They studied each other silently. Sam seemed to have nothing to say.

“Well?” inquired Munson. “Aren’t the letters all there?”

“You can have them back, Scott,” said Sam huskily, and he extended the letters. “If they’ll help Dan you can have them.”

“They won’t help Daniel,” said Munson. “You’re the only one who can do that … and you refuse. For that I now tell you to go to hell.”

He deliberately turned his back on Sam and continued to stare out of the window.

“Listen,” went on the voice behind him. “I’ll tell now. What you said about Dan … got me … I won’t hold out any more. Listen, Scott, do you want to hear?”

“Sit down,” said Munson, “and take it easy. You’ve fought like a fool tonight. If I were in your place I’d burn those letters up.” He turned from the window and, going to the closet, produced a bottle of whisky. “Here,” he continued, handing Sam a drink. “Swallow that down and give me those letters. We’ll burn them now before I change my mind.”

He struck a match to a bundle of newspapers in the fireplace and carefully distributed the letters among the flames. Together they watched them burn, and for the first time in weeks a feeling of freedom stirred in Sam’s heart. For some reason he felt cleaner.

“Well, that little chapter in Emily-Jane’s life will never be read again,” Munson remarked, as he pulverized the ashes. “Let’s get this over, Sam.”

“God, how I hate doing this,” muttered Sam. “It’s going to be even worse than I thought.”

“And it might be even worse than that,” replied Munson, “if you don’t come clean.”

Sam started abruptly as if afraid to give himself any more time to think.

“You’re right about the knife,” he began. “I wanted to kill her. I wanted to kill her, Scott, for several reasons – for myself, for Daniel, for Barney, for all of us nearly – Sue and June. I feel that the person who did it was a public benefactor. You see she wouldn’t give up, wouldn’t listen to reason. That afternoon Daniel had pleaded with her in her room. He offered her a pile of money. She laughed at him. She even tried to vamp him then and there. After that I knew she was going to die. I knew it, Scott. I saw it in Daniel’s eyes. But somehow I didn’t want him to be the one to do it. I wanted it done, but I didn’t want Dan to do it. See what I mean?”

Munson nodded sympathetically. “A tough situation,” he said, “I can see it.”

“Yes,” continued Sam. “It was tough. So, I decided to do it myself, and I’d have succeeded if they hadn’t moved after the lights went out.”

“You nearly succeeded in killing Dan,” Munson observed.

“The very one I wanted to help most,” Sam went on regretfully. “Scott, you might not believe me, but I’m sorry right now I didn’t succeed in killing Emily-Jane that time.”

“I would have had you behind the bars within fifteen minutes, and you’d never have come out alive, Sam.”

“Perhaps it would have been the better way,” he answered dispiritedly. “It couldn’t be worse than it is now. Well, that clears up that part of it, anyway. When I went into the dining-room I had it all doped out. I knew the exact fold in the curtain. I picked up the knife from the table and switched off the lights. Then I felt for the fold and stabbed. When the signal came for the lights, I was back again at the switch.”

“In the eyes of whatever God there is I dare say you’re as much of a murderer, Sam, as the person who actually did succeed.”

“I’m afraid I’m even worse.” Sam spoke with conviction. “My motives were more selfish. When I saw Dan’s arm that night, I became even more determined to go through with the thing. I thought he was out of commission, and that put it up to me. And Daniel knew I had tried to stab Emily-Jane. He told me not to be a damn fool. For the rest of the night I watched her. When she went down the Cliff Path with Lane Holt, I followed them. Oh, I gave them plenty of time and kept well out of the way. I was still hooded, too. When I got to High Point Rock I crouched down in some bushes and waited. I don’t know how long it was – more than ten minutes, anyway. And I didn’t quite know what I was going to do, but of course, the place naturally suggested one thing. By that time I was all prepared to push them both off if Holt put up a fight. Then they strolled into view and stood near the edge of the rock. They were laughing and drinking and mixing it up.”

“Did you suspect anyone else’s presence?” asked Munson.

“An army might have been encamped right behind me, and I wouldn’t have known it. I was too busy thinking and watching and nerving myself for that short, quick dash.”

Once more Munson nodded.

“Then a thing happened, Scott,” Sam resumed, “that spoiled all my plans and scared me stiff for a moment. Another hooded figure broke from the bushes and made for the pair at the edge of the rock. I started to follow. Got well out in the open, then stopped in my tracks. Emily-Jane had gone over. I saw her go. So, I backed into the bushes again, feeling pretty sick.”

Sam stopped as if he had finished his story and looked hopefully into Munson’s hard, scornful eyes. No hope there. Sam lowered his gaze.

“Give the unimportant details, Sam,” said Munson. “Those ashes in there bear witness to my good faith.”

Sam gulped and the color slowly left his face. Once more his face and hands grew moist.

“What do you mean, Scott? That’s just what I saw.”

“You know damn well what I mean. Who was the man – that second figure?”

“Daniel.” The name came with a gasp.

“Then you saw him?”

“I recognized him right off. Later I saw his face. It was after Holt ran away. I saw Dan’s face. There was moonlight on it.” Sam stopped and a shudder ran through his body. “He was suffering, Scott,” he added simply. “Suffering there alone. It was as much as I could do to keep from going to him, but I knew he wouldn’t want me then.”

Munson rose from his chair and walked to the window.

“Much obliged,” he said with his back to Sam. “I’m glad you got that off your chest. Then you’re morally certain that Dan did it, eh? I knew all along, but I needed your story. You see, if I can get him to make a confession, I’ll be able to spare the lot of you no end of scandal and publicity. It will be better for Dan in the end.”

Munson stretched wearily and turned yawning from the window. Sam remained in his chair. His eyes were filled with trouble. He was breathing rapidly.

“Sam,” continued Scott, “it’s about time we hit the hay. It’s been a devil of a strain on you, and you don’t look any too damn well. But you’ll sleep better tonight with a clean conscience and those letters out of the way.”

Sam looked at him dully and gave a short mirthless laugh. “I’m going,” he said. “Give me a drink first.”

Munson poured him a drink and stood watching him as he gulped it down. The empty glass fell to the floor with a little crash. Sam sprang to his feet and faced Munson. His eyes were in torment, pierced with utter misery.

“That isn’t all, Scott,” he said in a low voice. “I saw something else.”

“Oh, you did,” replied Munson casually. “What?”

“A hand,” Sam whispered. “It slipped over the edge of the cliff and clutched Emily-Jane by the ankle.”

“Was it a man’s hand, Sam?”

Sam shook his head.

“Right hand or left?”

“Left, Scott.”

“And was there a ring on it – a large solitaire?”

“Let me go, Scott. I’ve told you enough.”

“You saw it?”

Sam bowed his head and walked unsteadily to the door. For a moment their eyes met, but neither man spoke. There was nothing left to say.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Face in the Picture

Munson stood there looking wearily at the door. It had been a fight – a tough one. Scott felt that it had been a fight. He felt it as much spiritually as he did physically. The fact that he had won brought him scant elation. To the contrary. He was now faced with a situation he would have gone a long way to avoid. God, what a case! What a mess of misdirected loyalty and idealism! And to what good end? He shrugged his shoulders and turned from the door.

This time when he stretched his long frame and indulged in a yawn it was honestly. There was no strain for an effect. He was tired – fed up with himself and with humanity in general.

“I don’t know the oriental mind,” he mused, “but damn if these people aren’t all Chinese to me. Still there’s something terribly human about them. A generous murder. Now who in hell ever heard of a paradox like that?”

The fact that his night’s work was not yet over made him feel even more weary. Longingly he eyed his bed. One of the most all around satisfactory beds in which he had ever slept. From the bed his eyes traveled to his easy chair. He felt himself longing for this source of comfort and repose. Then his gaze sought the table on which stood the bottle of whisky.

“Damn if I have to long for that,” he muttered with a faint smile. “That’s one thing I can do at least.”

He did. He was even lavish about it, which was unusual for Scott Munson.

“Might get myself drunk for a couple of months,” he reflected. “Just stay drunk and go dotty and forget who I am. That would be one way out.”

He finished his drink and left the room abruptly. No answer was forthcoming to his knock on Barney’s door. He turned the knob and entered. When he switched on the lights he received a start. The wreck of a small male creature was sitting up in bed. Out of two vaguely inquiring eyes it regarded Munson. Young Barney had selected for his sleeping attire a tattered, paint-smeared smock. This, together with his casually straying hair and his lined face, gave him the appearance of an exceedingly ancient infant.

“What do you want to wear that thing to bed for?” demanded Munson in a tone of disgust.

“Couldn’t find my tops and I can’t stand bottoms,” said Barney cryptically. “Can you stand bottoms, Scott?”

“If you are referring to pajamas,” replied Munson, “it’s purely a personal matter. Only God and myself know the answer.”

“How about Betty?” came the surprising inquiry. “You seem to be forever chasing her about. I don’t think it’s nice. For a man of your—”

“And for a person who never seems to be looking at anything,” cut in Munson, “you seem to be able to observe one hell of a lot. And your mind, Barney, is about as evil as your eye.”

“That’s the usual detective’s line,” replied Barney, “and it doesn’t help at all about the tops. If you’ll believe it, that drawer over there is just bursting with bottoms – practically new bottoms – and there’s not one top among them. Aunt Matty used to supply me with tops, but she’s off me now on account of that picture. Anyway, what does it matter to you whether I sleep in my bare skin or in a suit of armor?”

“You can sleep in a dress suit so far as I am concerned,” replied Munson, sitting down near the bed and suddenly becoming grave. “It’s about that painting of yours that I want to talk. Like Aunt Matty, I’m off you, too, Barney. I’m off you because of that damn picture and the way you’re treating Daniel. Somehow it’s not like you, Barney, and it’s rotten. Daniel needs you now. He’s always stood by you.”

A strange look came into Barney’s eyes, but he remained silent.

“But,” continued Munson, “I’m not going to tell you why you’re all wrong. You’re going to find that out for yourself. Then you’ll just have to believe. And it’s not going to be easy, Barney. It’s going to hurt like hell … knock down your house of cards and scatter your beautiful dreams.”

Munson paused for a moment. When he resumed speaking his voice was unusually gentle.

“But I won’t mind hurting you, Barney,” he said, “if it will only help you to see the truth, which in this sad affair is more beautiful and more terrible than any dreams your brain will ever weave. I won’t mind hurting you if it will bring you back to Daniel, who for your sake has made a sacrifice even greater than death itself. I won’t mind hurting you, Barney, if it will help you to see through the maze of stupidity and despair clouding this case – to see behind it all the essential love and loyalty of the thing. I tell you frankly that during all the years of my dealings with misguided humanity I have never encountered such a poignantly sorrowful situation.”

“Listen, Scott,” said Barney. “I don’t mind being hurt either. Most of my life I’ve been pretty much sat on, but I never minded before because Daniel … well, you see, Daniel was always around. He used to be a big help in the old days.”

Barney stopped speaking and sat staring into space. Munson knew that memories were stealing back from the past. He could almost feel their presence in the room.

“You know, Scott,” continued Barney in a low voice, “sometimes I watch kids and wonder if any of them are as decent as Dan must have been when he was their age. Without anyone knowing it much, he must have been a remarkable youngster … fearless, generous, and understanding.” Barney smiled rather sheepishly at Munson and added, “He was awfully damn good to me, Scott.”

“Then,” said Munson, “for the sake of the old days are you willing to find out the truth now?”

“Yes, Scott, if it will help any.”

“And you’ll take it like a man?”

Barney slowly nodded. “I’ll take my medicine,” he replied with a faint smile. “I’ve been in a gray murk lately, but when you took Dan away that day, I received a bit of a shock. Since then I’ve been asking myself a few questions.”

“I’m still in a gray murk,” replied Munson, producing one of the letters Emily-Jane had written to Daniel and extending it to Barney. “Do you recognize that handwriting?”

Once more Barney nodded, and this time his face was white. “Emily-Jane wrote that to him,” he said, as if speaking to himself. “It must have been years ago.”

“It was,” replied Munson. “All you need to do is to skip through it. Then think of Daniel and the situation he was in – and he wasn’t alone either. I’ll be back in about ten minutes.”

Barney made no answer as Munson rose and left the room. His eyes were fixed on the letter, and the hand that held it was shaking so violently that he was forced to clamp it between his knees.

When Munson returned to the room some fifteen minutes later, Barney was sitting up in bed, in the same position, but the letter had fallen from his hand. A change had come over his face. During Munson’s absence young Barney had grown fast. The eyes that greeted Munson were no longer vague and visionary. They were alert, confident, and at the same time disconcertingly unfathomable. Only a slight tenseness around the corners of his mouth gave evidence of the strong control he was exerting over his emotions.

“Thanks, Scott,” he said in a calm voice. “I have pictured the whole situation. Why didn’t Daniel show me this before – before it happened?”

“There were other letters,” Munson replied. “Sam’s. She had them and she was going to use them.”

“What a mess,” mused Barney. “And a creature so utterly lovely … God’s mind must have been straying.” His voice trailed off into silence, and he sat there with his chin on his knees.

“But Daniel should have shown you that letter,” came Munson’s voice. “That would have been the sane and rational thing to do … only people don’t do the sane and rational things. He wanted to spare you, Barney.”

“He knows my old weakness, Scott,” said Barney. “I’m a great dodger of facts. If I don’t like a fact I alter it to suit my own ideas. If I can’t alter it, I ignore it – banish it from my mind. I’ve never been a great hand at lifting up my voice and declaiming about the hard facts of life, its grimness, its realness, and all that jargon. From the first time a baby falls down on its nose it begins to know about the hard facts of life and its grimness. What I’ve always tried to do is to ungrim life a little, and to do that successfully one must be pretty clever at self-deception.”

He paused and considered Scott Munson thoughtfully.

“I suppose you’ve noticed that I’ve never asked you any questions about this case. Apparently I’ve been indifferent. But I haven’t. I haven’t wanted to know. I’ve been dodging facts and making up facts – false ones – of my own. And all the time I’ve been painting that picture a question has been buzzing round in the back of my mind, Scott. I was afraid of the answer. I didn’t want to know why Emily-Jane was out with Lane Holt at that time of night. So I just kept on painting. The more I painted the angrier I became, until finally the thing fastened on me like an obsession. I only knew that a beautiful thing had been snatched out of my life … the most beautiful thing that had ever come into it. That beauty had been denied me and I wanted to make someone else suffer. God help me. I picked on Dan. Now that I look back on it all, I can see that she never really cared for me. Little incidents stand out – things I refused to admit at the time. I couldn’t talk to anyone else like this, Scott, not even to Daniel. Beauty must have made me drunk and now – oh, well, I sobered up to find a lot of facts that can be neither altered nor dismissed. I’ll just have to face them, Scott, that’s all. I must think about Dan. How do things stand with him?”

“Not so good, Barney,” said Munson slowly.

“God. What a tragic jam,” mused Barney. “There seems to be no way out … and I’m responsible for it all.”

“The situation was,” replied Munson. “You were merely a part of it.”

“I know. I know,” said Barney. “That doesn’t help any, Scott.”

Munson rose and Barney handed him the letter. “I wish you could destroy it,” he said, “but I suppose it’s a bit of evidence. We must all of us lose our dreams now.”

“Nothing else you want to know, Barney?” asked Munson, slipping the letter into his pocket. He was frankly puzzled by Barney’s attitude, his baffling mixture of common sense and visionary ideas. He was puzzled and at the same time pleased.

“No, Scott,” Barney replied. “I owe you a lot as it is. Don’t tell Dan I know.”

When Munson had left, Barney lay back on his pillows and looked sightlessly up at the ceiling. Presently two glistening drops gathered in his eyes and trembled there until they broke from his lashes. That was all … two tears for Emily-Jane, or, rather, for what Emily-Jane had meant to him.

•   •   •   •   •

Several hours later he rose and, dressing about as carefully as he ever did, went quickly downstairs. All quiet in the old house. Dawn was trembling on the fringe of night. From the hall he collected his easel and painting equipment and staggered with them to his brother’s study, the first room to catch the light. The noise this occasioned aroused the shadowing instincts of Officer Red. Breathing heavily, he creaked down the corridor in the wake of Barney. Between them they made the night lively with sound. To such an extent, in fact, that Officer Shad awoke and dogged the heels of Red.

Both officers stood peering into the study. Some minutes passed.

“You might as well get the hell out of here,” said Barney, without troubling to turn around. “Those faces of yours behind me give me the creeps. Take them away.”

Whereupon the faces, wearing a slightly injured look, were withdrawn. It didn’t matter about Mr. Barney. Too bad, though. A nice young man like that going clean off his head.

While Crewe House slept Barney sat before his easel. Occasionally he rose and going out to the veranda, studied the eastern sky. And when at last the comfortable old study was filled with the light of a new day, Barney took up his brushes and began to paint with swift, sure strokes.

•   •   •   •   •

Munson returned to his room and quite willingly accepted the invitation of his easy chair by the window. Barney had not proved difficult. A surprising character. Scott had wanted to see Daniel but he did not feel up to it now.

“Come in,” he called, as a knock sounded on the door.

Daniel came quietly into the room. At the sight of the thin, lined face and the eyes sunken from watching too many long nights through, Munson felt a trifle downed. He wanted to escape from the room.

“Want a drink, Dan?” he asked.

“I do,” said Dan, pouring out a drink and tossing it off. “I did. Badly.”

Seating himself on the bed, he looked silently at Munson. “Almost over now?” Dan asked.

“Almost, Dan.”

“What are you waiting for?”

“For the most natural thing in the world.”

“Meaning what?”

“For someone to say something, Dan. I’ve had a talk with Sam.”

“Did he say something?”

“More than enough.”

Daniel rose from the bed. “Then that pretty well leaves it up to me,” he remarked.

“Yes,” replied Munson. “And to me, also.”

Daniel walked to the door. “I’m glad it’s all over, Scott. It will be—”

“I said almost over,” interrupted Munson.

“Almost over,” Daniel corrected himself. “Don’t feel too low about it, Scott. It started out to be a rather decent summer. I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

“We’ll have to go through with it then,” replied Munson. “Sam isn’t all clear yet.”

He hated himself for the lie, but it was necessary to play these people against each other. And Munson knew how to play them.

•   •   •   •   •

The sun was well up when Daniel opened his eyes. He had slept deeply and forgotten something. What was it? Oh, hell, yes. Scott had said they would have to go through with it today. Well, here was today. Daniel was ready for it. As he rolled from his bed a thrill of excitement ran through him. No more skulking now. That was all over. He would make a confession and Scott would do the rest. And the yacht? Too bad. He tried not to think of the yacht. “Keep on fighting,” June had said. To what good end that? Scott still thought that Sam was involved. His mind must be disabused. No need to make too many people suffer needlessly. There would be enough.

He bathed and dressed quickly and went downstairs. He would have liked to see Barney just then, but Barney was not to be seen. Perhaps things could be patched up, now that Daniel was going away.

He wandered about the lawn as if seeing the place for the last time. He kept telling himself that this could not be so, but deep down in his heart he knew that when he took that ride with Munson or Bennett he would never return to his old home again. Crewe House would see the last of him.

Look, trees, look! Here comes your old friend. Take a good look at him now before he goes away. He used to climb you once. Remember? The two little boys? No more climbing now. Daniel has become a murderer. He murdered a beautiful girl, and now he, too, must die.

Daniel shivered and went down to the beach. For a while he stood idly tossing stones into the water. Not such bad sport, that. There was quite a knack in skimming stones. Better than being locked behind bars. Oh, hell!

Daniel turned from the beach and looked in at the boathouse. There were the canoes and there was Barney’s crazy motorboat. Daniel recalled the first ride he had ever taken in it. It had also been his last. Only Barney knew how to make the engine work, and at times it failed even Barney.

Daniel returned to the lawn and sought his study. At the door he stopped suddenly, his eyes transfixed. Bowed and motionless Barney was sitting before the canvas, and the picture was finished. Daniel saw himself standing at the edge of the cliff and behind his head the yellow moonlight radiated like a nimbus. His arms were outspread and from his left hand blood was dripping. And the face was not the face of a murderer. All the pain of suffering humanity seemed to be centered there. Tenderness and deep regret looked out of the deep-set eyes.

The minutes passed unheeded as Daniel studied the painting and the intention of the painter. A wave of relief and thankfulness swept over Daniel. Unconsciously a deep sigh escaped his lips. Barney looked up and met the gaze of his brother. Daniel nodded silently.

“Yes,” he said quietly, “I did it, Barney.”

“I know, Dan. Forgive me—” and Barney knelt at his brother’s feet.

Daniel put his hand on Barney’s head. “I’m going to confess, Barney.”

“Don’t, Dan. Don’t!”

In Barney’s excited imagination he saw what lay ahead for Daniel … the trial and humiliation of it all, then the waiting alone in a cell, and finally Daniel in the chair. Good God, that couldn’t be! His brother, Dan, alone and convulsed in death. His arms went up to Daniel, to this man who had always stood for the fine things of life, the decent, generous things.

“Don’t, Dan,” he repeated.

Silence a moment, then: “Is it all right with you, Barney?”

“Yes, Dan, and you?”

“It’s always been all right with me, kid. We’ve had a tough break – that’s all.”

He stood with his hand on his brother’s head, and his face was the face in the picture. His eyes were filled with pain and infinite tenderness.

CHAPTER TWENTY

All the World and Places

In the library June Lansing sat facing Scott Munson. Her eyes were alert and filled with expectancy. Munson’s were those of a tired and none too happy man.

“June,” he began, “I want to talk over this case with you. Something has to happen today. Things can’t continue like this. We’ve been stalling long enough.”

June leaned back in her chair and considered her cigarette. “Yes, Scott,” she said. “What comes next?”

“Well,” replied Munson hesitatingly, “I thought you might have something to say.”

“And I thought that was your job, Scott,” June coolly observed.

“Of course,” said Munson, “but – well, I had a long talk with Sam last night and he had lots to say. Daniel is going to talk this morning.… You see, June, the case is about closed.”

“Then why string it out, Scott?” June smiled and lighted another cigarette.

“I have some things,” Munson explained. “This for example. It was hidden in the pantry, June.”

He held up the black domino, which he had taken from the table.

“And then there’s this buckle,” he continued. “It was found in the sand near the rocks. It sort of worries me, June … this thing taken together with what Sam saw that night, your hand with that solitaire on it, and no end of other stuff. Did you hold on with your right hand and pull with your left, June?”

“Yes,” said June, her poise never deserting her. “It was safer. The ledge, as you know, is narrow at that point.”

Munson thoughtfully studied the girl’s face. She was pale but collected, and for the first time he detected an expression of pain in her eyes.

“I’m sorry, June,” he said gently.

June laughed shortly and rose from the chair. For several minutes she paced the room restlessly.

“Sorry, Scott?” she repeated at last, turning suddenly and confronting Munson. “Where can you find the word? There is no word. No form of speech can express the sorrow and horror I’ve been carrying round in my heart. I did the thing. Let’s get that straight. I did it because I couldn’t let Dan do it. I took that frightful stigma on myself because Dan – Scott, Dan is too fine for a thing like that. In time I was going to let him know – let you all know, but I still had hope. I still thought we might get away somewhere. It was murder, Scott, but it wasn’t such a terrible murder. I am weak enough to regret it though. Day and night it is in my eyes, in my thoughts, gnawing at my mind. But I couldn’t let Dan do it … I couldn’t let him do it. We were all mad that night.”

She sank to a chair and buried her face in her hands. Little convulsive shivers ran through her body. Munson rose and, crossing over to her, placed a hand on her shoulder. For some time they remained thus in the silence of the great, dim room.

“I read one of her letters to him,” she resumed, her head still in her hands, her eyes fixed on the carpet. “Then I knew what all the trouble was about. After the dance she told me she had a date for a little walk in the moonlight.”

“Why did she tell you that?”

“Because I pretended I had one, too, and she was warning me to keep away from High Point Rock. She thought I was like herself – a cheat. I think she almost liked me then. A girl like her gets lonely unless she has someone of her kind about her. I took the domino and got down to the ledge long before anyone else had started. I thought I lost that buckle somewhere along the way. All evening it had been giving me trouble, but I never knew just where it fell off. I waited on the ledge, Scott, waited a long time, and then the thing happened. Everyone who comes to High Point Rock halts at that spot or close to it at sometime or other. I knew they would come and I waited. Those minutes will be with me all my life. You know the rest. Sam must have seen. In the confusion of the scuffle above my head I reached up and gripped her ankle … I pulled her over the edge of the cliff and she almost struck me as she fell. I heard her strike. It came to me through the darkness. Oh, God, oh, God, that sound!” She paused and looked up at Munson. “I’d beaten Dan to it,” she added, “but at the peace of my own soul if I have such a thing. Is that enough, Scott?”

“Yes, June,” he answered. “I’m afraid the case is closed.”

“It’s a God-damned lie.” Daniel’s words cut sharply across the silence of the room. “It’s impossible – stupid.”

Munson and June turned quickly to see the two brothers standing in the doorway. Daniel strode across the room and pulled June roughly to her feet. Then he took her in his arms and held her fiercely to him.

“Scott, it’s a damned lot of nonsense,” he said, looking at Munson over June’s shoulders. “I did it and you’ve all along known I did. Barney – everyone knows. This girl here is out of her mind. Shut up, June” – and Daniel shook her vigorously, then once more gathered her in his arms.

“I’m afraid June is right,” replied Munson. “You see, Daniel, I can prove it.”

For a moment Daniel’s faculties were atrophied. He could hardly realize the fact that he was not an actual murderer. His whole world was changed by this new development. But he was not relieved. He was afraid for June. She was in danger. This, at the moment, was all he knew. June was in danger. Now he would have to fight. Barney crossed the room and placed a timid hand on June’s arm. He, too, seemed bewildered.

“Then, I’m morally responsible,” said Daniel. “I tried to do it, I wanted to do it, and I planned to do it. If June did do the thing it was I who drove her to it.”

“I killed her because I wanted to,” broke in June. “No one drove me to it.”

“You keep quiet,” said Daniel, holding her even closer.

“Do you loathe me, Barney?” she asked.

Barney bent over and kissed a part of her nose. “I’m thinking,” he whispered. “Hold tight, old girl.”

“Morally responsible, yes,” replied Munson, “but I can’t arrest you on that. June actually did it and inasmuch as there was no conspiracy between you, June is guilty of murder in the eyes of the law. And it’s the law with which we have to deal. Both you and Sam are potential murderers. Both of you tried to murder Emily-Jane, but the fact remains that you didn’t do it. You failed and now June must—”

“But, my God, Scott,” cut in Daniel, “can’t something be done? You’re not going to arrest June for the murder of Emily-Jane?”

“What else can I do?” asked Scott, with a helpless shrug of his shoulders.

“Take me,” said Daniel. “You can prove a charge against me without any trouble. I’ll offer no defense.”

“I’m not looking for a victim just for the fun of it,” replied Munson rather bitterly.

“Listen, Scott,” put in Barney, “if you’ll go over there in the corner and count one hundred I’ll guarantee to save everybody a lot of trouble.”

For some minutes Munson paced the floor lost in thought. June raised her head and watched him.

“Keep fighting, Dan,” she whispered. “We’re not licked yet. I feel it.”

“Wish I had a gun,” muttered Barney. “I’d shoot him in the legs.”

“This is what I’m going to do,” said Munson, stopping in front of the little group. “I’m going to motor to New Haven and parley with the district attorney. I don’t know what will come of it, but I’ll try to make things as easy as I can for you, June. Daniel, you and Sam had better come along with me, so that June won’t have too many allies to get her into trouble. June, I suggest that you stay on the veranda as much as possible where my staff can keep an eye on you. Consider yourself under arrest.”

He left the room and hurried upstairs. The moment he was gone Daniel turned to Barney.

“It’s up to you, Barney,” he said. “Get in touch with Manning and dope out a scheme with him. Mention the yacht. June shouldn’t be here when we get back. Lay the staff low if necessary. And work quick, Barney. I’ll delay Scott as long as I can.”

“I’m thinking,” replied Barney, “thinking deeply.”

“Don’t forget the yacht,” continued Dan, hurriedly. “It’s our one best bet. And get June out of the way.”

“I’m still thinking,” was all Barney said.

“Ready?” called Munson from the door. The Shays stood behind him. They were regarding June with sorrowful eyes.

•   •   •   •   •

Barney had thought to some purpose. No sooner had the car containing Munson, Sam, and Daniel driven off than he was calling up Manning. This excellent man received the news calmly.

“From six o’clock on tomorrow morning,” he told Barney, “there’ll be a sea-going yacht hanging round Singing Reef. Try like hell to pick us up there. We’ll be waiting – that is, the yacht will.”

Barney then called up Sally Brent and made known his needs. Sally was only too willing to meet them. Barney could have her motorboat or anything else he wanted. The warmth of Barney’s gratitude brought a faint flush to the cheeks of the small young lady at the other end of the wire.

Barney’s next call was a New Haven number – another girl friend. Marion Wilson would be quite willing to lie for Barney. At seven o’clock tomorrow morning she would call up and say that June had arrived in a state of nervous exhaustion. Yes, she understood perfectly. All set.

Leaving the library, Barney hurried to the beach and got his motorboat into the water. Soon he was chugging vibratingly toward the islands. As a result of this trip, Pete Clark began to move with incredible rapidity. He left the rocks and went about his affairs. Barney returned to the beach and did a surprising thing. He took a heavy sock from his pocket and packed it with sand. Later, when Pete came strolling through the orchard, Barney unobtrusively put him in possession of the sand-filled sock. Barney was still thinking. He hurried up to June’s room and carefully packed two traveling bags. He included even mules and a rather seductive pajama outfit. All the bright things he put in, for in his heart he knew that even if he succeeded there still would be many sad days dawning for June.

When Barney descended to the veranda the Shays were keeping solicitous eyes on June Lansing. He procured his easel and set it up in front of one of the French windows opening into the library. Then he wandered up to the Shays. They made no protest when he offered to paint their pictures. June made this possible by agreeing to sit close by. Barney placed his subjects in the French windows and began the serious business of making the Shays immortal. He painted swiftly and honestly, and presently the Shays began to appear on the canvas. After ten minutes of steady work, he arrested his flying brush and asked the officers to elevate their chins a little more proudly. As they did so, Pete Clark silently rose up behind them and smote Officer Shad delicately but sufficiently upon the head with the sock Barney had so providentially packed with sand. Officer Red, turning to ascertain the reason for his associate’s sudden collapse, received a similar blow. Pete then quietly withdrew with the sock, and Barney hurried upstairs for the bags. June was waiting in the hall to relieve him of one of these. Together they hurried to the back of the house where Aunt Matty and Sue were waiting to say goodbye. There was no time for words. It was a silent departure. June was crying softly as she hurried through the orchard. Aunt Matty was holding a conference with the servants from which they dispersed with sealed lips.

At the border of the salt marshes Barney suddenly disappeared into a hole from which June had to extricate him. The suitcase had opened and most of its intimate contents lay on the ground.

“Are you helping me to escape or am I helping you?” demanded June.

“It’s sort of an entente cordiale,” replied Barney, helping her to repack the bag.

At the opening of a small creek, Pete was placidly waiting for them in the flattest of flat-bottomed skiffs. June stepped in and Barney passed the bags to her.

“They’ll never find her, Mr. Barney,” declared Pete. “Never in the world. I’m taking her to my last resort. Have Mr. Dan down here tonight. I’ll be waiting.”

June said nothing as the skiff moved off. She merely looked back at Barney and bit her under lip.

When Barney had once more seated himself in the chair, the Shays were about to return to their normal state of mental obtuseness.

“What happened?” asked Officer Shad.

“Nothing,” replied Barney innocently. “I thought you fell asleep.”

Officer Red tenderly felt the top of his head.

“No,” he declared. “No. It couldn’t have been that … not just that.”

•   •   •   •   •

Munson on his return was not a happy man, and the Shays were even less so. On learning of the disappearance of June, Scott had immediately called up Headquarters and got in touch with Bennett.

“Get out here as fast as you can,” he told him. “The Shays are hopeless.”

In spite of the fact that both Shad and Red stoutly exonerated Barney, pointing out the utter impossibility of his having had anything to do with June’s escape, Munson regarded that cheerful young man with suspicion and distrust.

Munson felt that the absence of June Lansing was not so serious. She would not be able to get far. All arteries of escape were being watched. It would be impossible for her to make a complete getaway. Nevertheless it was annoying. Things looked bad enough for June as they were. This little escapade was not going to help at all. Yet in his heart he did not blame her. Had he been in her place he would have done the same thing. He did not even take the trouble to make inquiries, knowing the hopelessness of trying to battle against the loyalty of Crewe House.

•   •   •   •   •

At two o’clock that night Daniel used the old tree outside his window for the last time. At the edge of the salt marshes Pete Clark was patiently waiting for him. Daniel stepped into the skiff and was silently carried out across the marshes. The reeds hid the skiff, and the channel twisted between high banks. Presently they came to a small island – a mere scrap of earth surrounded by mud and stagnant water. In the darkness, Pete miraculously guided Daniel along a narrow path. Daniel was mud to the hips.

There was a low shed in the bushes, and it was here that Daniel found June. She was fighting mosquitoes and smoking cigarettes. For a moment he held the disheveled figure in his arms, then he, too, turned his attention to the mosquitoes.

“Think we’ll get away with it?” asked June.

“We have so far,” replied Daniel.

“Didn’t believe it was in Barney,” she continued.

“You never can tell what’s in Barney,” said Daniel. “He’s always been a bit amazing to me.”

June edged closer to Daniel.

“Dan,” she said rather haltingly, “do you feel any differently toward me now that you know I’m a – that I killed Emily-Jane?”

“How could I, June?”

“You don’t feel that I’m stained sort of?”

“Far from it.”

“But I do, Dan.” Her sad eyes looked out into the darkness.

“We were both in it, old thing. Don’t feel like that.”

Pete appeared with a pot of hot coffee.

•   •   •   •   •

At seven o’clock that morning, Barney was called to the telephone. Marion Wilson was on the wire. Munson followed Barney into the room and stood suspiciously at his elbow.

“You say she’s there?” said Barney into the transmitter.

“Yes,” came the mendacious reply. “In bed. Her nerves seem to have gone to pieces.”

“Hell!” replied Barney. “Hold the wire, Marion.” He turned to the waiting Munson. “She says that June’s just drifted in and they’ve put her to bed.”

Munson took the telephone and questioned the girl closely. “Don’t let her out of your sight until I get there,” he told her. “I’m coming right now.”

“Want me to go with you?” asked Barney. “She might need a friendly face.”

“I want no one to go with me,” snapped Scott. “I’m damn well sick of you all.”

“Oh, I see,” said Barney humbly.

When Scott had gone Barney had an extremely private interview with Aunt Matty. As a result of this little talk three rather questionable cups of coffee were expeditiously brewed. They contained most of the tablets Dr. Manning had left for Daniel on the night of the dance. Aunt Matty painted the lily by adding several drops of this and that to the mixture – strong drugs long secreted in her own private medicine chest.

A few minutes later when she offered this concoction to Bennett and the two Shays with her own fair hands, the officers of the law could hardly refuse, especially when they saw Barney and Sam Stoughten gulping down their coffee with every indication of relish.

“I guess we all need something in these sad times,” the old lady said, with a deep but hypocritical sigh.

There is no getting away from the fact that the officers were most potently doped. And strange to say, Bennett was the first to go. He was found sleeping peacefully in a chair on the veranda. Officers Shad and Red speedily emulated his example. Then Barney executed his master stroke.

With the aid of Sam he carried the sleeping men to the beach and placed them comfortably as possible in his temperamental motorboat. A modest supply of food and water followed them. The remaining room was taken up with an extra supply of gasoline. These preparations completed, Barney lashed the wheel and brought the engine to life. Soon the little motorboat with its three unconscious passengers became a rapidly diminishing speck against the blue.

“Suppose the boat capsizes and the three of them drown?” asked Sam, unhelpfully. “What then?”

Barney ran a hand through his disorderly, straw-colored hair. “I don’t know exactly what then,” he admitted. “It would be a great pity, but nobody has anything on us.”

Barney next resorted to his bicycle and pedaled rapidly to Sally Brent’s sumptuous home. That young lady was ready and waiting for him.

“It’s all tuned up,” she announced.

“So am I,” said Barney, stepping into her long, rakish-looking motorboat. “You wait here for me, Sally. I’ll take a walk with you then.”

“All right, Barney,” said little Sally Brent. “I’ll wait right here.”

Barney swept out on the Sound for a few miles, then brought the boat sharply about and followed the coast line. In the distance he saw his own home standing comfortably back among the trees. In a few minutes he rounded High Point Rock, and once more he changed the course of the boat. This time he drove for the shore, to a narrow channel opening into the salt marshes. Here among the reeds Pete with June and Daniel were waiting in the skiff. The transfer was rapidly made, Pete suitably rewarded, and the motorboat headed for Singing Reef with June at the wheel. Daniel came aft and sat by Barney.

“Well, old fox face,” he said, making an effort to be cheerful. “Why don’t you come along with us?”

“No,” said Barney, “I’ve a date to go walking with Sally, and, anyway, I have to return her boat.”

“But you’ll join us soon?”

“Just as soon as I’ve perfected a little scheme I’ve been working out.”

“What scheme’s that, Barney?”

“I’m learning how to count my chickens before they’re hatched.”

“How’s that?” asked Daniel.

“Well,” began Barney, “I’m a little reluctant to talk about it until I’m sure I’m right. You might laugh at me.”

“Certainly not, Barney.”

“It’s really quite simple,” said Barney. “The most important thing is to get to know a lot of chickens.”

“Sort of gain their confidence?” Daniel suggested.

“Exactly,” replied Barney, his face lighting up. “You get those chickens to place implicit trust in you. Then you stick around while they are laying their eggs, after which you stroll up quite casually and borrow the eggs.”

“I think I see it all,” said Daniel.

“I knew you would,” replied Barney. “Well, when you’ve lured the eggs away from the chickens you find something or someone to throw them at – some enemy or creditor or just a casual passer-by. And there you are.”

“How do you mean, there we are?” demanded Daniel.

“Just that. There you are. You can’t go wrong. No eggs, no chickens. The answer is zero. It works out every time.”

“Pretty tough on the hens,” observed Daniel. “Don’t you ever pay them back?”

“No,” said Barney. “You buy ’em another rooster. After that I’m going in for bull-baiting.”

“Sounds interesting. How do you do that?”

“Well, you put a worm on the end of a bull’s nose.” began Barney. “Then you push him off the end of a pier and the fish in snapping at the worm bite the bull on the nose.”

“I should think the bull would be furious,” put in Daniel.

“He is,” said Barney. “And humiliated, too.”

Before Barney could go on any more about the bull, they had passed Singing Reef and were circling round a large, handsomely designed yacht with runaway-looking lines. On the stern they made out a freshly painted name.

No time for bull-baiting now. Barney took the wheel and brought the motorboat neatly alongside the yacht. Two handclasps and it was all over. Ready hands assisted June and Daniel aboard. The luggage followed.

Daniel and June were leaning over the rail as Barney sheered off.

“Goodbye, Barney,” called Daniel. “God bless you, boy.”

“I’ll follow you, Dan,” called the small figure in the motorboat. “Wherever you are, I’ll follow you. Just let me know.”

June tried to speak, to call back a last word to Barney. Her voice broke and she held out both her hands in farewell.

The yacht got under way, and Barney turned to face a lonely sea. It had never been so lonely, he thought, so utterly bereft of life and interest. He turned his head and looked back at the rapidly vanishing yacht.

“So long, Dan,” he whispered. “It won’t be long. We’ll get together soon.”

True to her word, Sally was waiting for him in the same spot. She looked as if she had not even moved. At first she appeared as a small speck in the distance, and when Barney drew into the slip by which she stood she did not appear much larger.

For a long time they walked in silence, then presently they joined hands and Barney began to talk. Sally Brent listened with the wisdom of her sex.

When they reached Crewe House, Scott Munson was sitting on the veranda. As he watched them approach, a strange expression came into his eyes. It would have been difficult to tell at that moment the nature of his thoughts.

“Hello, Scott,” said Barney.

“Out of my sight,” replied Munson. “What have you done with Bennett and the Shays?”

“Don’t be silly, Scott,” said Barney. “Do I look as if I could do away with three able-bodied men?”

“No,” admitted Scott, “but someone has.”

“Perhaps they got tired of waiting for you and just went home.”

“Who was responsible for that fake telephone call this morning?”

“Search me,” said Barney.

“I’d like to hang you,” said Scott.

•   •   •   •   •

That night Barney sat on the veranda and wondered about June and Daniel. A few chairs away Munson was smoking moodily. Well on their way to the sea, June and Daniel were leaning over the rail of the flying yacht and wondering about Barney. Their thoughts must have passed on the water. Manning was not with them. He was walking across the lawn of Crewe House and approaching Barney’s chair.

“May I come along when you go?” he asked, his voice sounding hushed in the darkness.

Barney placed his hand on the back of Manning’s. “We’ll go together,” he said.

Later they were joined by Sam and Sue, but still the place seemed empty.

•   •   •   •   •

The next morning Munson received a furious long-distance call from New York City.

“This is Bennett,” that officer mouthed, “and I’m in New York. The Shays are with me and they’re driving me mad.”

“But why did you want to rush off to New York?” asked Munson, in his mildest voice.

Strange animal-like noises at the other end of the wire greeted this question.

“We didn’t want to,” Munson at last made out. There seemed to be tears in Bennett’s voice. “We were doped and dumped into a half-witted motorboat and sent out unconscious across the Sound. When we came to we didn’t know where we were. Later a Sound steamer picked us up and landed us at New York.”

Munson sat back and considered the telephone. His face was a study in conflicting emotions.

“What do you think of that, Mr. Munson?” Bennett’s voice demanded.

“Remarkably neat,” replied Munson. “Never heard of anything quite like it.”

“Ruthless, I call it,” said the other. “The work of a cold-blooded criminal.”

“Who doped you, Bennett?”

“That old devil you call Aunt Matty.”

“What!” Munson sat up in his chair.

“Thought you’d be surprised,” came Bennett’s voice. “Yes. She’s the snake in the grass. Put the bracelets on her, Mr. Munson. Arrest everybody. They’re all in it.”

Munson’s eyes reflected the hopelessness of the situation. “I’m afraid they are,” he answered. “In fact, I suspect the entire neighborhood. We can’t arrest all of them.”

“But what are we going to do?”

“Damned if I know, Bennett. I’ll admit I’m stumped. I know this, though – in the future I’m going to confine my efforts to the professionally criminal class. Amateurs are too erratic for me.”

“Same here,” replied Bennett earnestly. “I guess I better be getting the Shays back home.”

“All right,” said Munson. “Bring them along.”

He hung up and sat looking at the telephone. Slowly, reluctantly, a smile gathered at the corners of his lips. This facial manifestation finally crystallized in a grin of sheer enjoyment.

“Put the three of them in a boat and sent them off on their own,” he mused. “My God, what a thing to do. And the old lady’s in it – up to her ears. They’re all in it – more than I even suspect.”

Slowly he rose from the chair.

“Well, I’m licked,” he said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Reunion

One year later two small, untidy, and exceedingly incompetent-looking individuals alighted from the wrong train at the Swiss lake resort of Montreux. Many bags surrounded them, and at these they looked as if seeing them for the first time. The female member of this team proceeded to count the bags.

“I forget whether there were six or seven,” she said.

“I never knew,” replied Barney, then added cheerfully, “We’ve quite a lot at any rate.”

After bumping into each other several times in their efforts to get started they finally managed to go in the same direction at the same time. One hour later they had reached the hotel that was only ten minutes’ distance from their original point of departure. This was exceptionally good time for them. They considered themselves in luck.

At the hotel they at last induced someone to take them to the suite of rooms occupied by June and Daniel. Here they were warmly received. June had grown graver and more womanly. There was a suggestion of humility in her eyes and a world of understanding. Even about Daniel there lingered traces of the tragedy through which he had passed.

Barney and Sally Brent sat down very close together and looked about them.

“It’s nice here,” said Sally. “Nicer than Paris.”

“Yes,” replied Barney. “She thinks we lost a bag.”

“That’s all right,” said Daniel comfortingly. “We’ll get that for you. I can’t believe you’re here.”

“We are,” replied Barney. “We eloped.”

“And we’re not married yet,” added Sally, as though mentioning a fact of relatively minor importance.

“What!” exclaimed Daniel. “Not married. How’s that?”

“Well, you see we were awfully busy,” began Barney.

“And in New York we didn’t know just how to go about it,” Sally helped out.

“And by that time we’d gotten started,” put in her teammate.

“Started?” demanded Daniel. “How do you mean, started?”

“Everything,” replied Barney simply, and Sally nodded her head.

“Why didn’t you get the captain to marry you on the way over?” Daniel inquired.

“We didn’t think of it for a couple of days, then it didn’t seem to us as if it would be very nice,” Barney explained.

Daniel turned to June for help. She had sunk to a couch and was laughing silently but desperately. Tears were running down her face.

“Well,” said Daniel, turning back to the expectant pair. “We’ll have to fix that up, too. And without further delay.”

Barney’s face brightened. “I kept telling Sally you’d see about everything when we got here,” he said. “I never was any good about details.”

“Do you call getting married a detail?” asked Daniel.

“Sure,” said Barney, “compared with all the rest of it.”

“Where’s Manning?”

“He’ll be along later. Said he had some business to transact with a baroness or something.”

“A nice lot, the three of you,” observed Daniel.

“Yes,” replied Barney. “The three of us are all right. Munson’s in Paris. He sent you this.”

Daniel took the hastily written note and read:

To the both of you –

After your sneaking departure Betty and Tom became so indignant that they swore out two statements and gave them to the district attorney. They seemed sufficient to satisfy him, and so the case is officially closed. He attributes June’s confession to an attempt to extricate Daniel from an unfortunate set of circumstances. I can do nothing to change his mind. The law is no longer interested in either one of you, but I am. Why not join me this winter in Egypt? We could do well there.

Affectionately,

Scott Munson.

“I’ll show this to you later,” Daniel said to June. “Munson says everything is all right.” He put the letter into his pocket and once more considered the pair. “I suppose you’d like a drink,” he observed.

“Oh, yes,” said Barney.

“Could I have some ice-cream?” asked Sally. “Peach ice-cream, perhaps?”

Daniel smiled and June looked somewhat shyly at Sally. “Do you want to come over here, Sally?” she asked.

Evidently Sally did. June took her in her arms.

“Sure, kid,” she said, “you can have all the ice-cream you want.”

“I suppose you’d like to wash up a bit,” Daniel suggested.

“Do we have to do that now?” asked Barney.

“Oh, no,” replied Daniel. “It’s merely customary, that’s all.”

Sitting on the terrace overlooking the lake, the four of them did things about drinks and ices. Sally was extremely happy.

“I’ll paint that brute of a mountain,” declared Barney, waving a hand at the Dent du Midi.

“I guess it will be able to stand it,” observed Daniel. “Everybody paints that.”

“But not the way I’m going to paint it,” said Barney. “When I’ve finished with that mountain it won’t recognize itself.”

“That,” said Daniel, “is barely possible.”

June’s eyes were fixed on the mountain, but she was seeing High Point Rock. Barney’s arrival had brought so many things back to mind. Then she smiled upon Sally Brent, who was whole-heartedly sucking a spoon.

“Do you think you’ll like it here with us?” asked June.

“It’s wonderful,” said Sally. “We’ll all stick together, June.”

“And you two will damn well get married right off,” put in Daniel.

“Sure,” said Barney. “You fix us up.”

Later, when Manning arrived, it was discovered that he had brought the baroness with him. She was charming. They were still transacting business, it seemed, the exact nature of which was never quite disclosed.

— THE END —

DREAM’S END

DESCRIPTION

Dream’s End is Thorne Smith’s attempt at a serious gothic romance.
A New York advertising executive leaves his job in the city to write poetry in a hut by the sea. Once there he finds himself caught in the coils of his attraction to two women – a situation that so unsettles his wits that he falls prey to a heavily symbolic dream obsession.

— PART I —
THE BIRTH AND DEATH
OF A DREAM

I

Many years have passed since last I was here in this silent place on the border of the salt marshes… many years. And though time and absence have blunted somewhat the edge of my regret for the things that came to pass here and hereabouts, neither time nor absence has been able to alleviate the pain which today I feel as keenly as I did this day twenty years ago.

Like a living symbol of discontent, casting shadows in its wake, I have skulked drearily across a sun-lit world since last I turned my face from these marshes with a double purpose in view – to escape a tormenting memory and to recapture a lost dream. And now after the passage of all the restless years I have returned to the point of departure no better off than when I set out.

There is a difference though, and I can feel it. For as I sit here in the quiet of falling dusk, it seems to me that an odd, quivering tension is troubling the air, as though actors were silently waiting behind a curtain for the last act of a play in which I am cast for a part. Whether the actors are hostile or friendly, and what is to be the nature of my role, is still withheld from me, for that is the dénouement of the drama and the end of a long, long quest.

•   •   •   •   •

To me this is the fairest spot in the world, and the saddest. In the days of my youth when I first came upon it, I recall how I crept through the rushes and sat watching, as now I watch, the water trails in the marshes fill up with purple and crimson shades as the sun made down the sky.

I have always heard that disappointment follows the footsteps of those who retrace their paths back to the scenes of their youth. Mountains diminish to hills, I am told, and rivers change to muddy streams, nor does the sun ever shine so brightly or the sky seem quite so blue, I have not found it true in this case. If anything, time has intensified the beauty of these marshes. The influence they exert over me is as strong today as it was many years ago. I look upon them now, not with diminished vision, but with added appreciation. They have become a vital part of my life.

Through all the years that I have fled this place memory has held it ever fresh in my eyes; and now, as I behold it once more in reality, nothing seems to have changed… even the peculiar stillness hovering over the spot, the sensation of finding oneself quite alone in a lost corner of the world still lingers in the air, holding the soul within me in a calm but watchful hush.

•   •   •   •   •

That ragged apple tree over there, extending its maimed and cramped limbs from the green curve of the bank, is as gaunt and weird an object as when I first looked on it, yet just as friendly. Perhaps a little more so, now that the years have brought me similar physical defects… but here perhaps I should apologize to this weather-blown old watcher of the marshes, for it at least has remained picturesque.

One of the fascinations of this place for me lies in the fact that it is shut off on three sides from the rest of the world by a tall and thickly laced screen of reeds, the open side giving view to the green level reaches of the salt marshes where flat creeks of water wind slowly, endlessly, and mysteriously into a fantastic and insolvable design of flowing color.

The semicircular inclosure itself is carpeted with a broad mat of springy reeds which time and the elements have beaten low. Though dead, dry and gray, these reeds, from having become so closely interwoven, still retain a feeling of buoyancy, and yield softly without breaking under the weight of the reclining body.

I have said that this natural pavilion by the marshes appeals to me because on three sides it is shut off from the world, and this statement, on second thought, seems to be no less than the truth. Perhaps I am still possessed by some compelling instinct of a distant primitive life thus to find comfort and satisfaction in having safety around me and a clear outlook in front. Whatever the reason may be, I never fail to experience a thrill of expectancy and relief whenever I turn away from the great voice of the sea that chants against the rocks on the other side of this ledge of land – to seek out this hidden pocket in the reeds.

Through fields high in wild grass and, in May time, freckled with daisies, I pick my way until at last, after a careful survey round me, I drop suddenly from view down a declivity concealed by the overgrowth. Immediately I am plunged into a land of wavering twilight and of intimate earthy smells. I pause for a moment to drink in my sensations, then parting a known opening in the rushes, I fling myself down on the mat of reeds to gaze on the green, salt marshes where the waterways slowly glide.

Before me, stretched out like a huge map, and reminiscent of an old geography, lies a silent and unpeopled country; while round me circle the whispering reeds terminating in a high, green bank from which like a garrulous old pensioner, the friendly apple tree hobbles out to greet me.

•   •   •   •   •

In the bygone days, to my knowledge, no other person visited this spot save one who came and passed in the swift flight of a summer, and in passing left no path that mortal foot could follow.

See, over yonder, on the flat surface of the marshes, there lies a small green island decked with a plume of trees?

It was there that I lost a dream.

II

Men have fought to realize a dream and men have gone down in defense of one; but my lot has been less fortunate and certainly less spectacular than these, for I have been possessed of a longing that has forced me to wander, restless and unrewarded, across the face of the world in fruitless search of a dream that I lost in the days of my youth, and I have grown old and unbecoming in the quest.

Those who have tasted and died have at least experienced the joy of the dram before the goblet was shattered at their feet, whereas I, who have quaffed from many goblets, have never yet found in any of them a liquor that would appease the flame which even now is parching my throat.

When I first set out in pursuit of this dream, I proceeded with the logical folly characteristic of many madmen. I wandered irresponsibly in strange places, but always with a definite object in view. During the first year of the search I passed through cities and foreign lands as the shadow of a cloud drifts across a field. I was not a part of anything. Places made no impression on me, and I left no impression behind. Like a sightless phantom I moved with outstretched hands, futilely plucking at the air. And in those days I dwelt in pools of spiritual silence.

Once when I was in Egypt my search carried me out into the desert, where through many days of disappointment I endeavored to concentrate on the dream that I had lost. With all my will I strove to recall it from the appalling immensity confronting my burning eyes. But the brooding consistency of the desert silence, and at night the impersonal splendor of the stars, instead of quieting my spirit, awoke within me a strong desire for human companionship. Night after night I continued to struggle alone in this vast, unresponsive stillness, hoping to force myself into that condition of spiritual calm which I knew to be vital to the success of my search. At length, unable to endure it longer, I arose one night from my rug and drew near to the camp of my guides. Their fire lay like a pool of light on the dark floor of the desert, and as I approached I caught the monotonous whining of native instruments and heard the tinkling of flying anklets. Imperceptibly, as though hypnotized, and yet clearly aware of my weakness, I drew nearer, with quickening pulse, to the half-circle of swarthy nomads. Three girls were dancing in the firelight, their supple bodies voluptuously abandoned to the rhythm of the music. And as I watched my eyes grew bright with hunger… and I no longer sought a dream.

The next day I struck camp, and retreated from the scene of my defeat. I returned to Paris and sought to capture my dream in the fleeting glance of a woman, or to hear it floating to me from the cascading notes of a symphony. All day long I walked the streets, peering into the eyes of the women I passed, and at night I drowned myself in a flood of music. But in the feverish turmoil of Paris I fared no better than I had in the austere silence of the desert.

Then, stung by remorse and self-loathing, I denied myself the companionship of my kind, and withdrew to a little hamlet far up on the snow-cloaked shoulder of a mountain. Through the long, cold winter nights, I waited for the dream to come. In the intensity of my longing I fasted for many days and punished my body with exhausting exercise and long exposure to the elements. And in the deep, still valleys of the mountains I groveled in the snow and whimpered for the return of the dream. But I who had forsaken the object of my quest was in turn forsaken. The mountains looked down on my misery and denied me peace. Then, once more, the spirit of rebellion took possession of me and I went down from the mountain to find laughter and forgetfulness in the sun- warmed dissipation of a Mediterranean watering-place.… I met there many who gave me memories, but none who brought me a dream.

•   •   •   •   •

Once I thought I had found it. In a sultry back yard in London a girl lay dying. Childhood had hardly left her before the city had found her out, used her, enjoyed her, and passed on to its trams and pubs and laughing stalls. As she lay stretched out on a miserable cot, her hot breath falling on the tepid air around us, her wandering eyes sought comfort in the sickly green of a stunted tree.

She was known to me as Molly, and during the early days of her decline we had spent many hours together conversing on subjects which would have brought pious consternation to the matrons of the last “home” that had turned her out redeemed. Instinctively she seemed to divine that, like herself, I too belonged to the unstable and was drifting without a rudder.

Now she lay dying. From time to time a red-faced, perspiring woman came panting out of the kitchen to gaze solicitously at Molly, then returned silently to her labors. Once she wiped her large, raw hands on her apron and timidly stroked the bleached hair of the dying girl. A little later appeared a doctor, aggressively supported by a visiting nurse. After making his patient keenly aware of the fact that she was stubbornly dying the face of a pure, powerful and indignant charitable organization, he took himself off with many ominous shakings of his head. But before he left, the doctor was good enough to explain to me that it was quite a common case.

“Oh, quite common, sir, I assure you,” he said. “The wards are full of ’em. They’re eaten up, simply eaten up. No fiber moral or physical… weak sisters This girl will die soon. You might give her a few drops from this bottle. It will steady her nerves a bit.”

As evening came on Molly grew steadily weaker, and her eyes filled up with dreams. Her thin hand groped for mine, and she made an effort to rise.

“Yes, Molly,” I said, bending over her. “What is it? What do you see?”

“Something I can’t understand,” she answered. “Something new.”

“Try, Molly, try,” I pleaded.

“It’s bright,” she gasped, “an’ green an’ there are trees waving on it in the wind. Oh, Mr. Landor, it’s ever so peaceful there.”

Her voice faded away as her life streamed out through her eyes. I was trembling violently now and clinging to her hand.

“Is that all, Molly?” I asked. “Is there anything else you see?”

“Yes; I seem to make out something… someone… Lor’! Mr. Landor,” she murmured as peace touched the lines of her face.

Quickly, before she died, I bent and kissed her lips.

•   •   •   •   •

Now the sun is rapidly nearing the end of its course, and still I sit here muttering to myself like some old book left to grumble alone on a shelf.

See! There it hangs now behind the island, blazing for a moment through the trees like a burning scarf… it’s quenched, and the night is at that stage of darkness which precedes the coming of the stars. The marshes are blotted from view, but soon their wandering waterways will be shot with dancing jets of green and the golden shrubbery of the stars will twist across the sky.

From the high bank above me drifts down the mingled voices of a boy and girl engaged in earnest discussion – fisher folk, perhaps, straying inland from the beach. Although it is impossible for me to miss a word of their conversation, sitting as I am directly at their feet, yet to them I am as far away as though I were squatting in a reed- built tepee on a distant South Sea island.

“But, Joe, you promised. When we started out you said you wouldn’t go home so soon.”

“Aw, I know, but this walking ain’t no fun.”

“So you want to go back to Becky, is it? What do you do if you don’t walk when you go out at night with her?”

“What’s that to you?”

“I’m a finer shape of a girl than her, the flat-breasted, thin-flanked gabby.”

“Come, let’s see if you’re. You’d better let me try.”

“What do you think of her now? Oh… Joe!”

“You are fine, Madge, darned if you ain’t! Say, let me try again.”

“You won’t go back if I do?”

“No, let me hold you now.”

“Promise?”

“I swear!”

“Then you can try if you want.”

“Madge! Where have you gone to now?”

“The daisies are thick where I am.”

The voices die away.

•   •   •   •   •

Here in the darkness I sit apart from life, and like an unregenerate worldling moralize on its ways. The ways of a man with a woman and the ways of a woman with a man; different in method of approach, different perhaps in fundamental purpose, but eventually arriving at the same conclusion. The battle continues as briskly today as when the issue was first joined eons ago in the twilight of the jungle. The ambush warfare between women still goes on, and man still fights his brother as merrily as ever for a booty of yielding flesh. And the old, sweet, hateful flame burning between man and woman forever blinds their eyes to the world that lies round them. The curve of a woman’s breast, or the swift pressure of her thighs, largely controls the impulses and aspirations of man. In his inability to adjust himself to the most powerful and joyous force in life man still walks on all fours; and in the presence of this force the cumulative experience of the ages drops away, leaving him as helpless to order his conduct as any of his capricious cousins chattering in a. treetop to an audience of trembling leaves.

Here, after years of searching for the one thing in life or death that I truly desire, here on the very spot where my dream fleetingly merged with life, I find my mind distracted by a crude courtship. Forgotten now the dream I have searched in vain to find and reluctantly, but with a furtive thrill, my thoughts return to Scarlet.

III

From out the deep, disturbing past swarm thoughts of Scarlet. Memories long suppressed attack me now. Like swift pursuing insects bearing poison in their stings, they dart around me, but their wings are gorgeous as they poise before the thrust. In bygone days, that poison, sweet and wild, ran riot in my veins.

At a time of conflict and disenchantment this girl, like a scented flame, kindled in me a spark of madness which, dying, left me desperately sane. Though the perfume is gone now – gone utterly and forever – the memory of its fragrance still taints the air I breathe. Even while I pray for the return of my lost dream, I am moved to hopeless laughter. I see myself. The masks have all been used. Poor, painted masks… fatuously grinning!

•   •   •   •   •

The city was pressing down. I could feel it at my back. With lazy, good-natured indifference it seemed to be waiting for me to encompass my own trifling destruction. In my guardedly neurotic mind, New York was assuming the personality of a huge, sponge-like creature implacably bent on absorbing my identity. As a matter of accurate record, I trod its streets unnoticed and betrayed the sincerity of my desire to escape by surrendering of my own free will to the drab routine of its days and nights.

What fascinated me most in the city, I feared most in myself. Under the influence of solitude and ceaseless speculation, I had grown abnormally sensitive and, I suspect a trifle arrogant. Even then there was something for which I was always searching, and although I was unable to define the exact object of my quest, I was dimly aware of its nature. Immersed in a world of fantastic ideals and bitterly checked desires, I had already discarded as inconsequential the aims and ambitions of men as expressed by the people with whom I came into daily contact.

In spite of this vainglorious superiority of youth I had a sincere desire to live, but no equipment with which to set about doing it. From time to time vague rhythms of life ran through me – a passage in a book, glance in a crowded car, the atmosphere of a room or the signal of a ship at night aroused in me a feeling that I was standing on the edge of things, plucking at reality with uncertain fingers.

I had a friend during this period who was much like me. For several years we had been readjusting the world together, changing it bit by bit until we had created something quite new and beautiful, a decent place to live in to our way of thinking.

“But it’s impossible,” he said one day, getting up from the table with a defeated expression in his eyes. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

But my friend never came back to the table. Within sixty seconds he had shot himself cleanly through the heart rather than face the weary problems which centuries of civilization had failed to solve.

They found him in the lavatory, crumpled and unimportant looking, a weak young man, conventionally known as a coward. The bubbles were still on his beer and his castles were floating round me when I was asked to claim the body of this fleeting friend of mine.

“I’ll be with you in a minute,” he had said, and I wondered where he really was now as I clung to a circular towel and watched the curtain rise higher and higher on the jumbled stage of life. I realized then that I could never go his way. His worn boots bereft of personality remained forever in my mind as a symbol of surrender. There was something within me, something either cowardly or curious which prevented me from voluntarily giving up my seat at the play, as ineptly directed as it seemed to be.

•   •   •   •   •

Meanwhile life was made more unreal for me by the nature of my occupation. From nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, I was grimly engaged in creating beautiful illusions about various commodities bought, but not needed, by a duped public.

“Mr. Landor,” my chief once said to me, “do you realize that if you lived in the heart of a dense forest and invented there a more efficient rat trap than had ever been launched on the market by judicious advertising, the world would make a beaten path to your door?”

I was forced to admit that I had never devoted much thought to this particular problem.

“Well, it’s true,” continued the chief. “Emerson says so. Read Emerson? You must! Great man. Study him. He had the heart of a copy writer. And man, I want you to put some life in this copy. Let the public understand the romance behind these lawn mowers, the part they play in the heart of the home, their power for good in the life of the nation. Pack a punch into every sentence. Make a beaten path.”

Thus inspired, I devoted myself to the glorification of lawn mowers until I learned to detest them.

The remarkable seriousness with which my zealous colleagues at the office gathered in their conferences over the most insignificant trifles gave color to my belief that I was passing through a value of unreality from which I would presently emerge into the open space of reason. Surrounded by degrading wall mottoes, and further humiliated by the inspirational speeches of a desk pounding executive, I sometimes wondered if it would not be more admirable of me to take an uncompromising stand at once and apply to be admitted to a home for the mentally defective, where life could be led frankly and agreeably off key.

This attitude of mine, insufferable certainly in one who had hardly been brushed by the wing of life, could not help but be reflected in the spirit of blind detachment with which I approached my work. As a result I was regarded with quite justifiable suspicion by those who paid me for my time. They seemed to realize instinctively that my thoughts were unfumigated aliens invading their beautiful business world, and I was classified as an enemy to the established order of things, both sacred and sublime, all of which had to do with the accumulation of wealth.

The mistrust of those for whom I worked fortified my self-respect, but offered little prospect of advancement. This last consideration hardly disturbed me at all, for I had the satisfaction of knowing that in two years’ time, when I had attained the age of twenty-five, I would through the agency of a trust fund left to me by my father, become economically independent of a system I despised.

After the death of my friend I was very much alone. The world was full of a number of things, most of them disturbing. And in my solitude I would dwell on these things. It seemed to me that there was no scheme nor pattern in life, no mounting rhythm nor sense of value. People talked of unreal aims and worked for unreal ends, and died at last in great confusion clinging to unreal gods. To keep alive the majority of men and women were forced to withdraw from life. From blind alleys they looked out through all their weary days on a world which, in the course of a work- day week, had been created for the edification of man; but they did not find it good. In fact, they never found it at all. The world to them was merely a problem on which they were being hurled arbitrarily through space, filled with work and nervous quarrels and a profusion of unsavory smells. To their more fortunate fellow-men, particularly to those for whom I worked, the world was a nice, bright ball to be plastered over as speedily as possible with nice, bright advertisements, and girdled stoutly with slogans. While scientists were quietly revolutionizing life and artists contributing new forms to it, these business- builders came staggering down from the mountain with a billboard brandished aloft.

•   •   •   •   •

Finally there were women and the tremendous possibilities they presented. There were so many different kinds of women and they had so many ingenious ways of showing that they were different, though still women. To walk along a shopping street on a Saturday afternoon gave me the sensation of swimming against a current of swiftly darting glances, ever changing, ever seeking. In the short course of a block I was able to read a thousand feminine moods and a thousand feminine meanings. The interrupting eyes of women, cut across my thoughts and left me fearfully alert. Arrogant, tender, cruel and alluring, they plunged into my mind and created there a question, a sort of troubled wonderment. Yet whenever I was brought into contact with women by my more astute friends, I was invariably disappointed by a certain underlying sameness characterizing them all. This was due, I realize now, to the obvious fact that they were women, but in those days of unexamined expectations, I looked upon it as being a rather saddening indication.

On the rare occasions when I sat at a table with my friends in the cheerful intimacy of a glass or so of something and the equally stimulating presence of women, I became quite pleased and excited with the prospect. But I was never able to shake off the feeling that beneath their masks of laughter these delightfully animated creatures were dispassionately testing me by their own unfathomable standards. I always divined that when they had satisfied themselves I was of no practicable value to them they would tolerantly include me in the party and apply their talents to more profitable fields of endeavor.

For this there was ample justification. I was rather a sallow and unimposing person, disconcertingly watchful and utterly devoid of technique. It was only natural I should be the loser in these furtive counter-appraisals. Although the women fell far short of my expectations, they still remained women to me and were desirable as such, whereas to them I was merely a vague sort of person of no particular value other than serving as a useful bit of masculine furniture to be propped up in a public place.

Once I found myself sitting alarmingly alone opposite an elderly sort of a girl with discontented eyes made hard and bold by contact with many men.

She was my first woman, and I was none too happy.

Presently she said, “Come on, dear, it’s time we were getting home.”

As I placed my empty glass on the table I wished that she had given me at least an opportunity to do the urging. There was something rather disconcerting in the way she had said “we.” It sounded so intimately inclusive.

A dark side street and a dingy entrance presided over by a collarless West Indian bell boy. Beneath our feet the narrow elevator wheezed and shuddered; and a damp, unpleasant smell followed us up the shaft. The woman was standing close to me, her arm pressed to mine. I was wondering about her arm. The elevator came to a stealthy, insecure stop, and with a grating noise the door slid back. We were at the fifth floor.

“Here we are,” said the woman, giving my hand a squeeze. “This is where we get off.”

I was being led down a long, dimly lighted hall in which there were many doors, and I walked on guilty tiptoe. No moral consideration troubled me. I was disturbed merely by the sordid method of a procedure which this woman took for granted. I was accepted as a matter of course.

Gas light on a pink bed and the closing of a door. I felt a desperate need to escape. Then it occurred to me that to stave off the inevitable I might try to reform her; but when her lips sought mine, I decided to postpone the reformation indefinitely. She asked me for money and mechanically I gave her what I had. When she had carefully counted off the amount to which she was entitled, she handed back the remaining bills and placed her share on a small table on which there was a bust of Garfield. I remember that – Garfield! Why not Grant or Arthur, I kept wondering. Why Garfield? Then I decided that whoever the bust represented, its presence on that table would still be just as puzzling.

A few moments later she emerged fleshily from an alcove and after looking at her with frank interest I dropped my eyes to the carpet. It was a red carpet with sprawly blobs in it of a deeper hue. The only sensation I experienced was one of disappointment. Although I had never before seen a woman so scantily draped, I had often enough thought about them. This woman now confronting me was unlike anything my mind had ever culled. Her weary looking breasts were heavy and pendulous and the flesh round her hips had been despoiled by the markings of her corsets. I had never considered this contingency before, but now that I saw it, I realized that it was both a natural and pardonable result of girth and civilization. Nevertheless it was an unsightly one. Her thighs seemed dumpy to me and terribly aggressive, and there was something altogether spiritless in the poise of her body. It was naked, but unalive. Yet when she came up to me and twisted her arms round my neck, I trembled in spite of myself and pressed my palms tentatively against her soft flesh.

“Why are you so slow, dearie?” she whispered. “Don’t you like me?”

As I raised my head to answer, my eyes were attracted to the doorknob. It was turning noiselessly.

“Don’t you like me?” she repeated.

Before I had time to push her from me, the door slowly opened and an oily-haired, bepimpled youth, clad in striped silk pajamas, stood looking at us with an expression of apologetic surprise.

“Hello,” he said. “Sorry. Didn’t know you had visitors.”

In spite of his apologetic attitude he still waited, until with a gesture of impatience, the woman turned from me and hurried over to the door. There was a whispered conversation which made the oaths punctuating it sound terribly in earnest. Several times he thrust out his hand and finally the woman, with a whipped expression on her face, seized the money from the table and brought it back to him.

“More before morning,” I heard.

Suddenly I felt tired and shamed. I tried not to look. A wave of sympathy and understanding passed over me, and I realized my own uselessness. People wanted to be real, but conditions had changed. The world was old and rouged. It could never be young again.

The door closed and behind me on the carpet I heard the patter of the woman’s bare feet. She placed her hands on my shoulders and leaned against me. I turned and looked at her through different eyes. For some reason I was unable to speak. I was crying. Then moved by a strange impulse I took her face between my hands and kissed her. At the door I looked back and tried to smile, but failed. She was standing in the middle of the red carpet, a white, ridiculous figure, dismayed and incredulous, perhaps a little indignant.

That night I walked the streets and occasionally stopped in at the side doors of dark cafés. Through the gray mist of dawn I returned to my lodgings to change my collar before going to the office. As I walked down Fifth Avenue, a wagon- load of cut flowers clattered past. The air was filled with fragrance. Weary, disillusioned, and a trifle drunk, I followed the wagon, my eyes already filled with new visions.

•   •   •   •   •

When people are left much to themselves they think such queer little shame-faced thoughts, and carry on such unbelievable games of the imagination, that I have often felt the courageous foolishness of man is perhaps his only attribute of divinity. Nine-tenths of the time the mind of the average man and woman is forced by the sorry facts of life to be occupied with unpleasant and trifling considerations. It is an ironical thing indeed that the brain should thus become the dwelling place of pygmies.

The expedients of a solitary man were all mine. My few possessions became my friends. I endowed them with all the qualities I admired most in others and which I lacked myself. When occasionally some jest was made at my expense because of my habit of carrying a cane to the office, I never explained to the red-blooded wits that my cane was not an inanimate rod of wood, but a confidential friend, an admirer, in fact, who hugely enjoyed taking walks with me.

This sort of ingrowing thought life was in many ways I realized, both timid and sentimental, but as I look back now on those days of solitude and futile protest, I find in them something of happiness, something which might have led to a truer contact with life than any I have since been able to establish.

There were the Saturday afternoons when, among the first to abandon the oppressive diligence of the office, I would hurry home to prepare for an elaborate walk which I had planned and eagerly looked forward to during the colorless week just passed. From beneath the arch in Washington Square I would usually proceed up Fifth Avenue past the two brown churches set neatly back in their little lawns of green, and on through the valley of silk lofts and sweat shops draped at all hours of the day with heavy shadows. Further up the Avenue, I would run into the feminine maelstrom of the shopping district and here it was that I encountered the glances and experienced the swift little contacts that so often upset my tranquillity. Occasionally, when I caught the happy, carefree eyes of a girl, I would turn mine quickly away, fearing that perhaps she might misunderstand my meaning or that I might be disappointed in the thoughts I was weaving around her.

These walks took me far afield. Without mercy I drove myself on them, hoping thus to gain that mental and bodily repose which comes to one after strenuous exercise. After leaving the glittering shopping district behind, I would continue northward, skirting the east side of Central Park, but never entering it, for I preferred to picture in my mind a fantastic park of my own rather than to see this one in all its artificial reality. Sometimes I found myself on the banks of the Hudson far up above Riverside Drive. Here as I watched the broad stream move onward to the sea, I would rest and speculate idly on the probable destinations of the ships riding quietly there at anchor. It always liberated my mind a little to see at dusk the lights appear on the ships and to picture to myself the scenes taking place along their decks and within their twinkling cabins.

To return to the lights and excitement of the city after one of these quiet, open-air expeditions was like plunging back into a horribly fascinating nightmare from which I had striven to free myself. All the old things were there – the women, the restaurants, the swarming multitudes, and the heady temptation to spend oneself down to the last drop of one’s innermost personality in a night of headlong debauchery.

“Why not?” I asked myself.

“Why not, indeed?” replied New York, with bland indifference.

•   •   •   •   •

Then one day I received a letter from an old artist, Hugh MacKellar, a friend of my father’s youth who in the course of an untidy life had succeeded in painting a number of good pictures which had at first aroused the ridicule, then the animosity, and at last the recognition of the artistic world. He had been spending the last three years on the Continent, but he was now home and was writing to tell me that his little hut by the sea, such as it was, had room enough for my small frame. He went on to say that while abroad he had assumed another responsibility, this time a girl – his niece, in fact – unceremoniously left to him by his good but nevertheless good-for-nothing brother, who had acquired final promotion by politely drinking himself to death among his mess-room companions in India. This girl was now a sort of ward and was known as Scarlet, a regimental nickname given to her years ago because of her fondness for that color. Scarlet’s mother had died when the child was still very young, and as a consequence she had grown to womanhood in the atmosphere of a military post in India, which is not always the best. Scarlet was an unusual product. I would have to be prepared for her, he said. She admitted twenty-three years and treated MacKellar brutally. He had gotten accustomed to her, however, and could stand for her moods. At present she was posing for him when she was not sleeping, eating, or fuming round the house like a caged tiger from the jungle she knew so well. Mrs. Tylor, their estimable cook, was shocked by Scarlet and a little afraid of her. MacKellar rather enjoyed the situation. So much for Scarlet. Did I care to leave the city?

After my encounter with the woman I had a feeling that I was becoming morally and intellectually bankrupt. I was beginning to accept things, things that I knew were false. I was even finding satisfaction in revenging myself against society by hastening the day of my country’s economic ruin through the medium of catch-penny advertisements exploiting inferior goods. Unless I abandoned my solitary mode of existence and shook myself free from the influence of the hotly circulating night life round me, I knew that soon I would not be listening to the experiences of my acquaintances, but cheaply participating in them. When not engaged at night in peering, like a shamed but desirous phantom into the eyes of the women I passed on the street, I had been forcing myself to the creation of what I fondly believed to be the better sort of literature – literature so remote from life that fortunately it never lived. Even in this I found no comfort. And now MacKellar’s letter. Did I care to leave the city?

I smiled cheerfully and gave a quick, appraising glance round the room containing my few possessions. No, it would not take me long to pack. Then I fell to studying the elaborately drawn and marked map MacKellar had enclosed in his letter, and as my eyes followed the outlines of a ragged coast New York gradually withdrew, until at last the room was filled with the sound of churning water.

IV

As the heavy train clanked and buckled from the little station, I felt, with unlimited relief, that the last tie binding me to the city and my old ways of life was definitely severed.

Somewhere, hidden, yet close at hand, I sensed the sea, and a great longing to look upon open water took possession of me. I produced MacKellar’s map and studied it with a view to finding my way to his cottage, which as well as I could figure lay some five miles off in a grove of trees running down to a beach.

According to the map, I was to take the Station Road. This dusty bit of tape twisted out of sight beneath a small railway bridge close at hand, only to reappear on the other side, sliding lazily over the crest of a brief hill, until finally it settled down to a quiet and comfortable course which carried it across a green stretch of meadowland into the shadowy recesses of a forest rising far off in the distance.

With renewed interest I returned to the map. Apparently the neck of land I was on the point of exploring thrust itself out into the ocean like a battleship plunging headlong through the waves. However, it was not altogether cut off from the mainland, for near its prow a narrow strip of land sprang out at right angles, and running gracefully across the sea, almost touched the opposite shore, thus forming a natural breakwater for small craft in time of stress. This smooth and practically land-locked body of water lay against the lower two-thirds of the battleship’s side and was finally absorbed in a series of salt marshes laced by innumerable serpentine currents, which flooded and faded away with the rise and fall of the tide. Thus on one side of this rugged vessel and against its prow the sea dashed endlessly, while the other side lay untroubled in the still waters of a lake. Altogether the promontory suggested an interesting subject for exploration, and as I studied the map I grew impatient to tread the reality.

Here was the road and at the other end of it lay shelter, friendship and the sea. It was enough to send me singing on my way. I lifted my bag from the platform and set off. My steps fell with satisfying lightness on the powdery dust rising in little puffs and spurts over my shoes. I paddled through it with a new feeling of exhilaration, my awareness of the sea becoming more acute as I proceeded. Already I seemed to hear the surf pounding against the rocks. There was a smell of its salt in the air. At any moment now I was prepared to see the ocean break tumultuously in view, and my eyes kept searching the distant vistas ahead. On either side of me smooth green meadows ran rippling back to a border of bush fringed woodland, and occasionally a smaller road turned off from mine to wander neatly across the meadows until it rested at the door of a farmhouse. There was an atmosphere of self-respect and well-being about most of these rustic dwellings that spoke enthusiastically of the industry of their inmates, probably the soil-wedded sons and daughters of men who had at one time snatched a precarious livelihood from the lurching waves.

I drew near the forest and entered into its shadow. It was silent here and cool. Only the notes of birds left a delicate tracery of music across the green dome of the trees, A feeling of peace and restfulness came over me. No longer eager to hurry forward, I dropped my satchel to the roadside, and sat down on a fallen tree. Somewhere behind me I had left a city – escaped from it. Sprawled out at the end of a ribbon of steel tracks the city lay sweltering noisily beneath a hot down-pour of sunlight. Once I had dwelt in this city, been a part of its industry and idleness, an elbowing unit in its endless stampede, fearing it, fighting it, and yet fascinated by it. Now that I was no longer bound to its pavements, drugged by its merciless routine, I felt no fear of New York, but only its tremendous challenge. Here in the dusky green of the woods, sitting at peace and unhurried beneath the slowly moving boughs, I gained a proper perspective on the place I had left behind.

A wagon came lumbering toward me down the road – an ancient vehicle laden with logs – and its driver, a grizzled veteran of the woods, holding the long reins loosely in one hand, plodded through the dust beside his team.

“Hi, there,” he said, pulling up in front of me. “I see you’re giving yourself a rest. Guess I’ll do likewise.”

“Not resting so much,” I replied with a smile, “as admiring those trees you’re so industriously carting away. There won’t be many left when you get through.”

“No, sonny, that’s not so,” said the old man. “There’ll be trees aplenty when my sons and grandsons are dead and gone, and before that time there’ll be another forest where my grandfather worked before I could hold an ax.”

From some recess in his withered body, he succeeded in producing a peculiarly patient sounding note, which partook of the nature of both a chirp and a cluck and which seemed to convey to his horses the intelligence that it was about time for them to be getting on. For a few minutes more he stood regarding me, the road, and his team, with impartial indifference, then he carefully assembled his ancient members to resume his measured pace.

“Well, so long, sonny,” he said, and repeated that curious, patient note.

Fascinated by his virtuosity and hoping to hear the sound again, I decided to share the way with him.

For some time we plodded along in silence. At length, after a mile of dust had settled in our wake, he reined in his team to ask if I was going in his direction. I had been and would be going in his direction for quite some time if it so happened that he was going in mine. He allowed that he was, and eyed me consideringly.

“Well, then,” he said at last, “I guess you might as well put your bag on the cart.”

For the third time I had the pleasure of hearing that half-chirp, half-cluck tremble over the old man’s lips, and of seeing it take effect upon his horses. To them it meant merely the resumption of an uninteresting occupation, but to me it was one of those altogether pleasant trifles which linger delightfully in the memory long after more important events have passed from mind.

For a matter of a mile we continued on through the cheerfully clinging dust. Gradually, but unremittingly – for I could tell by the strain on my city accustomed thighs – we had been following an up-grade road. I felt that soon we would be treading the quarter deck of the battleship I had pictured in my mind from MacKellar’s map. The ocean, however, was still hidden from view.

“See over there, those marshes,” the old man said as we broke through the last avenue of trees and the forest gave way on one side to a running slope of lowlands. “No soul’s ever found the secret of those marshes. They’ve called to men and they’ve eaten men, but nobody yet has been able to figure out just what purpose God intended them for.”

The summer sun was still triumphant in the sky, and the marshes lay in the glowing calm of midafternoon. The green plain of waving reeds seemed to cast a spell over me. I was troubled and at the same time attracted.

“They don’t do us no good,” broke in the old man, “but there they sleep just the same. They’re waiting for something, but no one knows what it is.”

I looked on the marshes with interest, so tranquil and beautiful they seemed. An atmosphere of tropical luxuriousness lay over them, and as I gazed, I was strongly conscious of their mysterious appeal. It was as though some hidden yet fascinating clanger were quietly stealing through the reeds and observing me from shadowed security out of bright, considering eyes. The extent of this level, water- laced plain was vast. The mainland stood many miles away on the other side, and yet the marshes appeared to fill completely the great space lying between the opposite shore and the out-thrown arm on which I stood. Here and there between the vivid green of the reeds there was a glinting flash of water, while through the marshes themselves innumerable putty colored streams sluggishly twisted.

And over all the hushed expanse there brooded an insecure peace, like a fantastic dream trembling on the brink of a tragic awakening.

•   •   •   •   •

The wagon creaked, the boughs swayed, and time swam drowsily by. We walked in silence as though influenced by the witchery of the marshes. The lift of the road was no longer gradual, but steep and uncompromising. Weary itself of the journey, it was tugging impatiently to wriggle its way over the last grade. As I trudged along, my mind fell into one of those restful conditions of torpor in which tangible objects and active thoughts become subdued and blended in a twilight of untroubled stillness… hazy, distant, yet enveloping.

“There she is,” said the old man suddenly.

We stood at the end of the ascent. The horses came to an unrequested stop, raised their heads and sniffed, then fell peacefully to cropping grass by the roadside. The remainder of the land tapered unhurriedly away before us. On the side fronting the sea the cliffs were fluted with many groves that gave to smooth, white beaches. On the other side, lifting forests hid the marshes from view. The road lay along the cliffs, occasionally slipping out of sight down one of the gently sloping indentures. There were gables in the green, but only a few. The place seemed almost uninhabited, as though it had drifted away from the world and been lost on an unknown ocean.

In the air there was the cry of water. The distant rhythm of the surf spilled up over the cliffs. A plume-flecked campus of blue curled out to a cloud banked horizon. Gulls on motionless wings coasted down the air lanes and circled over a group of rocky islands, lying ponderously like a school or dozing leviathans on the ocean’s slanting floor.

“There she is,” repeated the old man. “Mean and unreliable, but just the same, fit for the labors of man. Those marshes now…”

He snapped the reins without finishing his sentence, and we proceeded along the road.

•   •   •   •   •

The map indicated that its author’s abode lay somewhere near at hand, so I consulted my companion.

“Wait a bit,” he said. “It’s down the road a piece.”

Presently he stopped in front of two gray sentinels of granite standing guard at the gates of an estate. The house was barely visible through the trees, under which wound a smooth gravel road between a border of ragged grass, but what caught my eye and held it was the strange carving cut roughly into the flank of one of the granite posts. It was a bas-relief of a large hand, a cruel, gripping hand, crushing in its grasp the body of a deer, whose head was thrown frantically back between an imprisoning finger and the thumb. As I looked at this sinister tragedy in stone I was caught between a feeling of pity and antagonism. Instinctively, I looked about me, as though sensing an unseen enemy.

“Yes,” said the old man, following the direction of my gaze, “that’s just about the way he strangles this neck of land. John Elliott’s like his father before him. For ninety- nine years they got a lease on all that you see in sight and a great deal more besides, and we poor folks here fished and plowed for them – it’s him now. Some folks say he counts the sand on the beach to see if the ocean has taken any away.”

The old man spat deliberately in the dust and cleared his throat.

“Now, sonny, your place lies somewhere over there in that grove of trees,” he continued. “I know it, for I’ve heard folks speaking of an old artist feller that’s shut himself off from the world in a house he’s hired from him,” and he pointed to the granite hand. “You can cut across the lawn if you want,” he went on, “or you can go down the road till you come to the grove. You’ll find the place easy enough.”

He waved his hand in the general direction of the grove, gathered up his reins and made ready to depart. After thanking him for his companionship and instruction, I hastened down the road, preferring to try the grove rather than to trespass on the lawn of one who displayed such an inhospitable device at his very gates.

•   •   •   •   •

In a short time I found myself in the midst of a grove of tall trees stepping majestically down a gradual slope to a beach sparkling at the end. A yellow half-light filled the place and birds slipped furtively through it among the branches overhead. MacKellar’s house lay somewhere at the other end of this sun-mottled avenue of trees. I was not long in finding it. The grassy flue curved sharply to the left and there at the edge of the grove, set back on a little lawn in a cluster of bushes, stood a small two-story cottage. Very neat and inviting it looked with its shingled roof, its small white sides and its windows picked out in green. I crossed the lawn and was about to step over the threshold of the door, when my foot was arrested on the ledge by the sight of a large painting hanging on the wall facing me.

On a low divan, across which was thrown a black silk mantle splashed with scarlet flowers, lay the body of a nude girl. She was partly reclining on one side and her dark, lusterless hair fell over the arm supporting her small head. The painting itself was striking enough with the dead white skin of the girl’s body thrown out in bold relief against the silken blackness of the flower-strewn mantle, but what held me transfixed was the claiming appeal, the almost irresistible urgency of the voluptuous figure.

To me it seemed to symbolize all that was desirable and at the same time corrupt in the human flesh… a soft, intoxicating refuge in which to abandon once and for all the dreams and aspirations that trouble the souls of men. Here there was no place for dreams, no need for aspirations; here was only delight, fierce, imprisoning, and futile.

The black, searching eyes of the girl seemed actually to live and glow in the pallor of an oval face made vivid with the scarlet of her full lips. A scarf of the same color, twisted snake-like across her thighs, fell in a strange design on the glossy surface of the mantle. Her breasts were high, imperious, and rather full for those of a girl; and the whole body possessed a luxurious yet indefinably youthful maturity suggestive of a tropical flower prematurely forced into bloom from the rich soil of a moist climate.

As I stood regarding this picture my mind fell into a vortex in which time and space faded away before a windy conflict of emotions, the impulse to become submerged and forgotten beneath suffocating waves of passion and the desire to rise, winged and alone, into some still, blue sky where only thought existed. The glowing eyes were looking deep into mine, and so humanly intense was the challenge in them, that as I returned their gaze, I felt a strange, almost hypnotic, influence impelling me to glance downward. Yielding to the power of those painted eyes, I lowered mine, and there, virtually at my feet, was the living embodiment of the portrait I had just beheld. The girl lay on a black divan, and even in my confusion I could not help realizing that the warmth and radiance of her flesh could never be transferred to canvas. She must have been silently enjoying the profound impression the painting had made on me, for when I looked into her eyes I saw that they were filled with the soft, half caressing glow that kindles in the eyes of some women when under the admiration of men. The girl did not stir, but lay there quietly in full and triumphant consciousness of her beauty. A sigh escaped my lips, and involuntarily I took a step forward. At this moment I was brought back to my surroundings by the gusty entrance of Hugh MacKellar through a door at the end of the room.

“David!” he cried, rushing up to me with his outstretched hands filled with spotted rags and recently cleaned brushes. “If it isn’t my flagged and failing Shelley, rancid from the city. Welcome, my boy, to our unsanctimonious sanctuary.”

My voice was hardly audible at that moment, but I stammered as ingratiatingly as I could and made friendly grimaces at my host. All the while I felt the mocking eyes of the girl quietly observing my embarrassment.

“That’s Scarlet,” explained MacKellar with an unceremonious wave of his brushes. “Scarlet, this is David Landor.”

“Has he come to stay all summer?” she asked in a dull voice.

“Certainly,” he answered. “That is, if you’re good to him.”

“That all depends,” she said. Then extending an arm to me, “Come over here, David.”

With a feeling of reluctance I crossed the room and took her hand.

“Do you think you’re going to like me?” she asked.

As she idly studied my face through her heavily fringed lashes, I felt that she was coolly expecting an affirmative answer, and I decided to disappoint her.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Heavens,” she exclaimed, petulantly tossing my hand from her. “How disagreeably honest. What sort of a boy is he, MacKellar?”

“He’s a poet,” replied MacKellar, “and a damn good boy.”

“Oh, he’s a poet,” she said, “and a damn good boy. What a ghastly combination. Poets and painters, they’re always poor and seldom interesting.”

“Now you’re being disagreeably honest,” admonished MacKellar. “Talent’s more interesting than wealth, don’t you think?”

“Not to me,” she announced. “I prefer wealth and I intend to enjoy it in this world if I have to make some man suffer, but right now I’m going to sleep.”

Without even glancing at me, she draped the scarf over her body and with a sinuous movement of her hips slid down into a mass of pillows until only the gleaming white of her arms and shoulders could be seen. She yawned lazily displaying her strong white teeth, then, as though overcome with drowsiness, her head fell back and she closed her eyes.

“A remarkable creature,” said MacKellar, as he led me from the room. “You’ll have to get used to her, David I did. Spoiled, and a bit headstrong, but she has a divine disregard for those disreputable conventions that stand in the way of artistic creation. She must get it from the jungle. She was a part of it once. All day long she’ll pose for me most uncomplainingly, until suddenly she takes a notion into her head that she wants to sleep. Then nothing can stop her. Oaths, candy and flattery have no effect, although she will greedily and dishonorably accept the last two. It makes no difference where the sun is or where I am, that girl will sleep. She’s like a cat in that respect. Well, David, here’s your room.”

As I glanced round my tiny quarters the words of my host went flitting through my mind – “like a cat” He was right. Yes, she was like a cat, but disturbingly like a woman, too.… New York, its streets and its women… Where was the sea that I loved? Scarlet… her unclad body… Why should she be here!

With these disjointed thoughts breaking in upon the tranquillity my mind had acquired in the short course of my walk with the ancient woodsman, I turned as if in search of comfort, and gripped the solid flesh of MacKellar’s friendly hand. He was a man who responded with childlike gratitude to any show of affection, and his fingers closed firmly upon mine.

“David,” he said, “it’s good to get you back. You’ll be able to refresh your body and air that funny soul of yours this summer.”

V

My first night in the cottage was a sleepless one, and when at last dawn found its way into the grove and routed the shadows from their berths beneath the trees, I arose from bed and stole out into the fragrant hush of a world paying silent tribute to the rising sun. For a moment I paused to take in a grateful breath of the fresh, earth-scented air, then hurried through the wet grass to the beach where already the lamps burning in the fishermen’s huts were winking out.

The beach was still wrapped in the hazy dusk of dawn, and far out against the burnished horizon the great, red sun hung low to the water as though testing the strength of the craggy clouds before mounting into the sky.

Further down the beach I noticed two great rocks standing in dignified aloofness. These I made serve as a natural bathhouse and, between their barnacle incrusted sides, stripped speedily and ran down to the water’s edge. Immediately the morning embraced my body with a cold, damp cloak of mist to which even the dark and uninviting sea was preferable. As I gave myself over to the waves I thought of the great amount of physical punishment and mental anguish a man will subject himself to for the sorry satisfaction of making public the fact that his abilities are very much inferior to those of the merest minnow.

The first shock of the water sent me spurting through the surf. In front of me stretched the shadow-stained sea. Thin veils of mist were gracefully lifting from, it. Across the reaches of the ocean the sun sent a shaft of flickering gold through which I swam with increasing fortitude as my normal spirits returned.

About half a mile out from the shore an island lay on the water. It was rocky and barren, and in the early light of day, it appeared to be wallowing in the wash of the waves as if reluctant to leave its slumbers. I shouldered my way through the choppy sea until I had reached one of the outer ledges of this island, where I rested from my exertion and studied the mainland, now green and sparkling beneath the new day. The upper windows of John Elliott’s mansion were neatly framed between the foliage of the trees. A little further to the left I was able to trace the course of our grove curving away from the beach. The cliffs swept up majestically from the waves that washed their base, filling their arching caverns with a thousand songs. Along the summit of these lofty walls poplars tossed their branches in a wind driving in from the sea. In front of me stretched a smooth, white ribbon of sand over which the surf ceaselessly ruffled and retreated. Here and there a group of fishing huts squatted on the beach like so many huge frogs patiently contemplating the ocean tumbling always at their feet.

As I half reclined on my submerged couch, my body found the repose that had been denied it in a comfortable bed during the lagging hours of the night. I must have remained for a long time resting thus on this rocky ledge, for when at length I returned across the water and presented myself at the cottage, I found MacKellar already astir and fumingly engaged in stimulating to greater activity a certain Mrs. Tylor, the wife of a fisherman who had but recently received his breakfast from her hands. She was probably reproachfully considering this fact as she silently and deliberately prepared ours.

“The sun, Mrs. Tylor,” my host was declaiming as I entered, “is not to be stayed in its course. No more am I. You shrug your shoulders and leer at me, but let me tell you that that golden disc is the very bread and butter of my existence. Isn’t the bacon ready yet?”

When he saw me standing in the doorway, he began to complain bitterly about Mrs. Tyler’s lack of speed. He was losing valuable time and this woman was losing it for him, no doubt deliberately.

“She won’t hurry and I don’t seem to be able to do anything about it,” he informed me in a whisper so piercing that it was obviously not intended for my ears alone.

We were soon joined by Scarlet, who, enveloped in a flame colored robe of silk, slouched across the room and seated herself at the table without favoring us with a glance.

“Mrs. Tylor, I want my coffee,” she announced in a peremptory voice as she rested her chin between the palms of her hands and stared moodily down at her plate.

“Absolutely!” chimed in MacKellar, emboldened by Scarlet’s presence. “We all want our coffee.”

During the course of the breakfast I had a good opportunity to study the girl opposite me, for she hardly raised her eyes from the table. One of the first things I noticed was that, though sleepy and apparently out of sorts, she nevertheless succeeded in consuming her breakfast with a fair show of relish and an occasional display of white teeth. In this she was human, then – almost too human; her preoccupation with food completely absorbed her attention. Once I had seen a panther feeding… Scarlet was equally beautiful and quite as hungry. Her head was small and delicately shaped, and her hair, tumbling upon it in a series of disordered, but not unstudied loops, gave the picturesque effect of a heavy turban. Beneath the lashes of her lowered lids I caught from time to time the arousingly intimate glow of her deep, black eyes. Once more I was struck by the unnatural pallor of her skin and the vivid scarlet of her lips, and forgetting my resolution to fight against the animal magnetism of her presence, I found myself dwelling on the flowing lines of her body, the darting pose of her head, and the soft skin of her breasts gently curving away beneath the colorful folds of her robe. She was the last woman in the world with whom I would have chosen to sit down to breakfast. The physical appeal of her body was oppressive. It had nothing in common with the morning and the sea from which I had come, but was heavily sweet and intoxicating, enveloping the senses in a tepid bath of fragrance like those moist, breathless perfumes drifting through the corridors of a hothouse.

MacKellar, who was happily beyond the sphere of her influence, and who therefore believed everyone else immune, continued to discourse volubly upon the manifold merits of the sun. Scarlet and I sat in two isolated pools of silence, she engrossed with bacon and I consuming her form through covert eyes. Just as MacKellar was achieving a splendid climax, she lifted her heavy lids and regarded him crossly. The sun was a stuffy old maid, she told him, a prying busybody who couldn’t wait for the proper time to arise because of her overpowering eagerness to go poking her great nose into other persons’ affairs. Quite undaunted by this unfavorable opinion of the agent of his bread and butter, MacKellar contended that the sun would rise and rest at its appointed time regardless of the pitiful affairs of mortals. I was about to remark that the moon had the same disagreeable habits Scarlet had attributed to the sun, when the girl yawned so obviously in our faces that I decided to withhold my contribution to the discussion.

MacKellar rose from the table and began to snatch at his brushes. Scarlet followed him. Taking her scarf from the divan, she draped it over her, then with a slight shrug of her shoulders she let the robe slip to the floor and wound the folds of her diaphanous covering around her body. For the first time her eyes looked full into mine, and I met their gaze with assumed indifference. As I surveyed her body from head to foot I casually hummed a tune beneath my breath – an obvious piece of travesty for which I cursed myself at the time – then, after thoughtfully selecting a book from the shelf, I strolled out to the lawn, where I did not read.

•   •   •   •   •

The days passed as neglectedly over the roof of the cottage as I passed unnoticed before the eyes of Scarlet. From the time of our first meeting she apparently dismissed me completely from her thoughts. With the dignity of a large, beautiful and well established cat she indifferently tolerated my presence in the house. I was accepted, but not received. There were times, however, when I felt certain that, like the incomprehensible creature she suggested, her large, black eyes were lazily following my movements as I came and went about my appointed ways.

I remained much to myself and MacKellar, like an intelligent host, left me to my own devices. The beach now saw me often and there I soon made friends with the fishermen, their sons and their wives and their daughters. Among these people I felt no restraint, no necessity for being on guard. The talk consisted chiefly of boats and nets and rigging, and the prospects of the catch.

In the course of my walks I explored the promontory from end to end, and lay for long, dream-laden hours by the marshes. They never failed to exert a subtle influence over me, these jade-green plains of reeds. In their presence my body was rested and lulled into a state of forgetfulness in which my mind was left free to wander untrammeled across the hills and dales formed by the soft, white clouds plunging through the sky. For some reason the marshes always made me feel physically and spiritually refreshed, and after I had been on the promontory for a few weeks my mind became so crowded with odd notions that I undertook to write them down as I sat before a small table I had moved out to the lawn. But, invariably on these occasions I felt myself becoming gradually more restless as the consciousness of the nude white figure, lying motionless on the divan in the cottage behind me, took possession of my mind. In my anger I conceived the insane fancy that Scarlet was silently taunting me, and deliberately trying to disperse my thoughts. As I labored over my writing I began to entertain for her a feeling akin to hate.

Since my arrival at the cottage no reference had been made to our landlord and neighbor, John Elliott, until one morning MacKellar paused long enough over his coffee to inform me that Elliott had an exceedingly pretty wife.

“There’s something strange about her,” he said. “Something not quite of this world. It’s beautiful and at the same time rather touching. Damn me, if I see how she can stand him! His eyes seek beauty of a different nature.”

Scarlet rose from the table and confronted MacKellar. Her robe had fallen back from her shoulders and she stood trembling before us, heedlessly exposing her breasts. Involuntarily I made a motion as if to adjust her robe, but she turned on me with a snarl.

“John Elliott’s rich and you hate him for that,” she said to MacKellar. “You and your artistic socialism are not worth the price of one of his shoe laces. His eyes are for beauty of another nature, are they? Well, I don’t blame him. If you think she’s so damned beautiful and touching why don’t you get her to pose for your stupid pictures?”

She drew herself up sullenly and left the room. Upstairs a door violently slammed shut.

“She’s like that,” remarked MacKellar resignedly. “Now I won’t be able to get her to pose for me until her sulks wear off. Well, David, let’s go for a walk.”

•   •   •   •   •

A few days after this occurrence I had the pleasure of testing for myself the sharp edge of Scarlet’s temper. Believing myself alone, I was standing in deep thought before the picture when she came silently up behind me.

“Do you like it?” she asked, sneeringly.

Startled by the sound of her voice, I hesitated a moment to hide my confusion.

“No,” I replied at last, “I’m afraid I don’t like it.”

“Then why do you stand there looking at it?” she continued aggressively. “It isn’t the first time, you know.”

“For that very reason,” I said quietly, turning to her from the picture. “I look at it because I don’t like it.”

“Why?”

“I’d prefer not to answer that question,” I replied, slowly becoming provoked by her sneering attitude. “It’s a little too personal.”

“Do you know why you don’t like that picture?” she demanded, coming closer to me.

“Suppose you tell me,” I suggested.

“Because you don’t like me,” she said. “Because you’re just a little afraid of me. Oh, don’t smile in that superior way. You know what I mean.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” I answered, “but it seems to me that the animal lies too close to the surface. There’s no room for anything else. It’s too obvious. I wonder if you know what I mean.”

I smiled at her with exasperating politeness and waited. Her hands were unconsciously twisting a paint-smeared rag she had taken from the table. Her eyes never left mine.

“You mean that I’m a beast?” she asked in a low voice.

I shrugged my shoulders indifferently and turned away, but a swift movement behind, me made me look around. As our eyes met she struck me across the mouth with the rag, then stepped back and waited, studying me cautiously.

“That’s for your hateful mouth,” she said, her voice trembling with anger. “You’ll be careful who you insult next time.”

As I looked into her blazing eyes an answering spark of anger was ignited in my brain. Blood rushed to my head and strummed in my temples. I knew I ought to leave the room, but I was rooted to the spot. There was a contemptuous smile on her lips.

“Do you want it again?” she asked, drawing back her arm.

With a spring I covered the space between us and seized her wrists. I was probably trying to smear her face with the rag. She dropped it to the floor and pulled her wrists free. The room became quiet… only the sound of our breathing. Then swiftly, like the striking head of a snake, her hand flew to my face, and I felt her nails rip through the skin of my cheek.

Infuriated now beyond all power of reason, I took her by the shoulders to hurl her from me, but her strength was equal to mine. As she fell over backwards on the divan she twined her arms round my neck and dragged me down with her. My head was pressed to her bosom and my lips crushed against her flesh. My breath came in suffocating gasps.

Finally I wrenched my head free from her arms and closed my fingers on her throat. As she struggled her body thrashed beneath mine.

Then fear came into her eyes. Her hands clutched frantically at my wrists and succeeded in loosening my grip. Once more her arms twined round my neck, and head darted up from the pillows, I felt her hot lips close upon mine. The strength seemed to leave my body. I pitched heavily forward in the power of her furious kiss. Blood ran down my cheeks and mingled with our lips. This contact seemed to add to her frenzy, for I could feel her body shuddering against mine. As I felt the madness of desire overcoming my anger, her heavy lashes parted and I saw that her eyes were filled with triumph.… They were gloating eyes.

This sudden intelligence gave me the strength to tear myself from her embrace. I staggered to the door and looked back at the divan. Scarlet was lying motionless among the pillows. She appeared to be calm and indifferent, almost sleepy. As I left the room she yawned.

•   •   •   •   •

It was then that I first came upon this clearing by the marshes. As I plunged distractedly through the fields I stepped over the hidden ledge and was instantly precipitated into the twilight green of the reeds. Dazed by this swift change in my surroundings, I rose to my feet, and passing through a narrow opening in the reeds beheld the great salt marshes spread out before me. The silence and the isolation of the spot – its haunting beauty and old, forgotten charm – touched my troubled spirit with a little of its peace. I sank down on the mat and made an effort to keep my emotion in check, to erase from my mind all memory of what had just passed. She would never conquer me, I swore that. In spite of the glory of her body, I would break it first before that happened. Desire… good God!… A moment, only a moment, then bondage, flesh triumphant! I raised my eyes and looked out over the level plain of green. The island lay burning in the last rays of the setting sun. The waterways were shot with flowing color.

How cool and quiet over there it seemed, the dark trees banked against the fiery wall… hardly a part of the world. My spirit winged its way across the marshes and rested there awhile.

VI

It is a pleasant and restful thing to swim among the waves far out from shore, and to catch at the turn of a stroke a spray-dashed glimpse of the sun before you bury your face again in the ocean’s soft green light. Deep down beneath the shifting leagues lies a mysterious under- land upon whose hollow pampas great, quivering herds of flickering creatures graze delicately on tender grass. In your mind’s eye you can picture the silver battalions of the sea filtering through forests of silent trees. There, below you, stretches a land of fronded grottoes where swift and silent tragedies of life and death take place. There, almost within reach of your arm, is a world of hidden beauty, a veiled universe above which your body tumbles like a white cloud through a troubled sky. On the moody solitudes of the sea all is quiet save for the slap and fall of the waves and the song of the wind among them. Here you are alone where you can think swift thoughts as you measure your length along a rolling trough of green. The land world lies behind. You are no longer a part of it. Your life has been transferred to another element. Sometimes a feeling comes to you, a vague, indefinite feeling, hauntingly reminiscent, that you have returned to your natural environment in which you were wont to sport before the garden of the world grew old beneath its weeds.

•   •   •   •   •

A few days after my encounter with Scarlet an adventure befell me out there on the lonely slopes of the sea which forever after influenced my life and which will continue to influence it until the end.

I was swimming through the choppy seas in the direction of one of the outlying islands when a small sail boat knifing dangerously across my path caused me to look up from the water. A pair of deep blue eyes gazed down into mine. It was a matter of only a moment, that swift, unexpected meeting, but as we regarded each other it was as though two creatures from another world had bewilderingly met in the midst of a mighty solitude.

The sloop cleared me neatly and left me bobbing in its wake. I turned for a last glimpse of the sea-blue eyes that had looked down into mine, then started out once more on my course, but as I thrust my face into the waves I felt as if I had suddenly buried it in a pool of liquid fire. The sharp agony of the contact caused me to throw my body half out of the water. A cry of pain broke from my lips, and blinded, I slipped back into the sea. Soft pulpy objects bobbed against my body – jellyfish in swarms. The flames were now scorching my legs and arms. I gasped for breath and a stream of salt water ran chokingly down my throat. I still had enough presence of mind to realize that I was losing control of myself and that sheer panic would soon send me to the bottom. From the black terror racing round my heart I managed to extract sufficient common sense to twist myself over on my back, and to lie floundering in the waves. Then a clear voice called down to me from somewhere close at hand and in my stricken condition it sounded almost supernaturally sweet and comforting.

The voice said, “Catch the side of the boat!”

“I can’t see the damn thing!” I gasped. “I can’t even open my eyes.”

“Oh, dear, they’ve blinded you!” the voice exclaimed with real concern. “Grab my hand – quick! Can you pull yourself over the side?”

Two small hands tugged at my arms and aided me into the boat. Still unable to open my eyes, I fell clumsily inboard, and the same ready hands saved my head from striking the swinging boom.

“You’re all right now,” said the voice. “Keep quiet a moment and get your breath.”

I felt the boat take to the wind and heel along. The waves rippled and flapped against her sides. Like a caressing hand a cool breeze ran over my face as my head fell back into the lap of my unseen rescuer.

“It’s a funny coincidence,” I said after I had recovered my breath, “being snatched like this from a school of infuriated jellyfish. I don’t know how to go about thanking you.”

“It wasn’t such a coincidence,” the voice replied, “and you’d better thank my curiosity. I’ve been following you for some time.”

“Mistaking me for a sort of fish,” I suggested.

“No,” she answered, “I was admiring your swimming and suspecting your sanity. I like to swim myself, but I seldom go any more.”

I seemed to detect a faint note of regret in her last remark.

“And out of gratitude to you,” I said, endeavoring to get up, “I’m getting you terribly wet.”

“Not yet,” the voice commanded. “Stay where you are. It’s good for me to be useful.”

Once more I caught the suggestion of a deeper meaning behind her words. She pressed a wet cloth to my eyes and held my head firmly in her lap.

“You know,” she continued, “I almost ran you down a little while ago. I lost track of you in coming about and my curiosity was getting the best of me.”

I recalled the sea-blue eyes gazing down at me from the little boat, and from the fleeting glimpse I had caught of the girl at the tiller, I tried to reconstruct her image.

“That was a startling encounter,” I remarked. “I didn’t know there was a soul within miles and then suddenly your eyes, deep blue – that’s all I can remember.”

“Didn’t you think I was rather forward to shatter your solitude at such close range?” she asked.

“No,” I answered, surprised by my own reply, “I thought you were beautiful.”

The wet cloth which had been cooling my eyes was promptly thrust into my mouth and held there, stifling further words. Through the cloth I mouthed a protest.

“Well, you deserved it,” she said, removing the cloth. “If it wasn’t for your eyes I’d keep it there.”

Then to my relief she began to laugh.

“You know,” she added, “when I looked back and saw you doing such surprising things in the water I thought you’d gone mad. I didn’t realize at first what had happened to you.”

“The ocean seemed to turn to fire,” I replied. “It was like swimming into a burning pool. Then I felt them all around me – unpleasant creatures.”

“Perhaps you’ll be more sensible the next time.”

“The islands are always a challenge,” I explained, falling into a sort of loquacious trance out of which I heard myself speaking at random. “I was trying to reach the outer one today. Then came the late unpleasantness, and then I heard your voice. You can’t imagine how strange it all was. It was like a small white cloud calling down to a swimmer lost among the waves – that’s what your voice was to me… a small white cloud dropping into a green valley.”

The fever in my eyes was making me drowsy. My words trailed away and for some moments I was content to rest without speaking. As the small craft lilted on its course I imagined that I was flying across the ocean with a strange and beautiful being from another world, a woman much like other women no doubt, but, in some way different. Her eyes, as I recalled them, had been different – deeper and more direct – and her voice had a different quality.

Her fingers were unconsciously running through my hair. This action seemed perfectly natural. She must have thought that I was sleeping, for when I spoke her hand was quickly withdrawn.

“May I know the name of my unseen rescuer?” I asked.

“Haven’t you any idea?” she said. “There are not so many of us on the neck of land.”

“No,” I replied, “I haven’t any idea, and that’s why I like to talk to you – that’s why I’m not afraid. All I know is that my head lies in your lap and that I am conscious of the nearness of your body. I almost envy the blind. I can sense without seeing a kind and lovely creature. Your limbs have made a cushion for my head and I hear your voice above me. It’s cool and friendly and filled with peace. It makes me think—”

“I’ll gag you again,” she interrupted in a warning voice. “MacKellar told me you were a little mad and I believe him now. Poets go on at such a great rate once you’ve given them the chance.”

This remark surprised me into opening my eyes, and gradually, as they became accustomed to the daylight, the woman’s face floated into my vision, materializing as it were from the misty sky hovering round her head.

She was not like any other woman I had ever known. I was struck by this at once. Her lips were resolute, yet tenderly conceived. The thought came to me that laughter had once been crushed on them, and that ever since they had remained a trifle rebellious, as though desirous, yet fearful, of trying the experiment again. Her cheek-bones were high and prominent, and her cheeks were tanned to a deep glow. About her face her dark brown hair, spun with copperish glints of red and gold, floated like a wind tossed cloud kindled to fire in the warm rays of the setting sun. Her throat was bare and strangely innocent looking. Delicate blue veins played beneath her clear skin. There was something lovely and fine about her, something not quite of this world, yet very much alive. From the moment my eyes rested on her face, her beauty became necessary to me. I asked nothing more of life. Oddly enough at the time the possessive instinct was absent from my thoughts. I wanted only to be allowed to remain in her presence.

She must have sensed that she was under observation, for as I lay in the bottom of the boat quietly studying her features a deeper flush crept into her cheeks. Her eyes were fixed on the sea. They were steadfast and friendly eyes, as blue as the waves she was watching. Behind her contemplative, almost trance-touched expression there seemed to stir dreams and visions that had very little to do with this world.

“Nevertheless you are very beautiful,” I said in spite of myself. “Who are you?”

She kept her eyes on the sea, but I fancied she drew a quick breath.

“Evidently,” she remarked ironically, “your eyes haven’t been permanently injured.”

“I could almost find it in my heart to regret that you are so beautiful,” I replied almost to myself. “I’d rather remember a voice.”

“You needn’t be so upset,” she said indifferently. “I’m an old married woman and in a short time I’m going to put you ashore. You’ve recovered enough to sit up now, don’t you think?”

There was nothing left for me to do but to stretch myself along the weather side of the sloop and cling on. She deftly brought the boat about.

“I can sail,” I offered in an amicable voice, hoping thereby to reopen the conversation.

“No doubt you’re remarkably gifted.”

Her small firm chin was rebukingly tilted as she looked at me. She was so studiedly cold that I felt like laughing. There was something delightfully youthful and unfledged about her pose. She had obviously overstated the case in saying that she was an old married woman. I judged that our years were nearly equal.

“Won’t you tell me who you are?” I asked.

“What does it matter who I am?” she asked suddenly, almost with a note of irritation. “Why do people have to be tagged and docketed? Think of me as a woman out of life – a chapter that was never written. Anyway you’ll find out soon enough.”

Her words produced a strange effect on me. It was almost physical. I had the impression that a shadow was creeping over the face of the ocean, trampling down the radiance of the day. And through the failing light we were scudding toward the shadow. It was not to be avoided. Somehow we knew this. And although we accepted the shadow, we feared it. There was a consciousness of fate in the air, something concealed, yet close at hand, always close at hand. Even after I came to know her better this impression still hovered in the background.

“A woman out of life,” I repeated in a low voice. “No, that’s not it… a harp that has never been played… a song that was never sung.”

Her hand worked nervously on the tiller as if she were trying to collect herself after her previous outburst. Then she turned and looked me squarely in the eyes, a faint smile on her lips.

“Minstrel,” she said, “have you the magic to strike the chords? Can you find the words in that brain of yours?”

For a moment I remained silent, considering the significance of her questions, then I said, “No, an exquisite thing makes me mute.”

“You evade,” she replied, “gracefully but not well.”

“I’m not evading now,” I said. “This is one of the times when I’m honest.”

A shade of disappointment settled in her eyes and she turned back to the sea. Instead of heading the sloop inshore as she had threatened she was sending it along parallel with the mainland.

“If you can’t sing,” she said at length, “you’ll have to steer. I’m tired.”

I rose and took the tiller. For a few moments she observed me with professional interest, then settled herself on the transom.

“So you don’t know who I am?” she said with a sarcastic smile. “Haven’t you tried to guess?”

“No,” I answered shortly.

“Well, I live in that old gray house over there,” she continued, pointing to the shore. “It dominates the beaches. One can’t get away from it. I’m Hilda Elliott. Does that mean anything to you?”

There was something more in her question than idle curiosity. Her deep eyes never left my face. They seemed to be searching my mind.

“Naturally,” I replied. “I’m ashamed of my slow wits. Hugh has said lots of things about you – favorable things.”

“Then in a way we’ve been introduced,” she said.

“But I feel that we’ve met before,” I answered, a trifle self-consciously.

“Where?” she demanded with mock seriousness. “Was it in a garden, perhaps?”

“I can’t remember where it was or when,” I said. “But why do you ask?”

“Oh, I lived in a garden once,” she replied indifferently. “I thought it was there we might have met. That was a long time ago – so long that I’ve almost forgotten the garden.”

“So did I live in a garden once,” I said, “but tell me about yours. Mine was filled with peach and cherry blossoms and there were geese with twisting necks. They used to hiss at me ill-temperedly and flap their great wings. I was afraid of them – I would be today.”

She settled her chin in her hands and looked back at the wake of the flying sloop. Some minutes passed and when she spoke a veil of remembrance had dropped like a scarf over her eyes.

“I was a little girl when I lived in the garden,” she said. “The trees were like bursts of green spray tossed high in the air. The garden was a silent place – nothing ever stirred there, nothing but the drowsy voice of the wind and the waving of boughs. All day long the boughs waved. It was like a world of them. And there were birds in the garden. Their small, happy voices were always sounding among the leaves. These sounds belonged to the garden. They were a part of its stillness.”

“Was it a real garden?” I asked. “I mean, could you go back to it now and walk beneath the trees?”

“It must have been a real garden,” she replied as if trying to convince herself. “But I could not go back to it. Don’t you see, I left the garden and came to live in that old gray house? It’s watching us even now. But sometimes I think about the garden and it gets all mixed up like a dream – the trees and the waving boughs and the strange stilly excitement of the place. It used to come over me at times when I was all alone. But the garden wasn’t a dream. I know now that it was one of the realest things in my life.”

“Realer than the old gray house?” I asked.

Once more her eyes searched mine.

“That’s the dream part,” she said deliberately. “In spite of its solid walls the old gray house is a dream. One of these days it is doomed to disappear, fading into the shadows it has created. I know this. Look now – is it still there?”

I looked shoreward and saw the stern gables of John Elliott’s house standing among the trees. Its upper windows seemed to be staring watchfully at us.

“It’s still there,” I replied, “but tell me more of your garden. It sounded like an enchanted spot.”

Without answering she sprang up quickly from the transom and with light feet made her way forward where she stood looking straight ahead of her, a steadying hand on one of the stays.

“Then head out,” she called to me. “Make for open water.”

The salt wind caressed her body and threw confusion in her hair. I could see the sensitive curve of her cheek and the soft column of her throat. Her figure was delicately balanced, yet taut and eager. As she stood there a previous remark returned to me – a harp that had never been played. She made me think of that.

Suddenly she swung around on the stay, one of her feet brushing the surface of the water, and came aft to the transom.

“There’s not much more to be told,” she said, resuming her former position. “I lived in a garden and, like the birds and the boughs, became a part of its stillness. And high up in the air there were other birds. I used to watch them until I became dizzy. Sometimes they would circle down from the sky and as they drew near they seemed to turn into people. At first they were only tiny little people spinning like specks against the blue, then is they came nearer they grew larger and brighter, and they were beautiful. They would come to me, these strangers, and tell me about places on the other side of the stars – quiet valleys cleft in clouds by rivers of flowing sunlight. And some of them would talk with me about things that were to come, beautiful adventures that thrilled the little girl. That’s why I asked if I’d met you in the garden,” she concluded abruptly. “You might have been one of the strangers, you know.”

“I must have been banished,” I replied, “without even the solace of memory.”

“Banished,” she repeated slowly. “But I wasn’t banished. I left the garden of my own free will. One day I left it to go outside in search of the great adventure which brought me at last to the old gray house. And now the garden is gone, but just the same it was real. I insist on that.”

“Perhaps we might find it again,” I suggested, “if we looked for it together.”

“Would you help?” she asked with a bright smile.

“I’d search the world over,” I replied eagerly.

“I believe you would,” she said, a bright light stirring in her eyes.

“That would be the least I could do,” I answered a little confused. “Didn’t you save me from the jellyfish? And after all, we may not need to go so far. Maybe your garden was only a frame of mind.”

When she spoke again I hardly recognized her voice. It was controlled, yet vibrant with emotion punctuated with sharp accents of bitterness and disillusionment.

“That’s impossible,” she said. “The garden can never be found nor the frame of mind recaptured. It was just like crossing a line. On one side you felt and lived and came near to things. On the other side all was different, and in the midst of life you found yourself unreal, ceasing to live, ceasing to feel, unable to touch things with understanding hands. No one knew that you had died, but you had died. Although your body still went on the life had gone out of it. And it must continue to go on until you have learned to escape it.”

Her words closed on this note of mysticism and her eyes were filled with thoughts that I could not follow.

We were beyond the islands now. Far away on the other side of the tapering mainland the sun was hanging low to the marshes. Like the arching wall of a cavern filled with reflected light and slashed with veins of gold the sky curved out behind us. We were sailing against this glowing wall, a black speck on a gleaming sea. High above us a trail of birds drifted landward to the distant woods. Their wings stroked the air with the leisurely pace of a long dusk. A great stillness had gathered round us, and I wondered why such beauty made me sad. It was as if my mortal eyes were unable to look upon an evening sky without suffering a feeling of personal loss. Another sun would soon be gone. Sleep, the pupil of death, was drawing near. Unconsciously I sighed and was startled to hear a merry laugh from Hilda Elliott. I looked at her with an expression of reproach and saw that her face was bright with animation.

“I’ve been trying to follow you,” she remarked lightly, “but you were all wrapped up in the sunset, We’ll have to put in now, the wind is dropping.”

“I’m afraid I’ve been getting mixed up in lots of things today,” I said, pressing a hand to my eyes. “Jellyfish, gardens, and sunsets, and old gray houses.”

She sprang from the transom and sat down close beside me. Her arm was touching mine. As I glanced at her over my shoulder she seemed very much of a girl-

“You mustn’t take the garden too seriously,” she said. “That was a beautiful story with a dramatic end, but you’d better remember the jellyfish. They’re real, and I can’t be always combing the sea.”

Not a trace of her former mood remained. She was composed now and apparently light hearted. The dark cloud had momentarily receded.

“They don’t belong, those jellyfish,” I said, trying to fall in with her new mood. “There’s no rime nor reason to them.”

“How can you say that?” she demanded. “They might be very kind to their young.”

“But they’re too prolific,” I protested.

“It’s a big ocean,” she said.

“And yet it brought us together.”

“In a little while we’re going to part,” she replied. “Steer by that small green dock.”

The sloop was not long in reaching the shore. A man came down and took charge. As I turned and followed his mistress up the steps leading to the roadway on the edge of the cliffs he regarded me with undisguised curiosity. When we had achieved the steep ascent Hilda Elliott sat down on a fallen log and regarded in silence the grim carving on her husband’s gate. A brooding expression came into her eyes, and all suggestion of laughter left her lips. Then she looked up at me.

“Just the same,” she remarked casually as though we had been discussing the topic all afternoon, “I wouldn’t go out there any more alone. That is, not unless you don’t care whether you come back or not Don’t you realize the danger?”

“I never stopped to think,” I replied, secretly pleased by her matter-of-fact display of interest in my welfare. “It’s less complicated out there. Everything is roomier – less cramped. The escape spirit comes over me. It’s always been like that. Sometimes when I look up at the sky I want to spring clear of the earth and its ponderous urgency and go spinning dizzily around in space poking my fingers into the puffy cheeks of clouds.”

“Oh, I see,” she remarked. “Not content with trying to be a fish you also have ambitions to become a bird.”

“Crying for the moon is one of my most serious occupations,” I said. “I object to being limited to dry land. We should be a part of all elements. Wouldn’t it be nice to go coasting down the dim green lanes of the sea until you had reached its uttermost depths?”

“It all depends,” she replied with a serious face. “Do you mean alive or dead?”

“Certainly not dead,” I answered indignantly.

She laughed softly and held up a hand to me.

“The way you put it sounds very attractive,” she said in a mollifying voice, “but really if I were you I wouldn’t try it. Take a walk with me sometime. It would be much healthier.”

She rose from the log and extended her hand.

“Will you?” she asked, smiling into my eyes.

I took her hand in mine and muttered a sincere but incoherent affirmative.

“Then I can say goodbye with a lighter heart,” she said.

When she had disappeared among the trees I reluctantly directed my steps toward the cottage.

•   •   •   •   •

For a happy space I had forgotten Scarlet. Her white form was stretched on the black divan, and at the sight of her the old stealthy conflict returned. The arrogance of her beauty was exciting. It attracted me even while it sharpened my antagonism.

At the moment of my entrance an altercation was in progress. Scarlet was wearily protesting that she was too tired to go on and MacKellar was damning her and the dying daylight with impartial violence. Mrs. Tylor, both orally and visually outraged, was holding up dishes before her face as she set the table, and peering over their rims. Her husband drank and used strong language as was ordained and proper, but he never abstractly cursed the sun or publicly looked on nude women. MacKellar, she decided, was a blasphemous old fool who was wasting his declining years in painting improper pictures, but not so with Scarlet. The woman in Mrs. Tylor whispered true words in her ear.

When Scarlet saw me she wearily rose from the divan and stood gazing at the canvas while Hugh punctuated his personal opinion of her with vicious little jabs of his brush.

“Hugh,” she said, turning from the picture with a certain pride of bearing, “where do you find your magic, you’re such an old fuss-box? I simply must stretch.”

Then, as if noticing me for the first time, she walked slowly across the room, her scarf draped around her, and placing her hand on my shoulder supported herself as if weary.

“You look all played out, David,” she said with unexpected kindness. “So am I. Hugh’s been brutal all day.”

Mrs. Tylor left the room and slammed the door behind her.

“Come away from that fellow,” Hugh commanded.

As her body swayed against mine her heavy perfume caught me in a close embrace and made me forget the wind, soft- edged from the touch of waves.

“But you told me to be nice to him,” she protested, glancing over her shoulder at the exasperated MacKellar.

“I’m waiting!” he exclaimed impatiently. “Three minutes, that’s all I need. Oh, God!”

She turned quickly and pressed her lips to mine.

“Well, I’m damned!” cried MacKellar. “Things can’t go on like this. Come back here and lie down!”

Demurely Scarlet obeyed. Mrs. Tylor emerged from the kitchen puritanically sniffing the air, her eyes riveted on the coffee pot as though salvation lay therein.

VII

“What’s all this I’ve been hearing about jellyfish and islands?”

When MacKellar confronted me with this unexpected question somedays after my meeting with Hilda Elliott we were out on the cliff path taking an early morning walk. For some reason, vague even to myself, I had made no reference to the adventure. My curiosity was now suddenly aroused to discover the source of his information.

“Just what have you been hearing about jellyfish and islands?” I asked.

“Everything,” he grunted. “It started a hell of a row.”

“How’s that?” I demanded.

“Because you were fool enough to try to get yourself drowned,” he replied, “and she was fool enough not to let you.”

“Who told you about it?” I insisted. “Did she?”

“In a way she did,” he answered. “It was last night. I was seeing her husband on business – rent. He loves to take other people’s money because he knows it hurts them to give it to him. On the way back I met her. She’d been crying, but she denied it and asked me about your eyes. This surprised me, for I’d never considered your eyes particularly worthy of note and I told her as much. And then she told me that she’d found you out there playing with a lot of jellyfish… you would.”

“And the row?” I interrupted.

“She merely said there had been one. The man at the pier must have told and now Elliott’s forbidden her to use the boat. Then she laughed. People shouldn’t laugh like that.”

For some minutes I said nothing, but stood looking down at the blue sea spreading its white ripples along the little beaches. It was a heavy morning, one on which the world seems to cling lovingly to its coverlet of mist. Nature was unrefreshed and reluctant to awaken. Here and there patches of silver gray still floated over the water and the fields. A light breeze blew in fitful, breathless little rallies against which the trees moved languid, protesting limbs. And even the birds in the branches seemed more inclined to observe us comfortably from the shade of their leafy pockets than to proclaim their presence in song. Every sign foretold the leisurely approach of a hot day beneath which the earth would steam, until it dried.

“What sort of a person is Elliott?” I asked at last in a conversational voice.

“He’s a madman,” replied Hugh deliberately, “a throw-back from some hellish cave, only he has all the curses of civilization. It makes him crueler – more versatile.”

“Can she care for such a person as that?”

He subjected me to a look of demolishing pity, then said, “If you were a song bird instead of an ass would you care for the person who stifled your notes?”

“Naturally not, but why does she put up with it?”

“From some mistaken notion of pride,” he answered turning away. “Some weird quirk – working things out or some such nonsense as that.”

“Perhaps it’s fear?” I suggested.

“She’s not afraid of the devil himself,” he said with conviction. “It’s not that. She’s got some strange ideas in her head. They should be knocked out. She’s like you… impossible.”

“And now he’s taken away her boat,” I remarked in a low voice.

“It’s a good thing,” Hugh retorted. “One of these days she’ll sail so far away that she’ll never reach land again.”

“But now she’s caged, Hugh,” I protested. “Shut in, and I did it.”

“She’s always been caged with him,” he said.

When we came to Elliott’s gates Hugh stopped and stood regarding the carving, a scowl slowly spreading over his face.

“It’s bad craftsmanship to begin with,” he observed, “and worse taste. Doesn’t that give you a better idea of John Elliott than I could?”

“It made me hate the place and its owner from the moment I first saw the thing,” I replied, recalling the morning when I had accompanied the old woodsman along this same road.

“Well, that’s what he’s trying to do to her,” said MacKellar, “only he’s doing it slowly and enjoying it more.”

We were about to move away when a laugh at our backs made us turn around. Hilda Elliott, with little jewels of spray still glistening in her hair and a blue robe partly concealing her bathing suit, was standing on the top step of the stairs leading up from the beach.

“Good morning,” she said, gathering her hair in a great mass and twisting it round her head.

As she stood before us with upraised arms, her head tilted back and her slim young body as straight as a silver birch, she appeared to me as the very embodiment of dawn, a lovely spray-fresh creature newly risen from the sea. Her legs and arms were bare and her feet were caught in sandals. A faded bathing suit, picturesquely tattered, clung to her delicate figure. Hugh must have been caught by the same spell her beauty had cast over me, for he stood gazing at her with concentrated admiration, his fingers working nervously as though searching for a brush. The sky was her background and the sea spread out at her feet. Around her floated the blue robe like a wave bewitched to land.

“What the devil’s the meaning of this?” said Hugh, at last.

“Rebellion!” she cried, extending her arms in the air. “Mutiny! If I can’t sail, I will swim.”

She stopped suddenly as if remembering my presence and looked at me like a child endeavoring to ascertain the merits of a prospective playmate.

“How are your eyes, Mr. Landor?” she asked. “Hugh tells me they’re not worthy of note.”

“They never were,” I replied slowly, “but they will be from this moment. The beauty in them will never die.”

She gathered her robe about her and looked questioningly at MacKellar.

“Does he talk like that often?” she demanded.

“Not to me, he doesn’t,” answered Hugh. “You have to insult the brute to loosen his tongue, but in this instance he’s quite justified and, I think, sincere.”

She smiled quickly at me, then passed between us and crossed the road. Standing between the granite posts she regarded us with amused eyes.

“You’re a pretty pair,” she remarked. “The painter and the poet searching the dawn for inspiration.”

“If you want to know,” MacKellar answered gruffly, “you were the subject of our inspiration this morning.”

As she looked from one to the other her face clouded.

“Were you gossiping, Hugh?” she asked with a note of reproof in her voice.

“Yes,” said MacKellar defiantly, “if you want to call it that.”

“Then I’m going to turn my back on you as a mark of great disapproval,” she replied, gathering up her robe. “Pay no attention to him, Mr. Landor. You’d do better to come swimming with me instead.”

“He’ll do nothing of the sort,” MacKellar proclaimed with vigor. “He sees too much of the beach as it is, disappearing from it by day and haunting it by night.”

“Mr. Landor will choose between us,” she said, challenging me with her eyes.

“I’ve already chosen,” I replied before Hugh could speak. “The beach has it.”

“More mutiny and rebellion,” MacKellar grumbled. “I wash my hands of the both of you.”

“And I kiss my hand to you,” she answered, blowing a kiss to Hugh from the water-pinched tips of her fingers. “Good- by, old weasel.”

We watched her running across the grass until she had disappeared among the trees, and even then I felt inclined to linger, but MacKellar forcibly drew me away.

“While you two have been wasting precious minutes, I’ve been struggling to get back to the cottage,” he said. “Come on now, hurry. Scarlet might be up.”

Scarlet was up. She was eating breakfast and Mrs. Tylor was serving her with the air of one who refuses to be responsible for her actions. As we entered the little door Scarlet looked up at us over the rim of her coffee cup.

“Enter two madmen,” she said, putting the cup down. “They are discussing who is the madder.”

“I am,” replied Hugh, “and I’ll be a lot madder if you don’t stop stuffing yourself and spoiling your figure before I’ve painted this picture.”

“He is such a considerate uncle,” she remarked to me as she rose from the table. “Good morning, David. Run away now. I’ve got to go to work.”

Irritated by her air of indifference, I sat down at the table and drank a cup of coffee while she arranged herself on the divan.

VIII

A spray of stars was floating in a low black sky. The sea had grown quiet, as though subdued by the oppressive mass of darkness resting upon it. Along the beach invisible wavelets rustled like songs within a dream. Faint and far off they seemed, as though depressed people were whispering together somewhere in a quiet hallway.

“If a man could walk across the night-filled floor of the sea,” I thought to myself, “and stand out there in the blackness with his hand held up to the dripping sky, I wonder how shut off he would feel, how solitary and far away from everything… even unhappy things!”

For some reason I shivered slightly and turned away from the water’s edge. My mind was divided by thoughts of two women. It was like a circus field on a cloudy day – confused, colorful and tawdry, uncertain in its gayety. Wind was somewhere near. Shadows scudded across the field, voices shrilled through the wind, and there were other noises and smells to arouse one’s interest. Yet over the field hovered the threat of the wind and a feeling of impending trouble. In my mind there were many pictures and many impulses. Both Hilda Elliott and Scarlet were embodied in them.

Scarlet floated gaudily through my thoughts. Her full, white arms seemed to be waving to me from the flap of a bannered tent. She was a side show thought, attractive in her very vulgarity. She was hot and scented and promiscuous, obviously of a more destructive type than the beasts she was asking the crowds to see. She was, nevertheless, desirable. I passed her by impatiently. Though dangerous at close range, she was rather easy to deal with from a distance. It was not so simple a matter to dispose of Hilda Elliott. Her personality was more subtle and enduring.

MacKellar had been right when he said that there was something about her not quite of this world. From the moment she had passed from sight behind the gaunt trees on her husband’s lawn, she had not been at any time entirely absent from my mind. I felt that I had come to understand her very intimately during the short course of our conversation. It seemed to me that for the first time in my life I had been in close sympathy with the mind of a woman. This understanding could not be traced so much to the spoken word as to an unmistakable harmony of thought that had sprung up without effort between us. It was like the undemonstrative hand clasp of two kindred spirits after years of separation.

In a sense, Hilda Elliott had already become necessary to me. Her personality had taken possession of my imagination, her laughter had left a responsive echo in my heart. I wondered about her eyes and the thoughts that lay behind them. And incredulously I also wondered if it were possible for me to have fallen in love with her. To others of a more generous and happier nature this spontaneous excitement of interest might come. I had been told that such things happened. In books I had come across both lovely and ludicrous examples of love. Some had been sophomorically lurid, and others tediously lewd; and some had seemed quite reasonable and convincing, beautiful beyond everything else in life; but whatever they had been, I had always remained surreptitiously on the margin of the pages, a stranger to the subject.

As I walked along the beach I argued with myself that I was too wrapped up in my own conceits and too skeptical of human conduct for the love of a woman to overcome the introspective obstructions of my thoughts. With painful reasoning I rejected the existence of such a possibility, and by the very fervor of my logic I was at last forced to admit that I was merely endeavoring to delay an inevitable capitulation. Like a bright light in a tangled confusion of thought the knowledge came to me that even though I were never again to look on Hilda Elliott’s face, still she would haunt me to the end of my days. Quietly, but completely I accepted the situation, realizing full well that in all probability, it would lead to nothing but unhappiness.

•   •   •   •   •

For some time I had been passing and repassing the two isolated rocks which on a previous occasion had served me as a bath house. In my preoccupation I had not at first noticed that a third object was placed between them, like a small rock but recently born to the monolithic old couple looming watchfully over its head. As I stood regarding this unfamiliar object, I began to feel that I was no longer alone on the beach. Another person had been sitting there for some time, quietly observing my actions. Without considering the good taste of my curiosity I approached the rocks and peered between them.

“Good evening, Mr. Landor,” came disconcertingly from the shadows.

“Hello,” I replied, somewhat taken aback. “What are you doing here?”

“Watching you with great interest,” she replied. “Tell me, do all poets stalk? I mean, is it essential, like gout to a rich old uncle or biscuits to a ten-day bride?”

“Or good fellows and fair weather,” I suggested.

“Exactly,” she answered with a serious face. “Do you believe it always is?”

“I’ve never had the courage to investigate,” I said. “We must have some illusions, you know.”

“But don’t you think it could be real bad weather just for once when they all get together?” she persisted.

“The song makes no allowance for even a slight shower,” I answered.

“Very well,” she said with a little sigh, “but it does seem remarkable to me. How about poets and stalking? Does that hold, too?”

“I don’t know. I’m not one. I’ve tried. MacKellar was lying as usual. Anyway did you ever walk comfortably in sliding sand?”

“I have,” she replied. “And what’s more I can run in sliding sand. For instance—”

Without waiting to finish her sentence she sprang to her feet and flashed away in the darkness. The night closed round her white figure like the velvet lining of a black pocket, and from the depth of the pocket there floated a swift note of laughter. Along the beach I could hear the sound of scattering pebbles, then these grew fainter and silence settled down. Her disappearance had been so sudden and unexpected that for a moment I remained motionless, confused. Then sensing the implied challenge in her flight, I followed her through the mist which had crept in from the sea. And as I ran the dampness split coolingly across my face like ribbons of moist gauze. In a short time I came to a place where there were sharp rocks and boulders. The beach curved here and came to an abrupt stop, and the descending cliffs, running out into the sea, formed a steep barrier on the crest of which dark trees, vaguely defined, waved their arms like impotent magicians at the ocean moving fitfully in its sleep. As I searched among the bowlders I heard the name of Hilda falling unconsciously from my lips, but nothing stirred save the little waves endlessly fingering the sand.

With a feeling of having been duped, I was about to abandon the search when from down the beach I heard a clear call floating through the heavy air like the notes of a distant bell on a thick night. When I returned to the rocks Hilda Elliott was sitting quietly Between them as though she had never stirred.

“That was a fiendish thing to do,” I said.

“I was exercising you,” she explained innocently, “Taking the stalk out of your joints.”

“You were deliberately imperiling my life and limb in a forest of infuriated bowlders,” I complained sitting down beside her.

“If you haunt the beach so much,” she answered, “you should have discovered all of its secrets by this time.”

“I never discovered you before.”

“I haven’t been here to discover.”

“Why did you come down tonight?” I asked.

“While you were watching me stalk I was thinking of you. When I saw you sitting here between the rocks it was as if I had thought you into real life.”

“Well, don’t think of dragons or mosquitoes,” she said, “or we might be very uncomfortable.”

“I was thinking of your husband, too.”

She looked at me in astonishment for a moment, then burst out laughing. It did my heart good to hear it. When she had finished she said, “That’s one of the most impertinent remarks I’ve ever heard. If it wasn’t so ridiculous, I’d be very angry. I think I am, a little.”

“I didn’t mean anything,” I replied. “I was thinking of the trouble I made for you by getting mixed up with those jellyfish.”

“Then Hugh was gossiping after all, wasn’t he?”

“No, not gossiping. He was scolding me for having started a row and put a stop to your sailing.”

“He must have said more than that. Be honest now.”

“Yes, he did – you know how he talks.”

She rose to her feet and walked down to the water’s edge, where she stood with her back to me and her face turned toward the night smothered ocean. She seemed to be deep in thought. As I watched her I rapidly considered the situation and decided that no good purpose would be served by feigning ignorance of her life with John Elliott. It would only make things more strained and unnatural for us both. She slowly retraced her steps and stood looking down at me.

“Yes,” she said. “I know how Hugh talks and I know how everyone else talks around here, but you mustn’t let it affect you. One more drop of commiseration would drive me to terrible things. There’s some truth in it all, obviously. Sooner or later you’d find out for yourself, but it’s unimportant. It’s my particular problem after all, mine to solve, and until I’ve solved it I’m not seeking another way out.” She stopped for a moment and trampled the sand with her foot.

“Hugh’s splendid,” she continued. “I love him. In fact he’s the only person I talk with at all, but he refuses to understand. He puts all his patience into his paint and lashes out with his tongue. You shouldn’t take him too seriously. And don’t think of me as a pretty princess who had been captured and brought to this place. I came here of my own free will. I left the garden in search of the high adventure – romance, and if I didn’t find it I must be partly to blame. I’m a part of the problem, too. Do you understand?”

“I don’t understand anything,” I replied. “That is I don’t understand you, but for all that I’m sorry about the little sloop. It was sort of fun for you and now that’s stopped. If it hadn’t been for those jellyfish it wouldn’t have happened.”

“But something else would,” she said. “Something always does.”

“Yes, as Hugh said, you might have sailed away so far in that little boat of yours that you’d never have reached land alive.”

“I don’t know as that would make such a great difference, would it?”

“I wish I could shake you a little,” I replied.

She laughed lightly and sank down beside me.

“Men are all like that,” she answered. “When they don’t know what to say they want to fight.”

“All right, but wouldn’t you have solved your problem a little too easily? Death never clears up anything. It merely adds to the mystery.”

“How sure you are about such things,” she replied. “The only thing that’s real to me in life is the leaving of it and what follows after. All the rest seems to be just a series of false, ineffectual starts leading nowhere.”

“But even that is better than a complete stop, isn’t it.”

“Is it?” she asked with a slight smile. “I’m not so sure about that. Everyone seems to be going busily around routing out drab little scraps of life and teasing them to shreds, but it’s not so clear to me. After all how do we know that it is life? Isn’t it just as sensible to be as much interested in what lies beyond life than in some obvious travesty waiting round the corner?”

She laughed a trifle nervously, I thought, and sifted some sand between her fingers.

“Don’t look so upset,” she continued. “Haven’t you ever felt like that?”

“Yes,” I admitted in a low voice. “I left the city to get rid of it – it’s such an abject, negative feeling. You see, I happen to be one of those who love life and everything about it, even its obvious travesties, but so far I haven’t made much of a success of living. I seem to lack the proper equipment. My mind is too soft. Thoughts form pools there that never drain. They grow stagnant.”

Impulsively she reached out and placed her hand on mine. My fingers trembled at her touch and I glanced away fearing that she might read in my eyes the struggle going on within me.

“How serious we are,” she said, “talking here in the darkness like a pair of tragic masks. We should try to help each other out instead of adding to the gloom.”

“I need a lot of helping at present,” I remarked.

“Do you?” she asked, studying my face. “Well so do I. Shall we form a league – a sort of defensive alliance?”

“I’ve caused you enough trouble already,” I replied

“Still lamenting the loss of the sloop,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’ll get her back before long.”

“I’d like to be your ally,” I replied, “but I’m afraid the arrangement would be too one-sided. I’m not a very helpful person.”

“You’ve helped a lot already,” she answered, giving my hand a slight squeeze. “Suppose I should tell you that I came down here tonight merely because Hugh said you were always haunting the beach?”

“I’d feel foolishly happy,” I replied.

“Well, that’s a start,” she said, smiling into my eyes. “Go ahead and feel foolishly happy. The alliance is already working.”

This time I took her hand in mine and held it, but I did not speak, knowing in my heart that in the true sense I could never be her friend. Along the beach the wavelets rustled like songs within a dream. In silence we listened to the chorus of little silvery voices. Hilda Elliott was sitting with her head against the rocks. Her eyes were closed. Gently she withdrew her hand from mine.

“You see,” she murmured without stirring. “Already we’ve begun to be friends. We can enjoy each other’s silence.”

IX

For the next few weeks Hilda and I were very much together. Her husband had gone away on one of his periodical and unexplained visits to the city, from which he would presently return heavy-eyed and sullen, to stalk watchfully round his grounds.

“Things won’t be like this after he comes back,” she warned me once as her searching eyes gazed seaward from the island on which we were sitting. “With a few unpleasant exceptions, my husband dislikes all men.”

She seldom made any reference to her husband and always evaded my attempts to lead her into a discussion of her relations with him. During his absence she seemed to be determined to forget his very existence, and I attributed this remark of hers to a sudden realization of the transitory nature of her release.

“It would be nice if we could take the little sloop and sail away forever,” I suggested.

She cast me a sympathetic smile, then her face clouded.

“Yes,” she said, “but that would be escape without freedom. As you reminded me once, it would solve nothing, and I’m not yet ready for flight. There are things I must settle first.”

“It seems to me that flight under any circumstances would be well justified,” I replied.

“Some of my husband’s friends used to say things like that,” she answered. “They were so disinterested that I suspected them when they offered to take me out of it all. But you’re different, David. I like you, and because I do I’m going to ask you to change the subject. The sky is far too blue today to be filled with man-made clouds.”

“But, Hilda,” I protested, “what about the years? Time isn’t standing still to watch you solve your problem.”

“Come now, glum face, you promised to be my ally. No battles, no internal conflict, or I shall instantly break off relations.”

I shrugged my shoulders and abandoned the attack, defeated, but still rebellious.

In the meantime we made the most of our freedom. The neck of land, the islands and the ocean surrounding them afforded us endless opportunities for expeditions by water and foot, and I who had already exhaustively explored both land and sea, took pleasure in bringing my companion to the places I had discovered.

Often I used to wait for her in the fields leading down to the marshes. Through the high grass she would come flying to meet me, her arms wide spread and her head thrown back. Something in the buoyancy and rhythm of her movements made me think of the bright strangers she had spoken about in telling me of her garden. She seemed so swift and light that I almost feared she would spring from the earth and flash away forever into space. Then I would hurry to meet her and we would come together with great confusion which would send us tumbling through the high grass.

At times I became dispirited when I thought of the separation that would follow the homecoming of John Elliott. When such thoughts came I found it difficult to conceal my emotions from Hilda and to refrain from telling her the truth concerning the relationship existing between us. These spells were usually accompanied by periods of moodiness during which she would study me with troubled eyes as though fearfully endeavoring to catch the thoughts that were passing through my mind. For the most part, we were happy enough together, and if at times the laughter was a trifle mirthless, Hilda marvelously succeeded in reestablishing an atmosphere of natural and spontaneous comradery.

That summer I was happier than I had ever been before in my life, and at the same time sadder. The days were filled with bright, sun-filtered hours, and at night the stars like golden bees swarmed out across the sky. It was like living in a beautiful dream with the knowledge that an unpleasant awakening was near at hand. I found pleasure in watching Hilda return, cautiously at first and then tumultuously as her confidence in me increased, to the lost garden of her girlhood from which she had so heedlessly departed. From her behavior I gained the impression at times that she realized only too keenly she was paying the garden a fugitive visit and that in a little while she would once more find herself standing alone and cheerless outside its vanishing walls.

As the days passed I could see that she had taken my promise to her very seriously and that in spite of her occasional flashes of coquetry, she confidently relied on me to give her the friendship her spirit craved. Her personality grew more vivid and interesting as I came to know her. A mere suggestion or a fine shade of meaning was all she required to give body to a mood. She was able to make things live because she herself was the very essence of life, an exquisitely real and vital creature whose intellectually honest mind gave warmth and color to her thoughts.

Of Hilda Elliott I still carry the same impression I received when first I looked at her from the bottom of her little boat. Today the sloop lies rotting in one of those forgotten havens where honest sailboats go when they become weary of the sea, and the small hands that once so skillfully guided the craft have forever yielded up their hold on its tiller, yet in memory she still remains to me as being unlike any other woman I have ever known – braver of spirit, more honest of mind and physically more beautiful.

Once in the early morning just after the sun had risen we came together on the beach and dashed in among the waves. A great roller broke over her and tossed her into my arms. As the wave receded we clung together, alternately laughing and gasping for breath. Then suddenly our eyes met and we became vitally conscious of each other. I found myself looking down into the eyes of a new Hilda. They were touched with languor and expectation as they gazed into mine. The morning was young and she was young and I was fresh with life. I wanted only her and at that moment she knew it. For an instant we stood like statues carved together from a single block, but the racing blood in our bodies warmed through our wet garments and made us thrill with life. Before the expression could fade from her eyes I kissed her mouth and at the touch of my lips I could feel her little finger nails convulsively digging into my arms. Then she wriggled from my grasp and sprang back to the beach, where she stood looking at me out of eyes wide with astonishment. For a moment I thought she was going to laugh, but she turned instead and ran down the beach, her white legs flashing and her hair streaming out behind her. At the steps leading up to the road she stopped and held up her hands to me in an odd little motion of protest, then she inclined her head and hurried up the steps. I went for a long swim and by the time I returned she was dressed and waiting for me on the beach.

“You’re an idiot,” she announced as I came panting up to her. “Oh, what an idiot! What an exasperating loon!”

I threw myself down on the sand and turned my face to the sun. And together we planned the day, but neither of us referred to the incident of the kiss. I could tell that she was self-conscious. Her businesslike manner betrayed her. As she talked I watched her with amused eyes until at last she gave me a vicious dig with the point of her shoe.

“Don’t look at me like that!” she exclaimed, her face flaming. “Go home and put some clothes on your wolfish body.”

I departed, supremely happy.

•   •   •   •   •

The evening before John Elliott returned I brought Hilda to this pavilion by the salt marshes, and when I introduced her to it, I invested the ceremony with an air of elaborate mystery. This I did partly from fear lest the scene might fail to impress her as deeply as it had me, and partly to lessen the feeling of restraint which had fallen like a shadow between us.

When we arrived at the border of the bush-fringed declivity I bade her turn her back to me and to remain motionless with closed eyes. Then I slipped quietly down the hidden ledge and called to her in a muffled voice.

“David,” she answered, bewildered, “where have you gone? Where are you?”

“Far away from everything,” I replied. “You’ll never find me now.”

In the intervening silence I could hear her moving about on the bank above my head. Then she called to me again and this time I detected a frightened note in her voice.

“David, David, where are you?” she cried.

“At your feet,” I answered reassuringly, but even as I spoke she stepped over the ledge and with a startled cry came tumbling down into my arms. Her warm little body was all crumpled and confused and her face was buried in my neck. I could feel her breath coming in short, surprised gasps as her heart throbbed excitedly against mine. Her arms clung to my shoulders and her hair lay round me in a fragrant maze.

“David,” she said, “put me down.”

Without answering I carried her through the reeds and deposited her on the mat. For an instant she regarded me with frightened eyes, then she smiled and drew a deep breath. I watched her expression as her gaze moved to the marshes and rested there. Slowly her face lighted up with wonder, her eyes seemed to grow deeper and bluer and presently her lips parted in a puzzled smile.

“Why, David,” she said in a low voice, “I feel as if I’d been here before. It’s all so natural and familiar and yet it’s strange… like a half-remembered dream.”

“Then you like it?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Your lost chapel by the marshes has become a part of me already. I shall never forget it. See how fresh and green the island lies with the tall trees waving on it. How peaceful it seems over there.”

“Hardly a part of this world,” I suggested.

“No,” she murmured. “It’s like another one – a fairer place.”

“Cut off from life by quicksand and hidden streams,” I continued. “Acres of false ground protected by an army of reeds separate us from the island.”

“Somehow it’s like life, isn’t it?” she replied. “We have to wade through the mire to reach the beautiful things we want.”

The silence of the place settled round us. I looked at Hilda and my heart went out to her. She was so near and desirable, so vitally necessary to me. I could not bring myself to face the thought that perhaps this would be the last evening we would spend together. It made me feel rebellious, unfitting me for the role I was supposed to play.

“Hilda,” I said, taking her hand and raising it to my lips, “don’t you wish we could reach the island together? It’s impossible to believe that we’ll never be like this again. I can’t go on.”

“David,” she warned in a strained voice, “even now our feet are on false ground.”

I dropped my eyes to the small hand lying so confidingly in mine. It’s trustfulness disarmed me.

“I shall need your friendship more than ever now,” she continued, looking at me with unnaturally bright eyes. “Keep giving it.”

The sun dipped down behind the island and lay glowing through the trees like a beautiful Japanese screen. I watched the colors spill out over the shadow-filled plain of the marshes, where they were gathered up by the currents and carried away to the sea.

“Friend,” she whispered, lightly pressing my hand, “continue to be my friend – only that.”

•   •   •   •   •

When I returned to the cottage I stood for a long time on the lawn, striving to reconcile myself to the fact that Hilda had gone back to a house in which she would no longer be alone. A feeling of unutterable loss crept into my heart and settled there for a long sojourn. Silken rugs of moonlight were strewn across the grass, the lilac bushes were sprayed with yellow mist. Against the black trees of the grove the little white cottage stood sharply silhouetted. The quiet beauty of the scene hurt me. Now that I was separated from Hilda its loveliness served only to remind me of her absence. For the first time since I had left the city I felt a desire to return to it.… New York, its streets and its women… one could lose oneself there very easily and destroy beauty in a few short hours, but the memory of it would always linger like a secret betrayal.

A pool of light falling at my feet made me to raise my head. Scarlet was leaning down to me from one of the upper windows of the cottage. In the clear flood of the moon her face had taken on a deathly pallor in which her eyes burned like those of a wild thing in a thicket. Her lips were parted in a half smile and her arms cradled to her breast the heavy waves of her dull thick hair. I experienced then the same sensation that, had come to me when I had first looked on the marshes. Resolution left me, and the beauty of the night no longer hurt my eyes. The promise that lay revealed in hers offered a means of escape from the chill depression surrounding me. Thoroughly abominating myself for the thoughts that were forming in my mind I furtively entertained the idea of acceptance. Why not? Hilda could never be mine. Friends, always friends, a false and insipid relationship. I had my own life to live, my own cravings to satisfy.

I took a step forward and held up my hand to Scarlet. With a supple twist of her body, she snatched the scarf from her shoulders and tossed it from her. Down through the light night air it floated gracefully and coiled itself like a serpent at my feet. For a moment she stood revealed, a soft radiance glowing over her white form. Then with a low laugh she sprang from view and the light went out.

I picked the scarf from the grass and buried my face in its folds. Hilda seemed far away.

•   •   •   •   •

That night I dreamed that I stood with Hilda on the edge of the marshes. She had taken my hand in hers and was pointing to the island. As though repelled by the message in her eyes, I drew back and muttered, “No, Hilda. No. That way is death.”

“But, David,” she replied, “with confidence and courage even quicksand can be crossed.”

She looked at me appealingly, then turned her eyes to the island. Quiet and peaceful it lay, bathed in a peculiar half light that seemed to partake of the qualities of both night and day, a pale, unearthly glow weirdly beautiful in its deathlike calm and perfection. As I gazed at the island the realization came to me that death itself was waiting for us behind the trees, and with this knowledge, fear like a cold spring chilled my heart.

“Won’t you follow me if I lead the way?” she pleaded.

With a supreme effort to master the dread that had taken possession of me, I stepped with her into that other world half-light lying across the marshes. Through the noiselessly waving reeds I followed her reluctantly, fearing at every step that we should sink into the quicksand. The soggy ground felt cold and unpleasant to my feet. Yet the island, which repelled me most of all, strangely drew me onward. The sharp terror of extinction struggled against my desire for eternal freedom with Hilda. I sought her eyes for encouragement and she smiled back at me. At last when we had drawn near to the island I could control my fear no longer. I stopped and drew her back.

“Don’t you understand?” she whispered. “It’s the only way out for us, the only escape from all that’s waiting back there.”

As she spoke these words I seemed to recall even in the dream a remark she had once made to me. The night came back again and I could hear the waves rustling along the beach. “Anyway,” she had said, “the only thing in life that’s real to me is the leaving of it and what follows after.” I realized now what she had meant and though I longed with all my being to follow her to the island, the uncertainty of death rather than the love of life restrained me.

“I can’t do it!” I cried. “I haven’t the strength to go!”

Filled with misery and self-loathing, I knelt at her feet and kissed the hem of her skirt. Then I rose and fled from her over the marshes. Once I turned and looked back. She was standing with an arm extended in a gesture of supplication. An expression of desolation filled her eyes and the smile had died on her lips. Hot tears streamed down my cheeks and I awoke.

•   •   •   •   •

Immediately after breakfast I returned to my room to consider the strange dream that had come to me. Its significance was unavoidable, and although I was attracted by it I still felt in broad daylight a tremor of the same dread that had caused me to desert Hilda and seek safety on solid ground. As I sat tormented by the thought of having failed the woman I loved, Scarlet entered the room and came up behind me. She leaned down over the back of my chair and, taking my head in her hands, pressed it against her bosom. At first I resisted, then relaxed and let my head sink back. For some reason I thought of a large house with bay windows and scented curtains. Then I thought of a garden heavy with perfume and hidden by streaming vapors. And as I thought the memory of my betrayal of Hilda on the marshes gradually faded away. Leaning far back in the chair, I reached up and clasping Scarlet round the neck, attempted to draw her face down to mine. She gave a short, disagreeable laugh, and flinging my arms aside walked across the room to the window, where she stood leaning out and humming a soft air under her breath. She seemed to have forgotten my presence. The room grew still, save for the low, irritating humming and the sound of the wind outside. Then she turned and faced me, her lips parted in an irritating smile.

“Well, my dear, David,” she remarked, “aren’t you unusually hospitable this morning?”

I raised my eyes to hers and tried to answer her smile, but failed in the attempt.

“Come here,” I said in a low voice. “Scarlet, I want you now. Damn it, do you hear?”

“I prefer to remain where I am,” she answered and began to hum again.

“Stop that noise!” I exclaimed, springing from the chair.

She laughed, and as I approached her she continued to watch me with an indulgent smile behind which I seemed to detect a hint of anger. But when I ran my hands up over her arms she made no effort to resist, only standing there looking at me out of her deep, glowing eyes with her lips slightly parted as if awaiting my kiss.

“You beast,” I muttered, taking her by the shoulders, “come here!”

With a lithe movement she dropped to one knee and passed under my outstretched arms. Still humming softly to herself she moved over to the bed and sat down. Like a befuddled man I followed her, my hands fluttering crazily before me.

“You beast!” I kept muttering under my breath. “You beast.”

I found satisfaction in the word.

When I stood over her she looked up at me and critically studied my face.

“Stop making a fool of yourself,” she commanded in a level voice, “and save your caresses for those who want them. I don’t. They bore me.”

Angered by her indifference, I seized the scarf from the table and tossed it in her face.

“You get out of here!” I said. “Quick! Go!”

“How changeable you are,” she said, throwing her head back and showing her white teeth in an unpleasant smile.

With an effort I collected myself and grinned back at her, my hands gripping the edge of the table.

“And you?” I asked.

“I’m enjoying the situation hugely,” she replied. “Your actions are quite revealing. How surprised some people would be!”

Then, moved by an impulse to torment myself as well as this creature who was forever challenging me with her beauty, I deliberately recounted to her in detail, omitting Hilda’s name, however, the dream that had so distracted me. When I had finished I added, almost gloatingly, “You, too, would have been afraid.”

She rose slowly from the bed and confronted me. Her eyes had grown hard and two vivid spots were flaming in her dead white cheeks.

“Do you think I don’t know who she is?” she said, her voice coarse with anger. “This woman in your dream? She’s that poor, bloodless thing you’ve been mooning around with like a silly fool for the last few weeks. Why, she’s afraid of life – doesn’t even know what it is.” And she threw her shoulders back as though taunting me with her body.

“And you’re afraid of death,” I replied, “and so am I. Of the three she’s the bravest.”

Scarlet laughed unnaturally.

“But let’s see who’s the wisest,” she said and lounged across the room to the door, where she stopped and looked mockingly over her shoulder.

“By the way,” she added, “her husband has just returned. He’ll put an end to your dreams.”

X

Scarlet was wrong. John Elliott did not put an end to my dreams. A fortnight elapsed before I saw Hilda again, but during every night of our separation she came to me in the same intangible, yet realistic, form. And the dream was always the same. In the calm, unearthly half- light flooding the marshes, we met each night and reenacted the same unfinished drama. At dawn when I awoke, it was always with a poignant feeling of loss that I returned to face another day.

•   •   •   •   •

With each new day Scarlet would be there to greet me, to taunt me with her body, and to cast confusion across my mind. Her window opened on the grove. At certain times of the day she would lean on the ledge like an idol and quietly follow my movements as I wandered round the cottage or sat writing futile things at my table on the lawn. So aware was I of her presence I could tell without even glancing up that her eyes were on me. Sitting with my back toward her I imagined that I could feel them glowing behind me.

At other times I would come upon her lying silhouetted on the black divan. With sleepy hostility she would watch Hugh as he daubed at the canvas or stood squinting at it in heavy contemplation.

Sometimes I would stop to study her smooth white figure so gentle in its curves. I would wonder then about her beauty and the secret of her strength. Quite deliberately I would endeavor to analyze her out of my thoughts as I had tried to do with the dream; but in this I was no more successful. Scarlet existed and the dream existed. Scarlet was real and the dream was real. Both appealed to me, yet both repelled. I was unable to strike a happy balance with my environment.

And the more I thought of Scarlet the more I came to realize that if I wanted to remain at least intellectually honest I should have to admit my inability to judge whose influence governed me the more, hers or Hilda’s. Both were so utterly different; yet, in a way, both were subtly blended.

In spite of her apparent indifference I could sense that Scarlet was deeply interested in my conduct, more so than she had ever been before. There was something in her very quietness, some half concealed light in her eyes that made me think of a beautiful vulture lazily treading the air until the time was fitting to strike, to spiral swiftly down the sky and to smother her victim beneath the shadow of her wings. There were moments when I almost longed for the time to arrive. In my hazy scheme of things there was a joyous place for physical desire, but Scarlet’s attraction for me was not joyous. It was of an altogether different nature. In it there was something base and degrading, something tainted in my blood or else as old as the first dark love. I was interested in this. My curiosity was aroused by the prowling nature of my emotions. They made me feel as if I were plumbing the last degradation of the soul before it sprang to freedom. I pictured this place of freedom and there would pass before my eyes a valley dancing with sunlight in which dwelt people who had been bruised and spotted by their contacts with life, people who had stumbled and hurt themselves, but who now knew hurt no longer. Through shameful things they had suffered their way to laughter and had learned to know its worth. I longed to be among these people and to join them there in the sunlit valley. I longed to be a rational creature again and to seek sanity in laughter, but the situation controlled me. I was able neither to meet it nor to escape it.

Scarlet was watching me and Hugh was watching Scarlet, watching her in a way that was unlike him. It was almost as if he were trying to study her moods to reach for me. Powerless to change the situation, I realized nevertheless that my attitude of growing detachment was sorely perplexing this essentially human old creature. I was beginning to learn how poignantly one could abominate oneself. However, he made no effort to encroach upon my thoughts, but let me go freely about my business as he effaced himself in his paint.

“Going out?” he would grunt, peering at his canvas with gloomy concentration.

“Going out,” I would answer as I left the room with a feeling of guilt and reluctance.

Once when I was writing Scarlet came to me across the lawn and placed her hand on my arm.

“The old ogre has let me off,” she said. “Stroll with me while I stretch.”

I rose from the table and walked with her down the grove. Slowly and without purpose we moved beneath the trees. And as we walked she leaned against me as though she needed support. Her head was close to mine and her hair, a nest of fragrant coils, seemed to twine itself round my senses.

“What has come over you, David?” she asked presently. “You’ve been so different lately. Does that silly dream still trouble you?”

“I’m troubled by many dreams,” I answered evasively. “You see I’m one of those unfortunate people whose lives are made wretched by dreams – they come to nothing.”

“How can you say that,” she replied, “when you’ve never dreamed of me?”

“What makes you so sure?” I asked.

“Why, David, you don’t even talk to me any more,” she said. “You used to fight with me and call me a beast. That was something.”

“Do you like being called a beast?”

“It doesn’t upset me,” she replied. “I’m rather fond of being a beast. You’re a bit of a beast yourself, David.”

“You’re right,” I said, “but I don’t glory in it.”

“That’s why you’re troubled by dreams. They never trouble me. I learned my lesson years ago. When people are dying around you of fever and boredom and drink, being a beast is all that’s left. It’s pleasant then – gratifying.”

“You learned your lesson well,” I remarked. “In a way I envy you. You’re not a hypocrite and I am.”

“That’s because you haven’t learned your lesson at all,” she answered. “You’re merely a beast that tries to dream.”

Stung by the truth of her remarks, I withdrew my arm from her and returned to the table. I hated and yet admired her for her insight. She was right. I was merely a beast that tried to dream, a beast possessed by a dream and fearful of it.

She followed me to the table and picked up a piece of paper on which I had been writing. In a voice filled with exaggerated emotion she read:

“To me you are as one a god once made

Before the garden of the world grew old,

Who, seeing you so fair and unafraid,

Felt less a god, inscrutable and cold,

And more a man. The fretted ages passed”

I snatched the paper from her and tore it to bits, thoroughly ashamed of the wretched lines she had made obnoxious to my ears. She looked at me and laughed sarcastically, then her expression changed.

“Who was that for?” she asked.

“For you,” I replied. “Couldn’t you recognize yourself?”

“That’s a lie,” she said sharply.

“I intended it to be,” I answered.

At this moment Hugh appeared in the doorway of the cottage and made frantic motions at Scarlet.

“I didn’t tell you to stay forever,” he shouted. “Come back here at once and lie down. Drive her in, David.”

Scarlet picked up the pieces of torn paper from the table and sprinkled them over me.

“Take them to her,” she said as she turned away.

A few minutes later Mrs. Tylor placed a cup of coffee before me, her solicitude actuated no doubt by the fact that I had been arguing with Scarlet.

“Take this, young man,” she said. “You didn’t eat speck for breakfast.”

Mechanically I sipped the coffee.

•   •   •   •   •

The more I attempted to analyze the dream out of existence, the more real and significant it became to me. The fantastic allegory of it took possession of my imagination, its symbolism became clear and logical, its outcome inevitable – inevitable save for the tormenting knowledge that it was expected of me to make an appalling decision. For the first time in my life I realized how strongly tied to the earth I was in spite of all my complacent and carefully constructed idealism. In the encouraging light of day it was easy enough for me to deceive myself, but at night when the dream came, I was forced to observe in all its nakedness that shivering thing I had always so fondly believed to be my soul. It was a cowering object and an unpleasant one. As I watched it struggle to return to the warmth and comfort of my body, I realized that the stark reality of a dream had the power to destroy in a single night the well-padded hypocrisies of a lifetime. I saw myself then as I really was and as I had always been – an earth-bound slave, secretly rejoicing in the chains he so valiantly rattled when he thought the world was watching.

Even this unavoidable knowledge of my inherent weakness failed to discourage me from hoping that I could still arrive at some safe compromise whereby I could gain Hilda without losing the world. Although I knew that she would be waiting for me at night on the edge of the marshes and that there she would plead with me to follow her to the island, I felt that a chance remained to persuade her to return with me to the comforting security of solid soil. However, if I failed in my purpose and she succeeded in hers, I was convinced that two lives, like two pale stars at daybreak, would be quietly snuffed out. The stars would return on the following night to drift above the marshes, but we should no longer be present to see their yellow reflections splash and tremble in the waterways. We should be gone – absorbed, perhaps, into that sad, still radiance resting upon the island.

•   •   •   •   •

During the first days of the dream my mind must have been in an abnormal condition of excitement, and I doubt if any of my thoughts or the conclusions I drew from them were wholly sound. Only the dream seemed real to me, only at night did I really live. My waking hours were devoted to thoughts of another world. Life passed me by like an old friend I had once loved well and was now reluctantly losing. I pondered ceaselessly upon the fate that lay in wait for us if I should yield to Hilda’s pleading and traverse the short space now separating us from the island. Against the possibility of sharing a future life with her, I weighed the chances of losing her altogether in one of the blind alleys of the dead, a place in which we should be changed to unremembering things forever voicelessly seeking even deeper forgetfulness. Although in life I could never hope to keep her with me, I could at least retain her memory, see her at times, perhaps, and hear the sound of her voice, beyond life I had neither the courage nor the conviction to venture. Hilda had. Her faith was greater than mine, her need more urgent, and her motives of a finer quality. I realized this with a pang of remorse when I considered how selfishly I had denied her the release her spirit was seeking. Repeatedly during the course of the day I resolved to follow her to the island if the dream should return to me, but when night came, my courage invariably failed and I would leave her, standing alone and abandoned on the marshes. Throughout the following day her eyes would haunt me, the silent reproach in them clutching at my heart, holding it still with pity.

The memory of her eyes gave me courage to move with her each night closer and closer to the tree-shaded lawn of the island. On the last night before I saw her in real life we approached very close to its edge. Scarcely a hundred yards of reeds separated us from a little sandy cove stretching out fanwise between an avenue of dark bushes. A necklace of glinting water lay around the island. From this point on, the way would be fraught with peril. The tall trees yielded noiselessly to a noiseless wind which brought across to me the fragrance of hidden flowers, a fragrance far sweeter than any that had ever escaped from earthly petals.

“We’re almost there,” Hilda said, in a voice I could hardly recognize. “Don’t leave me now, David.” Her eyes fought to claim mine, and as I fled back over the marshes I could feel her gazing after me with a look that I dared not meet.

When I awoke, a faint scent of flowers lingered in the air. Lighter and purer than the breath of dawn this other- world fragrance floated through the room. With a sensation of uneasiness and suffocation I left my bed and sought the window. A breeze, edged with the smell of salt, came in from the sea. The sky, as though reflecting my uneasiness, was choked with heavy clouds. There was a feeling of storm in the air.

•   •   •   •   •

It was useless for me to tell myself that my imagination was playing tricks with my reason. I knew this, but the knowledge was of no help to me. I could neither shake off, nor reason away, the profound impression made on me by the frequent occurrence of the nightly drama. I felt that it bore some relation to me far more significant than the usual interpretation placed on such things. And now as I leaned out of the window into the face of a gray dawn, I definitely and finally accepted it, not as a manifestation of overwrought nerves, but as an actual part of my life, a thing as real and tangible as the bed on which I lay when Hilda and the marshes came to me at night.

My thoughts turned back to the city now so vague in outline. In the light of what had been happening to me since I left New York, I was able to gain a clearer understanding of the mental and physical reactions I had experienced while treading its pavements. It was plain to me now that my controlling motives had always been physical, glossed over with a superficial veneer of spiritual repression. Although my impulses had been neither morbid nor abnormal, as I understood such things, they had been in such constant conflict that I had lived in an emotional straight-jacket. I had disliked the women I had met, not so much because I had felt myself to be their moral superior, but because they represented to me something I urgently wanted and at the same time was unwilling to take. The spirit of the direct and dominating male was not in me. Confused thinking had made me self-deceitful and roundabout. Although I had never yielded to the physical attraction of women, I had carried round with me the uneasy suspicion that I was merely waiting for a situation to arise in which circumstances would justify the letting down of the bars, in which, rather, the bars would be conveniently let down for me by rosy fingers. Secretly I had comforted myself with the knowledge that I was still young and that there was ample time ahead of me for an emotionally eventful life. When I had met Scarlet I had immediately raised a defensive barrier between us because I felt myself in the presence of a dangerous and destructive influence. In her eyes I had seen promiscuously revealed the same desire I had always tried so carefully to withhold from mine. She had penetrated at a glance the passion-hungry recesses of my heart and had found me out to be a creature very much like herself. And because I had felt that her intuition had given her power over me, my hostility to her had increased.

With Hilda Elliott it had been different. When I had first seen her from the water something from deep within me had gone out to her, something indefinable yet stimulating. It was as if she had awakened in me a love of beauty detached from the destructive desire to possess it. With her I glimpsed the possibilities of a more abundant life and gained a vague conception of what lay in store for man, once he had blazed a trail through the tangled jungle of his soul. With other women it had been different. They had always obscured the issue. Their eyes had been veiled and promising, disillusioned, hard and restless; but within Hilda Elliott there dwelt a divine spark of sanity which gave her the ability to see life as it was, to know herself as she was, and yet to keep on honest terms with both.

And now, in the dream it seemed that she wanted me to abandon life without my ever having lived it. In exchange she offered me what? I knew not, and a wave of rebellion mounted in me. How strange it was that I should be involved in such a situation, that I should have withdrawn so far from the world of which I was once a part. Again the familiar streets of the city stretched out before me. They were thronged with a thousand women and bright with flashing eyes. I held out my arms toward the women, and, there, at the edge of the grove, I saw in fancy, Hilda Elliott walking among the trees. Her step was light and unconsidered, and the joy of life radiated about her. She paused for a moment to gaze up at me and I dwelt on the features of her upturned face, the delicate line curving down from her ear to her chin, the small, straight nose, sensitive and fine, her sunburned cheeks with their aggressive cheek bones and the small head ridiculously burdened by a mass of burnished hair. As she stood there so slim, and alive, life itself seemed a small price to pay for her friendship.

I left the window and hurriedly began to dress.

“I must see her,” I kept repeating to myself. “I must see her today!”

•   •   •   •   •

At breakfast I had the impression that Scarlet was furtively watching me as though she knew some conflict was taking place in my mind. As I caught a glimpse of her black eyes, the disturbing knowledge came to me that, instead of increasing my desire to avoid her, my mental condition had made her the more desirable to me. Of late I had grown to regard her as being the embodiment of life, standing for the world and much that was acceptable in it. Her physical presence brought comfort to my fear, giving it an earthly and immediately possible means of escape to which I could secretly cling. Against this growing attraction I endeavored to fortify myself by thinking of Hilda, for I understood only too well that my change of heart sprang from a source no higher than a blind, animal instinct of self- preservation.

Even Hugh MacKellar seemed to be more than usually disturbed this morning. From time to time I caught him studying my face with his wise old eyes, and finally he departed so far from his rule of polite unobservance of the movements of those around him, as to inquire how I had been and what, in a general way, I had been doing with my time. When breakfast was over he made the unexpected announcement that inasmuch as he had practically completed work on his canvas he proposed to declare a holiday. It was his pleasure that I should lead him forthwith into the beauties of nature which, he understood, I had conscientiously explored. Paint, of course, was superior, but then he was always willing to take a look at nature in order to gloat over its failure to equal art.

When he had left the room in search of his hat and stick, Scarlet called to me from the divan.

“David,” she said, “would you mind bringing my robe from that chair?”

As I tossed the flimsy thing across her my hand touched the soft flesh of her neck. I thrilled suddenly and let it remain there. At the moment I was powerless to do otherwise. She made no movement, but looked at me indifferently between her narrow lids, a faint smile touching her lips.

“Do you want something, David?” she asked.

“No,” I muttered, looking away. “What could I want of you?”

“Life,” she answered, gazing up at me challengingly out of her shadowy eyes.

My hand slipped over her shoulder and rested beneath the folds of her robe.

“Do you think you could give me life?” I asked.

“If you’re not afraid, why don’t you kiss me and find out for yourself.”

I drew close to her lips and hovered over them, conflicting impulses racing through me. Her smooth lids quivered slightly and her lips from which the smile had fled remained a little parted. Here then was the way out – forgetfulness. As I hesitated a lifetime of memories passed before my eyes.

“David,” she whispered. “Your hand. It’s hurting me.”

At the sound of her voice I started as though emerging from a reverie.

“My hand,” I replied. “Oh, yes.” And with a feeling of lightness in my head, I turned from her and walked to the door.

“You’d make a perfect lover,” she called, “if you could learn to want only one thing at a time.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I wish I could take your advice.”

“Why not?” she asked. “Are you disturbed by a dream?”

“Yes,” I answered, turning to her almost helplessly. “You were wrong about John Elliot. He did not end my dreams.”

“But I can,” she laughed, “and give you sweeter ones instead.”

Tempted by the truth that lay behind her words, I studied her face hopefully, desperately.

“I believe you could,” I said in a low voice. “You could give me new dreams, Scarlet, and in them I’d be able to lose myself.”

“Perhaps you might even find yourself,” she reminded, raising herself on one elbow, “and know what you’re really like.”

“I know,” I replied. “Don’t you see? That’s what I want to forget.”

“Then let me help you forget,” she said, falling back among the pillows and stretching herself luxuriously. I moved toward her, but the sound of Hugh’s stick warned me of his approach. As he entered the room he looked sharply from Scarlet to me, then his eyes returned to Scarlet.

“Get up,” he commanded, “and put on your things. You’re not posing now. Why can’t you leave this boy alone? You’d do well to have nothing to do with her, David. Let’s get out of this.”

Scarlet smiled sardonically upon us. One bare arm dropped over the side of the divan. Her little nails beat a devil’s tattoo on the floor.

“Pigs!” she said, amicably.

•   •   •   •   •

In silence we walked through the grove, until we had come to the beach, where we stood gazing out at the cheerless ocean. The slow rise and fall of its putty- gray waves kept time with the thoughts in my mind. MacKellar seemed disinclined to talk, but a particularly enterprising wave dashing up at our feet aroused him from his preoccupation, and he said abruptly: “Well, David, it’s nearly finished. I’ve an idea you don’t like it much.”

“It’s splendid, Hugh, but I’m a little afraid of it. It’s cruel, if you understand what I mean… the earthly beauty of the thing.”

“But it’s true,” said MacKellar, simply.

“That’s just the trouble. It’s too true. People shouldn’t be like that.”

“Nothing in art can be too true, David. That’s its only reason for life. Ideas grow stale and theories wear out, but art is. If it’s good art it’s always true, and never old – anyway, people are like that.”

“Are you?”

He paused to consider this highly personalized question.

“Fundamentally, yes,” he replied, “and I would have been more so if I hadn’t been smeared with paint all my life. She – for I imagine you’re thinking of Scarlet as much as you are of my painting – has nothing else to do. It is her life. I understand it to some extent, for I’ve been an artist, David. I’ve worshiped beauty and I’ve loved it. Some of it too well. But, then, I’ve created it also!”

“And which do you remember with greater warmth, the beauty you loved too well or the beauty you created?”

“There was a woman once. She died before I had finished her picture.”

“And before—”

“Exactly – before I had tried to limit her through possession. To this day she remains a true creation to me, and yet a trifle blurred. Like something wonderful ahead. You’re right, David. I see what you’re pinning me down to – your Socratic method works.”

After stuffing some tobacco in his pipe, he continued meditatively: “It’s true enough. Passion is a rather petty outlet for the creative potentialities of man. With woman it’s different. She does something with it. Uses it, lives with it, and carries her creation around with her beneath her heart. She carries it with anguish, but also with the joy of the creator. Woman fashions a spark into a life and gives it her breath to breathe. True enough she does not always consciously strive to become a creator – often it’s luck, bad luck, some consider it – but the fact is materially the same. A woman is born with the ability to create. She may not consider it the highest form of creation, or the most desirable. She may even turn from it and become an over-emotionalized yearn, a super-sexed voluptuary, or the peer of man in any field of endeavor, but whatever she does, she’s born with a head start. Men stumble along in an aimless sort of a way and women quite naturally play blind man’s buff with their passions. It’s a thing to do – a good thing, for all I know.”

After numerous abortive attempts at lighting his pipe he went on, “There’s something after all in the saying that all men are children. In a sense it’s so. We make a very serious nursery game of our desires, but seldom do we take them beyond the nursery walls. Up to the present, with a few outstanding exceptions, man has succeeded in confining a great constructive force to the narrowest of a thousand splendid outlets. We have to think more, David, and live longer… a great deal longer. Someday…”

“Hugh,” I interrupted, “it’s consuming me, and it’s no good. I don’t like it. It’s like an interrupting hand held across my eyes. I want to see something, read a little deeper, and, damn it, the hand is there!”

“I understand. It’s the old struggle. Your eyes have been touched by unearthly vistas. Your spirit fired by an ideal. You want to rise like a free thing and take to the air, but desire has clipped your wings. I’ve had my dreams, David, and in my time I’ve tried to fly, but I’ve always come a cropper. Now I’m too old to worry much. I dare say you prefer a woman like Hilda Elliott.”

Once more I felt that his eyes were quietly studying my face.

“Perhaps,” I replied in a low voice, “but I’m afraid of her, too… she seems so decent. I feel rather low in her presence.”

“I saw her the other day,” he remarked casually. “She’s not been well. It seems to me that a shadow has settled on her face. She spoke of you.”

“What did she say?”

“Oh, she merely wanted to know what you’d been doing, how you looked, and if you ever said anything about her. She hasn’t been out of the house since Elliott returned.”

“Yes, I know.… I’ve spent many a long hour waiting outside his gates.”

“Then, if I were in your place,” he said, giving me a keen glance, “I’d try going inside for a change.”

“I wouldn’t like to add to her trouble. She has enough as it is, I imagine.”

“That’s true, David, but now she is really ill. There’s something happening to her. I can’t make out what it is, but she’s changing, gradually withdrawing from her old interests – not so much losing hold as putting things aside. Before he returned it seemed to me that she had found an unexpected source of happiness in life. She was eager and interested in things, but all that’s gone now.”

“How did you happen to see her?”

“Why, I’m fond of her, David. I’m an old man, you see, and a painter. He likes to patronize artists. It seems to please a brutal sort of culture he professes, I told you once that he was mad, I think. He’s more than mad. In fact he strikes me as being a terrifically controlled demon – controlled, I mean, so far as his relations with the outer world are concerned.”

“And she spoke of me, you say?”

“Yes, in a rather indifferent way, when he wasn’t present. You used to see her occasionally, didn’t you?”

He regarded me with a particularly irritating air of indifference.

“What a hellish hypocrite you are,” I said. “This walk’s ended so far as I’m concerned.”

“You’re going in the right direction,” he called after me.

•   •   •   •   •

On a fallen tree opposite John Elliott’s gateway, I seated myself and gazed up the avenue of trees twisting to his house, parts of which were revealed among the foliage. Day after day for the past two weeks I had been going through this same procedure without once having been rewarded with a glimpse of Hilda. Today I decided that I should wait only a short time. If she did not come to me within half an hour I should go to her.

Then, like an answering thought, she was with me. I must have turned to study the ocean and the glowering sky above it, for I failed to notice her approach. There was a light step behind me and two hands were rested on my shoulders. I turned and seized both of her hands and closely scanned her face. As MacKellar had said, a shadow seemed to have settled on it. I was startled by what I saw. The tan had left her cheeks and her eyes had grown larger and deeper – there was a haunted look in them. Her firm chin was pointed and her face thinner. Under her heavy mass of hair she seemed to have become strangely spiritualized, as though she had been subjected to a process of refinement through pain.

“Smile for me, David,” she said hurriedly. “Laugh if you can! This minute! Oh, where has all the laughter gone?”

Her eyes grew moist and a single tear dropped to her cheek. She turned away. I had never seen her so moved or so human. The unexpectedness of her emotion made me mute. I clung to her hands, but she forcibly withdrew them, looking behind her as she did so.

“I haven’t smiled in so long,” she continued with a note of apology, “or heard a laugh. Remember the stories you told me the day I fished you out of the sea? They were about small white clouds, submarine grottoes, lost valleys, and lots of other nonsense. Remember?”

I nodded my head.

“I miss all that now,” she went on, drawing the back of her hand across her eyes. “You see, I’ve been ill and I must hurry or he’ll be here. He’s going to take me sailing. Insists on it. He’s been drinking all morning, and, David, I felt like joining him. I hate to watch. Now he’s a little gone. You wouldn’t notice it, but I do. He knows nothing about the water, and he hates sailing.”

“Don’t go,” I pleaded. “Let me take—”

“What! Are you, too, offering to take me out of it all?”

I remained miserably silent.

“Don’t mind,” she said. “I didn’t mean it. I understand, but I must hurry. Yes, yes, I must hurry. There’s so much I want to say.”

And again she glanced nervously over her shoulder.

“What’s happened to you?” I demanded.

“Do you notice something, then?” she asked. “Oh, yes, I know. You’ll tell me I’m sick, but I’m all right, perfectly well. You’re a little pale yourself, David. Have you been sleeping? I’ve seen you sitting here every day from the tower window, so I knew you hadn’t forgotten me, but I couldn’t come down. It would have attracted attention. But just the same I was a little afraid you’d turn to a knot on this log.”

“I’d hardly forgotten you,” I said. “In fact you’ve more in my mind during the last two weeks than before.”

“That’s a good friend. I thought you’d be anxious, I couldn’t do anything about it. Something’s been happening to me. There’s some sort of trouble here,” and she held a hand to her breast. “I go away somehow. Every morning before dawn I seem to drop out of things and when I awake, my maid, poor wretch, is frantically trying to drag me back to life. I’ve a numb feeling and that’s all.”

“And you remember nothing?”

“No, there’s only a feeling of loss, as if I’d been struggling fearfully somewhere and failed. It’s depressing, David. But what about yourself? What’s this I hear about a dream? You know my husband sees Scarlet often and she’s told him about a dream. Why don’t you tell it to me?”

When I had given her a brief, and not altogether accurate summary of the dream, she looked at me with bright eyes.

“Isn’t it funny, David,” she said, “me fainting and you dreaming. It’s strange. Doesn’t seem rational, does it? Do you believe there’s anything in it?”

“Certainly not,” I replied, with forced assurance. “We’re both overwrought, that’s all.”

“Is that all?” she asked, with a note of disappointment. “There might be something in it.”

“You must get well,” I replied, trying to change the subject. “You’re worrying me. I can’t bear to see you like this.”

“Then you’d be sorry if the dream came true—?”

I laughed in order to cover my uneasiness.

“You’re becoming morbid.”

“I’m almost at the end of my rope. Your – our friendship has meant so much, David.”

She stopped. John Elliott was coming towards us through the trees. The moment my eyes rested on him, I understood why as a girl Hilda had found him attractive. He was magnificent in a glowering, statuesque way. Beneath his gray tweed suit, his tall, powerfully knit frame seemed to long for action. His face was extremely dark and rugged, of a kindly, uneasy aspect and heightened in its youthfulness by the gray hair at his temples. He was at least fifteen years the senior of his wife and gave the impression of being even older. There was a certain fascination about him, a spirit of reckless nonchalance. One felt immediately that one was in the presence of a personality, a rather dubious and sinister personality, but nevertheless an interesting one. What struck me most about him was his eyes. They smoldered in his head. In them I detected a sort of subtle craftiness with which I imagined it would be difficult to deal. MacKellar had said he was a trifle mad. It seemed quite possible. Altogether he was a picturesque and perplexing character.

A servant, bearing a basket from which protruded the necks of several bottles, was following him.

“This is my husband,” said Hilda, then, turning to Elliott, she added, “You have heard me speak of David Landor.”

Although he spoke in an unexpectedly soft and friendly voice his eyes blazed insanely into mine as though he were facing an antagonist.

“So this is the young man who writes poetry and goes sailing with my wife,” he said, dropping a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Well, Mr. Landor, I hope your selection of words is as good as your choice of women.”

This speech, made almost affectionately, had all the elements of a warning.

“I’m afraid my selection of words could never do credit to my admiration for your – for Mrs. Elliott,” I replied.

A smile momentarily touched the corners of his lips and the grip of his hand tightened on my shoulder.

“I suspect you’re quick enough in spite of your highly commendable modesty,” he remarked.

Hilda stood in the roadway regarding the carving on the granite post with an expression of distaste; and Elliott, as if divining her thoughts, asked me abruptly:

“What do you think of that, Mr. Landor? You’re a sort of an artist. What’s your honest opinion?”

“It seems appropriate,” I replied.

Hilda looked at me anxiously, then leveled her eyes on the sea.

“Appropriate,” said Elliott, thoughtfully regarding the granite hand squeezing the deer in its grasp. “I dare say you’re right. That’s what I call an honest opinion – almost a personal one.”

I smiled at him cheerfully and turned to Hilda.

“Don’t be surprised,” I said, “if you run into me out there. I’m going to take a swim.”

“But there’s going to be a storm,” she protested.

“Then let it break,” laughed Elliott.

He motioned to the servant and with a nod to me he began to descend the stairs to his private pier.

“Goodbye, Mr. Landor,” he called back. “We’ll see each other later. I want to—”

He stumbled and slid down a few steps, and the end of his sentence was lost in an oath.

Hilda held out her hand to me.

“Be careful, David. It’s no day for one of your foolhardy expeditions.”

“It’s no day for you to go sailing.”

“It’s better that I should.”

“Then I’ll be closer to you in the water.”

She reached out and timidly touched my cheek with the tips of her fingers.

“Goodbye,” she said. “I’ll keep a watch for you on the sea.”

“Come, Hilda!” cried Elliott from below. “Damn it, the boat’s ready.”

She hurried to the steps without pausing to look back, for Elliott in his impatience was coming up to find out what had been detaining his wife.

XI

Low, oily waves were grossly mugging the beach as the sloop tacked out from shore. A moist breeze veered unsteadily from the cliffs to the sea. The floor of the ocean was carpeted with squalls. Storm clouds puffed out their ashen cheeks all along the horizon, but as yet the sea was comparatively calm. It was waiting lethargically for the fist of the wind.

I watched the boat beat its way with unreefed sails slowly and delicately across the swells, then I hurried to the cottage. By the time I had returned to the beach the small craft was hardly half way to the nearest island. In the strengthening, but still uncertain wind it was having a difficult time keeping its head pointed seaward, gaining only a dozen or so yards on each short-legged tack. Hilda, I felt sure, could have driven the sloop better, and I decided that John Elliott’s unsteady hand was at the tiller. I tried to figure out the general drift of his mad intentions – whether he meant to take the boat out to open water or to foot it among the islands.

Either course would be dangerous. If the storm should break now it would be practically impossible for them to beat back to the shore. The coast was sown with jagged rocks and lined with cliffs, and even the occasional beaches flaring out from them would be too deeply smothered beneath the surf to afford a safe landing. The little pier, which had already been partly carried away by the summer storms, was good only for fair weather sailing. The open sea was less dangerous than the shore, but here, too, the chances were all against the sloop. A single slap of the wind would be enough to unmast it.

As I gazed at the sail bobbing among the waves I heartily wished myself aboard, for there at least I would be able to know what was taking place. Here I was merely an impotent spectator, unable either to share or avert the peril of one whose safety meant a great deal more to me than my own. Hilda had said that she would keep a watch for me on the sea, and with this thought in mind I pitched myself into the waves and made for the nearest island.

An ebbing tide added impetus to my stroke, enabling me to make fair headway against the steadily rising waves. The beach was soon left behind and I was now fully committed to the unpleasant prospect of a long swim in the face of an approaching storm.

The water was surprisingly warm. There was a stimulating clutch to it which made me feel able to deal with whatever might lie ahead. From time to time I caught a glimpse of the sloop scudding across my path about a quarter of a mile away, and I wondered if Hilda’s eyes were searching the waves for a sight of me.

Apparently, Elliott was inclined to keep the boat near shore, contenting himself with sailing aimlessly within the barrier of the islands. This course would give me a chance to cut across his path, but the peril lay in the fact that when the storm did break, the boat would be in danger of being dashed against one of the low, running reefs lying in wait for it just below the surface of the water. This expedition of Elliott’s was merely a drunken whim. The moment anything happened he would be unfit for effective service. Hilda had once told me that although he had lived most of his life on the coast he had but seldom gone sailing. It was an occupation that bored him tremendously and for this reason it was one to which, of recent years, she had devoted most of her time. The sloop had given her an opportunity to be alone, affording her a breathing space in which she had striven to reconstruct from the broken illusions round her a fairly tenable niche in reality.

As I shouldered my way toward the island I reconsidered the conversation that had just passed between us. To me there was a meaning in her sinking spells at dawn a great deal deeper than mere coincidence. In some way her illness was related to the dream. It was a clear case of cause and effect in which both of us were involved. As she herself had said, it did not seem rational; yet, nevertheless, it was true. I knew that it was true and wished that it might have been otherwise. She had caught the significance of the dream immediately and with a thrill of eagerness. I had seen it in her eyes and noted it in her voice. Her words came back to me – “David, I’m almost at the end of my rope.” Why? To what torture had this hulking devil been subjecting her? Even now he was risking her life merely because it appealed to a drunken mood.

Rain drops began to splatter about me, and the island which a moment ago had been plainly visible was now obscured by a sudden lurch of the sea and a blanketing downpour of rain. I treaded water and looked for the sailboat. It had vanished utterly from sight. Even had it been within forty yards of me I should have been unable to see it because of the high seas intervening.

Then came the storm like a swift, sure-footed beast and struck the last gleam of light from the sky. I found myself in a dead, gray world of rain and lashing waves, and through it all came the high-pitched voice of the wind and the clamorous churning of water. I was spun helplessly about, and two waves, passing over my head, left me strangling and half blind. The shore was blotted from view and only a deep, bull-throated roaring at my back told me that the surf was once more laying siege to the cliffs.

The unordered bitterness of the first stages of the storm did more to maintain my presence of mind than any deliberate process of reason. The wind seemed to challenge something in me fundamentally antagonistic to its vast chaotic bluster, its overzealous enterprise. Even in the midst of its fury I remembered that I also disliked the prelude to William Tell. The storm, though brutally real, was just a trifle stagy. I felt myself to be in the grip of a great, stupid, unconsidering animal clumsily striking at my existence. Against such a creature, I decided, it would be best to fight with the weapon of non-resistance. To me the storm assumed the aspect of a contest – a short-lived one at best, for I realized that there remained in me no more than a few minutes of energy. If I failed to reach the island within a short time the issue would be clearly decided. I should go down defeated into the untroubled waters lying beneath the tumult of the waves. As the situation stood, however, I had no desire for such an end.

If the sloop had not gone over, I knew that it would be somewhere near, and, also, that it would be dangerously close to the island. Hilda would not abandon me until she had exhausted every possibility of picking me up. She would forego her own chances of escape first, no matter how slim they might be. With the caution of a man feeling his way through a dark and unfamiliar room I felt my way among the waves. Although the wind maintained its velocity the rain had appreciably thinned and I was now able to see before me.

Already I was beginning to experience the first sensations of exhaustion. There was a burning feeling in the pit of my stomach, and my breath came with increasing difficulty. After every few strokes I raised my head from the water in the hope of catching a glimpse of the boat, but always a mounting wave cut short my vision. A feeling of growing helplessness added weight to my arms and legs. My strokes were becoming more feeble and undirected. I was no longer striving to reach the island, but merely to keep my head above water. This unconscious abandonment was the beginning of the end. Finally, after a short and futile effort to make headway against the seas I was forced to abandon all attempts at swimming in order to conserve my strength. As each wave drove over me I yielded to its rush and made no effort to resist. In this way I was able to regain a shred of the energy that had been driven from my body.

A wall of water bore down on me, and climbing with all my might to its summit I looked for the sloop. I had just sufficient time to see it racing along parallel to the island before I was plunged down again into a valley of blinding spray. An unsatisfactory feeling of relief filled my heart. I had seen Hilda and lost her, and in losing her I had in all probability lost myself. Here I was, sanely going down to a sharp and suffocating oblivion within a few hundred yards of the woman I loved without her even knowing that I was near, that I had seen her, and that my last earthly thoughts were centered on her safety.

In that short glimpse of the boat I had noticed its jib streaming futilely from the bow. The scene was graphically etched on my memory – Hilda braced in the stern with the tiller hugged to her breast, Elliott’s figure leaning over her in what struck me as an attitude of anger, the little boat with its helpless jib pitching miraculously along through the waves, and as a background, the foam crested summit of the island.

As I mounted with a straining heart to the back of the next wave I threw up one arm and spent my lungs in a long cry across the water. The breath was driven back in my teeth but my gesture had been seen, for almost immediately the boat came about and bore down in my direction. True to her word Hilda had kept a watch for me on the sea. Just before the wave melted I had time to see her raise her hand above her head and Elliott lurch crazily backward as though he had been violently pushed. With this bit of arrested action in my eyes I went down once more into a gulch of water.

To add to my difficulties I became entangled in a floating island of seaweed, and by the time I had succeeded in extricating myself from its coils the waves had nearly done for me. An eternity seemed to have elapsed since I had last seen the boat, and I began to fear some misfortune had overtaken it. When I had seen it I had gained the impression that John Elliott had not been at all favorably disposed to change his course. I now had a mental vision of his fighting with Hilda for the control of the tiller.

Then in the midst of these dreary speculations, I saw the sloop cut through the waves about fifty yards distant and a hundred feet off my position. With the last measure of strength remaining in me I struggled to place myself in its path. Hilda brought the boat’s head as close up in the wind as it would sail and as the sloop plunged by she deftly cast the sheet rope around me. At the same moment Elliott hurled a bottle, and I felt the thing whiz past my head. As the sloop luffed perilously in the wind I pulled myself through the water to the leeward side. Elliott leaned down to me and seized my hand.

“Be careful,” called Hilda in a warning voice.

Elliott looked back with a dark face.

“Damn you, keep quiet!” he yelled.

Instead of helping me he seemed to be trying to hamper my efforts to climb aboard, but as the boat wallowed over in the opposite direction, he was tossed back, and the dead weight of his falling body did much to aid me in scrambling over the side. I fell on top of him and found myself looking down into his blood-shot eyes. Tired as I was I could hardly resist the temptation to strike the sneering smile from his mouth. For a brief space we gazed hatefully at each other, then I staggered back to Hilda, who had already put the boat under way.

“That bottle was meant for you,” she said in a low voice. “Be careful. He’s in one of his most playful moods.”

“This is the second time you’ve given me my life,” I replied.

“Would you be willing to return the compliment?” she asked, without turning her head from the sea.

I looked away without replying, for there was nothing that I could say. Elliott rose to his knees and began to fumble about the bottom of the boat. When at last he succeeded in finding a bottle he cast himself down on a transom and began the serious business of uncorking his prize.

“I was committing the dead men to the deep, Mr. Landor,” he called to me in a thick, apologetic voice, “but that last devil had more life in him than I supposed. I’m afraid I almost struck you. Nothing, of course, could have been further from my mind.”

With a final tug he drew the cork, and was about to raise the bottle to his lips when Hilda spoke directly to him.

“Pass that bottle down here,” she said. “This man needs a drink.”

Elliott regarded her with fuddled amazement, then handed me the bottle with elaborate politeness.

“The lioness fights for her cub,” he said. “Drink hearty, my boy; there’s body and blood in that wine. Look at me!”

The resounding thump he administered to himself was sufficient to send him sprawling once more to the bottom of the boat, where he remained half covered with water.

“Take the boat and save her if you can,” said Hilda, slipping out of her place and motioning me to take the tiller, “but if not, beach her and we’ll risk the surf. I’m tired, David.”

“The bottle first, Mr. Landor,” called Elliott, reaching out his hand.

Hilda passed him the bottle and I braced myself in her place with the tiller caught against my arm. Already I had a course of action in mind. MacKellar’s rough map of the sea coast flashed vividly before me. On the other side of the point of land extended a natural breakwater which enclosed the marshes and a still lagoon. Before I could reach this, however, I should be forced to take the sloop at least a mile out to sea until I had succeeded in finding an opening in a reef knifing along for several miles from one of the outer islands. Once through the reef we should have nothing to face save the natural hazards of the storm, until we came to the small opening in the breakwater. Whether the boat could point up sufficiently in the wind to head into this refuge remained to be seen. It was a desperate chance, but a feasible one, and it appealed to me as being a splendid way to outwit the egotistical carelessness of the storm.

After running several hundred yards past the island until I had cleared its reef, I brought the boat about and headed it out to sea, thus definitely putting my plan to the test.

It was a heart-breaking decision to sail away from the shore to which we stood so close, but I realized that in spite of its nearness and its familiar, home-like appearance, the shore was one of our greatest perils. For a lingering moment I gazed back at its fading outline, and Hilda followed my eyes.

“I’m going to try the reef,” I told her.

“The opening’s about half-way out,” she said. “Maybe you’ll be able to find it by the change in the water. We’ve done it before.”

I made no reply, but from time to time I lifted my eyes from the sea to study her face. Her hair had come down and was plastered in a damp mat round her cheeks and neck. Her face was pale and drawn, and her thin, white dress, drenched by the rain and the sea, clung tightly to the lines of her body, giving her the appearance of a beautiful draped statue whose eyes had come to life.

“Stick to it,” she said. “I’ll be all right,” and she began to bail the boat, while Elliott, without making any effort to lend a hand, watched her through half closed eyes.

When we reached the outer island, the force of the wind was so great that it felt as if it would tear the little boat from the surface of the sea. The shrieking in the rigging was unnerving to hear. At every onset I expected to see the delicate mast go by the board. The windward stays were as taut as bow strings, but they held fast. I shall never forget the strange scene as it struck me at that moment; the gray, wind-lashed sea on all sides and the waves herding in against us like buffaloes stampeding; John Elliott, unheeding and indolent, partly asleep in the bottom of the boat as the shipped water lapped over his sprawling legs; Hilda, pale and calm, intent on her bailing; and finally myself, sitting shivering and half-drowned in the stern of the boat, anxiously watching for an opening in the reef.

What a cargo of crossed lives and mixed motives, I thought. Elliott, a potential murderer; Hilda, poor wretch, a life in revolt; and I – well, I was no better than a neurotic young man who had been caught in one of life’s undercurrents and was being carried whither he knew not.… Probably to death I decided, as I scanned the waves ahead. Hilda’s voice interrupted my thoughts.

“There it is,” she cried, pointing to some green hillocks rolling ponderously between the white foam flecking the teeth of the reef. “That’s open water, David!”

“Damn me!” shouted Elliott, unexpectedly rising from the bottom of the boat. “You two will be dancing with each other next. So it’s ‘Hilda’ and ‘David,’ now? Get the hell out of my way; I’ll sail this boat. Hand over that tiller, Mr. Poet.”

As Elliott lurched aft Hilda placed herself between us and from the open neck of her dress quickly drew a thin, steel blade. Her face was as calm as the face of an angel and her voice was casual and unhurried, carrying with it an unmistakable note of determination.

“I never wanted to use this thing on you,” she said, “and I hope that even now you won’t force me to do it, but if you make any further attempt to interfere…”

She broke off, and Elliott, with an uncertain smile on his swollen lips, stood swaying above her.

“You don’t like death,” she went on evenly. “I know you don’t. I’ve seen you cower from it before now, but that’s exactly what you’re bringing about – death! One wave badly met will send us all to the bottom. Do you know what it feels like to drown, to smother until your lungs are heavy with water and then to go down, choking and blind into the wet dark where it’s cold and still and hopeless?”

As though she were trying to frighten a child she continued to paint for him a vivid picture of death, and as she spoke a change came over him. Insane terror burned in his eyes, his mouth lost its mean lines, growing oddly flabby, his great body shuddered, and he moved back.

“Do you know what it means to strangle?” she went on, her voice rising against the wind. “To fight for air until your heart snaps and you’re dead, the light gone from your eyes and the breath from your body?”

As he backed away she followed him. He stood before her cowering with his hands held up to his face. Hilda was like a different person. I had never seen her so filled with grim determination. Her voice rose higher as she continued:

“Only the boat stands between you and the bottom of the ocean. You can’t swim and you’d sink like a rock. You’d go down to death and silence and to other things that lurk down there – things that feed—”

“Stop, damn you!” he cried. “Sail your boat to hell, but get me ashore first,” and sinking down on the transom, he raised the bottle to his lips.

Hilda regarded him almost pityingly, then she turned to me and said: “He’s like that. Death terrifies him. The mere mention of the word makes him uneasy. Did you think me cruel?”

I had no time to answer, for at that moment a great wave tossed itself across the bow of the boat, completely smothering it in foam. As the craft pitched head down in the water I heard Elliott scream like a stricken animal and saw that his body had been carried half overboard. Hilda sprang forward and seized him by the arms. Still uttering his half- animal cry, he struggled back into the boat and fell sobbing to the bottom. The sloop righted itself and bounded ahead as I drove her at the opening in the reef.

When we neared the rocks I cast a glance at Hilda. Her eyes were fixed anxiously on mine.

“The tide’s running out,” I said. “If we hit, it’s the end of the sail. Give me your hand, Hilda. We’ll sink or swim together.”

I held out my left hand to her and she took it in both of hers. When she spoke I was surprised by the note of fear in her voice, it was so unlike her.

“Be careful, David,” she pleaded, her lips close to my ear. “We can’t let it end here. You’ve got to drive her through. Do it for me, please. We mustn’t go down now.”

I squeezed her hand reassuringly and watched the reef come on. The next moment we were in the midst of a deafening roar. Spray flew round us and from out of it long, fang-like rocks struck at the boat. Hilda clung to my hand and looked straight ahead. We were lost in a wet hell in which the waves turned to demons. When we emerged from the din the voice of the wind seemed muffled in comparison with the tumult we had left behind.

I looked back at the reef and wondered how we had ever come through. At that moment I loved the sloop as a human being, and as we bore down on the point of land and rounded it, a cry of triumph escaped my lips.

We were running with the waves now and parallel with the breakwater. There was a good chance for the success of my plan. Already we could see the marshes and the quiet water spreading out from them. One long tack to windward and we would be in a position to try for the passage. With a feeling of reluctance I headed the boat away from the narrow strip of land and out once more to the open sea. If only the mast would hold, I felt sure that the sloop would take us home. Hilda pressed close to me, and I could feel her wet clothes clinging to mine.

“You must be cold,” she said. “I wish I had something to put over you.”

“Here!” came a voice from the bottom of the boat. “Give him another drink. Mr. Landor, I apologize. I really do. I must have been drunk to have behaved so wretchedly. You’ll forgive me, won’t you?”

Elliott, completely sobered by fear, handed me a bottle from which I took a long drink before I passed it back to him.

“Thanks,” I said. “That will last me to shore – I hope.”

He took the bottle, but this time he did not drink.

“You cursed eloquently going through the reef,” Hilda said with a smile. “I was even trying to think up some new ones to pass along.”

“I’ll need them in a little while,” I told her as I cast a backward look at the low-lying breakwater against which the waves were cannonading in white, dancing plumes.

After a long reach to sea I brought the boat about and headed in. It flew across the waves like a homing bird and as the seas rolled up behind us it seemed to leap away from danger. No one spoke now, for we were all intent on reaching that quiet haven secluded behind the breakwater. As the boat swept steadily on I kept alert for the opening. Presently I made it out, flanked on either side by trees that were bending down in the wind. We were headed directly for it. In a few minutes we should be safe and the adventure ended.

Hilda would return once more with her husband to the bleak house among the trees and I should go back to my small room in the cottage… back to the dream and to Scarlet. Nothing would be changed.

I felt tired and overstrained, and it was only with a great effort that I was able to hold the boat to its course. Then, in a surprisingly short time, the passageway stood out in front of us. One side was formed by the breakwater and the other by an overlapping jetty reaching out from the shore. We were driving now directly at the surf-covered side of the breakwater and should have to keep to our course up to the last moment before it would be wise to put the boat about for a try at the narrow opening. The wind, as if fearing that at the last minute it would be robbed of its toy, lashed furiously round us, plucking maliciously at the rigging. Then, just as the rocks appeared before our bows, I put the boat about for the last time and with spilling sails heeled down the passage into the protected basin of the lagoon.

At an old deserted pier we made fast the boat and climbed stiffly ashore. The moment Elliott was on dry land he once more became master of the situation.

“Hurry,” he said to his wife. “I must get you back to the house. Remember, you’ve not been well.”

He held out his hand to me and shook mine heartily.

“Mr. Landor,” he said, “I have nothing but the greatest admiration for your seamanship. I hope you’ll dine with us soon.”

He turned and started up a narrow path leading into the woods. Hilda held back for a moment.

“Why were you so frightened out there?” I asked. “It wasn’t like you.”

Before she answered she looked back at the waves we had so fortunately placed behind us, then she said in a low voice, “I couldn’t bear the thought of our going down with him. It would have been different if we’d been alone. Do you understand, or am I just a superstitious person?”

“I understand,” I replied, “or, at least, I think I do. You’d like to leave him behind when that happens?”

“Yes,” she answered. “One world is quite enough. I want my chance… someday.”

“Alone?” I asked.

“I’m supposed to have a friend,” she replied, looking at me enigmatically.

“Only a friend, Hilda?”

“How can I answer that?”

She must have caught the shade of disappointment that passed across my face, for she added, “I can hope, though, and I do… lots of things.”

Elliott had turned in the path and was looking back at us with a smile that would have been pleasant had it not been for the disagreeable light in his eyes. Hilda touched my hand and hurried after him through the rain.

I watched them disappear among the trees, then made my way to the cottage where MacKellar, like an affectionate bombshell, was sizzling with oaths and anxiety.

XII

It stormed steadily for the remainder of the day, and towards evening I was forced to admit the presence in me of the chills and fever that all afternoon had been consuming my body. I made my capitulation by announcing to MacKellar that I was unable to sit down to dinner and was only fit for bed. With a glass of hot lemonade he followed me up to my room and fussily assisted me to tumble in between the sheets while my teeth chattered an accompaniment to his running fire of lamentations.

“You know,” he said in leaving me, “I like a damn fool well enough, but you please me altogether too much. What do you mean by picnicking out there in a hurricane? A pretty thing to do! What a restful sort of a guest you make trying to turn yourself into a dancing dolphin.”

Receiving no answer to this, he lashed himself into a greater tempest of indignation.

“Of course you had no thought of me left alone all day in the midst of the elements,” he continued. “This cottage is none too strong. It’s as light as a feather… thistledown! Who am I, anyway? Farragut? Nelson? John Paul Jones? Now you’re sick… probably dying. For the love of God go to sleep and make an end of it. I’m miserable!”

Exactly what I was to make an end of he failed to explain, for after tossing another blanket over me, he muttered himself out of the room and closed the door quietly behind him.

Later, as I was lying in a semi-conscious doze, Scarlet came in and stood looking down at me. She was clad in some sort of a tight-fitting robe with a high collar, around which ran a narrow, white band. Her dark eyes looked somberly out from between their heavy lashes. I could catch the rounded outline of her strong breasts as they rose and fell beneath her dress, and the animal magnetism of her body seemed to envelop me like a suffocating blanket. Only the vivid red of her lips relieved the severity of her attire. As she stood there silent and motionless by the bedside, with her white hands clasped in front of her, I began to move uneasily beneath her gaze. Her red, arched lips, so soft and full, fascinated me. I was unable to repress a desire that she should bend down and crush them against my parched ones. Irritated by the thought, which my feverish brain intensified, I said, insultingly, “If the devil had a mother, Scarlet, Hugh could paint you as the Madonna of Hell.”

“I’d make the devil a better bride,” she remarked ironically. “Don’t you think, David?”

“Go away,” I muttered, half rising in the bed. “Go marry the devil and all his friends. I don’t want you here.”

She laughed and bent down to me. I could feel her breath on my dry lips.

“Doesn’t my presence bring you comfort?” she asked.

“Not yours,” I gasped, sinking back on the pillows.

“Whose then?” she demanded, her face flushing.

“Go away,” I repeated. “It doesn’t matter.”

With an impudent shrug of her shoulders she turned away and walked over to the door.

“Then why don’t you send for her?” she said mockingly. “Try it, David, and see how quickly she’ll come.”

“She’d bring me peace at any rate,” I answered. “That’s more than you can do.”

“Do you think so?” she replied with a strange smile. “Wait. I know you better than she does.”

•   •   •   •   •

That night, when the dream returned, it was slightly different from what it had been on previous visitations. We met as usual in the reed-sheltered pavilion by the marshes, but this time when Hilda came to me it was sorrowfully and with a bowed head. And when she stood before me she held out her arms and I saw that they were covered with dark bruises, and when she raised her head and looked at me out of her deep, unhappy eyes, I saw that round her neck there were ugly marks as though her throat had been squeezed by a powerful hand. At the sight of these signs of violence I began to tremble and cry out in a frenzy of rage like a nervous and overwrought child. When I awoke MacKellar was bending over me with his hands pressed against my chest.

“Lie still,” he commanded. “You can’t get out of this bed.”

“That devil’s doing something to her,” I panted. “I know it, Hugh, I saw it in his eyes today.”

“It’s dawn now,” he said, soothingly. “In a little while I’ll scout around and get the lay of the land… that is, if you’ll try to sleep.”

With my feverish mind harassed by tormenting speculations, I lay shivering in a cold sweat. Where was Hilda now and what was happening to her? Was she still out there on the marshes searching about for me, calling my name and waiting for me to answer, or was she suffering beneath the hands of Elliott? As I tossed miserably between the crumpled sheets I began to mutter my half formed thoughts. MacKeller with a distracted expression sat down at the side of the bed and endeavored to rearrange the pillows. When I impatiently rejected his kindly efforts, he rose and with a tragic sigh went to the window, through which the early morning sunlight was already sending a golden mist. He was on the point of drawing the blind when he stopped abruptly and looked down on the lawn, an expression of incredulity replacing the mask of martyrdom he had previously worn.

“Who is it?” I cried, filled with a sudden suspicion. “What do you see down there?”

“Has all thought of rest vanished utterly from the face of the world?” he demanded, turning from the window. “Has sleep been discovered worthless? Am I alone in my sanity? Am I just—”

“Who is it, Hugh?” I interrupted.

“You know who it is,” he snapped. “Knew it all the time… probably arranged it. What an hour for her to be standing on my lawn and looking up at your window! Damn me, if I didn’t think she was a ghost.”

“Perhaps she is,” I muttered.

With an embittered look at me, he left the room. Consumed with anxiety, I awaited his return. In a short time I heard him ascending the stairs in company with someone else, and in my eagerness it seemed to me that they would never reach the top.

“Hugh!” I called, raising myself in the bed.

He appeared in the doorway and with exaggerated ceremony ushered Hilda into the room.

“Here’s your ghost,” he said. “Now, let’s sit down and have a nice little talk after our long night’s rest.”

She gave him an affectionate smile and came quickly over to the bed.

“What’s happened to you?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she replied, with a nervous catch in her voice. “It’s all right… only I had an odd feeling that something had gone wrong with you. When I awoke this morning—”

“Had the same thing happened?” I interrupted. “Could you tell whether or not you’d fainted?”

“Oh, yes, I can always tell,” she continued. “There’s a numb feeling back of my heart; it gets chilly there, but this time it was different. I remember nothing except that when I came out of it I had the strangest feeling that somehow I’d lost you… as if you had gone away… suddenly. Then it occurred to me that you might have been taken ill after the sail, and—”

“And well it might,” broke in MacKellar. “After that sail, we all should be nervous wrecks. I am.”

“Yes, yes,” she agreed. “It was terrible, but you know how it is?… I couldn’t sleep. So I thought I’d run over to find out. He is sick, isn’t he?”

“He’s mad,” pronounced MacKellar, sitting down in a remote corner with an expression of a night watchman waiting for relief.

In silence I gazed at Hilda, suspiciously studying her pale face. Her hair had been hastily arranged and a soft, satin thing of gray, evidently designed for evening wear, was thrown over her shoulders and gathered round her neck. There was a distressed look in her eyes. They reminded me of the dream. She seemed nervous and ill at ease as she sat by the bed in a huddled attitude. I held out my hand to her and she was about to take it when, as if remembering something, she stopped and drew her cloak around her.

“Then he has been unkind,” I said with conviction.

“What do you mean?” she asked uneasily.

“Give me your hand,” I replied.

She hesitated, then held out her hand, and as the tears welled slowly to her eyes she bowed her head. MacKellar had leaned forward in his chair. He now smothered an oath. The room became quiet, and I found myself unable to speak because of a choking sensation in my throat. I felt the same desire to cry out I had experienced in the dream and as I clung to her hand I began to tremble violently. The white flesh of her wrist and arm was horribly mottled with heavy blue bruises, which only a maniac could have inflicted.

“And your neck,” I whispered at length.

“Don’t, David,” she protested, her hand involuntarily seeking her throat. “Why torture us both?”

I was about to insist that she should unfasten her cloak when my eyes fell on Scarlet standing in the doorway, regarding the scene with cynical amusement. She had just arisen from her bed, and the garment she had carelessly thrown over her thin nightdress but partly concealed the lines of her body, leaving her splendid arms and shoulders in bold display. Her pale face was slightly flushed now, and her thick, black hair fell across the dead white of her neck in two heavy braids. She looked at Hilda with sleepy arrogance, and Hilda returned her gaze with eyes filled with interest.

“Good morning, Mrs. Elliott,” Scarlet said, with an unpleasantly sweet smile.

MacKellar made a grumbling noise in his throat and walked up to her.

“Because he was instrumental in keeping both her husband and herself afloat yesterday,” he said, “Mrs. Elliott has been considerate enough to find out if the idiot is still alive. What are you doing up so early? Go back to bed. This will kill you.”

“Oh, I merely wanted to find out if the idiot was not yet dead,” she replied. “I imagine Mr. Elliott is anxiously waiting his wife’s report.”

“I think Mr. Elliott was still sleeping when I left the house,” Hilda offered casually. “But I’m sure he’d be interested if he knew of my visit.”

“I’m sure he would,” commented Scarlet, as she stifled a little yawn. With a ghost of a nod she turned her back on us and moved slowly to her room. Hilda, looked thoughtfully after her, then, extending her mutilated arm, she placed her hand on my forehead and said:

“Well, she succeeded in making me feel decidedly immoral. I’m quite cheered up at that. You’re going right to sleep now, or else I’m going home. How about it, Hugh?”

“Put the dolt to sleep,” he snorted. “I’m going, and when you two have succeeded in driving each other completely insane, just send for me and I’ll hurry up and drag you apart.”

With the bearing of a driven man he left the room and thumped out his indignation on the creaking stairs. Hilda laughed softly as if to herself, then turned to me.

“You’re to go to sleep,” she said.

“One moment,” I protested. “I want to ask you one more question. Why is it that you still persist in refusing to solve a problem when the solution lies so close at hand? Answer me that.”

“Now what are you driving at?” she asked.

“You know what I’m driving at,” I continued stubbornly. “Why don’t you clear out and leave that man? There’s ample justification, God knows.”

“But, David,” she said, “how do you know I’m looking for justification? Perhaps such freedom as I can gain through man-created laws and institutions no longer interests me. There was a time once when it would have, but that time has passed… it’s gone. Since this stupid malady has come over me I seem to have neither the strength nor the desire to start over again. It’s as if my will were being consumed by something else. Things don’t matter much. A bruised arm is ugly, but it isn’t really important. It’s only a superficial injury. You shouldn’t mind it. I don’t.”

“That fits in with your theory,” I replied in a rather mean spirit. “Didn’t you tell me once that the only thing in life that interested you was the leaving of it and what followed after? Do you still feel the same way?”

“About life?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I must have been blue then, David,” she said at length, “and I don’t think I intended you to take me literally, but perhaps I did.”

She stopped and gazed through the window at the limb of a tree stirring up the sunlight as a soft breeze swam through its trembling leaves.

“I don’t know whether or not you’ll understand me,” she continued, “but five years such as I’ve lived through are rather difficult to forget. Things have happened to me during that time… you don’t know… abominable things. I don’t think I could ever forget them in this world. You see, David, it’s just as if I’d been robbed of my womanhood. Those things that a man wants in a woman, expects of a woman, and which frankly every woman wants in herself have been turned in me to… loathing… spoiled. I’m changed and cheated. Only my mind and the compensating thoughts that have come to me in the repugnant hours of the night have been able to keep me on an even keel, have given me a little hope. Things grow up and spread out until at last it becomes too late to change them.”

“So you feel that it’s now too late for you to begin again?”

“I’d like to begin again, David, but it would have to be in a different place, an altogether different place, in a new world, in fact, and I’d have to have a new body and a less remembering mind.”

“With whom would you begin?” I asked.

“A friend who’s a bit of a dolt,” she answered with a rather dreary smile. “Don’t ask questions, David. We need each other too much for that.”

Then she began to stroke my head until my senses became partly lulled. A feeling of drowsiness stole over me, and, dimly, I heard her repeating, “Go to sleep. It’s time to rest. No more talk. No more worry… only sleep.” And as my surroundings faded away I imagined that my body was enclosed in a cradle of cool, green waves in which I was floating far out on a quiet sea… green, wind-swept miles.

Five days later, with the help of MacKellar, I was able to resume my chair on the lawn where the sunlight, like a yellow scarf, fell over my body, filling my mind with a restful languor from which it would suddenly jerk whenever my thoughts returned to the approaching night and the ordeal of the dream.

XIII

It was at this time that I met a man who, in spite of the brief duration of our friendship and the many years which have elapsed since last we met, I always recall with a spontaneous dash of interest. Hunter Aird, a professor of psychology in a neighboring university, was one of those keenly scientific yet tolerant spirits, who exist like a green oasis in the parched desert of academic life.

For one already a recognized authority in the scientific world he had been surprisingly successful in keeping himself free from the blighting traditions of a sanctified past. He belonged to a small, diligent and greatly disliked group of realists which will in time create a new romance. He sincerely believed – without feeling virtuous for it – that there was still ample room in the world for those whose thoughts and ways of life were diametrically opposed to his; in fact, he rather preferred to associate with such persons. Perhaps it was for this reason that he found me, the slave of impulse, acceptable as a friend.

My meeting with Aird occurred at a fortunate time, during another period of enforced separation from Hilda, and his companionship served to dispel the depressing thoughts tormentingly winding through the corridors of my mind.

I came upon him in the course of a stroll that had taken me to a spot where the land thrust its tapering hull far out into the sea. The place was interesting to me chiefly because of its desolate and rocky formation, but for the fishermen it held an interest of an altogether different nature. Nearby was situated a tavern wherein they could forget for a brief space the sea and the monotony of its waves.

The rocks were gathered here in massive shelves, which, mounting one upon the other from the sea, gave the effect of a great stairway up which in the days of the gods Neptune had probably stridden on his way to Mount Olympus with all his spray bright court. At the extremity of the point a huge rock arched down into the sea like a great crooked finger with its nail buried in foam, and against this massive digit the waves ceaselessly hurled themselves as if endeavoring to make it clench. Far down to the left the black nets of the fishermen lay on yellow sand beneath the sharp light of a sun blazing high in the heavens. To the right the narrow breakwater enclosing the marshes curved out abruptly and ran away to the distant mainland. Along the crest of this friendly reef a few adventurous trees maintained a precarious footing, bending down like timid divers to the surf.

At the highest step of the rocky ascent, where often I had pictured the streaming old God of the Sea as he paused to watch his creatures emerging from the waves, now stood, or rather squatted, a structure known as the Ark. This disreputable abode for the most part consisted of the hull of a ship which years before had been washed up by the sea and upon which a retired fisherman, like an expatriated but still enterprising crab, had reared a small one-story shack where his friends became his debtors and eventually his slaves. Prosperity, with its dirty hands, had approvingly patted this old sailorman upon his once honest back, and beneath the honor he had grown so mean and acquisitive that at last money had remained his only companion. It was a poor companion at best, for he heartily feared to be seen in its company, spending most of the time hypocritically envying the good fortune of the friends he had abandoned. The fishermen listened stolidly to his laments until drink so sharpened their blunted sensibilities that it became necessary to beat him for the sake of decency, after which they departed, reeking through the night down the narrow path winding to their respective homes and inhospitable wives. His life was not pleasant, but it paid. With John Elliott he divided the hate and fear of those who dwelt on the promontory, and there were times when the two of them in the midst of a hostilely silent group of fishermen ceremoniously drank to each other’s prosperity. Close to the Ark a few stunted pines clung wretchedly to their scrap of shallow soil. When the wind drove through their branches, it sounded like the accusing wail of the rigging which at one time had carried the old ship out on worthier expeditions. Around the isolated tavern there was always the clamoring of the elements. Men grew drunk to the tumult of the waves and the carousing voice of the wind, while above the roof gulls bent their wings as they wheeled through the spray-drenched air.

Like a large bird abandoned on an unfriendly coast, Aird, when I saw him first, was perched on one of the slabs, where he sat motionless with his face turned expectantly to the sea. He was bird-like in feature and outline, and at this moment he appeared to be unconsciously forlorn. His nose was large and aquiline, and dominated without destroying the other features of his face. One was still conscious of a sharp, clean-cut chin, high, narrow cheek bones and eyes that were blue and rather apologetically inquisitive. As I studied his face I was struck by the thought that the mouth, which in a woman is so expressive of beauty, in a man can be beautifully expressive. His was large and strong and thin- lipped, not ungenerous, but giving the impression of a character intellectually controlled and free from the domination of impulse. With such a mouth Hamlet might have been able to make up his own mind instead of importuning a politely indifferent audience to do so for him. Here was a man, I instinctively felt, who was respected by many, but liked by few and to whom solitude came as a natural and unquestioned heritage.

When he became aware of my presence he greeted me with an unaffected friendliness characteristic of many persons who, either through choice or circumstances, are left much to themselves.

“Good morning,” he called, motioning to the rock beside him. “Surf gazing, too?”

“Yes,” I replied, accepting his offer to join him. “I never grow tired of this particular spot.”

“Nor I,” he answered simply. “I’ve always liked it here.”

As I sat beside him on a wave-worn stone I found that his presence made no demands on conversation. There was something composed and restful about him. Yet as I glanced at his sharp, eager profile I felt that here was a person who would understand whatever I had to say. For some minutes we sat without speaking as the wind and the waves filled the world about us with agitated sound.

“These waves must be hypnotic,” I remarked at last. “They put my thoughts to sleep.”

“I know,” he said. “Sometimes they do mine, but at others they seem to help me think. They form a sort of an accompaniment, and after awhile I fall in with their beat.”

“People think too damn much,” I replied with sudden irritation. “I’m not fond of thinking. That’s why I come here – the surf drugs me… pleasantly.”

He looked up and smiled, but made no answer, and once more we sat in silence. A little later he remarked laconically:

“I get paid for thinking. It’s forced on me.”

“That’s different,” I answered, this time smiling at him. “I was paid for a while, but if I’d kept it up I’d have gone mad.”

“Probably you weren’t interested in your thoughts.”

“I despised them. They were all false. You see I had to persuade people to buy things against their wills, and I was always on the side of the people. I felt sneakingly sorry for them.”

Aird laughed outright.

“Well, I’m not much better off,” he said. “I have to make people learn things against their wills and sometimes I’m quite sorry for them.”

“And so am I,” I answered, “and for you too.”

Once again he laughed good-humoredly, then turned his face to the sea, and for awhile we watched the waves rush in and hurl themselves against the great, unyielding finger. Spray fell like brilliants at our feet and the drone and churn of the water sounded in our ears. I had a desire to fling myself into the welter of the waves and to become a part of their mad disorder as they unreasoningly attacked the rocks. Aird began to speak, diffidently at first, and then with increasing earnestness.

“You know,” he said, “I don’t believe people think too much. It strikes me that they dream too much. They try to dream themselves blindly through life instead of first trying to adjust themselves to live intelligently and harmoniously within their own minds and bodies.”

“You’re as hopeless as I am,” I remarked.

“I’m not hopeless,” he answered. “I’m older and perhaps a little more experienced in a stuffy way. I’m a sort of intellectual wolf. I watch people and devour them. I’m a consumer of thought – though most of the time I’m hungry.”

“People like myself furnish scant intellectual nourishment,” I remarked.

He considered me seriously a moment, then grinned.

“You know,” he said, “I think you’re right. Perhaps you do think a little too much.”

“No,” I replied, “you were right the first time. I’m afraid I dream too much.”

“Don’t do it,” he replied. “It’s debilitating, unless you can put your dreams into action or words. I remember when I was a child people used to blindfold me and give me a tail to pin to a paper jackass hanging on the wall. I never won once, and although I enjoyed the game moderately, I soon grew tired of it. But man hasn’t wearied of the game. For several thousand years he has permitted himself to remain blindfolded while he’s stumbled destructively over the universe looking for a jackass to which he could pin a tail. Usually he’s ended by pinning the tail to himself. And because it’s the old, traditional game, the game of his nursery days, he still pretends to enjoy it in spite of his bruised shins. Man is still dreaming in a nursery that looks suspiciously like a cave.”

“It’s an edifying picture,” I said, “but perhaps man likes it that way.”

“No, he doesn’t,” replied Aird. “I don’t and you don’t. There’s no use in draping our bodies with the complicated finery of a civilization we scarcely understand. Why minister so solicitously unto the savage when we ourselves allow the dead weight of old, unventilated thought to retard progress and keep us from seeing the realities of life, much less its dreams. Only the clear eyed can dream to an end.”

Aird paused to glance at me with a deprecating smile, then added apologetically, “When I speak in this vein most of my students have the good sense either to go to sleep or to brush up for the class ahead. As you can do neither the one nor the other, Mr. Landor, I’m afraid I’m taking an unfair advantage.”

Surprised by the fact that he knew my name, I asked him how he had obtained the information.

“Leaving out the fishing element,” he explained, “there are not many souls on this narrow strip of land and here as in other places, a newcomer is immediately marked out and spied upon. My mother, who directs the destiny of our small place overlooking the marshes, keeps me continually supplied with news. You’ve been the subject of several earnest discussions at our table. For instance, she has come to the conclusion that you swim altogether too far out from shore and as a consequence of your recklessness and her garrulity I have been forced to listen to detailed statements concerning the watery graves of many of her dearest friends. In fact, I hardly see how she has any friends left alive, so many of them has she graphically drowned before my horrified eyes. You’d really be doing me quite a favor if you’d try skirting the coast line for a change.”

“For the sake of your peace of mind, I’ll consider it,” I said. “Evidently you’re not a newcomer like myself.”

“I was born here,” he replied. “Our cottage and the land on which it rests is one of the few pieces of property in the neighborhood that John Elliot doesn’t own. I suspect he dislikes us for that reason. My mother knew the old Elliott, his father. She insists he was slightly mad, and for years she’s been waiting, and, I believe, secretly hoping, that his son would also go mad. I’ve a feeling she hasn’t so very long to wait. It seems there has always been one crazy man in every generation of that family.”

“And his wife?” I asked casually.

“One sees very little of her – too little, I fear. She sails a boat and keeps to herself. She’s probably faring in her quiet way the same fate that’s overtaken the wives of many of the Elliotts. They’ve died young, I’m told, or lost their minds. There’s some compensation in that.”

Masking my true feelings I remarked, “It’s an interesting situation – like an old novel somehow.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “It is interesting in a rather tragic way. However, I imagine she doesn’t find it quite so interesting.”

“I should hardly think she would,” I answered, with a forced laugh. “It must be rather nasty to be tied to a man like Elliott.”

He subjected me to a quick scrutiny which I attempted to avoid by turning away. A few minutes later I invented a flimsy pretext to take leave of him. As I walked past the Ark, I paused for a moment to look back. He was following my departure with a friendly smile and resembled more than ever some large, lost bird forced to abandon flight after an unsuccessful struggle with the wind.

•   •   •   •   •

A little more than a week later, after numerous meetings had established a bond of friendship between us, I was sitting on the broad veranda of Aird’s cottage. His house, situated on the crest of a slight hill, commanded a sweeping view of the salt marshes. Cool and inviting on the vividly green campus of reeds, the island now lay bathed in the soft light of the evening sun. From where I sat I could clearly trace the narrow, reed-pierced band of water encircling it, and I fancied that I could also distinguish the small fan-shaped beach tapering down to the glinting channel between an avenue of bushes. As I gazed at the island in the full light of day I found it difficult to believe that a spot so calmly beautiful, so utterly real and familiar a feature of the landscape, could inspire me with terror when it appeared to me in a dream. The possibility that this picturesque place could conceal behind its graceful trees the slightest element of the supernatural seemed so infinitely remote that I scoffed at the very idea. Yet even as I scoffed I was unable to shake off a sensation of uneasiness that stole over me as I looked out upon this isolated bit of solid soil so alluringly set in the false ground of the marshes.

Behind us, in the kitchen of the cottage, Mrs. Aird, a delightful person who read the Holy Scriptures and quoted Robert Burns, was contentedly engaged in the preparation of gingerbread, with which, and a glass of milk, we should presently be regaled. Aird had once told me that the dispensing of this slight entertainment had been one of his mother’s most pressing activities from the day when he was first placed on solid food. I could not help noticing that although he always received the offering with almost religious devotion, like most people in the formal observance of their sacred obligations, he made an end of it as expeditiously as possible.

On previous visits to this quiet little household I had always taken pleasure in the company of these two friendly spirits, but on this occasion, as I sat watching the sun draw nearer to the tree tops on the island, neither the prospect of Mrs. Aird’s gingerbread nor the stimulus of her son’s conversation was able to arouse me from the depressing mood into which I had fallen. It had been many days since I had last seen Hilda. From the first morning of my illness I had heard from her only indirectly through Hugh MacKellar, and what I had heard had not served to cast a more cheerful light on the situation.

“David,” he had said after he had returned from one of his visits, “I believe her health is seriously endangered. She’s still subject to those peculiar fainting spells at dawn. It’s not natural. Can’t understand it. She looks like the devil – bad. Elliott doesn’t give a damn. I can see that, but the suave bounder conducts himself with the utmost concern whenever I call.”

At another time he had told me that for various obvious reasons Hilda had expressed the wish that I should make no attempt to see her. As a consequence I had abandoned my long vigils on the fallen log in front of Elliott’s inhospitable gates and had given myself over to tormenting speculations as to what was taking place inside the old gray house so completely shut off from the rest of the world behind its barrier of trees.

This profitless occupation, together with the constant recurrence of the dream, did much to retard my recovery and destroy what little mental poise I still retained. Frequently in the course of a walk with Aird I kept thinking to myself what a splendid subject I would make for one of his researches into human conduct had he but known what was going on in my mind. Perhaps he did have some slight suspicion of the overwrought state I was in, for as I look back on it now it seems to me that he made persistent efforts to lead the conversation into channels that would take me out of myself.

On this particular evening he had carried me as far afield as Oxford, which he was casually describing as a “funny old pin-cushion of a place quite overstuffed with cricket,” when my thoughts, flying back unbidden from that beautiful spired town, sank broodingly down in my mind. I could listen no longer to Aird. His words became meaningless to me. I was too much wrapped up in my own affairs and I hated myself for being so.

“Aird,” I asked, taking an advantage of a brief pause, “what do you think of a man who has neither the strength to live nor the courage to die?”

“He’s in a pretty bad way,” said Aird. “Do you know anyone in that fix?”

“No,” I lied, “but I did once.”

“How did he get out of it?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps he didn’t.”

“His life must have been an unhappy one,” Aird said after a thoughtful interlude, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people were like that – neither one way nor the other.”

“This man was different,” I replied. “He knew what he wanted well enough. He wanted the other way – the way out – but he couldn’t take it. In spite of himself, he couldn’t. Something held him back.”

“What do you suppose it was?” he asked.

“The very thing he wanted most to shake off – life.”

“He must have loved it then.”

“He did. He loved it as a man does a drug which gives him dreams. Yes, he must have loved life, although he seemed able neither to accept it nor to escape it.”

“Your friend was honest at any rate.”

“Not honest,” I said, “but pursued.”

Aird made no reply to this and I continued to speak. Ascribing the story to somebody I had once known, I set my characters in an imaginary environment and caused them to move through virtually the same roles as those that Hilda, her husband, Scarlet, and myself were now playing in grim reality. As I told the story to Aird I could hardly find it in myself to credit the truth of my own statements; they seemed too utterly overdrawn. When I had finished I studied his face thoughtfully to see what impression my words had made on him.

“Well?” I said as the moments passed and still he did not speak. “How does a situation of that kind strike you?”

Aird frowned and puffed noncommittally at his pipe.

“It doesn’t strike me at all,” he said after a moment. “It sounds like the last, sorrowful slam of an unhinged mind.”

“Nonsense, you mean?”

“Not exactly nonsense, but too fantastic for any useful analysis.”

“The last slam of an unhinged mind,” I repeated. “It’s a graphic way of putting things, Aird. I never thought of that. Perhaps my friend was a little mad.”

“Most people are,” said Aird.

“But don’t you see anything in it?” I protested, almost desperately. “He wasn’t altogether a coward, this fellow. He wanted something, wanted it badly; in fact he’d have given his life for it, but he wasn’t able under the circumstances. It was all real to him, frightfully so, but the man was bewitched, caught up in some sinister magic. Life was laughing at him. He hated to hear it, yet he feared to leave it.”

“He wanted two things at once,” Aird broke in, “and his wants just didn’t jibe. The situation worked on his nerves and he dreamed about it. That’s about all Landor. Such things happen to people.”

“No, that wasn’t all,” I said. “There was more to it than that. You see, I knew this man.”

“Why are you so interested?” Aird asked, turning on me as he spoke.

“Why am I interested?” I repeated, carefully weighing my words. “Well, for one thing I can understand to some extent the workings of the man’s mind. In some ways I’m like that myself. It must have been miserable for him, beating and kicking at the narrow walls of life, yet never able to break through. Enslaved by his body and tormented by his mind. Always looking for something and finding it just a little spoiled. I know how he must have felt. It’s difficult to explain, but I’ve always been alone and thought things, beautiful things, and beastly. My God, the women I’ve seen and the women I’ve wanted! The dreams I’ve had and the songs I’ve heard. Where are they now? Gone. Women, dreams, and songs, all gone. Life swallows them up. If you’re not a genius, your soul starves; if you are, it isolates itself and feeds on its secret food. The man between is the man who suffers. He’s neither one thing nor the other. Yet he craves. He looks for love and passion and finds them… standardized, divided. There’s no zest nor sparkle, no joy and spontaneity – moral mouthings on one side, vulgar smirks on the other. Society makes either a curse or a cult of lust, and both sides enjoy it in secret. They make things dirty and like them that way.

“This man had a flame in his heart. I know it. It wanted to burn pure and leap high. It wanted to live in the sun, to give warmth and receive warmth. It wanted to be free and filled with glowing things. That’s what it wanted, but that’s just what it didn’t get. Instead the flame was smothered in his heart, where it nagged and tormented him until he became a changed man – warped, suspicious, ingrown.

“Then what happened? He found at last what he was looking for – a woman, to him the most perfect thing in the world, the only perfect thing. With her he could live entire. She was the mate to his flame, the answering spark. But the flames could never meet, could never fuse into a life. Hers was dying, his was blighted. And when he looked at the woman, he felt like a man who was seeing the sun go down for the last time, knowing that thereafter he would dwell in the eternal darkness of the jungle, lapped by its hot life, abandoned to its murky ways, given over to the jungle heart and soul. He knew himself, knew what was in him.

“Then came the dream. It offered a way out, but he couldn’t take it. The body had its rights. Its demands were imperious. He was a fool perhaps, and weak, but he was all confused. He saw what he wanted less distinctly now, and always through a thickening vapor rising from the jungle. And in the vapor the other woman was standing and she was desirable. Don’t you see, it was all mixed up in him. I don’t say he was right or admirable or anything like that, but the man existed, he was like that, and you can’t explain him away. He believed in the dream, Aird! It was in him to believe in the dream. What the mind can imagine must exist or can be made to exist. If not in this world, then in another. I believe that, too.”

I stopped from the sheer urgency of my words and sat stupidly gazing at my hands, refusing to meet Aird’s eyes. Thoughts were tumbling through my mind, but they had neither form nor sequence. I knew that I had spoken vaguely and side-stepped the issue, but nevertheless I felt relieved. Aird started to speak, but I interrupted him.

“What I mean, Aird,” I said, “is that there’s a lot of love and life and beauty in this world that we can’t get at. Some people are willing to accept substitutes. Others prefer to invent things, but occasionally you find somebody who is willing to accept neither one nor the other method of existence, and that person, unless some unusual thing happens, either goes mad or commits a crime. Sometimes he does both, but it’s seldom he knows what he’s doing. Now when such a one meets a woman of a like mind and she’s willing to lead the way out – oh! well, you see it’s difficult. There are so many things to decide, particularly if he wants to think straight. And there are so many things to overcome if he happens to be weak – not cast in the hero’s mold.”

“Landor,” said Aird, his voice sounding kind and serious, “when a man is going through such a spiritual conflict as you describe, he must necessarily be alone. I pity your friend and in a way I envy him. I’m a skeptic by training and profession. It’s my business to question things, to believe in nothing unless it can be reduced to demonstrable fact. That’s my business. But in my heart, securely locked in an unprofessional strong box, there are a lot of hopes and fears that have no foundation in fact.”

“You’re not so skeptical then as you pretend?”

“I’m afraid not,” he replied. “We are all of us more or less bound up in the sanctions and prohibitions of the past, the old creeds and customs, tenets and traditions that have been accepted as irrefragable truths. The world is still littered up with a lot of hypocritical cussedness, some of it vicious and some of it just plain foolish, but until this stuff is cast aside, it doesn’t pay for a man to be anything other than skeptical. The time isn’t ripe for a person to indulge his soul. If he does he’s liable to lose it or else, as you say, go mad or commit a crime.”

“The dead still bury the living,” I suggested.

“In a sense,” he agreed. “But nevertheless we seem to have a well-developed faculty for burying ourselves. The world is like a train running along through a series of tunnels… it’s like certain parts of the Italian Riviera, where beauty lies all around you, yet most of your time is spent in the hot, confusing darkness of a tunnel. That’s the way we are, Landor, and that’s the way life is. We spend altogether too much time in darkness running through tunnels. For a moment we come out of the smoke and confusion to catch a glimpse of beauty, a fleeting vision of reality, peace and plenty and daylight, then suddenly we rush back again into the black mouth of the tunnel, and the vision fades from our eyes. Only the memory remains, and most of us forget that. As the engineers have bored through the mountains and brought us forth to the light that lies on the other side, so someday the scientist will tunnel through the deep confusion of our minds and let in a finer and more orderly conception of life. Then perhaps we shall know where we’re going and why we’re going, and what to expect at the end.”

“When the world has emerged from its last tunnel, we won’t be among its passengers.”

“I’m afraid not, Landor. There are many tunnels yet ahead and the way still lies up grade. Soon we shall all step off before the journey’s end.”

“Before we do,” I said as I rose to go, “I might be able to help you out with the end of that story.”

“It would be interesting to know more about such things,” he replied, looking at me attentively, “but for purely personal reasons I should prefer to let it remain only a story.”

At this moment Mrs. Aird appeared with her gingerbread and I was forced to resume my chair for fear of committing the unpardonable sin of not receiving her offering with a proper show of reverence. Apparently forgetting that she had entertained me thus on several previous occasions, she said brightly, “I just thought that I’d throw together a little gingerbread. It’s very nice in the afternoon.”

“What!” exclaimed Aird as though stabbed by the daring originality of the idea. “Gingerbread! Splendid, Mother.”

Believing it hardly necessary to act a lie with such callous elaboration, I did my duty with a conservative show of enjoyment. Between us Mrs. Aird sat flushed and triumphant as we dutifully consumed her offering. The sun dropped from view behind the island, leaving a melting light in the sky. The marshes filled up with shadows, among which streaks of crimson fitfully glittered.

•   •   •   •   •

It was dark when I reached the cottage. MacKellar was not at home. Without troubling to strike a light, I groped my way to the stairs. As I was about to reach the landing, I heard in the hallway above me the pattering of bare feet, and Scarlet’s voice called down:

“One moment, David, I’m undressed.”

“That’s nothing new,” I replied irritably. “Since when have you become so delicate?”

“You’re always so sweet to me,” she said with good- natured sarcasm. “I’ve known officers who would have torn up their commissions to be in your shoes at this minute.”

“I wish to God they were,” I answered. “Shut your door.”

“If you’ll only wait a minute,” she called.

I could hear her stealthily moving about in the darkness. Then she said:

“Well, David, you can almost have your wish. I know a man – not so far away – who will gladly give me a fortune for my favor. He’s said as much… several times.”

“Accept it and get dressed,” I exclaimed impatiently. “Look out, Pm coming up.”

“All right, then,” she said. “Come up!”

Somewhere near at hand a door slammed, and without further hesitation I groped my way down the hall. Suddenly my outstretched hands encountered the soft flesh of a woman’s body and two strong arms twisted themselves round my neck.

“You thought I’d gone,” she whispered, “didn’t you?”

Before I had time to reply my lips were closed by hers, and a little tongue of fire seemed to dart through my brain. Weary as I was at that moment, both physically and mentally, I felt unable to resist the madness that had overtaken me in the darkness. Like a tired swimmer I now yielded to Scarlet. My arms slipped down to her hips, my mouth responded to hers, and our bodies clung together.

“You’ve never been to see me,” she whispered as she drew one arm from around my neck and quickly opened a door behind her. “Come in and see how nice it is.… Hugh won’t be back for hours.”

My hands fluttered over her body like frantic wings and my lips insanely sought her neck. All the while my brain was numb, dark and devoid of thought. I was glad of this, for I was afraid to think. And for the same reason I gave myself over the more completely to the moment. As we stood on the threshold of her room every other impulse in my life was subordinated to my desire to possess this woman. Her body quivered against mine, and I could feel her gently pulling me forward.

“Come, David,” she repeated under her breath.

As she spoke, she placed her two small hands against my chest and with all the strength that was in her shoved me violently backward. The door slammed in my face, and as I staggered back against the wall I heard the click of a lock. I sprang at the door, but it held firm. On the other side of it Scarlet was laughing softly. The very nearness of her body added to my rage.

“Oh, you little prig,” she called to me. “What becomes of your beautiful dream? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

Without replying I began to kick madly at the door, beating upon it with my hands. A demon of desire had taken possession of me. I was driven blindly to the attack like an unreasoning creature. Much of the hate in my heart was directed against myself. I held Scarlet responsible for this and my anger against her increased. I felt ashamed and yet unable to abandon my object. Then the door opened and she looked fearlessly out at me-

“Why don’t you try Hilda?” she asked with a’ sneer in her voice. “She’d love to see you now.”

At the mention of Hilda’s name my desire for Scarlet was consumed in a white hot flame of anger. I wanted her now, but for another reason. My hand shot out through the darkness. I seized her wrists as I had once done on another occasion, but this time I slapped her a full swinging blow on her face. As my hand came heavily down on her flesh I experienced a thrill of pleasure. Like a man intoxicated with brutality I continued to cuff her across the face and head until she began to sway unsteadily from side to side. She made no outcry nor attempt to free herself, but submitted silently to my blows. My strength was exhausted before my anger, and finally, through sheer weariness, I was forced to release her. She sank to the floor and threw her white arms around my knees. I was trembling violently and felt dazed and tired. A deep sigh escaped my lips. It sounded like a third person.

“I’m sorry,” she said as she clung to me. “Do you hear, David? I’m sorry. You can do what you want with me now.”

“I’ve done it,” I answered, balancing myself against the side of the door.

“David!” she pleaded.

As I looked down at the crumpled figure at my feet, a lump rose in my throat. My whole being was revolted by what I had done. Scarlet’s face appeared to be terribly bruised. In the dim light of the hallway I could see a little strip of black sliding over her lower lip and down to her chin. It was fascinating to watch this thread of blood as it crawled like a tiny snake to the white skin of her neck.

I averted my eyes and an unutterable sadness settled down on me. I felt afraid to be left alone with myself and yet unable to remain in the presence of this woman. With a low sob I broke from her grasp and, staggering through the hall to my room, sat down on the edge of my bed.

For a long time I sat there motionless, desperately going back over my conduct. No matter how falsely I shifted my reasoning, there were some facts that could not be avoided. I was no better than John Elliott. That was apparent. In fact, I had surpassed him. He could never have treated his wife as brutally as I had treated Scarlet. Why had I done it? Because she had mentioned Hilda’s name, or because she had made a mock of my passion? If it had been for Hilda’s sake there might have been some slight justification, but I could not honestly convince myself that Hilda had been the reason. My thoughts went back to the afternoon. It had been so quiet and different on the veranda of Aird’s little cottage. I had been different too – another person. Who would have believed that scarcely ten minutes after leaving that peaceful place I should try to take a woman by force and then have beaten her because I had failed in my purpose? How many other primitive and disgusting creatures were slinking about in the twilight of my soul, waiting their chances to confront me?

Unable to stand the darkness any longer I walked over to the table and lit the lamp. Then I began to move restlessly around the room, picking up familiar objects and examining them minutely as though they were new – anything to keep from thinking. Once I went to the door and listened, but it was quiet in the hall. With a little shiver I turned back to the room and stood irresolutely at my table. Some unfinished verses were lying upon it. Without realizing what I was doing, I sat down and began to write.

•   •   •   •   •

Some time later I heard a tapping at my door. With a strange sense of fear I looked up and waited. The tapping continued patiently and at last, mastering my emotions, I called out in an irritable voice.

“Who the devil’s there?”

The door opened and MacKellar stood blinking at me.

“It’s one,” he said, “who began life as an artist, but who seems doomed to end it as a damn duenna. I’ve seen Hilda. She says she’s better… she isn’t. There’s been a doctor.”

“Who sent for him?” I asked.

“I did, of course. Elliott was furious.”

“What did he say – the doctor?”

“Very little. Merely looked confused… like a savage handling a watch. Her heart’s bad, but he could find nothing organic. I didn’t like the way he shook his head. Anybody can do that. When he left he was good enough to say that it was a very interesting case, and recommended a change of scene. Well?”

“Nothing,” I said, rising from the table. “Oh, God, there are too many things! What shall we do now?”

“What can we do?” he replied shortly. “She isn’t our wife. Here, she sent you this.”

He handed me a small square of Academy board which I took eagerly and carried to the lamp.

“Do you like it?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered, my hand shaking slightly as I looked at the picture. “You caught her beautifully, didn’t you?”

But I turned my eyes away from the simple little sketch MacKellar had handled so tenderly. At the moment I could not bear to look at Hilda’s face. Her eyes were too honest, and between them and mine floated the white bruised face of Scarlet as she had looked up at me from the floor.

“Where do you keep your whiskey?” I asked after a pause.

“Under lock and key,” he answered triumphantly.

“Where’s the key?” I demanded.

He looked at me with a startled expression which caused me hastily to add, “Oh, it’s all right, Hugh, only I’m still in need of a little picking up.”

His face cleared, and crossing the room, he took me affectionately by the arm.

“Come along then,” he said. “Let’s drink some whiskey.”

XIV

Whenever I think back over this period of my life I seem to be able to recall it in complete detail, and yet, at times when my thoughts are otherwise engaged, I suddenly discover in some dusty pigeonhole of my mind a new sheaf of unremembered things, and once more the past is vividly reopened. Little unimportant things, such as the acrid smell of a weed plucked by the roadside, the flight of a hawk across the marshes, or the sound of an ax ringing in the woods, serve to bring back more poignantly to me the exact texture of a forgotten mood than could any deliberate effort of memory.

Today, for example, the sound of a child’s voice caused me unexpectedly to recall the fishermen’s children with whom I shared the beach for two days after I had attacked Scarlet. This small voice drifting in at my window awakened a clear echo of the past, bringing back to me with almost photographic distinctness the faces of those vanished children, and, as if it were only yesterday, I remembered the tale they coaxed from my reluctant lips fully twenty years ago.

Because of my encounter with Scarlet I now loathed myself more heartily than ever before, and was eager for the companionship of other people. A feeling of guilt restrained me from either remaining in MacKellar’s cottage or visiting Hunter Aird’s. And so, as a last resort, I withdrew to the beach, where I strove to forget myself in the company of a wind-weathered band of vagabonds whose clamoring voices mingled with the wash of the waves from early dawn until dark.

Children, I have always felt, are instinctively perceptive of sorrow in their elders, and when not too preoccupied with their own affairs, have a charmingly tactful yet lavish way of expressing their sympathy, particularly if the object of their affection happens to be an evil doer whose crimes have thrust him from the oppressive good graces of organized society.

The children of the fishermen received me with that spirit of free-masonry which exists between all habitual delinquents. They were professionally but not spitefully interested in the exact nature and extent of my offense.

“Whatcha sorry about?” asked one little chap after peering for a long time thoughtfully into my eyes.

“I’ve been bad,” I replied.

“Yeah?” he continued with rising interest. “Whatcha do?”

“I lost my temper,” I told him, “and made a terrible fuss of it.”

He considered this information judiciously while the other children drew nearer with serious faces. To them this was life, something that touched them intimately. Their spokesman continued:

“Did you kick an’ scream and fight?”

“Exactly,” I replied. “And now I don’t want to go home any more.”

“I know,” he said with the air of one who had suffered much. “They do git right after you when you go on like that. Las’ week I caught it somethin’ terrible, didn’t I, Natty?”

He looked at Natty for confirmation, and that young lady nodded vigorously with a shy smile on her rather serious and expressive face.

“Natty’s my sister, ain’t you, Natty?” he continued, and once more the girl made affirmative bobs with her brown curls.

“She’s eight,” he concluded abruptly.

“I’m the oldest of everybody here,” she announced.

“Except me,” I said, and Natty was reduced to silence.

It was with these slight but essential formalities that I was received into the band of youthful beachcombers. They amused me, these seaside urchins, but in turn they insisted on being amused, and in spite of my earnest protests, they succeeded on the second day in launching me forth on a story the end of which was still nebulous in my mind.

“Tell us anything,” they insisted when I endeavored to escape on the plea of ignorance. “You must know something, some sort of a story. Make one up.”

The children were sprawled round me on the sand, their serious faces expectantly turned to mine. From a blue, cloudless sky the sun showered down on us wave upon wave of heat which a breeze blowing in from the sea caught in its cool embrace and tempered pleasantly. At our feet the surf sleepily rose and fell and high over head a scattering of sea gulls diligently searched the sky. As I turned my eyes from one face to another, the stolid patience of the expressions I encountered gave me to understand that further resistance was useless, and rather than risk the general condemnation of my implacable audience, I began with a brave show of confidence, “Well, children, it seems that there was an old deer—”

“When?” interrupted a voice.

“Very well,” I agreed hastily, realizing that I had sinned against both convention and good taste. “What I meant to say was, that once upon a time there was an old deer who lived in the forest with her little baby deer, of whom she was very proud. But one day the little deer strayed away from its mother’s side and was killed by a woodsman who lived in a clearing in the forest with his wife and their little daughter. Now when the old deer, whose name was Tonka, found out what the woodsman had done, she was so overcome with grief and rage that she decided to revenge herself on the woodsman by stealing his little daughter and killing her in the forest. So one day she stood for a long time watching at the fringe of the trees until at last the little girl came close to her and then Tonka led the child farther and farther away until she had it at her mercy in the deep woods. But when Tonka was about to kill the helpless little girl with her hoofs, the baby smiled up at her and the old deer, remembering her own baby, felt so sad and lonely she decided that instead of killing the woodsman’s daughter, she would adopt her in place of the little deer he had killed.

“Well, the years passed, and the child grew up to be a slim and beautiful young girl. Her hair was the color of a rusty cloud when it is kindled by the sun, and her eyes were deep blue and honest, like the sea on a calm day when the sky is high and filled with sunlight. The young members of the herd became her brothers and sisters and she learned how to speak their language, and Tonka was her mother. At night when the moon came out the girl would dance in the moonlight and the deer would stand round in a circle and look on. In the middle of the moon-flooded space and surrounded by the soft, glowing eyes of the deer, she would stand straight and slim, like a silver birch, and dance the Dance of the Trees. With her white arms extended above her head, she would sway from side to side in the clutch of a magic wind, then suddenly as though uprooted by the storm, she would leap high in the air and spin around with her hair whipping out behind her. Then she would stop abruptly and throwing herself down on Tonka’s flank she would lie there panting while the older deer told stories of when the forest was young and Pan played among the trees.

“Then one day the Lord of the North rode down the peaceful valley with his swift-footed hounds, and began to hunt the deer. Now this grim knight was so cruel and bloodthirsty that his castle was coated with ice and nothing would grow near it. No living creature ever ventured close to his home nor were there any bird notes in the air. Life was cold and dead at this place and none of the servants was ever known to smile.

“At last, when the Lord of the North came upon the deer, he sent his dogs in chase of them with a loud blast from his horn, and he himself on his coal-black steed, followed in pursuit. The herd broke and fled in a panic of fear, but the great dogs were soon among the stragglers and sprang upon the weakest of them all. The other deer swept on ahead, but the girl remained behind to fight for her little brother so that when the riders came upon them they captured both the deer and the girl, and carried them back to the knight.

“When the knight saw what a beautiful creature they had brought to him from the woods, he had her placed in front of him on his horse and he ordered his men to strap the wounded deer behind him. Thus with his two prizes he rode away from the quiet valley up the bleak, winding passage leading to his castle. And when he finally reached his stronghold, a strange thing took place, for no sooner had the girl’s foot touched the frozen ground than the ice melted from the old stone walls and flowers sprang up from between the chinks in the stone. And the dead trees came back to life, golden blossoms covering their branches. There was the sound of a thousand silver wings in the air and a flock of gay plumed birds flew down on the place scattering songs about them. The sun came out from behind the clouds and the ground became springy under foot. It was a remarkable transformation and it seemed that even the cold heart of the Lord of the North was a little thawed, for he carried the girl into the castle and had her dressed in rich garments, and he put jewels in her hair and around her throat. Then he had his servants prepare a table for her on which there were fruits and rare dishes.”

“What sort of dishes?” asked Natty’s brother in a thick voice.

“Just rare dishes,” shouted several of his elders reprovingly.

Thoroughly engrossed now in the story, I continued, “But the girl would have none of the wonderful things until she had been permitted to bathe the wounds of her brother and to give him water to drink, for the poor little deer was very thirsty, his throat was parched, and he longed to go back to the forest from this strange and faraway place.

“The girl lived a long time at the castle, and as the days passed a gradual change took place in the knight. He no longer hunted the deer and his terrible bow hung neglected over the fireplace, while his great dogs dreamed of the hunt in their sleep and grew fat. The gentleness of the girl and her strange kinship with nature had a strong influence over this fierce man and caused him to grow kinder and more thoughtful, although there were still times when he looked longingly up at his bow. His fingers itched to hold it, and his ears ached to hear the thrilling twang of its string.

“Then the girl fell in love with the Lord of the North and they were married. To celebrate his wedding day, the knight allowed the little deer its liberty, and the girl gave it a message to take back to Tonka and her brothers and sisters in the forest. All went well with the girl and her husband until one day when he was alone he spied a deer on his lawn, and unable to resist the temptation, he seized his bow and quiver and shot an arrow at it. The arrow flew straight to its mark, wounding the deer in the leg, and the dogs raced across the lawn to capture it. But just in time the girl came running from the castle and with a word she stopped the dogs. Then she hastened to the deer and found that it was Tonka, who because of her love for the girl had come all the way to see her. When the girl heard the moans of the poor, wounded Tonka, her heart was filled with anger and she vowed never to return to the castle and live with her husband again. So that night when Tonka was able to walk, they faded away into the forest, while the Lord of the North, too proud to ask forgiveness, sat alone in his castle.

“The months passed and the girl once more took up her life with the herd and presently she became the mother of a beautiful baby girl. When Tonka saw the new baby her dim eyes kindled and she proudly nuzzled the little bundle. Then she called the girl over to her and spoke to her for a long time, telling her that no matter what might come to pass never to forget the deer and always to be their friend. Then old Tonka laid her head on the girl’s lap and with a little quiver of weariness, gave up forever her mothering of the herd.

“After the death of Tonka, a longing came over the girl to look on the face of her husband. So she took her baby and traveled back to the castle, where she hid herself among the rushes growing on the banks of a brook, and in this place she waited in the hope that he would soon come out on the lawn where she would be able to see what changes time had written in his face. But alone in his castle the Lord of the North was sitting in front of his fireplace thinking of his wife. When he raised his heavy eyes and saw the bushes waving in the distance, he imagined that the deer who had robbed him of her had come back to mock at his solitude and to triumph over him for having been able to call her back to the forest.

“Now the knight still loved the girl so much that he had not touched his bow since she had left him, but the thought that the deer were silently watching his misery was more than he could bear, so once more he seized his bow from above the fireplace and sent an arrow into the bushes. The dogs raced across the lawn and when the knight reached the spot, he found them licking the hands of the dead girl whose brown hair was floating On the current of the stream.

“And that night when the deer were gathered round the pool in the forest, the little stream brought down to them the story of the ending of their sister and they were sore at heart. But the sorrow that dwelt in the heart of the knight as he stood over the body of the dead girl, and held the little baby close to his rough coat, no one will ever know, for now he was all alone. This much we do know, and that is, that he broke his bow across his knee and never more killed a living thing. And he carried the girl back to the forest and buried her there with his own two hands.

“Sometimes even now, when the moon is full and the forest still, the deer come silently from the trees and stand in a sorrowful circle round her grave, just as they used to stand when white and slim, like a silver birch, the girl held her arms above her head and danced the Dance of the Trees.”

“An’ what became of the new baby?” a small voice asked after a short pause.

“Oh, the baby grew up to be a beautiful girl, as her mother had been before her, and she lived happily ever after with her father, the Lord of the North, who always remembering his wife, became so kind and gentle that he was loved by all the deer and they came to his door whenever they had need of a friend.”

A thoughtful silence settled down on the children. Their eyes were filled with the story. Natty drew a deep breath and said, “That was a good story. I wonder how she danced.… I’d liked to been there.”

•   •   •   •   •

This brief interlude in the unhappy drift of time comes back to me now like a friendly note from the past. I can still recall the feeling of relief that came to me when the children, after judicious consideration, agreed that with a few minor exceptions, my story had been well worthy of repetition. It was the consensus of opinion that the slaying of deer was a disgraceful sport in which they vowed never to indulge, and as most of them are by this time either fishermen or fishermen’s wives, I dare say their vows have been kept far better than many others they made later on in life.

When the day wore into dusk, I could tell that the imperious demands of hunger were causing the children to regard with secret favor the homes they outwardly professed to deplore. As the manifestations of their appetites became more acute, they diffidently abandoned their various occupations and furtively withdrew in quest of food. Only Natty and her brother were left, the latter with ill- concealed reluctance. The girl sat hunched in the sand, looking out across the darkening ocean. I wondered where her thoughts were straying. Probably her eyes were following the feet of a slim, white girl dancing alone in the moonlight. Presently a vague sigh escaped her and, unwinding her arms from around her knees, she arose and took her brother’s eagerly extended hand.

“I like that story,” she said, deliberately avoiding my eyes. “Sad stories are sort of nice. They seem like as if they might happen.”

Her small brother, now completely mastered by his greed, tugged manfully at her hands, but she resisted long enough to ask, “Are you comin’ back tomorrow?”

“Perhaps, Natty.”

She moved thoughtfully away, then stopped for a moment to call back through the darkness, “Good night.”

“Goo’ night,” contributed her brother, with an unmistakable note of relief in his husky little voice.

The beach became depressingly empty now that the children were gone.

XV

But when tomorrow came I did not return to Natty and her friends. Wearied by two days of self-imposed inactivity, I decided to put into action a plan that had long been taking shape in my mind.

Once when I had been considering the dream, and the strange frequency of its return, the thought had occurred to me that if I could only reach the island and investigate it in the full light of day, I might be able to free myself forever from the terror it inspired in me. For several weeks past I had studied the marshes with this object in view, but the more I considered the island and tried to devise ways and means of reaching it, the slimmer seemed the chance for success in such an undertaking. Cut off from the rest of the world by several miles of false ground and tangled reeds, through which innumerable currents of water twisted, the island seemed as safe from the incursions of man as a coral reef tucked far away from the lanes of trade.

From my observations it appeared to me that the island stood in nearer to the opposite shore and that from there I might be able to find a less hazardous means of approach. As I had never viewed it from this angle, I made up my mind to journey to the mainland to investigate the possibilities of reaching the island from that side.

The road I took was the same one I had followed on arriving from the city. So many things had happened and so many things had changed since first I had felt its dust. I now pictured myself as I had been on the day of my arrival, and the person I saw was almost a stranger to me. Various moods and events came drifting back to mind – the feeling of relief I had experienced when the train pulled out of the little station leaving me standing on the deserted platform; my rest in the quiet woods and the old man with whom I had shared the way; the first sight of the marshes; the carving on Elliott’s gate; Scarlet, nude on the black divan, and later the touch of her lips. The ribbon of memory slipped swiftly across my mind, and once more I was looking up from the water into Hilda’s deep blue eyes. In swift review there passed before me the happy days we had spent together before Elliott’s shadow had fallen between us. Again I saw her sitting white and motionless in the little sloop as the storm raged over the sea, and again I saw her extending a bruised arm with an expression of mute entreaty in her eyes. Wherever my eyes rested I saw her face and wherever my thoughts wandered she wandered with them. When first I had followed this road, I had been a fugitive from the city; now I was a fugitive from myself, from an intangible fear and a host of conflicting impulses.

After skirting a long stretch of meadowland enclosing the inland end of the marshes, I struck directly into the woods and continued through the trees and undergrowth until I had arrived at a point which I figured would bring me out opposite the island. I was not far off in my reckoning, for when I broke through the edge of the forest the island lay almost directly in front of me, and to my great disappointment, about two miles out from shore. The land in between was of the same insecure and treacherous character as that which lay on the other side. As my eyes ran over the intervening space I was forced to exercise all my powers of imagination to prevent my reason from convincing me of the hopelessness of the undertaking. I felt that I was now confronted by a problem more dangerous of solution than the blind fury of wind and wave I had faced alone in the storm. Beneath the suave tranquillity of the marshes there lay in wait an antagonist more deliberately cruel and watchful than the ocean when aroused. The snapping of a twig in the forest caused me to start violently, and by this involuntary reaction I was able to gain some indication of the nervous tension under which I must have been laboring as I studied that remote island in its picturesque setting of green. I glanced over my shoulder at the sun and saw that it was already nearing the spear points of the trees. Only a few more hours of daylight remained in the sky. This knowledge, arousing me from the state of lassitude into which I had fallen, sent me hurrying to the edge of the marshes, where I seized a stick from the undergrowth and began to test the submerged soil which, under a thin sheet of water, ran out from the shore for about two hundred yards. The ground was soft and muddy, but seemed sufficiently firm to bear the weight of my body. Had I found myself alone on a lost planet with unknown dangers surrounding me, I could not have experienced a feeling of greater trepidation than when I left the shore and waded out into the silence and insecurity of the marshes.

Green, slimy water closed over my shoe tops and mud molded itself to my feet. By carefully sounding ahead of me with the stick, I was able to reach a comparatively solid strip of land the end of which, a short distance away, was screened by reeds. As I approached this spot I became aware of a low singing in my ears, and a few mosquitoes struck against my hands and face. Once I was in the reeds the singing grew louder, and a swarm of insects, rising like dust from beneath my feet, vindictively attacked me. With my free hand I fought them off as well as I could, but as the reeds closed over my head my skin began to flame from stings.

The ground was now of a soggier nature, clotted here and there with pools of stagnant water. At every step my feet sank deep into the mud. As I continued, the reeds grew thicker, until finally I was forced to slacken my pace, not only because of the resistance of the growth, but also for fear of plunging into one of the many currents twisting like great, green snakes across my path. My body was bathed in sweat, and the intensely hot air pressing down on the marshes made breathing unpleasant. At times I almost lost control of myself from pain and irritation as the singing plague hummed tormentingly in my ears.

Nevertheless, I had successfully traversed about half the distance separating me from the island when I found myself standing on the brink of a stream so much wider than the others that in order to find a more favorable crossing I was forced to follow its bank. As far as I was able to judge the stream spanned the marshes in a series of great loops. With its steep muddy sides and the uncertain nature of its bed, it served as an effective barrier to further progress – an obstacle filled with all sorts of unpleasant possibilities. After following the bank for some distance, I found that it was taking me considerably off my course; and as there seemed to be no immediate prospect of the stream’s growing narrower, I decided that I should either have to abandon the enterprise or risk a crossing without further delay.

Accordingly I slipped down the moist bank into the slow current and started to wade across. The water reached my thighs, and the mud, into which I sank up to my knees, yielded with the greatest reluctance as I moved my feet. As I approached the opposite bank, my progress became more difficult and my footing less secure. Only a few yards separated me from safety, when, as I was just about to grasp the reeds swaying above my head, I felt with a ghastly sensation of finality that I was sinking deeper and deeper into the mire.

Hardly daring to breathe, I remained motionless as the stuff crept slowly up my legs. Then I made one frenzied effort to withdraw my feet, only to find that I was accelerating the speed of my descent. Within an inch of my outstretched hand a tuft of marsh grass was protruding from the bank. For several minutes I dully regarded this possible means of escape before I fully appreciated its value. My mind was numb and heavy, unwilling to function. Idly I extended my arm and almost touched the grass. I tried again and this time came a little closer. Then as it dawned on me that probably this handful of grass was my last chance of life in this world, I centered all my hopes on it. My fingers quivered to secure a hold, and I felt a hot, crazy tension gathering round my eyes. Sweat broke from my pores as I strained forward, but the tuft which a moment before had been within an inch of my hand, was now two inches away. Between the grass and the tips of my fingers the space was growing wider. It was a fearful thing to watch. Hopelessly I looked around for another means of escape, but there was nothing to be found. The marshes were as still as death, and the air seemed to be growing more suffocating. The idea of calling for help came to me, but the possibility of being reached in time by human aid was too obviously remote for even my fear-weakened intelligence to entertain. I wondered what had become of the stick I had been carrying only a few minutes before. Looking about, I saw it floating idly on the current several yards away. That stick would have been useful. It might have saved my life. Now it lay beyond my grasp like the smug moral of an Aesop fable.

The steady advance of the mud along my legs caused me to make one last attempt to reach the grass and from the eagerness of my effort it seemed as though my arms would spring from their sockets. I failed abjectly, and was about to abandon hope when the idea came to me that if I flung myself forward with all my strength in the direction of the grass I might be able to add a few more inches to my reach, and thus either secure a hold or else topple helplessly, face downward, into the muddy water of the stream.

Without giving myself time to consider this possibility, I lurched forward, and falling completely off balance, clutched at the grass. It slipped through my fingers, and with a little splash the water closed over my head. I experienced a sensation of being strangled in the dark. There was a mad pounding in my ears. As I thrashed wildly about in the water, I was suddenly electrified by the realization that my fingers were clawing at the very base of another tuft of grass, growing below the surface of the stream. With a greedy feeling of relief I pulled myself forward until I was able to raise my head from the water. My fingers sank deep into the earth around the roots of the grass and held firm. The mud sucked viciously at my legs, but gradually I drew myself nearer the bank. The tuft I had previously missed was now directly above my head. Very carefully I reached up and seized it. Then began a tortuous hand over hand contest, a slow painful battle of inches in which a fractional miscalculation or the snapping of a reed might have made all the difference between victory and defeat. Imperceptibly I drew myself from the mire until at last I was clear of it. Then I scrambled up the bank of the stream and sprawled in the rank ooze lying between the reeds. It was pleasant to feel and I wallowed in it with animal satisfaction. Now that I was too exhausted to repel their attacks the mosquitoes settled down on me in swarms, but as I looked stupidly at the mud worming through my fingers, I was insensible to pain. Never had life seemed more worth living, and in a vague way I felt that my expedition to the marshes had produced the opposite effect to the one I had expected, or rather, hoped for.

With a gloating feeling I turned my eyes back to the stream from which I had escaped. It was rising. The tide was running in from the sea, and in a short space the current would flood. I considered this with satisfaction, for now I should be able to swim across instead of trusting myself again to its treacherous bed.

As I lay there resting I became dimly aware of the fact that for some minutes past a stray, disconnected picture had been floating through my mind. It was a picture of the western sky overspread with a vast black cloud threatening to consume the sun. It was all clear and distinct in my memory, every detail being so vivid that I was convinced the impression was not a figment of my imagination. The thing had actually happened and a feeling of disquiet crept over me as I tried to trace the picture to its source. Then I sprang to my feet and stood swaying among the reeds. A distant volley of thunder rolled through the heavens, echoed, and died away.

I remembered now where I had seen the picture. Only a short time before, when I had been struggling from the stream, I had gazed up at the sky and unconsciously made a mental note of its appearance. At the time I had failed to appreciate the meaning of the heavy cloud slipping like an unclean thing across the western section of the horizon, but now I appreciated only too keenly its significance. To be overtaken by a storm on the marshes was to be overtaken by death itself. Even if I escaped the quicksand the mosquitoes would be in at the kill. Already my ears were filled with the chanting of their requiem.

While I stood there considering this new danger, a bolt of lightning like a fiery seam ran across the sky, a deluge of thunder fell shuddering through the air, and darkness settled down on the marshes. As though giant hands were squeezing the clouds, rain descended in an overwhelming blanket. With all my reason I strove to beat down the fear that was rising in me. It was as though God or some other supernatural agency had decided to destroy me for my temerity in attempting to reach the island.

For several hundred yards I stumbled on through the rain and darkness, when a flash of lightning, laying bare an area of glistening sand, made me stop abruptly. With absolute certainty I knew that once I had put foot on that reedless plain I was lost beyond all chance of escape. A sensation of nausea filled my stomach, my legs failed, and with a feeling of unspeakable misery, I sank down among the reeds.

Whenever the lightning smote the sky the island sprang quiveringly into view and lay vividly revealed on the marshes, dancing there before my eyes as though it were tempting me on. And through the din of the rain and thunder I hurled at it a curse of impotent rage. Then fear gained the upper hand, and, rising like a distracted creature impelled by its mad desire to escape, I turned my back on the island and fought my way through the reeds. When I reached the edge of the stream I tore off my shoes, and without stopping to consider the consequences, took a shallow dive from the bank. My body shot through the water, and a few strokes brought me to the opposite side. With frenzied haste I climbed over the edge of the stream and lurched onward through the reeds.

The knowledge that the blackness of the storm might merge into that of night sharpened my determination to gain the mainland. Under the-clash of the lightning the sky was palpitating with fire. My ears were sore from the sound of thunder, and as the rain descended the breath was whipped from my body. During the short intervals between the play of the lightning, I was left in thick darkness, through which I staggered with outstretched hands. Beneath the bitter radiance of the lightning the shore ahead of me was occasionally outlined. A dull glow flooding up from behind a hill told me that some farmer’s house had been struck. In my mind’s eye I could see black figures darting back and forth in the firelight as they strove to save their livestock. The knowledge that human activities were taking place so near at hand gave me an intenser feeling of remoteness and desolation.

That evening on the marshes I sounded the uttermost depths of fear. For a time I was an abject and unqualified coward. And my fear was the more overpowering in that it was made up not only of imaginings, but also of horribly realistic facts. The clammy hand of terror lay against my back urging me ever onward in spite of my exhausted condition. At times I tripped, became tangled in the reeds. Once I missed my footing altogether and splashed into one of the little streams criss-crossing my path. When I emerged, my face was bleeding and my body was covered with slime. Toward the end of my flight I began to curse and rave incoherently. My anger was directed against the island as the cause of my humiliation. I hated the place with the hate of the conquered.

At last, when I reached the short strip of submerged soil lying against the mainland, I ran across it with my body bent forward and my head rolling from side to side. I was sobbing softly to myself. Before I reached the shore my strength gave out. I fell on my face in the mud and water. Like some prehistoric reptile emerging from a swamp I wriggled onto the shore and lay there with my fingers digging at the earth.

Once I turned my head to look back at the island. A bolt of lightning forked directly over it and the tall trees, sharply limned against the unnaturally green background of the reeds, seemed to be stepping silently toward me over the marshes.

“Take them away!” I screamed. My voice was lost in the rain.

I dreamed that night that Hilda was standing alone among the reeds fronting the island. From where I stood I could see her clearly as she turned and held out her arms to me. With a sharp conviction that I was about to lose her I rushed out on the marshes, but before I could reach her side I sank in the quicksand and went struggling down into the dark. As my head sank into the stifling slime my hands, still clutching at the air, grasped two small bare feet. My descent was arrested, and by slipping my hands further up along the legs I was able to pull myself from the quicksand. Then I found myself holding Scarlet in my arms. Her neck and shoulders were covered like a beast’s with short, yellow hair, and her head was that of an Indian idol, heavy and obscene, with thick, grinning lips and bleared eyes. She approached her distorted face to mine and gripped me round the waist. Together we fell back on the marshes and the soft, warm mud closed over us. But this time I felt no fear.

When I awoke I rose and went to the window with a feeling of disgust. My skin was raw and feverish and I ached in all my joints.

As the dawn broke I looked down on the silent grove and thought of this unclean thing. Not content with influencing my days, Scarlet had now begun to taint my nights.

XVI

Beneath the golden avalanche of the noonday sun all life was silent in the grove. The trees, transfixed by the heat, stood frozen in a yellow glow. On their limbs each tiny leaf lay glued to its plane of air, and on the lawn each spear of grass stood poised and still. It was as though life at full tide had been caught and crystallized in a setting of dream-swept radiance. Only the chant of the distant surf gave token that nature stirred. Remotely, the slumberous cadence of the waves stole up from the beach, touching the ear soothingly like the distant ticking of an old clock heard in the restless hours of the night. The wind which but a short time before had moved like a sigh through the trees, had drifted back to the sea. An enchanted sleep hung over the place. Even the birds were still, their wings at rest.

In the midst of this trance-like silence, yet unable to yield to its spell, I had been sitting watchfully all morning at my table on the lawn of MacKellar’s cottage. Only a moment ago, Scarlet had stood beside me, and as I had looked up at her, my thoughts had unconsciously reverted to the excitingly repulsive dream of the night just past, when clasped in each other’s arms we had sunk beneath the soft, warm mud of the marshes.

In some indefinable way Scarlet seemed different to me now, a shade more thoughtful and subdued. Her eyes no longer met mine with their usual glint of challenge. She gave the impression that she was holding herself in reserve, waiting quietly and planning, as though she were playing some game. Without admitting it to myself I was secretly stirred by the idea.

This impression, rather than belief, had grown in me from the evening, only a few days past, when I had seen her huddled at my feet in the semi-darkness of the hall. Now as she stood beside me I felt that in a sense I had placed myself a little deeper in her power. With her I was sharing a secret, and the very nature of that secret had established an intimate bond between us. Also, as a consequence of that mad outbreak of mine, there was a feeling of power in me. It was something altogether foreign to my nature, and not unpleasant. This woman, whose body had so often dominated my thoughts, fired my desire, and swayed my very reason, I had beaten with my hands. The memory of the yielding of her soft flesh against my open palms aroused in me an unhealthy sensation of satisfaction. I might do it again, I thought, as I took in the full, graceful lines of her figure. Even now I could rise from my chair and crumple her to my feet. But mingled with this emotion there was a vague feeling of sympathy… something that drew her as a woman a little closer to me.

Hitherto whenever I had heard stories in which women had suffered at the hands of men, I had always been conventionally outraged, but in the presence of the woman I had beaten I saw things in a new and less chivalrous light, and, ironically, I twisted the feet off of another tame ideal. Few were now left to me of the collection I had been secretly treasuring all my life. Soon I would be stripped of them all – the sooner the better, perhaps.

Scarlet’s voice cut in on my thoughts.

“Your face is swollen,” she said.

“And yours is better,” I replied.

“Mine wasn’t so badly bruised… only the lips. I used some ointment stuff and a little paint and powder.”

“What did you tell MacKellar?” I asked, despising myself for the question.

“Nothing definite. Merely that I’d been walking and tripped over some blackberry vines. He believes anything I say. It’s easier.”

She smiled faintly and gazed down the grove with a pensive expression in her eyes.

“That was sportsmanlike of you,” I said, after a moment’s silence.

“Oh, not particularly. I was partly to blame, you know.”

I made no answer to this and she continued rather apologetically, “I’ll not bother you much any more, David, but at least we might try to be friends, don’t you think?”

“Friendship is not for you,” I said. “You’d hate it.”

Before she answered she walked a few paces across the lawn.

“And so do you,” she replied with a gleam of her old spirit returning to her eyes – then in softer voice, “Would you like me to leave that ointment in your room?”

“No,” I said shortly, then added, “Yes. Thanks.”

“That’s right, David,” she called back. “It might relieve your irritation.”

From the doorway of the cottage she smiled at me for an instant. I was fascinated by the white flash of her teeth. With a feeling of annoyance I turned back to the table.

•   •   •   •   •

After Scarlet had left I took up some lines of verse into which all morning I had been apathetically endeavoring to breathe a little life. At the end of half an hour of mechanical shifting they still limped along on bandaged feet, a dolorous procession of meaningless words. As I scanned the stuff I was discouraged by its extreme futility. Exasperated at last by the smug insincerity of my thoughts, I defaced with a burst of true inspiration all that I had written.

The profound silence of the grove was gradually wearing on my nerves. I had a feeling that unless I received a message from Hilda before another night had passed I should take some unwise action. With the intention of consulting MacKellar about this, I rose from the table and had started for the cottage when I heard my name called out behind me. I turned quickly and saw John Elliott striding across the lawn. His presence shattered the enchantment of the grove.

“You’re just the man, Landor,” he cried in a hearty voice. “I’ve been stalking you through the trees.”

“My instincts must have warned me,” I replied, smiling slightly. “As you see I was about to make good my escape.”

“But I would have followed you on like the hound of hell,” he said, dropping a heavy hand on my shoulder “When I seek a victim for my hospitality, I’m an implacable man.”

He, too, was smiling, but his strange eyes blazed unpleasantly down into mine, and, involuntarily, I stepped back a pace. Tightening his grip on my shoulder, he continued to speak in an unnaturally loud voice, considering his nearness to me.

“Mrs. Elliott has commissioned me to invite you to dine with us tonight,” he said. “Ever since that day we went sailing she has been too ill to get out. What a day it was, eh? Will you come?”

“You’re very kind,” I replied, watching him closely. “I accept with pleasure.”

“That’s as I thought,” he said as though to himself, then glancing over my shoulder he withdrew his hand and took a step forward.

“That invitation also holds for you, young lady,” he said in a changed voice. “I’m my wife’s messenger.” Scarlet was leaning in the doorway, her cheek resting against her white, rounded arm which was held extended above her head along the frame of the door. In her pose, there was something of the slave girl. As she lazily regarded Elliott through half- closed eyes, there was a provocative smile on her lips. In that same intimate way she had often looked at me and now as I saw her thus challenging another with her eyes, I was surprised by a sudden flash of jealousy.

“I hope you’re a willing messenger,” she said, with a trace of arrogance in her voice. “Otherwise, I might not come.”

“More than willing,” he replied, walking over to her, “an eager messenger.”

“How eager?” she asked.

“You must know already,” he said.

Laughing softly, Scarlet moved out to the lawn.

“I know nothing,” she flung back at him, “until the proof is in my hands. Men toss away worlds with their lips.”

“Only come and I’ll show you,” he urged.

“It will be very amusing,” she replied.

“Good!” he exclaimed, turning briskly back to me as though just remembering my presence. “That’s settled. Two birds with one stone. Where’s the third? Where’s MacKellar? He must come along.”

“Here’s MacKellar,” announced Hugh, as he emerged from the cottage. “What’s this about dinner? I’ve had my dinner.”

“Mr. Elliott means this evening,” I explained.

“Won’t do it,” he said fretfully. “Until I’ve forgotten one meal I never eat the next. My stomach has a lingering memory. As I grow older it becomes more retentive. Ask me to breakfast, Elliott. I can always eat breakfast.”

“Come for my sake, Hugh,” I pleaded in a low voice.

“No, no, I won’t do it,” he whispered furiously, nudging me with his elbow and looking wildly about.

“He’ll hear you,” I warned.

But if Elliott heard he gave no indication.

“We must all bow to the master,” he said with a deprecating smile, and once more joined Scarlet, who was standing a little apart from the group.

Together they moved through the grove and disappeared among the trees. I noticed that she was leaning on his arm, her body swaying against his. And once more I felt a stab of unexpected jealousy.

“What’s his game, Hugh?” I asked, turning back to MacKellar.

“You mean there?” he said, pointing down the grove.

“No, about the dinner.”

“It isn’t his game. He just thinks it is. Hilda planned the dinner and made him believe it was his idea. It tickles his devilish sense of irony and he hopes it will torment her.”

“Why won’t you go, Hugh?”

He regarded me darkly, then turned and made off to the cottage.

“I don’t want to go, that’s all,” he said. “Don’t keep after me. You go, and keep your wits about you.”

At the door he paused and sourly surveyed me, then added as though delivering a telling thrust, “That is, if you have any left.”

•   •   •   •   •

The wide lawn, strewn with weeds, fanned out from the driveway and ran neglected into the hemming darkness. Here and there the ragged grass was stained with shabby patches of yellow, burned out and dead. In the ebbing light the place gave the appearance of being drowned beneath a sea of shadows, a vast plain submerged in the gloom, cheerless and abandoned. The sound of our feet, grating harshly against the gravel of the driveway, cut a jagged discord across the still evening. Like a proclaiming voice refusing to be stilled it tormentingly followed our progress. On either side of us the great, dark trees formed a grim and unfriendly avenue. Above our heads their limbs locked themselves into a canopy of furtively rustling leaves. They had witnessed the passage of the unhappy years, these old, dark trees, and now, like disinterested spectators safely removed from the conflict, they seemed to be gloating in the dusk over the prospect of approaching sorrow.

During the course of our uncommunicative walk from the cottage, I had known that Scarlet was studying my face with her cynically amused eyes. As we drew near the house, which in the curtaining night loomed up like a forbidding fortress at the end of the driveway, I noticed that her expression of assurance was gradually giving way to one of fear. When we were about to ascend the steps leading up to the high porch, she hesitated, and with a little shiver, laid a restraining hand on my arm.

“It’s gloomy here, isn’t it?” she said in a hushed voice. “If ever I were forced to live in this place I know I’d do something desperate.”

Up to this time I had been too absorbed in the thoughts coursing through my mind to be greatly influenced by my surroundings. The mere fact that Hilda had conspired to arrange this dinner in order to have me at it was enough to subordinate all other emotions in me to a warm feeling of happiness, but at Scarlet’s words I paused with my foot on the first step and looked up at the house.

Like its owner it was tall and rather loosely constructed and, fittingly enough, it seemed to give off the same atmosphere of smothered hostility. Built entirely of brick and stone in the general shape of a cross, this bleak abode looked less like a private dwelling than a public institution. It had the same uninviting personality as have many of those grim establishments in which charity moves through gloomy corridors. Long rows of black windows looked down on us, and I imagined that behind them generations of vanished Elliotts were standing in hushed attention, their mad eyes fiercely resenting our intrusion. When I thought of Hilda’s years of captivity within the damp walls of this dismal mass of stone, I was better able to understand why laughter had been crushed on her lips. Surrounded as she was by all the bitter traditions and repressions of the place, there was little room for wonder if at times her eyes grew haunted as she searched for some means of escape.

Scarlet was breathing softly beside me, her hand still resting lightly on my arm. Her perfume drifting to me spoke of another world. Something of her own disquiet was communicated to my spirit. I thought of streets and women, luxurious places of abandon, whispers thrilling through the dark, intimate laughter stilled by a sigh. As though I were standing in a pool of decadence I absorbed like some parasitical growth the animalism of her body. The chill, revengeful atmosphere washing about the house urged me to seize her in my arms and to flee with her through the trees back to comfort and warmth. Under the pressure of her hand my arm seemed to swell in my sleeve. I longed to cover her body with mad caresses, to consume in a flame of passion the promptings of hope and memory, the obligations of loyalty. And beneath it all there was a feeling in my heart of death, and that feeling alone seemed real. In its grim presence, as if to delay its approach, I was desperately trying to sully all the beautiful values of life. Beneath a flood of obscene thoughts, beastly, slinking things, I strove to smother a voice that was crying out within me for expression. Were it to gain utterance I knew that it would confound me with the sting of its reproach. Closer to me, and more persuasive, another voice was whispering, “Why cling to the old idealism, the empty dream of the weak? Why not live a little with the rest? There’s nothing exquisite in life, all joy’s hot and coarse… it’s all the same.”

And as though aware of the nature of my thoughts Scarlet swayed against me, holding my eyes with hers. For a moment her thighs froze to mine. I felt the flooding of the breath within her and the supple vigor of her hips. My hands slipped beneath her cloak and smoothed the silk of her dress.

“David,” she whispered, a light of gratification brightening her eyes. “David, dear, are you mad?”

As she spoke the voice within me was released and found expression. It cried out to me to trample and destroy the tainted thoughts clinging to my mind.

“There’s light at the end!” it cried. “Light and exquisite beauty.”

Abruptly I withdrew from her and hastened up the stairs, a feeling of pity and protest cutting sharply across the confusion of my mind. Somewhere close at hand Hilda was sitting in the dark, waiting like a prisoner for a friendly voice from the outside world. A low laugh followed me up the stairs. Scarlet had misunderstood the meaning of my sudden flight.

“Wait for me, David,” she called.

A pursuing wind was running through the trees. It sounded like the wind in a dream, swift and ominous. In its hidden approach there was something terrifying, something of the clutching panic of childhood. With a shrinking dread of being overtaken by some unseen danger I glanced back at the lawn. Scarlet caught up with me and pressed my arm.

“Come, dear,” she whispered.

At the touch of her hand I turned quickly away to the door where a subdued youth with an air of unassurance was waiting to let us in. A maid, materializing from the shadows, whisked Scarlet away, up a broad flight of stairs mounting into darkness. I was left alone in the twilight of a wide hall with a door at the far end. Through the door I caught a glimpse of the day dying on the green floor of the marshes. Many doors opened into the hallway, and as I stood there looking nervously about me, I heard my name spoken softly. It was Hilda’s voice, but in the eerie darkness of the place it seemed to drift to me from another world. I started and faced about.

“Hilda,” I called, unable to check my eagerness, “where are you?”

“Follow your nose,” she replied. “Can’t you see?”

Directly in front of me heavy portières were swaying gently in the light air. They were only partly drawn, and through the opening I could see a large room at the end of which, near a window looking out on the lawn, Hilda was reclining on a couch. In a corner of the room a large lamp cast a restricted glow over the faded red carpet. From where I had first stood this darkened room had been cut off from my vision, but Hilda from the shadows round her couch had been able to observe me. Through the open window I could trace the dim outline of the trees. Like an invisible snake the wind writhed through them, leaving a wistful stir in the air, and filling it now with the scent of dust and dead flowers.

For one still moment I gazed at Hilda’s indistinct form, then running noiselessly over the carpet, I dropped to my knees beside her couch and took her hands in mine. Neither of us spoke, and out on the lawn the soughing of the wind washed like a sorrowful voice against my ears. Hilda was the first to break the silence. She laughed unsteadily and drew her hands away.

“You were nervous out there in the hall, weren’t you?” she said.

I nodded and looked closely at her, but in the dim light I was unable to make out her features. Round her face her hair floated in a shadowy mass. Only her eyes seemed to be alive. They were filled with a glad light and, as I looked into them, all of the fears and repressions that had been troubling me were forgotten, and for the first time in many days a feeling of peace took their place.

“But I don’t blame you,” she went on in a low voice. “This place would make anyone nervous. It’s old and dead and damp… drenched with stagnant dreams. I shall be glad to get away from it.”

“Are you going away?” I asked eagerly.

“No, David, I meant when I did go… someday.”

“Hilda?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you go away now, quickly, out of this nightmare life?”

“Wouldn’t you miss me, my ally?”

“I miss you enough as it is.”

“My friendship has brought you less happiness than sorrow, I’m afraid.”

“Perhaps it has. I haven’t thought.”

“But you regret it now?”

“I can’t regret it, Hilda, any more than I can regret my eyes and lungs because they let me see and breathe. My eyes may stream with tears and my lungs burn with pain, but still I don’t regret them – they’re a part of me, and so are you, at least your friendship is. Perhaps we are not the happiest of friends. That can’t be helped. I wish to God I were a better person, though, a bit more worthy… different.”

“Don’t, David.”

“Why not? There’s little good in pretending. Away from you my heart is as stagnant as the dreams in this house. Only with you do I touch beauty, only with you do I see the light.”

“It’s in yourself. You have it.”

“No, it’s not there. There’s nothing in me, nothing that I’d care to have come out. What I’ve seen is disgusting. I hate it. When I’m alone I walk through jungle thoughts, the victim of jungle desires. It’s you who have shown me the open country and given me a taste of freedom, but my instincts still hold me to the jungle where the voices are whispering always. I’m different when I’m with you.”

She made no reply and the room grew still. With one hand pressed to her eyes she lay among the cushions. I could hear her quietly breathing. In the trees the murmur of the wind rose like a distant threat. The silence lasted until I spoke again.

“Hilda,” I asked with a feeling of dread, “do you think that you are ill, seriously?”

“I think I’m dying,” she said quietly.

A flood of unreasonable anger immediately followed the sharp stab of pain that shot through me. I felt as though I were being trapped and betrayed, that the cards were stacked against me. Hardly realizing what I was doing I seized her roughly by the arms and thrust my face close to hers.

“What are you saying?” I cried. “Are you, too, trying to torment me?”

“Who has been trying to torment you?” she asked in a little whisper of alarm. “What is it, David? You’re strange.”

The dream had given me the warning, now Hilda herself had confirmed it. I could no longer delude myself into believing that I was the victim of a mental phase, the passing of which would readmit me to a normal and carefree world. In the light of her words it would be impossible for me to excuse my cowardice in abandoning her on the marshes. Now I should be leaving her to her death in the full knowledge of what I was doing. Unable to answer, I rested my head on the edge of the couch and pressed my cheek to her arm.

“You mustn’t take it like that, David,” she said. “It’s only a feeling of mine – a foolish one, perhaps. I’m ever so much better already, now that I’ve had a chance to speak with you.”

Before I could reply I heard the portières rustle as someone stepped into the room.

“That you, Landor?” Elliott asked.

“Yes,” I answered, without raising my head.

“Is my wife with you?”

“She is.”

“Pardon me. It’s dark as hell in this room. Would you mind telling her that Scarlet – that Miss MacKellar and I are going down to dinner?”

“She can hear you.”

Once more the portières rustled and there was the sound of low voices in the hall. Then I heard Scarlet laughing softly as the footsteps died away.

“Help me to get up,” said Hilda. “I can feel that this is going to be a merry little feast.”

She threw an arm across my shoulder, and rose quickly from the couch. She swayed dizzily against me and clung to my arm, then steadied herself and led me across the room.

“Hurry,” she commanded in a brisk voice. “Let’s go to the light and see what we look like. Prepare your smile in advance.”

We passed down the long hall, now lighted by hanging lamps, and descended a narrow flight of stairs twisting to the basement.

“The ancient Elliotts frankly enjoyed devouring their food in a cave,” she explained. “Now we call the place the ‘Grill,’ but the spirit remains unchanged.”

As she drew me along the winding passage to the meeting place of the ancient Elliotts, the damp, age-old walls seemed to be pressing in on me. In the moist air there was the odor of decaying vegetation, potatoes rotting in the dark.

“It whetted their appetites to swim through this,” she continued. “I can see them sniffing it now as a pleasant prelude to the soup. Great noses. Greedy sniffs.”

She laughed and turned back to me.

“If you don’t help me out a little, David, I’ll become hysterical,” she said. “My laughter would sound positively maniacal in these narrow walls.”

I smiled reassuringly and pressed her hand, but across my eyes there flashed a sudden picture of what Hunter Aird had told me about the wives of many of the Elliotts. In that chill, draughty passageway I caught a swift mental vision of a demented woman beating her hands against the walls while the air was filled with her terrible laughter. With this picture in my eyes I stepped into the light of the “Grill.”

As we entered the room Elliott, glass in hand, was standing opposite Scarlet at a ponderous sideboard, but on seeing us he hastily set aside his drink and greeted me with faultless cordiality. Hilda moved over to Scarlet and said a few friendly words, which were received with a punctiliously correct, but unresponsive, smile. A large and unhealthy looking servant, wearing the expression of one who for years had unsuccessfully combated a secret malady, stood in attendance. In his shadow hovered the same unassured youth who had previously ushered us into the house.

The room was long and low. Its brick walls, calcimined at one time to a harsh white, were now dingy. Streaked in places by the trickling moisture, they had a mildewed and leprous look. Clammy walls. Along one side of the room, set close to the ceiling, were several small windows, their lower edges level with the lawn, now invisible in the night. Two brass lamps suspended from the ceiling, served as illumination, and their soft, yellow glow, falling in two interesting arcs of light on the white tablecloth, cast a shower of tiny sparkles among the chinaware and silver. At one end of the room was the sideboard where Elliott had been standing and at the other end, crouching in the shadows like some huge mythical monster, was a great stove.

The room was cheerless and inhospitable. Probably in the old days there had been some practical reason for its existence. It had filled a logical need. When the ancient Elliotts had tilled the land and dwelt in more restricted quarters, the room had in all likelihood been a place of comfort and warmth. Now, like the rest of the house, it was damp, and depressing, more like the tomb of appetites than their sanctuary.

When we were seated at the table, Elliott immediately seized his glass and brandished it aloft.

“May all our dreams come true,” he cried, looking directly at me, and by that token I knew that the issue was joined.

He threw back his head and drank deeply, then regarded us with a smile.

“Well, Landor,” he asked jovially, “what do you think of that? Was it a good toast?”

“It was obviously in order,” I replied. “Do you happen to be interested in dreams?”

“Hugely,” he said. “Not my own, though. I enjoy interpreting others.”

With a faint smile touching the corners of her lips, Scarlet said, “Perhaps, David, you have one that would amuse Mr. Elliott.”

“Don’t tell it if it deals with death,” Hilda calmly put in. “The Elliotts have always been a childishly superstitious tribe.”

She cast a mocking glance at her husband, then turning to Scarlet, continued, “For a strong man he has the most unaccountable terror of death. The mere mention of the word makes him uneasy, doesn’t it, John? I suppose you can’t understand that, Miss MacKellar… the fear of death as an abstract thing?”

As though expecting an answer she looked brightly from one to the other, but none was forthcoming. For a space no one spoke, then Elliott broke the silence by saying in a voice of suppressed rage: “It’s hardly a topic in which Miss MacKellar would be deeply interested. Let’s change it.”

“How very stupid of me!” exclaimed Hilda contritely. “I should have been more considerate.”

Elliott was frowning impatiently into his glass and two spots of red were glowing in Scarlet’s dead-white cheeks. As she looked restlessly about her, I was reminded of a cornered animal.

“Life’s more interesting to me,” she said, with a swift glance at Elliott. “Perhaps your husband agrees.”

At her words he raised his angry eyes from his glass and caught her glance with a look filled with meaning.

“Right you are, Miss MacKellar!” he cried. “Here’s to life and all that it has to offer!”

Scarlet raised her glass to her lips and drank with Elliott.

“How charmingly virile,” said Hilda, with innocent appreciation. “Strength and beauty generously accepting life. Well, here’s a toast to death. Will you drink with me, David?”

As she rose from the table I followed her example and extended my glass to hers. Her hand was trembling slightly and beneath her spirit of mockery I caught a hint of tense earnestness.

“Here’s to death!” she cried in a ringing voice, dramatically raising her arm, “Death, death, death, and all that it has to offer! Drink, David, and remember, all that it has to offer.”

“Sit down, you devil,” growled Elliott, half rising from his chair. “Are you mad?”

She calmly resumed her chair and I looked at her with undisguised admiration. Her flushed face and sparkling eyes made it hard to believe that her life was ebbing out, and as the dinner progressed I gradually began to attach less importance to the words she had spoken to me upstairs in the gloomy room. I convinced myself that she had merely yielded to a momentary wave of depression induced by shadows and stifling walls. If I could only prevail on her to escape from this place I felt sure that she would speedily regain her health. I resolved to make the attempt.

For the remainder of the dinner she permitted her husband to dominate the table; and as the wine grew warm in his veins he carried on an overbearing monologue with Scarlet as his chosen audience. It was obvious that he was deliberately trying to belittle Hilda and me by excluding us from the charmed circle of his words. At the same time, through veiled allusion and sarcastic innuendoes, he kept us dangling like ridiculous jumping-jacks in front of Scarlet’s amused eyes. Several times in the course of his tirade he so successfully penetrated beneath the surface with his disagreeable insinuations that I was on the point of checking him, but the warning light in Hilda’s eyes and her attitude of good-natured detachment restrained me from introducing another element of discord. As the dinner drew to a close he made a last attempt to obliterate from his mind the sting of his previous defeat.

“What’s marriage, anyway,” he exclaimed with a large gesture, “but an abortive attempt to crystallize an essence that is essentially fluid? The poet, poor wretch, sings about his silly soul. Why? Why does he sing about his silly soul? Merely because he’s too damn puny to contain anything heavier.”

To thrust his point well home he paused and regarded me with an unpleasant smile, then resumed his one-sided attack, “Give him a heart and a good pair of lungs, put a strong appetite in his belly, breathe into him a proper appreciation of women, and the ability to overcome their scruples, and then harken to his song. Watch him forget his fragrant soul.”

His eyes shifted to Hilda, who, with a patient smile, was listening politely. Her indifference seemed to annoy him, and he continued with increased venom, “Those who dream so much about another world are damn seldom able to find their way around in this one. They appreciate poets because, like them, they have no appetite for pleasure, no ability to give it. Tell me, Miss MacKellar, tell me, Scarlet, aren’t there some caresses you remember that have expressed more downright passion than all the poems you’ve ever read, all of them put together?”

“I’ve never read much poetry,” she replied.

He looked at her for an instant with an appreciative eye, then slapping his hand on the table, burst into a loud laugh.

“Splendid,” he cried. “You’ve not read much poetry, but—”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she interrupted lightly. “Some poets I know can be quite intense when it comes to earthly matters.”

She smiled at me across the table, Elliott following her eyes.

“Some poets,” he remarked, “seem to cover a lot of ground in spite of their silly dreams.”

“All men are forgetful at times,” said Scarlet.

To meet their eyes without flinching required all of the self-possession I could command, but in spite of the turmoil within me I was able to remark in a natural voice, “You’ve only begun to skim the surface, Elliott. You should read a little deeper.”

“There’s too much slush on the top,” he replied, and turned back to Scarlet.

“Perhaps you’re right,” remarked Hilda, regarding her husband with an expression of rather impersonal antagonism, “but at least the poet can sin and sing about it while other men – you, for one – can only sin and swear. If we must have sin, I prefer it with a song. The other grows so tiresome. It’s like a business – dull.”

Flushed now and reckless, Elliott stared at her with open hostility.

“More rattle-brained reasoning,” he said, contemptuously, rising from the table. “Come,” he added to Scarlet, “let’s take a walk. It’s stuffy here.”

As if we had conveniently ceased to exist, he led Scarlet from the room. The servants entered, but on seeing us still standing at the table, withdrew. The moment they were gone a shade of weariness passed over Hilda’s face, and she sank in her chair, a scrap of a smile playing round her lips.

“Well, David,” she said, “that’s what might be known as a merry little dinner party. Four good friends dining in cozy intimacy.”

“It could easily have been worse.”

“Yes. We could have assaulted each other until the militia interfered. Just one of the remarks you didn’t make, but were dying to, would have been enough. It was-kind of you to check them.”

“Your masterful detachment helped me. After your first attack you were splendidly indifferent – irritatingly so.”

“Only on the surface. It seems that there’s still enough strength left in me to feed a healthy temper. If I hadn’t been so tired I’d have entered more spiritedly into the conflict.”

“Can you give me one good reason, Hilda, for your remaining here any longer?”

In my earnestness I leaned across the table and took her hands in mine. Cold and lifeless, they lay huddled in my palms as though seeking warmth.

“None that would satisfy you,” she replied. “I told you once how things were with me. Have you forgotten so soon?”

I made no reply, but stared hopelessly down at the tablecloth as mechanically I warmed her hands. To me there was still so much in life worth seeking that I found it hard to believe she had already abandoned the search.

“Come,” she said at last. “You look altogether too dismal. Let’s leave this place of mirth for outer darkness.”

She led me to the back veranda of the house, where she made me sit down close beside her on the steps. In front of us hung the heavy curtain of the night, behind which the marshes lay concealed. It was a starless evening, the darkness being almost palpable. In vibrating waves of sound the chorus of night things rose from the grass. The scent of damp earth and vegetation floated through the air. The odor was reminiscent of an abandoned garden. Staring into the blackness I could picture what lay before me, an old, forgotten garden over-run with weeds.

“It’s not so bad here, is it?” she said, settling herself comfortably.

“No,” I replied, “but when I think of that great, black house behind us, I feel as if I were sitting on the edge of a grave.”

“How comfortably you put things. Tell me, David, what’s been happening to you? Your face looks as if someone had mistaken it for a pincushion.”

“I’ve been out on the marshes with the mosquitoes.”

“Alone?”

“Yes. I was caught in a storm.”

“That was dangerous. I should have been with you.”

“That would have been the end of everything.”

“Why?”

“Because it would have killed you.”

“Would that have been the end? How do you know? It might have been the beginning.”

“That’s what I was trying to find out. It may have been foolish of me, but I was attempting to reach the island.”

“And failed?”

“Abjectly. I lost my wits and fled in terror. The rain and the reeds and the quicksand. I was sinking, going down slowly – it was like the dream.”

“Not the real dream, David? Not your dream – our dream?”

With a feeling of guilt I remembered that I had never been honest with her about the dream, but had distorted the facts in my favor. She knew nothing about my leaving her night after night on the marshes and rushing back to shore. Partly for her sake, but more so for my own, I had kept much from her. Scarlet knew more about the true significance of the dream than she did. Even Elliott had heard a fairer version. I was troubled by this knowledge. Hilda’s questioning voice broke in accusingly on my thoughts.

“It wasn’t like the real dream?” she persisted. “The real dream isn’t terrible?”

There was a quality of earnestness in her voice which made it impossible for me to continue the deception.

“Yes, Hilda, the real dream is terrible,” I replied slowly. “At least, to me it is. My experience on the marshes was very much like it. If anything, I behaved less despicably in real life. That’s why I’m troubled. I can’t understand myself. I want to find out.”

Looking straight in front of me, I told her then the true story of the dream, and the effect it had on me. As I recounted my repeated desertions, I felt as though I were going through some painful operation in which my character was being stripped of all protecting tissue. When I had finished I continued to stare ahead of me. I could hear Hilda breathing softly by my side. She made no reply, but I could see that she, too, was gazing across the night in the direction of the marshes. The silence became unendurable. I turned and looked her full in the face, then laughed abruptly in a false key.

“Well,” I asked, “what do you think of your friend now?”

She started and returned my gaze, steadily and without reproach.

“It must be dreadful for you, David,” she replied. “To think what you’ve been going through all summer, and I haven’t known. Oh, why didn’t you tell me?”

“Doesn’t the dream itself answer that question?”

“No. How can you help what happens in a dream? And, after all, it is only a dream. You’ve no control over yourself when that comes on.”

“It’s an indication, Hilda.”

“Oh, David, don’t say that,” she said, and there was a note of entreaty in her voice. “Don’t try to make me believe that. Why, in reality, you risked your life out there on the marshes for the sake of a dream. It was partly for my sake, too. Isn’t that an indication?”

“I proved myself a coward in either case, that’s all.”

“You mustn’t talk like that,” she pleaded. “Don’t you see what you’re doing?”

“I’m showing you what I am,” I replied grimly.

She was silent for a while and when she spoke again I detected a note of sadness in her voice.

“It’s only natural,” she said. “It’s to be expected. You’ve more to live for than I. There’s nothing solid to which I care to return, nothing to call me back. I can afford to be fearless.”

“But in your heart you’re disappointed just the same,” I said. “Can you truthfully tell me you’re not?”

“Yes,” she replied. “I can truthfully tell you that. If anything, I’m rather proud of you. It was a divinely inspired piece of madness, that venture of yours.”

She moved down a step and with a little sigh rested her head against my knee.

“Don’t let’s talk about it any more,” she said drowsily. “I feel as if I could rest with you. Once I was never tired, David. Now I’m never anything else.”

I touched her neck lightly with the tips of my fingers, and sat motionless as her breathing grew more regular. The minutes slipped past and still she did not stir. Like a weary child, exhausted by the events of the day, she had fallen asleep beside me. A feeling of still happiness warmed my heart. I felt that I could be content always to sit there and guard her in her sleep. I could look at her now without the fear of troubling her with what she might see in my eyes. As I looked down at her small head, and the drooping outline of her body, a bright mist swam before my eyes and danced in the darkness surrounding me. Somewhere beneath that darkness the island lay floating on the marshes. I wondered if, after all, in spite of my doubts and fears, a refuge might not be waiting for us out there at the end of the dream.

XVII

Although the evening was well advanced when I left Hilda, I had no desire to return to the cottage. I was strangely alert and happy. An unfamiliar feeling of confidence stimulated my self-respect. I was warmed by a glow of hope. To check this heady sensation of well-being, this unaccountable lightness of heart, a warning voice within me kept asking, “Why should you be happy? For what is there to hope?” And unable to answer this insistent voice, I drove it from my ears. It was encroaching on my new-found sense of freedom, threatening to absorb it.

For some minutes I walked along the cliffs overhanging an invisible sea. From far below came the faint chiming of the surf. Like a shower of silver petals it fell through the silence. No moon, no stars, darkness, and the soft, moist breath of the night.

The narrow cliff path was taking me in the direction of the Ark, where the shelving rocks massed themselves against the waves. Hunter Aird occasionally haunted this spot at night. Moved by a desire to talk with him, I hastened my pace. It had been some time since I had last seen Aird, and now that I came to think of it, I found that I had rather missed his companionship. Of late I had been missing a lot of things. Hardly living at all. But now perhaps things would be different. Happier. Escape no longer seemed so hopelessly impossible. Hilda had been different tonight. I had been quick to notice it.

As I approached the Ark my expansive mood gradually subsided. I no longer felt eager to talk and was almost glad when Hunter Aird’s angular figure was nowhere to be seen. For a moment I stood irresolutely studying the dim outline of the squat, amphibious structure. Sharp beams of light crept through its shuttered windows, and from within came the sound of shuffling feet, laughter, and loud voices. Suddenly the door flew open and a stream of light like a golden snake ran swiftly up the trunk of a stunted pine tree near which I was standing. A small fisherman, as though being urged by some powerful, but unseen force, lurched across the threshold as the door slammed behind him.

“They can all go to hell,” he muttered comfortingly to himself as he regarded the door, then with drunken inconsistency he began to pound on it and plead for readmittance.

With sympathetic interest I listened to the mouthings of this small soul who had been ejected so unceremoniously from his alcoholic paradise. There was something fundamental in the earnestness of his entreaties. He was obviously sincere in his craving for drink and companionship. Then as suddenly as it had been closed behind him, the door flew open again and he was snatched from sight.

I had a vague impulse to follow him inside, if only to witness his joy at being received back into the fold. But it was not alone for this reason that I desired to enter the Ark. A recrudescence of the craving for excitement that had often plagued me in the city was again stirring. I had no real interest in the fortunes and flounderings of this drunken fisherman, but a strong desire to emulate his example. Like one endeavoring to shake off the familiar hand of an unwelcome companion, I turned impatiently from the door and made my way into the shadow of the rocks.

I hardly know whether or not a person can be both happy and depressed at the same time. Somewhere I think I once read in a book of a character’s being “sadly happy” and, if I remember rightly, I thought at the time that the expression was a short cut to nowhere. But as I sat on the rocks and stared out at the dark sea, these two emotions – happiness and sorrow – seemed to blend harmoniously in me into a single mood of tranquillity. I felt that I was on the verge of some glorious fulfillment which, if denied me, would lead to life-long incompleteness.

The air was filled with the din of charging water, and occasionally scarves of spray brushed across my face. As my thoughts turned back to the evening I had spent with Hilda I involuntarily stroked my knee where her head had rested. For more than an hour she had slept peacefully beside me, and although my body had grown numb from the tenseness of its position, I had continued to let her sleep, for she seemed to be in mortal need of it. Later she had awakened with a start and had clung to me as though in fear of being taken away.

“David,” she had said in an awed voice.

“Yes, Hilda, what is it?”

“It came to me, too.”

“What came to you?”

“The dream. It came to me. Oh, David, it was just as you said, but there were other things.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “What were the other things?”

“You left me alone on the marshes, but on the shore I could see someone waiting for you – a woman. She was calling you back to her, David, and…”

“Yes?”

“It was Scarlet.”

I made no answer, and she continued hurriedly. “It was Scarlet, David, and I had the strangest feeling. It was so lonely and far away out there, and yet I had no desire to turn back. I felt that something wonderful was just ahead – peace, freedom, happiness. I can feel it still. But something restrained me from going alone. I wanted you, my friend. Around me the reeds were bristling like hostile spears. They were darting at my body and I seized them in my hands, and tore them away. I remember that I was dressed in white and my robe was pierced in many places. Then, flinging the reeds aside, I stretched out my arms and called to you as you fled back to her. The strange, unearthly half-light was draining out of the sky. Soon I would be left alone. I called you with all my strength, and in my heart there was a terrible pain – black emptiness. I wanted you to come back to me and hold me in your arms. I wanted you to kiss me, David, to take me… anything to keep you from that woman, but you went to her!”

She stifled a cry, and springing to her feet, covered her eyes with her hands. She was trembling violently.

“They’re swaying,” she whispered. “I can see them now, the long, slim reeds on the marshes. Swaying in the twilight like a sea of angry spears.”

Then she dropped her hands to her sides and looked me straight in the eyes.

“I wanted you then, David,” she said, “as a woman wants a man, and that’s how I want you now, but there’s more to it than that. I can’t explain what I mean, but life – is – opening up… there’s light at the end.”

As I raised my eyes to hers and saw the undaunted light in them I think I experienced for one clear moment the most exquisite revelation of understanding a man can attain on earth. I felt as though my faculties had been sharpened and intensified, my sympathy extended, my perception deepened. Although Hilda appealed to me in a compellingly personal way, my feeling for her at that moment was almost selfless. It was like a great bird liberated after a long captivity, poised on strong wings and ready to mount into the air lanes of the sky out of pure joy for its tireless existence. I doubt if I saw the actual woman silently confronting me, for she seemed to have blended with life itself, and with something greater beyond. Then the contact snapped and she swayed forward, an expression of exhaustion shadowing her face.

“Take me in your arms and hold me,” she said.

I had the strange feeling that I was holding not only her woman’s body, but also something that could never be captured or claimed. It was as though some mysterious and beautiful being had brushed against me in its flight. Her head rested on my shoulder and her body relaxed. A feeling of hope stole into my heart like the first faint streaks of dawn. I held her lightly in my arms.

“First I sleep on your knee,” she murmured, “then I move up to your shoulders. You’re a great comfort, David.”

“Now you’re going to bed,” I told her. “It’s high time you did.”

“I’ll sleep better tonight, I think,” she replied.

I took her to the stairs and watched her mount slowly up into the darkness. Once she looked down at me from the shadows and smiled.

“Don’t worry,” she called in a low voice. “I’m better now. You’re not unhappy, are you?”

“No,” I replied, “if you’re not.”

“Good friend.”

She turned her face back to the darkness and left me standing alone beneath the soft radiance of the hanging lamps. I wondered what would happen to us on the marshes when the dream returned that night.

As I left the house and walked down the driveway, it came to my mind that since dinner neither Scarlet nor Elliott had returned.

•   •   •   •   •

Under the hypnotic influence of the churning water I must have fallen into a light doze as my mind dwelt on the events of the evening, for suddenly I came back to a consciousness of my surroundings with a feeling that I was no longer alone. Glancing quickly round, I saw a tall figure standing behind me, and in my confusion I gained the impression that the figure was swaying unsteadily back and forth as though it were being fanned in the waves of mist drifting across the rocks.

“That you, Aird?” I asked uneasily.

“No, poet,” came the thick-voiced reply. “What the hell would I be doing as Hunter Aird? I’m Elliott. John Elliott. You’ve met my wife.”

Although I was startled by the unexpected presence of Elliott, my instinctive antagonism for the man restrained me from showing my feelings.

“Oh, yes,” I replied indifferently. “I left her only a short time ago. We were wondering what had become of you and Scarlet.”

“Wondering, were you? Well, I took her home. She’s there now, for all I care a damn.”

“Evidently your evening has not been an altogether pleasant one.”

“Blood and fire one minute, claws the next,” he muttered furiously as if to himself. “She’s playing with me, but I know her little game and how to play it, too.”

For some reason I experienced a feeling of satisfaction on hearing that Scarlet had made a dupe of Elliott. The knowledge pleased me more than I was willing to admit.

“What’s the hour?” I asked, rising from the rocks.

At this he laughed and slapped me across the back.

“It’s late, poet,” he said. “Ever so late. Past three, I suspect. Poor poet, sitting alone by the waves. Is your stomach strong enough to stand whiskey? If it is I’ll buy you a drink.”

His invitation carried with it an element of challenge, and although I was loath to drink with him, a feeling of pride prompted me to accept. Also, for an altogether different reason, his invitation was not wholly unwelcome. Only a few more hours remained of the night and if I could find some satisfactory pretext to keep from going to bed I would thus be able to escape the dream and its unpleasant consequences. Deliberately to do this would seem like an act of cowardice, but to become involved in a situation from which it would be difficult to withdraw was surely sufficient justification to excuse me for missing the nightly ordeal. I made up my mind quickly and decided to accept.

“It used to be,” I said.

“Let’s see if it’s changed,” he replied with a light of triumph in his eyes.

Thrusting his arm through mine, he turned back to the Ark.

•   •   •   •   •

The interior of the place was not altogether unexpected. Lanterns hung from the low cross- beams and the floor and tables were splashed here and there with shifting patches of light. Across one side of the room ran a long bar, against which, as we entered, three late drinkers were leaning in various stages of incompetence. Like age-old oaks enfeebled at last by the elements, these men were finding it difficult to realize that the ground was no longer firm beneath their feet. In order to convince themselves of their stability they were drinking with stubborn courage through the night. I recognized these worthy persons and greeted them as friends. In turn they nodded to me with solemn affability. To Elliott, after a weighty stare of ill-concealed hostility, they eloquently turned their broad backs and called for another drink. Their lack of cordiality was copiously offset by the obsequious attention of the owner who fussily arranged us at a table by which he stood caressing Elliott with his sleepy, red-rimmed eyes.

“Some of your Special, Mr. Elliott?” he suggested.

“Why not?” replied Elliott. “Bring the bottle, ice, and a couple of glasses.”

The man laughed obediently and hastened to a locker which he proceeded to open with great unction and rattling of keys, as though he were endeavoring to draw the attention of his prized guest to the care he exercised in the conservation of his private stock. This fat, dull-looking creature, with his loose lips and dishonest eyes, aroused in me a feeling of profound dislike. The mere fact that he was so earnest in his efforts to please Elliott was enough to stimulate my antagonism. After one drink I conceived a desire to insult the man if only for the sake of his master.

“I don’t like that person,” I said, unreasonably, as I refilled my glass. “Send him away.”

“Go away,” commanded Elliott, with unexpected readiness. Like a whipped dog the owner withdrew to his bar.

Elliott was already partly drunk, and I suspected, in a rather unreliable mood. Behind his loose and untidy good nature there seemed to lurk a certain grim motive. In his bloodshot eyes, as they studied my face, I detected a red spark of malice. When I raised the glass to my lips, he smiled ironically and I set it down untouched.

“Why don’t you drink it, poet?” he said. “It won’t hurt you. It might even make you human.”

“Like you, for example?” I asked, irritated in spite of myself.

He regarded me with smoldering eyes.

“What do you mean by that, Landor? Are you comparing yourself with me?”

“Yes, and to your disadvantage,” I replied with a pleasurable glow of anger. “You were good enough to imply that if I drank your whiskey I might become human, meaning, of course, that as things stand I’m deficient in that greatly overestimated quality. I was merely wondering whether I’d rather be drunk and the way you are, or sober and the way I am. You see, our ideas of what it means to be human hardly coincide.”

“Coincide, hell!” he exclaimed. “They’re miles apart. If you’d like to know exactly what I think of you and all your damned ideas—”

“Pull in, Elliott,” I warned, deliberately emptying my glass. “I’ve had enough of your opinions for one night. They’re both childish and boring. Did you ask me in here to continue your insults?”

“Oh, poet,” he said, extending a mollifying hand, “don’t be so quick. We’ve so much in common, the pair of us… almost like brothers.”

“What, for instance?” I asked with a faint inkling of the motive behind his drunken mood.

He smiled sleepily at me but made no reply. Presently he sagged forward in his chair, his eyes closed and his hand released the glass.

“What have we in common, Elliott?” I urged, feeling in the back-waters of my mind that in truth we were not so far apart. “Tell me, why are we like brothers?”

“So much in common,” he muttered indistinctly. “So much in common. Just like brothers, we are, but I know her game, damn her eyes. She can’t play it on me.”

His muttering ended in a ponderous sigh, and he slept, his chin resting on his breast. Around the Ark the wind searched diligently and fingered at the shutters. The slap and fall of the surf as it lashed against the rocks drove through the air an insistent volley of sound, the drone of worried water. At the bar the three imperiled oaks were exchanging non-committal snatches of conversation, and at the far end of the room, well out of harm’s way, a small, familiar figure lay sprawled across a table. I recognized in him the inebriated man who had been so roughly expelled from the Ark. Even now in his sleep he was clinging to the table with his stubby hands as though anticipating another expulsion. Behind the bar the owner was hovering watchfully near the fishermen, casting them from time to time a glance in which greed and apprehension furtively struggled for control. The minutes passed, the wind sucked at the building and the clamorous voice of the waves filled the air. From the huddled figure at the table snores issued with clock- like regularity. Beneath this medley of sound I sat in a peculiarly soothed frame of mind as the whiskey warmed my spirit. I was grateful for the bottle and reached for it to refill my glass, but as I moved, Elliott, bringing himself up with a start, automatically anticipated my intention.

“What’s that, poet?” he said, his dull eyes fixed on my face. “Still there, I see. Want another drink?”

He manipulated the bottle unsteadily and gulped down half a glass of the liquor. This seemed to revive him. He settled back in his chair and looked round the room with aggressively brooding eyes. The fishermen held his attention.

“They’re swine, poet,” he said with a wave of his hand. “Swine. I hold their lives. Don’t notice them.”

At the sound of his voice the proprietor hurried joyfully from behind the bar and set before us as tribute a plate of cheese and crackers, across which he had placed with an erring sense of daintiness a large and deadly looking knife, which in former days had done heavier execution. Upon seeing the special attention being shown us, the fishermen muttered together, then laughed sarcastically.

“Don’t notice them,” cried Elliott, crumbling a cracker between his fingers. “They’re swine, I tell you. Their lives are in my hands… like that.”

The crumbs fell to the table as he opened his powerful hand. His eyes were blazing now and he was talking in a louder voice. As I looked thoughtfully at the knife, a little, unpleasant fancy, half-formed but fascinating, was shaping itself in my mind. For a moment I permitted myself to dwell upon it, and then I averted my eyes from the long blade and looked up at Elliott almost guiltily. He returned my gaze with a mocking expression. Irritated by his sense of power, I remarked.

“The swine seem to entertain very little regard for their master.”

“So you’ve noticed that, have you, poet?” he asked, drawing his chair close to mine and throwing an arm across my shoulder. “Well, you’ve got a good pair of eyes in your head, my little man. I suppose you’ve also noticed that someone else isn’t so fond of her master. How about that, my puny poet?”

I threw off his arm and pushed him from me, but his aggressive good nature seemed undisturbed. Still smiling cunningly, he poured himself out another drink and leered at me over the glass.

“Don’t do that, poet,” he said. “I’m fond of you because you’re so fond of my wife. Let’s come to an understanding. I’ll take Scarlet and you can have—”

“Shut up, Elliott,” I said. “You’re drunk now or you wouldn’t be talking like that – or, perhaps, you would.”

Unsteadily he rose to his feet and once more threw an arm around my shoulder. This time he held me in a vice-like grip.

“Oh, the little man’s angry,” he admonished jeeringly. “What are you so particular about, anyway? Where have I been all summer?”

“Steady, Elliott,” I said in a low voice. “You’re making a fool of yourself. Let me go.”

Tightening his grip, he breathed down in my face, a smile of cruel confidence distorting his lips.

“Don’t be frightened, poet,” he replied. “I’m fond of you. Want to know why I asked you in here tonight? Want to know?”

“Yes,” I said. “Get it over with and sit down.”

“You want to know, eh?” he continued teasingly. “Well, listen, poet. You’re listening?”

“Yes. What is it?”

“Well, I asked you in here because you’re in love with my wife. Do you understand now? Because you’re a poor, puny little thing, a sneak, and I wanted to tell you about it.”

I twisted free from his grasp, giving him a shove that sent him staggering across the room. He brought up against the bar, where he stood swaying with lowered head as he regarded me with a sarcastic smile.

“Good, little man,” he taunted. “Why don’t you get angry? Are you afraid of me?”

He held out his two great fists and waited. The men looked up from their glasses and regarded us with mild interest. The owner, behind the bar, stood transfixed, a bottle poised in his hand. A feeling of weakness overcame me. Trembling with suppressed rage I was forced to sit down. I realized that there was some truth in what Elliott had said. I had no desire to fight. Not in his way, at any rate. It would give me little satisfaction to bruise his body and tear at his flesh. He would still be in the world, as much of a problem as ever, as much of a menace to Hilda. If I could only kill him there would be some reason in it, something would be settled. Fighting was a mere waste of time – rumpling inefficiency. I hated it. The room was silent, and in the silence I sat wondering what I should do. Something must be done. I realized that. It was now too late to ward him off. His determination to force the issue was not solely due to liquor.

And all the time my eyes were resting on the knife, running absently along its blade, studying its heavy handle. What had it seen on the high seas, I wondered, as if to escape a perilous thought.

“Well, poet,” I heard him saying. “You haven’t done anything yet. I’m waiting. Are you dreaming about my wife?”

“Elliott,” I said, making one last attempt to silence him. “Come over here and sit down. You don’t know what you’re doing now.”

“Do you hear that, you swine?” he cried, turning to the men. “The poor little chap’s afraid of his life, and he tried to tell me I don’t know what I’m doing. I know, by God, that he’s in love with my—”

I had done the thing. From the moment my eyes had rested on the knife the idea had been fixed in my mind. Before he could finish his sentence, the heavy weapon with a low whir flashed across the patches of light and struck him between the eyes. He took one step forward and held out his arm as though he would engage me in conversation and were only searching for the right word. Then a look of confusion clouded his eyes, and rocking gently on his feet, he buckled to the floor.

The three fishermen looked down at him with drunken curiosity but made no effort to go to his assistance. After a careful examination of the still body, they transferred their gaze to me and smiled blandly.

“You did it very nice, Mr. Landor,” said one of them. “Too bad’ it wasn’t the blade.”

The proprietor was crouching by Elliott and applying ice to his head.

“Help me lift him,” he asked the men.

They stared at him sullenly, but made no answer. Discomfited by their silence, he screwed his fat neck around and looked at me over his shoulder.

“If he’s dead,” he said, “I’ll see the constable knows.”

“If he’s dead,” I replied, fascinated by the idea, “I think I’ll make a good job of it and lay you out beside him.”

The man shuddered and turned back to Elliott as though seeking comfort from his inanimate body. I resumed my chair at the table and poured myself out a drink.

Something told me that Elliott was not dead. Now that my anger was passed I was glad of it. To have killed him would have settled nothing. I realized that now. I would still have Hilda to deal with, one problem instead of another. But suppose he were dead. Suppose I had actually killed him. I started to my feet and crossed the room. Elliott’s face was pallidly calm and across his forehead blood was flowing from an ugly bruise. As I looked down at the inert mass of flesh I began to feel a throbbing in my ears. A sensation of loneliness took hold of me.

“He isn’t dead, is he?” I asked, hardly recognizing my own voice.

For the first time the fishermen became interested to the point of activity. One of them bent over and peered down into Elliott’s face.

“He’s not dead,” he said regretfully, and resumed, with no little effort, an erect position. “He’s breathing… like an ox.”

I returned to my chair and sat down to wait until Elliott had revived. It would be interesting now to see what he would do. Finally, after half an hour of faithful endeavor, the efforts of the proprietor were successful. A shiver ran through Elliott’s body and he opened his eyes.

“Give me a drink,” he muttered.

The whiskey gave him strength, and soon, with the assistance of the delighted proprietor, he rose to his feet and stood clinging with one hand to the bar while in the other he held the knife. He seemed to be entirely sober now, and as I watched him I gained the impression that his mind was busily engaged in devising some unfathomable plan. I sat and waited, but he steadily refused to meet my eyes. When he did look up, there was an easy smile on his lips as he gazed thoughtfully at me. He was about to say something, but as if thinking better of it, he remained silent and continued to smile at his thoughts. The owner placed a chair beside him. He motioned the man away. When he had finished another glass of whiskey, he walked carefully across the room to the door, where he halted to look back at me.

“I don’t have to dream about my wife,” he said, pointing to me with the knife. “I’ve got her. Understand?”

He went out and quietly closed the door. The room became still and the three men returned to their glasses.

Elliott bore the scar but also the victory. His parting words were more painful for me to bear than any damage he could do to my body. With a feeling of utter defeat I rested my head on my hands and studied the grain in the table. Outside the wind tortured the sobbing pines. The proprietor moved slowly about the room taking the lanterns down from the crossbeams. In his secluded corner the sleeping fisherman continued to snore with unflagging energy. One of the oaks lurched from the bar and sprawled to the floor. Laughing like pleased children the remaining oaks gathered him up between them and dragged him away.

“It’s morning now,” said the owner in a husky voice.

XVIII

When I left the Ark, pools of daylight were lying among the clouds. Across the sea crept a putty-colored shadow pushing in front of it a wave of darkness. Ahead of me on the path thin columns of mist rose in the air and floated away among the trees like phantoms saddened by the approach of day. The chill of morning lay round me. My body felt cold and bloodless. Days seemed to have passed since I had set out from MacKellar’s cottage to Elliott’s house. Since then I had run the gamut of emotions, and now the reaction was setting in.

Years before, in my childhood, I had once stood in the early daylight and looked down at the frost clinging to some cinders my father had placed round a rose bush. I remembered those cinders now. Like them I was burned out and cold.

Smoothly the dawn flooded the sky, filling the pools with colors until at last they broke from their settings and merged into a sea of light in which the rose-tipped clouds floated like dream-built islands.

When I reached the grove I turned in, but hesitated before the heavy darkness of the place. It was as though night had selected this tunnel of trees as an avenue of escape. I had been too long already with the night and, despite my weariness, I was unable to bring myself to tread this passageway of gloom. With a feeling of relief I turned back to the path and walked along the cliffs. Far below me huddled the huts of the fishermen, spirals of smoke curling up from their chimneys. Already a few women were astir, busily engaged in collecting driftwood from the beach. A gull, poised for his plunge, hung over the ocean. As he dropped like a gray smudge through the air, I breathed a warning to the heedless fish below. There was a faint splash of water, then the gull rose with a quivering slip of silver in his claws, and circling inland over the tree tops, dropped like a thought.

Pondering over this daybreak tragedy, I continued along the path until I found myself standing once more in front of Elliott’s gate. For a while I stood there studying the granite hand slowly breaking the life of its victim. My gaze dropped from the tortured deer and wandered across the lawn. I wondered whether Hilda was sleeping now or struggling back to life. In fancy I saw myself standing by her bed, waiting for her to open her eyes. Elliott’s words returned. “I don’t have to dream about my wife. I’ve got her.”

A feeling of futility came over me. Without realizing what I was doing, I moved across the lawn. In my mind still floated a picture of Hilda lying asleep in bed. I was looking down at her – waiting. Her lashes parted and her eyes filled with impossible fulfillment as they rested on my face. Then she smiled and called my name and I, dropping to my knees beside the bed, took her face in my hands. “This will be the beginning of a new day,” I murmured. “It will always be morning now.”

Quietly I approached the house impelled by this vision. Forgotten now was the fatigue of the evening. I was conscious only of an overpowering desire to be with Hilda.

Then as though my mind had summoned her image, I saw her standing like a distracted apparition in a doorway of a deserted wing of the house. It was but a momentary glimpse before she was gone, wavering like a phantom down the garden path.

So unexpectedly had she flashed across my sight that for a moment I was unable to grasp the real significance of what I had seen. Strangely enough, as I gazed at the barren wing, I was reminded of a story I had once read in which a demented woman had escaped at dawn from an asylum. Hilda had looked much as I had imagined that woman had looked. In the one flash I had caught of her I had seen a stark-eyed creature with dishevelled hair and fluttering hands. For an instant she had stood there tugging at her robe, then melted from view down the garden path. I was disposed to believe that the incident had not occurred, that I had created an illusion of Hilda through association.

I took a few irresolute steps toward the path, and stopped, arrested by the conviction that Hilda had actually been present only a moment ago, and that even now she was somewhere near. In the light morning air a silk scarf was fluttering from a bush. Running across the lawn, I snatched the thing and examined it. There was no doubt. It was hers. I had seen her wearing it many times. I stuffed the scarf into my pocket and started down the path to the garden. The place was deserted. A scent of damp earth and decaying vegetation still lingered in the air, vividly bringing back to me the night just passed when together we had sat on the steps. I glanced quickly up at them, my heart heavy with misgiving.

“Hilda,” I called, then spying a path at the end of the abandoned garden, I ran down it, repeatedly calling her name. At the sound of my voice startled wings fluttered in the thicket. The bushes were in the conspiracy. No answer.

Soon I was in the open fields that rose in little hillocks and cantered to the marshes. As I tore through the high, interfering grass it occurred to me that possibly Hilda had fled to the pavilion hidden away among the reeds. Altering my course, I ran in that direction. There were no daisies now. I remember thinking of that. Then as I mounted the next hillock I caught a glimpse of a white figure swaying on the brink of the hidden declivity.

“Hilda!” I called.

The figure crumpled. It dropped from view.

•   •   •   •   •

She was lying among the reeds, crying softly to herself. When I tried to take her hands from her face she resisted and turned away. To my question she made no reply, but continued to sob in a low unbalanced voice. It was disquieting to hear. From time to time she shuddered and attempted to crawl away among the reeds. Her robe had fallen from her shoulders, leaving her back and arms bare. Only a light nightdress protected her. As though she were a child I gathered her up in my arms and carried her through the reeds. When I placed her on the mat she clung to me, her face hidden in my coat. For some minutes I held her while convulsive sobs shook her body. Then gradually they decreased and she became quiet.

“Hilda,” I said.

“Not now, David,” she pleaded. “Wait.”

Beneath the assault of the newly risen sun, the fog was melting from the marshes. Here and there waves of mist remained floating lightly above the reeds, like small clouds grazing. The island lay bright and clean in its deep, green setting. Round it sparkled the band of water and between the tall trees were narrow panels of the blue sky. Hilda began to speak in a muffled voice, her face still buried in my coat.

“It was dawn, David,” she said. “I must have gone off you know, as I do. When I came to, his eyes, all bleared were looking down into mine, close, horrible eyes.”

She caught her breath, then continued in a quiet voice, “My body felt crushed and broken. I could hardly breathe. I’m that way now, struggling—”

She put her hand to her throat. An animal noise hurt her. “He had taken me, David, taken me like flesh while I was unconscious. He laughed when I ran from the room. I can hear him still. That’s all,” she added helplessly. “You see? It’s just that.”

My arms fell limply from her. As though paralyzed I sat gazing out across the marshes. There was no feeling in me, nothing. I merely wanted to sit there forever, never to speak, never to stir, never to hope nor think. Hilda’s sobs fell painfully on the silence, and I became aware that she was calling my name and looking at me. It made no difference now, I would listen, but I should never again be interested.

“But you mustn’t mind,” she was saying. “Not like that, I mean. It makes no difference, David. It can’t make any difference. A thing like that has no place in life, no meaning. I’m the same now as before. Can’t you see I’m the same? Look at me, my ally! Oh! Look at me! Body and soul I’m the same. David, do you hear?”

I looked down into her eyes and noticed with a start that tears were dropping from them. “She has been crucified,” I thought, as I absently touched a tear with the tip of one of my fingers. Then something gave way within me and my arms went round her crumpled body.

“This will be the beginning of a new day,” I heard myself saying. “It will always be morning now. Stop crying, Hilda.”

“If you will,” she said.

XIX

It was decided that Hilda should go. After what had happened she felt that she could remain no longer under the same roof with Elliott.

“Even a dog has a right to a corner,” she said, “but he has succeeded in driving me from mine.”

“But where will you go?” I asked her.

“To another corner,” she replied indifferently.

She was calmer now and had moved a little away from me. On her wan face there was an expression of resolution and in her bearing there was something aloof, almost bitter. This new mood of hers was the more difficult for me to bear because in it there was something remote, something I was unable to share.

“I don’t know exactly where that corner will be,” she continued, “but I’d like to start out for it in a ship. The isolation of a temporarily detached universe might give me a sense of security. No walls, no lurking shadows, no corridors of fear.”

For a few moments she remained silent, contemplating the picture her words had evoked, then she went on reminiscently:

“Years ago my mother took me across. It must have been in another world, a different life… he wasn’t in it then. I can hear now the slap of the waves and the steady throbbing of the engines. And the little rainbows that chased each other across the bow. I can see them as if it were only yesterday. They used to fascinate me, those little rainbows looping through the spray. It might help me out a little now if I tried to repeat the experience. What do you think, David? It might even bring back something of the past in which he had no part – ah, David, don’t look so frozen.”

My frozen expression, as Hilda had put it, was due to the fact that she had decided to leave as she had always said she would. In her escape I was only to be indirectly involved. At first she had refused to allow me to accompany her even a part of the way, but in the face of my insistent entreaties she had finally consented that I should help her to find a refuge. After that there was to be a separation.

“It’s as much for your sake as it is for mine,” she said “You must see how it is… things are in the way. My ideas are all upset. There were other problems once, but now they will always remain unsolved.”

She looked at me strangely and smiled, then added, as though to herself, “To begin life again I must first be renewed and readjusted. There are no emotions left. I’m empty.”

Although I turned an unsympathetic ear to her words I felt something of her meaning. More than her body had been outraged. She was entitled at least to herself. But the thought of the separation facing me destroyed my sense of justice. In its place I experienced a feeling of stubborn resentment.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she continued, studying my face with considering eyes. “You’re trying to make yourself believe that I’m abandoning you, taking myself out of your life, but you’re wrong there. Won’t you understand and try to help a little? We’re different now. You must realize that.”

“It’s just you, Hilda,” I replied without daring to look at her. “There’s nothing else. How things will be with me when you’re gone I can’t say. I’m not very admirable, you know. The voices in the jungle… I’m afraid of them. They whisper. You’ve never heard.”

“How do you know?” she replied, laying her hand on my arm. “Perhaps I, too, have heard them as well as other voices – more insistent ones. We have more to hope for now than we had before.”

“Do you mean that someday we shall always be together?” I asked.

“That thought has occurred to me,” she replied with an enigmatic smile. “But first we must find the way. Will you follow if I lead?”

“I’ll try,” I said. “God knows I want to.”

“Then meet me here tonight,” she answered, rising painfully from the reeds. “It will be our last rendezvous, David. We must scheme like two conspirators, for tomorrow I start on the search.”

As though moved by the same thought, we turned and gazed in silence toward the island.

•   •   •   •   •

In a bewildering confusion of mind I spent the remainder of the day wandering purposelessly about the neck of land, revisiting in search of comfort and distraction the places I had grown fond of during the course of the summer. The thing that had befallen Hilda lay like a live coal at the core of my heart, smoldering there until at times it threatened to consume in a surge of rage all other emotions in me. Only the knowledge that no action must be taken that would endanger Hilda’s chances of escape gained immunity for Elliott. At this, perhaps the turning point in her life, she was expecting me to stand by her. There was no place in her scheme of things for the satisfaction of personal revenge. Furthermore, I was unable to rid myself of the belief that in a way I had been partly responsible for her suffering. Had I not lost my temper with Elliott, the thing might never have occurred. By my actions at the Ark I had contributed directly to the outrage. Elliott was not alone to blame. Through him I had struck Hilda. Another half turn of the knife and things would have been different.

Then, too, I rather suspected that under a forced spirit of courage, Hilda was endeavoring to make it easier for me, and that, in reality, she was creeping away like a stricken creature to heal her wounds in secret, or else to die of them alone. But she had told me that we had more to hope for now than ever before. Surely she could have meant but one thing by that. Hitherto, the gulf between us had been too wide for bridging, but now, because of this recent tragedy, we were being brought closer together. As I stood by the marshes this thought gained ascendancy in my mind. “It will always be morning now,” I repeated to myself, and this single sentence summed up for me all that I hoped for in life – morning, the freshness of a new day, Hilda.

At the cottage I attempted, as far as it was possible, to avoid MacKellar. This was not difficult to do, for already he was absorbed in making sketches for a new canvas. However, he caught me once as I was passing through the room and fastened me with his keen old eyes.

“What’s the matter with you?” he demanded. “You don’t seem to have any place to sit down. Are there no chairs in this house?”

In spite of my fondness for him, I could not bring myself to tell him what had happened to Hilda. I was trying to forget the thing myself and the fact that another person also shared the knowledge would only serve as a reminder. Anyway, he was better off as it was.

“Come here,” he said when he saw me searching for an answer. “Who blew hell’s fire into your eyes? Has anything happened – something you can’t stand, I mean?”

“Hilda’s going away,” I said.

“When?” he asked without looking up from his sketch. “Are you going away, too?”

“Tomorrow,” I replied. “No, only part of the way.”

“Then you’ll come back?”

“Perhaps, Hugh, but I don’t think so. It would be strange here without her, wouldn’t it?”

“Not any stranger than it is now with both of you ramping about, but, just the same, you’d better come back – that is, if you think you could.”

I made no reply, and he went on, “Did she know you were going to tell me – I mean, did she send any message?”

Without thinking, I answered, “No.”

“Well, she’s doing the right thing,” he said after a pause. “You needn’t tell her I wish her luck, but I do. Should have done it years ago. You’d better come back, though. Think you will?”

“I’ll try, Hugh.”

For a moment he studied my face, then he said, “I don’t know what it’s all about, but, of course, I have my suspicions. You’ve been so irrational this summer that I’ve about given you up as hopeless, but remember, if you want anything that I have, it’s yours – and hers. Now, for God’s sake, go away and be lovelorn somewhere else.”

“Someday we may all be together again,” I suggested.

“Connecting rooms in a mad house,” he muttered, turning back to his work.

As I walked down through the grove Scarlet leaned out of her window and waved to me. At that moment I saw her only vaguely, as though a mist had drifted between us.

•   •   •   •   •

The chill of Fall lay round me and in the air there was a feeling of the ending of things. Summer was flowing out, bearing on its current a host of intimate associations, none of which would ever return in quite its original mood. The future was uncertain and insecure. To- morrow life would be radically altered. Hilda would drop out of it, and I should be left alone. As I considered the approaching separation, resentment rose up within me. It seemed hardly loyal of her to abandon me in her flight. Now that she had finally committed herself to a new life and was about to gain her freedom, I felt that I was entitled to share it with her. As I made my way across the dark fields to the pavilion by the marshes, this feeling was uppermost in my mind. She had said that it was to be “our last little rendezvous,” and the needlessness of the thing irritated me.

Then, without purpose or reason, Scarlet’s face floated before me in the darkness. Her full lips were parted and her eyes smiled mockingly at me, leading me on. In them I read a promise of swift and immediate solace. Already the voices in the jungle were beginning to whisper, and already I found myself hearkening to their invitation. With a feeling of revulsion, I passed my hand in front of me to erase the vision from the night. It was gone, and in its place I gazed up at the stenciled sky. The cold perfection of the stars gave me a sensation of loss. Those gleaming points of gold, so remote from life, plagued me with their beauty. In their exquisite aloofness there was something both cruel and stupid. I was seized with a desire to pluck them from their settings and toss them into the sea – anything to blur their clear-cut splendor.

When I parted the reeds, Hilda was already there. The light scarf which I had snatched from the bush that morning lay across her shoulders. She was sitting with her back towards me, and as I stepped into the clearing, I gained the impression that she had been gazing for some minutes at the indistinct outline of the island. At the sound of my step behind her she turned quickly and looked up at me with a shade of fear in her eyes. It was pitiful to see. Then she smiled and held out her hand. I took it in silence and stood looking down at her. Something in the situation brought back to me a night at the beginning of summer when I had stood on the beach and looked down at her as she sat between the two great rocks. That night now seemed to belong to an imagined existence, and I wondered if this night, too, would in time become merely another tormenting reminder of the past.

“There were little waves then,” I said absently. “I can hear them now running along the beach… like songs within a dream they sounded.”

“And I watched you from the shadow of the rocks,” she replied, continuing my thought. “You looked so odd as you stalked through the sand.”

“You said as much at the time,” I remarked.

“Was it years ago or only a night?” she asked musingly. “Are we the same persons now, or have those two ceased forever to exist? Do you know, David?”

“All I know is that I’m seeing you for the last time,” I replied, “and that you’re going away tomorrow. I can think of nothing else. It stifles me, even the thought.”

“But why do you say for the last time?” she demanded, closely watching my face.

“I don’t know. I feel it. Don’t you?”

“See,” she said in an altered voice, disregarding my question, “I have dressed for the occasion.”

Even in the dim light I was able to see that she had made some special effort with her toilet as though hoping to leave me with a beautiful memory of this last evening together.

“It’s a new dress, David,” she continued. “He has never seen me in it.”

Her voice sounded strained, and a wave of fellowship momentarily swept aside the feeling of resentment I had been harboring against her all day.

“I can’t believe it’s over,” I muttered. “I can’t believe you’re going. This part is the dream.”

“It seems strange,” she replied, “to leave all this behind and to know that you’ll be here seeing it, breathing it, living it, sitting here at night and wondering to yourself about things. Never to look at the marshes again or to follow the path by the cliffs – it makes me feel lonely already, all lost and still inside.”

“But someday we may come back together,” I suggested.

“Not until that old, bleak house has been destroyed by fire and its ruins turned beneath the plow,” she replied, prophetically. “On that day we shall return together and sit here by the marshes.”

“Then let me go with you now!” I cried.

“Don’t, David,” she said. “I hate to hear you plead.”

Once more the feeling of resentment claimed my thoughts and I looked impatiently away.

“We’ve only a short time left,” she continued. “I must hurry back tonight, and I wanted you to remember this evening happily, always happily, David.”

“That will be impossible until we are together again,” I replied shortly.

“Then when I call you must come to me quickly,” she said.

“But will you call?”

“Listen to me, David,” she said in an odd, low voice. “I shall call and you will hear me, but whether you’ll answer me or not I can’t say. Only remember this, I shall never abandon you, never. You may wander far in search of me and grow weary in the quest, but as long as a spark of hope remains alive in you the path will still be open.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She made no answer and for a time we sat in silence, her bare white arm and shoulder brushing against my sleeve. Unable to stand the silence, and endeavoring to ward off a desire that was taking possession of me, I began to explain to her the details of the flight. At first she listened attentively, but as I continued to talk I could see that she was no longer interested in what I was saying. Like an obedient schoolgirl whose mind was obviously elsewhere engaged, she sat beside me, looking curiously into my face. Finally, as if desirous of ending the interview, she said, “Yes, David. I’ll do that.”

“What?” I asked.

“Wait for you down the road until you come along with the carriage. My maid is to carry the bags and we’re both to stand in the woods. David.”

“Yes.”

“What’s to become of the little sloop? I hate to leave it behind. It’s almost a part of me – the happy part.”

“It will stay behind with me, I’m afraid.”

“But you’re going to see me off – the last of me.”

“Yes, Hilda.”

“And I’ll wave to you until you grow so small – just a little speck of friendship, and then that too will fade from view,… David!”

She rose to her feet and stood with her face buried in her hands.

“Can I do it?” she whispered. “Can I?”

Her shoulders shook and dry sobs broke from her lips. I sprang from the reeds and took her in my arms, and at the touch of her body I lost control. She dropped her hands and looked into my eyes. There was something she saw in them that made her draw back. This movement served only to intensify my desire and I held her the more fiercely, pressing my lips to her neck. A shudder ran through her and her body stiffened against mine.

“David, David, David,” she whispered, beating me back with her hands. “Friends to the end – ah, David, friends!”

With one hand I forced her head back to kiss her lips, then her resistance ceased and she lay limply in my arms, her head thrown back and a twisted smile on her lips.

“And you, too, David?” she said with a note of irony in her voice. “Go on.”

The life went out of my arms and I released her. She sank to the reeds at my feet. In a dazed way I looked down at her, then with a feeling of unspeakable regret, I raised my eyes to the cold, unchanging stars. A wan moon set in a pool of yellow haze had floated out across the sky, casting over the stars a spume of mist. Everything seemed confused and shattered. Hilda rose to her feet.

“Good night,” she said in a calm voice, and held out her hand. “I’ll try to remember all you’ve told me about to- morrow.”

I helped her up the embankment, unable to speak, but when she had taken a few steps from me I managed to call after her: “Good night, Hilda. I’m sorry.”

She stopped and hesitated, then with impulsive directness turned and retraced her steps through the clinging grass. I was conscious of a loveliness in her, more poignant than I had ever before experienced. She seemed to be lifted out of herself as if some unknown but exalted force were inspiring her emotions. I felt that she was no longer a part of her environment, that she had transcended life itself. With a feeling of adoration, sharply edged with pain, I raised my eyes to hers and drank in the beauty and tenderness of her face. I tried to speak, but could only mutter incoherently.

“I know how it is,” she said, and held out her arms to me. “Kiss me now, David.”

For a moment I clung to her as her lips brushed lightly across mine.

“Poor old thing,” she whispered. “Don’t worry. I understand.”

A moment later she was only a shadow moving through the fields.

•   •   •   •   •

Overtaxed by the events of the past two days, and exhausted from lack of sleep, I returned to the cottage. More than ever now I feared the coming of the dream. Although my body cried out for rest, my mind, as though aware of danger, still fought against taking the plunge into the weird unconsciousness inevitably induced by sleep.

The house was dark and I went directly to my room. Once the door was closed, I undressed rapidly and threw myself down on the bed, but the moment my body touched the sheets my veins seemed to tingle with fire. As often in the past I had found myself unable to rest under the strain of mental and physical excitement, a spirit of restlessness now overcame my fatigue. With renewed force my resentment against Hilda returned. If she had understood so well, why had she fought so desperately against me? On our last night together why had she made herself so aloof and unattainable? Why had she been like the stars, flawless and remote, serving only to reveal the depth of my own imperfection? I thought of her neck and shoulders, and the delicacy of her skin so smooth and white and close to me, brushing against my arm. My lips had touched her neck and the memory thrilled through me. Motionless I lay on the bed striving to beat back the corroding impulses that were scorching the most sacred thing in my life. Her woman’s beauty drugged my senses, filling me with unsatisfied longing. My arms, rigid against my sides, ached to hold her body.

Then as if to protect Hilda against the assault of my unleashed passion, once more Scarlet’s face floated across my vision. I closed my eyes to dwell on her disturbing charm.

When I opened them again, Scarlet was in the room. Like an oriental idol she stood revealed in the drifting light of the moon, her body gleaming through a gauze of black. Her hair, arranged across her head in a high fantastic wave, shone like lacquered teakwood. The moonlight lent it luster.

Silently she moved toward the bed, pausing at each step to listen while her great black eyes rested on my face – alert, devouring, caressing. Preceding her there swam through the air an oppressive wave of perfume beneath which my nerves quivered.

As she approached the bed I watched her through half- closed lids, and not until she leaned over me and covered my mouth with her lips did I show her that I was aware of her overpowering nearness.

•   •   •   •   •

Scarlet had triumphed; but it was not until several hours had passed, and she had stolen from the room as silently as she had entered, that I realized the full extent of her victory – and my defeat. Even then I endeavored to stay the flood of realization by seeking an outlet in some trivial form of action. Brushing away the drug-like perfume still lingering in the air, I glanced with dull eyes around the room, and wondered what had become of the moon. Only a moment ago, it seemed, the room had been drenched with its light, which now had drifted away leaving darkness behind. For some reason it became important for me to find out where the moon had gone. I submerged myself in this single interest, and as though destroying some damning piece of evidence, I tossed the sheets aside and felt my way to the window.

The grove was dark and still. Far away in a corner of the sky there was a hint of radiance seeping through a cloud. The moon was there, retreating. Soon even that feeble haze of light would be withdrawn. I shivered nervously and returned to bed. The moment my head touched the pillow, sleep smote my jangled mind with numbing force, and I crumpled into the unconscious.

Then came the dream. I saw Hilda far away on the green plain, moving like a white flame through the reeds. A form – half woman, half beast – was holding me to the shore. It was soft and warm, and beautiful, and it clung to me with shameful and maddening caresses. Although I endured the embrace of its arms I could not bring myself to look at the creature, but kept my eyes fixed on Hilda. Standing now before the island, she was looking back at me. I hesitated and she still waited, her arms outheld to me in an attitude of supplication. When I failed to respond, her arms dropped to her sides, and with bowed head she moved over the narrow band of water separating her from the island. It was then that I tore myself from the hot circle of those tawny arms and rushed out over the marshes in pursuit of Hilda. At the edge of the island she turned and looked back once more with an expression of infinite sadness in her eyes. Then she held out her arms to me and I thought that her lips framed my name. Thus she stood there, waiting with an encouraging smile. Filled with unconquerable terror, I stopped. Hilda turned, and with a last backward look, vanished among the trees. With all my heart I longed to follow her; but now that she was gone, melted forever from the eyes of the world, I lacked the courage to continue alone. I tried to call her name, but no sound came to my lips. Invisible wings were in the air and running feet fled past me. Over the marshes darkness was creeping as the yellow radiance faded above the island. I turned back to the dark figure waiting for me on the shore. But when its arms were once more thrown round my neck there came to me a sudden and overpowering realization of loss. Hilda was gone – dead!

With this knowledge beating at my heart I awoke and sprang from the bed. As I threw on my clothes a voice kept whispering monotonously in my brain, “Hilda is dead. Hilda is dead.” Like the beating of those invisible wings across the marshes, the echo of her death was chanted in my ears in muffled waves of sorrow. “Hilda is dead. Hilda is dead.” I should never again see her in life. I should never touch her hand or hear the sound of her voice. Hilda was dead. I had let her die. I had let her go out alone.

Then came the cry to my lips, and reason vanished. I had a vague consciousness of tearing open the door and of rushing from the cottage. There were dark trees ahead of me. They were flying past. Wind moved through their branches. It was waiting to strike me down. As I ran sobbing voices in the wind cried after me: “Hilda is dead. Hilda is dead.”

I was standing in the dark hallway of Elliott’s house. Here the dawn was reluctant to enter and the place felt damp and cheerless. As I hurried up the stairs I remembered that Hilda had once referred to the position of her room. She had seen me from its window as I waited outside in the road. I now groped my way down a dark corridor to where I thought her room was situated. On the way I opened several doors and called her name.

“Hilda! Hilda!”

Like a lost breath my words floated through the hall.

At the end of the passage I threw open the last door and entered the room. Then I stopped and a great calmness touched me.

Like a glorious promise the light of dawn rested on her face. Gone now were the lines of suffering, only peace remained. Through the open window a fresh breeze blew in from the sea. In me room there was a sense of freedom and space. There was something almost joyous in the air.

“It will always be morning now,” I thought as I looked down at the calm, untroubled face. “Morning for you.”

Still hoping that she would awake and smile up at me, I waited, but in my heart I knew that Hilda was past all earthly waking. Her lips would never smile, her lashes never part. I took her face between my hands and the coldness of her skin brought to me the full realization of her departure. Without tears, without sorrow, almost as though seeking rest, I let my head drop to the pillow beside her. A little later a light step hurried across the carpet. Then a strong hand was placed on my shoulder, and I was lifted to my feet. Absently, and without the slightest interest, I studied Elliott’s face and noticed that the scar on his forehead had turned from vivid red to blue. He would always bear that mark.

“It was the dream,” I explained, absently. “I knew she was gone. I saw her go among the trees… like a flame.”

“Damn your dreams to hell!” he cried. “They’ve robbed me of my wife.”

For some reason I smiled at this huge, threatening creature. In his senseless anger, there was something comically out of key. He had lost a piece of property.

“Yes, Elliott,” I replied. “The dreamer wins. You didn’t want her, anyway.”

He raised his arm to strike me, then let it fall to his side. With an expression of fear in his eyes he looked down at the silent figure. At the foot of the bed stood the maid, sobbing quietly, her fingers pecking at the railing. I, too, looked down at Hilda with the knowledge that it would be for the last time, but I knew also that I was not leaving her here behind me. She was out somewhere in the dawn. She was free. I took her hand and rubbed it mechanically in an effort to give it warmth, then placing it gently on the sheet, I turned to the maid with a new suspicion in my mind.

“Didn’t she tell you that she had intended to go away to- day?” I asked.

“No, sir,” she replied, “but last night she said ‘Goodbye’ to me and not just ‘Good night,’ as she usually did. I thought it was funny at the time, her saying ‘Goodbye’ and not just ‘Good night’ like she always used to.”

Elliott was drawing away from the bed as though repelled by the sight of death. As I walked to the door he followed me.

“It will be lonely for you now, Landor,” he said, and this time he smiled.

“Yes,” I replied, looking back at Hilda’s sunbright face. “It will be lonely now – always. Already it’s shutting down.”

•   •   •   •   •

When I reached the house Scarlet was standing in the door and at the sight of her my heart was filled with loathing.

“Has anything happened?” she asked.

“She’s dead,” I replied mechanically.

Her white teeth were startlingly bared. Then her eyes grew soft.

“David,” she said, “come back to me.”

Without answering I turned away. It occurred to me that she had just said a terrible thing, but why I was unable to decide. Instinctively I sought the pavilion by the marshes.

The day was flowing in and life was beating round me. As I crouched on the mat of reeds and stared blindly at the island, the chirping of birds and trilling of insects rose in a wave of sound. With a golden shout the sun had come into the sky. The day had begun and life was surging back. In the air there was a feeling of speed and reawakening. Hilda was gone, and the world was rushing ahead. It would not wait. Hilda was gone and beneath the glad, imperious flood of sunlight I was alone. In my ears was a steady throbbing like the far-off beating of drums. I should always be alone now… throughout all the days of my life. In my heart I cried to Hilda to send across the marshes the dream I no longer feared. Far away on the island the trees tossed their branches as a buoyant wind circled down the sky. It was a fair, bright day. Life sparkled in the keen air. And in the midst of all this beauty I knelt on the mat of reeds as solitary a creature as the first man in the world – or the last.

— PART II —
RETURN TO
THE SALT MARSHES

XX

As a man drifts down the stream of his days, the trees standing out on the bank become more beautiful to him, and more eloquent with memory. Old thoughts and fancies, interrupted by the vigorous stages of the journey, return again, like tattered friends, and with them comes a host of haunting associations. Humbled a bit in spirit by the disillusioning years, the traveler welcomes back with secretive eagerness his first conceptions of the meaning and purpose of life, hugging them almost guiltily to his heart to keep them safe from the laughter of a generation that has not yet learned to laugh.

To what good end has he driven his bark so speedily along? What purpose has been served by contesting the right of way down the river? Futile miles. One has hardly had a chance to enjoy the scenery. And what is left? An old man in a battered craft. A dumb, solitary soul on the broad surface of an unknown stream. Only a vista or so stand out ahead. Soon they too will fade.

Thus drifts the traveler with shipped oars and a leaking boat. His eyes are fixed on the bank. He is content now to drift and dream. There is little enough time left, God knows, for a man to sit still and take his bearings. And in gazing thus with reawakened appreciation upon beauty long cast aside, the traveler is sometimes spared the sharp terror of the descent that plunges him into the silent pool of oblivion, where first thoughts and last are merged in a cry for life as life goes shuddering out. No time left for appreciation. The trees fade, the old heart breaks, and the stream continues on. In a single moment the man with all his little complications has become shockingly simplified. Nothing remains of him now but a froth of memory to which credit or blame is attached according to the charity of those who sit in judgment. Death has either solved his problems or erased them. And the stream goes on untroubled.

•   •   •   •   •

All around me there is life. I feel it keenly today, it is so intense and real. Its loveliness bears an authentic touch, its colors and fragrance are genuine. In its very simplicity there is something gripping to those who must soon give it up. Little details such as the groove of a worm through the dust, the fungus on a fallen tree, or the glint of a wing in the bush, mean remarkably more to me now than they did in the so-called idealistic days of my youth. Now when I am an emotional bankrupt, I long most to leave behind some fitting appreciation of the things my eyes have seen and the songs my ears have heard. The revolt of age is grimmer than that of youth. Youth goes forward gloriously with shouts and noisy defiance, while age fights on in silence and oftentimes in shame.

I am alone here and there are trees around me, trees, silence, and sunlight, and the dusty smell of bark. A furtive breeze is creeping through the forest. Here and there an eddy lifts a last year’s leaf, peers under it, then drops it back again. Each snapping twig deepens my sense of solitude, each stirring thing is a delight and a mystery to me. They bind me to the past and establish a link with life, yet every bit of beauty that claims my eyes serves only to remind me that, so far as I am concerned, both life and beauty have already been squandered in the market places of the world.

With the tips of my fingers I touch things – bark and woodland grass – and through my veins there passes a feeling of kinship with all growing things, a knowledge of their life, an understanding of their ways. If I would ever look on the face of God I should dwell in the heart of a forest. Yet even here I am bound to earth by a thousand clinging ties.

In vastly different surroundings a strain of this same feeling has come to me, and because of this I am led to marvel at a man’s ability to delude himself, at his almost perverted determination to peek at life through his fingers rather than to scan its face.

I was dining at a place in Amalfi, and my head was among the stars. The low sky was powdered with them. I had merely to raise my hand in order to pluck one from its setting and to hurl it into the Mediterranean, slumbering at my feet. A breeze swept down from the heights, leaving a song alive in the olive trees. I glanced about me and felt at peace as my eyes, encountering the eyes of the women diners, lingered to admire the beauty of their arms and the poise of their well- groomed heads. With my senses made acute by wine, and my spirit lulled by the music, a feeling of acceptance came over me. “This,” I said to myself with arrogant complacency, “is how the gods once dined when pagans ruled the earth.” I loved it all and seemed to understand it. But even then, as I drank from a glass the cost of which would have fed some poor, starved devil, even then in the warm glow of my contentment the nagging thought returned to me that while I dined on manufactured romance, somewhere human souls were being stifled in dark places.

The stars no longer encircled my head, the women became what they were, and the sentimental purring of the orchestra aroused in me a desire to kick the baton from the leader’s hand and to flood the place with a torrent of healthy vulgarity.

I rose then from the table and insulted the first person I met, a harmless creature who stood in blank amazement as I made my way from the terrace. People turned and gazed at me, remarking my evil face, and they were right so to do, but I paid no attention to their words. Within me a thought was burning and I clung to it because I knew that it was real.

There was a dirty tavern high up on the dark side of the hill. Men came there to drink and spit, and occasionally they fought. Ideas were worth while there. Even while they cheated each other, these people still believed in things.

I came to this place, a bundle of words and scathing indictments. Beneath the low roof of the tavern I crucified myself. Everyone agreed with what I said, everyone understood. A girl came over to me and placed her hand on my lips. I told her that she was very much in the way. She laughed, and I began to forget what I was saying. Wine and more wine, the moving of chairs and scraping of feet.

In the midst of this, the Ark came back to me. I heard the drum of the surf, and caught the spirit of the old ship. Suddenly my thought came through and I knew what it was I wanted.

To begin with I wanted to cry, but a funny little man sitting earnestly in a corner aroused my mirth. He was all whiskers and good intentions, but hopelessly drunk. As I made an effort to reach his table, someone placed a glass in my hand. I stopped to drink, but the girl was all around me. No one seemed to object. The room had apparently decided that I should be placed in her care. I resented this. I resented everything. There was something I wanted to do, a place I wanted to see. And I was tired of waiting. I sat down at a table and buried my head in my arms.

When I woke up I was lying in the woods. From behind me came the steady drip of water. It made me nervous. I got to my feet and stood clinging to a tree. There was the girl with her stockings down and her strong legs cut and bruised. She seemed remarkably crumpled and childish. As I studied her face the thought returned to me again. There was a place I wanted to see. I was tired of all this. Standing there in the freshness of the dawn, with the fever of the night behind me, I came to a decision. Then with a feeling of thankfulness I dropped down by the girl. She opened her eyes and smiled sleepily, and her arms curved round my shoulders.

“Don’t cry,” she murmured. “Don’t cry.”

And now, as I sit here miles and miles away from that high place in Amalfi, I want to know what it is that a man should love. In God’s name what? Certainly not his duty, for the very meaning of the word is too negative and arbitrary. Women? Poor devils, they are human too and as a consequence incomplete and filled with their own troubles. Himself? No comfort there. He is either hiding or on the search. At best he is an unreliable companion, too easily convinced and too quickly aroused to suspicion.

I have come back to the place that I love. I have come back in search of a dream. It seems ridiculous, yet to me it is the only real thing in life, the only thing that matters. If I cannot find it here, there is no place on earth where I can find it. I have tried and failed. Here where I lost the dream I must capture it again, or lose it forever. It is strange that I should have grown old with this fixed idea in my mind. In all other things I am rational enough. People consider me sane. That’s the disturbing part of it – perhaps I am sane.

•   •   •   •   •

All day long and all this week I have been recapitulating my life in an abandoned shack on the beach. The place was turned over to me by a fisherman, who has just completed a house consisting of two rooms instead of one.

Since I returned to this neck of land I have been to the pavilion by the marshes many times, and on each occasion I have been unable to shake off the impression that I was being watched.

This evening, when I had finished writing, I left the shack and returned to the woods, where already spring is well advanced and little shoots of green are thrusting themselves up between the faded brown of old, dead leaves. At sunset my feet turned instinctively toward the marshes. When I reached the pavilion I knelt on the mat and gazed across the reeds at the island sharply outlined against the red glare of the dropping sun. As I strained my eyes to pierce the mystery lying behind the trees, a flood of longing mounted in me, and I began to speak aloud as though in prayer.

“Hilda,” I said, “look at me. Look at me now and see what the years have done. Look at me. I offer myself to your eyes. See – in my face the world has written its story. You can trace there the lines of passion and self-indulgence. Look deeper and you will see the soiled print of life stamped on my very soul. I have loved myself and the world. I have clung to little immediate things. I have sought other women and given to each one of them something of myself. You can see that. It is written plainly. I have always felt that you have known. But look again, look deeper. Do you not see one clear flame burning amid the ruins of an altar? Muddy feet have trampled the place and left their tracks behind, but the flame still burns. Look now, I beg you, and recognize the one real thing in my life. You must see it. You must know it. I have nothing else to offer. Across the false grounds of the marshes send back the dream to me. I am ready to come to you now. See, I am here on my knees. I am calling to you. Do you hear? Can you see? Send back the dream to me. Hilda.… Oh, my love!”

My voice failed, a feeling of weakness came over me and I fell forward on my face. In the cool air of the evening my forehead was bathed in sweat. The island had faded from view and darkness settled on the marshes.

“Send back a call,” I whispered “Some little sign, something to show you have heard.”

Silence and darkness. Then a breath of air passed through the reeds.

•   •   •   •   •

Some minutes later, when I struggled up the embankment and stood knee deep in the weeds and undergrowth, I experienced again the feeling that someone was watching me. Not more than ten yards off I made out a clump of solid blackness even deeper than the night surrounding it. Under ordinary circumstances I should have taken the object for one of the many bushes dotting the field, but tonight I was not so easily reassured. In its very stillness there was something alert and watchful, something suggestive of a crouching form. Then almost imperceptibly the clump melted into the night and a moment later from across the field came the swish of running feet.

XXI

To walk on ground revisited after a number of years is a little like walking on yourself. Something of you, some little spark, has entered into the very soil. It has felt the light touch of your toe and the heavy searching of your foot. The earth has known you intimately. It has tasted of your tears and been gladdened by the sound of your laughter. In it you have stamped a print of the past which now you read with a remembering eye. Each stone and each tree has a special significance. Other people may pass that way, but they will never see what you have seen nor feel what you have felt. The place is yours, for in a sense it is you. And if some old landmark happens to be missing, you feel as though a member had been cut from your own body. The memory is not complete.

A part of my youth is interred in the sod of this place. Though the ground has been covered by many seasons of fallen leaves and the grass has withered and grown again, something of the person that once was, remains hidden here beneath the leaves and grass.

•   •   •   •   •

On the morning following my adventure by the marshes, I rose early and walked through the wet woods. After I had gone a short way the feeling that I was being followed returned to me. Unable to shake off this impression, I made a detour among the trees before I returned to the path. Although I was unable to discover a trace of any living being, I was convinced that I heard a pursuing whisper running through the leaves.

When I emerged from the woods I found myself in the presence of the Ark. It was much like looking on the transfigured corpse of an old friend. The remains of the tavern were far more picturesque than its memory. Nothing was left of the housing save a mass of moist planks and rotting timbers charitably garnished with patches of moss. The old ship in its last stages of decay had regained a suggestion of its lost dignity. Around the ruins the stunted pines still clung to the shallow soil, their ragged arms extended as if in mock benediction over the crumbling bones of the Ark.

Turning from this melancholy spectacle, I climbed laboriously over the shelving rocks until I had reached the point where the great stone finger arches down into the sea. A curtain of glinting spray sprang up before my eyes and dimmed the tumbling ocean. I felt like a solitary traveler amid the ruins of a deserted city. At my back and sides rose a demolished citadel of jagged rocks, in front of me stretched the lonely leagues of the sea. All inland sounds were drowned by the roar of its waves. In this spot even thought was petrified.

For a long time I stood there looking blankly out at the lurching plain of green. My mind was as empty as the ocean I was facing. It seemed to me that I had come to the end of thought and would dream on forever. Then I turned my back on the ocean. My clothes were drenched with spray. Twenty years before I had moved across these rocks with an untroubled step and a firm limb, but now as I picked my way among them I was forced to exert my strength to the utmost to achieve the steep ascent.

XXII

Today I visited the cottage in the grove. Several times before I had planned to do this, but a feeling of reluctance had held me back. Above my head the birds darted through the trees with the same diligent air of secrecy that had amused me twenty years before. Secure in their leafy domain, they were still playing at being afraid, like children in a dusky garret. As I walked through the grove I could hardly believe that the years had passed. Where were they hiding themselves with all their precious loot? Were they behind the trees laughing at my poverty? With a feeling of protest I looked about me. The grove was empty, but I was almost certain that I heard voices whispering among the trees.

Like myself, the house had died a little. Its door stood open and the interior was filled with shadows. The years had left it friendless. There was much in common between the cottage and myself. Both of us were empty shells from which life and purpose had withdrawn.

Plundering time had ironically tossed aside those things which served best to recall the past. The low divan where Scarlet had once reclined was still in place. It was dust- covered now and crumpled. And the long table, the scene of so many disorderly meals, had not moved an inch from its old position. Every object my eyes encountered spoke eloquently of personal things – the stairs leading to the upper floor, the fireplace heaped with litter, and the hung door to the kitchen. Evidently no tenants had occupied the cottage since MacKellar’s régime. For twenty years it had remained much as he had left it. As I glanced about me, I felt that at any moment he might come fuming out of the shadows to begin work on a new canvas.

Preoccupied with my thoughts, I walked over to the table and sat down. A piece of flimsy cloth was lying on the dusty surface. For some minutes I regarded the thing idly, then something vaguely reminiscent made me pick it up. As I did so I caught a sudden picture of MacKellar standing by the fireplace. In one hand he was holding his brushes and in the other a piece of cloth. The picture faded, but the impression remained. I bent over the cloth and examined it closely. It was smeared with streaks of faded color. Had I discovered some rare object of antiquity hidden for centuries amid the ruins of a tomb, I could not have been more impressed than I was as I sat there gazing at this dust-covered bit of stuff. Hugh had held it in his hands. It had tasted the paint of his brushes.

In the dusk of the room he stood before me as he had stood so often in the past, a square, untidy figure, his eyes snapping with animation and his hands making swift little motions in the air.

“Hugh,” I whispered, extending my arms to the shadows, “why am I so terribly alone? You were once a living part of this place. Are things over with you? Is there no word you can speak to me now?”

The room grew dark and I felt the presence of someone at my back. Mastering my first impulse to spring to my feet, I waited, every muscle in my body painfully taut. Then, as though only a day had passed since we had last met, John Elliott’s voice prosaically broke the silence.

“Good afternoon, Landor,” he said. “This comes under the heading of a pleasant surprise.”

He had aged, but in spite of his burnt-out appearance there clung to him a sense of power as though his spirit were stubbornly defying extinction. With some malicious intent it was making use of a dead body – inhabiting a mummy. Even his actions seemed automatic, and for that reason more weird to observe. He gave the impression of being a sort of manufactured thing endowed with a sly tenacity of purpose. The flesh had fallen away from his gaunt frame, and his Hair, now thin and listless, had turned completely white. There were deep lines in his face, and round his drooping mouth a look of defeat had settled. But in spite of these ravages of time his eyes blazed as fiercely as ever beneath his heavy brows. In his general bearing there remained a suggestion of the suave and debonair character of former days. His crazy eyes were fairly sparkling with cordiality.

“Why pleasant?” I asked at last. “And why particularly a surprise? Did you think I had died?”

“I was afraid,” he began, then hesitated, correcting himself with a smile. “I have often wondered about it.”

“Why were you afraid?” I continued, delving behind his words.

“It wasn’t fear so much,” he said. “I just didn’t want you to die. Why should I, Landor?”

“You always hated me,” I answered. “Your solicitude did not spring from friendship nor does your pleasure now on seeing me again. What is it? Do you still feel jealous of a dream? Do you still fear it?”

He turned from the table and walked across the room, then wheeled about and faced me.

“Haven’t you outgrown that?” he demanded. “Are you still harping on your dream? Are you so mad as to believe that there was any relation between that dream of yours and her – her going?”

“I do,” I answered quietly. “And so do you.”

“Is that why you’ve come back?” he asked. “Are you looking for your dream?”

“I am,” I replied, smiling at him. “I’ve come back to find it. And you’re about the only person in the world who can understand why.”

He walked over to the fireplace and stood with his back to me. I remained seated at the table, waiting for his reply. The conversation had taken a revealing turn. I was interested to see how far he would commit himself.

“Your dream will never return,” he said in a low voice.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it’s too impossible.”

“That’s hardly a reason.”

He looked back at me with a questioning light in his eyes.

“Elliott,” I continued, “in your heart you know it will return.”

“No, by God!” he flung back, his face growing dark, then as if struck by a new thought, he smiled and added, “If you are so sure yourself, Landor, let me put this cottage at your disposal. Would you consider the offer? It was here that you found your precious dream. The old surroundings might help. What do you say?”

Although I well realized that he had some unpleasant motive behind his invitation, I was tempted to accept. The cottage drew me.

“You’re very kind,” I replied after a moment’s thought. “I should like to live here again.”

“Good!” he exclaimed, coming over to me and extending his hand. “I’m glad you have the courage of your convictions. Will you dine with me tonight?”

“Why not?” I said, disregarding his hand. “In a way there is a bond between us. Perhaps it will be severed soon. I hope so, at any rate.”

As he looked at me, the smile froze on his lips. It was a remarkable thing to witness. His dead cheeks sagged, and his body, which a moment before had been tense from some inner excitement, gradually became flabby. The man seemed to be decomposing before my eyes. It was as though some piece of clockwork concealed within him had suddenly run down. Even his eyes burned dim. Several times he looked about him helplessly, his long, nervous fingers plucking at his mouth, then with difficulty he cleared his throat. It was plain to see that he was craving something, craving it desperately.

“Do you want water?” I asked, motioning to the kitchen. His behavior was beginning to alarm me.

“Water,” he repeated, licking his dry lips. “No, that’s not it. Not water.”

With an effort he crossed the room, his legs moving clumsily and his body swaying forward. His arms had a mechanical and uncoordinated appearance. Something in his bearing reminded me of the night when he had dragged himself from the Ark. At the door he stopped and twisted his face round until his lost eyes met mine.

“Then I’ll be going now,” he said, in a flat voice, “but I’ll look for you this evening.”

I followed him to the door and stood looking after him as he shambled across the lawn. With a feeling of growing uneasiness I wondered what could have come over him. Before he disappeared from view, he stopped and looked back at the cottage, his fingers still plucking at his pouch-like cheeks.

XXIII

The gravel crunching beneath my feet sent an unpleasant sensation along my spine. Almost automatically my thoughts reverted to the evening when Scarlet and I had walked up this same driveway together. Even now as it had then, the light was failing and on either side of the drive the ragged lawn drifted away into deepening shadows. Above my head the wind sifted wakefully through the trees. In its thin, whispering voice there was an ominous note. It was not a part of the wind that stirred in the woods or that came in from the sea. It seemed as if it had escaped from some unhappy place and taken refuge in Elliott’s trees, where for years it had lain like a soul in pain writhing among the leaves. It gave me a feeling of far-off things silently yet surely approaching… events that could afford to bide their time.

Like a man treading a maze of memories I climbed the steps to the veranda. No one was there to meet me. The place seemed even older than my awakened memories, more remote, more chilling, more cut off from the past. But when I stepped into the great hall the past was there indeed. Here as at the cottage, little seemed to have changed. If possible there was more disorder and a greater littering of furniture – a low divan or so and a table heaped with jars and bottles. In other days the smell of the hall had been moldy, now it had become vicious with some heavy perfume.

Something almost personal in this incense-like atmosphere made me uneasy. A new fear crept into my heart. Through a distant doorway at the other end of the hall I caught a glimpse of the marshes – a vivid sector of green slashed with the gray coils of the waterways. The island was out there somewhere, the island we had watched together. A curtain stirred and I saw a woman standing behind it in an attitude of fear. She appeared to be a servant.

“Good evening,” I said, and the figure withdrew into the darkness of the room. “So would the island withdraw,” I thought, “into the darkness of the night.”

A woman was slowly descending the stairs, her eyes fixed curiously on my face as her hand slipped caressingly over the bannister.

It was an odd thing that when I saw Scarlet again I scarcely realized her. At that moment she was a nebulous association in a chain of thoughts. As a living, tangible person, an actual part of the present, she had no meaning. I seemed to be looking far beyond her down a vista peopled with unrelated incidents, things I had known and felt, but which I had left behind in some other land – in another world. Once more I saw Hugh MacKellar, once more I caught a picture of Hilda running through the fields, and oddly enough, I saw my old Aird sitting alone like a lost gull on the rocks. It was not until Scarlet had drawn near me and subjected me to a close scrutiny that I felt as I had so often felt before, the physical influence of her presence. I became aware of my own body and distrustful of my mind. Something of the old antagonism flamed up in me anew.

When she spoke I was arrested by the familiar sound of her voice, its deep, hateful quality. For some reason I had expected it to be changed, coarser if anything, and more arrogant, but her voice was the voice I had never forgotten, and when she called my name I felt that in truth the years had been standing still behind the curtains of the hall. Neither had she changed greatly physically. Her face had grown a trifle grosser, her lips less firm and more sensual, and shadows had settled permanently beneath her dark eyes. The youthful spring I had once secretly admired had now almost left her body, giving to her movements a slow but compelling force. Although her figure was fuller now, it was more dominating, more primitively appealing. Beneath the folds of a yellow robe it seemed to spurn concealment.

“What on earth are you doing here after such an unsociable absence?” she asked in an easy tone.

“Looking for something,” I answered. “Following old tracks.”

“You’ve waited too long, David,” she said. “The scent has grown cold. Only the living can give you dreams. I offered to do so once. Do you remember that?”

“It’s one of the memories I’ve always tried to forget.”

“Thanks so much,” she remarked, dropping to one of the divans and arranging the pillows behind her with studied preoccupation. “It pleases me to know that I made at least a lasting impression.”

“It would hardly please you to know what kind of an impression it was.”

“Come, David. That’s not sporting. I refuse to quarrel with you at this moment. You haven’t even been thoughtful enough to touch my hand, and you know I’m really dying to discover if you’re real. You were once, but you’ve changed a lot.”

“The years have shown scant discrimination. I’m old now and you’re still young, in a sense. Time has been generous with you, given you what you wanted. Me it has ridden heavily.”

“Not quite,” she interrupted. “I never made a complete conquest. Is there still a chance… any sparks?”

Her hot palm pressed against mine as she suddenly twisted on the divan and pulled at a tasseled cord hanging from the wall. Two curtains parted, disclosing the picture Hugh MacKellar had painted of her many years before. The incident occurred so quickly that she seemed to have disrobed before me.

“Look,” she commanded in a low voice. “Look, David. Is not that better than a dream?”

“Very dramatic,” I replied, “but you were always a bit stagy. That thing destroys dreams. You’ve never understood.”

Her eyes sought mine, and her fingers clutching round my hand, drew me toward her.

“Is this the answer?” she asked, looking at our clasped hands. “Is this all, David, you whom I have watched for days?”

“Quite,” I said abruptly. “More than I ever thought I could bring myself to bear. Cover that picture up. You’re silly to draw the comparison.”

“Then at least we can take a drink together,” she cried with unexpected friendliness as she rose from the divan. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, David, but someday I’ll break your heart.”

From the table she took a bottle and poured a golden, translucent fluid into two glasses, offering me one of them.

“I drink to your return,” she said, “and may you never depart.”

As I looked at the glass in my hand the old desire for excitement and forgetfulness once more stirred in me. I recalled the night at the Ark and my futile years abroad. Even the words she had spoken added to my fear. In my own soul I realized that I was far weaker than either she or her husband knew. Nevertheless a spirit of bravado compelled me to respond to her toast. As I raised the glass to my lips I was again aware that a servant girl was watching me from the curtains. She seemed to be trying to communicate with me in an inarticulate way.

At this moment Elliott joined us, and when he too had taken a drink, we sat down near Scarlet and talked about the many changes that had taken place in our lives since last we had been together. Elliott spoke easily and interestingly about various countries that he and Scarlet had visited. In India, he told me with real animation, he had made a study of Eastern occultism, and had become deeply interested in it. Amateurish, of course, but he had learned some things, gained an insight, a mere divination.

The remarkable change that had taken place in the man since the afternoon surprised me. He was no longer now the crumpled creature I had watched shamble across the lawn. His eyes had regained their luster, his voice was firm and self- possessed, his whole bearing bespoke confidence and vigor. Still there was an air about him which gave me the impression that beneath his easy manner he was laboring with some form of repressed excitement.

Elliott drank less frequently than either Scarlet or myself. Once when the conversation flagged he left the hall for a short time. Scarlet poured me a drink just before he returned. Without taking any apparent effect on my mind, the wine was gradually filling me with a sort of contented excitement. All fear and distrust had left me, and with their leaving I was surprised to discover that I no longer disliked my companions. In fact it seemed only natural for the three of us to be sitting there again… the remaining participants in a remote tragedy. The pale hands of the past had reached out and gathered us together again.

The furtive servant brought us food which we ate in our chairs, Scarlet on her divan. I merely pretended to eat as the wine warmed through my body.

It was no longer necessary to try to be entertaining. The only thing that worried me was the face of the servant. It was always in the shadow, yet always turned to me. The air in the hall, had become heavy with smoke. Waves of perfume drifted through it.

“Quite a party,” remarked Scarlet as she regarded her husband slouched with closed eyes in his chair. I was puzzled to see him in this attitude. He had scarcely taken anything.

“Do you like it?” I asked, sitting down by her divan and throwing my head back. “I haven’t been this way for years.”

From a far-off black sky her eyes looked down into mine. A white arm uncoiled and wound itself round my neck. I touched her wrist with the tips of my fingers.

Floating figures filled the darkness, the graceful forms of women writhing through garlands of smoke. While I was studiously intent on following the movements of these figures Scarlet’s face approached mine. I could see it slowly descending from the sky, a pallid face with sharp eyes. The situation awoke a memory… the memory of a dream.…

I was standing again by the salt marshes and a woman’s arms covered with yellow fur were twisted round my neck And the woman who looked at me had the face of a beast – no it was more the face of an obscene carving with thick, sucking lips. The woman leaned against me and as she did so I felt myself being drawn down into the marshes. The mud rose over us and the woman’s body clung to mine.

I flung off this memory of a dream and rose from the floor. Scarlet’s arms were still extended to me as though thrust from the mud.

“Don’t be a fool,” she whispered. “It’s too late for heroics now – too late for anything but this. He’ll stay asleep.”

The dream-like cadence of the surf drifted up from the beach. I turned away and listened. Then as if in answer to a familiar voice I walked down the hall and out of the house. The chant of the surf rose up to meet me.

•   •   •   •   •

From where I am sitting I catch a glimpse of the ocean. A phantom boat is scudding there and a voice in my heart cries, “Head in! Head in!” But the boat holds to its course, then fades from the floor of the sea. Like a sailor cast on a hostile shore I try to trace its whereabouts.

XXIV

Down by the remains of the Ark, where we had first met, I found him again. He was sitting on a shelving rock as though he had never moved. A forlorn figure, he was, looking patiently out to sea for vanished wings.

When Aird held up his hand to me and smiled, the swift transition of his expression immediately dispelled whatever doubt I had previously entertained. In his quiet way he was delighted, and an answering spark of warmth sprang up amid the ruck and litter of my heart, making it feel a little lighter for the friendship of this man. His ability to contain his emotions aroused in me both envy and admiration. And once more, the thought came to me that I had been going through life stamped with the mortifying brand of the emotionalist. I even doubted if I were capable of feeling anything sincerely. For twenty years I had been cherishing an ideal merely to satisfy a false mood.

About Hunter Aird there was no disconcerting overflow of greeting, no hung explanations or forced summaries. He merely shook my hand and turned back to his everlasting sea. When I had seated myself beside him, he asked in a quiet voice, “Well, Landor, how has it worked out for you?”

“By ‘it’ you mean what?” I parried.

“Things in general,” he said, “and you in particular.”

“I’ve kept on living,” I replied, “if that’s what you mean, but there wasn’t any virtue in that. I’ve lived so that I might look, and I looked so that I might cease to live.”

He smiled and said, “Complicated, but characteristic. You never were an easy person to follow.”

“You know, Aird,” I continued after a moment’s silence, “it’s a weak thing to say and a cowardly way to feel, but I can’t help it – the more I see of life the more I want death. For years it’s been like that with me.”

“You’re courting a veiled woman,” he replied gravely. “That’s what interests you. Her face may be lovely or it may be—”

“A tragic mask?”

He nodded.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve always liked to think of the hereafter as being a place where we’d be able to collect all our happy memories and make them live again.”

“And the unhappy ones?”

“They’ll float around in the background for the sake of contrast. An hereafter would be a depressing place without its lights and shades.”

Under the heckling of the wind the waves were herding in, their arching backs ponderously moving shoreward. I could have stayed on there forever, listening to the pounding of the surf and feeling the moist wind against my face. There was peace here, and contentment, and a release from all the brooding things that lay behind. Already I was beginning to feel rested and refreshed. Aird’s voice broke in on my thoughts.

“By the way,” he asked, “where have you been putting up since your return?”

I told him about the deserted shack on the beach, mentioning the fact that Elliott had placed his cottage at my disposal. In doing so I endeavored to make my voice sound unstudied, but for some reason it had a defensive ring.

“That was surprisingly thoughtful of John Elliott,” he remarked when I had finished. “Have you been to see him?”

“Only once,” I replied guiltily. “I dined there the other night.”

“Then you know that he married the girl you used to call Scarlet?”

“Naturally,” I said, a little resentfully. “I wasn’t greatly surprised. I seem to have lost the faculty.”

“I’m living alone now, David,” he said. “The gingerbread days are over; the old lady has gone. I was only thinking that if at any time you happen to need a berth there’s a room over at my place. You can see the island from its windows and at sunset there’s a good view. I think you’d like it at the cottage. It’s quiet there – almost too quiet.”

He broke off rather lamely, like one in doubt of his ground. Although I well understood his invitation had been extended in my best interests, I was unable to check an unreasonable, almost childish feeling of resentment. I deliberately convinced myself that he was trying to meddle in my affairs, that he was attempting to save me from Scarlet and John Elliott, and thereby implying that I lacked the strength to save myself. Perhaps he already suspected something. Perhaps he knew how morally flabby I had become. His quiet, inquiring eyes irritated me. They were altogether too honest and friendly. My head was beginning to ache, and peace had fled from my heart. A desire for the yellow wine returned to me, taking possession of my mind. Why was this man annoying me, placing in my way an opportunity to escape when I had almost resigned myself to captivity?

He rose from the rock and stood with his eyes bent on the far reaches of the ocean, where already the night was gathering. I followed his example and stood beside him. I was trembling slightly now and the fear that he might notice this irritated me the more. Then he turned and looked me squarely in the eyes.

“David,” he said quietly, “God knows what it is, but something is hurting you. You seem to have lost part of yourself, and you’re afraid to get it back. For some reason you’re angry with me now. In a minute you’ll probably be telling me to mind my own business, and that’s just what I’m going to do. Just the same I want you to remember that I’ve asked you to make use of my cottage, and that the invitation still holds good. The place is yours whenever you want it – or need it.”

“Tell me first what’s your objection to Elliott and his wife,” I asked stubbornly.

“They’re not right,” he said in an even voice, “and you know it. Their life is one of debauchery and despair. They’re morally and physically rotten. That’s what I object to. If I remember rightly there was never any love lost between you and John Elliott. Why do you begin to defend him now? Has he changed so greatly since you saw him last, or have you? Do you know what the fishermen call his house, so evil has its reputation become? They call it the ‘Mad- house,’ and that’s what it is – literally. One of the girls who worked there for a while – a girl brought up from the beach – oh, well, she’s a drug fiend now. How did that happen? You must have noticed something, felt something, or did the place please you?”

He held out his hand to me, but I pretended not to notice his action. It suited me to hurt both myself and him. Some devil was squeezing my soul. I could feel his malicious hands beating down the friendly words trying to pass my lips. I wanted with all my heart to accept Aird’s invitation, to go immediately with him to his cottage, yet something prevented me. He hesitated and then turned slowly away, looking more forlorn and solitary than ever. When he had gone but a few paces, I wanted to call him back to say a few words showing that I was grateful, but the words would not come. With a feeling of wretchedness I sat down on the rocks and waited for the night to come in from the sea.

XXV

Late that night I heard footsteps in the cottage. This time I was convinced my imagination was not involved. Someone was downstairs, moving slowly across the room. A chair scraped against the floor, then silence – a tense, waiting silence. The sounds began again. I heard them on the stairs, then in the hall, then just outside my door. Like a hunted animal, I slipped from my bed and, crouching in a corner, fumbled for some matches. My fingers were trembling so violently that I was unable to strike a light. The door opened softly, and with its opening, even deeper darkness flooded the room. Then unexpectedly my muscles relaxed and I regained my composure. Although I was unable to see her, I was aware of Scarlet’s presence. Her perfume pervaded the room. I struck a match and caught a flash of her pallid face. Before she had time to recover from her surprise, I walked over to the table and lit the lamp. We stood facing each other without speaking, then my nerves snapped.

“What do you want here?” I asked in a sharp voice.

She made no answer, but continued to stand in the door, her eyes fixed on my face. In spite of myself I could not help but admire the intense quality of her beauty, and the consummate art she used in setting it off. Some women are artificially natural, while others are naturally artificial. Scarlet belonged to the latter class. To the end she would retain the physical glory of her body. Nevertheless, as I studied her closely, I knew that something had gone out of her. She was no longer secure in the claim of her beauty. Her confidence had failed.

She was dressed outlandishly, and yet one could hardly think of her as wearing any other costume. Her neck and shoulders were bare, and round her body was wound a black shawl, figured with leaves of gold. Through her hair was twisted a band of olive-colored silk.

The silence became oppressive; I began to drum impatiently on the table.

“What do you want here?” I repeated, my voice sounding strange in my ears.

She remained silent, but a contemptuous smile touched her lips.

“Damn it!” I cried, springing from my chair and advancing across the room. “Answer me.”

She stopped smiling and looked at me with an expression of infinite cunning.

“Come in or get out,” I added in a quieter tone.

She walked across the room, and drawing a bottle from the folds of her scarf, placed it on the table.

“Were you expecting me?” she said, with a nervous laugh. “Well, I didn’t come unprepared.”

There was something unnatural in the way she spoke. In her eyes burned a feverish light.

“I’ve been expecting you for some time,” I replied.

“The same modest old David,” she said, sitting down. “Always glad to see one.”

Her restless fingers were playing with a thin silver chain tucked in at her breast.

“Not necessarily,” I threw back. “Any animal will follow its prey, whether it happens to be fat or lean.”

“That doesn’t insult me at all,” she said “It rather pleases me. I can see the picture. I love it. A tigress. She is moving through the green shade of the jungle like a swift shadow. And she is urged on by a desire for blood. Can’t you see it, David?”

As she spoke she rose from the chair and stood confronting me with blazing eyes, her body swaying as though she were lashing herself to a rage.

“Can’t you see it?” she repeated in a coarse voice. “It’s green and hot and moist.”

As she moved slowly round the table I watched her. Between her painted lips there was a glimpse of strong white teeth. The excitement of her mood was contaminating. In the silence I heard the pounding of my heart.

“You see it,” she said, laughing confidently. “You see it well enough. Don’t pretend. Don’t stand there like that. You’re one of us… you’ve always been. See the tigress? See her?”

She paused and measured me with her eyes.

“Then if you don’t see her,” she cried, “feel her!”

The full weight of her body struck me and her teeth cut into the skin of my shoulder. It was confusing to feel her lips enclosing so much pain. I staggered back to the wall and made an effort to thrust her from me.

“Fool!” she cried in a choking voice. “Here and here and here!”

The hot life of her body surged through mine, and the darting pains in my shoulder, instead of arousing anger, awoke in me an answering spark of frenzy.

“The tigress has captured her prey,” she whispered, pressing her lips to my neck.

My arms held her.

“David!” she said, and her startled eyes met mine. “David!”

Then her head fell forward and she buckled in my arms. The light faded from her eyes like breath from a mirror. As I struggled to support the dead weight of her body, I felt dazed and unprepared. Her arms dropped from my neck and sagged behind her.

I carried her to the bed and stood looking down at her, my mind filled with conflicting thoughts.

“It’s green,” she murmured, “green and hot and moist… and we are there in the twilight.… Can’t you see it, David?”

Opening her heavy eyes, she looked at me dreamily, then she smiled and her lids closed. Her breath rose and fell regularly as though she were sleeping, her body relaxed voluptuously, and one bare arm slid down over the side of the bed. I went to the table and stood there with my back to the sleeping woman. It seemed to me that hours had passed before I was able to bring myself to move.

Finally I sat down and drank a glass of wine. In a short time a kindling radiance enveloped my body. I rose from the table and approached the bed. She must have felt my hand moving across her shoulder, for she smiled in her stupor and murmured something I was unable to understand. At the sound of her voice I drew back and walked to the window.

How dark and secretive the world had become. Even nature was conspiring against me, driving me back into the room where Scarlet lay and the yellow wine glowed in the lamplight. In sheer rage I beat my hands on the sill until my knuckles bled, then with an oath I faced about and confronted the room as I would an antagonist. There was Scarlet on the bed and the wine on the table – an abundance of blessings at my disposal. I chose the wine and drank avidly. The room became peopled with the white floating figures. They twisted up under the lamp shade, yellow light gilding their breasts and thighs – white floating figures, curving slowly through the air, holding out their arms to me from the shadows. I wondered where Hilda was. And then I saw her. She was standing at the end of a dark tunnel, and her back was turned to me. She was facing a green, sloping country. Without looking back, she drifted into the light. Nothing remained but a strip of green, then that faded from view, and I found myself gazing down at Scarlet. With a twinge of fear I returned to the table where some wine still remained in the bottle. I drank this down and threw on my clothes. If I stayed longer in the room I should eternally regret it. While I dressed I fumbled at the lamp until I had succeeded in extinguishing its flame. In the darkness that followed I heard Scarlet’s regular breathing. Then the room dropped away and I became a stranger to time and space.

When reason returned to me I was standing in the cheerless light of a damp dawn by the ruins of the Ark. I was wet and muddy from head to foot, and at the knee of my trousers there was a jagged rent disclosing a clot of stiffened blood. With indifferent eyes I studied the scar, and endeavored to piece together the events of the night. There had been wine and a lot of trees, a nightmare of trees, and before that there had been a jungle, a hot, moist jungle, and Scarlet lying on my bed. Yes, that was it. I could see her white neck and arms and the curve of her breasts. Hilda had been there too, and gone away. I remembered clearly. She had gone into a sloping land where it was green, but she hadn’t looked back, and now she would never know that I had been watching her from the other end of the tunnel.

I considered the Ark and the idea occurred to me that it would be highly appropriate were I to lie down among the rotten old timbers and become a part of them. At this thought I laughed aloud, but stopped suddenly. I had left Scarlet in the cottage and no doubt she was still there. I would go back to see. If she had not gone I should drive her from the place.

When I was only a short distance from the cottage, I stopped and drew back into the bushes. Like a debauched goddess, Scarlet was making her way across the lawn. What conflicting impulses surged up in my heart as I watched her weary departure through the dawn.

XXVI

This morning it is as though Summer had cast across both land and sea a mantle of enchantment. In the flight of a night nature has intensified herself. I gaze with a sensation of sharp delight on scenes which have somehow changed, although they are the same as those I have been looking on for many days, I recognize the things around me – the trees, the grass, and the shrubs – and yet they are all different. Through the deep arteries of the earth one can feel the flooding in of life. There is new loveliness in the world.

The sea looks clean and bright. One would swear that it had been but freshly painted. Like a sparkling surface of electric blue, it arches across the world to a sharp horizon now clear of clouds and mist. One would like to run shouting over that painted floor and become intimate with space. There is a South wind today. As it spills over the high cliffs, it leaves behind the fragrance of the flowers it cooled in the woods. The strip of beach below looks neat and clean. Women are down there busy with the nets, and far away, like a colony of tents, the fishing fleet is bending to the wind.

Yet in the midst of all this beauty I feel unclean.

Perhaps that’s the reason for my reawakened appreciation of the world around me. I have withdrawn somewhat and am no longer a part of it. By my own actions I have sacrificed the right to claim kinship with the things I love. Even the trees must resent the humble caress of my hand. I have receded from the world and all its friendly things.

Well, then, let it go, for this morning a strange thing happened, and for the time being, at least, the world has spun back to its natural orbit.

When it happened I was standing in the abandoned garden at the back of Elliott’s house. From the corner of my eyes I could see the high steps on which I had once sat with Hilda. I tried not to look at them and I tried not to think, but memories kept rising to the surface of my brain like flowers floating on a dark pool and opening their petals to the night.

She had fallen asleep with her head resting on my knee, her neck wearily curved and her arms drooping. Yes, it had been like that, and later I had held her in my arms, and then she had mounted the stairs into the shadows. How intense and romantic I had been in those days, and how ridiculously since then had I been floating through life. But all that was over now. I had come to my senses at last. And yet there had been something real about that night. For an instant we had stood before each other as though stripped of all garments and we had found each other pleasing and infinitely clean. Through our minds we had loved with our bodies, and through our bodies we had loved with our minds… no stars, and the smell of weeds and the moist, heavy air from the marshes… only a moment, then she had gone up the stairs to meet the waiting shadows.

With a low curse I dug my heel into the earth and turned from the steps. Only ten feet away from me a girl – she might have been a woman – was standing in the garden path. I knew her at once to be the servant who had so often watched me from the shadows. Her head was bowed like one listening to the chiming of distant bells. In her attitude there was a suggestion of crumpled humility. She was meagerly clad and appeared to be ill. Her thin fingers twisted and untwisted in helpless agony. I could tell it. My own fingers had worked that way often enough. There was a kinship between our fingers.

“Who are you?” I asked.

When she raised her head there was a familiar light in the eyes that met mine.

“I’m Natty,” she said in a hurried voice. “You don’t remember. Once you told us a story. There was a girl who danced in the moonlight while the deer looked on. I’ve never forgotten. Well, that’s who I am – Natty, the little girl on the beach. My kid brother – don’t you remember?”

She made an attempt to smile, but it was far from a success. And all the time her fingers kept squirming together.

“Lots of things are coming back,” I said. “But why did I ever tell you that they lived happily ever after, Natty? That was a lie, wasn’t it?”

“No,” she replied, fiercely. “That wasn’t a lie, but all the rest has been.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” I replied. “There’s nothing true here.”

“Where are they?” she asked in a changed voice, making a jerky motion towards the house. “He’s not the only one. The other is just as bad.”

“I don’t know where they are.”

She took a few steps forward and began to speak in a low voice, her eyes darting searchingly around.

“I’m not here any more,” she said, “but I know. I tried to tell you many times. They sent me away, but before I left I heard them talking. They’ve planned it all. See how he’s gotten me? Look!” – and she held out her trembling hands – “Look. I’m full of it. I need some now.”

Her eyes sharp and eager, pleaded with mine.

“Perhaps you’ve some of it with you,” she hurried on with a note of entreaty in her voice. “Look and see. I’d do anything for it now… anything.”

She laughed brazenly. Then covering her face with her working hands stood bowing before me.

“Don’t mind what I say,” she went on. “I’m all different when I’m like this. I’m not this way myself, honestly I’m not. There’s still a little moonlight left, Mr. Landor, but I’ll never dance in it.”

Once more she tried to smile, but her lips were all wrong. They looked smeared and undirected as though they were not related to her face.

“Mr. Landor,” she said, “why don’t you go away? There’s still time. Why don’t you save what’s left while you’ve got the chance? Go away. Go away now! Get out of this place. It’s no good. Oh, what can I do to make you go?”

“It’s too late, Natty,” I replied, taking one of her dry hands in mine. “Don’t you see? They’ve gotten me too.”

I laughed a trifle unsteadily as she studied my face with her questioning eyes.

“Oh, well, I helped just a little myself,” I suggested.

“Yes,” she said. “I know how it is. I helped too, after they started me.”

“What can I do?” she continued as if to herself. “How can I help now – here?”

Before I could reply a strange expression came into Natty’s eyes. They no longer saw me. For her I had ceased to exist. Following the direction of her gaze, I saw John Elliott standing on the veranda. He was looking at the girl, with a warning expression on his face. It was plain to see that he was far from pleased with our meeting. Natty walked away from me and slowly mounted the steps. In subdued tones, the two of them spoke together, then Natty grew excited and I could hear her pleading with Elliott. Her hands went up as though she were about to seize him by the throat, then they dropped helplessly to her sides and she stood before him sobbing. Elliott thrust his fingers into his vest pocket and produced a small round box which Natty snatched and concealed in her dress.

“Now,” I heard him say, “clear out and don’t come back.”

She hurried down the steps and in her eagerness to escape with her prize, staggered against me as she passed. Her face was working pitifully and little dry gasps came beating from her lips.

I found it hard to believe that she was the same person with whom I had been speaking only a few minutes before. Her hand was clutched to her breast and as she hastened down the path she walked with a shuffling, one-sided gait – the little girl whose mind had once been fired by the picture of a slim white figure dancing in the moonlight.

I walked away, but before I had gone many paces Elliott caught up with me and slipped his arm through mine.

“You see how it is?” he said. “You can’t be kind to these people. They take advantage of one. Why that girl’s notorious. She worked for us a little while ago, but we had to get rid of her. She’s crazy. Too much intermarrying in her stock. The poor thing isn’t responsible for what she says. It’s devilish inconvenient just the same. People get the wrong impression.”

Sick at heart, I smiled at him and nodded agreement.

“I know,” I said. “Occultism, and all that.”

“I hope she didn’t annoy you,” he went on, looking at me closely.

Unable to answer him, I walked down the garden path and sought the pavilion by the marshes. I hadn’t been there for weeks. As I sat on the reeds and followed the waterways with my listless eyes, my mind was filled with thoughts of Natty.

Natty… poor wretch… “And they lived happily ever after, and the old knight never more was cruel to the deer.”

“Sad stories are sort of nice,” she had said. “They seem like as if they might happen.”

That’s odd.

They do happen.

XXVII

A person alone derives scant comfort in trying to deceive himself. In the presence of others he gains confidence in his ability to lie, his own words for the moment bring him conviction, he admires his own skill in outwitting the probing minds of others. But alone a man becomes a rather sorry object. Brag and strut as he may he cannot deceive himself. He knows with a dreadful knowledge how false and futile he is. Although I have been trying to convince myself to the contrary neither Elliott nor Scarlet are responsible for my present condition. I have been drinking because I wanted to drink. I have been forgetting because I have been afraid to remember. I have been headstrong because I know my own weakness. With a feeling of relief I would abandon myself, yet I am reluctant to depart. Each new day is a false creation of time and I am its creator.

•   •   •   •   •

It is quiet by the marshes. The sun, but newly risen, is feeling its way through the reeds, fingering them here and there with gilded hands and leaving behind on the green a path of yellow light. In the quiet stirring of the day something of the zest and freshness of youth comes back to me – a twinge of its enviable solitude, a breath of its wonderment. Here as the day grows strong I feel myself keenly expectant. Rhythms of life long dormant play over me again like friendly hands on an old fiddle. As green as jade the island lies beneath the morning’s golden light. In joyous salutation the trees spring up to the sky. A breeze moves across the reeds and I catch the smell of swamps and beaches, clam shells and tarred boats. It brings back things to mind, little, obscure memories that were hardly a part of life, yet which somehow justified living.

I have watched the sun cleave an aisle through the mist on the marshes. I have seen it climb to the sky and scoff the mist away. In the hush that precedes the birth of day I have knelt on the reeds and watched the earth appear through a mantle of drifting haze. I have been touched by the breath of dawn and have tasted its sharp perfume, and I have been happy. Something came back to me – a shred of strength and hope. Yet in spite of these moments of peace I have felt that all things must perish and be lost, that ecstasy would vanish from my heart, that even the marshes would fade, and that these eyes have looked so long on them would encounter at last only shadows.

It is an abhorrent thing to go down to oblivion. It is a terrifying and destructive thought. Today as I looked at the island so secure and inaccessible, so set apart from life, I was seized again by the fear that everything must perish and that I should be left in darkness where even fear ceased to exist. I stretched out my arms to the island and called to Hilda – perhaps for the last time. I wanted her to return before it was too late.

XXVIII

Dreams spun from incense floating in the amber heart of wine. Stained thoughts, and beautiful, edged with sharp regret. The peace of abandonment and quiet of despair.… How strange they are, these evenings passed in shadows tossed by flickering candles, waves of smoke in yellow places, the fragrance of incense mixed with mold of dying walls… silence, dreams, and the far-away voice of the wind.

In such a place it is difficult to distinguish between the false and the true. Sometimes I feel that this hall and its occupants are no longer in life. There is no such place and there are no such persons. It is all false, like the fancies of drugged brains. Yet the fact remains that for me this hall is the most hideously real thing in life. I try to blind myself to its existence, arguing that the hall has vanished and that I am out somewhere in a field tramping through the high grass. Sometimes I catch myself laughing crazily and waving my arms in gestures of defiance.

To know that only a few paces from here green waves are falling on a flat, white beach and children’s voices are crying through the spray; to know that somewhere outside this reeking place a great wind is rushing down the sky and that growing things on the earth are feeling the touch of its feet, to know these things and yet to be cut off from them is more at times than my mind can stand. This hall is real enough, its occupants are real, and at last I have been brought face to face with reality in one of God’s unfavored places.

•   •   •   •   •

Elliott sprawls in his chair. He is muttering to himself. His indifference to his wife and the things round him far surpasses mine.

“Landor?” he called the other night, his voice sounding hollow in the silence of the hall. “Landor, are you listening?”

“Yes, what is it?” I said.

“You’re one of us,” he began, “you and your ridiculous aims and ideals. You’re no better than the rest. And somewhere she is witnessing your defeat. Do you think she’s enjoying it?”

“No,” I said quietly. “The very fact that it gives you pleasure would close that possibility. You never had anything in common with her.”

He made no reply to that but regarded me with brooding malice as he filled his glass with wine. I glanced up at Scarlet, who, with her face framed in her hands, lay gazing into space. It was apparent that she was not interested in her husband’s conversation. For a time we sat in silence, then Elliott again began to speak.

“Oh, you’re a clever fellow, Landor,” he said.

“I’ll admit that, but don’t think I’m being fooled. Even now you’re trying to make me believe that there’s nothing in that dream of yours. You’d have me think she died naturally – the way most people do. You’d like me to believe a lot of things, but I don’t. I’ve been in strange places and I’ve seen strange things. I’m not so easily deceived. In this very house strange things have taken place, but perhaps the strangest of them all is about to occur.”

“Death is behind a curtain now, waiting for us all,” I said with mock seriousness. “There’s nothing strange in that. Who goes first, Elliott?”

“Death!” he cried, starting to his feet and peering fearfully around him. “Death! Where?”

Like terrified wings his words beat through the hall. Panic was in his bloodshot eyes, and the veins stood out on his neck. With a shaking hand he raised his glass to his lips, then sank down on his chair. Completely unmoved, Scarlet looked at his huddled form, but when her eyes shifted to me they were bright with animosity. I thought at first that Elliott had fallen asleep, but after some minutes had passed he began to mutter to himself.

“She’ll wait all right,” he said. “There’s no going back now – no escape.… The dream… Oh, damn the dream!… through all eternity waiting… That’s good.… He’s one of us now… don’t have to lift even my finger… he likes it here… waiting… waiting… waiting… through all the years.…”

XXIX

This morning when I staggered along the cliff path and broke into the fields I heard someone calling my name. Hunter Aird was coming in my direction. With head lowered and feet spraddled I stood like some dumb animal and watched him approach. My heart was full of conflict. I wanted to see him and talk with him, I had an impulse to fling myself at his feet and to beg for protection, but an overpowering fear restrained me. He would take me away from my one source of comfort. With him there would be no release, no dreams, no floating figures. Unable to endure this thought, I turned and ran through the high grass. Once I struck my foot against a stone and was hurled to the ground. By the time I had regained my feet Aird was standing only a short distance away. The expression in his eyes infuriated me. He was pitying me. I could feel it. With drunken pride I drew myself up and cursed him roundly.

“Damn your pleading eyes!” I cried. “Go back. Can’t you see you’re not wanted? We don’t belong together.”

He held out his hands rather helplessly and in such a tragic way that I laughed at him in derision.

“What an ass you are,” I shouted. “For God’s sake go away. I’m through with you and your kind forever. You bore me.”

He took a step forward, but before he could approach closer I sprang back and started again across the field.

“David!” he called. “David!”

Without looking back I fled toward the marshes, his running feet keeping pace with mine, then falling faintly behind.

“David!” he called again, and as I turned to look back, the light went out of the sky and I felt myself spinning through a green eternity of twilight with his voice still ringing in my ears.

That happened this morning at an early hour. It was noon by the sun when I next opened my eyes to the restful green of the marshes. Bruised and numb, I was lying on the reeds, my mind in a sorry state of confusion. Remote and peaceful the island floated on the marshes. I longed with all my heart to be there in that quiet place. Far away on the other side I could see the curve of the shore, and my thoughts returned to the time when I had waded through the slime in an effort to reach the island.

All round me insect life was singing. The song of the little creatures was drowsy in the heat of the mid-day sun. My ears were filled with a ringing sound and a shower of buzzing notes. In the midst of this my brain began the distasteful task of reconstructing the immediate, yet irrevocable past. I had lost Aird’s friendship forever, that was certain. No matter what happened to me, I could never face him again. What a spectacle I must have made, raving before him like a maniac. Oh, well, it had to come sometime. We lived in different worlds.

Wind and the smell of stagnant water, the marshes and the island – everything was the same. Only I had changed, and now I was looking on the scene for the last time. I should never come here again. Dull pains moved through my body, but from sheer indifference I refused to change my cramped position. The insects buzzed and the sun sprayed down on my back. I felt dreadfully weak and nauseated. From time to time I shook with convulsive tremors. My heart raced, and then stood chokingly still. As though in sleep, confused words came unguarded from my cracked lips. I was crying. The wretched tears trailed down my cheeks and dropped on my dirty hands. I looked at the tears and wondered who was crying, then I listened and wondered whose voice it was I heard.

“It’s over now,” the voice was saying, “and even the ending is over. I shall never come back to this place. Hilda, do you hear me? There’s nothing left that you can do or that I can do. Soon it will no longer be in my power to break the faith. All faith will have been destroyed. I shall feel no more, think no more, be no more. Even regret will have ceased to be, and with it all memory of what has been. You can no longer reach me with your spirit hands. You who are a part of the dawn could never walk the night through which I move.”

•   •   •   •   •

Embers dying in the dark… they lie on the floor of the sea… smoking embers, white with hate, triumphant as they die.… Spirit hands helplessly beating, poor hands, desperate hands, you cannot reach me now.

XXX

It was morning and I was on the beach, walking by the water’s edge. My mind was dim. At the far end of the beach, quite removed from the huts of the fishermen, a number of rocks run out into the sea. When the tide is low it is a fascinating spot for children, because the receding waves leave behind in the hollows of the rocks a chain of sun-warmed pools ideal for the sailing of miniature craft and the paddling of small bare feet.

On this particular morning some vagrant memory of happier days attracted me to the rocks. With caution I picked my way out to the last stony ledge, and sitting down, hazily considered the little waves lapping at my feet. Beneath the green surface of the water, faces floated and peered up at me, faces familiar and unknown, men and women I had passed on the streets, eyes that had lived in my memory and lips that had smiled in my dreams. I was confronted in turn by Hilda, MacKellar, and a little girl who died in London, and then Natty’s thin white face swam into my vision and remained there. I brushed my hand across my eyes and looked again. The girl’s face would not vanish. Unlike the others, the eyes were closed and features sharply defined.

“Natty,” I muttered, “are you too among the dead? If not why are you floating there before me?”

The face still confronted me. In order to convince myself that my imagination was not up to its old tricks I rose to my feet and waded out on the ledge. I could distinguish a body now, the body of a girl left dangling by the tide on the tapering skirt of the rocks. Like one in a trance I bent over and stirred the water with my hand. When I withdrew it some strands of hair were twined round my fingers. My eyes clouded and I was seized with a desire to shout, to arouse the world and give warning. Then something shifted within me. I no longer protested or disbelieved, but accepted the situation quite calmly. Those clinging strands of hair were too pitifully appealing to allow for disbelief. Natty was bound to me in death.

How remarkable, and yet how simple, it was to look at her and know that she was dead. I straightened up and tried to think things out. Death had come to her and given back the peace which life had denied. Perhaps even now her spirit was away somewhere dancing in the moonlight. That would have been her choice, I knew. She had done the logical thing and placed herself beyond all earthly cravings. Elliott’s power was broken. She was free now, and forever, from things that did not matter. She was eternally simplified, and at liberty to enjoy the lilt of her own soul. Like a child in sleep she lay with her arms thrown up behind her head. The sea had washed her clean. Gone now the sting and the torment, the nausea and remorse. Natty was much better off, and in my heart I envied her and wished her peace.

When I attempted to lift her from the ledge my strength almost failed me. Several times I slipped on the rocks as I carried her back to the beach. The poor thing was as thin as a starved child, but in my weakened condition it was more than I could do to carry her without frequently stopping to rest. Thus Natty and I made our slow progress down the beach, and the glaring sunlight fell cheerfully over us as though it would bring back life and warmth to the dead girl’s cheeks. In life she had tried to warn me, and now that she was dead I was paying her the final tribute.

Already my arms were beginning to ache from their light burden. My over-taxed heart pounded against Natty’s silent one. Several times I staggered and fell to my knees in the sand and remained in that attitude until I had regained my strength. When I came in sight of the fishermen’s huts I sank down exhausted, letting Natty slip from my arms. Presently a woman came out of one of the houses and I raised my hand to attract her attention. She approached me slowly, but when she caught sight of the other figure lying in the sand she hastened up to us and automatically broke into a volley of lamentation.

“God will punish someone for this,” she cried, lifting her arms above her head and shaking her clenched fists in the air. Her hands dropped to her sides and she stood looking at me suspiciously, then turned and hurried down the beach to inform the settlement of the fate that had befallen one of its daughters.

Once more I was left alone with Natty. As I looked at her peaceful face I was moved by a desire to make her appear as well as possible in the eyes of her friends. So I straightened her torn garments and attempted to arrange her hair, which the hot rays of the sun had already partly dried.

Soon we were surrounded by a number of excited men and women, all talking at the same time and to no purpose. Between the legs of their elders, children thrust through their heads and stared curiously at Natty. Then a woman broke from the circle and threw herself down by the body of the dead girl, and a gaunt man with red hands stood gazing at the two figures.

No one paid any attention to me and I was glad of this. Some tissue seemed to have snapped in my brain, leaving me in a mood of hazy indifference. I was aware of all that was going on round me, but the faces of the people were blurred and the voices came from far off. Only Natty’s face was clear, and on it my eyes dwelt in dumb entreaty. I wanted her to speak to these people and tell them to be quiet. In particular I wanted her to speak to that silent man looking down at her and explain his grief away.

Now he had lifted her up and was carrying her to the huts. The woman walked behind him as though she were being led by an invisible wire. From time to time her hands jerked out spasmodically from her sides. I rose from the sand and trailed down the beach in the wake of the crowd. The men bore Natty through the door of one of the huts and the people followed him. As she disappeared I muttered to myself, “Goodbye, Natty. Live happily ever after.”

Then I sat down on a rock. When I looked up some minutes later the men had come out of the hut and were grouped about the door. They were talking quietly together. Several women joined them and the men’s voices became loud and excited. John Elliott’s name was mentioned and fists were swung aloft in ineffectual rage. An old woman appeared in the door of the hut and hatefully surveyed the gathering. Her short, white hair stood out from her head and her cracked voice grated on my ears.

“Men,” she shouted, “John Elliott did it! What are you going to do about it? Your oaths and threats don’t help. Why are you standing there?”

“We’ll get him,” a great fellow shouted. “Don’t you worry, mother.”

The old woman looked scornfully at the speaker, then pointed a finger at him.

“If he’d taken his two hands,” she continued, “if he’d taken his two hands and squeezed the life from her body he couldn’t have done worse – he couldn’t have been more of a murderer.”

The men surged round the door, and something like a smile came to the old woman’s face. Once more she extended her arms.

“You’re young and you’re strong and you’re free men,” she shouted in her cracked voice. “Do something about it or you won’t be worthy of the arms of your women. Punish John Elliott!”

For a moment she held the men with her eyes, then turned quickly away. The gaunt fisherman came to the door and stood looking far out to sea beyond the crowd.

“When we came back from out there,” he said in a surprisingly quiet voice, “she was always here to bear a hand, and now when we come back she won’t be here any more. You understand? Natty’s dead. She won’t be here any more – never.”

The men remained silent, pressing closer to the door.

“No,” continued the man in a tired voice. “She won’t be here any more; so maybe you’d like to step inside and see the last of her, see her as she is now all straggled out and dead.”

Several men started to enter the house, but he held them back and shook his head.

“I’ll bring her out so we can all have a look,” he said.

He moved gropingly from the door and reappeared with the dead girl in his arms. The old woman was standing anxiously beside him. She was holding one of Natty’s hands.

“Here she is,” he called out, tears streaming down his cheeks. “Look at her and thank John Elliott. He’s still alive.”

At the sight of Natty the anger of the people blazed forth. Men and women alike pressed against the tall fisherman with his dead burden. The cursing of the men and the shrill voices of the women disturbed me. I held out my hand as though to quiet them, and with this movement their anger was immediately transferred to me. I could feel it in the air, but I was not interested. I wanted to be left alone.

“There’s one of them now,” someone shouted. “He’ll warn Elliott.”

“Drive him away!” a woman cried. “He had a hand in this.”

A shower of stones came at me. One large missile, striking me over the heart, sent me sprawling from the rock. I rose to my feet and made an attempt to approach the crowd. Another volley of stones checked me. I was cut in several places, and the blood from a wound in my forehead ran down into my eyes. I took a few steps forward and tried to speak, but my voice was drowned by the shouts and jeers of the fishermen. Then I smiled and held out my hands. As I did so I felt, or rather heard, a great crash at the base of my skull and I toppled forward into a sea of angry faces.

When I regained consciousness Aird was bending over me.

“They didn’t mean it,” he said when I opened my eyes. “They didn’t understand.”

I moved my lips, but no words came.

“Lie still,” he continued in a low voice, “and I’ll get someone to help me. It’s my house this time.”

His face floated away and became confused with a cloud hanging directly over me in a blue sky. Far away several voices were calling. I imagined I could distinguish Hunter Aird’s. The sea and the land and the sky were swimming in my eyes, and little flames of pain danced over my body. Then daylight streamed from the world.

XXXI

I cannot visit the marshes now, and yet I have been there. Although three days have passed since I resumed these notes and during that time I have not moved from this room, I have stood each night with Hilda by the marshes.

For the first time in twenty years we have been together. For the first time in twenty years I have heard her voice and felt the touch of her hand. She came to me as I was lying in bed, and as I rose to meet her I left my body behind. It was nearly dawn. Far off on the edge of the sea a rosy light was tipping the horizon. To prove to myself that I was not dreaming, I stood by the bed with Hilda and together we looked down at my sleeping image. An old man was in the bed, an old gray stranger. His cheeks were sunken and pale, covered with a stubble of whiskers and his eyes were set in shadows. Deep wrinkles lined his face and touched the corners of a weak and petulant mouth. A soiled bandage was around his forehead and above this his long gray hair bushed out in disorder.

As I gazed down at the body I had quitted, a feeling of shame came over me. I was about to turn away, but Hilda restrained me and, kneeling down by the bed, she kissed this unlovable creature on the lips. The dawn streamed into the room and I could hear birds singing in the green boughs. Beneath the silver lash of the rising sun the sea leaped and sparkled. Then Hilda took me by the hand and we were back once more by the salt marshes. The reeds were round us and the marshes spread out at our feet.

“Hilda,” I whispered, “let me never return again.”

“You no longer fear the marshes?” she asked.

“Try me,” I pleaded.

“When the time comes,” she replied, “you will find me waiting here.”

She placed the tips of her fingers against my eyes and the scene faded from view. Little sunbeams were playing on the counterpane and the air was sweet with morning fragrance. I awoke with the firm conviction that Hilda had been in the room and that I had stood with her by the marshes. I am still of the same conviction.

•   •   •   •   •

From my couch on Aird’s veranda I am looking down on a scene of tropical splendor. Below me the marshes flare out into the distance, their water ways, now clearly revealed, gliding ceaselessly through the thick, green reeds like restless snakes on the search. Occasionally from the glinting coils a bird darts high in the air, then settles back again as though unable to snap the thread of fascination. There is always a trance-like stillness resting on the marshes, but today it seems more profound than ever before, more haunting and touched with mystery. One could almost imagine that they were waiting for something or for someone. The sun is slanting down a clear sky, but before it reaches the horizon, its light will be quenched in a dark cloud boiling up from the western horizon. It is the season of the year when summer is caught without warning and flayed to withered bits.

By my side Aird sits reading from a ponderous looking book. Occasionally we exchange a few words, then he returns to his reading and I to my notes. He strikes me as being one of the most solitary souls alive, and yet he seems to be contented enough. I do not mean that he has ceased intellectually to strive, but merely that he is in harmony with the way he has chosen to live. For one who has been so much alone, so far removed from human contact and complications, he has a remarkable appreciation of life, whereas I who have been bound to life by a thousand clinging fetters feel as though I had been too long alive.

•   •   •   •   •

When I was a boy I was always a great one for cutting my initials in the bark of trees. It worked on my imagination to think that in the years to come another person would stand where I had stood, another boy like myself, who would admire my rude design and wonder a little about the vanished carver. No doubt I am still actuated by the same motive, for all day long I have been impelled to drain out the dregs of my life on these trivial pages. Death, what is it? A gasp of surprise in the face of unsuspected beauty, or is it merely a failing voice crying out in protest to unresponsive night? There is no death if Hilda ever lived, but sometimes I wonder if she did live.

How tired a person can be and still continue to cling to life! My body feels as crisp and dry as though it had lain on a slow grill. It is hardly time for me to be so old, yet I am old. I shall never be young again in this world. Like a common pickpocket I have filched the years from the purse of Time, collected life in advance.

There goes the sun now, piling down into a valley of clouds. From the west a wind is footing it over the marshes and the storm song of the reeds is in the air. Aird has laid aside his book and is walking out on the lawn where he stands hawk-like in poise and outline, nervously sniffing in the wind. As I look down on the marshes, over which the light is fading, I recall, as if it were only yesterday, the time I was lost out there in the storm. Once more I can hear the sobbing of the reeds and feel the suffocating assault of the rain, but none of the old terror troubles me now. Thank God, I am free from that.

A gray haze is driving across the twilight, leaping over the marshes like a living veil. As though in anticipation of defeat the trees are already dropping their leaves over the cottage. Aird has turned in the path and is looking back at me.

“Hold tight!” he cries. “It’s going to hit this old shack like an express train. I’ll fetch you in, David.”

And like an overwrought gull driven before the gale he gallops up the path.

•   •   •   •   •

Some hours later.

Why is it that I, who have led such an inglorious life, have been vouchsafed happiness tonight? And why is it that I, who have failed so consistently in all my endeavors, have at the end been allowed to enjoy a glow of triumph?

Round the corners of the house the storm lashed like a stricken reptile. A thousand windy assaults were hurled against the walls and roof, and a limb torn from a neighboring tree came crashing to the veranda where it lay beating its branches against the door like a crippled stranger pleading to be let in from the storm. Lightning sprayed its gold across the marshes and at times the little cottage shuddered as the knife-edged thunder drove through the sky. The voice of the wind ran the scale of human emotions, from bull-throated bellowings of fury to shrieks of impotent rage, and in the lulls between it sobbed and whimpered like a tortured spirit broken in defeat. And there were times when it sounded like a mad woman crooning a crazy lullaby to a dead child in the dark.

As I sat in the yellow lamplight of Aird’s room I heard in the voice of the storm a mighty symphony, shot through with themes from the life of man. I heard him cursing and raving as he hurled himself against the naked stakes of life. I heard the muffled cry of his soul protesting against the bondage of his body. Louder and louder the cry rose, until at last it seemed to rip the cords from his straining throat, and in bitter snarls and screaming vent his spleen against the world. In the heart of the storm I heard his cries of defiance, his raptures of desire, his anguish and remorse. I heard him sob in the darkness as he knelt by the body of one he had loved, of one he had loved and destroyed. In the booming voice of the storm I heard the illogical voice of man. I heard his shouts of joy and triumph, his hunger and despair. Then as the storm receded and the wind fell to a minor key I heard a song floating from the lips of one who, spent and broken, had been left behind on the field. Clear and jubilant the song mounted to the arches of the sky, gradually dying away in the upper air. It was the voice of the spirit singing amid the ruins of a man:

“All things he has claimed and lost.

All things he has touched and destroyed.

Yet me he has not destroyed

And me he shall never lose.

Now he is weary of seeking,

His feet are broken and still.

Now shall my song be heard,

For I am the voice of his soul.

I have lived in the din of his body

I have felt his fever and pain,

And now that the storm is past

I shall sing him upward from death.”

Far away over the mainland the thunder muttered and rumbled. From the eves of the cottage the rain dripped steadily. The broken branch kept tapping pitifully against the door.

“And now that the storm is past

I shall sing him upward from death.”

The singing faded away in the distance. I looked at Aird, who was standing by the window.

“Did you hear anything?” I asked, and my voice sounded strange in the quiet room.

“A lot of things,” he replied, facing me with a smile. “What do you mean, David?”

“I thought I heard someone singing,” I said. “A great voice pouring a golden flood against the gates of paradise. I wish you had heard it, Aird.”

He came over from the window and sat down beside me.

“Don’t go on like that, David,” he said, “or you’ll be making a nervous wreck of me. You’re going to get well now, aren’t you?”

“Am I?” I asked. “What did the doctor say?”

“He said you couldn’t,” replied Aird, looking me straight in the eyes, “but you know and I know he’s wrong. You could pull through if you wanted to, if you really cared, couldn’t you?”

“Why should I, Aird? There’s nothing here for me.”

“You’re not any too complimentary,” he said with a short laugh. “I’d rather looked forward to your visit.”

“I know,” I replied, placing a hand on his. “It’s a funny thing, but I’ve always had a feeling that the two of us belonged together. That’s why I cursed you that day in the field. You’ve forgiven me for that?”

“I understood at the time,” he said. “But damn it, all that has nothing to do with this. I know there’s a fight left in you. Are you going to make it?”

“Tell me, Aird,” I asked, “is it immoral or cowardly or particularly weak for a man not to want to live? What do you think? As I look back on my life it seems to me that I’ve never really wanted to live. There was a time, a brief period, when I did, but that passed like a—”

“Dream,” he interrupted.

“Yes,” I added, looking away. “It passed like that – like a dream at dawn.”

Before he spoke again Aird provided me with a cigarette, then lighted his pipe, behind which he sat thoughtfully puffing destruction into globes and minarets of smoke.

“No doubt you’ll think it rather ridiculous of me,” he said at last, “but there was a time when I wanted to become a leader. I thought it would be a splendid thing to educate the world. I felt that if I succeeded in clearing up only a few universal lies I should be accomplishing a great deal, but on my first attempt I found that all the roads to knowledge were already securely held by an established army of educators – academic mercenaries. There was no way of getting at the people. Even when you broke through the lines, the lies still surrounded the non-combatants like a picket fence. The people hid behind the lies and steadfastly refused to be disillusioned. They are doing it today.”

He paused for a moment to consider a leisurely disintegrating smoke cloud, then continued:

“So I abandoned my elaborate educational program and began to educate myself. I was not particularly fond of life either, but as time went on I gradually changed. I found myself growing interested. Each day offered me a new vista of knowledge, each night another secret. I studied, applied, and compared. I learned to love life intelligently, instead of emotionally. And I’ll tell you, David, there’s lots to love in life once you’ve gotten the hang of it.”

“It’s too late now for me to learn,” I told him. “You see I was never adjusted right to begin with – I didn’t work somehow. You’ve known people like that. They belong to the undisciplined army of the unstable. Men write books about them, then wonder why. So do the readers.”

“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “I can’t see anything immoral or weak about not wanting to live. Most people do, or pretend they do, but that doesn’t signify anything. If you could assure the average man that one quick gasp would be to his advantage, he would readily find an excuse to justify him in taking it. If the existence of another life were ever satisfactorily proved there would soon be few people left in the world. Heaven would be littered with a lot of amateur suicides, bragging about how easy it was to shake off life’s mortal coil. Those who hadn’t managed to get themselves run over in a state of grace, would have acquired heavy colds or something of the sort.”

“To keep the world filled you must keep it fooled,” I suggested.

“The wisest man must always remain a little ignorant,” said Aird. “If not he would lose his wisdom. I’d hate to be the man to learn the last secret of life.”

“And I’d like to be the one to learn the first secret of death,” I replied.

“It would amount to the same thing,” he answered.

“But you believe?” I asked after a brief pause.

“I do,” he said.

“And shall we be able to take all our happy memories and make them live again?” I continued.

He looked up at me and smiled.

“As a scientist,” he said, “I refuse to be interviewed theological questions.”

“But as a human being?”

“I unreasonably hope so.”

For some minutes we sat in silence, each occupied with his own thoughts. In the distance the mollified storm still grumbled through the sky. A drowsy numbness was creeping over my body. From the base of my skull hot pains occasionally played over me, but I was strangely insensible to them. Only when the spasms closed round my heart was I unable to suppress an involuntary gasp. At these times I felt as though I were being plunged into the black depth of a pool. At last I made an effort to rise, but fell back helplessly. My legs were like withered branches. When Aird helped me from the chair there was no feeling in the soles of my feet. They tapped the floor searchingly.

“You’ll feel better, perhaps, in the morning,” he suggested.

It was almost a question. In his eyes I read a mute appeal.

“Better, I hope, than I’ve felt in years,” I answered, gripping his hand.

For a moment we stood looking at each other, both of us groping for words and finding none, then we moved slowly across the room.

•   •   •   •   •

There has been enough scribbling for one day. And what a long day it has been. I am tired.

The room in which I am writing commands a view of the marshes. Out there lightning is still flickering, but now its fangs have been pulled. It waves among the clouds like a golden plume. My bed is near the open window, through which drifts an occasional scent of drenched shrubbery and other growing things. The rain is still falling. There are bogs in the woods tonight and along the cliffs the rollers must be churning – mad things, tearing at eternity. How vividly it all comes back to me and how intimately I have loved this place all my life. My youth lies buried in the soil and Hilda’s spirit still hovers over it. I have felt this keenly today. Even now I feel that she is looking down at me as she once did from her little boat as I lay in the water… “a small white cloud”… Hilda, do you remember? I called you that.

“And now that the storm is past

I shall sing him upward from death.”

Did I really hear a song today issuing from the heart of the wind, or was it merely a trick of my mind? I am almost certain I heard it marching up the sky.

“I have lived in the din of his body.

I have felt his fever and pain.”

Higher it soared and higher, the battle hymn of the unstable, the triumphant chant of the soul giving the lie to death.

Beneath the fiery plumes of the lightning I can catch, from where I am sitting, an occasional glimpse of the island lying beneath the rain. The trees are sharply edged with gold. Their black trunks glisten.

It will be a clear dawn tomorrow and a fair day. The sun will rise from the sea and loop across the sky. Its light will fall on the pavilion by the marshes and there among the reeds the insects will take up their chorus… shrill, little notes of life dancing in the sun. And through the green marshes the glinting waterways will wind, endlessly circling among the reeds in restless search of the sea. The sun will drop behind the island, catching the trees for a moment against its flaming heart. It will sink, and then the night will come and there will be stars in the sky – the frosty stars of a Fall night, perfect and remote. And out there on the marshes the waterways will be gliding and a sigh will follow after them as the wind runs through the reeds.

I wonder if I shall be here to witness another day. Aird would wish it so. Oh, well, old friend, I have waited too long already. Let me go now. I can accomplish nothing here. I have a feeling tonight that if the dream returns I shall awake in a fairer country than any I have ever known before and that my eyes will look on a face they have searched for years to find.

EPILOGUE

“In case I oversleep tomorrow I’ll say good morning now.”

Those were the last words that David Landor ever spoke. Sometime later when the golden bar of light disappeared from beneath his door, Aird felt as though the last tie had been severed between them.

For a few minutes he tried to read, but his mind was closed to the subject. Once he went to Landor’s door, then with a shrug of his shoulders put on his rain coat and left the room. Making his way to the protected side of the house, he flattened himself against the wall to be free from the dripping eaves. Landor’s window was just round the corner. The thought occurred to Aird that the rain might be driving in on his bed. He was about to investigate when a stirring in the darkness arrested his attention. The thing seemed to waver and melt away. He fixed his eyes on the spot and waited for the lightning. When the sky awoke and formed a background he saw against it John Elliott bending low, approaching. He was trying to reach Landor’s unprotected window. There was something chilling in his angular advance.

Aird moved round the corner and placed himself before the window. As Elliott rose to his full height Aird seized his upraised arm and twisted it back. The arm seemed to snap like a piece of chalk and Elliott fell writhing to the soggy grass. For a moment the two men struggled together then Elliott with an unexpected burst of strength scrambled to his feet.

“The dream,” he muttered. “It’s the dream. I knew it would come.”

For an instant he wavered drunkenly, then started down the hillside in the direction of the marshes.

“It’s the dream,” he almost sobbed. “I’ll get to the island first.”

When Aird reached the edge of the marshes he could hear the man splashing among the reeds. A glow of lightning revealed a swollen plain from which the reeds were thrusting up their points. About twenty yards from the shore Elliott was floundering waist-deep in water. He was raving like a madman. Darkness rushed in on the desolate scene and Aird waited for a sound he knew he should hear. Then he heard it – a long scream shuddering over the marshes. When the lightning came back to the sky, the plain was empty, so empty in fact that Aird was almost convinced that Elliott had never been there.

As Aird turned up the hill the cry still followed him, splitting through the night. The cottage squatted beneath the rain. Quiet lay around it. He went to Landor’s window and listened. After he had satisfied himself that his friend was still sleeping he went to the veranda and sat down on a wet chair. The rain had dropped to a drizzle, and the night was well advanced. Already he could catch in the air a hint of the oncoming day. It was like a fresh breath in a crowded room.

For some minutes he had been hearing the sound of voices in the distance. He paid no attention to this, his mind occupied with his thoughts, but when he opened his eyes he was startled to find a bright glare in the east. The voices continued to shout, and as he leveled his eyes on the fringe of a row of trees, a beautifully proportioned flame, like a formal design in a Japanese screen found its way to the sky and swayed there. Before it had time to become convincing, it collapsed and a number of lesser flames took its place, each suspended by a runner of tortured smoke.

Aird had little doubt of what was happening. The beach had risen and come inland. Elliott’s house was burning. Natty was being avenged. But Elliott would never know it. When Aird recalled the scream and saw again the funny helpless arm he decided the man had stood enough for one night.

Then dawn rose in the sky and Aird walked to Landor’s window. He was lying with one arm across the sill as though he were reaching out to the island. His head was resting on his arm and little drops of rain still glistened in his hair. Something about the still figure arrested Aird. It seemed to him that a change had taken place in Landor’s features. His expression was different yet familiar. He felt as if he were seeing again a person he had known many years ago. No miraculous transformation had taken place, but somehow it appeared to Aird that all of the grace and essence of youth had returned to Landor and touched him with triumph that was almost radiant.

Time passed unheeded as he stood in the presence of this friend he had lost, this being so unlike him. Something of the dead man’s peace entered into his soul, and yet because he had no one to share it with he felt lonely. He left the window and sat on the steps. Perhaps the strain of the past twenty-four hours had overtaxed his mind, perhaps he was unduly impressionable from lack of sleep. Whatever the reason was, the fact remains that as the dawn spread through the sky and spilled its light across the marshes, he heard, or thought he heard, a clear voice singing the lines that Landor wrote just before he died:

“And now that the storm is past

I shall sing him upward from death.”

On a slight hill bearing down on the marshes, they buried him, Aird and the fishermen, and there he lies now, a part of the soil he loved so well, but as Aird stood by the fresh mound he could not shake off the impression that David Landor had just begun to live.

— THE END —

BILTMORE OSWALD

DESCRIPTION

Thorne Smith, the great American humourist, first practiced his trade lampooning his own experiences serving in the navy. In this “diary” he pokes fun at the military powers that be, at his shipmates and himself – not least his talent for getting into romantic scrapes – to great comic effect.

Dedication

DEDICATION

To my buddies, an unscrupulous, clamorous crew of pirates, as loyal and generous a lot as ever returned a borrowed dress jumper with dirty tapes; to numerous jimmy-legs and P.O.’s whose cantankerous tempers have furnished me with much material for this book; and also to a dog, an admirable dog whom I choose to call Mr.
Fogerty, with apologies to this dog if in these pages his slave has unwittingly maligned his character or in any way cast suspicion upon his moral integrity.

BILTMORE OSWALD

The Diary of A Hapless Recruit

Feb. 23d. “And what,” asked the enlisting officer, regarding me as if I had insulted him, his family and his live stock, “leads you to believe that you are remotely qualified to join the Navy?”

At this I almost dropped my cane, which in the stress of my patriotic preoccupation I had forgotten to leave home.

“Nothing,” I replied, making a hasty calculation of my numerous useless accomplishments, “nothing at all, sir, that is, nothing to speak of. Of course I’ve passed a couple of seasons at Bar Harbor – perhaps that—”

“Bar Harbor!” exploded the officer. “Bar! bah! bah – dammit,” he broke off, “I’m bleating.”

“Yes, sir,” said I with becoming humility. His hostility increased.

“Do you enlist for foreign service?” he snapped.

“Sure,” I replied. “It will all be foreign to me.”

The long line of expectant recruits began to close in upon us until a thirsty, ingratiating semi-circle was formed around the officer’s desk. Upon the multitude he glared bitterly.

“Orderly! why can’t you keep this line in some sort of shape?”

“Yes, give the old tosh some air,” breathed a worthy in my ear as he retreated to his proper place.

“What did you do at Bar Harbor?” asked the officer, fixing me with his gaze.

“Oh,” I replied easily, “I occasionally yachted.”

“On what kind of a boat?” he urged.

“Now for the life of me, sir, I can’t quite recall,” I replied. “It was a splendid boat though, a perfect beauty, handsomely fitted up and all – I think they called her the ‘Black Wing.’”

These few little remarks seemed to leave the officer flat. He regarded me with a pitiful expression. There was pain in his eyes.

“You mean to say,” he whispered, “that you don’t know what kind of a boat it was?”

“Unfortunately no, sir,” I replied, feeling really sorry for the wounded man.

“Do you recall what was the nature of your activities aboard this mysterious craft?” he continued.

“Oh, indeed I do, sir,” I replied. “I tended the jib-sheet.”

“Ah,” said he thoughtfully, “sort of specialized on the jib-sheet?”

“That’s it, sir,” said I, feeling things taking a turn for the better. “I specialized on the jib-sheet.”

“What did you do to this jib-sheet?” he continued.

“I clewed it,” said I promptly, dimly recalling the impassioned instructions an enthusiastic friend of mine had shunted at me throughout the course of one long, hot, horrible, confused afternoon of the past summer – my first, and, as I had hoped at the time, final sailing experience.

The officer seemed to be lost in reflection. He was probably weighing my last answer. Then with a heavy sigh he took my paper and wrote something mysterious upon it.

“I’m going to make an experiment of you,” he said, holding the paper to me. “You are going to be a sort of a test case. You’re the worst applicant I have ever had. If the Navy can make a sailor out of you it can make a sailor out of anybody”; he paused for a moment, then added emphatically, “without exception.”

“Thank you, sir,” I replied humbly.

“Report here Monday for physical examination,” he continued, waving my thanks aside. “And now go away.”

I accordingly went, but as I did so I fancied I caught the reflection of a smile lurking guiltily under his mustache. It was the sort of a smile, I imagined at the time, that might flicker across the grim visage of a lion in the act of anticipating an approaching trip to a prosperous native village.

Feb. 25th. I never fully appreciated what a truly democratic nation the United States was until I beheld it naked, that is, until I beheld a number of her sons in that condition. Nakedness is the most democratic of all institutions. Knock-knees, warts and chilblains, bowlegs, boils and bay-windows are respecters of no caste or creed, but visit us all alike. These profound reflections came to me as I stood with a large gathering of my fellow creatures in the offices of the physical examiner.

“Never have I seen a more unpromising candidate in all my past experience,” said the doctor moodily when I presented myself before him, and thereupon he proceeded to punch me in the ribs with a vigor that seemed to be more personal than professional. When thoroughly exhausted from this he gave up and led me to the eye charts, which I read with infinite ease through long practice in following the World Series in front of newspaper buildings.

“Eyes all right,” he said in a disappointed voice. “It must be your feet.”

These proved to be faultless, as were my ears and teeth.

“You baffle me,” said the doctor at last, thoroughly discouraged. “Apparently you are sound all over, yet, looking at you, I fail to see how it is possible.”

I wondered vaguely if he was paid by the rejection. Then for no particular reason he suddenly tired of me and left me with all my golden youth and glory standing unnoticed in a corner. From here I observed an applicant being put through his ear test. This game is played as follows: a hospital apprentice thrusts one finger into the victim’s ear while the doctor hurries down to the end of the room and whispers tragically words that the applicant must repeat. It’s a good game, but this fellow I was watching evidently didn’t know the rules and he was taking no chances.

“Now repeat what I say,” said the doctor.

“‘Now repeat what I say,’” quoted the recruit.

“No, no, not now,” cried the doctor. “Wait till I whisper.”

“‘No, no, not now. Wait till I whisper,’” answered the recruit, faithfully accurate.

“Wait till I whisper, you blockhead,” shouted the doctor.

“‘Wait till I whisper, you blockhead,’” shouted the recruit with equal heat.

“Oh, God!” cried the doctor despairingly.

“‘Oh, God!’” repeated the recruit in a mournful voice.

This little drama of cross purposes might have continued indefinitely had not the hospital apprentice begun to punch the guy in the ribs, shouting as he did so:

“Wait a minute, can’t you?”

At which the recruit, a great hulk of a fellow, delivered the hospital apprentice a resounding blow in the stomach and turned indignantly to the doctor.

“That man’s interfering,” he said in an injured voice. “Now that ain’t fair, is it, doc?”

“You pass,” said the doctor briefly, producing his handkerchief and mopping his brow.

“Well, what are you standing around for?” he said a moment later, spying me in my corner.

“Oh, doctor,” I cried, delighted, “I thought you had forgotten me.”

“No,” said the doctor, “I’ll never forget you. You pass. Take your papers and clear out.”

I can now feel with a certain degree of security that I am in the Navy.

Feb. 26th. I broke the news to mother today and she took it like a little gentleman, only crying on twelve different occasions. I had estimated it much higher than that.

After dinner she read me a list of the things I was to take with me to camp, among which were several sorts of life preservers, an electric bed warmer and a pair of dancing pumps.

“Why not include spurs?” I asked, referring to the pumps. “I’d look very crisp in spurs, and they would help me in climbing the rigging.”

“But some officer might ask you to a dance,” protested mother.

“Mother,” I replied firmly, “I have decided to decline all social engagements during my first few weeks in camp. You can send the pumps when I write for them.”

A card came today ordering me to report on March 1st. Consequently I am not quite myself.

Feb. 27th. Mother hurried into my room this morning and started to pack my trunk. She had gotten five sweaters, three helmets and two dozen pairs of socks into it before I could stop her. When I explained to her that I wasn’t going to take a trunk she almost broke down.

“But at least,” she said, brightening up, “I can go along with you and see that you are nice and comfortable in your room.”

“You seem to think that I am going to some swell boarding school, mother,” I replied from the bed. “You see, we don’t have rooms to ourselves. I understand that we sleep in bays.”

“Don’t jest,” cried mother. “It’s too horrible!”

Then I explained to her that a bay was a compartment of a barracks in which eight human beings and one petty officer, not quite so human, were supposed to dwell in intimacy and, as far as possible, concord.

This distressed poor mother dreadfully. “But what are you going to take?” she cried.

“I’m going to take a nap,” said I, turning over on my pillow. “It will be the last one in a bed for a long, long time.”

At this mother stuffed a pair of socks in her mouth and left the room hastily.

Polly came in tonight and I kissed her on and off throughout the evening on the strength of my departure. This infuriated father, but mother thought it was very pretty. However, before going to bed he gave me a handsome wrist watch, and grandfather, pointing to his game leg, said:

“Remember the Mexican War, my boy. I fought and bled honorably in that war, by gad, sir!”

I know for a fact that the dear old gentleman has never been further west than the Mississippi River.

Feb. 28th. (on the train.) I have just gone through my suitcase and taken out some of mother’s last little gifts such as toilet water, a padded coat hanger, one hot water bottle, some cough syrup, two pairs of ear-bobs, a paper vest and a blue pokerdotted silk muffler. She put them in when I wasn’t looking. I have hidden them under the seat. May the Lord forgive me for a faithless son.

The departure was moist, but I managed to swim through. I am too excited to read the paper and too rattle-brained to think except in terrified snatches. I wonder if I look different. People seem to be regarding me sympathetically. I recognize two faces on this train. One belongs to Tony, the iceman on our block; the other belongs to one named Tim, a barkeep, if I recall rightly, in a hotel I have frequently graced with my presence. I hope their past friendship was not due to professional reasons. It would be nice to talk over old times with them in camp, for I have frequently met the one in the morning after coming home from the other.

March 1st. Subjected myself to the intimate scrutiny of another doctor this morning. I used my very best Turkish bath manners. They failed to impress him. Hospital apprentice treated me to a shot of Pelham “hop.” It is taken in the customary manner, through the arm – very stimulating. A large sailor held me by the hand for fully fifteen minutes. Very embarrassing! He made pictures of my fingers and completely demolished my manicure. From there I passed on to another room. Here a number of men threw clothes at me from all directions. The man with the shoes was a splendid shot. I am now a sailor – at least, superficially. My trousers were built for Charlie Chaplin. I feel like a masquerade.

A gang of recruits shouted “twenty-one days” at me as I was being led to Mess Hall No. 1. The poor simps had just come in the day before and had not even washed their leggings yet. I shall shout at other recruits tomorrow, though, the same thing that they shouted at me today.

Our P.O. is a very terrifying character. He is a stern but just man, I take it.

He can tie knots and box the compass and say “pipe down” and everything. Gee, it must be nice to be a real sailor!

March 2d. Fell out of my hammock last night and momentarily interrupted the snoring contest holding sway. I was told to “pipe down” in Irish, Yiddish, Third Avenue and Bronx. This, I thought, was adding insult to injury, but could not make anyone take the same view of it. I hope the thing does not become a habit with me. I form habits so readily. In connection with snoring I have written the following song which I am going to send home to Polly. I wrote it in the Y.M.C.A. Hut this afternoon while crouching between the feet of two embattled checker players. I’m going to call it “The Rhyme of the Snoring Sailor.” It goes like this:

I

The mother thinks of her sailor son

As clutched in the arms of war,

But mother should listen, as I have done,

To this same little, innocent sailor son

Sprawl in his hammock and snore.

Oh, the sailor man is a rugged man,

The master of wind and wave,

And poets sing till the tea-rooms ring

Of his picturesque, deep sea grave,

And they likewise write of the “Storm at Night”

When the numerous north winds roar,

But more profound is the dismal sound

Of a sea-going sailor’s snore.

II

Oh, mothers knit for their sailor sons

Socks for their nautical toes,

But mothers should list to the frightful noise

Made by their innocent sailor boys

By the wind they blow through their nose.

Oh, life at sea is wild and free

And greatly to be admired,

But I would sleep both sound and deep

At night when I’m feeling tired.

So here we go with a yo! ho! ho!

While the waves and the tempests soar,

An artist can paint a shrew as a saint,

But not camouflage on a snore.

III

Oh, mothers, write to your sons at sea;

Write to them, I implore,

A letter as earnest as it can be,

Containing a delicate, motherly plea,

A plea for them not to snore.

Oh, I take much pride in my trousers wide,

The ladies all think them sweet,

And I must admit that I love to sit

In a chair and relieve my feet.

Avast! Belay! and we’re bound away

With our hearts lashed fast to the fore,

But when mermaids sleep

In their bowers deep,

Do you think that the sweet things snore?

Our company commander spoke to us this morning in no uncertain terms. He seems to be such a serious man. There is a peculiar quality in his voice, not unlike the tone of a French 75 mm. gun. You can easily hear everything he says – miles away. We rested this afternoon.

March 3d. Sunday – a day of rest, for which I gave, in the words of our indefatigable Chaplain, “three good, rollicking cheers.” Some folks are coming up to see me this afternoon. I hear I must moo through the fence at them like a cow. (Later.) The folks have just left. Mother kept screaming through the wire about my underwear. She seemed to have it on her brain. There were several young girls standing right next to her. I really felt I was no longer a bachelor. Why do mothers lay such tremendous stress on underwear? They seem to believe that a son’s sole duty to his parents consists in publicly announcing that he is clad in winter flannels.

Polly drove up for a moment with Joe Henderson. I hope the draft gets hold of that bird. They were going to have tea at the Biltmore when they got back to the city. I almost bit the end off of a sentry’s bayonet when I heard this woeful piece of news. Liberty looks a long way off.

I made an attempt to write some letters in the Y.M.C.A. this evening but gave up before the combined assault of a phonograph, a piano, and a flanking detachment of checker players. Several benches fell on me and I went to the mat feeling very sorry for myself.

March 4th. The morning broke badly. I lashed my hand to my hammock and was forced to call on the P.O. to extricate me. He remarked, with ill-disguised bitterness, that I could think of more ineffectual things to do than any rookie it had been his misfortune to meet. I told him that I didn’t have to think of them, they just came naturally.

Last night I was nearly frightened out of my hammock by awakening and gazing into the malevolent eye of my high-powered, twin-six wrist watch. I thought for a moment that the Woolworth tower had crawled into bed with me. It gave me such a start. I must get used to my wrist watch – also wearing a handkerchief up my sleeve. I feel like the sweet kid himself now.

Drill all day. My belt fell off and tripped me up. Why do such things always happen to me? Somebody told us to do squads left and it looked as if we were playing Ring Around Rosie. Then we performed a fiendish and complicated little quadrille called a “company square.” I found myself, much to my horror, on the inside of the contraption walking directly behind the company commander. It was a very delicate situation for a while. I walked on my tiptoes so that he wouldn’t hear me. Had he looked around I know I’d have dropped my gun and lit out for home and mother.

Forgot to take my hat off in the mess room. I was reminded, though, by several hundred thoughtful people.

March 5th. Stood for half an hour in the mail line. Got one letter. A bill from a restaurant for eighteen dollars’ worth of past luncheons. I haven’t the heart to write more.

March 6th. Bag inspection. I almost put my eye out at right hand salute. However, my bag looked very cute indeed, and although he didn’t say anything, I feel sure the inspecting officer thought mine was the best. I had a beautiful embroidered handkerchief holder, prominently displayed, which I am sure must have knocked him cold. He missed the dirty white, but I will never be the same.

Fire drill! My hammock came unlashed right in front of a C.P.O. and he asked me if I was going to sleep in it on the spot. It was a very inspiring scene. Particularly thrilling was the picture I caught of a very heavy sailor picking on a poor innocent looking little fire extinguisher. He ran the thing right over my foot. I apologized, as usual. I discovered that I have been putting half instead of marlin hitches in my hammock, but not before the inspecting officer did. He seemed very upset about it. When he asked me why I only put six hitches in my hammock instead of seven, I replied that my rope was short. His reply still burns in my memory. What eloquence! What earnestness! What a day!

March 7th. Second jab tomorrow. I am too nervous to write today. More anon.

March 16th. Life in the Navy is just one round of engagements to keep. Simply splendid! All we have to do is to get up at 6 o’clock in the morning when it is nice and dark and play around with the cutest little hammock imaginable. When you have arrived at the most interesting part of this game, the four hitch period, and you are wondering whether you are going to beat your previous record and get six instead of five, the bugle blows and immediately throws you into a state of great indecision. The problem is whether to finish the hammock and be reported late for muster or to attend muster and be reported for not having finished your hammock. The time spent in considering this problem usually results in your trying to do both and in failing to accomplish either, getting reported on two counts. Any enlisted man is entitled to play this game and he is sure of making a score. After running around innumerable miles of early morning camp scenery and losing several buttons from your new trousers, you come back and do Greek dances for a man who aspires to become a second Mordkin or a Mr. Isadora Duncan. This is all very sweet and I am sure the boys play prettily together. First he dances, then we dance; then he interprets a bird and we all flutter back at him. This being done to his apparent satisfaction, we proceed to crawl and grind and weave and wave in a most extraordinary manner. This is designed to give us physical poise to enable us to go aloft in a graceful and pleasing manner. After this dancing in the dew you return for a few more rounds with your hammock, clean up your bay and stand in line for breakfast. After breakfast we muster again and a gentleman talks to us in a voice that would lead you to believe that he thought we were all in hiding somewhere in New Rochelle. Then there are any number of things to do to divert our minds – scrub hammocks, pick up cigarettes, drill, hike and attend lectures. As a rule we do all of these things. From 5 p.m. until 8:45 p.m. if we are unfortunate enough not to have a lecture party we are free to give ourselves over to the riotous joy of the moment, which consists of listening to a phonograph swear bitterly at a piano long past its prime. The final act of the drama of the day is performed on the hammock – an animated little sketch of arms and legs conducted along the lines of Houdini getting into a straitjacket, or does he get out of them? I don’t know, perhaps both. Anyway, you get what I mean.

March 17th. This spring weather is bringing the birds out in great quantities. They bloomed along the fence today like a Ziegfeld chorus on an outing. One girl carried on a coherent conversation with six different fellows at once and left each of them feeling that he alone had been singled out for her particular favor. As a matter of fact I was flirting with her all the time and I could tell by the very way she looked that she would have much rather been talking to me. Last week I had to convince mother that I was wearing my flannels; this week I had to convince her I still had them on. The only way to satisfy her, I suppose, is to appear before her publicly in them. Poor, dear mother, she told me she had written the doctor up here asking him not to squirt my arm full of those horrid little germs any more. She said I came from a good, clean family, and had been bathed once a week all my life, except the time when I had the measles and then it wasn’t advisable. I am sure this must have cheered the doctor up tremendously. She also asked him to be sure to see that I got my meals regularly. I can see him now taking me by the hand and leading me to the mess-hall. When I suggested to mother that she write President Wilson asking him to be sure to see that my blankets didn’t fall off at night, she said that I was a sarcastic, ungrateful boy.

March 18th. There is something decidedly wrong with me as a sailor. I got my pictures today. Try as I may, I am unable to locate the trouble. There seems to be some item left out. Not enough salt in the mixture, perhaps. I don’t know exactly what it is but I seem to be a little too, may I say, handsome or, perhaps, polished would be the better word. I’m afraid to send the pictures away because no one will believe them. They will think I borrowed the clothes.

March 19th. A funny thing happened last Sunday that I forgot to record. A girl had her foot on the fence and when she took it down everyone yelled, “As you were.” Sailors have such a delicate sense of humor. Well, that’s about enough for today.

March 20th. We had a lecture on boats today. The only thing I don’t know now is how to tell a bilge from a painter. The oar was easy. It is divided into three parts, the stem, the lead and the muzzle. I must remember this, it is very important. The men are getting so used to inoculations around here that they complain when they don’t get enough. We’re shaping up into a fine body of men, our company commander told us this morning, and added, that if we continue to pick up cigarette butts several more weeks we’ll be able to stack arms without dropping our guns. Eli, the goat, seems unwell today. I attribute his unfortunate condition to his constant and unrelenting efforts to keep the canteen clear of paper. It is my belief that goats are not healthy because of the fact that they eat paper, but in spite of it, and I feel sure that if all goats got together and decided to cut out paper for a while and live on a regular diet, they would be a much more robust race. The movies were great tonight. I saw Sidney Drew’s left ear and a mole on the neck of the man in front of me.

March 21st. A fellow in our bay asked last night how much an admiral’s pay was a month and when we told him he yawned, turned over on his side and said, “Not enough.” He added that he could pick up that much at a first-class parade any time. We all tightened our wrist watches. Been blinking at the blinker all evening. Can’t make much sense out of it. The bloomin’ thing is always two blinks ahead of me. It’s all very nice, I dare say, but I’d much rather get my messages on scented paper. I got one today. She called me her “Great, big, cute little sailor boy.” Those were her exact words. How clever she is. I’m going to marry her just as soon as I’m a junior lieutenant. She’ll wait a year, anyway.

March 22d. I made up verses to myself in my hammock last night. Perhaps I’ll send some of them to the camp paper. It would be nice to see your stuff in print. Here’s one of the poems:

THE UNREGENERATE SAILOR MAN

I

I take my booze

In my overshoes;

I’m fond of the taste of rubber;

I oil my hair

With the grease of bear

Or else with a bull whale’s blubber.

II

My dusky wife

Was a source of strife,

So I left her in Singapore

And sailed away

At the break of day –

Since then I have widowed four.

III

Avast! Belay,

And alack-a-day

That I gazed in the eyes of beauty.

For in devious ways

Their innocent gaze

Has caused me much extra duty.

IV

I never get past

The jolly old mast,

The skipper and I are quite chummy;

He knows me by sight

When I’m sober or tight

And calls me a “wicked old rummy.”

A sort of sweetheart-in-every-port type I intend to make him – a seafaring man of the old school such as I suppose some of the six-stripers around here were. I don’t imagine it was very difficult to get a good conduct record in the old days, because from all the tales I’ve heard from this source and that, a sailorman who did not too openly boast of being a bigamist and who limited his homicidical inclinations to half a dozen foreigners when on shore leave, was considered a highly respectable character. Perhaps this is not at all true and I for one can hardly believe it when I look at the virtuous and impeccable exteriors of the few remaining representatives with whom I have come in contact. However, anyone has my permission to ask them if it is true or not, should they care to find out for themselves. I refuse to be held responsible though. I think I shall send this poem to the paper soon.

It must be wonderful to get your poems in print. All my friends would be so proud to know me. I wonder if the editors are well disposed, God-fearing men.

From all I hear they must be a hard lot. Probably they’ll be nice to me because of my connections. I know so many bartenders. Next week I rate liberty! Ah, little book, I wonder what these pages will contain when I come back. I hate to think. New York, you know, is such an interesting place.

March 25th. Man! Man! How I suffer! I’m so weary I could sleep on my company commander’s breast, and to bring oneself to that one must be considerably fatigued, so to speak. Who invented liberty, anyway? It’s a greatly overrated pastime as far as I can make out, consisting of coming and going with the middle part omitted.

One man whispered to me at muster this morning that all he could remember of his liberty was checking out and checking in. He looked unwell. My old pal, “Spike” Kelly, I hear was also out of luck. His girl was the skipper of a Fourteenth Street crosstown car, so he was forced to spend most of his time riding, between the two rivers. He nickeled himself to death in doing it. He said if Mr. Shonts plays golf, as no doubt he does, he has “Spike” Kelly to thank for a nice, new box of golf balls. And while on the subject, “Spike” observes that one of those engaging car signs should read:

“Is it Gallantry, or the Advent of Woman Suffrage, or the Presence of the Conductorette that Causes So Many Sailors to Wear Out Their Seats Riding Back and Forth, and So Many Unnecessary Fares to Be Rung Up in So Doing?”

His conversation with “Mame,” his light-o’-love, was conducted along this line:

“Say, Mame.”

“Yes, George, dear (fare, please, madam). What does tweetums want?”

“You look swell in your new uniform.”

“Oh, Georgie, do you think it fits? (Yes, madam, positively, the car was brushed this morning, your baby will be perfectly safe inside.)”

“Mame.”

“George! (Step forward, please.) Go on, dear.”

“Mame, it’s doggon hard to talk to you here.”

“Isn’t it just! (What is it lady? Cabbage? Oh, baggage! No, no, you can’t check baggage here; this isn’t a regular train.) George, stop holding my hand! I can’t make change!”

“Aw, Mame, who do you love?”

“Why, tweetums, I love – (plenty of room up forward! Don’t jam up the door) you, of course. (Fare, please! Fare, please! Have your change ready!)”

“Can’t we get a moment alone, Mame?”

“Yes, dear; wait until twelve-thirty, and we’ll drive to the car barn then. (Transfers! Transfers!)”

“Spike” says that his liberty was his first actual touch with the horrors of war.

Another bird that lived in some remote corner of New York State told me in pitiful tones that all he had time to do was to walk down the street of his home town, shake hands with the Postmaster, lean over the fence and kiss his girl (it had to go two ways, Hello and Goodbye), take a package of clean underwear from his mother as he passed by and catch the outbound train on the dead run. All he could do was to wave to the seven other inhabitants. He thought the Grand Central Terminal was a swell dump, though. He said: “There was quite a lot of it,” which is true.

As for myself, I think it best to pass lightly over most of the incidents of my own personal liberty. The best part of a diary is that one can show up one’s friends to the exclusion of oneself. Anyway, why put down the happenings of the past forty-three hours? They are indelibly stamped on my memory. One sight I vividly recall, “Ardy” Muggins, the multi-son of Muggins who makes the automatic clothes wranglers. He was sitting in a full-blooded roadster in front of the Biltmore, and the dear boy was dressed this wise (“Ardy” is a sailor, too, I forgot to mention): There was a white hat on his head; covering and completely obliterating his liberty blues was a huge bearskin coat, which when pulled up disclosed his leggins neatly strapped over patent leather dancing pumps. It was an astounding sight. One that filled me with profound emotion.

“Aren’t you a trifle out of uniform, Ardy?” I asked him. One has to be so delicate with Ardy, he’s that sensitive.

“Why, I thought I might as well embellish myself a bit,” says Ardy.

“You’ve done all of that,” says I, “but for heaven’s sake, dear, do keep away from Fourteenth Street; there are numerous sea-going sailors down there who might embellish you still further.”

“My God!” cries Ardy, striving to crush the wind out of the horn, “I never slum.”

“Don’t,” says I, passing inside to shake hands with several of my friends behind the mahogany. Shake hands, alas, was all I did.

March 26th. I must speak about the examinations before I forget it. What a clubby time we had of it. I got in a trifle wrong at the start on account of my sociable nature. You know, I thought it was a sort of a farewell reception given by the officers and the C.P.O.’s to the men departing after their twenty-one days in Probation, so the first thing I did when I went in was to shake hands with an Ensign, who I thought was receiving. He got rid of my hand with the same briskness that one removes a live coal from one’s person. The whole proceeding struck me as being a sort of charity bazaar. People were wandering around from booth to booth, in a pleasant sociable manner, passing a word here and sitting down there in the easiest-going way imaginable. Leaving the Ensign rather abruptly, I attached myself to the throng and started in search of ice cream and cake. This brought me up at a table where there was a very pleasant looking C.P.O. holding sway, and with him I thought I would hold a few words. What was my horror on hearing him snap out in a very crusty manner:

“How often do you change your socks?”

This is a question I allow no man to ask me. It is particularly objectionable. “Why, sir,” I replied, “don’t you think you are slightly overstepping the bounds of good taste? One does not even jest about such totally personal matters, ye know.” Then rising, I was about to walk away without even waiting for his reply, but he called me back and handed me my paper, on which he had written “Impossible” and underlined it.

The next booth I visited seemed to be a little more hospitable, so I sat down with the rest of the fellows and prepared to talk of the events of the past twenty-one days.

“How many Articles are there?” suddenly asked a C.P.O. who hitherto had escaped my attention.

“Twelve,” I replied promptly, thinking I might just as well play the game, too.

“What are they based on?” he almost hissed, but not quite.

“The Constitution of these United States,” I cried in a loud, public-spirited voice, at which the C.P.O. choked and turned dangerously red. It seems that not only was I not quite right, but that I couldn’t have been more wrong.

“Go,” he gasped, “before I do you some injury.” A very peculiar man, I thought, but, nevertheless, his heart seemed so set on my going that I thought it would be best for us to part.

“I am sure I do not wish to force myself upon you,” I said icily as I left. The poor man appeared to be on the verge of having a fit.

“Do you want to tie some knots?” asked a kind-voiced P.O. at the next booth.

“Crazy about it,” says I, easy like.

“Then tie some,” says he. So I tied a very pretty little knot I had learned at the kindergarten some years ago and showed it to him.

“What’s that?” says he.

“That,” replies I coyly. “Why, that is simply a True Lover’s knot. Do you like it?”

“Orderly,” he screamed. “Orderly, remove this.” And hands were laid upon me and I was hurled into the arms of a small, but ever so sea-going appearing chap, who was engaged in balancing his hat on the bridge of his nose and wig-wagging at the same time. After beating me over the head several times with the flags, he said I could play with him, and he began to send me messages with lightning-like rapidity. “What is it?” he asked.

“Really,” I replied, “I lost interest in your message before you finished.”

After this my paper looked like a million dollars with the one knocked off.

“What’s a hackamatack?” asked the next guy. Thinking he was either kidding me or given to using baby talk, I replied:

“Why, it’s a mixture between a thingamabob and a nibleck.”

His treatment of me after this answer so unnerved me that I dropped my gun at the next booth and became completely demoralized. The greatest disappointment awaited me at “Monkey Drill,” or setting up exercises, however. I thought I was going to kill this. I felt sure I was going to outstrip all competitors. But in the middle of it all the examiner yelled out in one of those sarcastic voices that all rookies learn to fear: “Are you trying to flirt with me or do you think you’re a bloomin’ angel?”

This so sickened me at heart that I left the place without further ado, whatever that might be. Pink teas in the Navy are not unmixed virtues.

March 27th. My birthday, and, oh, how I do miss my cake. It’s the first birthday I ever had without a cake except two and then I had a bottle. Oh, how well I remember my last party (birthday party)!

There was father and the cake all lit up in the center of the table; I mean the cake, not father, of course. And there was Gladys (I always called her “Glad”). She’d been coming to my birthday parties for years and years. She always came first and left last and ate the most and got the sickest of all the girls I knew. It was appalling how that girl could eat.

But, as I was saying, there was father and the cake, and there was mother and “Glad” and all the little candles were twinkling, lighting up my presents clustered around, among them being half a dozen maroon silk socks, a box of striped neck ties, all perfect joys; spats, a lounging gown, ever so many gloves and the snappiest little cane in all the world. And what have I around me now? A swab on one side, a bucket on the other, a broom draped over my shoulder, C.P.O.’s in front of me, P.O.’s behind me and work all around me – oh, what a helluvabirthday! I told my company commander last night that the next day was going to be my birthday, hoping he would do the handsome thing and let me sleep a little later in the morning, but did he? No, the Brute, he said I should get up earlier so as to enjoy it longer. As far as I can find out, the Camp remains totally unmoved by the fact that I am one year older today – and what a hubbub they used to raise at home. I think the very least they could do up here would be to ask me to eat with the officers.

March 28th. These new barracks over in the main camp are too large; not nearly so nice as our cozy little bays. I’m really homesick for Probation and the sound of our old company commander’s dulcet voice. I met Eli on the street today and I almost broke down on his neck and cried. He was the first familiar thing I had seen since I came over to the main camp.

March 29th. This place is just like the Probation Camp, only more so. Life is one continual lecture trimmed with drills and hikes – oh, when will I ever be an Ensign, with a cute little Submarine Chaser all my own?

April 6th. The events of the past few days have so unnerved me that I have fallen behind in my diary. I must try to catch up, for what would posterity do should the record of my inspiring career in the service not be faithfully recorded for them to read with reverence and amazement in days to come?

One of the unfortunate events arose from scraping a too intimate acquaintance with that horrid old push ball. How did it ever get into camp anyway, and who ever heard of a ball being so large? It doesn’t seem somehow right to me – out of taste, if you get what I mean. There is a certain lack of restraint and conservatism about it which all games played among gentlemen most positively should possess. But the chap who pushed that great big beast of a push ball violently upon my unsuspecting nose was certainly no gentleman. Golly, what a resounding whack! This fellow (I suspect him of being a German spy, basing my suspicions upon his seeming disposition for atrocities) was standing by, looking morosely at this small size planet when I blows gently up and says playfully in my most engaging voice:

“I say, old dear, you push it to me and I’ll push it to you – softly, though, chappy, softly.” And with that he flung himself upon the ball and hurled it full upon my nose, completely demolishing it. Now I have always been a little partial to my nose. My eyes, I’ll admit, are not quite as soulful as those liquid orbs of Francis X. Bushman’s, but my nose has been frequently admired and envied in the best drawing rooms in New York. But it won’t be envied any more, I fear – pitied rather.

Of course I played the game no more. I was nauseated by pain and the sight of blood. My would-be assassin was actually forced to sit down, he was so weak from brutal laughter. I wonder if I can ever be an Ensign with a nose like this?

April 7th. On the way back from a little outing the other day my companion, Tim, who in civil life had been a barkeeper and a good one at that, ingratiated himself in the good graces of a passing automobile party and we consequently were asked in. There were two girls, sisters, I fancy, and a father and mother aboard.

“And where do you come from, young gentlemen?” asked the old man.

“Me pal comes from San Diego,” pipes up my unscrupulous friend, “and my home town is San Francisco.”

I knew for a fact that he had never been farther from home than the Polo Grounds, and as for me I had only the sketchiest idea of where my home town was supposed to be.

“Ah, Westerners!” exclaimed the old lady. “I come from the West myself. My family goes back there every year.”

“Yes,” chimed in the girls, “we just love San Diego!”

“In what section of the town did you live?” asked the gentleman, and my friend whom I was inwardly cursing, seeing my perplexity, quickly put in for me:

“Oh, you would never know it, sir,” and then lowering his voice in a confidential way, he added, “he kept a barroom in the Mexican part of the town.”

“A barroom!” exclaimed the old lady. “Fancy that!” She looked at me with great, innocent interest.

“Yes,” continued this lost soul, “my father, who is a State senator, sent him to boarding school and tried to do everything for him, but he drifted back into the old life just as soon as he could. It gets a hold on them, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” said the old lady, sadly, “my cook had a son that went the same way.”

“He isn’t really vicious, though,” added my false friend with feigned loyalty – “merely reckless.”

“Well, my poor boy,” put in the old gentleman with cheery consideration, “I am sure you must find that navy life does you a world of good – regular hours, temperate living and all that.”

“Right you are, sport,” says I bitterly, assuming my enforced role, “I haven’t slit a Greaser’s throat since I enlisted.”

“We must all make sacrifices these days,” sighed the old lady.

“And perhaps you will be able to exercise your – er – er rather robust inclinations on the Germans when you meet them on the high seas,” remarked the old man, who evidently thought to comfort me.

“If I can only keep him out of the brig,” said this low-down friend of mine, “I think they might make a first-rate mess hand out of him,” at which remark both of the girls, who up to this moment had been studying me silently, exploded into loud peals of mirth and then I knew where I had met them before – at Kitty Van Tassel’s coming out party, and I distinctly recalled having spilled some punch on the prettier one’s white satin slipper.

“We get out here,” I said, hoarsely, choking with rage.

“But!” exclaimed the old lady, “it’s the loneliest part of the road.”

“However that may be,” I replied with fine firmness, “I must nevertheless alight here. I have a great many things to do before I return to camp and lonely roads are well suited to my purposes. My homicidal leanings are completely over-powering me.”

“Watch him closely,” said the old lady to my companion, as the car came to a stop.

“He will have to,” I replied grimly, as I prepared to alight.

“Perhaps Mr. Oswald will mix us a cocktail someday,” said one of the sisters, leaning over the side of the car. “I have heard that he supported many bars at one time, but I never knew he really owned one.”

“What,” I heard the old lady exclaiming as the car pulled away, “he really isn’t a bartender at all – well, fancy that!”

There were a couple of pairs of rather dusty liberty blues in camp that night.

April 8th. Yesterday mother paid a visit to camp and insisted upon me breaking out my hammock in order for her to see if I had covers enough.

“I can never permit you to sleep in that, my dear,” she said after pounding and prodding it for a few numbers; “never – and I am sure the Commander will agree with me after I have explained to him how delicate you have always been.”

Later in the afternoon she became a trifle mollified when I told her that the master-at-arms came around every night and distributed extra blankets to everyone that felt cold. “Be sure to see that he gives you enough coverings,” she said severely, “or else put him on report,” which I faithfully promised to do.

She was greatly delighted with the Y.M.C.A. and the Hostess Committee. Here I stood her up for several bricks of ice cream and a large quantity of cake. My fourth attempt she refused, however, saying by way of explanation to a very pretty girl standing by, “It wouldn’t be good for him, my dear; my son has always had such a weak stomach. The least little thing upsets him.”

“I believe you,” replied the young lady, sympathetically, as she gazed at me. I certainly looked upset at the moment. This was worse than the underwear.

“So that’s an Ensign!” she exclaimed later in an obviously disappointed tone of voice; “well, I’m not so sure that I want you to become one now.” The passing ensign couldn’t help but hear her, as she had practically screamed in his ear. He turned and studied my face carefully. I think he was making sure that he could remember it.

“Now take me to your physician,” commanded mother, resolutely. “I want to be sure that he sees that you take your spring tonic regularly.”

“Mother,” I pleaded, “don’t you think it is time you were going? I have a private lesson in sale embroidery in ten minutes that I wouldn’t miss for the world – the sweetest man teaches it!”

“Well, under the circumstances I won’t keep you,” said mother, “but I’ll write to the doctor just the same.”

“Yes, do,” I urged, “send it care of me so that he’ll be sure to get it.”

Mother is not a restful creature in camp.

April 9th. “Say, there, you with the nose,” cried my P.O. company commander today, “are you with us or are you playing a little game of your own?”

I wasn’t so very wrong – just the slight difference between port and present arms.

“With you, heart and soul,” I replied, hoping to make a favorable impression by a smart retort.

“That don’t work in the manual,” he replied; “use your brain and ears.”

Unnecessarily rough he was, but I don’t know but what he wasn’t right.

April 10th. I hear that I am going to be put on the mess crew. God pity me, poor wretch! How shall I ever keep my hands from becoming red? What a terrible war it is!

April 11th. Saw a basketball game the other night. Never knew it was so rough. I used to play it with the girls and we had such sport. There seemed to be some reason for it then. There are a couple of queer looking brothers on our team who seem to try utterly to demolish their opponents. They remind me of a couple of tough gentlemen from Scranton I heard about in a story once.

April 12th. The price of fags (gee! I’m getting rough) has gone up again. This war is rapidly cramping my style.

April 14th. I have been too sick at heart to write up my diary – Eli is dead! “Pop,” the Jimmy-legs, found the body and has been promoted to Chief Master-at-arms. It’s an ill wind that blows no good. I don’t know whether it was because he found Eli or because he runs one of the most modernly managed mess halls in camp or because his working parties are always well attended that “Pop” received his appointment, but whatever it was it does my heart good to see a real seagoing old salt, one of our few remaining ex-apprentice boys, receive recognition that is so well merited. However, I was on much more intimate terms with Eli when I was over in Probation Camp than I was with “Pop.” He almost had me in his clutches once for late hammocks, me and eight other poor victims I had led into the trouble, and he had our wheelbarrows all picked out for us, and a nice large pile of sand for us to play with when fate interceded in our behalf. The poor man nearly cried out of sheer anguish of soul, and I can’t justly blame him. It’s hard lines to have a nice fat extra duty party go dead on your hands.

But with Eli it was different. When I was a homeless rookie he took me in and I fed him – cigarette butts – and I’ll honestly say that he showed more genuine appreciation than many a flapper I have plied with costly viands. He was a good goat, Eli. Not a refined goat, to be sure, but a good, honest, whole-souled goat just the same. He did his share in policing the grounds, never shirked a cigar end or a bit of paper and amused many a mess gear line. He was loyal to his friends, tolerant with new recruits and a credit to the service in general. Considering the environment in which he lived, I think he deported himself with much dignity and moderation. I for one shall miss Eli. Some of the happier memories of my rookie days die with him. He is survived by numerous dogs.

April 25th. Yesterday I wandered around Probation Camp in a very patronizing manner and finally stopped to shed a tear on the humble grave of Eli.

“Poor sinful goat,” I thought sadly, “here you lie at last in your final resting place, but your phantom, I wonder, does it go coursing madly down the Milky Way, butting the stars aside with its battle-scarred head and sending swift gleams of light through the heavens as its hoofs strike against an upturned planet? Your horns, are they tipped with fire and your beard gloriously aflame, or has the great evil spirit of Wayward Goats descended upon you and borne you away to a place where there is never anything to butt save unsatisfactorily yielding walls of padded cotton? Many changes have taken place, Eli, since you were with us, much adversity has befallen me, but the world in the large is very much the same. Bill and Mike have been shipped to sea and strange enough to say, old Spike Kelly has made the Quartermasters School. I alone of all the gang remain unspoken for – nobody seems anxious to avail themselves of my services. My tapes are dirtier and my white hat grows less ‘sea-going’ every day and even you, Eli, are being forgotten. The company commander still carols sweetly in the morning about ‘barrackses’ and fire ‘distinguishers,’ rookies still continue to rook about the camp in their timid, mild-eyed way, while week-old sailors with unwashed leggins delight their simple souls with cries of ‘twenty-one days.’ New goats have sprung up to take your place in the life of the camp and belittle your past achievements, but to me, O unregenerate goat, you shall ever remain a refreshing memory. Good butting, O excellent ruminant, wherever thou should chance to be. I salute you.”

This soliloquy brought me to the verge of an emotional breakdown. I departed the spot in silence. On my way back through Probation I chanced upon a group of rookies studying for their examinations and was surprised to remember how much I had contrived to forget. Nevertheless I stopped one of the students and asked him what a “hakamaback” was and found to my relief that he didn’t know.

“Back to your manual,” said I gloomily, “I fear you will never be a sailor.”

Having thus made heavy the heart of another, I continued on my way feeling somehow greatly cheered only to find upon entering my barracks that my blankets were in the lucky bag. How did I ever forget to place them in my hammock? It was a natural omission though, I fancy, for the master-at-arms so terrifies me in the morning with his great shouts of “Hit the deck, sailor! Shake a leg – rise an’ shine” that I am unnerved for the remainder of the day.

April 29th. Life seems to be composed of just one parade after another. I am weary of the plaudits and acclamation of the multitude and long for some sequestered spot on a mountain peak in Tibet. Every time I see a street I instinctively start to walk down the middle of it. Last week I was one of the many thousands of Pelham men who marched along Fifth Avenue in the Liberty Loan parade. I thought I was doing particularly well and would have made a perfect score if one of my leggins hadn’t come off right in front of the reviewing stand much to the annoyance of the guy behind me because he tripped on it and almost dropped his gun. For the remainder of the parade I was subjected to a running fire of abuse that fairly made my flesh crawl.

At the end of the march I ran into a rather nebulous, middle-aged sort of a gentleman soldier who was sitting on the curb looking moodily at a manhole as if he would like to jump in it.

“Hello, stranger,” says I in a blustery, seafaring voice, “you look as if you’d been cursed at about as much as I have. What sort of an outfit do you belong to?”

He scrutinized one of his buttons with great care and then told me all about himself.

“I’m a home guard, you know,” he added bitterly, “all we do is to escort people. I’ve escorted the Blue Devils, the Poilus, the Australians, mothers of enlisted men, mothers of men who would have enlisted if they could, Boy Scouts and loan workers until my dogs are jolly well near broken down on me. Golly, I wish I was young enough to enjoy a quiet night’s sleep in the trenches for a change.”

Later I saw him gloomily surveying the world from the window of a passing cab. He was evidently through for the time being at least.

April 30th. I took my bar-keeping pal home over the last weekend liberty. It was a mistake. He admits it himself. Mother will never have him in the house again. Mother could never get him in the house again. He fears her. The first thing he did was to mix poor dear grandfather a drink that caused the old gentleman to forget his game leg which had been damaged in battles, ranging anywhere from the Mexican to the Spanish wars, according to grandfather’s mood at the time he is telling the story, but which I believe, according to a private theory of mine, was really caught in a folding bed. However it was, grandfather forgot all about this leg of his entirely and insisted on dancing with Nora, our new maid. Mother, of course, was horrified. But not content with that, this friend of mine concocted some strange beverage for the pater which so delighted him that he loaned my so-called pal the ten spot I had been intending to borrow. The three of them sat up until all hours of the night playing cards and telling ribald stories. As mother took me upstairs to bed she gazed down on her father-in-law and her husband in the clutches of this demon and remarked bitterly to me:

“Like father, like son,” and I knew that she was thoroughly determined to make both of them pay dearly for their pleasant interlude. Breakfast the next morning was a rather trying ordeal. Grandfather once more resorted to his game leg with renewed vigor, referring several times to the defense of the Alamo, so I knew he was pretty low in his mind. Father withdrew at the sight of bacon. Mother laughed scornfully as he departed. My friend ate a hearty breakfast and kept a sort of a happy-go-lucky monologue throughout its entire course. I took him out walking afterward and forgot to bring him back.

April 31st. Have just come off guard duty and feel quite exhausted. The guns are altogether too heavy. I can think of about five different things I could remove from them without greatly decreasing their utility. The first would be the barrel. The artist who drew the picture in the last camp paper of Dawn appearing in the form of a beautiful woman must have had more luck than I have ever had. I think he would have been closer to the truth if he had put her in a speeding automobile on its way home from a road house. It surely is a proof of discipline to hear the mocking, silver-toned laughter of women ring out in the night only ten feet away and not drop your gun and follow it right through the barbed wire. After the war, I am going to buy lots of barbed wire and cut it up into little bits just to relieve my feelings.

Last night I had the fright of my life. Someone was fooling around the fence in the darkness.

“Who’s there?” I cried.

“Why, I’m Kaiser William,” came the answer in a subdued voice.

“Well, I wish you’d go away, Kaiser William,” said I nervously, “you’re busting the lights out of rule number six.”

“What’s that?” asks the voice.

“Not to commit a nuisance with anyone except in a military manner,” I replied, becoming slightly involved.

“That’s not such a wonderful rule,” came back the voice in complaining tones. “I could make up a rule better than that.”

“Don’t try to tonight,” I pleaded.

There was silence for a moment, then the voice continued seriously, “Say, I’m not Kaiser William really. Honest I’m not.”

“Well, who are you?” I asked impatiently.

“Why, I’m Tucks,” the voice replied. “Folks call me that because I take so many of them in my trousers.”

“Well, Tucks,” I replied, “you’d better be moving on. I don’t know what might happen with this gun. I’m tempted to shoot the cartridge out of it just to make it lighter.”

“Oh, you can’t shoot me,” cried Tucks, “I’m crazy. I bet you didn’t know that, did you?”

“I wasn’t sure,” I answered.

“Oh, I’m awfully crazy,” continued Tucks, “everybody says so, and I look it, too, in the daylight.”

“You must,” I replied.

“Well, good night,” said Tucks in the same subdued voice. “If you find a flock of pink Liberty Bonds around here, remember I lost them.” He departed in the direction of City Island.

May 1st. I visited the office of the camp paper today and found it to be an extremely hectic place. In the course of a conversation with the Chief I chanced to look up and caught two shining eyes staring malevolently at me from a darkened corner of the room. This creature blinked at me several times very rapidly, wiggled its mustache and suddenly disappeared into the thick shadows.

“Who is that?” I cried, startled.

“That’s our mad photographer,” said the Chief. “What do you think of him?”

“Do you keep him in there?” I asked, pointing to the coal-black cupboard-like room into which this strange creature had disappeared.

“Yes,” said the Chief, “and he likes it. Often he stays there for days at a time, only coming out for air.” At this juncture there came from the dark room the sounds of breaking glass, which was immediately followed by strange animal-like sounds as the mad photographer burst out of his den and proclaimed to all the world that nothing meant very much in his life and that it would be absolutely immaterial to him if the paper and its entire staff should suddenly be visited with flood, fire and famine. After this gracious and purely gratuitous piece of information he again withdrew, but strange mutterings still continued to issue forth from his lair. While I was sitting in the office the editor happened to drift in from the adjacent room crisply attired in a pair of ragged, disreputable trousers and a sleeveless gray sweater which was raveling in numerous places. It was the shock of my life.

“Where’s our yeoman?” he grumbled, at which the yeoman, who somehow reminded me of some character from one of Dickens’s novels, edged out of the door, but he was too late. Spying him, the editor launched forth on a violent denunciation, in which for no particular reason the cartoonist and sporting editor joined. There they stood, the three of them, abusing this poor simple yeoman in the most unnecessary manner as far as I could make out. Three harder cutthroats I have never encountered. While in the office, I came upon a rather elderly artist crouched over in a corner writhing as if he was in great pain. He was in the throes of composition, I was told, and he looked it. Poor wretch, he seemed to have something on his mind. The only man I saw who seemed to have anything like a balanced mind was the financial shark, a little ferret-eyed, onery-looking cuss whom I wouldn’t have trusted out of my sight. He was sitting with his nose thrust in some dusty volume totally oblivious of the pandemonium that reigned around him. He either has a great mind or none at all – probably the latter. I fear I would never make an editor. The atmosphere is simply altogether too strenuous for me.

May 4th. There seems to be no place in the service for me; I cannot decide what rating to select. To be a quartermaster one must know how to signal, and signaling always tires my arms. One must know how to blow a horrid shrill little whistle in order to become a boatswain mate, and my ears could never stand this. To be a yeoman, it is necessary to know how to rattle papers in an important manner and disseminate misinformation with a straight face, and this I could never do. I fear the only thing left for me is to try for a commission. I’m sure I would be a valuable addition to any wardroom.

May 6th. “Man the drags! Hey, there, you flannel-footed camel, stop galloping! What are you doing, anyway – playing horses?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I cried out, hot with rage and humiliation; “you know perfectly well I’m not playing horse. I realize as well as you do that this is a serious—”

At this juncture of my brave retort a gun barrel stove in the back of my head, someone kicked me on the shin and in some indescribable manner the butt of a rifle became entangled between my feet, and down I went in a cloud of dust and oaths. One-fourth of the entire Pelham field artillery passed over my body, together with its crew, while through the roar and confusion raised by this horrible cataclysm I could hear innumerable C.P.O.’s howling and blackguarding me in frenzied tones, and I dimly distinguished their forms dancing in rage amid descending billows of dust. The parade ground swirled dizzily around me, but I had no desire to arise and begin life anew. It would not be worth while. I felt that I had at the most only a short time to live, and that that was too long. The world offered nothing but the most horrifying possibilities to me. “What is the Biltmore to a man in uniform, anyway?” I remember thinking to myself as I lay there with my nose pressed flat to an ant hill, “all the best parts of it are arid districts, waste places, limitless Saharas to him. Death, where is thy sting?” I continued, as an outraged ant assaulted my nose. The world came throbbing back. I felt myself being dragged violently away from my resting place. I was choking. Bidding farewell to the ants, I prepared myself to swoon when gradually, as if from a great distance, I heard the voice of my P.O. He was almost crying.

“Take him out,” he pleaded; “for Gord sake, take him out. He’s hurtin’ our gun.”

This remark gave me the strength to rise, but not gracefully. My intention was to address a few handpicked words to this P.O. of mine, but fortunately for my future peace of mind I was beyond utterance. Weakly I tottered in the direction of the gun, hoping to support myself upon it.

“Hey, come away from that gun!” howled the P.O. “Don’t let him touch it, fellers,” he pleaded. “Don’t let him even go near it. He’ll spoil it. He’ll completely destroy it.”

“Say, Buddy,” said the Chief to me, and how I hated the ignominy of the word, “I guess I’ll take you out of the game for today. I’m responsible for Government property, and you are altogether too big a risk.”

“What shall I do?” I asked, huskily. “Where shall I go?”

“Do?” he repeated, in a thoughtful voice. “Go? Well, here’s where you can go,” and he told me, “and this is what you can do when you get there,” and as I departed rather hastily he told me this also. The entire parade ground heard him. How shall I ever be able to hold up my head again in Camp? I departed the spot, but only under one boiler; however, I made fair speed. Like a soldier returning from a week in the trenches, I sought the comfort and seclusion of the Y.M.C.A. Here I witnessed a checker contest of a low order between two unscrupulous brothers. They had a peculiar technique completely their own. It consisted of arts and dodges and an extravagant use of those adjectives one is commonly supposed to shun.

“Say, there’s a queen down at the end of the room,” one of them would suddenly exclaim, and while the other brother was gazing eagerly in that direction he would deliberately remove several of his men from the board. But the other brother, who was not so balmy as he looked, would occasionally discover this slight irregularity and proceed to express his opinion of it by word of mouth, which for sheer force of expression was in the nature of a revelation to me. It was appalling to sit there and watch those two young men, who had evidently at one time come from a good home, sit in God’s bright sunshine and cheat each other throughout the course of an afternoon and lie out of it in the most obvious manner. The game was finally discontinued, owing to a shortage of checkermen which they had secreted in their pockets, a fact which each one stoutly denied with many weird and rather indelicate vows. I left them engaged in the pleasant game of recrimination, which had to do with stolen golf balls, the holding out of change and kindred sordid subjects. In my weakened condition this display of fraternal depravity so offended my instinctive sense of honor that I was forced to retire behind the protecting pages of a 1913 issue of “The Farmer’s Wife Indispensable Companion,” where I managed to lose myself for the time in a rather complicated exposition of how to tell which chicken laid what egg if any or something to that effect, an article that utterly demolished the moral character of the average hen, leaving her hardly a leg to roost on.

May 8th. “Give away,” said the coxswain today, when we were struggling to get our cutter off from the pier, and I gave away to such an extent, in fact, that I suddenly found myself balanced cleverly on the back of my neck in the bottom of the boat, so that I experienced the rather odd sensation of feeling the hot sun on the soles of my feet. This procedure, of course, did not go unnoticed. Nothing I do goes unnoticed, save the good things. The coxswain made a few comments which showed him to be a thoroughly ill-bred person, but further than this I was not persecuted. After we had rowed interminable distances through leagues upon leagues of doggedly resisting water a man in the bow remarked casually that he had several friends in Florida we might call upon if we kept it up a little longer, but the coxswain comfortably ensconced upon the hackamatack, was so deeply engrossed in the perusal of a vest pocket edition of the “Merchant of Venice” that he failed to grasp the full meaning of the remark. I lifted my rapidly glazing eyes with no little effort from the keelson and discovered to my horror that we had hardly passed more than half a mile of shoreline at the most. What we had been doing all the time I was unable to figure out. I thought we had been rowing. I could have sworn we had been rowing, but apparently we had not. I looked up from my meditation in time to catch the ironical gaze of the coxswain upon me, and I involuntarily braced myself to the assault.

“Say, there, sailor,” said he, with a slow, unpleasant drawl, “you’re not rowing; you’re weaving. It’s fancy work you’re doing, blast yer eyes!”

All who had sufficient strength left in them laughed jeeringly at this wise observation, but I retained a dignified silence – that is, so far as a man panting from exhaustion can be silent. At this moment we passed a small boat being rowed briskly along by a not unattractive girl.

“Now, watch her,” said the coxswain, helpfully, to me; “study the way that poor fragile girl, that mere child, pulls the oars, and try to do likewise.”

I observed in shamed silence. My hands ached. A motor boat slid swiftly by and I distinctly saw a man drinking beer from the bottle. “Hell isn’t dark and smoky,” thought I to myself; “hell is bright and sunny, and there is lots of sparkling water in it and on the sparkling water are innumerable boats and in these boats are huddled the poor lost mortals who are forced to listen through eternity to the wise cracks of cloven-hoofed, spike-tailed coxswains. That’s what hell is,” thought I, “and I am in my probation period right now.”

“Feather your oars!” suddenly screamed our master at the straining crew.

“Feather me eye!” yelled back a courageous Irishman. “What do you think these oars are, anyway – a flock of humming birds? Whoever heard of feathering a hundred-ton weight? Feather Pike’s Peak, say I; it’s just as easy.”

Somehow we got back to the pier, but I was almost delirious by this time. The last part of the trip was all one drab, dull nightmare to me. This evening my hands were so swollen I was forced to the extremity of bribing a friend to hold the telephone receiver for me when I called up mother.

“What have you been doing?” she asked.

“Rowing,” came my short answer.

“What a splendid outing!” she exclaimed. “You had such a lovely day for it, didn’t you, dear?”

“Hang up that receiver!” I shouted to my friend; “hang it up, or my mother shall hear from the lips of her son words she should only hear from her husband.”

May 9th. I am just after having been killed in a sham battle, and so consequently I feel rather ghastly today. I don’t exactly know whether I was a Red or a Blue, because I did a deal of fighting on both sides, but always with the same result. I was killed instantly and completely. People got sick of putting me out of my misery after a while and I was allowed to wander around at large in a state of great mystification and excitement, shooting my blank bullets into the face of nature in an aimless sort of manner whenever the battle began to pall upon me.

Most of the time I passed pleasantly on the soft, fresh flank of a hill where for a while I slept until a cow breathed heavily in my face and reminded me that it was war after all. My instructions were to keep away from the guns, and get killed as soon as possible. As these instructions were not difficult to follow, I carried them out to the letter. I stayed away from the guns and I permitted myself to be killed several times in order to make sure it would take. After that I became a sort of composite camp follower, deserter and straggler.

In my wandering I chanced upon an ancient enemy of many past encounters.

“Are you Red or Blue?” I asked, preparing to die for the fifth time.

“No,” he answered, sarcastically, “I’m what you might call elephant ear gray.”

“Are you the guy the reporter for the camp paper was referring to in his last story?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he replied, “the slandering blackguard.”

“You hit me on the nose with a push-ball,” said I.

“I’ll do it again,” said he.

“That reporter, evidently a man of some observation, said you didn’t wash your neck and that you had the habits of a camel.”

“But I do wash my neck,” he said, stubbornly, “and I don’t know anything about the habits of a camel, but whatever they might happen to be, I haven’t got ’em.”

“Yes,” I replied, as if to myself, “you certainly should wash your neck. That’s the very least you could do.”

“But I tell you,” he cried, desperately, “I keep telling you that I do wash my neck. Why do you go on talking about it as if I didn’t! I tell you now, once for all time, that I do wash my neck, and that ends it. Don’t talk any more. I want to think.”

We sat in silence for a space, then I remarked casually, almost inaudibly, “and you certainly shouldn’t have the habits of a camel.”

The depraved creature stirred uneasily. “I ain’t got ’em,” he said.

“Good,” I cried heartily. “We understand each other perfectly. In the future you will try to wash your neck and cease from having the habits of a camel. No compromise is necessary. I know you will keep your word.”

“Go away quickly,” he gasped, searching around for a stone to hurl at me, and discarding several because of their small size. “Go away to somewhere else. I’m telling you now, go away or else a special detail will find your lifeless body here in the bushes sometime tomorrow.”

“I’ve already been thoroughly killed several times today,” I said, putting a tree between us, “but don’t forget about the camel, and for heaven’s sake do try to keep your neck—”

A stone hit the tree with a resounding crack, and I increased the distance.

“Damn the torpedoes!” I shouted back as I disappeared into the pleasant security of the sun-warmed woods.

May 11th. “What navy do you belong to?” asked an Ensign, stopping me today, “the Chinese?”

“Why do you ask, sir?” I replied, saluting gracefully. “Of course I don’t belong to the Chinese Navy.”

“What’s your rating?” he snapped.

“Show girl first class attached to the good ship Biff! Bang! sir,” came my prompt retort.

“Well, put a watch mark on your arm, sailor, and put it there pronto, or you’ll be needing an understudy to pinch hit for you.”

As a matter of fact I have never put my watch mark on, for the simple reason that I have been rather expecting a rating at any moment, but it seems as if my expectations were doomed to disappointment.

Nothing matters much, anyway, now, however, for I have been selected from among all the men in the station to play the part of a Show Girl in the coming magnificent Pelham production, “Biff! Bang!” At last I have found the occupation to which by training and inclination I am naturally adapted. The Grand Moguls that are running this show came around the barracks the other day looking for material, and when they gazed upon me I felt sure that their search had not been in vain.

“Why don’t you write a ‘nut’ part for him?” asked one of them of the playwright as they surveyed me critically as if I was some rare specimen of bug life.

“That would never do,” he answered. “Real ‘nuts’ can never play the part on the stage. You’ve got to have a man of intelligence.”

“Look here,” I broke in. “You’ve got to stop talking about me before my face as if I wasn’t really present. Nuts I may be, but I can still understand English, even when badly spoken, and resent it. Lay off that stuff or I’ll be constrained to introduce you to a new brand of ‘Biff! Bang!’”

Saying this, I struck an heroic attitude, but it seemed to produce no startling change in their calm, deliberate examination of me.

“He’ll do, I think, as a Show Girl,” the dance-master mused dreamily. “Like a cabbage, every one of his features is bad, but the whole effect is not revolting. Strange, isn’t it, how such things happen.” At this point the musician broke in.

“He ain’t a-going to dance to my music if I know it. He’ll ruin it.” At which remark I executed a few rather simple but nevertheless neat steps I had learned at the last charity Bazaar to which I had contributed my services, and these few steps were sufficient to close the deal. I was signed up on the spot. As they were leaving the barracks one excited young person ran up and halted the arrogant Thespians. “If I get the doctor to remove my Adam’s Apple,” he pleaded wistfully, “do you think you could take me on as a pony?”

“No,” said one of them, not without a certain show of kindness. “I fear not. It would be necessary for him to remove the greater part of your map and graft a couple of pounds on to your sadly unendowed limbs.”

From that day on my life has become one of unremitting toil. Together with the rest of the Show Girls I vamp and slouch my way around the clock with ever increasing seductiveness. We are really doing splendidly. The ponies come leaping lightly across the floor waving their freckled, muscular arms from side to side and looking very unattractive indeed in their B.V.D.’s, high shoes and sock supporters. “I can see it all,” says the Director, in an enthusiastic voice, and if he can I’ll admit he has some robust quality of imagination that I fail to possess.

Us Show Girls, of course, have to be a little more modest than the ponies, so we retain our white trousers. These are rolled up, however, in order to afford the mosquitoes, who are covering the show most conscientiously, room to roost on. And sad to relate, the life is beginning to affect the boys. Only yesterday I saw one of our toughest ponies vamping up the aisle of Mess Hall No. 2 with his tray held over his head in the manner of a Persian slave girl. The Jimmy-legs, witnessing this strange sight, dropped his jaw and forgot to lift it up again. “Sweet attar of roses,” he muttered. “What ever has happened to our poor, long-suffering navy?” At the door of the Mess Hall the pony bowed low to the deck and withdrew with a coy backward flirt of his foot.

I can’t express in words the remarkable appearance made by some of our seagoing chorus girls when they attempt to assume the light and airy graces of the real article. Some of the men have so deeply entered into their parts that they have attained absolute self-forgetfulness, with the result that they leap and preen about in a manner quite startling to the dispassionate spectator. My career so far has not been a personal triumph. In the middle of a number, the other night, the dancing master clapped his hands violently together, a signal he uses when he wants all motion to cease.

“Take ’em down to the end of the room, boys,” he said. “I can tell three minutes ahead of time when things are going to go wrong. That man on the end didn’t have a thought in his head. He would have smeared the entire number.” I was the man on the end.

May 23d. This has not been a particularly agreeable day, although to a woman no doubt it would have been laden with moments of exquisite ecstasy. Feminine apparel for me has lost forever the charm of mystery that formerly touched it with enchantment. There is nothing I do not know now. Its innermost secret has been revealed and its revelation has brought with it its full burden of woe. All knowledge is pain and vice versa. I have always admired women; whether so profoundly as they have admired me I know not; however that may be, I have always admired them collectively and individually in the past, but after today’s experience my admiration is tinged with pity. The source of these reflections lies in no less an article than a corset. As a Show Girl, it has been my lot to be provided with one of these fiendish devices of medieval days. It is too much. The corset must go. No woman could have experienced the pain and discomfort I have been subjected to this day without feeling entitled to the vote. Yet I dare say there are women who would gladly be poured into a new corset every day of their lives. They can have mine for the asking. Life at its best presents a narrow enough outlook without resorting to cunningly wrought devices such as corsets in order further to confine one’s point of view or abdomen, which amounts to the same thing. The whale is a noble animal, it was a very good idea, the whale, and I love every bone in its body, so long as it keeps them there. So tightly was my body clutched in the embrace of this vicious contraption that I found it impossible to inhale my much needed cigarette. The smoke would descend no further than my throat. The rest of me was a closed port, a roadway blocked to traffic. I have suffered.

But there were also other devices, other soft, seductive under-strappings. I know them all to their last most intimate detail. I feel that now I could join a woman’s sewing circle and talk with as much authority and wisdom as the most veteraned corset wearer present. My views would be radical perhaps but at least they would have the virtue of being refreshing.

However, I can see some good coming out of my unavoidably acquired knowledge of female attire. In future days, while my wife is out purchasing shirts and neckties for me, I can easily employ my time to advantage in shopping around Fifth Avenue in search of the correct thing in lingerie for her. It will be a great help to the household and I am sure impress my wife with the depth and range of my education, which I will be able to tell her, thank God, was innocently acquired.

May 28th. I am slowly forming back into my pristine shape but only after having been freed from bondage for some hours. After several more sodas, concoctions which up till recently I have despised as injurious, I guess I will have filled out to my usual dimensions around the waist line, but when I consider the long days of womanhood stretched out before me in the future I will admit it is with a sinking not only of the waist, but also of the heart.

More indignities have been heaped upon me. Why did I ever take up the profession of a show girl? Today I fell into the clutches of the barbers. They were not gentle clutches, brutal rather; and such an outspoken lot they were at that.

“What’s that?” asked one of them as I stood rather nervously before him with bared chest.

“Why, that,” I replied, a trifle disconcerted, “that’s my chest.”

He looked at me for a moment, then smiled a slow, pitying smile. “Hey, Tony,” he suddenly called to his colleague, “come over here a moment and see what this bird claims to be a chest.”

All this yelled in the faces of the entire Biff-Bang company. It was more inhuman and debasing than my first physical examination in public. The doctors on this occasion, although they had not complimented me, had at least been comparatively impersonal in despatching their offices, but these men were far from being impersonal. I perceived with horror that it was their intention to use my chest as a means of bringing humor into their drab existences. Tony came and surveyed me critically.

“That,” he drawled musically, “ees not a chest. That ees the bottom part of hees neck.”

“I know it is,” replied the other, “but somehow his arms have gotten mixed up in the middle of it.”

Tony shrugged his shoulders eloquently. He assumed the appearance of a man completely baffled.

“Honestly, now, young feller,” continued my first tormentor, “are you serious when you try to tell us that that is your chest?”

He drew attention to the highly disputed territory by poking me diligently with his thumb.

“That’s the part the doctor always listened to whenever I had a cold,” I replied as indifferently as possible. The man pondered over this for a moment.

“Well,” he replied at length, “probably the doctor was right, but to the impartial observer it would seem to be, as my friend Tony so accurately observed, the bottom part of your neck.”

“It really doesn’t matter much after all,” I replied, hoping to close the conversation. “You all were not sent here to establish the location of the different parts of my anatomy, anyway.”

The man appeared not to have heard me. “I’d swear,” he murmured musingly, standing back and regarding me with tilted head, “I’d swear it was his neck if it warn’t for his arms.” He suddenly discontinued his dreamy observations and became all business.

“Well, sir,” he began briskly, “now that we’ve settled that what do you want me to do to it?”

“Why, shave it, of course,” I replied bitterly. “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? All us Show Girls have got to have our chests shaved.”

“An’ after I’ve shaved your chest, dear,” he asked in a soothing voice, “what do you want me to do with it?”

“With what?” I replied, enraged, “with my chest?”

“No,” he answered easily, “not your chest, but that one poor little pitiful hair that adorns it. Do you want me to send it home to your ma, all tied around with a pink ribbon?”

I saw no reason to reply to this insult, but stood uneasily and tried to maintain my dignity while he lathered me with undue elaboration. When it was time for him to produce his razor he faltered.

“I can’t do it,” he said brokenly, “I haven’t the heart to cut it down in its prime. It looks so lonely and helpless there by itself.” He swept his razor around several times with a free-handed, blood-curdling swoop of his arm. “Well, here goes,” he said, shutting his eyes and approaching me. Tony turned away as if unable to witness the scene. I was unnerved, but I stood my ground. The deed was done and I was at last free to depart. “That’s a terrible chest for a Show Girl,” I heard him to say to Tony as I did so.

May 29th. The world has come clattering down around my ears and I am buried, crushed and bruised beneath the debris. There was a dress rehearsal today, and I, from the whole company, was singled out for the wrath of the gods.

“Who is that chorus girl on the end acting frantic?” cried out one of the directors in the middle of a number. My name was shouted across the stage until it echoed and resounded and came bounding back in my face from every corner of the shadow-plunged theater. I knew I was in for it and drew myself up majestically although I turned pale under my war paint.

“Well, tell him he isn’t walking on stilts,” continued the director, and although it was perfectly unnecessary, I was told that and several other things with brutal candor. The dance went on but I knew the eyes of the director were on me. My legs seemed to lose all proper coordination. My arms became unmanageable. I lost step and could not pick it up again, yet, as in a nightmare, I struggled on desperately. Suddenly the director clapped his hands. The music ceased, and I slowed down to an uneasy shuffle.

“Sweetheart,” said the director, addressing me personally, “you’re not dancing. You’re swimming, that’s what you’re doing. As a Persian girl you would make a first class squaw.” He halted for a moment and then bawled out in a great voice, “Understudy!” and I was removed from the stage in a fainting condition. This evening I was shipped back to camp a thoroughly discredited Show Girl. I had labored long in vicious, soul-squelching corsets and like Samson been shorn of my locks, and here I am after all my sacrifices relegated back to the scrap heap. Why am I always the unfortunate one? I must have a private plot in the sky strewn with unlucky stars. Camp routine after the free life of the stage is unbearably irksome. My particular jimmy legs was so glad to see me back that he almost cried as he thrust a broom and a swab into my hands.

“Bear a hand,” he said gleefully, “get to work and stick to it. We’re short of men,” he added, “and there is no end of things for you to do.”

I did them all and he was right. There surely is no end to the things he can devise for me to do. I long for the glamor and footlights of the gay white way, but I have been cast out and rejected as many a Show Girl has been before me.

June 1st. The morning papers say all sort of nice things about Biff-Bang but I can hardly believe them sincere after the treatment I received. I know for a fact that the man who took my place was knock-kneed and that the rest of his figure could not hold a candle to mine.

I still feel convinced that Biff-Bang lost one of its most prepossessing and talented artists when I was so unceremoniously removed from the chorus.

June 10th. I was standing doing harm to no one in a vague, rather unfortunate way I have, when all of a sudden, without word or warning, a very competent looking sailor seized me by the shoulders and, thrusting his face close to mine, cried out:

“Do you want to make a name for yourself in the service?”

I left the ground two feet below me in my fright and when I alighted there were tears of eagerness in my eyes.

“Yes,” I replied breathlessly, “oh, sir, yes.”

“Then pick up that,” he cried dramatically, pointing to a cigar butt on the parade ground. I didn’t wait for the laughter. I didn’t have to. It was forthcoming immediately. Huge peals of it. Sailors are a very low tribe of vertebrate. They seem to hang around most of the time waiting for something to laugh at – usually me. It is my belief that I have been the subject of more mirth since I came to camp than any other man on the station. Whatever I do I seem to do it too much or too little. There even seems to be something mirth-provoking in my personal appearance, which I have always regarded hitherto not without a certain shade of satisfaction. Only the other day I caught the eyes of the gloomiest sailor in camp studying me with a puzzled expression. He gazed at me for such a long time that I became quite disconcerted. Slowly a smile spread over his face, then a strange, rusty laugh forced itself through his lips.

“Doggone if I can solve it,” he chuckled, turning away and shaking his head; “it’s just simply too much for me.”

He looked back once, clapped his hands over his mouth and proceeded merrily on his way. I am glad of course to be able to bring joy into the lives of sailors, but I did not enlist for that sole purpose. Returning to the cigar butt, however, I was really quite disappointed. I do so want to make a name for myself in the service that I would eagerly jump at the chance of sailing up the Kiel canal in a Barnegat Sneak Box were it not for the fact that sailing always makes me deathly sick. I don’t know why it is, but the more I have to do with water the more reasons I find for shunning it. The cigar butt episode broke my heart though. I was all keyed up for some heroic deed – what an anticlimax! I left the spot in a bitter, humiliated mood. There is only one comforting part about the whole affair – I did not pick up that cigar butt. He did, I’ll bet, though when nobody was looking. I don’t know as I blame him – there were still several healthy drags left in it.

June 11th. This war is going to put a lot of Chinamen out of business if it keeps up much longer. The first thing a sailor will do after he has been paid off will be to establish a laundry, and he won’t be a slouch at the business at that. I feel sure that I am qualified right now to take in family laundry and before the end of summer I guess I’ll be able to do fancy work. At present I am what you might call a first class laundryman, but I’m not a fancy laundryman yet. Since they’ve put us in whites I go around with the washer-woman’s complaint most of the time. Terrible shooting pains in my back! My sympathy for the downtrodden is increasing by leaps and bounds. I can picture myself without any effort of the imagination bending over a tub after the war doing the family washing while my wife is out running for alderman or pulling the wires to be appointed Commissioner of the Docks. The white clothes situation, however, is serious. It seems that every spare moment I have I am either washing or thinking of washing or just after having washed, and to one who possesses as I do the uncanny faculty of being able to get dirtier in more places in the shortest space of time than any ten street children picked at random could ever equal, life presents one long vista of soap and suds.

“You boys look so cute in your funny white uniforms,” a girl said to me the other day. “It must be so jolly wearing them.”

I didn’t strike her, for she was easily ten pounds heavier than I was, but I made it easily apparent that our relations would never progress further than the weather vane. I used to affect white pajamas, the same seeming to harmonize with the natural purity of my nature, but after the war I fear I shall be forced to discontinue the practice in favor of more lurid attire. However, I still believe that a bachelor should never wear anything other than white pajamas or at the most lavender, but this of course is merely a personal opinion.

June 14th. I have been hard put today. The Lord only knows what trials and tribulations will be visited upon me next. At present I am quite unnerved. Today I was initiated into all the horrifying secrets and possibilities of the bayonet, European style. Never do I remember spending a more unpleasant half an hour. The instructor was a resourceful man possessed of a most vivid imagination. Before he had finished with us potential delicatessen dealers were lying around as thick as flies. We were brushing them off.

After several hair-raising exhibitions he formed us into two lines facing each other and told us to begin.

“Now lunge,” he said, “and look as if you meant business.”

I glanced ingratiatingly across at my adversary. He was simply glaring at me. Never have I seen an expression of greater ferocity. It was too much. I knew for certain that if he ever lunged at me I’d never live to draw another yellow slip.

“Mister Officer,” I gasped, pointing across at this blood-thirsty man, “don’t you think that he’s just a little too close? I’m afraid I might hurt him by accident.”

The officer surveyed the situation with a swift, practical eye.

“Oh, I guess he can take care of himself all right,” he replied. That was just what I feared.

The man smiled grimly.

“But does he know that this is only practice?” I continued. “He certainly doesn’t look as if he did.”

“That’s the way you should look,” said the officer, “work your own face up a bit. This isn’t a vampire scene. Don’t look as if you were going to lure him. Y’know you’re supposed to be angry with your opponent when you meet him in battle, quite put out in fact. And furthermore you’re supposed to look it.”

I regarded my opponent, but only terror was written on my face. Then suddenly we lunged and either through fear or mismanagement I succeeded only in running my bayonet deep into the ground. In some strange manner the butt of the gun jabbed me in the stomach and I was completely winded. My opponent was dancing and darting around me like a local but thorough-going lightning storm. I abandoned my gun and stood sideways, thus decreasing the possible area of danger. Had the exercises continued much longer I would have had a spell of something, probably the blind staggers.

“You’re not pole vaulting,” said the instructor to me, as he returned the gun. “In a real show you’d have looked like a pin cushion by this time.” I felt like one.

Then it all started over again and this time I thought I was doing a little better, when quite unexpectedly the instructor shouted at me.

“Stop prancing around in that silly manner,” he cried, “you’re not doing a sword dance, sonny.”

“He thinks he’s still a show girl,” someone chuckled, “he’s that seductive.”

Mess gear interrupted our happy morning. The sight of a knife fairly sickened me.

June 24th. Last week I caught a liberty – a perfect Forty-three – and went to spend it with some cliff dwelling friends of mine who, heaven help their wretched lot! lived on the sixth and top floor of one of those famous New York struggle-ups. Before shoving off there was some slight misunderstanding between the inspecting officer and myself relative to the exact color of my, broadly speaking, Whites.

“Fall out, there,” he said to me. “You can’t go out on liberty in Blues.”

“But these, sir,” I responded huskily, “are not Blues; they’re Whites.”

“Look like Blues to me,” he said skeptically. “Fall out anyway. You’re too dirty.”

For the first time in my life I said nothing at the right time. I just looked at him. There was a dumb misery in my eyes, a mute, humble appeal such as is practiced with so much success by dogs. He couldn’t resist it. Probably he was thinking of the days when he, too, stood in line waiting impatiently for the final formalities to be run through before the world was his again.

“Turn around,” he said brokenly. I did so.

“Fall in,” he ordered, after having made a prolonged inspection of my shrinking back. “I guess you’ll do, but you are only getting through on a technicality – there’s one white spot under your collar.”

Officers are people after all, although sometimes it’s hard to realize it. This one, in imagination, I anointed with oil and rare perfumes, and costly gifts I laid at his feet, while in a glad voice I called down the blessings of John Paul Jones upon his excellent head. Thus I departed with my kind and never did the odor of gasoline smell sweeter in my nose than did the fumes that were being emitted by the impatient flivver that waited without the gate. And sweet, too, was the fetid atmosphere of the subway after the clean, bracing air of Pelham, sweet was the smell of garlic belonging to a mustache that sat beside me, and sweet were the buttery fingers of a small child who kept clawing at me while their owner demanded of the whole car if I was a “weal mavy sailor boy?” I didn’t look it, and I didn’t feel it, but I had forty-three hours of freedom ahead of me, so what did I care?

All went well with me until I essayed the six flight climb up to the cave of these cliff-dwelling people, when I found that the one-storied existence I had been leading in the Pelham bungalows had completely unfitted me for mountain climbing. As I toiled upward I wondered dimly how these people ever managed to keep so fat after having mounted to such a great distance for so long a time. Somehow they had done it, not only maintained their already acquired fat but added greatly thereto. There would be no refreshing cup to quaff upon arriving, only water, or at best milk. This I knew and the knowledge added pounds to my already heavy feet.

“My, what a dirty sailor you are, to be sure,” they said to me from the depth of their plump complacency.

“Quite so,” I gasped, falling into a chair, “I seem to remember having heard the same thing once before today.”

June 25th. Neither Saturday nor Sunday was a complete success and for a while Saturday afternoon assumed the proportions of a disaster. After having rested from my climb, I decided to wash my Whites so that I wouldn’t be arrested as a deserter or be thrown into the brig upon checking in. The fat people on learning of my intentions decided that the sight of such labor would tire them beyond endurance, so they departed, leaving me in solitary possession of their flat. I thereupon removed my jumper, humped my back over the tub, scrubbed industriously until the garment was white, then hastened roofwards and arranged it prettily on the line. This accomplished, I hurried down, removed my trousers, rehumped my back over the tub, scrubbed industriously until the trousers in turn were white and once more dashed roofwards. I have always been absentminded, but never to such an appalling extent as to appear clad only in my scanty underwear in the midst of a mixed throng of ladies, gentlemen and children. This I did. Some venturous souls had claimed the roof as their own during my absence so that when I sprang from the final step to claim my place in the sun I found myself by no means alone. With a cry of horror I leaped to the other side of the clothesline and endeavored to conceal myself behind an old lady’s petticoat or a lady’s old petticoat or something of that nature. Whoever wore the thing must have been a very short person indeed, for the garment reached scarcely down to my knees, below which my B.V.D.’s fluttered in an intriguing manner.

“Sir,” thundered a pompous gentleman, “have you any explanation for your surprising conduct?”

“Several,” I replied briskly from behind my only claim on respectability. “In the first place, I didn’t expect an audience. In the second—”

“That will do, sir,” broke in this heavy person in a quarterdeck voice. “Who, may I ask, are you?”

“You may,” I replied. “I’m a God-fearing sailor man who is doing the best he can to keep nice and clean in spite of the uncalled for intervention of a red-faced oaf of a plumber person who should know better than to stand around watching him.”

“Don’t take on so, George,” said one of the women whom I suspected of edging around in order to get a better view of me, “the poor young man is a sailor – where is your patriotism?”

“Yes,” broke in the other woman, edging around on the other side, “he’s one of our sailor boys. Treat him nice.”

“Patriotic, I am,” roared George wrathfully, “but not to the extent of condoning and looking lightly upon such a flagrant breach of decency as this semi-nude, so-called sailor has committed in our midst.”

“If you’d give me a couple of Thrift Stamps,” I suggested, “I might be able to come out from behind this blooming barrage.”

“Shameless,” exploded the man.

“Not at all,” I replied, “in the olden days it was quite customary for young gentlemen and elderly stout ones like yourself, for instance, to drop in at the best caves with very much less on than I have without anyone considering their conduct in any degree irregular. In fact, the ladies of this time were no better themselves, it being deemed highly proper for them to appear in some small bit of stuff and nobody thought the worst of it at all. Take the early days of the fifteenth century B.C.—”

At this point in my eloquent address a young child, who had hitherto escaped my attention, took it upon herself to swing on the line with the result that it parted with a snap and my last vestige of protection came fluttering to the roof. For one tense moment I stood gazing into the dilated eyes of those before me. Then with surprising presence of mind, I sprang to a ladder that led to the water tank, swarmed up it with the agility of a cat and lowered myself with a gasp of despair into the cold, cold water of the tank. From this place of security I gazed down on the man who had been responsible for my unfortunate plight. I felt myself sinned against, and the longer I remained in that water, up to my neck, the more I felt my wrongs. I gave voice to them. I said bitter, abusive things to the man.

“Clear the quarter deck,” I shouted, “get aft, or, by gad, I’ll come fluttering down there on your flat, bald head like a blooming flood. Vamoos, hombre, pronto – plenty quick and take your brood with you.” Then I said some more things as my father before me had said them, and the man withdrew with his women.

“He’s a sailor,” he said as he did so. “Hurry, my dears, this is worse than nakedness.”

I emerged and sat in a borrowed bathrobe the rest of the evening. The next morning my clothes were still damp. Now, that’s what I call a stupid way to spend a Saturday night on liberty. The fat people enjoyed it.

June 29th. I met a very pleasant dog yesterday, whom I called Mr. Fogerty because of his sober countenance and the benign but rather puzzled expression in his large, limpid eyes, which were almost completely hidden by his bangs. He was evidently a visitor in camp, so I took him around and introduced him to the rest of the dogs and several of the better sort of goats. In all of these he displayed a friendly but dignified interest, seeming to question them on the life of the camp, how they liked the Navy and what they thought were the prospects for an early peace. He refused to be separated from me, however, and even broke into the mess hall, from which he was unceremoniously ejected, but not before he had gotten half of my ration. In some strange manner he must have found out from one of the other dogs my name and address and exactly where I swung, for in the middle of the night I awoke to hear a lonesome whining in the darkness beneath my hammock and then the sniff, sniff of an investigating nose. As I know how it feels to be lonely in a big black barracks in the dead of night I carefully descended to the deck and collected this animal – it was my old friend, Mr. Fogerty, and he was quite overjoyed at having once more found me. After licking my face in gratitude he sat back on his haunches and waited for me to do something amusing. I didn’t have the heart to leave him there in the darkness. Dogs have a certain way about them that gets me every time. I lifted Mr. Fogerty, a huge hulk of a dog, with much care, and adjusting of overlapping paws into my hammock, and received a kiss in the eye for my trouble. Then I followed Mr. Fogerty into the hammock and resumed my slumber, but not with much comfort. Mr. Fogerty is a large, sprawly dog, who evidently has been used to sleeping in vast spaces and who sees no reason for changing a lifelong habit. Consequently he considered me in the nature of a piece of gratifying upholstery. He slept with his hind legs on my stomach and his front paws propped against my chin. When he scratched, as he not infrequently did, what I decided must be a flea, his hind leg beat upon the canvas and produced a noise not unlike a drum. Thus we slept, but through some miscalculation I must have slept over, for it seems that the Master-at-arms, a very large and capable Irishman, came and shook my hammock.

“Hit the deck there, sailor,” he said, “shake a leg, shake a leg.”

At this point Mr. Fogerty took it upon himself to peer over the side of the hammock to see who this disturber of peace and quiet could be. This was just a little out of the line of duty for the jimmy legs, and I can’t say as I blame him for his conduct under rather trying circumstances. Mr. Fogerty has a large, shaggy head, not unlike a lion’s, and his mouth, too, is quite large and contains some very long and sharp teeth. It seems that Mr. Fogerty, still heavy with slumber, quite naturally yawned into the horrified face of the Jimmy-legs, who, mistaking the operation for a hostile demonstration, retreated from the barracks with admirable rapidity for one so large, crying in a distracted voice as he did so:

“By the saints, it’s a beast he’s turned into during the night. Sure, it’s a visitation of Providence, heaven preserve us.”

It seems I have been washing hammocks ever since. Mr. Fogerty sits around and wonders what it’s all about. I like Fogerty, but he gets me in trouble, and in this I need no help whatsoever.

July 1st. This day I almost succeeded in sinking myself for the final count. The fishes around about the environs of City Island were disappointed beyond words when I came up for the fourth time and stayed up. In my delirium I imagined that school had been let out in honor of my reception and that all the pretty little fishes were sticking around in expectant groups cheering loudly at the thought of the conclusion of their meatless days. Fortunately for the Navy, however, I cheated them and saved myself in order to scrub many more hammocks and white clothes, an object to which I seem to have dedicated my life.

It all come about, as do most drowning parties, in quite an unexpected manner. For some reason it had been arranged that I should take a swim over at one of the emporiums at City Island, and, as I interposed no objections, I accordingly departed with my faithful Mr. Fogerty tumbling along at my heels. Since Mr. Fogerty involved me in trouble the other day by barking at the Jimmy-legs he has endeavored in all possible ways to make up for his thoughtless irregularity. For instance, he met me this morning with an almost brand new shoe which in some manner he had managed to pick up in his wanderings. It fits perfectly, and if he only succeeds in finding the mate to it I shall probably not look for the owner. As a further proof of his good will Mr. Fogerty bit, or attempted to bite, a P.O. who spoke to me roughly regarding the picturesque way I was holding my gun.

“Whose dog is that?” demanded the P.O.

Silence in the ranks. Mr. Fogerty looked defiantly at him for a moment and then trotted deliberately over and sat down upon my foot.

“Oh, so he belongs to you!” continued the P.O. in a threatening voice.

“No, sir,” I faltered; “you see, it isn’t that way at all. I belong to Mr. Fogerty.”

“Who in – who in – who is Mr. Fogerty?” shouted the P.O. “And how in – how in – how did he happen to get into the conversation?”

“Why, this is Mr. Fogerty,” I replied; “this dog here, sitting on my foot.”

“Oh, is that so?” jeered the P.O., a man noted for his quick retorts. “Well, you take your silly looking dog away from here and secure him in some safe place. He ain’t no fit associate for our camp dogs. And, furthermore,” he added, “the next time Mr. Fogerty attempts to bite me I’m going to put you on report – savez?”

Mr. Fogerty is almost as much of a comfort in camp as mother.

Well, that’s another something else again and has nothing to do with my swim and approximate drowning at City Island. Swimming has always been one of my strong points, and I have taken in the past no little pride in my appearance, not only in a bathing outfit, but also in the water. However, the suit they provided me with on this occasion did not show me up in a very alluring light. It was quite large and evidently built according to a model of the early Victorian Era. I was swathed in yards of cloth much in the same manner as is a very young child. It delighted Mr. Fogerty, who expressed his admiration by attaching himself to the lower half of my attire and remaining there until I had waded through several colonies of barnacles far out into the bay. Bidding farewell to Mr. Fogerty at this point, I gave myself over to the joy of the moment and went wallowing along, giving a surprising imitation of the famous Australian crawl. Far in the distance I sighted an island, to which I decided to swim. This was a very poor decision, indeed, because long before I had reached the spot I was in a sinking condition owing to the great heaviness of my suit and a tremendous slacking down of lung power. It was too late to retreat to the shore; the island was the nearest point, and that wasn’t near. On I gasped, my mind teeming with cheerless thoughts of the ocean’s bed waiting to receive me. Just as I was about to shake hands with myself for the last time I cleared the water from my eyes and discovered that the island though still distant was not altogether impossible. Therewith I discarded the top part of my suit and struck out once more. The island was now almost within my grasp. Life seemed to be not such a lost cause after all. Then suddenly, quite clearly, just as I was about to pull myself up on the shore, I saw a woman standing on the bank and heard her shouting in a very conventional voice:

“Private property! Private property!”

I sank. This was too much. As I came up for the first count, and just before I sank back beneath the blue, I had time to hear her repeat:

“Private property! Please keep off!”

I went down very quickly this time and very far. When I arose I saw as though in a dream another woman standing by the first one and seemingly arguing with her.

“He’s drowning!” she said.

“I’m sure I can’t help that!” the other one answered. And then in a loud, imperious voice:

“Private property! No visitors allowed!”

The water closed over my head and stilled her hateful voice.

“No,” she was saying as I came up for the third time; “I can’t do it. If I make an exception of one I must make an exception of all.”

Although I hated to be rude about it, having always disliked forcing myself upon people, I decided on my fourth trip down that unless I wanted to be a dead sailor I had better be taking steps. It was almost too late. There wasn’t enough wind left in me to fatten a small sized bubble.

“There he is again!” she cried in a petulant voice as I once more appeared. “Why doesn’t he go away?”

“He’s just about to – for good!” said the other lady. With a pitiful yap I struck out feebly in the general direction of the shore. It wouldn’t work. My arms refused to move. Then quite suddenly and deliriously I felt two soft, cool arms enfold me, and my head sank back on a delicately unholstered shoulder. Somehow it reminded me of the old days.

“Home, James,” I murmured, as I was slowly towed to shore. Just before closing my eyes I caught a fleeting glimpse of a young lady clad in one of the one-piecest one-piece bathing suits I had ever seen. She was bending over me sympathetically.

“Private property!” cried my tormentor, shaking a finger at me. “What a pity!” I thought as I closed my eyes and drifted off into sweet dreams in which Mr. Fogerty, my beautiful rescuer, and myself were dancing hand-and-hand on the parade ground to the music of the massed band, much to the edification of the entire station assembled in review formation.

Presently I awoke to the hateful strains of this old hard-shell’s voice:

“See what you’ve done!” she was saying to the young girl. “You’ve brought in a half naked man, and now that he has seen you in a much worse condition than he is, we’ll have ten thousand sailors swimming out to this island in one continuous swarm.”

“Oh, won’t that be fun!” cried the girl. And from that time on, in spite of the objections of her mother, we were fast friends.

When I returned to shore it was in a rowboat with this fair young creature. The faithful Fogerty was waiting on the beach for me, where, it later developed, he had been sleeping quite comfortably on an unknown woman’s high powered sport hat, as is only reasonable.

July 2nd. Mother got in again. There seems to be no practical way of keeping her out. This time she came breezing in with a friend from East Aurora, a large, elderly woman of about one hundred and ten summers and an equal number of very hard winters. The first thing mother said was to the effect that she was going to see what she could do about getting me a rating. She did. The very first officer she saw she sailed up to and buttonholed much to my horror.

“Why can’t my boy Oswald have a pretty little eagle on his arm, such as I see so many of the young men up here wearing about the camp?”

The abruptness of this question left the officer momentarily stunned, but I will say for him that he rallied quickly and returned a remarkably diplomatic reply to the effect that the pretty little eagle, although pleasing to gaze upon, was not primarily intended to be so much of a decoration as means of identification, and that certain small qualifications were required, as a rule, before one was permitted to wear one of the emblems in question; qualifications, he hastened to add, which he had not the slightest doubt that I failed to possess if I was the true son of my mother, but which, owing to fate and circumstances, I had probably been unable to exercise. Whereupon he bid her a very courteous good-day, returned my salute, and passed on, but not before the very old lady accompanying my mother saluted also, raising her hand to her funny bit of a bonnet with unnecessary snappiness and snickering in a senile manner. This last episode upset me completely, but the old lady was irrepressible. From that time on she punctuated her progress through the camp with exaggerated salutes to all the officers she encountered on the way. This, of course, was quite a startling and undignified performance for one of her years, very embarrassing to me, as well as mystifying to the officers, who hardly knew whether to hurl me into the brig as vicarious atonement or to rebuke the flighty old creature, on the grounds of undue levity. Most of them passed by, however, with averted eyes and a discountenanced expression, feeling, I am sure, that I had put her up to it. Mother thought it quite amusing, and enjoyed my discomfiture hugely. Then for no particular reason she began to garnish her conversation with inappropriate seagoing expressions, such as “Pipe down,” “Hit the deck,” “Avast,” and “Hello, Buddy!” Where she ever picked up all this nonsense I am at a loss to discover, but she continued to pull it to the bitter end.

“Hello, Buddy!” was the way she greeted the Jimmy-legs of my barracks after I had introduced her to him with much elaboration. This completely floored the poor lad, and rendered him inarticulate. He thinks now that I come from either a family of thugs or maniacs, probably the latter. I succeeded in shaking the old thing for a while, and when I next found her she was demonstrating the proper method of washing whites to a group of sailors assembled in the wash room of one of our most popular latrines. She was heading in the direction of the shower baths when I finally rounded her up. She was a game old lady. I’ll have to hand her that. Her wildest escapade was reserved for the end of her visit, when I took her over to the K. of C. hut, and she challenged any sailor present to a game of pool for a quarter a ball. When we told her that the sailors in the Navy never gambled she said that she was completely off the service, and that she thought it was high time that we learned to do something useful instead of singing sentimental songs and weaving ourselves into intricate figures. This remark forced us to it, and much against our wills we proceeded to show the old lady up at pool. She had been bluffing all along, and when it came to a showdown we found that she couldn’t shoot for shucks. When the news spread around the hut the sailors crowded about her thick as thieves, challenging her to play. She was a wild, unregenerated old lady, but she was by no means an easy mark, as it later developed when she matched them for the winnings, got it all back, and I am told by some sailors that she even left the hut a little ahead of the game. I don’t object to notoriety, but there are numerous ways of winning it that are objectionable, and this old lady was one. Mother must have been giddier in her youth than I ever imagined.

July 3d. Yesterday I lost my dog Fogerty and didn’t find him until late in the afternoon. He was up in front of the First Regiment, mustered in with the liberty party. When he discovered my presence he looked coldly at me, as if he had never seen me before, so I knew that he had a date. He just sat there and shook his bangs over his eyes and tried to appear as if he were somewhere else. When the order come to shove off he joined the party and trotted off without even looking back, and that was the last I saw of him until this morning, when he came drifting in, rather unsteadily, and regarded me with a shifty but insulting eye. I am rapidly discovering hitherto unsuspected depths of depravity in Mr. Fogerty, which leads me to believe that he is almost human.

July 4th. This has been the doggonest Fourth of July I ever spent, and as a result I am in much trouble. All day long I have been grooming myself to look spic and span at the review held in honor of the Secretary when he opened the new wing to the camp. I missed it. I lost completely something in the neighborhood of ten thousand men. It seems hard to do, but the fact, the ghastly fact, remains that I did it. When I dashed out of the barracks with my newly washed, splendidly seagoing, still damp white hat in my hand my company was gone, and the whole camp seemed deserted. Far in the distance I heard the music of the band. Fogerty looked inquiringly at me and I fled. He fled after me.

“Fogerty,” I gasped, “this is a trick I have to pull off alone. You’re not in on this review, and for God’s sake act reasonable.”

I couldn’t bear the thought of chasing across the parade ground with that simple-looking dog bounding along at my heels. My remark had no effect. Fogerty merely threw himself into high, and together we sped in the direction of the music. It was too late. Thousands of men were swinging past in review, and in all that mass of humanity there was one small vacant place that I was supposed to fill. I crouched down behind a tree and observed the scene through stricken eyes. How could I possibly have managed to lose nearly ten thousand men? It seemed incredible, and I realized then that I alone could have accomplished such a feat. And I had been so nice and clean, too, and I had worked so hard to be all of those things. I bowed my head in misery, and Mr. Fogerty, God bless his dissolute soul, crept up to me and tried to tell me it was all right, and didn’t matter much anyway. I looked down, and discovered that my snow white hat was all muddy. Fogerty sat on it.

July 8th. As a result of my being scratched out of the Independence day review I have been tried out as punishment in all sorts of disagreeable positions, all of which I have filled with an inefficiency only equaled by the bad temper of my overlords. Some of these tasks, one in particular was of such a ridiculous nature that I refuse to enter it into my diary for an unfeeling posterity to jeer at. I am willing to state, however, that the accomplishments of Hercules, that redoubtable handy man of mythology, were trifling in comparison with mine.

To begin with, the coal pile is altogether too large and my back is altogether too refined. There should be individual coal piles provided for temperamental sailors. Small, colorful, appetizingly shaped mounds of nice, clean, glistening chunks of coal they should be, and the coal itself could easily be made much lighter, approaching if possible the weight of feathers. This would be a task any reasonably inclined sailor would attack with relish, particularly if his efforts were attended by the strains of some good, snappy jazz. However, reality wears a graver face and a sootier one. Long did I labor and valiantly but to little effect. More coal fell off of my shovel than remained on it. This was due to the unfortunate fact that coal dust seems to affect me most unpleasantly, much in the same manner as daisies or golden rod affect hay fever sufferers. The result was that every time I had my shovel poised in readiness to hurl its burden into space a monolithic sneeze overpowered me, shook me to the keel, and all the coal that I had trapped with so much patience and cunning fell miserably around my feet, from whence it had lately risen. Little things like this become most discouraging when strung out for a great period of time. In this manner I sneezed and sweated throughout the course of a sweltering afternoon, and just as I was about to call it a day along comes an evilly inclined coal wagon and dumps practically in my lap one hundred times more coal than I had disturbed in the entire course of my labors. On top of this Fogerty, who had been loafing around all day with his tongue out disporting himself on the coal pile like a dog in the first snow, started a landslide somewhere above and came bearing down on me in a cloud of dust. I found myself buried beneath the delighted Fogerty and a couple of tons of coal, from which I emerged unbeamingly, but not before Mr. Fogerty had addressed his tongue to my blackened face as an expression of high good humor.

“Take me to the brig,” I said, walking over to the P.O., “I’m through. You can put a service flag on that coal pile for me.”

“What’s consuming you, buddy?” asked the P.O. in not an unkindly voice.

“Take me to the brig,” I repeated, “it’s too much. Here I’ve been working diligently all day to reduce the size of this huge mass, when up comes that old wagon and humps its back and belches forth its horrid contents all over the place. It’s ridiculous. I surrender my shovel.”

“Gord,” breathed the P.O., looking at me pityingly, “we don’t want to go and reduce that coal pile, we want to enlarge it.”

“Oh!” I replied, stunned, “I didn’t quite understand. I thought you wanted to make it smaller, so I’ve been trying to shovel it away all afternoon.”

“You shouldn’t oughter have done that,” replied the P.O. as if he were talking to an idiot, “I suppose you’ve been shoveling her down hill all day?”

I admitted that I had.

“You see,” I added engagingly, “I began with trying to shovel her up hill, but the old stuff kept on rolling down on me, so I drew the natural conclusion that I’d better shovel her down hill. It seemed more reasonable and—”

“Easier,” suggested the P.O.

“Yes,” I agreed.

There was a faraway expression in his eyes when he next spoke. “I’d recommend you for an ineptitude discharge,” he said, “if it wasn’t for the fact that I have more consideration for the civilian population. I’d gladly put you in the brig for life if I could feel sure you wouldn’t injure it in some way. The only thing left for me to do is to make you promise that you’ll keep away from our coal pile and swear never to lay violent hands on it again. You’ll spoil it.”

I gazed up at the monumental mass of coal rearing itself like a dark-town Matterhorn above my head and swore fervently never to molest it again.

“Go back to your outfit and get washed and tell your P.O. for me that you can’t come here no more, and,” he added, as I was about to depart, “take that unusual looking bit of animal life with you – it’s all wrong. Police his body or he’ll ruin some of your pals’ white pants and they wouldn’t like that at all.”

I feared they wouldn’t.

“Yes, sir,” I replied in a crumpled voice, “Much obliged, sir.”

“Please go away now,” he said quietly, “or I think I might do you an injury.” He was fingering the shovel nervously as he spoke. Thus Fogerty and I departed, banished even from our dusky St. Helena.

July 9th. Working on the theory of opposites, I was next placed as a waiter in the Chief Petty Officer’s Mess over in the First Regiment. I wasn’t so good here, it seems. There was something wrong with my technique. The coal pile had ruined me for delicate work. I continually kept mistaking the plate in my hand for a shovel, a mistake which led to disastrous results. I will say this for the chiefs, however – they were as clean-cut, hard-eating a body of men as I have ever met. It was a pleasure to feed them, particularly so in the case of one chief, a venerable gentleman, who seemed both by his bearing and the number of stripes on his sleeve to be the dean of the mess. He ate quietly, composedly and to the point, and after I had spilled a couple of plates of rations on several of the other chiefs’ laps he suggested that I call it a day and be withdrawn in favor of one whose services to his country were not so invaluable as mine. Appreciating his delicacy I withdrew, but only to be sent out on another job that defies description. Even here I quickly demonstrated my unfitness and have consequently been incorporated once more into the body of my regiment.

July 10th. I had the most terrible experience in mess today when a guy having eaten more rapidly than I attempted to take my ration. When I told him he shouldn’t do it he merely laughed brutally and kicked me an awful whack on the shin. This injury, together with the sight of witnessing my food about to be crammed down his predatory maw, succeeded in bringing all my latent patriotism to the fore and I fell upon him with a desperation bred of hunger. We proceeded to mill it up in a rather futile, childish manner until the Master-at-arms suggested in a certain way he has that we go away to somewhere else. Hereafter if anyone asks if I did any actual fighting in this war I am going to say, “Yes, I fought like hell many hard and long battles in camp for my ration,” which will be true.

“Say, buddy,” said my opponent, after we had landed quite violently on the exterior of the Mess Hall, “you didn’t git no food at all, did yer?”

“No,” I replied bitterly; “at all is right.”

He looked at me for a moment in a strange, studying manner, then began laughing softly to himself.

“I don’t know what made me do it,” he said more to himself than to me. “I wasn’t hungry no more. I didn’t really want it. I wonder what makes a guy brutal? Guess he sort of has a feelin’ to experiment with himself and other folks.”

“I wish you’d tried that experiment on someone else,” I replied, thinking tenderly of my shin.

“Sometimes I feel so doggone strong and mean,” he continued, “I just can’t keep from doing things I don’t naturally feel like doing. I guess I’m sort of an animal.”

“Say,” I asked him in surprise, “if you keep talking about yourself that way I won’t be able to call you all the names I am carefully preparing at this moment.”

He peered earnestly down on me for a space.

“Does my face make you talk that way?” I asked, feeling dimly and uncomfortably that it did.

“Yes,” he replied, “it’s your face, your foolish looking face. I can’t help feeling sorry for it and your funny empty little belly.”

“You’re breaking me down,” I answered; “I can’t stand kindness.”

“I ain’t no bully,” he said fiercely, as if he was about to strike me. “I ain’t no bully,” he repeated, “I’ll tell you that.”

“No, sir,” I replied soothingly, keeping on the alert, “you ain’t no bully.”

Here he took me by the arm and dragged me along with him.

“Come on, buddy,” he said, “I’m going to take you to the canteen and feed you. I’m going to do it, I swear to God.”

So he fed me. Stacks and stacks of stuff he forced on me until the flesh rebelled, after which he put things in my pockets, repeating every little while, “I ain’t no bully, I’ll tell you that, I ain’t no bully.” He spent most of his money, I reckon, but I did not try to stop him. He wanted to do it and I guess it made him feel better. After the orgy I took him around and let him pat Mr. Fogerty. He seemed to like this. Fogerty took it in good part.

July 11th. There’s something about Wednesday afternoons that doesn’t appeal to me. First they make you go away and dress yourself up nice and clean and then they look you over and make you feel nearly as childish as you look. Then they put a gun into your hand that is much too heavy for comfort and make you do all sorts of ridiculous things with this gun, after which you fall in with numerous thousands of other men who have been subjected to the same treatment, and together we all go trotting past any number of officers, who look you over with uncanny earnestness through eyes that seem to perceive the remotest defect with fiendish accuracy. Then we all trot home again and call it a review.

This is all very well for some people, but not for me. I’m a little too self-conscious. I have always the feeling that I am the review, that it has been staged particularly for my discomforture, and that every officer in camp is on the lookout for any slight irregularity in my clothes or conduct. In this they have little difficulty. I assist them greatly myself. Today, for instance:

Item one: Dropped my gun.

Item two: Talked in ranks. I asked the guy next to me how he would like to go to a place and he said that he’d see me there first.

Item three: Failed to follow the guide.

Item four: Didn’t mark time correctly.

Item five: Was in step once.

Now all of these things are trifling in themselves, but taken en mass, as it were, it leads up to a sizable display; at least, so I was told in words that denied any other interpretation by my P.O. and several pals of his. After the review our regimental commander lined us up and addressed us as follows:

“About that review today,” he began, “it was terrible” (long, dramatic pause). “It was probably the worst review I have ever seen (several P.O.’s glanced at me reproachfully), not only that,” he continued, “but it was the worst review that anybody has ever seen. Anybody! (shouted) without exception! (shouted) awful review! (pause) Terrible!”

We steadied in the ranks and waited for our doom.

“It will never be so again,” he continued, “I’ll see to that. I’ll drill ye myself. If you have to get up at four o’clock in the morning to drill in order to meet your classes, I’ll see that ye do it. Dropping guns! (pause). Talking in ranks! (pause). Out-o-step (terrible pause). Marking time wrong. Everything wrong! Company commanders, take ’em away.”

We were took.

“All of those things,” said my P.O. in a trembling voice, “you did. All of ’em. Now the old man’s sore on us and he’s going to give us hell, and I’m going to do the same by you.”

“Shoot, dearie,” says I, with the desperate indifference of a man who has nothing left to lose, “I wouldn’t feel natural if you didn’t.”

And in my hammock that night I thought of another thing I might have said if it had occurred to me in time. I might have said, “Hell is the only thing you know how to give and you’re generous with that because it’s free.”

But I guess after all it’s just as well I didn’t.

August 1st. Mr. Fogerty has returned aboard. My worst fears are realized. For a long time he has been irritable and uncommunicative with me and has indulged in sly, furtive little tricks unbecoming to a dog of the service. I have suspected that he was concealing a love affair from me. This it appears he has been doing and his guilt is heavy upon him. I realize now for the first time and not without a sharp maternal pang that he has reached an age at which he must make decisions for himself. I can no longer follow him out into the world upon his nocturnal exploits. His entire confidence is not mine. I must be content to share a part of his heart instead of the whole of it. Like father like son, I suppose. However, I see no reason for him to put on such airs. On his return from City Island this time he had somehow contrived to get himself completely shaved up to the shoulders. The result is startling. Fogerty looks extremely aristocratic but a trifle foppish. However, he seems to consider himself the only real four-footed dog in camp. This is a trifle boring from a dog who has never hesitated to steal from the galley anything that wasn’t a permanent fixture. I can’t help but feel sorry for him though when I see that far-away look in his eyes. Sad days I fear are in store for him. Ah, well, we’re only young once.

August 3d. “Well, now, son,” he was saying, “mind me when I tell yer that I’m not claiming as to ever have seen a mermaid, but what I am saying is this and that is if anybody has ever seen one of them things I’m that man. I’m not making no false claims, however, none whatsoever.”

I carefully placed my shovel against the wheelbarrow and seating myself upon a stump prepared to listen to my companion. He was a chief of many cruises and for some unaccountable reason had fixed on me as being a suitable recipient for his discourse. One more hash mark on his arm would have made him look like a convict. I listened and in the meanwhile many mounds of sand urgently in need of shoveling remained undisturbed. Upon this sand I occasionally cast a reflective and apprehensive eye. The chief, noticing this, nudged me in the ribs with an angular elbow.

“Don’t mind that, sonny,” he said, “I’ll pump the fear-o’-God into the heart of any P.O. what endeavors to disturb you. Trust me.”

I did.

“Now getting back to this mermaid,” he began in a confidential voice, “what I say as I didn’t claim to have saw. It happened this way and what I’m telling you, sonny, is the plain, unvarnished facts of the case, take ’em or leave ’em as you will. They happened and I’m here to tell the whole world so.”

“I have every confidence in you, chief,” I replied mildly.

“It is well you have,” he growled, scanning my face suspiciously. “It’s well you have, you louse.”

“Why, chief,” I exclaimed in an aggrieved voice, “isn’t that rather an unappetizing word to apply to a fellow creature?”

“Mayhap, young feller,” he replied, “mayhap. I ain’t no deep sea dictionary diver, I ain’t, but all this has got nothing to do with what I was about to tell you. It all happened after this manner, neither no more nor no less.”

He cleared his throat and gazed with undisguised hostility across the parade ground. Thus he began:

“It was during the summer of 1888, some thirty odd years ago,” quoth he. “I was a bit young then, but never such a whey face as you, certainly not.”

“Positively,” said I, in hearty agreement.

— — —

At that time, he continued, not noticing my remark, I was resting easy on a soft job between cruises as night watchman on one of them P.O. docks at Dover. The work warn’t hard, but it was hard enough. I would never have taken it had it not been for the unpleasant fact that owing to some little trouble I had gotten into at one of the pubs my wife was in one of her nasty, brow-beating moods. At these times the solitude and the stars together with the grateful companionship of a couple of buckets of beer was greatly to be preferred to my little old home. So I took the job and accordingly spent my nights sitting with my back to a pile, my legs comfortably stretched out along the rim of the dock and a bucket of beer within easy reach.

— — —

“Could anything be fairer than that?” said I.

“Nothing,” said he, and continued.

— — —

Well, one night as I was sitting there looking down in the water as a man does when his mind is empty and his body well disposed, I found myself gazing down into two glowing pools that weren’t the reflections of stars. Above these two flecks of light was perched a battered old leghorn hat after the style affected in the music halls of those days. Floating out back of this hat on the water was a long wavery coil of filmy hair, the face was shaded, but two long slim arms were thrust out of the water toward me, and following these arms down a bit I was shocked and surprised to find that further than the hat the young lady below me was apparently innocent of garments. Now I believe in going out with the boys when the occasion demands and making a bit of a time of it, but my folks have always been good, honest church people and believers in good, strong, modest clothing and plenty of ’em. I have always followed their example.

— — —

“Reluctantly and at a great distance,” said I.

“Not at all,” said he and continued.

— — —

So when I sees the condition the young lady was in I was naturally very much put out and I didn’t hesitate telling her so.

“Go home,” says I, “and put your clothes on. You ought to be ashamed of yourself – a great big girl like you.”

“Aw, pipe down, old grizzle face,” says she; “wot have you got in the bucket?” And if you will believe me she began raising herself out of the water. “Give me some,” says she.

“Stop,” I cries out exasperated; “stop where you are; you’ve gone far enough. For shame.”

“I’ll come all the way out,” says she, laughing, “unless you give me some of wot you got in that bucket.”

“Shame,” I repeated, “ain’t you got no sense of decency?”

“None wot so ever,” she replied, “but I’m awfully thirsty. Gimme a drink or out I’ll come.”

Now you can see for yourself that I couldn’t afford to have a woman in her getup sitting around with me on the end of a dock, being married as I was and my folks all good honest church folks, and bright moon shining in the sky to boot, so I was just naturally forced to give in to the brazen thing and reach her down the bucket, a full one at that. It came back empty and she was forwarder than ever.

“Say,” she cries out, swimming around most exasperatingly, “you’re a nice old party. What do your folks know you by?”

I told her my name was none of her business and that I was a married man and that I wished she’d go away and let me go on with my night watching.

“I’m married too,” says she, in a conversational tone, “to an awful mess. You’re pretty fuzzy, but I’d swap him for you any day. Come on into the sea with me and we’ll swim down to Gold Fish Arms and stick around until we get a drink. I know lots of the boys down there. There ain’t no liquor dealers where I come from,” and with this if you will believe me she flips a bucket full of water into my lap with the neatest little scale spangled tail you ever seen.

“No,” says I, “my mind’s made up. I ain’t a-going to go swimming around with no semi-stewed, altogether nude mermaid. It ain’t right. It ain’t Christian.”

“I got a hat,” says she reflectively, “and I ain’t so stewed but wot I can’t swim. Wot do you think of that hat? One of the boys stole it from his old woman and gave it to me. Come on, let’s take a swim.”

“No,” says I, “I ain’t a-going.”

“Just ’cause I ain’t all dolled up in a lot of clothes?” says she.

“Partly,” says I, “and partly because you are a mermaid. I ain’t a-going messing around through the water with no mermaid. I ain’t never done it and I ain’t a-going to begin it now.”

“If I get some clothes on and dress all up pretty, will you go swimming with me then?” she asks pleadingly.

“Well that’s another thing,” says I, noncommittal like.

“All right,” says she, “gimme something out of that other bucket and I’ll go away. Come on, old sweetheart,” and she held up her arms to me.

Well, I gave her the bucket and true to form she emptied it. Then she began to argue and plead with me until I nearly lost an ear.

“No,” I yells at her, “I ain’t a-going to spend the night arguing with a drunken mermaid. Go away, now; you said you would.”

“All right, old love,” she replies good-naturedly, “but I’ll see you again sometime. I ain’t ever going home again. I hate it down there.” And off she swims in an unsteady manner in the direction of the Gold Fish Arms. She was singing and shouting something terrible.

“Oh, bury me not on the lonesome prairie

Where the wild coyotes howl o’er me,”

was the song she sang and I wondered where she had ever picked it up.

Well, continued the chief, to cast a sheep shank in a long line, these visits kept up every evening until I was pretty near drove distracted. Along she’d come about sundown and stick around devilin’ me and drinking up all my grog. After a while she began calling for gin and kept threatening me until I just had to satisfy her. She also made me buy her a brush and comb, a mouth organ and a pair of spectacles, together with a lot of other stuff on the strength of the fact that if I refused she would make a scene. In this way that doggon mermaid continually kept me broke, for my wage warn’t enough to make me heavy and I had my home to support.

“Don’t you ever go home?” I asked her one night.

“No,” she replied, “I ain’t ever going back home. I don’t like it down there. There ain’t no liquor dealers.”

“But your husband,” exclaims I. “What of him?”

“I know,” says she, “but I don’t like him and I’m off my baby, too. It squints,” says she.

“But all babies squint,” says I.

“Mine shouldn’t,” says she. “It ain’t right.”

Then one night an awful thing happened. My wife came down to the dock to find out how I spent all my money. It was a bright moonlit night and this lost soul of a mermaid was hanging around, particularly jilled and entreating. I was just in the act of passing her down the gin flask and she was saying to me, “Come on down, old love; you know you’re crazy about me,” when all of a sudden I heard an infuriated shriek behind me and saw my wife leaning over the dock shaking an umbrella at this huzzy of a mermaid. Oh, son, broke off the Chief, if you only knew the uncontrolled violence and fury of two contending women. Nothing you meet on shipboard will ever equal it. I was speechless, rocked in the surf of a tumult of words. And in the midst of it all what should happen but the husband of the mermaid pops out of the water with a funny little bit of a merbaby in his arms.

“Go home at once, sir,” screams my wife, “and put on your clothes.”

“I will,” he shouts back, “if my wife will come along with me.”

He was a weazened up little old man with a crooked back. Not very prepossessing. I could hardly blame his wife.

“So that bit of stuff is your wife, is it?” cries out my old lady, and with that she began telling him her past.

“I know it,” says the little old merman at last, almost crying; “I know it, but I ain’t got no control over her whatsoever. I’ve been trying to get her to come home for the last fortnight, but she just won’t leave off going around with the sailors. The whole beach is ashamed of her. It’s general talk down below. What can I do? The little old coral house is going to wrack and ruin and the baby ain’t been properly took care of since she left. What am I going to do, madam? What am I going to do? I’m well nigh distracted.”

But his wife was too taken up with the gin bottle to pay much heed to his pitiful words. She just kept flirting around in the water and singing snatches of bad sailor songs she’d picked up around the docks.

“Take her home,” said my wife, “take her home, you weakling, by force.”

“But I can’t when she’s in this condition. I got a child in my arms.”

“Give me the baby,” said my wife, with sudden determination. “I’ll take care of it until tomorrow night when you can come back here and get it.”

He handed the flopping little thing up to my wife and turned to the mermaid.

“Lil,” he says to her, holding out his arms to her, “Lil, will you come home?”

Lil swims up to him then and takes him by the arm and looks at him for a long time.

“Kiss me, Archie,” she says suddenly, “I don’t mind if I do,” and flipping a couple of pounds of water upon the both of us on the pier, she pulls him under the water laughing and that’s the last I saw of either of them.

— — —

“Now I ain’t asaying as I have ever seen a mermaid, mind you,” continued the chief, “but what I do say is that if any man has ever seen one I’m the man.”

“I understand perfectly,” said I, “and what, chief, became of the baby?”

“Oh, the baby,” said the chief, thoughtful like; “the baby – well, you see, about that baby—” he gazed searchingly around the landscape for a moment before replying.

“Oh, the baby,” he said suddenly, as if greatly relieved, “well, my wife took the baby home and kept it in the bathtub for a couple of days after which she returned it in person to its father. She made me give up my job. It did squint, though,” said the chief, as he got up to go, “ever so little.”

I turned to my shovel.

“But I ain’t saying as I have ever seen a mermaid,” he said, turning back in his tracks, “all I’m saying is that—”

“I know, Chief,” I said wearily, “I fully appreciate your delicacy and fairness. You’re not the man to make any false claims.”

“No, sir, not I,” he replied, as he walked slowly away.

August 5th. In order to distract Mr. Fogerty’s attention from his love affair and in a sort of desperate endeavor to win him back to me I took him away on my last liberty with me. Fogerty doesn’t come under the heading of a lap dog, but through some technical quibble I managed to smuggle him into the subway. All he did there was to knock over one elderly lady and lick her face effusively when he had gotten her down. This resulted in a small but complete panic. For the most part, however, he sat quietly on my lap and sniffed at those around him. At last we reached Washington Square, whereupon I proceeded to take Mr. Fogerty around and show him off to my friends. He was well received, but his heart wasn’t with us. It was far away in City Island.

At one restaurant we ran into a female whose hair was nearly as short as Fogerty’s. She was holding forth on the Silence of the Soul vs. the Love Impulse, the cabbage or some other plant. Fogerty listened to her for a while and then bit her. He did it quietly, but I thought it best to take him away.

After supper we went up to another place for coffee, a fine little place for sailormen, situated on the south side of the square. Here we were received with winning cordiality and Fogerty was given a fried egg, a dish of which he is passionately fond. But even here he got into trouble by putting one of his great feet through a Ukulele, which isn’t such a terrible thing to do, except in certain places.

Getting back to the station was a crisp little affair. Fogerty and myself rose at five and went forth to the shuttle. The subway was a madhouse. We shuttled ourselves to death. At 5:30 we were at the Times Square end of the shuttle, at 5:45 we were at Williams, at 6 o’clock we had somehow managed to get ourselves on the east side end of the shuttle, five minutes later we were back at Times Square, ten minutes later we were over on the east side once more. At 6:15 I lost Fogerty. At 6:25 I was back at Times Square. “Hello, buddy,” said the guard, “you back again? Here’s your dog.”

At 7 o’clock we were at Van Cortlandt Park, at 8 we were at Ninety-sixth Street, 9 o’clock found us laboring up to the gate of the camp, with a written list of excuses that looked like the schedule of a flourishing railroad. It was accepted, much to our surprise.

Aug. 7th. I have a perfectly splendid idea. Of course, like the rest of my ideas it won’t work, but it is a perfectly splendid idea for all that. I got it while traveling on the ferry boat from New York to Staten Island – the longest sea voyage I have had since I joined the Navy. On this trip, strangely thrilling to a sailor in my situation, but which was suffered with bored indifference by the amphibious commuters that infest this Island in those waters, I saw a number of ships so gaudily and at the same time so carelessly painted that any God-fearing skipper of the Spanish Main would positively have refused to command. Captain Kidd himself would have blushed at the very sight of this ribald fleet and turned away with a devout imprecation.

This was my first experience with camouflage, and it impressed me most unfavorably. An ordinary ship on a grumbling ocean is difficult enough as it is to establish friendly relations with, but when trigged out in this manner – why serve meals at all, say I. Nevertheless it occurred to me that it would not be a bad idea at all to camouflage one’s hammock in such a manner that it took upon itself the texture and appearance of the bulkhead of the barracks in which it was swung. In this manner a sailor could sleep undisturbed for three weeks if he so desired (and he does), without ever being technically considered a deserter.

One could elaborate this idea still further and make one’s sea bag look like a clump of poison ivy, so that no inspecting officer would ever care to become intimate with its numerous defects in cleanliness. One might even go so far as to camouflage oneself into a writing desk so that when visiting the “Y” or the “K-C” and unexpectedly required to sing one would not be forced to rise and scream impatiently and threateningly “Dear Mother Mine” or “Break the News to Mother.” Not that these songs are not things of rare beauty in themselves, but after a day on the coal pile one’s lungs have been sufficiently exercised to warrant relief. This is merely an idea of mine, and now that everybody knows about it I guess there isn’t much use in going ahead with it.

Aug. 8th. “This guide i-s  l-e-f-t!” shouted the P.O., and naturally I looked around to see what had become of the poor fellow.

“Keep your head straight. Eyes to the front! Don’t move! Whatcha lookin’ at?”

“I was looking for the guide that was left,” says I timidly. “It seems to me that he is always being left.”

“Company dismissed,” said the P.O. promptly, showing a wonderful command of the situation under rather trying circumstances, for the boo-hoo that went up from the men after my remark defied all restraints of discipline.

“Say, Biltmore,” says the P.O. to me a moment later, “I’m going to see if I can’t get you shipped to Siberia if you pull one of them bum jokes again. You understand?”

“But I wasn’t joking,” I replied innocently.

“Aw go on, you sly dog,” said he, nudging me in the ribs, and for some strange reason he departed in high good humor, leaving me in a greatly mystified frame of mind.

Speaking of getting shipped, I have just written a very sad song in the style of the old sentimental ballads of the Spanish war days. It’s called “The Sailor’s Farewell,” and I think Polly will like it. I haven’t polished it up yet, but here it is as it is:

A sailor to his mother came and said, “Oh, mother dear,

I got to go away and fight the war.

So, mother, don’t you cry too hard, and don’t you have no fear

When you find that I’m not sticking ’round no more.”

“My boy,” the sweet old lady said, “I hate to see you go.

I’ve knowed you since when you was but a kid,

But if the question you should ask, I’ll tell the whole world so –

It’s the only decent thing you ever did.”

A tear she brushed aside,

And then she sadly cried:

CHORUS

“I’m proud my boy’s a sailor man what sails upon the sea.

I’ve always liked him pretty well although he is so dumb.

For years he’s stuck around the house and disappointed me.

I thought that he was going to be a bum.”

He took her gently by the hand and kissed her on the bean

And said, “When I’m about to fight the Hun

You shouldn’t talk to me that way; I think it’s awfully mean –

I ain’t a-goin’ to have a lot of fun.”

“I know, my child,” the mother said. “The parting makes me sad,

But go you must away and fight the war.

At least you will not live to drink as much as did your dad –

So here’s your lid, my lad, and there’s the door.”

Then as he turned away

He heard her softly say:

CHORUS

“The sailors I have ever loved. I’m glad my lad’s a gob,

Although it seems to me he’s much too dumb.

But after all perhaps he isn’t such an awful slob –

I always knew that Kaiser was a bum!”

Aug. 9th. The best way to make a deserter of a man is to give him too much liberty. For the past week I have been getting my dog Fogerty on numerous liberty lists when he shouldn’t have been there, but not contented with that he has taken to going around with a couple of yeomen, and the first thing I know he will be getting on a special detail where the liberty is soft. I put nothing past that dog since he lost his head to some flop-eared huzzy with a black and tan reputation.

Aug. 10th. All day long and a little longer I have been carrying sacks of flour. The next time I see a stalk of wheat I am going to snarl at it. This new occupation is a sort of special penance for not having my hammock lashed in time. It seems that I have been in the service long enough to know how to do the thing right by now, but the seventh hitch is a sly little devil and always gets me. I need a longer line or a shorter hammock, but the only way out of it that I can see is to get a commission and rate a bed.

I carried all the flour today that was raised last year in the southern section of the State of Montana, and I was carrying it well and cheerfully until one of my pet finger nails (the one that the manicure girls in the Biltmore used to rave about) thrust itself through the sack and precipitated its contents upon myself and the floor. A commissary steward when thoroughly aroused is a poisonous member of society. One would have thought that I had sunk the great fleet the way this bird went on about one little sack of flour.

“Here Mr. Hoover works hard night and day all winter,” he sobs at me, “and you go spreading it around as if you were Marie Antoinette.”

I wondered what new scandal he had about Marie Antoinette, but I held my peace. My horror was so great that the real color of my face made the flour look like a coat of sunburn in comparison.

“There’s enough flour there,” he continued reproachfully, pointing to the huge mound of stuff in which I stood like a lost explorer on a snow-capped mountain peak and wishing heartily that I was one, “there’s enough flour,” he continued, “to keep a chief petty officer in pie for twenty-four hours.”

“Just about,” thought I to myself.

“Well,” he cried irritably, “pick it up. Be quick. Pick it up – all of it!”

“Pick it up,” I replied through a cloud of mist, “you can’t pick up flour. You can pick up apples and pears and cabbages and cigarette butts for that matter, but you can’t pick up flour.”

The commissary steward suddenly handed me a piece of paper upon which he had been writing frantically.

“Take this to your P.O.,” he said shrilly, “and take yourself along with it.”

“A defect in the sack,” I gasped, departing.

“And there’s a defect in you,” he shouted after me, “your brain is exempted.”

“Take this man and kill him if you can find any slight technical excuse for it,” the note ran, “and if you can’t kill him, give him an inaptitude discharge with my compliments, and if you are unable to do either of these two things, at least keep him away from my outfit. We don’t want to see his silly face around here any more at all.”

The P.O. read it to me with great delight.

“I guess we’ll have to send you to Siberia after all,” he said thoughtfully, “only that country is in far too delicate a condition for you to meddle with at present. Go away to somewhere where I can’t see you,” he continued bitterly, “for I feel inclined to do you an injury, something permanent and serious.” I went right away.

Aug. 11th. Mother has just paid one of her belligerent visits to the camp, and as a consequence I am on the point of having a flock of brainstorms. Some misguided person had been telling her about the Officer Training School up here, and she arrived fired with the ambition to enter me in to that institution without further delay. True to form, she bounded headlong into the matter without consulting my feelings by accosting the very first commissioned officer she met. He happened to be an Ensign, but he might as well have been a Vice-Admiral for all Mother cared.

“Tell me, young man,” she said to this Ensign, going directly to the point, “do you see any reason why my boy Oswald should not go to that place where they make all the Ensigns?”

“Yes,” said the officer firmly, “I do.”

“Oh, you do,” snapped Mother angrily, “and pray tell me what that reason might be?”

“Your son Oswald,” replied the Ensign laconically.

“What!” exclaimed Mother, “you mean to say that my Oswald is not good enough to go to your silly old school?”

“No,” replied the Ensign, weakening pitifully before the withering fury of an aroused mother, “but you see, my dear madam, he has not a first class rating.”

“Fiddlesticks!” said Mother.

“Crossed anchors,” replied the Ensign.

“I didn’t mean that,” continued Mother, “I think the whole thing is very mysterious and silly, and I’m not going to let it stop here. You can trust me, Oswald,” she went on soothingly. “I am going to see the Commander of the station myself. I am going this very instant.”

“But, Mother,” I cried in desperation, tossing all consequences to the wind, “the ‘skipper’ isn’t on the station today. He got a 43-hour liberty. I saw him check out of the gate myself.”

For a moment the Ensign’s jaw dropped. I watched him anxiously. Then with perfect composure he turned to Mother and came through like a little gentleman.

“Yes, madam,” he stated, “your son is right. I heard his name read out with the liberty party only a moment ago. He has shoved off by now.”

I could have kissed that Ensign.

“Well, I’m sure,” said Mother, “it’s very funny that I can never get to the Captain. I shall write him, however.”

“He must have an interesting collection of your letters already,” I suggested. “They would be interesting to publish in book form.”

“Anyway,” continued Mother, apparently not attending to my remark, “I think you would look just as well as this young man in one of those nice white suits.”

“No doubt, madam,” replied the Ensign propitiatingly, “no doubt.”

“Come, Mother,” said I, “let’s go to the Y.M.C.A. I need something cool to steady my nerves.”

“How about your underwear?” said Mother, coming back to her mania, in a voice that invited all within earshot who were interested in my underwear to draw nigh and attend.

“Here, eat this ice cream,” I put in quickly, almost feeding her. “It’s melting.”

But Mother was not to be decoyed away from her favorite topic.

“I must look it over,” she continued firmly.

It seemed to me that every eye in the room was calmly penetrating my whites and carefully looking over the underwear in which Mother took such an exaggerated interest. “Socks!” suddenly exploded Mother. “How are you off for socks?”

“Splendidly,” I said in a hoarse voice. A girl behind me snickered.

“And have you that liniment to rub on your stomach when you have cramps?” she went on ruggedly.

“Enough to last through the Fall season,” I replied in a moody voice. I didn’t tell her that Tim the barkeep had tried to drink it.

“Polly!” suddenly exclaimed Mother. “Polly! Why, I forgot to tell you that she said that she would be up this afternoon. She must be here now.”

The world swam around me. Polly was my favorite sweetie.

“Oh, Mother!” I cried reproachfully, “how could you have forgotten?”

At that moment I heard a familiar voice issuing from the corner, and turning around, I caught sight of the staff reporter of the camp paper, a notoriously unscrupulous sailor with predatory proclivities. He had gotten Polly in a corner and was chinning the ear off of her. As I drew near I heard him saying:

“Really it’s an awful pity, but I distinctly remember him saying that he was going away on liberty today. He mentioned some girl’s name, but it didn’t sound anything at all like yours.”

Polly looked at him trustfully.

“Are you sure, Mr. – —”

“Savanrola,” the lying wretch supplied without turning a hair.

“Are you sure, Mr. Savanrola, that he has left the station?”

“Saw him check out with my own eyes,” he said calmly.

I moved nearer, my hands twitching.

“Now with an honest old seafaring man like myself,” he continued, in a confidential voice, “it’s different. Why, if I should wear all the hash marks I rate I’d look like a zebra. So I just don’t wear any. You know how it is. But when I like a girl I stick to her. Now from the very first moment I laid eyes on you—”

Human endurance could stand no more. I threw myself between them.

“Why, here’s Oswald hisself,” exclaimed the reporter with masterfully feigned surprise. “However did you get back so soon?”

“I have never been away anywhere to get back from, and you know it,” I replied coldly.

“Strange!” he said, “I could have sworn that I saw you checking out. Can I get you some ice cream?” he added smoothly.

“What on?” I replied bitterly, knowing him always to be broke.

“Your mother must have—”

“Come,” said I to Polly, “leave this degraded creature to ply his pernicious trade alone. I have some very important words to say to you.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Savanrola,” said Polly.

“Until we meet again,” answered the reporter, with the utmost confidence.

Aug. 12th. It’s all arranged. Those words I had to say to Polly were not spoken in vain. She has promised to be my permanent sweetie. Of course, I have had a number of transit sweeties in the past, but now I’m going to settle down to one steady, day in and day out sweetie. I told Tim, the barkeep, about it last night and all he said was:

“What about all those parties we’d planned to have after we were paid off?”

This sort of set me back for the moment. The spell of Polly’s eyes had made me forget all about Tim.

“Well, Tim,” I replied, “I’ll have to think about that. Come on over to the canteen and I’ll feed you some of those honest, upstanding sandwiches they have over there.”

“Say,” says Tim, the carnal beast, forgetting everything at the prospect of food, “I feel as if I could cover a flock of them without trying.”

So together Tim and I had a bachelor’s dinner over the sandwiches, which were worthy of that auspicious occasion.

Aug. 17th. We were standing on a street corner of a neighboring town. The party consisted of Tim the barkeep, the “Spider,” an individual who modestly acknowledged credit for having brought relief to several overcrowded safes in the good old civilian days; Tony, who delivered ice in my district also in those aforementioned days, and myself. These gentlemen for some time had been allowing me to exist in peace, and I had been showing my gratitude by buying them whatever little dainties they desired, but such a comfortable state of affairs could not long continue with that bunch. Suddenly, without any previous consultation, as if drawn together as it were by some fiendish undercurrent, they decided to make me unhappy – me, the only guy that spoke unbroken English in the crowd. This is the way they accomplished their low ends. When the next civilian came along they all of them shouted at me in tones that could be heard by all passers-by:

“Here comes a ‘ciwilian,’ buddy; he’ll give you a quarter.”

“Do you need some money, my boy?” said the old gentleman to me in a kindly voice.

“No, sir,” I stammered, getting red all over, “thank you very much, but I really don’t need any money.”

Ironical laughter from my friends in the background.

“Oh, no,” cries Tim sarcastically, “he don’t need no money. Just watch him when he sees the color of it.”

“Don’t hesitate, my son,” continued the kind old man, “if you need anything I would be glad to help you out.”

“No, sir,” I replied, turning away to hide my mortification, “everything is all right.”

“Poor but proud,” hisses the “Spider.” The old gentleman passed on, sorely perplexed.

For some time I was a victim of this crude plot. When I tried to move away they followed me around the streets, crying after me:

“Any ‘ciwilian’ will give you a quarter. Go on an’ ask them.”

Several ladies stopped and asked if they could be of any service to me. I assured them that they couldn’t, but all the time these low sailors whom I had been feeding lavishly kept jeering and intimating that I was fooling and would take any amount of money offered me from a dime up. This shower of conflicting statements always left the kindhearted people in a confused frame of mind and broke me up completely. I had to chase one man all the way down the street and hand him back the quarter he had thrust into my hand. My friends never forgave me for this.

At length, tiring of their sport, they desisted and stood gloomily on the curb as sailors do, looking idly at nothing.

“It don’t look like we was ever going to get a hitch,” said the “Spider,” after we had abandonedly offered ourselves to several automobiles.

At that moment a huge machine rolled heavily by.

“There goes a piece of junk,” said Tim. The lady in the machine must have heard him, for the car came to and she motioned for us to get in.

“Going our way?” she asked, smiling at us.

“Thanks, lady,” replies Tim, elbowing me aside as he climbed aboard.

“Dust your feet,” I whispered to Tony as he was about to climb in.

“Whatta you mean, dusta my feet?” shouted Tony wrathfully, “you go head an’ dusta your feet! I look out for my feet all right.”

“What did he want yer to do, Tony?” asked Tim in a loud voice.

“Dusta my feet,” answered Tony, greatly injured.

“What yer doin’, Oswald?” asks Tim sarcastically, “tryin’ to drag us up?”

“I only spoke for the best,” I answered, sick at heart.

“Ha! ha!” grated Tim, “guess you think we ain’t never rode in one of these wealthy wagons before.”

“Arn’t you rather young?” asked the lady soothingly of the “Spider,” who by virtue of his mechanical experience in civil life had been given a first class rating, “Arn’t you rather young to have so many things on your arm?”

“Yes,” answered the “Spider” promptly, “but I kin do a lot of tricks.”

The conversation languished from this point.

“We always take our boys to dinner, don’t we, dear?” said the lady to her husband a little later.

“Yes, dear,” he answered meekly, just like that.

Expectant silence from the four of us.

“Have you boys had dinner?” the lady asked.

“Certainly not,” we cried, with an earnestness that gave the lie to our statement, “no dinner!”

“None at all,” added Tim thoughtfully.

The automobile drew up at a 14k. plate-glass house that fairly made the “Spider” itch.

“Gosh,” he whispered to me, looking at the porch, “that wouldn’t be hard for me.”

During the dinner he kept sort of lifting and weighing the silver and then looking at me and winking in an obvious manner.

“Not many people here tonight,” said Tony from behind his plate.

“Why, there is the usual number,” said the husband in surprise, “my wife and myself live alone.”

“Oh,” said Tony, looking around at the tremendous dining hall, “I thought this was a restaurant.”

Tim started laughing then, and he hasn’t stopped yet. He’s so proud he didn’t make the mistake himself.

The “Spider” didn’t open his mouth save for the purpose of eating. He told me he was afraid his teeth would chatter.

Aug. 20th. Got a letter from Polly today. She says that her finger is just itching for the ring. I told the “Spider” about it and he said that he had several unset stones he’d let me have for next to nothing. A good burglar is one of the most valuable friends a man can possess.

Sept. 3d. I had such a setback today. Never was I more confounded. This morning I received a notice to report before the examining board for a first class rating. Of course I had been expecting some slight recognition of my real worth for a long time, but when the blow fell I was hardly prepared for it. Hurrying to “My Blue Jacket’s Manual,” I succeeded by the aid of a picture in getting firmly in my mind the port and starboard side of a ship and then I presented myself before the examiners – three doughty and unsmiling officers. There were about twelve of us up for examination. Seating ourselves before the three gentlemen, we gazed upon them with ill-concealed trepidation. One of them called the roll in a languid manner, and then without further preliminaries the battle began, and I received the first shock of the assault. I don’t quite remember the question that man asked me, it was all too ghastly at the time, but I think it was something like this:

“What would you do if you were at the wheel in a dense fog and you heard three whistles on your port beam, four whistles off the starboard bow, and a prolonged toot dead ahead?”

“I would still remain in a dense fog,” I gasped in a low voice.

“Speak up!” snapped the officer.

“Full speed ahead and jumps,” whispered a guy next to me. It sounded reasonable. I seized upon it eagerly.

“I’d put full steam ahead and jump, sir,” I replied.

“Are you mad?” shouted the amazed officer.

“No, sir,” I hastened to assure him, “only profoundly perplexed. I think, sir, that I would go into a conference, under the circumstances.”

The officer seemed to be on the verge of a breakdown.

“What’s your name?” asked another officer suddenly.

I told him.

“Initials?”

I told him. He looked at the paper for a moment.

“That explains it,” he said with a sigh of relief, “you’re not the man. There has been some mistake. Orderly, take this man away and bring back the right one. Pronto!”

That Spanish stuff sounds awfully sea-going. I was taken away, but the officer had not yet recovered. He regarded me with an expression of profound disgust. Anyway I created a sensation.

Sept. 4th. Things have been happening with overwhelming rapidity. On the strength of being properly engaged to Polly, my permanent sweetie, I went to my Regimental commander this morning and applied for a furlough. He regarded me pityingly for a moment and then carefully scanned a list of names on the desk before him.

“I am sorry,” he said finally, “but not only am I not able to grant your request, but I have the unpleasant duty to inform you that you are a little less than forty-eight hours from the vicinity of Ambrose light.”

“Shipped!” I gasped as the world swam around me.

“Your name is on this list,” said the officer not unkindly.

“Shipped!” I repeated in a dazed voice.

“It does seem ridiculous, I’ll admit,” said the officer, smiling, “but you never can tell what strange things are going to happen in the Navy. If I were in your place I’d take advantage of this head start I have given you and get my clothes and sea-bag in some sort of condition. If I remember rightly, you have never been able successfully to achieve this since you’ve been in the service.”

“Thank you, sir,” I gasped, and bolted. In my excitement I ran violently into a flock of ensigns stalking across the parade ground.

“I’m going to be shipped,” I cried by way of explanation to one of them as he arose wrathfully.

“You’re going to be damned,” said he, and I was. Too frantic to write more.

Sept. 5th. All preparations have been made. Tim, Tony and the Spider are going too. I have just been listening to the most disturbing conversation. It all arose from our speculating as to our probable destination and the nature of our services. The Master-at-arms, who had been sleeping on the hammock rack as only a Master-at-arms can, permitted himself to remain awake long enough to join in.

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” said he, “if you were shipped to one of these new Submarine Provokers.”

“What’s that?” I asked uneasily.

“Why, it’s a sort of a dee-coy,” said he, stretching his huge hulk, “a little, unarmed boat that goes messing around in the ocean until it finds a submarine and then it provokes it.”

“How’s that?” asked Tim.

“Why, you see,” continued the jimmy-legs, “it just sort of steams back and forth in front of the submarine, just steams slowly back and forth in front of the submarine until it provokes it.”

“Ah!” said I, taking a deep breath.

“Yes,” he continues cheerfully, “and the more you provoked the submarine why the harder it shoots at you, so of course it doesn’t notice the real Submarine Sinker coming up behind it. See the tactics.”

“Oh,” says I, “we just provoke the submarine until it loses its temper and the other boat sinks it.”

“That’s it,” says the jimmy-legs, “you just sort of steam back and forth in front of it slowly.”

“How slowly?” asks the Spider.

“Very,” replied the jimmy-legs.

“No guns at all?” asks Tim.

“None,” says he.

“A regular little home,” suggests Tony.

“Sure,” says the jimmy-legs, “nothing to do at all but steam slowly back—”

“For God’s sake don’t dwell on that point any more!” I cried. “We understand it perfectly.”

“A regular li’l home,” muttered Tim as he began to stow his bag.

(Later) I write these lines with horror. Someone has told me that the Navy needs Powder tasters, something I’d never heard of before, and that perhaps – that’s what we are going to be used for. All you have to do, this guy says, is to taste the powder to see if it’s damp or dry and if it’s damp you take it away and bake it. This sounds worse than the Submarine Provoker.

(Still later) Rumor is rife. The latest report is that we are going to be Mine Openers.

“What’s a Mine Opener?” I asked my informant.

“Why, it’s a guy,” says he, “that picks up the mines floating around his boat, but only the German mines of course, and opens them to see if they are as dangerous as they look. Some are not half as dangerous as they look,” he continues easily, “some are not quite so dangerous and of course some are a great deal more so. But they are all dangerous enough.”

“My dear chap,” I replied, turning away miserably, “a pinwheel is quite dangerous enough for me.”

Sept. 6th. This is being written from the gate. My bag and hammock are beside me. Tim lashed them together for me so they wouldn’t come undone. We are waiting for the truck. Tony in his excitable way wants to kiss the guard goodbye. The guard doesn’t want him to. My last moments at Pelham have been hectic. The doctor said I looked one hundred per cent better than when I came in, but that wasn’t enough. If you didn’t look at me very closely you wouldn’t know that I was such an awful dub. This is progress at any rate. The telephone wires between mother’s house and the camp were dripping wet with tears when I phoned her that I was being shipped. However, she braced up and said she was proud of me and said she hoped I’d tell the captain goodbye and thank him for all he has done. I assured her I would do this, or at least leave a note. Polly was a trump. The Spider talked to her and said that he was going to save the best uncut stone for her that he had ever bitten out of a ring. The Spider has been very valuable to us all. He seems to have the uncanny faculty of being able to take the cloth straps off other people’s clothes right before their eyes. Consequently we are well supplied. At present he’s looking at the handle of the gate in a musing way. I think he would like to have it as a souvenir. Here comes the truck. Pelham is about to lose its most useless recruit. I must tuck these priceless pages in my money belt. Wish I had a picture of Polly. Well, here’s to the High Adventure, but there’s something about that Submarine Provoker I can’t quite get used to. It seems just a trifle one sided. However, that is in the lap of the gods. Instead of a camp I will soon have the vast expanses of the ocean in which to demonstrate my tremendous inability to emulate the example of one John Paul Jones.

“Bear a hand there, buddy,” the P.O. has just cried at me.

“Buddy” I came in and “buddy” I go out. We’re off! I can dimly distinguish Mr. Fogerty, that unscrupulous dog that abandoned my bed and board for a couple of influential yeomen. Farewell, Fogerty, may your evil ways never bring you to grief. I do wish I had a picture of my Sweetie.

OUT O’ LUCK

DESCRIPTION

Out o’ Luck is the sequel to Biltmore Oswald, which continues the record of Smith’s own madcap escapades as a sailor through to 1918 and his demobilisation after the war.

Dedication

TO
ELIZA
THE LADY WHO SAW ME THROUGH

BILTMORE OSWALD

Very Much at Sea

Sept. 7th. My first impression of the ship was not a reassuring one. As I regarded the tall, slim masts, with a lookout or crow’s-nest forward that somehow reminded me of an eggcup, a nervous sensation made itself manifest and enlarged in the pit of my stomach. The very idea of there existing a bare possibility of my being forced to ascend one of those masts in a pitching sea and ensconce myself in the crow’s-nest made the bitter, sweat-washed memory of the coal pile back at camp seem sweet. As I stood gazing at the vessel that was destined to bear me out upon the turbulent seas of the high adventure, I considered how unlike the sensations of the heroes of all the sea novels I had ever read were mine. The scent of tar, which is guaranteed in all the best sellers to send a thrill through the stalwart young adventurer, served only to cast a gloomy and nauseating foreboding of future complications over my rather meager frame. The bustle and hurry on the dock, so dear to the valiant hearts of the youthful mariners, confused my addled brain to a point bordering closely on idiocy. The ship seemed to be altogether too large. There would be many decks to holystone – too many, I decided. Furthermore, there would be much bright work to brighten. I pictured long days of ceaseless toil and nights of extreme danger during which the ship would play leapfrog with a series of submarines stretching away into the mist.

“Well, thank God, it ain’t a Submarine Provoker at any rate,” said Tim in a relieved voice.

“Too big,” breathed Tony, “thata ship he much too big. Whata you think, Bilta?”

“Well, it could be smaller,” said I, “but she looks safe.”

“Wonder when they issue the life preservers,” said the Spider in a dispirited voice. “I’d sort of like to put mine on before we went aboard.”

A member of the guns’ crew, one of the hardest looking white men I have ever seen, unfortunately overheard this last remark, and almost barked. I thought for a moment that he was going to bite the Spider, but he seemed to think better of it.

“You fellers ain’t a-goin’ ter git no life preservers,” said he, regarding our unheroic group through eyes that had recently looked on something other than water. “We drown such guys as you for the good of the service.”

“How’s your head, buddy?” says I all of a sudden, prompted by some mad impulse. He looked at me with extreme earnestness for a moment before he spoke, and when he did speak all he said was, “I’m going to remember you;” but that was quite enough for me. My first enemy 1 Tim threw a protecting arm around my shoulder and at the same time faced my avowed foe.

“Don’t worry about that guy,” says Tim, “if he’s got anything to do with the guns I’m glad that I took out insurance.”

“Oh, is that so?” says the sailor snappily.

“What a hot answer!” jeered the Spider. “He’s got a good line of stuff, that guy.”

“You think so, do you?” says the other, moving closer to us.

I expected the worst. He would at least break one of my arms. I wondered if sailors rated a wound mark for getting injured under such circumstances, but at that moment a diversion occurred in the form of a weather-beaten Chief.

“Grab your gear and get aboard, lads,” he said in a hearty voice. “Step lively now. Up with them outfits.”

Accordingly we shouldered our bags and hammocks and started for the ship. It was a great moment. At last we were going to be sailors, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out on which side of the ship we were entering. The excitement had caused me to forget all the knowledge I had so laboriously gained at camp.

And then a terrible thing occurred. I can scarcely bring myself to write these lines. But I must be truthful, or else the record of my life in the Navy would be of little value. Anyway, no one is going to see these pages, so possibly it doesn’t matter. How can I describe the horrible incident. It wasn’t my fault, I swear it. The blame lies with the guy that belonged to the guns’ crew. He “remembered” me with a vengeance. He said he would, and he was as good as his word. It came to pass this way or after this manner, for it all happened so suddenly that I have only a confused impression of the details. As usual I was among the stragglers, and finding it very difficult going. The plank was steep and my outfit extremely heavy. There were a few men behind me, and at my side I saw to my horror the guns’ crew guy. He was observing my efforts with a malevolent grin. And then it happened – this fearful thing. I had just reached the steepest pitch of the gangplank and was about to step aboard, when suddenly I felt myself pushed violently backward. Something became entangled in my legs, and I completely lost my balance. As my hammock and bag flew from my grasp I uttered a low, despairing cry and tumbled over backwards. Down the gang-plank I rolled with incredible speed, gathering momentum at every foot. Vague thoughts flashed across my mind in the course of my frantic evolutions. “Where is the bottom?” I wondered. “If Polly could only see me now,” came into my mind, and through it all I was fervently cursing my enemy. He had pushed me. I knew it. Furthermore, to make my ruin complete, he had tripped me. This I also knew. My flight was becoming more rapid every moment. I seemed to be hurtling through interminable leagues of space. Vaguely I remember encountering several pairs of legs on the way. The legs instantly disappeared and violent swearing broke out in my wake. Suddenly I brought up against something other than sailor legs. These legs seemed to be invested with all the slim, blue dignity of an officer. They, too, disappeared, and a body fell heavily upon me. My flight was over. I was lying on the dock at the foot of the gang-plank. Dreamily I opened my eyes and stared into those of an incensed junior lieutenant. He was lying hardly five Inches from me. Gravity is no respecter of gold braid.

“A thousand damns!” screamed the infuriated officer, trying to rise. He was unable to, owing to the fact that I was on one of his legs.

“A thousand pardons,” I moaned as he unceremoniously rolled me over.

At that moment I felt a heavy hand on my collar and I was violently placed on my feet. The Chief was glaring into my face. A low cheer arose from those on the ship.

“You simple-faced lubber,” grated the Chief, “you almost ruined our lieutenant.”

“I have apologized to him,” I replied, “but he wouldn’t accept it.”

“Out of my sight!” roared the officer.

I hastily looked for my bag and hammock, feeling a strong desire to withdraw not only from his sight but from the eyes of the world. The bag and hammock were nowhere to be seen. They had vanished In thin air. Several men were pointing to the water between the ship and the dock from which arose the most astounding volume of oaths I have ever heard. Peering over the dock I beheld my bag and hammock floating around in the water. A sailor was also floundering around in the oily substance, and there were several overturned buckets of paint on a nearby scow.

“Who dropped that hammock?” yelled the man in the water. “Just tell me who done it and I’ll cut his heart out.”

I moved quickly back from the edge of the pier. “We’ll show him to you later on!” yelled several voices from the ship as I stood by helplessly and watched my bag and hammock, together with the enraged ship’s painter, fished from the water.

“Get aboard,” said the Chief, and I marched up the gang-plank with thousands of eyes upon me. My outfit was presented to me with elaborate courtesy, the whole ship’s crew taking part in the ceremony. It was twice as heavy as before, and Tim had to help me carry it. As I turned away the Chief stopped me.

“The mere fact that you are aboard this ship,” he said in a loud voice so that all might hear, “is sufficient reason to give comfort to the enemy, and for that reason alone you deserve to be shot. Get below!” I got. Thus have I once more sprung into fame. Everyone on the ship knows me. I have been overwhelmed with jests and questions. The ship’s painter is still looking for me. My outfit is in terrible shape. I hope a submarine gets me soon. Life is a great deal too much.

Sept. 9th. The Spider was the first to go. Merely looking at him made me feel nervous. His face was slowly taking on a soft, greenish tint, but he said nothing. How long could he last I wondered. Finally I could restrain myself no longer.

“You’re getting sick, Spider, aren’t you?” I asked him.

“Getting!” gasped the Spider as he rose unsteadily to his feet. “I’ve already got,” and he dashed away, but I was close on his heels. Tim brought up the rear. Tony seems not to mind it. I can’t write any more. I wish the ship’s painter would find me and put me out of my misery.

Sept. 10th. Impossible to write. Unable to eat, unable to sleep. Great suffering and endless toil. How much longer will it last. Tony dangled a piece of fat before our stricken eyes this morning and we all three rose as one and went elsewhere. Many others are sick, but I am by far the sickest man not only aboard this ship, but aboard any ship afloat. I must go.

Sept. 12th. The worst is over, but misfortune still hangs like a black pall over my head.

“Get up in the chains,” said the Quartermaster to me last night, “I got to try some of you guys out to see how you cast the lead.”

Grabbing my Blue Jacket’s Manual I made my way limply forward. Here I placed myself in the so-called chains and carefully untied the lead from the rail.

“Heave!” cried the Quartermaster from the darkness behind me. I hove.

“Catch it!” he shouted, and I caught the line.

“Where is it at?” he demanded.

“Wait a minute,” says I.

“What for?” says he.

“I’m looking for the place.”

“What place?” he asks.

“Where it tells about the lead,” I replied. By the dim light I could hardly make out what the book said.

“By the marks and deeps 3½,” I cried, taking a chance.

“What!” came a surprised voice from the darkness, “By the what?”

“Oh, well,” says I, “I’ll try again.”

“You’d better,” growls the Quartermaster.

This time I gave the lead a mighty heave and felt the line flying through my hand.

“Stop her!” cried the Quartermaster, but it was too late. I had lost control of the line and the last foot of it slipped through my grasp.

“What she read?” demanded the Quartermaster.

Silence from the chains. I was afraid to answer. Crouching there in the darkness I stared ahead at the broad, dim ocean, and contemplated my fate. I had lost the lead. How could I tell him?

“Are you still there?” called the man who was destined to slay me as soon as he learned the horrid truth.

I came slowly back to him.

“Well?” says he.

“I lost the lead,” says I.

“Lost it,” says he, “why it was secured to the rail.”

“I know,” says I, “but I undid it. You see, I thought that was the thing to do, so I just …” My voice trailed away across the starless night.

“Gord!” breathed the Quartermaster, “you’ve gone and lost our lead.” There was silence. The ship panted swiftly through the night. “Some war!” thought I miserably.

“Come aft,” says the Quartermaster in a quiet voice. It was altogether too quiet. When the storm broke it would be all the more violent for having been controlled. He took me up to the Master-at-Arms.

“He lost the lead,” said the Quartermaster to the Jimmylegs. The bald simplicity of the statement made my crime appear even more appalling.

“Lost the lead!” said the Jimmy-legs in an incredulous voice. “That ain’t never been done before on this ship.”

“He did it,” said the Quartermaster.

“Impossible!” replied the Master-at-Arms.

“Not for this guy,” said the Quartermaster.

“First he almost ruins our junior lieutenant, and then he goes and loses our lead,” says the Legs, as if to himself. “He shouldn’t be allowed at large.”

“How about the galley?” suggested the Quartermaster. The suggestion was accepted. All day I have been washing dishes at angles varying between 20° and 75°. The Jimmylegs has told everyone to observe my actions closely. He fears, he says, for the safety of the ship.

The ship’s painter has just thrust his head through the door and looked at me a long time. “So that’s the guy,” he said as he withdrew.

“Yes,” replied the Master-at-Arms, “he lost the lead.”

“Gord!” said the painter. “What a sailor!”

Sept. 14th. The destroyers picked us up a while back and I breathed a sigh of relief. We are bound for some unnamed French port, at which we are to dock some time soon. Tim has been going around with a French-English conversation book. From time to time he mutters “Je vous aime” and “une jolie fille.” He seems to place a great deal of importance on these two phrases. The Spider has learned how to say “de vin,” which he earnestly believes flows freely at all French ports. Today during a few spare moments I came upon a magazine that would have delighted mother. It was filled with underwear advertisements. It seems from these advertisements that anyone to wear a suit of underwear must either belong to a country club or own at least two high-powered motors. It is evidently remarkable stuff, for as soon as it is put on the wearer immediately begins to play leapfrog, golf or tennis with some other fortunate gentleman similarly clad, or else large, jolly families, all wearing these miraculous garments begin to wrestle with each other or to hold an impromptu track meet. From the illustrations, no one but the very pick of supermen and women are ever sufficiently interested in underwear to the extent of having their photographs taken when clad in it. Now I guess I have worn more kinds of underwear than most people, and I have never felt like any of these remarkable people apparently feel. It would do my heart good to see for once an underwear advertisement showing a broken old man and a couple of fleshless, anti-athletic young men like myself, all seemingly unhappy, clad in the vaunted product. Napoleon wore underwear, I am told on good but intimate authority, yet I feel sure he hardly looked imposing in it. But all this has nothing to do with dodging tin-fish in mid-ocean. I must return to the mop. Leisure begets idle thoughts.

Sept. 15th. The Quartermaster in a sudden burst of confidence has just given me to understand that my hungry eyes shall soon feast on the sight of land. I almost broke down upon the reception of the news.

(Later) The Quartermaster for once spoke the truth. We made out the blue coast of France several hours back.

This so delighted me that in a burst of gratitude I gave Tony my wrist watch. Several planes are now circling around us. I wonder how sick an aviator can get? I should say, considerable. There is little envy in me for that sort of a pastime. We are now entering some kind of a harbor. It seems to speak French. There are no signs urging the perplexed visitor to drink this special brand of water and live forever.

Sept. 16th. At an Unnamed French Port. – Owing to a delay in something or other we were granted a certain amount of liberty. I have just returned aboard. What a time we had!

Tim, with his two French phrases; Tony and the Spider, loudly calling for “de vin,” went ashore with me. For some time we wandered around the streets looking at the queer signs. Tim became very dispirited because of the noticeable absence of “les jolie filles” as he called them. Presently he brought us up before a place that looked like a cross between a refreshment shop and a fish market.

“I guess this is where they dance on the tables,” said Tim, still clinging to his dream. The guns’ crew were there before us, and had spread themselves over the place in heroic attitudes. They seemed to recognize me as I entered, and several ironical remarks were tossed my way.

“Sure,” said one of them, “that’s the guy that lost the lead – some sailor, what?” and all of them laughed coarsely.

Without paying any attention we sat down at a long table at which several Frenchmen were carrying on an animated conversation by hands and shoulders and eyebrows and forks and plates and everything, in short, that was movable. They were all excited and enthusiastic about the recent victories. Suddenly one of them, in an uncontrollable outburst of patriotism, leaned across the table and kissed Tim on either cheek.

“Mon frere,” he exclaimed as he did so. Tim pushed him back in his seat with undue violence. The Frenchman looked at him in surprise.

“You must let him kiss you, Tim,” I told him. “It’s the custom.”

“Custom bosh!” said Tim in his most brutal voice, looking reproachfully at the Frenchman.

“M’appelez-vous bosh?” cried that gentleman, his eyes gleaming.

“Wee, wee,” cried Tim, not knowing what the Frenchman had said.

“Sacre nom de nom!” screamed the Frenchman, leaping up and overturning the table.

“Il m’appel bosh,” he cried, pointing to Tim.

“It is all a terrible mistake,” I tried to shout above the uproar, but my voice could not be heard. The guns’ crew sided with the Frenchman and a frightful scene took place. Tables were overturned, the store seemed to settle on its foundation, and plates went crashing to the floor. In the fury of the melee I remember seeing a cup bounce off Tim’s large red head. He apparently did not notice it. Standing on one of the guns’ crew he was waving a chair in the face of another. Slowly we retreated to the door. Someone had kicked me in the stomach. I suspected my original enemy, and emptied a bottle of vinegar on his head, which had somehow gotten tangled up with my feet.

“Kick him,” cried Tim, pointing to the head, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, although I felt like it. For no apparent reason a Frenchman was standing on a table in the corner singing the “Marseillaise” at the top of his voice. The odds were too great for us, and, realizing this, Tim called to us to cut and run. This we did in a whole-hearted manner. Down the narrow street of the little French town we sped with its whole populace streaming after us.

“Tuez-les! Tuez-les!” we could hear the Frenchman screaming, “Il m’appel bosh!”

“You should have let him kiss you,” breathed the Spider as we rounded a corner and broke for the open country.

“I ain’t a-going to let no man kiss me,” said Tim in a stubborn voice. “Jolie fille, yes, but furrin’ men, no.”

“You gotta let ’em kiss you,” panted Tony, “that whatta they do.”

“I don’t got to let them kiss me,” cried Tim getting excited, “I ain’t a-goin’ to do it.”

“You should have ought of done it,” said the Spider, “and we wouldn’t have been in this mess.”

The shouts were dying out in the distance. We were outstripping our pursuers, although we could still faintly hear the Frenchman entreating the world to “Tuez-les.”

“What’s that mean?” asked Tim.

“He’s asking them to kill us,” I replied, remembering my scanty freshman French.

“Gord!” said Tim, “what people! He was wanting to kiss me ten minutes ago.”

We were by this time some distance from the town, and gradually cracking beneath the strain.

“We musn’t be far from the front now,” said the Spider wearily. “Let’s stop this side of the Rhine.”

So we rested by the roadside. On the way back the Frenchman, who had learned that Tim had not intentionally called him a Boche, met us in the middle of the street and embraced us affectionately. We were accompanied to the ship amid flags and an admiring populace. My stomach is still a little tender, however. I do wish that guns’ crew guy would stop remembering me.

Sept. 17th. (Under way once more.) – This morning we left this port still unnamed and cleared away for the American coast which I devoutly trust I shall soon see. One observes very little of the war in this line of work. So far my experiences have been purely personal. This morning I was cleaning brass as if the future tranquility of my soul depended on the power of my elbows. So bright did I polish the brass that I was enabled to observe in it the reflection of the ship’s painter standing behind me with a large, flat stick, evidently made especially for my enjoyment, raised high in the air and on the point of descending with great force upon my unprotected person. I sprang aside just in time to avoid an unpleasant contact. The ship’s painter went away like a thwarted leopard and I gave the brass an extra shine out of sheer gratitude.

Sept. 25th. (at sea). “How often can a guy get seasick?” I asked the Quartermaster this morning between a lull in my labors. The Quartermaster spat reflectively over the lea side rail and gave due consideration to the question before committing himself.

“Well,” says he, “there’s some what get seasick perpetually and then there are those what only gets seasick intermittently or just every now and then.”

“I must belong to both classes,” says I in a cheerless voice.

“How’s that?” asks the Quartermaster.

“Well,” says I, “you see, I’m always seasick, perpetually, as you said, but intermittently I get more seasick and on special occasions I can get even still more seasick.”

“What,” says the Quartermaster, “you mean to say that you’re seasick now on this glassy sea?”

“I mean to say,” says I, “that I have been seasick every minute since I left the station and that ten years from now the mere thought of what you seem fit to term a glassy sea will be sufficient cause for a hasty exit from any company, no matter how entertaining.”

“Why, this ain’t no seat at all,” replies the Quartermaster, scornfully, “just a mere easy-running ground swell.”

He gazed to windward for a moment and scanned an unintelligent expanse of stupid gray sky with a discerning eye.

“Just wait,” says he, as if he were promising me a stick of candy, “just you wait until six bells and I’ll show you what a real sea is.”

“Something rough, eh?” says I, as the ship pitched shiveringly down the side of a valley of dark green, concentrated oneryness and sent me sprawling across the deck.

“Yes,” says he, “something rough, something very rough – not calm like it is now.”

“Well, I ain’t a-goin’ to wait,” says I, “I don’t have to,” and I made my way feebly aft to a place of seclusion, and here among other things, I prayed for peace. Then I proceeded to hide myself behind a hammock rack and wait for six bells. The storm was punctual to the minute, if anything a little before hand. Storms never have good taste anyway, and they never leave one. Well, that ship did everything but gallop. It waltzed, it fox-trotted, it performed several very elaborate Oriental muscle dances and a couple of buck and wings. I did all of these things with it. The first lurch sent me spinning across the deck to the end of the compartment; the second one carried me back with a resounding bang; the third conveyed me through the door and among the legs of the executive officer.

“What are you doing here?” asked the officer in an injured tone.

“Suffering,” I replied, digging my nails into the deck.

“Don’t you like it in the Navy?” he asked as I tried to rise.

“No, sir,” says I, “I don’t like it at all in the Navy, sir,” and then, carried away by an irresistible impulse of curiosity, I added, “Do you, sir?”

The officer smiled on me with kindly eyes. “I love it, my boy,” he said. “I enjoy it; it’s my life.”

“Oh, God!” I breathed as another wave hit the ship and sent me sliding from the officer’s sight, “those are the guys that have press-agented the Navy and kidded poor innocent people like me into believing it a romantic sport.”

“Where you going?” says Tim, as he caught me sliding past him.

“Going,” says I, “I’m going to vote for Mr. McAdoo if he ever runs for office. He builds tunnels under rivers and things and perhaps he might run one across the ocean.”

Later this evening the Quartermaster spoke to me apologetically.

“Sorry, Buddy,” says he, “but I was wrong about that storm. Thought we were going to have one, but it must have got shunted off somewhere along the line.”

“What!” I screamed, “you mean to say this isn’t a storm?”

“Certainly not,” says he, “this isn’t even a blow.”

For the first time since I joined the Navy I cried. He did not see me, for no tears ran down my face, but my soul was drenched with them.

“Not even a blow,” I repeated in a heart-broken voice as I staggered back to my compartment. What a war!

Sept. 26th. At four bells this afternoon the stern gun began barking furiously and Tony came dashing into our compartment, utterly demented.

“Submarine, he come!” he shouted, throwing everything around in wild disorder. “Submarine, he come!” he repeated, and with that he dropped an armful of whites, seized his guitar and rushed up on deck. Of course we all were close behind him, his temperamental nature having completely upset all our instructions.

“Submarine, he come,” Tony frantically informed the world as he cleared the hatch. We clustered around him and looked eagerly seaward.

“What the hell yer doin’ here?” shouted the Quartermaster, spying us standing near the hatch. “Are you going to serenade the old man?”

“Submarine, he ” started Tony, but he never finished.

“Submarine me eye,” cried the Quartermaster, “you poor simple lubbers, you calf-eyed, lily-livered, clay-footed spawn of satan, you swabs, don’t you know that this is only practice?”

“Then the submarine, he doesn’t come?” asked the Spider, deliberately.

“No, he doesn’t,” snapped the Quartermaster.

Upon receiving this information the Spider, with the same disinterested ease of manner, turned and kicked Tony down
the hatch. The poor misguided Italian fell amid a volley of imprecations and jingling notes as his guitar bounced along the steps.

“You were wrong, Tony,” said Tim later, “it isn’t ‘submarine, he come,’ but ‘submarine, she come.’ All submarines are shes. As soon as you get intimate with one you’re sunk, get me?”

Whereupon started an argument about submarines and women which lasted until lights. We all agreed that both were equally lawless and that both had the ability to make the bravest man feel uncomfortable in their presence.

Sept. 27th. Last night I dreamed that I was just about to kiss Polly, when suddenly there appeared upon her upper lip a huge bristling, upturned mustache and I woke up with a shriek.

“Damn the Kaiser!” I muttered.

There was silence for a moment and then way down in the darkness at the end of the compartment I heard somebody say in a low voice, “Damn Ludendorf!”

Again there was silence, and again it was broken by a subdued voice in another part of the darkness muttering, “Damn the Crown Prince.”

“Damn it all!” whispered someone, and with that the Master-at-arms damned us. Then there was silence, save for snores which in the Navy is considered the same thing.

Sept. 28th. Now that they’ve published my first diary in regular book form I might just as well tell of a terrible thing that happened. I took some of the books along with me on this trip and wrote fitting little sentiments in each one of them for my respective friends. Thinking it would be a sweet little attention I inscribed in the one intended for the Executive Officer the following words: “With the sincere respects of the author,” and in the one intended for a friend of mine in camp I wrote: “To a loose-talking old party of unsound morals from Biltmore Oswald.” I won’t say what I wrote in Polly’s. This morning I was called into the Executive’s stateroom.

“Ah,” thinks I to myself, as I made my way thither, “he probably intends to recommend me for a commission on the mere strength of my book.” However, when I saw him there was something in his expression that made me instantly reverse my opinion. He was sitting by a table, and on this table was a copy of Biltmore Oswald, and on this copy rested a large, tanned, seafaring hand which clutched convulsively upon my child as I entered.

“Yes, sir,” says I.

“Your name Oswald?” says he.

“Yes, sir,” says I.

“Did ye send me this book?” says he.

“Yes, sir,” says I for the third time.

“Did ye write this in it?” he continues, holding up the book to me.

“Yes, sir,” says I, “but not for you, sir, honest to God, sir—”

“That will do,” he snapped. Then, adjusting his spectacles on his nose, he proceeded to read in a portentous voice: “‘To a loose-talking old party of unsound morals, from Biltmore Oswald.’”

He looked over his glasses at me and even he seemed to be awed by the horror of the situation.

“Not for you, sir,” I managed to gasp, “honest—”

“That will do,” says he, and there was a pause. Finally I heard him speaking.

“To begin with,” says he, “you must have been feebleminded to have ever written such a book, and further than that – you must have been utterly mad to have written such a thing about me, an officer of the United States Navy in it. What have you got to say for yourself?”

“I didn’t mean—” I began.

“That will do,” said he in a voice that sounded as if he had listened to a lengthy explanation with infinite patience.

I was almost frantic by this time.

He opened the book again and I thought he was going to begin to read it all over in that same grim voice, but all I heard was such broken snatches as “loose-talking,” pause, “unsound morals,” longer pause, and then “general court-martial.” Suddenly his face became very red and he sprang to his feet and shook the offending book which I heartily wished I had never written, under my shrinking nose.

“What do you know about me?” he shouted. “What do you know about my morals?”

“Nothing, sir,” says I, “nothing—”

“You do,” he shouted back to me, “you do. Has that lying old boatswain’s mate been talking to you? What did he say, eh?”

“Nothing at all, sir,” says I, “honest, sir—”

“That will do,” says he, striding up and down the cabin; “The slandering old devil,” he muttered; “the old liar.”

At this moment the skipper entered the room and hope departed from my heart.

“What’s wrong?” asks the skipper of the infuriated officer.

“Wrong!” says the officer, “wrong! Read this,” he says, holding out the book in a shaking hand. “Written by this miserable sailor.”

The skipper read it through and handed it back.

“I have never read in fewer words a more accurate characterization,” he remarked in a calm voice. “It is nothing short of genius.”

“I know, sir,” I broke in, not wishing to contradict the skipper, “it might be true, but honestly it’s all a mistake—”

“There’s no mistake about it,” continues the skipper as if he had not heard me, “it’s all true, every word of it.”

“It’s all that old lying Murphy’s fault,” said the Executive Officer, in a complaining voice; “every ship I get on with him he blackens my character.”

“He knows too much,” says the Captain in an insinuating voice.

“And not about me alone,” replies the Exec, with equal insinuation.

“Oh,” says the Captain, “I dare say you fancy Murphy could blacken my character?”

The Executive Officer turned away to hide an obviously sarcastic smile. “Oh, no,” says he, “not Murphy nor any other man.”

“Right,” says the Captain; “above reproach – open like a book – white like a lily – my character.”

“How about Yokohama?” says the Exec, sudden like.

“That will do,” says the Captain, and both of them seemed to remember my presence for the first time.

“Well, young man, what have you to say?” asked the Captain, frowning. When I had finished telling my story about the books getting mixed up the Executive Officer still seemed to be a little suspicious.

“You can’t prefer charges,” said the skipper; “every officer knows it’s true. No court-martial would convict him.”

“But isn’t an old officer faithful in his duty going to have some protection?” expostulated the Exec.

“Virtue and a clean conscience are a man’s only shield and buckler,” said the skipper as he left the room.

We were alone together once more, but not for long.

“You swear it’s true what you’ve just told me?” he said, and I swore by some several known and unknown species of gods.

“All right,” says he, “you can go, but bring back the right book this time.”

As I was leaving I stopped in the doorway for a moment.

“Can I ask Murphy about Yokohama?” says I.

He leveled a pair of inscrutable eyes on me.

“Keep away from that wicked old man,” says he, “but if you do go near him confine your questions to the Captain; leave me out of it, ye understand?”

I did.

Sept. 29th. “The Exec, said that you were a ‘wicked old man’ and for me to keep away from you,” I remarked to the white-haired old boatswain’s mate this evening.

“He did, eh?” said the old fellow, glaring at me from under his eyebrows.

“Yes,” says I, “and he said that you were an ‘old liar’ and a ‘slandering old devil,’” I continued cheerfully.

“Ah, he did, eh?” repeated the aged person. “He said that, did he?”

“‘A wicked old man,’” I repeated, “‘an old liar,’ and lots more that I don’t remember right now.”

“Now look here, young feller,” began the boatswain’s mate, pointing his equally venerable pipe at me, “now just you look here – I knew that man when he was nothing but a midshipman, and I have followed him around the world several times since, and for a more characterless, desperate acting, misbehaving man, you’d have to look somewhere other than in this world. Now I can remember once in Lisbon—” And all this evening I have been learning things about the Navy and several of its officers. What days the old days must have been! What good old days! Not like these.

Sept. 30th. This day I found out what a windsail was. It is not at all a difficult thing to do. All you have to do is to fall down it, and if you come through alive your reputation is eternally made. I was already quite well known on this ship before but now I’m notorious.

“There goes the guy wot fell down the windsail,” they say as I pass by.

“Yeah,” says another, “an’ wot lost the lead.”

“An’ almost killed our ship’s painter,” adds a third.

“Not to speak of laming our navigator by his clumsy falling and sprawling,” puts in still another member of the company unwilling that one item of my long list of misdeeds should pass unremarked.

“Some sailor,” they chime in a sarcastic chorus, “Wot a guy,” and I hasten on my way with bitterness in my heart. But all this has nothing to do with my quick road to fame via the windsail. And, after all, there is nothing to tell save that I fell down the thing. It wasn’t at all what I thought it, neither are many other things. My inglorious career of trial and error in the Navy has taught me at least that much. Nothing is what you think it, not even liberty. Sometimes things are more so, sometimes less, but never true to form. That’s life and largely stomach. Lots of the world’s best poetry has come from a bad stomach and, of course, vice versa. Some of the finest murders of our times had their inception originally in a badly setting breakfast; divorces, marriages, fires and labor troubles – bad stomachs every time. If your food disagrees with you, you get married; if it continues to disagree you get unmarried, and if these expedients fail to work you get religion, dyspepsia or buried. There’s no getting away from your stomach. I’ve tried it; I know. It sometimes gets away from you, but you can never get away from it. Ever since I set foot upon this St. Vitus stricken ship I’ve been trying to get away from my stomach, what little there is of it, but it’s been right with me all the time and it’s been bad. I’ve never known my stomach to be so bad. It’s been terrible. Upset and all that; boxing the compass, doing the flips, standing on its ear and falling downstairs. Well, these are revolutionary times and every stomach is an out and out Bolshevist (popular conception). No stable government. No diplomatic exchange. No rest. Anarchy and torment from wave to wave. I never realized the sea could be so rough when I used to take my sweetie, that beautiful woman, out in a canoe on the lake, but maybe that was the reason. If sailors had their sweeties with them maybe they’d never get seasick. This is a good idea, but the Navy Department wouldn’t like it, I guess. Much better to have them in every port; rich ones with automobiles and lots of food on the table and a floor that doesn’t wiggle and a nice, big sofa in front of a swell fire and a couple of electric lights burning somewhere down In the cellar – oh, boy, this small man’s navy is making a polygamist of me, if that’s the right word. I don’t know that it is, because mother never let such words in the front door at home, never any further than that. She always said that her husband was as bad as she knew him to be and if he was any worse than that she’d have to hand it to him. She did – on numerous occasions. But then again this has nothing to do with the windsail I fell down. Well, that’s all I did. Just fell down it. Lit on the back of my neck and stayed there for some time. I have read of people falling down the windsail, but I never knew they did it in real life. They do though, at least I do. But that doesn’t matter, for I can do anything – wrong.

Note. – For those who are unfamiliar with the windsail, and certainly there must be some, I might mention that it is a large, compact canvas tube with an open flare at the head, lots of wind inside, and a hole at the deck end through which the wind and unfortunate people like myself pass swiftly down into the interior of the ship. Well, that’s a windsail, and I’m the “guy wot fell down it.” That’s who I am and will be ever more even if I should chance to meet, which I hope I don’t, any member of this crew twenty years from now in any part of this world of ours.

Oct. 1st. Without word or warning we steamed up the Narrows today. If I had known yesterday that we were so close to home I would have jumped overboard and tried to swim it. We rate liberty tomorrow. Tony is already beginning to apply large quantities of horrid smelling oil to his hair. He claims to have a little pig that loves it. If so she must always have a cold in her head.

Oct. 2nd. New York, a large city on the Hudson River, chiefly given over to coming and going. I have been here before, but I never thought that I’d ever get back again. The tall buildings are quite tall, the fine hotels are just that, there are many people on the streets and many streets for them to be on, but I don’t see why they are on the streets, for if I was in civilian clothes I’d be in a cafe, and if I ever got into a cafe I’d never get back again to the street, and I’d be glad of it – for awhile. New York has a nice subway that gets quite excited around 42d street and loses its head and everybody loses their tempers, but this is all right, for it serves many a commuter with an excuse for getting home late for dinner, or not getting home at all, or getting home too much so, and all that.

There are lots of nice canteens for sailors and soldiers in New York City, and in one of these canteens I found a grasshopper. How he had gotten there I don’t know, but nevertheless there he was a-grasshoppering around in the most approved style, and most of the ladies were up on the tables getting their nice white canvas shoes all dirty in the soldiers’ and sailors’ soup, and if Coles Phillips, the ankle artist, had been there with his pad and pencil, he would have been able to get enough material to supply an advertising agency with a campaign extending over several years.

Well, however that may be, I stalked this grasshopper from foot to soup, cornered him in a pile of baked beans, and eventually brought the grim pursuit to an end on the outskirts of some ham and eggs. No one would help me. They were all too busy looking at the ladies.

“It isn’t a rat,” I explained to the ladies between hops.

“No,” cried a sailor promptly, “but he’s just as dangerous.”

So the ladies stayed where they were, which was evidently where most everybody thought they should be.

After I had caught this grasshopper I didn’t know what to do with it. It is hardly an animal that you can reconcile to captivity. Everywhere you put it it hops. You can’t put it out and tell it to be still, and you can’t threaten it with punishment as you would a dog, and still you can’t kill it, particularly when on a visit to New York, as was evidently this grasshopper.

“Take it outside!” several ladies cried in chorus, and so I gathered up my bundle in one hand and caging the grasshopper in the other I left amid cheers. But Fifth Avenue is no place for a grasshopper – not a live grasshopper. It’s all right for a dead grasshopper or a despondent grasshopper, but a live, cheerful active grasshopper should never go on Fifth Avenue. It’s very bad hopping there. I put the old battler down, but nearly had heart failure because the very first hop sent him under the uplifted foot of a heavy pedestrian. Hoppers are not good navigators. Too reckless. With a loud yell I pushed the gentleman from off my unusual protegé.

“You nearly spoiled my grasshopper,” I explained to him.

From the man’s expression I knew there was no doubt in his mind about my being balmy.

“Grasshopper,” he ejaculated, “humbug!”

“In a sense, yes,” I answered; “but this one isn’t a humbug, it’s some bug. You just ought to see him hop.”

When we looked to find him he was no longer there, and the old guy thought I’d been kidding him.

“No more of your tricks,” he said, and passed on, leaving me groping around the feet of New York for a weak-minded grasshopper.

“Pardon me, sir,” I said suddenly to an English officer, “but you are about to step on my favorite grasshopper,” and I scooped the greatly interrupted insect out from under his high polished boot.

“Grasshopper,” said the officer severely. “Grasshopper. Shouldn’t be here. Not regular. Country the place for grasshoppers. Hang it all, it isn’t right. Bad taste. Not cricket.”

“Oh, no,” says I, misunderstanding him; “it’s a grasshopper all right, not a cricket.”

“No place for it,” said the officer briefly. “It’s not regular. All wrong.”

“Not for our grasshoppers,” I replied. “You see, sir, American grasshoppers are altogether different from English grasshoppers. They are brought up differently; more liberty, and all that. Frequently they spend weeks at a time in the city.”

“Fancy that,” replied the officer, much perplexed, “but it’s all wrong. Not right. City no place for it. Goodbye.”

And he, too, passed down the street, leaving me with this grasshopper to dispose of. It seemed to have come into my life permanently. Suddenly I had a bright idea.

“Why not take it over to the park back of the Library and let it go? There it can find everything that any reasonable grasshopper should expect. Lots of grass and plenty of room for hopping.”

I carried this move into effect, and just on the other side of Fifth Avenue – other, meaning the side opposite the one I had just left – I encountered an elderly naval officer and was forced to salute him. There was a bundle in my left hand and a grasshopper in my right, but I did my best.

“Young man,” said the officer blocking my progress, “are you shaking your fist at me?”

“No, sir,” says L

“Well what’s the matter with your hand?” he asked in a suspicious voice.

“I got a grasshopper in it,” I replied very simply and unaffectedly.

For a long time he gazed searchingly in my face as if trying to read my mind. I could see that he received my information with the greatest distrust. Presently curiosity overcame his dignity.

“Let’s see it,” says he.

I held my hand up and let him peek through the fingers through which the beady eyes of the grasshopper peered out upon the world with great discontent.

“See it!” says I excitedly. “See it!”

And with this remark the poor benighted insect made one leap for freedom and landed upon the officer’s breast. For a moment it looked like an assault. I pounced upon the grasshopper, and consequently had to pounce upon the officer, and nearly tore his campaign stripes off.

“Got him,” says I triumphantly.

The officer regained his balance and regarded me darkly.

“Keep him,” he says, and hotchels away.

So I kept him until I got into the park, and here I launched him forth to freedom with much ceremony.

“Good hopping, old sport,” says I as I tossed him to the grass.

But, strange to relate, he didn’t hop. All he did was to sit there and curl his whiskers at me for all the world like a mad photographer I once knew. I couldn’t drag myself away from the spot until I saw him hop. I feared he had gone sick on me. The moral responsibility of having a grasshopper on one’s hands is something tremendous. And as I stood gazing down into the grass a crowd gathered around me and also gazed down into the grass. Of course the crowd didn’t see the grasshopper, but it earnestly hoped to see something, so it added unto itself and gazed. Then suddenly the thing happened. It hopped.

“See,” says I proudly, “he will do it again.”

“What?” asked an old man.

“Who?” cried someone.

“What’ll he do again?” another one called out.

“Stand back, lemme see!” a fourth one shouted.

“Watch,” I commanded. “Watch close.”

Again the grasshopper proved himself worthy of his name and race by hopping.

“What did I tell you?” I said as I walked away; “he did it, and if you watch carefully he’ll do it again. In fact,” I added, to heighten the mystery, “that’s all he can do.”

The crowd was still gazing as I departed. It is the nature of crowds to gaze, and it is the nature of grasshoppers to hop, and I for one would not want it a bit different. “As it is, so it is,” say I.

Oct. 3rd. Met Gladys today and took her to tea. Score by innings:

5  p.m.
Tea, Sandwiches, French Pastry

5:15  p.m.
Lemonade, Cakes, Sandwiches

5:45  p.m.
Ice Cream, Coffee, Cakes

6  p.m.
Cakes, Almonds, Salad

6:15  p.m.
Demi Tasse, Cakes, Cakes

Grand total:
$9.85

That girl has the most fluent appetite I ever encountered. And the strange thing about it is that it seems to do her good. Even her dog Dippy who is no slouch at eating hands her the palm when it comes to a contest.

Oct. 9th. Numerous important and painful things have happened to me, but I am still quite vague about them all. I remember sitting in a friend’s apartment on my last liberty feeling very hot and doing some particularly fancy coughing, and then I remember someone getting up suddenly and looking at me in a peculiar, frightened way, then I coughed again, laughed rather foolishly and it seems I was then put to bed. From that time on, life assumed a cubist expression. I recall vividly oranges, a kind lady reading to me while I traced a map of the western front from the cracks in the plaster on the ceiling. There seemed to be a certain quantity of broth and milk and a long procession of glittering thermometers somehow connected to a doctor with a pointed beard, a great deal of unnecessary heat circulating around my anatomy and always a splendid accompaniment of coughing. At one time I remember mother came swooning into the room and delivered an impassioned dissertation on underwear, her favorite subject; and then Polly, my sweetie, arrived and sat down beside me like a thwarted nun and gave me to understand that she would cheerfully sign a guarantee to forgive me all my past and future sins if I would only get well, and then she went away just as I was telling her about the sad case of a broken-down elephant suffering from nervous prostration that had come to me in the dark hours of the previous night and sat heavily on my chest. She left, but I continued the story; and the funny part of it was that I believed it, at least they say I did.

Then one morning the doctor came and after listening eagerly to the animated conversation of my lungs, asked me how I would like to go to a hospital.

“Don’t be silly,” says I, “I’m very busy and I’ve a lot of things to do.”

“Get ready,” says he, giving my left side an extra jab for good luck, “get ready if you can, for the ambulance will be here in fifteen minutes.”

He departed and I arose more or less horrified and messed heatedly around in a world of infinite space and no security until a man in white suddenly appeared to me with a little book in his hands and began to ply me with purely rudimentary questions.

“What’s your name?” he asked in a bored voice.

“It doesn’t matter about the name,” I replied, “I won’t be answering to it long.”

“Perhaps not,” he agreed cheerfully, “but this is official.”

After that we departed the spot and I saw it no more. I had to climb down six flights of stairs and they taxed me greatly. I progressed with stately elaboration, considering which landing would be the best to go to sleep on. The man in white kept looking at me with an impatient scowl, but made no effort to help me.

“Sorry, old chap,” I said, to keep you from your pinochle, “but only one boiler is working at present.” The street was lined with expectant and morbidly interested people.

“Wotcher got, mister?” one worthy asked.

“Fits,” I answered, “with a deadly complication of bubonic plague. While I have been speaking I have given off exactly 7,895,372 extremely nosy germs. You have gotten many of them.”

After this I staggered to the ambulance and fell within. At the hospital I was greeted by a flock of nurses who convoyed me to my room.

“Get undressed, sonny,” said one of them while the rest crowded cheerfully around the door.

“All right,” says I, waiting for her to leave.

“All right,” says she, not leaving.

“All right,” says I, rather unhappily.

“Start in,” says she in a businesslike voice.

“You promise to marry me,” says I, taking off my shoes.

“Oh,” she says as light dawned upon her, “you want me to go.”

“Well, it would be easier,” I admitted, and she withdrew,

I had just gotten down to my shirt, when the door burst open and all the nurses in the world stood without regarding me anxiously.

“Atta boy,” called one of them in tones of encouragement.

“You’re doing fine,” cried another.

“What’s so blooming wonderful about this?” says I, edging behind an open-work chair. “I have undressed myself for a long time now – ever since Bridget left.”

“Go to it,” says one of them, and I was forthwith bundled into bed, at which moment I drew a complete blank.

Oct. 12th. Much better. I permitted Polly to kiss my hand this evening. It was interestingly thin. Mother has been shopping for a particularly thick brand of underwear all afternoon against my departure. I told her to interview Admiral Peary, who knew all about such things. She took his name down and said she’d look him up in the telephone book immediately. I have had a crisis and everything, but I’m not going to die for quite some time, Fm told. That’s nice.

Oct. 13th. Complications. The playful little pleurisy has me in its clutches. It’s one of those things that has to be felt and not described. No sleep, no rest. Constant misery. I asked the doctor if he was sure that I wasn’t going to die and when he said “Yes” I almost cried.

“Well, well, how are you feeling now?” asked the nurse this morning as she swooped cheerfully into the room. I had sat up all night with a hot water bottle and burned myself in several places which were so intimate that I could hardly indulge in the comfort of complaining about them.

“Well,” says I, wearily, “after all the agony I’ve been through the least you could do would be to come across with a little petting.”

“You don’t deserve to get well after that,” says the nurse, leaving the room with false dignity.

Oct. 17th. Out of pain. Wonder how Fogerty is. Hope he hasn’t caught the “flu.” Anyone wishing to verify the size and quantity of my illness needs only to look at my chart. The fever page looks like a sketch of the Andes Mountain range. Polly has just left. She’s a beautiful woman but a trifle too resolute.

Oct. 18th. I almost cried when I left the hospital this afternoon. I’d sort of gotten used to the place and the life of an invalid. I thanked everyone profusely, including the elevator boy and told them that they had saved my life. They admitted it, and I guess they did. The lady whose apartment I used to get sick in had a hand in it, too. She was first to the front and got all the good coughing, and was eternally compromised in the eyes of two schoolteachers who lived in the next flat.

Oct. 19th. Reported aboard today. No sympathy. Why do they always say “The good ship so and so”? I see nothing good about a ship except the gangplank and “Lay aft, liberty party!”

Oct. 23rd. (In the general direction of France) Sick, that’s all; just plain sick.

Oct. 26th. (Leaving the war) For full information reread entry of Oct. 23rd.

Nov. 2nd. (Near New York – maybe) The remarks of Oct. 23rd and 26th still hold good.

Nov. 5th. (New York) “Lay aft, liberty party!” The Boatswain has just uttered those magic words. I find no trouble in “laying aft.” It’s the best thing I do. Now I shall proceed to let Polly admire me make away with a pair of plutocratic steaks.

Nov. 12th. Well, it’s over; all, all over, and I haven’t any wound stripes on my arm. What an inglorious part I have played in the war. I have fallen down and gotten sick and made mistakes and boxed the compass and done endless useless things, but haven’t even seen a periscope. How I will have to lie to my grandchildren, I can now understand why poor, dear grandfather lies so abundantly about his leg that got caught in a folding bed. He feels morally obligated to posterity to tell about his heroic exploits in war. I’ll have to go through with it, too.

Last night was not a pretty night. People kissed me. Everywhere I went I was kissed just as resoundingly as if I had been the greatest hero. But they were never the right people. I suspected them of having been rebuffed by other sailors stronger than I. One very pretty girl kissed me, however, and Polly almost bit her. After this we soon went home, Polly abusing me all the way.

“Why didn’t you stop her?” she asked bitterly.

“I was too tired, Polly,” I replied. “You see for yourself, dear, I can’t help being what I am.”

“If I thought you could,” said Polly, “I’d have no respect for you.”

I chewed on this remark for quite some time. There’s a lot more in it than meets the eye. Women are that way.

Nov. 14th. The old camp has been blighted by a swarm of very new and bright assistant paymasters. Today I visited it and found the woods full of them. Everywhere I went they were looking for their orders. “More paymasters than pay,” mused I, looking bitterly at an approaching swarm. As they passed me I saluted them gravely and they returned my salute with gratitude.

The place is quite changed. I found any number of Chiefs doing sentry duty. I guess the Ensigns are manning the drags, but I did not actually see this. Everything is being done to make it easy and comfortable for the ordinary seaman.

Mr. Fogerty, my old dog, was moderately glad to see me. He was talking things over with Chief Larry near a very imposing coal pile. Fogerty is very anxious to be mustered out and get back into civil life. He has a couple of families over at City Island to support, not to mention a few down at New Rochelle and White Plains. He has traveled far in his day, has Fogerty, and never have I met a dog that so glories in his past indiscretion,

Nov. 16th. (Looking backward) He was sitting on the tool box of an automobile with his feet on the running board, and strange to relate he was sitting in his stocking feet. Placed carefully beside him were his large, expressive, nobbed-nosed, navy shoes. Through the long slits of the city fell the vast night, clamorous with the voices of people, the honking of horns which sounded like a large flock of disturbed geese passing southward through the night, and from the river came the deep, vibrating notes of a host of craft forming a sort of monotonous background of sound for the shriller noise arising from the multitude. The world moved through the streets of New York like an undulating, sombre colored ribbon. There were no single pedestrians. There was no room for the solitary traveler. Humanity, as if drawn by some vast magnet in the hands of an irresponsible god, was squeezed and molded into a solid river of life, flowing and pouring confusedly wherever an opening was presented. It was a flow of sound and unbridled triumphant rejoicing. Never in the history of the world had there been such a river. For four years the people that went to compose this mass had been held subdued and in leash, fear ridden, wracked by doubts and hitherto unknown bitterness, and now, on this night, the war was over and the phantom that had hung like a shadow for so long over their drab, everyday lives was being chased back into the night on the wings of a great noise. Here was the brutality of happiness divorced from all the cloying niceties of so called civilization, expressive and true in its sheer vulgarity and freedom. Here the numerous proprieties enforced by modern society were shown up in their true light as flimsy bits of drapery which man immediately discards in the face of any strong emotion. The next day the papers wrote indignant editorials on the coarseness and immorality of the celebration, a fact which proved that even in the face of evidence the editors still believe they can control the hearts of men with the same ease and precision with which type is run into the columns of their papers. Men read these editorials ironically and went their way rejoicing. Long after they were forgotten this great night would spring up in their thought as a particularly pleasant and thrilling memory, and they would tell their grandchildren about it in a discreetly abridged version.

As I read over these lines I have written I am wondering whether I am starting a novel or writing a diary. Certainly they sound novelesque. I think I might even show them to Polly, that beautiful and gracious creature, as sarcastic as she is sweet, which means some sarcasm at times. Yes, I might even show them to her, so pleased am I with them, if only to convince her that my literary leanings are really not literary flounderings, as she takes so much pleasure in assuring me every time I read her a poem composed to her eyes and in her honor.

In the meantime, I am leaving a certain party sitting quietly in his stocking feet on the tool box of an automobile.

“Sit down,” said the certain party, seemingly oblivious to all the turbulent masses seething around him.

“Sit down,” he repeated, “me dogs hurt.”

“Corns?” said I, sinking wearily to the running board of the deserted car.

“Bunions,” said the sailor moodily. “Terrible painful after being stepped on.”

“I can well imagine,” I replied, sympathetically.

“No you can’t,” said the sailor in an injured voice as though I was depreciating his pain. “No you can’t,” he repeated, “unless you’ve ever had ’em. Have yer?” he added looking at me with much interest.

“No,” I answered reluctantly, “but I know all about them. We had a cook once named Nora and she had them all the time.”

“I guess she didn’t have ’em any worse than mine,” he replied jealously.

“Oh, no,” said I, “certainly not. I guess you’ve got the worst attack of bunions a fellow ever had.”

“Sure,” said he, “you’ve said something.”

We were quiet for awhile, busy with our own thoughts. Mine were largely composed of Polly, whom I had just taken home and faithfully promised to go to bed and keep off the streets where the women insisted, despite my modest protestations, upon kissing me, and here I was, breaking my promise, sitting in the middle of Times Square with a sailor afflicted of bunions while all the world swarmed round our feet.

“Now I knew a guy,” began the sailor, “as thought himself taken with bunions. In fact, he claimed to have had the worst—”

And thus started a long discussion on the nature and habits of the domestic bunion with which I will not trouble the reader. For my part, I had very little to give to this discussion and consequently was forced to listen to a lengthy dissertation from the sailor, whose knowledge of the subject seemed well nigh inexhaustible. Thus, calmly in the face of one of the largest, noisiest and most spontaneous celebrations ever known in the history of such events we sat and talked bunions, which perhaps, after all, is about as good a thing to do as any in such circumstances.

After he had succeeded in convincing me that he was a person deserving of the utmost solicitude, he became quite cheerful and immediately forgetting his great affliction he put on his shoes and we proceeded to talk of the sea and ships as all real sailors do when they are thrown in each other’s company.

“Troopship, eh,” he replied in response to my answer. “You’re lucky. All I’ve been doing is snooping around the coast along with a lot of excitable furriners what went loco every time a submarine was even so much as mentioned. I got boiled on one of them southern islands once an’ almost lost me ship. What a night! Worse than this. Much broader.”

With this he thrust his arm into the after part of the automobile and produced, much to my surprise, a pair of golf clubs.

“See what they got in this machine,” he said, looking curiously at the sticks. “I guess they must be carpenters or mechanics or something, although I didn’t ever see any of these instruments used in those trades. What do you think they are?”

“Why, they are golf sticks,” I replied amazed at his ignorance.

“What are golf,” he asked looking at me innocently.

“Golf,” I answered. “Oh, golf is a sort of a game indulged in by the so-called upper classes and practically the entire population of Scotland and the Union League Club.”

“Oh, sure, I heard of it,” he replied and reaching back into the automobile once more he produced a thermos bottle.

“Oh, look,” he exclaimed, his eyes growing large, “whatta ye guess is in here?”

“Don’t know,” I replied. “Take a chance and open it.”

He opened it and proceeded to sniff suspiciously.

“There’s something in it,” he whispered, his eyes dancing.

“Taste it,” I answered, hardly able to restrain my excitement.

He tasted it and handed the bottle to me.

“Whatta ye think it is?” he said.

“I don’t exactly know,” I said, smacking my lips, “but let’s not inquire. As long as we don’t know what we are drinking we can’t be blamed for drinking it, see?”

He looked at me and smiled.

“You’re some wise guy all right,” said he. “No wonder you get along so well in the navy.”

I shuddered at this remark.

“Don’t feel so cold now, does it?” he said presently, after the mysterious bottle had exchanged hands numerous times.

“No,” says I, “I believe it’s actually gotten warmer.”

“Sure it’s getting warmer all the time,” he replied and reached for the bottle.

After we had taken a couple of more tugs at the halyards we found that we were against the bottom and we further found that the running board of the automobile was no longer large enough to hold us. In fact, the whole night seemed a little cramped for our exuberant spirits.

“Let’s play golf,” suggested my friend.

“All right,” I agreed readily, “but we’ve got to find a golf ball.”

“What’s this?” he asked, producing one.

“That’s the little thing,” I replied, and together we set off in search of a place in which to play our game.

Right in the middle of the street we found such a place. Owing to some unfinished street mending the people were unable to crowd on to this small spot and so we had just sufficient room for a swing.

“What do you do?” says he.

“I’ll show you,” says I, as I carefully set the ball and addressed it with the utmost politeness.

“See that window over there,” I said, pointing to the second story of a clothing shop across the street. “The one all lighted up with the figure of a guy wearing the latest ‘Varsity cut 1919’ model in it?”

“Yeah,” said he, still puzzled.

“Well, concentrate your attention on me and that window. I’m an old hand at this game.”

With this I set myself, raised the club and brought it down with a resounding whack upon the ball. It was one of the cleanest, most powerful strokes I have ever made. It would have found the green on any course in the world. My only regret is that the window was in the way. But the window was in the way. We could not follow the course of the ball, but we had no difficulty in locating it. There was a sudden, soul satisfying shattering of glass and instantly thereafter the gentleman in the “varsity cut” clothes became very much disturbed. His hat tilted over his inoffensive wax nose and his out-board arm swung crazily. Numerous people gazed up at the window, but no one seemed to know or care from which direction the missile had come.

“Lord,” breathed my friend, “what a wallop!”

He ran back of the automobile and returned with another ball.

“Let me try,” he pleaded.

“Go to it,” I said, giving him a few instructions and feeling highly delighted over the success of my last shot. “Don’t worry about the window; they’re all insured.”

His first half a dozen swings missed the ball completely and only succeeding in arousing his ill temper and putting more power in his arms. Suddenly he hit it. The departed spirit of some great golf champion must have guided his stroke.

“Listen!” he gasped, as the sound of breaking glass fell pleasantly upon the night.

The figure of an Egyptian king, sitting in envious admiration before the figure of an upstanding young gentleman clad proudly in another style of “varsity cut” clothes, suddenly crumbled up on his throne and seemed to lose all interest in the object of his admiration.

This was too much for my friend. He almost broke down from joy. He embraced me and danced around like the not infrequently referred-to wild Indian.

“What a game!” he kept repeating. “What a game! I’m going to buy me a lot of them funny little golf balls and play it all me life.”

We returned to the automobile with the clubs, but the car had disappeared completely, and the spot thereof knew it no more. From that time on this sailor man and I wandered around the town in each other’s company, getting kisses and refreshments whenever the opportunity presented itself, which it did with a certain degree of frequency. I must confess that for the time being I had completely forgotten Polly and, furthermore, may it be set down to my everlasting shame that I reported aboard with my hat tied on with some woman’s automobile scarf and a golf stick in my hand.

On my way to the ship I encountered an old woman standing miserably on a corner in the dim, early morning light. In one hand was a bucket, in the other she held a mop.

“It’s all over, mother,” I cried. “It’s all over.”

But she merely stared before her.

“It’s all over,” I repeated, thinking to arouse the old lady. “The war is over.”

For a moment she continued to stare in that same dull way into nothingness, then she turned on me with a slow, crooked smile, and one thin, bony hand sought her eyes. She bowed her head, and for some reason I felt sure there were tears beneath that withered old hand.

“It’s all over,” I repeated softly to myself, and for the first time the full, ironical significance of what I had been shouting to the lonely old woman became clear to me, and with that knowledge the joy of the past night grew sour in my throat.

Nov. 18th. Well, it’s all over with me. Tim, Tony, the Spider and myself have been detached from the ship and ordered to report back to Pelham. How will I ever be able to stand that place after having enjoyed the freedom of the seas. We’re to be released, I understand, but a certain amount of vagueness is attached to this point. Already the Spider has begun to sandpaper his fingers. He says that the rough work he has been doing while in the Navy has completely ruined his hands for safe cracking. His fingers fairly itch to get back on a good tough combination. Yesterday he relieved Tim of all his loose change and handed it back to him later, saying he was merely getting back into practice, and this morning he passed among the ship’s company, distributing little tokens he had removed from certain of its members during the last trip. From all sides he was greeted with expressions of admiration on the part of those he had so honored. After the ceremony he returned to us feeling both proud and reassured. We treat him now in a friendly manner, but are a trifle distant at the same time. The Spider has a habit of stealing our money and then asking us to loan it to him. This we are necessarily forced to do, under the circumstances.

It is now time for us to shove off. I have said goodbye to friend and enemy alike. Even the ship’s painter smiled when I apologized to him for the last time for having dropped my hammock on him and knocking him off the scow. The Quartermaster forgave me for losing the lead, and everybody seemed to be happy and relieved to see me go. I experienced a similar feeling myself, and when I came on deck and looked down the channel at a long, restive expanse of putty-colored water it was with a sensation of great thankfulness that I shouldered my bag and hammock and left the ship upon which I had served with a degree of uselessness hitherto unachieved by any sailor in any navy.

Nov. 19th. (Back at Pelham.)

“My God! Are you back again?” said an apparently horror-stricken officer, as I stood before the mast on the charge of having a dirty bag.

“Yes, sir,” I replied, cheerfully. “And I had earnestly hoped never to see your face again, sir.”

For a moment we stood gazing reflectively at each other. Then a broad, friendly smile made its appearance on the officer’s face, lending to it a hitherto unsuspected human expression.

“Well, what did you do to the ship you were on?” he asked.

“Practically everything, sir,” I replied, modestly. “In fact, it is claimed that I almost ruined it.”

“Not at all unlikely, if you ran true to form,” he answered, still smiling.

“I did, sir,” I said. “I ran true to form, and in some instances surpassed myself.”

“Good!” said the officer, approvingly. “And now you’re going up for a shoot.”

There was hardly any answer to this remark that I could well make. However, my face assumed a sort of smeared expression, and the more smeared my expression became the more cheerful grew the officer.

“Well, it’s hardly the way to welcome you back from the sea, I’ll admit,” began the officer. “Perhaps your bag got soiled, so to speak, in the process of transportation.”

He looked at me and smiled strangely.

“It did, sir,” I replied, without turning a hair. “It was very dusty coming up.”

“All right,” says he. “Under the circumstances it’s excusable, but remember, regulations are regulations in the future.”

To my dying day I’ll remember that sentence. Years from now I expect to wake up in bed repeating it to myself. And with this I departed the spot.

Nov. 23rd. More hitherto family-free sailors are discovering unsuspected families and dependents than I ever knew existed before. Every day some sailor breaks down on my breast and sobs over the great suffering and deprivation of an aged parent and seventeen brothers and sisters caused by his absence from home. I myself am trying to rake up a couple of perfectly helpless dependents, but I’m having a tough time of it. I know one aged bar-keep who more or less depended upon me in his declining years, but somehow I haven’t the nerve to write him into my application, although I’m sure the old gentleman deserves having someone to look after him. However, I’m afraid I’m not that person, because in all likelihood I will need a great deal of looking after once I’m mustered out of the service, but that has nothing to do with my diary.

Dec. 1st. Nothing to report save that this is another month and my tapes are still dirty! Steps must be taken or I’ll be going to the mat with my P. O. for the seventeenth hundred time since my first jab. My spirit remains unbroken, however. I exult in my ignorance and glory in my mistakes.

Dec. 2nd. (Holiday for some reason I haven’t troubled to enquire about.) Chicken, corn, pumpkin pie and trimmings. I saved the neck for Mr. Fogerty. The poor, simple-souled dog had hardly the heart to eat it. There are enough lovesick sailors In camp as it is without the dogs getting the complaint. It seems that Mr. Fogerty’s sweetie over in City Island has given him the go by. He’s not the first to meet such a fate in that quarter, I’ll tell the world.

The smoking lamp was lighted all day and consequently I was very popular with the “Spider” and his two companions, Tony and Tim, on the strength of a shipment of fags that mother left with me at the time of her last incursion on the privacy of the camp. There was little drilling today, but what there was was enough. Spent most of the afternoon in washing my tapes, sewing on buttons, scrubbing my bag and providing my friends with matches to enable them to light the cigarettes they had borrowed from me.

Dec. 3rd. Took an unnecessarily long walk with an unnecessarily heavy gun to an unnecessarily stupid place, then the reel was reversed and we proceeded back to camp, astounding the populace by our unnecessarily intricate formations. I have never been able to master the company square for the same reason, I reckon, that I was always a bum at ring-around-a-rosie in my childish days. Kissing games I could play, but no one would ever play them with me. “What’s the use,” they used to say. “You’re too willing.” I will admit it was more of an arrangement than a game when I took part in them.

Dec. 4th. Rose early and went to the mat with the Master-at-arms. He said I lashed my hammock like a dowdy woman laced. I hardly consider this a very nice thing to say and would not put it down here were it not that I want to show the low order of the man’s conversational attainments. I told him that I was unable to appreciate the full purport of his remarks for the reason that all my sweeties were trimly stayed fore and aft and sailed before the wind. My remark, however, did not prevent me from re-lashing my hammock and doing it over again. I could not help thinking of what the Jimmy-legs had said about, it, however, and kept laughing to myself at the idea. I now call my hammock “My Sloppy Old Jane.” Such simple things amuse us isolated sailors.

Dec. 5th. Tony, Tim, the Spider and I have taken to calling each other “Shipmates” around the barracks. It breaks the Jimmy-legs’ heart, as he has never been to sea.

Dec. 6th. An orderly almost kissed me this morning, but thank God, was able to suppress his burning desires at the sight of my repellent face.

“A lady is calling you on the wire,” he said jealously.

“My dear,” I said, not wishing to get in wrong with him. “Fm sure there must be some mistake. I have no interests outside of camp.”

He departed, relieved, but I answered the call in my quiet, unassuming way. It was from Polly, my permanent sweet; the beautiful woman I hope to make my jailer.

“Biltmore, dear,” she said, just like that, “I’m just crazy to announce our engagement, and I want you to ask the Captain if you can get off soon and come down to the affair. Maybe he’d come too, do you think so, dear?”

“Well, hon,” says I, for once bold, “he’s awfully busy now, but I’m sure he’d love to come if he could.”

You see, I’d told the poor girl, as sailors do, that the skipper and myself were awfully clubby and that he recognized me as the most dependable man on the station and that we often played croquet together on the lawn of the officers’ club. In fact, I had to tell her lots of things in order to induce her to become permanent instead of promissory. All men do under the circumstances – and all women, too, for that matter. As a rule both sides know the other is lying, but they respect each other for their ability and consideration. A man that won’t lie to the woman he loves, loves truth more than the woman and women can’t stand that. However, my observations are dropping to a low moral plane which is not good for those who are not rugged at heart and ragged at ethics.

“But you will come, won’t you, Biltmore?” she continues, pulling the dear stuff again. “The party wouldn’t be complete without you.”

“You mean the calamity,” says I.

Then she wanted to make arrangements for next Saturday and I let her because she seemed so happy and excited about it all.

“Where shall I meet you?” she says. “We must have tea all by ourselves first.”

I thought for a moment, for the presence of gold lace hanging furtively around in the background made me a little anxious.

“You’d better stay home, sweetie,” I said, “there are too many young Ensigns sticking about here for me to give locations. I don’t put anything past them.”

With this I hung up and walked past several of the above mentioned race of people, who eyed me with venom, I must keep Polly away from the Ensigns at all cost. No matter how white your tapes are, gold lace has the edge.

Dec. 7th. A personal and unconditional triumph in the grim, continuous battle between myself and my superiors.

Early in the afternoon we were told to go out on the parade ground and brush up a bit on our semaphore. “Brush up!” thinks I to myself. “How are you going to brush up when there ain’t anything to brush. The ship that depended on me for signaling would remain deaf and dumb.” I thought this, but to myself. The only letter I felt sure about was A and I didn’t remember quite whether it was optional which hand you used.

With the utmost confidence, however, I took my flags and proceeded to the middle of the parade ground where I hid myself behind the huge figure of Tim and began to wave my arms about in an aimless manner. Aside from becoming a trifle tired I was getting away fine until a C.P.O. hotchels up to me and stands observing my movements with horrified, dilated eyes. This made me so nervous, that my arms began swinging around convulsively at a tremendous speed. I looked like a gaudy, but conscientious electric fan. Perspiration streamed down my face and neck, and still he watched. His expression gave way from horror to amazement and from that to fury.

“Time!” he shouted suddenly. “Time! Stop what you’re doing, whatever it may be.”

I threw myself into low and gradually slowed down to a neutral.

“What,” asked the Chief with much deliberation, “what in the world do you think you’ve been doing?”

“Semaphoring, Chief,” says I promptly.

“Ah,” says the Chief, drawing a deep breath preparatory to a long burst of eloquence, insult and invective. “So that’s what you’ve been doing. Well, I’ve been observing you closely for more than half an hour and although the semaphore system is so arranged that it is almost impossible for a man not to make a letter in the natural evolution of his arms, you seem to have been able to achieve this truly remarkable, well nigh unbelievable feat. How did you ever do it? Do you know one letter, even one?”

“I can spell words,” I said proudly, but lyingly, “great long words.”

“Spell one,” said the Chief briefly.

“All right,” says I.

“What’s the word?” he asks.

“Oh, no,” says I, cagey-like. “I ain’t a-going to tell you the word. You just watch.”

At this point I gave Tim the wink and he stood by to assist. Thereupon I began to wave my arms around frantically.

“What’s that?” I asks the Chief after coming to a stop with a particularly catching flourish.

“Nothing,” says the Chief. “Absolutely nothing.”

“Wrong,” says I snappily. “What is it, Tim?”

“Our little home,” says Tim.

“Right,” says I. “Now, Chief, I’ll send you another one.”

This time I did some really startling evolutions and added several elaborate extra wiggles.

“Get that, Chief?” says I.

“No, nor nobody else,” says the Chief.

“Wrong,” says I. “What is it, Tim?”

“The camp we love,” says Tim.

“Right,” says I. “Watch me close, Chief, I’ll send you another one.”

By this time quite a crowd of sailors had gathered around to observe the circus. Among them I saw the rat-like “Spider’s” eyes gleaming forth.

“What’s that, Buddy,” I cried to him after I had finished my contortions.

“Sweetie,” cried the Spider promptly.

“Right,” I shouted. “See, Chief, anybody seems to be able to read my signals. Try this.”

Here I went through some mystifying passes before the man’s perplexed eyes and came to an abrupt finish.

“What’s that?” I shouted to the crowd.

“Great, big, blue eyes,” someone replied.

“Right,” says I, with finality, before anyone else had a chance to guess. The poor Chief’s amazement was really pathetic. He turned away a broken man.

“Oh, go to hell the all of yers,” he muttered. “Get out of my sight. Period’s over. Into your barracks.”

We left him in the middle of the parade ground in a crumpled condition. He was passing his hands over his dazed eyes. Later in the day we caught sight of him reading signals sent by another Chief. He was evidently convincing himself that he wasn’t crazy. He turned around and saw me – but not for long.

Dec. 8th. The favor of the gods was withdrawn from me today. Probably as a result of my yesterday’s success. Failed to catch a 43 hours’ liberty. Been washing windows. I can see the Chief’s fine hand in this.

Dec. 9th. Special war extra: Mr. Fogerty has the cooties. He has no pride. I am crushed.

What with scratching Mr. Fogerty and scrubbing my whites I have had scant time for availing myself of the solace of intellectual recreation derived from writing my diary. The depraved dog approaches me and gazes into my eyes in such a miserable and pathetic manner that I cannot withhold the craved for assistance. What a virile race the cooties must be! What families! What diligence! What fun!

Dec. 10th. The trench dog Fogerty seems now to consider his unsavory visitation as being a mark of special honor. He passed one of our most aristocratic goats today without even so much as flopping an ear. As a matter of fact, Fogerty is a well born dog himself and displayed all the characteristics of a careful and gentle rearing when I first knew him. I am sure he must have come from a home of culture and refinement. Now look at him – fleas, late hours and the primrose road.

The “Spider” has just come off of guard duty. There were a lot of stray visitors up today and they evidently came too near the fence. He showed me a fake silver cigarette case half full of fags, one gold cuff link, a stick pin and an exemption card. I have made him promise to send the exemption card home to the rightful owner. The cigarettes we smoked and then gave Tim the case as a joint token of our great respect and devotion. We told him that we had sent to New York in order to get it. The poor dub was really quite touched about it, as, no doubt, was its original owner. The “Spider” told me in strict confidence that he frequently had picked up (or out) a great deal more at parades and six-day bicycle races. Between that and showing up the safe manufacturers I decided he must have eked out an existence.

Dec. 11th. “Goodbye my fancy,” as old Walt said, or was it “farewell.” Anyway it doesn’t matter. How can I speak of poets after what has happened. It is all off with Polly. I am a corespondent – almost. It will all come out in the paper soon, I dare say. What will people say?

I have drunk deep of the waters of jazz in the course of my turbulent career and “shimmied” my share of miles around the clock. Frankly I admit that I have had my full quota of sweeties in the past and earnestly look forward to more in the future. In spite of which I have struggled manfully to retain that purity of character for which I was noted at the age of three. It is lost now. Already the headlines seem to be staring me in the face, crisp and clear.

BILTMORE OSWALD, THE WORLD’S STUPIDEST SAILOR, FOUND WITH THE WIFE OF PROMINENT BOOKMAKER

YOUTHFUL BLUEJACKET CLAIMS NEVER HAVING KNOWN MODEL BEFORE

I can see it all now. Tony takes it as a huge joke. Tim says I did not go far enough. Polly says I went altogether too far, and the unscrupulous “Spider” only regrets not being able to sell me one of those diamonds he gained ill possession of through the biting process in his dark civilian days. I couldn’t help it and I told Polly so, but she refused to listen to reason.

“In every port,” she kept repeating almost to herself, “and on every comer,” this more emphatically. And nothing I can say seems to do any good. Women will forgive anything but another woman’s good looks and a man’s bad dancing. I am very bitter about women. When Polly told me that I was nothing more nor less than a low-minded, brawling sailorman I turned on her and said:

“A man is as bad as the occasion demands, but the woman creates the occasion,” which I thought was a pretty good comeback on the spur of the moment, but instead of crushing Polly, she merely retorted that a man’s whole life was devoted to hanging around waiting for that occasion. You can see just how briskly we milled it up.

It all happened so quickly and so innocently. There I was standing by the road waiting bashfully for someone to come by in a nice comfortable automobile and pick me up and carry me along to New York to see my permanent sweetie, who doesn’t seem to be quite so permanent now, when all of a sudden a plush looking motor draws up by me and a woman I scarcely looked at asks me to step in. What could be more natural than to comply with so gracious a request? I asked Polly this and she said “anything.” Of course, I didn’t realize that the lady was a great, big, beautiful woman, naturally forward with men, particularly sailors, and a little dangerous. As soon as I saw how pretty she was I slid quickly over to the opposite corner which seemed to be just what she was waiting for me to do, because she had me where she wanted me with all avenues of retreat cut off. When she put her head on my shoulder and called me a cute little thing, what was I to do? I couldn’t scream or call out the guard, and no gentleman can push a woman’s head off his shoulder as if it were a bag of potatoes, and anyway she was an extremely nice looking woman. One had to be kind to her. It was the only thing to do. So, in this brotherly manner I went rolling along toward New York trying to make this lady as comfortable as possible. It was “Louise and Billy” from the start. She was an exceptionally swift worker. Once in the city she swore that she just couldn’t let me go. Nothing would content her but that we go to tea together and as I had still a couple of hours before meeting Polly I reluctantly consented. Gasoline is high nowadays and I had shared quite a lot of this fair woman’s. Going to tea with her was the least I could do. But I didn’t plan on going to the exact spot where I was to meet Polly. Nevertheless this was just where we went – swell hotel with a twilight tea room. One of those places where one feels at least compromised after having sat in it with a woman for a couple of hours. My protests were of no avail. She merely turned her eyes on me and I felt like a brute for having interposed an objection. But I hadn’t counted on her walk. This was the most surprising thing. It began at the feet and progressed by slow, undulating stages along her rakish frame until it terminated at her shoulders. My eye, what a walk! She did everything but loop-the-loop. Dimly I recalled having seen modifications of it before, but never in my most flapperish days had I seen anything so exaggerated as this. At any moment I expected an out of town buyer to rush up and say that he’d take a couple of dozen of model m-243. Casting a frightened looked down the street, I hastened after her into the portals of the hotel. By the time we entered the tea room I was so fascinated by that walk, so hypnotized, as it were, that I began, in spite of every effort to resist, to imitate it, following along in her tracks very much in the same manner as a trained collie dog does on the stage. Putting one foot directly before the other, overlapping them a trifle if possible, and wiggling all wiggable parts, we swept under full steam into that fatal tea room, intriguing and intimate under the soft glow of its dim little blobs of light. A regular Emile Zola sort of a dump. As luck would have it we ran smack into a brace of Ensigns hopefully drinking tea in the shadows. The poor chaps almost lost an eye. Gladly would I have exchanged places with them if only to be allowed to sweat quietly in a corner and collect my sadly shattered morale. It is my belief that one of them deliberately tripped me as I passed by, but I might be wrong. The room was impenetrably dark. My statuesque vamp came to in the middle of the room and after much uncalled for undulating picked out a clubby little table in a particularly sombre corner, wiggled herself into it and proceeded to hold my hand as if she was afraid of losing me, which she had every justification of being. I have never met a more unfortunately affectionate woman. Force of habit, I fancy, or probably just natural good will. As I sat there I thought bitterly to myself that I knew of exactly 16,999 sailors that would be glad to go on report to change places with me and I envied each and every one of them. However, it was a little better when she was sitting. She couldn’t wiggle so much although she managed to toss in a series of snake-like evolutions from time to time. I swore by all my gods in Harlem that I would never walk out of the place in the wake of that woman. Not that I had any personal objections to it, but I knew that I would be a marked man if I did, and then there was Polly. At the thought of Polly I fairly sickened. I would have drowned myself in the tea cup if my nose hadn’t been so long.

“Lady, all I asked for was a hitch,” I said huskily.

“I can never let you go,” she whispered tragically across the oppressive gloom, and my God, I believed her!

“So kind,” I muttered with lame politeness. “I don’t deserve it.”

“We were made for each other,” she thrilled back – a remark that struck me as being quite unreasonable and without any logical foundation in fact. It terrified me. In my desperate imagination I could see myself trailing this woman through life, the both of us vamping like a couple of licorice sticks on a hot day, with an infuriated Polly on every corner.

For a long time I had been unpleasantly aware of a couple of gleaming eyes glaring steadily at us from across the waste of darkness and there seemed to be something unfriendly in the way they gleamed; in fact, after watching them furtively for some time I decided that they were decidedly hostile.

“And to think,” says my captor, sighing deeply as she snuggled up close to me and unlimbered her head on my shrinking shoulder once more. “And to think,” she repeated, “that I am married.”

Appalled silence.

“But it doesn’t matter,” she added dreamily, “nothing matters.”

“But it does matter,” I almost screamed. “A great many things matter – I – I’m deeply engaged myself.”

“You must break it to her gently,” she murmured, kissing my neck – a sailor’s most undefended spot.

“Break it to her gently,” I began, and then my voice failed me – the eyes were approaching us through the darkness, they were growing larger all the time. .

“It’s Jack! My husband!” screamed the woman suddenly, and all the world grew still. Nothing could have been
more horrible. I found myself almost falling into those wild, fire-touched eyes.

“A poor sailor defending his country. Shake hands with him Jack. Show your patriotism,” whispered Louise with trembling assurance.

Jack proceeded to show his patriotism by uttering a howl of fury and snatching the cloth clean off the table. There was a smashing of china, general commotion and above it all I heard Jack’s voice:

“Git outter here,” he was shouting. “Git outter here this minute or I’ll baste yer one.”

I looked up and saw Polly standing in the doorway. She was pale, but she had nothing on me. A ghost would have appeared tanned in comparison. There was Polly in real life standing in the doorway – oh, the horror of it!

Jack was leading the woman out of the room. She apparently had forgotten that we had been made for each other and that she could never let me go.

“Yes, Jack,” she whispered timidly, forgetting to wiggle.

At the door Jack turned his huge figure around and pointed a threatening finger at me as I cowered behind an orange colored lamp.

“I’m coming back to git you,” said Jack as he vanished. Perhaps he did. I don’t know. It took me three blocks before I caught up with Polly and when I did she threatened to give me over to the police for flirting with her. Think of it! Such words from my future wife. Flirt with her. One might as well have flirted with a python. I followed her in distracted silence. Words were of no avail. She dismissed me bitterly.

“Kissing your neck in a restaurant,” she snapped. “Go out and find another sweetie to take pity on you – you – you bean pole.”

Bean pole were the words she used. Now, don’t I have the damdest luck? I’ve lost my permanent sweetie. She called me a bean pole.

Dec. 17th. No word from Polly. I have sunk to the level of my dog. I am distracted, a broken reed, a crippled bean pole. There is no health in me. I will seek the solitudes with Fogerty and his cooties. A P.O. approaches. I fly. Bean pole! The bitterness of it.

Dec. 18th. For once Fortune smiled on me. The whole crowd of us standing by having been granted furloughs, and not one of the men refused to accept. Mother insists on sending me for a good rest to some swell hotel in Lakewood. Later she is going to bring father, grandfather and Polly down with her to join me. In the meantime I expect to wander quietly around an expensive, gold-plated hotel and behave myself. I don’t know that I enjoy the prospects, but anyway it will be a change from shipboard and camp life. Probably I shall adventure with an adventuress, or air with an heiress. Who can tell? I can’t, but at least I can hope.

Dec. 19th. The most extraordinary thing happened to me today; before breakfast at that. It’s bad enough, I find, to have extraordinary things happen to me after luncheon or even later in the evening, but to start the day with a localized but hardly self-contained riot is almost too much of a vulgar display of the fate that seems to brood over my pure young life.

This is one of those gold-tipped, twin-six hotels at which I am stopping – very much in the nature of a bad watch – in which one must spend practically one’s entire life and several fortunes in order to be able to find one’s ways around the halls with any small degree of success. Like many of those foxy little tricks in arithmetic which used to keep me out of God’s pure sunshine in the days of my rapidly receding youth, the corridors of this cut glass seat of dyspepsia divide and multiply into infinity.

Morning found me without much difficulty in bed, and, remembering my mother’s advice to take a bath whenever I could get it, I sprang from my hop and proceeded, with full equipment and a bathrobe, to wander down the labyrinthian passages in a hazy, but hopeful frame of mind, in search of some receptacle in which I could immerse my body and thus gain that cleanliness which we are given to believe obtains for us a certain large amount of godliness. The fruits of my labors were a bewildered mind and a pair of weary legs. “Upstairs, downstairs, in my lady’s chamber,” as the sweet jingle goes, had I been, and still had succeeded in finding nothing remotely resembling a bathroom. Presently coming around a turn in the vast hall about two miles off I faintly made out the figure of a bellboy bearing down in his jaunty bellboyish manner in my direction. Consequently I seated myself on a pair of stairs and patiently waited the ten minutes it required for this brave spirit to wend his way from the point at which I had first sighted him to my languid presence.

“O, intrepid traveler of endless spaces,” says I, giving my bathrobe a dramatic hitch, “save me from a life of solitary wandering around these trackless wastes and lead me to the nearest bathroom before these my whiskers impede my progress and my weary limbs grow feeble in decay.”

Of course no bellboy likes to be addressed in this manner before breakfast and I cannot find it in me to blame the bellboy, but nevertheless he came to and asked me in eloquent Canarsie English what was the nature of my business.

“Take me, if you still love God and hate the devil, to the nearest bathroom by the shortest route with the minimum of delay,” that’s what I told him.

“Sure,” says he, with assurance, and together we set off on our pilgrimage.

After a quarter of an hour devoted to diligent search I began to lose the confidence this youth had hitherto inspired in me.

“It seems,” I said, “that I am a little less lonely than before I met you, but am still in the same unbathed condition and although I feel sure I would grow to like you better the more I know you, I still believe it would be much pleasanter to do our walking out in the bracing fresh air. This, of course, is a mere suggestion which conveys at the same time a strong but perfectly friendly suspicion of your ability to find anything in the nature of a bathroom.”

“I’ve only been here three months, boss,” replies the bellboy in answer to my mild remark, “and I haven’t gotten quite settled down to this dump myself.”

I stopped the bellboy and shook his hand.

“I have been unjust,” I replied. “I have been guilty of gross injustice. No man who has not taken a course in navigation and dwelt in these sacred precincts for at least four score years and ten could ever hope to have anything other than the vaguest knowledge of his whereabouts. Together we are lost. Together we must find our way out. If worst comes to worst and we must starve, let us face our 5ad and respective fates like men.”

Thus encouraging the young man, we proceeded to grope our way along the gallery until after interminable traveling we came upon a very old man sitting in the darkness on a trunk. Probably a victim of the halls, thought I to myself. Some unfortunate person who like myself in his early youth set out from his bed to find a bathroom in this accursed hotel.

“Old man,” I said, “if it needs must be that we share our fate with you, be so kind as to share your trunk with us upon which we can die together at some closely future date. When our parched bones are at last found it is my earnest hope that the finders in decency will erect a monument to commemorate the valor, daring and fortitude of the three unhappy individuals who in the recklessness of their youth once considered it possible to take a bath in a public hotel – not that I know of any private ones,” I added after due deliberation.

“It’s a bath you’re after wanting?” questioned the old man in a melancholy voice.

“Almost after wanting,” I replied, nodding my head hopelessly.

“Why, it’s a bathroom door you’re blinking at way down yonder at the end of the hall,” says he greatly surprised.

For a long time I gazed at the door for which I had searched so courageously.

“It’s too far,” I replied at last.

“It’s not at all,” answered the man.

“Then why don’t you bathe there?” I asked.

“Oh, I can’t bathe there,” replied the man, “I’m the porter.”

“Well,” I said, after having considered the proposition in all its unappealing aspects, “if this young man will bellboy me on one side and if you will porter me on the other perhaps together we might stagger far enough to be able to crawl the remaining distance.”

“Come along,” said the old man, “we’ll take you there,” and the two of them began leading me down the hall. We had not proceeded far on our way before we met a young lady in riding breeches and the rest of the stuff that goes with it. She was a pretty young lady to whom my heart went out, but seeing me thus under guard she evidently thought that I was either very sick or else dangerously insane. As a matter of fact I looked both.

At the door of the bathroom I shook hands with both of my rescuers, urging them not to forget me if they saw me no more and begging the old man to guide from his vast experience the young man to some point of safety. With friendly words they left me and I bathed myself much in the same manner as other human animals who are forced to confine their ablutions to so small a space as a tub.

Arising later from this with my eyes full of soap and my heart full of confidence, greatly refreshed from the benign influences of lots of cold water, I collected my razor, toilet water, tooth brush and other well advertised and familiar implements of culture and once again launched myself into the perilous mazes of the passageways, this time in the direction of my room. The return trip was surprisingly short and successful. Even with my eyes still dim with soap I was able to recognize my door at once, and It was with a sigh of profound relief that I entered my room and began to arrange my shaving things tastefully upon my dresser, humming the while a bit of a cheerful song.

“Oh Gawd,” I heard someone breathe back of me.

Ah, thought I, the maid. I failed to notice her because of the soap, no doubt.

“It’s all right,” I answered without troubling to turn around, “you may return at some later time. I shall soon be dressed.”

“What?” went on this voice, this time taking on a quality of horror. “What – what – what—”

Even then I failed to turn around. My attention was arrested by a silver-backed mirror which I was weighing absent-mindedly in my hand. In doing this I became vaguely aware of the fact that I had never in the entire course of my misspent day possessed such a thing as a silver-backed mirror. Still I failed to connect this fact in any way with the voice behind me. All men after bathing as a rule are cheerfully preoccupied with petty details and I was no exception. At that moment all I cared much about doing was to put on one sock and to continue to hum my little song. However, the unexpected presence of the mirror was a fact to be considered. I raised the mirror and gazed into it. In doing this I was enabled to catch over my shoulder the reflection of my bed and also the reflection of someone in my bed. This someone was a woman. This was apparent. It had long hair and the nose, which was all that I could see, had cold cream on it, an unmistakable sign.

My preoccupation left me immediately. I became unnerved. Panic took possession of me. I turned around as if on a spring.

“Where did you come from?” I gasped.

“From the South,” said a startled voice from the bed.

For a moment I pondered over the answer. I had apparently surprised the truth out of her.

“Well, I wish you had stayed there,” I replied bitterly. “Aren’t there any other beds save mine between here and the South?”

“This is my bed,” came the voice defiantly from beneath the blankets, “and if you don’t leave this room instantly I shall begin to scream.”

I looked around the room. She was apparently right. It did not appear to be my room. Whether it was her room or not I wasn’t certain. I wasn’t interested. I was convinced it wasn’t my room. That was enough. With nerveless fingers I began gathering up the toilet articles I had so tastefully arranged on the dresser.

“A terrible mistake,” I muttered thickly. “You must permit me to apologize. I must apologize. I shall never be through apologizing.”

“If you’re not through apologizing and out of this room in ten seconds I shall begin to scream,” said the bed.

“I hurry, I flee, I depart,” I whispered reaching for the door knob.

“Stop!” commanded the bed tragically.

“What is it?” I replied with an equal amount of tragedy in my voice.

“If you open that door one inch I shall scream,” continued the bed.

“Your scream seems to go both ways,” I remarked over my shoulder.

“Open the door and I scream,” came the voice.

“But, madam,” I expostulated, “I’m not Houdini. I can’t under the force of the most pressing circumstances possibly worm myself through the keyhole.”

This time the voice spoke more clearly, more rapidly; there was fear in it – positive terror.

“My husband,” it said, “will be here at any moment. He always comes up for a moment after breakfast. He is probably walking down the hall at this instant. He will not believe me and he will kill you. You must get under the bed. Quick, quick, under the bed! For God’s sake, under the bed! There will be a tragedy.”

“It will be more than a tragedy,” I managed to gasp. “It will be a total loss.”

“The bed, the bed, under it!” she urged.

“Does he, too, come from the South?” I asked,

“Yes,” she answered, “from the South.”

“Probably believes in the ‘unwritten law,’” I muttered, beginning in the anguish of my soul to prance around the room.

“I hear his step!” she cried. “Avoid a murder and get under that bed.”

My presence of mind left me. I had seen too many Keystone comedies, however, to permit myself to get under the bed.

“Cleanliness is not next to godliness,” I remember thinking at that terrible moment, “it is next to madness.”

An idea seized me. I remembered a friend of mine who in a similar position had escaped detection by sitting on the ledge of the window sill.

“Pull the shade down after me!” I cried, opening the window and climbing through.

The shade and the window came down with a snap, I heard a door open, a heavy tread in the room behind me, and I found myself sitting in God’s bright sunlight gazing down on the main thoroughfare of the town and one of the most popular of the hotel’s many sun porches.

Already I was attracting attention. Several embattled dowagers were gazing up at me. They had not yet come to the believing stage. With bejeweled hands they rubbed their eyes. It was horrible. One of my slippers fell heavily through the New York Times held above the nose of a fat old man of unmistakably conservative leanings. He spluttered and glared up at me. I did my best even at that moment to smile a polite smile of apology down upon the old gentleman. Several people had stopped on the street and were pointing up at me. An automobile party came to a dead stop and traffic began to pile up behind it. Several people ran out on the porch with their morning papers grasped in their hands, and through the bright, sweet air of this day rode In upon this scene the girl I had encountered in the hall. She stopped in the driveway and looked up. Her eyes met mine and she smiled. For a moment all was forgotten, even Polly. I smiled back in my imbecile way. The voices in the room behind me were growing louder and more excited.

I cannot go on. I am far too unnerved to write into my diary the subsequent events which took place on this ghastly day. It is too horrible to dwell on. I must have rest. I shall take it.

(Later). I realized that my position was not an enviable one. To sit in one’s pajamas on the extreme edge of a window sill, particularly if the window happens to be closed behind one, is not a position likely to arouse the envy of the average beholder. Some bird might enjoy it, but very few men. When I say I was not happy on my lofty pinnacle I am saying it merely because I have no adequate way of expressing how extremely unhappy I was. At any moment I feared I would follow my slipper down upon the billowy paunch of the convalescent stand-patter below me. If I did I felt sure that I would rebound into eternity, probably ending my wretched days on the chilly obscurity of some isolated star. I do not know whether it was because of my unusual appearance before the general public of that quiet town or because of the hour that the High School suddenly disgorged its brood. The result was the same. Several hundred youths piled out into the street below me and proceeded to hoot and jeer at me with all the detached cruelty of a savage race. The old gentleman was shaking his fist at me. Rage rendered him inarticulate, and I remember thinking at the time that it would be a blessing to humanity if it could be arranged always to keep him angry. The girl on the horse was still regarding me with amused eyes. Presently the horse itself raised its head and gazed up at me. I seemed to detect an expression of annoyance in his patient countenance. This is not right, he was evidently thinking to himself. If men take to conducting themselves in this strange manner what is a horse to expect? If this practice grows popular it will be extremely difficult for a horse to distinguish men from wild birds.

I felt sorry for the horse. In spite of the insecurity of my position I took a chance and waved down to the old gentleman. This gesture of good will succeeded in increasing his rage to the bursting point. I followed my friendly wave with an ingratiating smile. The good man choked and hurried off to the bar. The orchestra, finding itself bereft of an audience, had abandoned its music and followed the entire personnel of the establishment to the porch. One man, as if fearing I was not already sufficiently conspicuous, pointed to me with the long bow of his fiddle. From all sides came the excited twittering of women, the disturbed voices of men and the delighted cries of boys. Behind me, in the room, the angry exclamations of the husband mingled themselves with the pleading tones of the wife. Suddenly the window went up with a bang and with great speed I disappeared before the astounding eyes of the assembled throng as a powerful arm seized me around my middle and deposited me without further ceremony upon the floor. In a position such as I found myself it was well nigh impossible to draw upon one’s dignity. This man was saying unpleasant things to me and about me. I hardly understood what they were. The events of the morning had so beclouded my faculties that a numbing lassitude had overcome my brain. A man can stand only so much desperation, after which he finds his spirit plunged into a profound indifference. It was because of this strange mental condition that I found myself tracing the pattern in the rug with absorbed interest while this wild man fumed and raged above my bowed head and called upon every god south of the Mason-Dixon line to bear him witness that he intended to have my blood. His wife seemed to be so distracted that she was unable to decide whether to get under the bed or in it. For some minutes a cold object had been annoying my shrinking flesh. I had been brushing this object away petulantly objecting to the interruption in my intriguing pursuit of tracing the rug’s intricate diagrams. Presently I looked up in annoyance, and discovered that the object I had so carelessly been brushing aside was nothing less than a well-developed 48 Colt revolver. This discovery in no way served to bring back my good spirits; neither did it make the room any more comfortable. I immediately lost all interest in the rug. A revolver has a way of holding the eye. This one held mine. In fact, it claimed my entire attention.

“What do you mean by coming into my wife’s room?” grated the man.

“I only wanted to take a bath,” I answered in a dull voice, addressing myself directly to the gun.

“What?” he howled. “You wanted to take a bath in my wife’s room?”

“Not particularly in your wife’s room,” I replied, “but in any room. Just a bath, that was all I wanted.”

“Liar!” shouted the man. “Home breaker.”

“Sir,” I said, and this time with feeling, “I have never been in a less homelike place.”

“How long has this been going on?” he demanded, making little, cold rings on my neck with the gun.

“For years and years,” I muttered in a low voice.

“O, no, oh, no,” came the agonized voice of the wife who had at length decided to get behind the trunk. “My God; don’t say that!”

“Ha!” cried the husband, in triumph. “He admits it. He confesses. I am dishonored.”

“Is that the only gun you have?” I asked suddenly.

“No,” he said, “there is still another.”

“Then why do you all the time keep showing it to me?” I continued. “I believe you.”

“You are in love with my wife,” said the man, as if reading the lines from a book, “and one of us must die.”

“Sir,” I replied, completely forgetting my chivalry, “not only am I not in love with your wife, but I don’t even fancy her.”

“Shoot him, James,” came an indignant voice from the trunk. “He’s insulting me.”

“That sounds love-like, doesn’t it?” said I, bitterly, to James.

“Lies! Lies! Lies!” cried James. “You love her.”

“I don’t.”

“You do.”

“Don’t.”

“This is ridiculous,”

“It is.”

“It must be settled.”

He hurried over to the bureau and returned with another gun.

“This is the way we shall settle it,” he said, displaying the gun in all its splendor. “A duel.”

“You mean shooting at each other?” I gasped.

“To the end,” he replied.

“I won’t do it,” I replied with finality.

“Then I’ll shoot you down like a dog in cold blood,” he answered.

“Don’t talk that way,” I cried, “about blood and shooting down and all that. I don’t like it.”

He cocked one of the guns.

“Do you agree?” he said.

It seemed to me that the end of the gun was already smoking.

“How about a game of ping-pong?” I suggested desperately. “They have a dandy table here.”

“Have you any friends in the hotel?” he asked, stepping back and leveling the gun. The trunk seemed to be having a convulsion.

“Don’t do it!” I cried. “Don’t do it. I don’t want to be shot!”

“Then do you agree to a duel?” he said, lowering the gun.

“Sure,” said I, greatly relieved, “let’s have a flock of them.”

“Very well, then,” he said, “we shall arrange it now. You have no friends. Neither have I. We must use two of the bellboys as seconds. I shall talk with them and arrange everything. Tomorrow at daybreak you shall be called. Good day, suh.”

At the door I stopped.

“Say,” said I entreatingly, “won’t you cut out all this Kentucky Colonel stuff and be reasonable?”

“It is arranged,” said he, closing the door.

Half way down the hall I turned back, remembering I had left my shaving things.

“What!” he cried, when I had knocked and the door was opened to me. “Back again? Have you no shame? Shall I shoot you now?”

“No, don’t shoot me now,” I said, in a tired voice, “shoot me tomorrow. Just reach me out my shaving things now so that I can be all pretty.”

Somehow I got back to my room. Every door along the long halls presented itself to me as a possible duel. I stood outside my own room for fully fifteen minutes nerving myself to take the chance. At last I closed my eyes and entered. I was safe. All the day I stayed in my room. A bellboy brought me my meals, my slipper and a request from the management please not to sit on the window sill any more. Evidently they think that I was doing it through preference. And tomorrow I die. Well, thank God, at any rate I had my bath. There is probably some comfort in this but I have not as yet been able to find it.

Dec. 21st. (After the duel.) I don’t at all object to duels; in fact, I rather fancy them – when they are all over. Here I sit, a man who has both shot and been shot at; a man who has stood gallantly on the field of honor In order to defend his sacred rights to take a bath; a man who has proved his courage and magnanimity in a moment of great danger, and yet here I am, healthy and unscratched and sharing a dark secret with the man who only this morning was thirsting for my blood.

For the sake of posterity, personal or otherwise, I shall proceed to relate a few of the high lights of this singular affair.

At five o’clock a bellboy presented himself before me and said in a solemn voice:

“It is time, sir.”

“Time for what?” says I.

“For the dool, sir,” says he. “Will you have a bath, sir?”

“Little bellboy,” says I, turning over on my side, “if you love Charlie Chaplin and ever hope to sit in the bleachers at a world series again, don’t, don’t for the love of all you hold sacred in your bellboy’s soul mention bath to me. I have taken my last bath in this world. To that spot whither I am about to wend my way it is my hope that there will be no spirit tubs in which the shades that dwell in that place will be forced to immerse their spirit bodies. However, convention is strong and I can only with the greatest difficulty imagine a British ghost having anything like a contented time of it if he should happen to be deprived of his morning tub.”

During the course of this speech, which left the bellboy in a perplexed frame of mind, I had taken the occasion to arise and prepare myself for my undertaker.

“It’s going to be in the Cathedral Pines,” whispered the boy gleefully to me as we picked our way through the woods a few minutes later.

“Is it?” I said unenthusiastically, falling into a hidden brook. “It is a name that conveys a certain morbid significance to my mind at this moment.”

“Aw, he might not actually kill you,” put in the boy cheerfully.

“Little boy,” says I, “don’t you think you might make a man’s last moments on earth a trifle less ghastly if you should choose to discuss topics more remote to the business at hand?”

Of course I received no answer to this.

“But if he does,” continued this budding young materialist, “might I have that navy jumper you’re wearing? My girl has been after me to get her one.”

“Certainly,” I replied, “certainly, little bellboy, and perhaps you might like the funny trousers, also?”

“Sure,” said he, “sure I would. You’re all right, mister.”

“Thank you, little bellboy, for those kind words, the first I’ve heard for many days. But perhaps you will refrain from undressing me until after the funeral services? I should hate to make my departure in my underwear.”

“Certainly,” said the bellboy, “I’ll get ’em after it’s all over.”

“This, then, must indeed be a pleasant day for you?” I suggested as we crawled up a bank made unnecessarily slippery by pine needles.

“Aw, I ain’t never seen a dool before,” said the bellboy. “It will be different.”

“The eternal quest of youth,” said I to myself, and aloud, “Yes, won’t it? Quite. The difference between ham and eggs and easing the way for daisies.”

By this time we had reached the spot from which I was to take my sudden departure from the land of the Blue Jacket’s Manual. My foeman was prancing briskly around in the early morning sunlight. Apparently a duel to him was the same as a Bronx cocktail had at one time been to me, something to toss off with a smile of anticipation of more to come. A cow was thrusting her head through some nearby trees. I felt like kissing her farewell. She followed our movements with dreamy imaginings. In my mind, which always becomes dazed in the presence of danger and tailor bills, I wondered if she had been out in the woods all night. The songs of the birds hurt me. I was too soon to lose them. Even the smell of the pine-touched morning air annoyed me. I liked it too much.

“Good morning,” I said to my adversary, hoping to make friends with him at that late date. “Have you had your breakfast?”

“No, suh,” he replied, haughtily, “I shall get that latuh.”

“Let’s go back and get it now,” I suggested.

“You will not be hungry long,” he answered, busying himself with the guns. When I had last seen those guns they had been large. Now they looked tremendous. A new bellboy approached and handed me one. Then followed a joint conversation between the bellboys, who were playing the enviable role of seconds, and the principals. One bellboy wanted to start (or better, end) the thing by saying: “One for the money, two for the show, three to get ready and four to go.”

I objected to this on the grounds of childhood memories the ritual evoked and also because I disliked the word “go” as being a little too pertinent to the situation.

At last we made him memorize the simple imperatives, “Ready! Aim! Fire!” These also jarred on my nerves, but I felt that I could stand them. It was also decided that each man should have one and only one shot. This was also my suggestion. My adversary accepted merely because as he declared, “I never need more than one, suh.”

I replied to this by saying that that was one more than I needed.

We took our positions at forty-five paces apart. I had been forced to fight desperately for the extra five paces. The seconds took up their positions and I stood regarding my sponsor in spirit land. He was not a bad looking chap. For the first time the realization that by some off chance I might be responsible for letting daylight into his anatomy occurred to me. It was most unpleasant. However, he looked so fearless and assured that I felt how little I had to worry about on that score.

“All right,” he snapped out to the bellboy.

“Get ready,” said the bellboy.

“Wait,” I shouted. “Wait!”

“What’s the matter?” demanded the man.

“I can’t lift my arm,” I cried.

“What?” said the man.

“I can’t lift my arm,” I repeated. “I can’t do it. We’ll have to shoot lying down.”

“If you don’t raise your arm, right now I’ll shoot you down on the spot,” gritted the man.

I raised my arm.

“Get ready!” started the boy once more.

I lowered my gun.

“Bellboy,” I said, “you’re not saying it right. You musn’t say ‘Get ready;’ you must say merely ‘Ready.’ Am I not right, sir?” I continued, addressing my foe.

“Yes,” he said, shortly.

“Why say it at all?” I suggested, hoping he might be reasonable.

“He must say it,” breathed the man.

“See,” I said turning to the bellboy. “What did I tell you? You’ve gotta say it, only say it right.”

“Get ready!” cried the bellboy.

I lowered my gun once more.

“That bellboy is simply impossible,” I said. “I’ve never had such service in my life. If this keeps up I’m going to call the whole blamed duel off.”

The man was furious. I thought he was going to slay me without further conversation on the subject.

“Bellboy,” he cried, at last getting control of himself. “For Gawd sake, say it right!”

Once more we braced ourselves.

“Get ready!” stammered the bewildered boy, losing all presence of mind at this great moment.

“What did I tell you?” I said disgustedly. “What did I tell you? He can’t say it. He’s spoiled the duel for me. Absolutely ruined it.”

“You say it,” cried the man to the other bellboy; “and if you don’t say it right I’ll shoot you down.”

“Ready!” said the other bellboy proudly. “Aim!”

“Half a moment,” I interrupted politely.

“Well, what is it now?” demanded the man.

“Not until after the funeral,” I said to the bellboy. “Remember!”

“Sure, sir,” he replied, and in the next breath, “Ready!”

We raised our guns.

“Aim!” he shouted.

“Promise?” I cried.

“Sure,” said he.

“I’ll run you a race?” I called out in desperation to my foe, but there was no stopping the murderous progress of that boy’s words.

“Fire!” he called out in a relieved voice.

There was one sharp report. A bullet hurried by my left ear. Both bellboys were disappearing at great speed through the trees. I turned around and noticed that the cow was sinking slowly to the ground, bow first.

“Fair mark, shoot,” said my foe, baring his chest to me.

“Look what you done,” I replied, in my excitement forgetting to shoot him. “Look what you done,” I continued. “You’ve gone and killed that cow.”

“Shoot!” cried the man.

Forgetting completely about him I hurried over and gazed down into the large, suffering eyes of the innocent bystander. She was in great pain and dying slowly, as I might have been had the bullet found its mark. Poor cow. I could not stand to hear it breathing. Suddenly I thought of the gun hanging forgotten in my hand. With this gun I hastened the departing life of the animal. It was my only shot and it did the work.

“Now,” I said briefly, turning to the man. “We’d both better run like hell.”

Together we fled through the woods after the intrepid bellboys.

“Aren’t you going to shoot me?” gasped my unsuccessful enemy.

“No,” I managed to get out as we dashed along. “I’ve spent my bullet on something more deserving.”

“But you ought to shoot me,” replied the man with conviction.

“Just the same,” I answered, “I ain’t a-going to do it.”

We ran steadily and swiftly for a great time. At last we halted by a sort of subconscious mutual consent.

“What do you reckon the farmer would do to us if he caught us?” panted the man.

“He’d arrest us and make us pay and at the present high cost of living I guess we’d never stop paying,” I replied with conviction.

“I didn’t mean to kill the cow,” said the man musing over my words.

“Thanks for the compliment,” I replied shortly.

He looked at me and smiled. How I had prayed to see that smile on his face during the past 24 hours. Now it no longer mattered.

“You’re a funny person,” he said to me at last. “I’ve never met anyone like you before.”

“You almost lost the opportunity,” I reminded him.

“Funny,” he continued. “Rather help a dying cow than kill your man.”

“The cow was easier to hit,” I replied. “And she needed a lift.”

He swallowed hard and looked down at the ground.

“I reckon,” he said. “I reckon I was wrong about it all and I want to ap—”

“Have you had breakfast?” I interrupted.

“No,” he replied.

“Well, come on, let’s have it,” said I. And together we set off through the woods.

Dec. 22nd. The pine woods down here are gradually getting to my head. After the affair of the duel, I immediately sought the comfort and the solitude of the trees in order to allow my ruined nerves an opportunity to spring back to normal. While sitting in the sun-splashed tranquillity of a dense undergrowth, numerous poetic thoughts flashed through my mind. So as my frequently-referred-to-posterity may have the benefit of these great thoughts I have entered them, for the sake of permanency, into this, my diary. The first poem is entitled:

The Enigma.

Whither does the plumber wend?

He hath a water pipe to mend.

Yet, whyfore doth the plumber sit

And never seem to think of it?

Admittedly this is an outpouring of the soul which would be very difficult to connect with a pine forest, yet it is in such a spot that fancy took me unawares. The second poem is more reasonable, but no less beautiful. It is called:

To A Bird.

I never heard

A more absurd

Arrangement than a mocking bird.

Why Does he always scream and shout it?

Something should be done about it.

This last poem, of course, has more depth and philosophy than the first one, and also possesses the great virtue of being constructive. And one must be constructive, mustn’t one? – if only for the sake of being, as it were, constructive.

The third poem has an element of tragedy and bitterness of life. One can see at a glance that it came from a man’ who has suffered pitifully in this world. I read it to a bellboy the other night and the poor, emotional slob could hardly restrain his feelings. No one knows better than I what it means to feel deeply, particularly over my own poetry, and so, of course, I readily sympathized with him. As a matter of fact, there is something in it that gets you. I call it simply:

Hope

Amelia Jane at twelve-fifteen

Arose and sought her limousine.

And fell upon her fickle head –

I hope to God Amelia’s dead.

This, too, is an expression of profound knowledge and intercourse with life as it is and not as we would wish it.

Unfortunately for the enrichment of literature, the conception of further gems of poesy was rudely interrupted by a loud and sudden bang somewhere very close to my woodland nook, and all the shot propelled by all the powder belonging to all the Du Fonts in Delaware came tearing along in my direction. Quantities of dead leaves were ripped off the trees around me and numerous birds flew away uttering loud cries of protest in which I joined with fervor.

Presently there was one who appeared to me through the bushes. He was wearing a strange arrangement of hunting tweeds and was maintaining with no little difficulty and facial contortions a monocle in his starboard lamp.

“Oh, I say,” says he, “you carn’t sit here, old chap. This is a game preserve, ye know.”

In as calm a voice as possible I assured him that I had lost all desire to remain longer in that vicinity.

“Hang it all,” he continued, breaking out into a loud and unusual sounding laugh, “I bally nearly plugged you, ye know.” Merriment overcame him.

“Yes,” says I, inanely, “yes, indeed. Didn’t you just. Bally nearly plugged me. Funny, what? Ha! Ha!”

He wiped his eyes on a silk handkerchief and began searching around in the bushes.

“I say, old dog,” says he, waxing intimate on the ground of nearly having killed me, “you didn’t see any birds drop around here, did you?”

“May I ask you a question in return?” I asked him in my politest voice.

“Surely, old—”

“Make it hound this time,” I suggested.

He blinked at me a moment while digesting the suggestion. At last he smiled his silly smile.

“Surely, old hound,” says he, “surely. What’s your question?”

“Why don’t you go back to England?” said I, shortly, as I disappeared into the bushes.

“Harf a minute,” I heard him crying after me, “Harf a minute,” but I did not wait for further words with him. I have been too frequently shot at in the past few days.

Dec. 23rd. I received this morning the following cryptic telegram:

Mr. Fogerty is a father again seven times. Signed,

Spider.

To this startling communication I sent immediately the following reply:

Congratulate Mr. Fogerty for me. Take all necessary steps to see that Mrs. Fogerty is well provided for at my expense. Signed,

Biltmore.

Although I was in no wise obligated to that depraved dog, I could not permit myself to see his family suffer, which they certainly would if he had anything to do with it. Later in the evening I received this letter from my wop shipmate Tony:

Dear Bilta: That dog you call Meester Fogerty ess a papa. He has seven babies, all dogs. All the day he act strange. He walks unhappily up and down before the barracks S-11. He no eat. He no sleep. He no go away. He justa walk, walk, walk, all the day. I bring heem food. He looks at it. Too sad. Kicks it over. At about seven bells a sailor comes outta the barracks and calls to Meester Fogerty. They enter. I follow. Fogerty is led up to the heat pipes were lays a mama dog with seven babies. Meester Fogerty looks at them. He looks at me. He is proud. He has much pride and growls deep in hees throat and bites Murphy the jimmy-legs. Then he stalk outta the room and is seen no more. He is heard of later in the nearby village. He has placed himself at the head of a large body of dogs. They bully around the town and will not come home. Meester Fogerty he celebrates. Your dog is not nice.

Tony.

Thus wrote the poor Italian, describing as well as possible an episode that is becoming only too frequent in Mr. Fogerty’s life. If the government should send allotments to all of Mr. Fogerty’s families, a special department would have to be created in order to carry on the business. However, I cannot help but be pleased at Mr. Fogerty having been a father so near home. I am afraid he will be insufferable for many days.

Dec. 24th. In this hotel it is very difficult to distinguish the difference between a sun porch and a parlor. They sort of run into one another. But there is a difference. In the sun porch one is supposed to look convalescent, whereas in the parlor or lounges one is supposed to look dyspeptic. I have found this out, for in the latter place numerous large, brocaded dowagers foregather after meals and battle valiantly with this dread enemy of mankind. That they suffer greatly is apparent from the bitter way in which they regard all those whose cheerful faces show they are not its victims. They would love to use toothpicks, I know, but they are paying so much for their rooms that they can’t bear to lower their batting average.

I walked around the lake this morning and fell in it. It’s a nice lake to walk around, but not a nice one to fall into. One disturbs too many sleeping turtles recumbent on the rocks.

Most all of the visitors at this place come to the lake to talk business. I have been able to pick up no end of information regarding stocks and bonds, cloaks and suits and buttons and buttonholes. This is well. The good gentlemen show such a rugged Indifference to the beauties of nature. This, I suppose, Is progress. Soon we shall have stock tickers established at proper Intervals along our most picturesque walks and rustic settings in order to allow any business man who might chance by an opportunity to purchase the fruits of the earth at which he refuses to look. Yet people tell us that we all want something more In life than this. We do. We want something more than seventy-five cents, which is more than I have in my pocket. And when we get it we find that it has gotten us. Making money Is, on occasions, perhaps, excusable, but talking about it is at all times criminal. Hence no more of this trite philosophy. The reason I’m so cracked on the subject of money is that I have so little of it. In fact, I gave my last quarter to the porter who struggled in with my suitcase upon arriving. Since then I’ve been trying to get a little vicarious enjoyment by watching the bellhops steal a drag behind the water cooler. I’ve been without fags for so long that the nicotine is wearing off my fingers. Yesterday I borrowed a smoke from one of these said boys on the pretext of having left my cigarette case in my room. I nursed the butt till midnight. It looks as if mother has done me in. She’s equally as bad as numerous paymasters I have met who have been attacked by the yellow-slip fever.

Dec. 25th. Today, while walking, I came upon a kitten leaping alone in the road miles from habitation. I approached the small creature and considered it in all its tousled aspects. It was not the offspring of a wild cat. This was apparent. Consequently I knew that it would eventually perish in the woods. So I took this cat in my arms and proceeded in search of a refuge for it. After traversing a great distance I came to the home of a farmer, and, going up to the farmer, I addressed him in a polite voice.

“Farmer,” I said, “I have here with me a homeless cat. Will you take it in?”

And the farmer said, “We already have some cats.”

So I left the farmer, and after traversing a great distance, I came upon the house of another farmer, and, going up to the hired girl of the farmer’s wife, I said:

“Hired girl of the farmer’s wife, I have here with me a homeless cat. Will you take it in?”

And the maiden replied, “We have some cats.”

So I left that place and continued many leagues on my way until I came to the dwelling of a third farmer, where in the yard was a maiden throwing water over the body of a dog possessed of fleas, and, going up to the maiden, I said:

“Maiden throwing water over the body of a dog possessed of fleas, I have here with me a homeless cat. Will you take it in?”

And the maid replied, “Sire, we have some cats.”

So I quitted the spot and continued on my way a great distance until I came to the gates of a rich dealer in stocks, whereat there was a woman either blowing or washing the nose of a large brass lion, and, approaching the woman, I said:

“Woman ministering to the needs of a large brass lion, I have here with me a homeless cat. Will you take it in?”

And the woman answered, “We have some cats.”

And I spoke again and said, “Woman cleansing the body of a lion wrought in brass, do cats only grow in the plural in this place?”

And the woman answered, “It seems so.”

So I departed from that place and walked a long time on my way until I came to a great hospital, wherein there dwelt a host of wounded soldiers from over the water, and here there was a Red Cross nurse, and to this nurse I went up and said:

“Red Cross nurse, I have here with me a homeless cat. Will you take it in?”

And the Red Cross nurse smiled and took the cat and I departed.

When it was later in the day I passed this great hospital for wounded soldiers and I saw a soldier with one leg and with this soldier was a small cat with which the soldier seemed greatly pleased.

So I rejoiced in my heart that there was a place in the scheme of things for a small cat, and left the spot highly edified and feeling not a little boy-scoutish.

I have just learned that today is Christmas. This is a nice thing to know, although I hardly see what use I am going to make of the information. I might sing a couple of carols to my waitress with a certain degree of safety inasmuch as the good woman is evidently deaf.

Dec. 26th. At last I have met her, the girl in the riding breeches, the girl who observed me in all my glory sitting on the edge of a window sill. But this time she was not clad in riding breeches, but in full-dress, full of vacancies, that is, in which she looked equally attractive. It came about in this manner. Her father fell asleep. That explains it. He fell asleep before the fire in the main lobby directly after having strained the strength of his pearl shirt studs by the amount of food he had somehow managed to cram under them. The orchestra, at some distance, was playing a particularly jazzy shiver and this naturally brought my attention to the gleaming young lady sitting beside the snoring old man.

As I was looking at her I noticed a strange thing. The left shoulder of the young lady gave a slight but ever so eloquent hitch. This intriguing movement was then repeated by the right shoulder, bare and polished beneath the bright glow of the lights. With much less grace, but with equally as much expression, I proceeded to do a little hitching of my own shoulders. Thus, in all solemnity, we sat hitching at one another until at last I nodded my head in the direction of the ball room. Still without smiling, the young lady arose and departed quietly to the place where the music was, and I followed her. Silently she took my arm and with profound gravity we embarked upon a sea of jazz, from which we presently emerged still in a condition of mute but mutual enjoyment.

Without a word I led her to a secluded, palm-clustered recess in one of the numerous sun parlors, where together we sat in silence and gazed upon the gaudy visage of a moth-eaten moon. She dropped her fan. I picked it up.

“Thank you,” say she.

“Don’t mention it,” says I.

She dropped her handkerchief, and this, too, I retrieved.

“Oh, thank you very much,” says she.

“You’re cordially welcome, I’m sure,” says I.

Then she laughed. She laughed like a Bacardi cocktail tastes. Pleasantly. Something one cannot get enough of. One never does until one gets too much. When she had finished, we spoke. We spoke plenty. We told each other our right names, where we lived, the books we liked, the plays we had seen, what we thought of the hotel, the people, the scenery and the food. We spoke of the summer time and declared we like it best, although she held out for skating. We spoke of other hotels and other places and other people. In fact, we spoke very much in the same manner as all young people speak and always have spoken from the time that the first couple met in the first hotel. Then we became silent, which was dangerous, so she took me to her father, to whom I was properly introduced, as if that made any difference. To my pleasant salutation he replied grumpily:

“Knew it all the time. Knew it all the time. Wasn’t asleep. Go away.”

And we went. The upshot of it all is that I must rise at an early hour tomorrow morning and go riding with this fair party. I didn’t lie much about it. All I said was that I could ride. I can’t, but I might have gone so far as to say that I had been brought up in the saddle. I regard the morrow with suspicion and skepticism. I have never been on a horse, have stayed as far away from them as possible, and now I am actually going to mount one. Great guns, were women put into the world only to make fools of men?

Dec. 27th. I looked upon the horse as a murderer might look upon his jury. He gazed back at me and frowned. From that minute we were mortal enemies. I have never seen such marked hostility in any creature’s eyes.

“Good morning,” says my fair and slim young friend, buttoning her gloves as she approached me. “A fine day for a ride.”

“Don’t you think it’s going to rain?” I asked, wistfully.

“Oh, no,” says she. “It will clear up presently.”

She took a step toward her horse, but I stopped her.

“Say, don’t you think my horse looks sick?” I asked.

“No,” says she, “he’s well enough.”

“I wouldn’t like to ride him if he’s sick,” I replied, at which point the horse turned around and blew heavily in my face. I startled back horrified.

“Oh, you’ll find him mettlesome enough,” she assured me, “I picked him out myself for you. He’s the worst in the stable.”

“My family won’t thank you,” I muttered.

“There’s nothing like a mettlesome horse,” she added.

“To shoot,” says I, under my breath.

“Well, let’s go,” says she, all impatience.

“Sure,” says I, dropping the bridle with alacrity. “Where shall we go?”

“Riding, silly,” says she, laughing.

That laugh of hers had lost for me much of its fizz. It had sounded better on the previous evening. Today it was ghastly.

“Oh,” I says, “I thought you meant to go away somewhere.”

“Well!” says she, stamping her foot.

“Well, what?” says I, a little blankly.

“Well!” she replied.

Still I didn’t savvy.

“All right,” says she, huffily, “I’ll get on myself.” And she did.

“It’s more than I can do,” says I, looking with great misgiving at the murderous beast.

“Do you want me to help you?” she asks scornfully from her secure perch.

“I do,” says I, with more truth than pride.

“Well, I won’t,” says she.

I approached the horse warily and he frowned down at me over his long nose and consequently I de-approached him. That is, I moved away with as much dignity as possible under the spell of a great fear.

“Well, well, come on,” cried my intrepid Amazon.

“I’d rather sleep with a wildcat than get on that horse,” I declared.

“Shall I leave you?” demanded the girl.

“Alone with that horse? Never!” I cried, and once more approached him. He pivoted around head on and regarded me with his goggle eyes, a trifle crossed.

“My horse has goat blood in him,” says I to the girl. She refused to loosen up with a suggestion. Then suddenly I had a wise flash. Leading the brute up to the steps of the verandah I sprang upon him with a prayer to God in my heart and a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I say I sprang upon this horse, but in truth I didn’t. I only sprang partly upon him. The other part dangled artistically along the sleepy street of that rural town. Already my companion had ceased to be my companion. She was merely a memory. John Gilpin was a jockey in comparison with me. At last she caught up with me.

“What shall I do with my sailor trousers?” I demanded. “They flap.”

“Tuck ’em up,” says she, in her horsey voice.

“And show my garters?” I cried.

“Sure,” says she.

“Jade,” says I, and for the time being further conversation ceased because of the Pavalovish proclivities of my mount. At last he began to show his better nature and eventually became almost reasonable, but never rideable.

“Great stuff!” said I to the girl, drawing my first faint breath of relief.

“It’s the only thing,” she replied.

“For a suicide, yes,” I added.

Every bird on every limb, and there were many of both, seemed to be twittering at us. I felt sure they were kidding me. One old crow, who in his misogynistic manner, held himself aloof from the rest of his tribe, gazed gloomily at me from a distant limb, then flew away, making a horrid noise.

“Your cheeks are pale,” the young lady took the pains to inform me.

“It affects some athletes that way,” I told her, at which she laughed in a peculiarly irritating way that all women have and a great deal too many use.

“What’s to keep this horse from turning around and biting my leg?” I asked, suddenly appalled by this terrifying thought.

“Nothing,” says she.

“God!” says L

“Well, come on, then,” says she, “let’s race.”

Protest was in vain. I had no choice. Mine was a mettlesome horse. There is no denying it. If anyone ever does I feel sure I will strangle him or her on the spot. No sooner had my companion’s horse set out than we parted company for the second time that morning.

“Let’s swap horses,” I cried, as I passed her comparatively mild-mannered mount. But her reply was lost to me. For sheer speed nothing could beat that horse. An automobile may cover more ground in less time, but not any faster. The road seemed to curl up behind us and the clouds above tumbled and collapsed through space. Then, as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. That is, the horse stopped. I didn’t. I continued a few yards further on my nose. The horse, apparently satisfied with his sorry achievement, continued on his mad progress, and I made no attempt to follow him. When he at last disappeared from view I felt much better and arose from the road. On a nearby fence I seated myself and prepared to await the arrival of my fair friend. My knowledge of receiving a sarcastic greeting in no way offset my relief in having got rid of that terrible horse. At last she appeared.

“Where’s your horse?” says she, briefly.

“What horse?” I asked, absently.

“Why, the horse you were riding so badly?” she answers.

“Oh, that horse,” says I, brightening up, “why that horse lost interest in me about fifteen minutes ago. I think he has some friends down the road.”

“Are you interested enough to look for him?” she asks.

“Yes,” says I, “with a gun.”

As we were a long way from the hotel it was decided that I should get up behind the girl and that we ride homeward in this clubby manner until we reached civilization, at which point, it was further decided, I was to debark and make my way to the hotel on foot. A groom was to be sent out after the horse possessed of the devil.

“It’s not necessary to hug me,” said the girl, after we had progressed some distance in this fashion.

“I know,” I explained, “but it’s a great deal more pleasant.”

“You seem to know how to hug a girl a great deal better than you do how to ride a horse,” she replied, caustically.

“I do,” said I, “I like it better.”

She made no reply to this, so perhaps she did, too.

“Tell me,” she said, after a little while, “was that the first time you had ever been on a horse?”

“This is the second,” I admitted.

“Well, you stayed on him much longer than most of the men I’ve taken out,” answered this strange creature.

“It was not through preference,” I assured her.

“He’s the worst horse in seven counties,” she continued. “No one ever fools with him any more – stop that at once and don’t do it again!”

But I couldn’t stop. I was too grateful. At the spot decided upon, I dismounted, and looked up at her.

“Will you ride tomorrow?” she asked, with an unusually arresting smile.

“My dear,” I answered, “this is, or was, our last ride together. I understand Browning better now than I have ever done before.”

“But it’s not our last dance?” she continued, turning full current on her smile.

“No,” I replied, limping wearily down the road after her. And it wasn’t. She held me to it that very night in spite of all the pains and aches that were torturing my racked body.

Somehow I can’t keep from liking that girl. May Polly forgive me. May she never need to. May she never know. This is the universal prayer of all men and most women.

“Won’t you sit out a dance?” she asked me,

“Dearie,” I replied, “I’ll stand it with you, but after this morning’s ride I fear my sitting days are over.”

Dec. 28th. It’s all up with me now. Polly and mother arrived this morning. Some old scandal monger, unknown to me, but to whom I was not unknown, evidently tipped them off about me and my new sweetie. Polly’s first words were sufficient to dispel the hopes to which I had desperately clung that she was still in ignorance.

“Ah,” says she, regarding my blank face with battle-brewing eye, “I see you didn’t expect us.”

Muttering a few cheerless words, I kissed mother.

“Well?” says Polly.

Then I kissed her, too. She didn’t want It. In the bullying spirit of womanhood, she was merely demanding her rights. I kissed her quickly, but not quick enough. The other girl, clad in an extremely fanciful skating costume, was just passing by. It was horrible. My soul sweated in every pore. She stopped for merely a moment, but it was one moment too many.

“Is that the woman?” hissed Polly. Women can hiss. In spite of all statements to the contrary, I know that it’s possible. I’ve heard them. This hiss was particularly snakish.

“What woman?” I mumbled dully.

Polly took me by the arm and led me away.

“We are to be married,” says she, and I have never heard more deadly determination of purpose expressed in anyone’s voice. “We are to be married,” she continued, giving me time to take it in, “one month from today.”

“At what time?” I asked, knowing that something was required of me.

“At 9 o’clock,” says Polly.

“Splendid!” says I, in a dead voice. “Ripping!”

(Later) – The storm has broken in all its fury. For the first time in my life I wish I were at sea. They have met and practically insulted each other. A barroom fight is mild in comparison with the sweetness of two contending women. I managed with a skill born of desperation to see the other girl alone. In my wildness I admitted that I loved her. She told me that she was going to marry me or break my neck. She could do it, too. Here I am, the most sat upon sailor in the service, over whom two women are fighting to see which one will have the pleasure of making me the most miserable. It is more than I deserve, perhaps, and at the same time it is more than I require. As I was sitting on my bed a moment ago, holding my head in my hands, the other girl came quietly in, slipped me a small, swift hunk of a kiss and tiptoed out. There were no words spoken. That is evidently her way of clinching the bargain, and, by the way, I feel now I think she has done it. Dinner with Polly and mother is going to be a crisp affair. Why did I ever leave the sea?

Dec. 29th. Saved! Providence in the guise of a telegram intervened in my behalf and drew me out of the vortex of what was rapidly developing into a tragedy. I am no sounder of heart, but I am farther away from the scene of the accident. The telegram instructed me to report at once to camp and stand by for the mysterious process of releasing! I left them flat. I think I must have invented this train I’m on. No one knew there was such a train, but I caught it – sort of wished it into being. I’m now on my way to New York and from that point to camp. Behind me in the rapidly receding distance are two women. They must meet and talk. I fear the worst. If they ever come to the point of swapping stories, God help the good name I bear. It might not be right to love two women at once, but, by gad, it’s rational.

Jan. 3rd. (Back at camp) Not for long am I here, I hope. Some of my friends have waited so long, however, to hear their names called out on the release muster that their characters as well as countenances have utterly changed. I am slowly cracking under the strain myself. During the last three days which have elapsed since I arrived in camp I have attended nine different musters with hope and confidence in my heart, only to have a mighty crimp thrown into both.

As soon as I struck the station I hurried right up to the officer and said:

“Here I am, sir, when do I go?” And the things he said to me made me completely forget both of my bellicose sweeties. It seems that you don’t walk right in and then walk right out again. Not at all. The word “stand-by” has really an actual meaning. It means just that. You stand-by for hours and you stand-by for days. One man has lost seventeen pounds in his efforts to hear his name called.

Jan. 4th. Still out o’ luck. The officer who reads the muster out roll does not seem to be able to pronounce my name. I am haggard. This morning we assembled on the parade ground and listened to the list being read. I had to be led away when Tim’s, Tony’s and the Spider’s names were called out all in a row. I am alone now. My shipmates have gone. Why speak of the parting? Someone has made off with my hammock and I am told that no one can leave the station without turning in his outfit at the gear hut. A moment ago I caught myself laughing hysterically at a tree, then all of a sudden I burst out singing:

My name is Biltmore Oswald,

But the officer, he don’t care.

Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. That’s what is happening to me. One cold letter from Polly. Two warm ones from the girl. As David once said, “Feed me with apples, I am sick of love.” He could have said less at greater length. I must search for a hammock – I don’t care whose.

Jan. 5th. It has happened. The first pop out of the box. Mounting the platform, the officer, a seagoing looking body of a man, called out my name in a loud voice, but my answer was still louder. So loud, in fact, that when the echoes of my triumphant “Here, sir!” had died out in the distance, a profound silence fell upon the camp. One could have heard the thrice proverbial pin crash to earth. Sailors have an unpleasant habit of glaring. The eyes of the multitude were upon me. There was envy in every eye. Then in a quiet voice the officer repeated my name and I responded with a subdued “Here, sir.” He smiled and told me to fall out.

From that spot, together with my kind, I was taken to the medical office. Here I was examined. Standing before the doctor I looked him searchingly in the eyes. What was he going to do to me? My whole fate remained between him and a still unstolen hammock.

“Have they looked at your feet?” he snapped out.

“Have who looked at my feet, sir?” I asked.

“The men in the other room,” he replied.

“I didn’t know that the men in the other room wanted to look at my feet, sir,” I answered, humbly.

“They don’t,” said he, “but they have to.”

I returned to the men in the other room.

“I understand that you want to look at my feet,” I said, politely.

“Dear me, yes,” said one of them – the funny one, “we’re just crazy to look at your feet. Let’s see ’em.”

I showed them my feet. They gazed at them without any particular show of either interest or admiration, marked something on a card and sent me back to the doctor. This good gentleman then began to make passes at my body, all of which I successfully dodged.

“Stand still, can’t you?” says he. “I want to sound you.”

I stood still and was sounded – vigorously. Then he began to listen to me and his ear tickled.

“Don’t do that!” he cried, irritably. “Don’t fidget. Don’t budge.”

Once more I came to rest with a great show of self-control. Suddenly he stopped and began tapping on the wall. This was a new game. I didn’t know what was expected of me. At first I thought he might perhaps be a spiritualist and was getting into communication with my great-grandfather to find out if there had ever been any sickness in the family. I relinquished this thought in favor of the Morse code. He was evidently trying me out on this, and so at his next tap I took a chance and called out “A.”

After this came several more taps and one loud tap which caused me to answer “C.”

He tapped some more and I took a shot in the dark with

“What are you doing?” he cried, giving the wall a resounding bang. “I’m not here to listen to your letters.”

“Oh, I thought you were trying me out in the Morse code,” says I.

“No,” says he, “I want those guys on the other side to keep quiet. I can’t hear your heart.”

With this he bent down and listened vigorously.

“Can’t do it,” he said at last, “can’t hear it. Mustn’t let you out until I hear your heart. Apparently it’s not beating.”

He called another doctor over and asked him to listen to my heart. This gentleman listened attentively for a great while.

“Can’t hear a thing,” says he at last.

Both of the doctors looked at me and both muttered “Strange,” and one of them asked me if I wanted a chair. The noise in the other rooms was growing louder all the time. Running to the door I thrust my head into the room and shouted:

“For God’s sake, men, pipe down a minute or I’ll have to re-enlist!”

The silence of amazement fell upon the room and I returned to the doctors.

“Now listen,” I said, “and listen good.”

“Ah,” said the doctor, “I hear it. There it goes. Splendid! You pass.”

And I did – quickly.

(Later) – The pay office was long, but easy. I received forty-five seeds. This so delighted me that I tried to shake hands with the Paymaster, but he shut the window on my hand.

I stole a hammock and turned it in. It happened to be my own hammock. The last man in camp is going to be out of luck. The station is evidently short just one hammock.

On my way to the gate I met Mr. Fogerty staggering along in his insolent manner.

“Goodbye, Fogerty,” I said, taking him by his funny old paw, “I’m going now. Be good to your families.”

He gazed into my eyes for a moment, glanced at my sea bag, and took in the situation. He seemed to realize he was losing his best meal ticket, for his long red tongue suddenly protruded and he subjected my eye to an affectionate side swipe. He then followed me to the gate where I now am, waiting for a jitney. A sailor I never saw before just shook my hand vigorously and said, “Goodbye, good luck, God bless you.”

“Glad to have met you,” I replied, and the simple-hearted soul beat it down the road with his bag on his shoulder.

Before me lies Polly and the girl. Which shall it be? I know not. Let the future decide. All I know is that I am just one jump from a pair of trousers that don’t flap at the ends. Farewell, Fogerty; I shall see you again.

Now I must hasten to sow some jazz-weeds.

— THE END —

TWO SHORT STORIES

YONDER’S HENRY!

A SLIGHTLY BEFUDDLED ACCOUNT
OF A COMPLETELY COCKEYED HUNT
STARRING
HENRY, A FOXY HOUND

I

His question so upset me I put down my drink untasted.

Albert was like that. Upsetting. Years ago I had gone to school with Albert. He had been upsetting then – a sort of experimental liar, indefatigable in his efforts to plumb the depths of human credulity. Fifteen years in the discard that had been. Now fate had returned Albert – Albert Green – to my side. In a little bar in a little town in the large state of Texas we had been celebrating all morning. I now wonder why. In his charmingly casual manner Albert had just inquired if I cared to go fox hunting. He had added modestly that he lived in this state of Texas together with a population composed almost entirely of foxes. The first part of this statement might just possibly be true. I’m inclined to believe it is. He seemed to be living in Texas. It would take a big, strong state like Texas to stand for Albert. He would have upset any normal state just as he upset me. At the moment he was more interested in upsetting a lot of foxes.

I asked him a frank question. “Albert,” I asked him, “do I bear on my face the stamp of a man consumed with a secret passion for foxes?”

“Don’t have to be passionate about foxes, just to hunt ’em,” he replied. “In fact, you can hate foxes.”

I stopped to consider exactly where I stood about foxes. It surprised me to discover that I had no strong feelings either for or against foxes. Years ago I had heard something about a fox mentioned in connection with a bunch of grapes. Since that time, however, foxes had gone their way and I had gone mine. Our paths never crossed. I saw no reason why they should.

“We’ll waive that part of it,” I said with befitting dignity. “What do you know about fox-hunting anyway?”

Albert indulged in a tragic laugh. “Every possible thing,” he asserted. “Own the finest pack of hounds in Texas. You’d think they were on tracks the way they follow foxes. Wonderful dogs. And Henry! What a hound. Man! Man! Ho, I know all about foxes. Recognize one at a glance.”

“To recognize a fox is one thing,” I told him, “but to chase him over the landscape is an elk of another burrow.”

“Come on down to my place and I’ll show you,” urged Albert. “We’ll do more than just hunt foxes. Henry’ll juggle some for you. It’s his way.”

Precocious dogs, like precocious children had always been one of my pet aversions, but the picture of a noble hound juggling a number of foxes fired my imagination. I accepted Albert’s invitation, which goes to prove that one should never talk with Albert in a barroom.

On further consideration I am inclined to believe one should never talk with Albert at all.

II

After sleeping through numerous miles of Texas scenery while Albert sat alone with his God and his automobile, I found myself gazing miserably into the grim but good looking face of Mrs. Albert across the sparkling reaches of her luncheon table.

“The trouble with you boys,” she said, “is that you don’t drink enough.”

Suiting her action to her words she replenished our glasses with what she was pleased to call real Texas mule, adding that it was something like hair of the dog that had so brutally and recently mutilated us.

“My dear,” remarked Albert, accepting the drink, but ignoring the remark that went with it. “I’ve decided to hold the fox hunt tomorrow – you know, the regular weekly fox hunt.”

“Yes,” I added. “He wants to show me Henry in action. I can see him now at the head of your splendid pack of hounds.”

Mrs. Albert considered the suggestion. She poured out a drink for herself and tossed it off with professional detachment.

“Can you?” she asked in level tones. “You must have a remarkable imagination. Most northerners would not even believe it.”

“My wife is a little touchy about Henry,” Albert hastened to explain. “I brag so much about him. Might as well hold the hunt tomorrow at the usual time.”

“Oh certainly,” replied Mrs. Albert. “Why not?” As she rose from the table she added, “Did I hear a door slam?”

“That’s difficult to say,” said Albert.

“Correct. It’s almost impossible to tell whether a door has slammed or not after it’s once slammed.” Mrs. Albert continued thoughtfully. “It leaves no tracks behind.”

“Not like Henry,” I said to Albert. “He must fairly scoop up the earth when he once gets started.”

I though I saw Albert flinch. “Of course,” he agreed quite seriously. “Fairly excavates it, that dog.”

“Come, Albert,” said his wife. “We must see about that door…and make some arrangements for tomorrow.”

“May I stroll out and take a look at the pack?” I inquired.

“I’d hardly advise it,” observed Albert. “Not just before the hunt.”

“No, don’t do that,” put in his wife. “Henry does much better after he’s been lonely a spell.”

Later that afternoon I inadvertently overheard Mrs. Albert at the telephone.

“Certainly,” she was saying. “Bring your guests right along. We have an alcoholic with us who doesn’t know the first thing about fox-hunting. Doubt if he knows one end of a horse from the other.” She must have suspected my presence for she went on in an altered voice, “Oh, yes, he’s quite charming, this guest of ours. You must meet him. And tell the others not to dress formally, you know. Cut out the red coats for a change. He hasn’t an outfit with him. Neither have your guests, I reckon.” When she had hung up she turned to me.

“Did you hear?” she asked.

“No,” I replied gallantly. “A door slammed. But I gathered I won’t be alone in my misery.”

“No,” said Mrs. Albert. “There will be several other novices.”

That night Albert, weak from the lack of liquor, came in to my room and deposited a bundle of clothing on a chair.

“For tomorrow,” he explained, eyeing the garments with disfavor. “The hunt, you know.”

“Oh, I don’t care what I look like,” I assured the dispirited man. “What I’m interested in is what Henry looks like. Does he usually juggle the foxes before or after the hunt?”

“It makes no difference to Henry,” said Albert brightening. “Whenever he gets a fox. Some call it brutal.”

“Nonsense,” I replied heartily.

Albert went away.

III

When I looked out of my window the next morning I received a decided shock. For a moment I feared that Albert had gotten himself in some trouble. His ancestral home seemed to have become entirely surrounded either by bandits or deputies. I was not sure which. Anyway, they were rough looking men, most of them carrying shot guns and rifles while others were swinging large, ugly looking clubs. There were many women also. They had the rough and ready appearance of experienced camp followers.

“The hunt breakfast,” Albert murmured over my shoulder. I gave a slight start. He had made his appearance so quietly. “The regular hunt breakfast,” he repeated.

“Why, there’s hardly a red coat on the lot,” I complained. “Albert, I feel cheated.”

“Seldom wear red coats except on formal occasions,” said Albert. “Thought you knew that.”

“What does it matter?” I said philosophically. “We’re chiefly interested in foxes, after all.”

“So we are,” replied Albert simply. “What’s the sense in a lot of red coats, anyway? I don’t think the dogs like ’em or the foxes either.”

“Don’t see why they should,” I told him. “But I will ask you this. Do you use clubs and rifles and machine guns on your damn Texas foxes?”

“Not machine guns,” said Albert gently. “We use the others for hand to hand fighting. Texas foxes are often violent. They don’t seem to understand.”

“Neither do I, quite,” I admitted. “Why don’t you bomb the foxes and save yourself a lot of trouble?”

“That wouldn’t be sporting,” said Albert blandly. “and anyway, we like it. Then again, there’s Henry to consider. He must have his foxes.”

“That’s so, too,” I replied. “I guess that great beast would die unless he had his foxes.”

“Those clubs and guns are brought along just in case,” he informed me.

“In case of what?” I asked.

“Of wild turkeys,” he answered with out cracking a smile.

When I had finished dressing I was nearly as funny looking as Albert, but not quite. However, I was funny looking enough. I was exactly as funny looking as an oversized pair of plus fours, a checked flannel shirt, high boots and a campaign hat could make me. Albert was a little funnier because he was wearing a pair of white duck trousers encased in knee-length leggins. His nautical appearance was somewhat nullified by the presence of a large floppy straw hat on the back of his head. A corduroy hunting jacket alone suggested the general nature of Albert’s intentions. There was a colored shirt also which I find it pleasanter not to write about.

“The foxes are going to have the laugh of their lives today,” I remarked when I had acclimated myself to Albert. “They’ll be too weak to run.”

“Come,” said Albert with dignity. “The hunt breakfast is on. There is drink.”

“Let’s abandon this incessant fox hunting,” I suggested, “and make millions on the stage. We wouldn’t have to do much, Albert. One look would drive ’em frantic.”

“Later, perhaps,” replied Albert a little moodily. “We have to go through with this fox hunt first. Come on.”

I was introduced to a series of majors, doctors and judges. All men over thirty seemed automatically to come into a title. Whether they were merely hunt breakfast titles or not I never learned. There was one rotund colonel, authentic in every detail, an upon him was bestowed all the honor and glory due to his colorful record of violent and abrupt endings. He was the Colonel. Fat was this gentleman, fat, pompous and over-blooded, but a life-loving soul withal. In his youth he had been the life of all the local lynching parties, and now, in his declining years, he had acquired the reputation of an implacable hunter. He was wearing a Prince Albert coat and highly polished boots which lent the only touch of distinction to this nondescript gathering.

After being properly introduced to the ladies, all of whom seemed to be guarding some shameful secret the full significance of which they failed to grasp themselves, I was placed by the side of my hostess, and urged to drink. She subjected me to one swift scrutiny, then quickly dropped her eyes.

“Pardon me,” she said in a strained voice. “I think I heard a door slam.” The next moment she rose hastily and walked unsteadily toward the house. With pained eyes I followed her retreating figure.

Down the line a lady showing no end of well turned southern legs as she sat on the grass was speaking in an excited voice and waiving a cocktail glass in the air.

“What a lark,” she proclaimed. “John’s never so much as seen a fox and he can’t stand the sight of horses. They give him a violent rash, do horses.”

I turned and regarded my host inquiringly, “Is he one of the initiates like myself at this ceremony?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered. “There are several others – lots of new faces, in fact. You won’t be alone. Drink up.”

A man on my right leaned confidently over and made helpless, little motions with his hands.

“Pardon me,” he said incredulously, “but do I understand we are actually going fox hunting?”

I told him that that was about the size of it.

“Fancy that,” he observed musingly. “Of all things, fox hunting. Wonder where Mr. Green caught the beast. Haven’t seen a fox in years. I’ll ask him.”

To my great delight he leaned over and made some more motions at Albert.

“Mr. Green,” he whispered piercingly. “Where in the world did you get this fox?”

“What fox?” exclaimed Albert in a startled voice, looking quickly about as if he feared a fox was creeping up behind him.

“You know,” said the man mysteriously. “This fox we’re supposed to hunt.”

“Certainly,” I put in. “The fox Henry’s going to juggle with several others.”

“Who’s Henry?” asked the man innocently.

“Why don’t you know Henry?” I replied with some amazement. “He’s the greatest foxer in the state of Texas, that dog.”

“Strange,” muttered the man. “Don’t know him – but I’m a stranger to these parts.”

“We raised many of our foxes in England,” Albert explained.

“And ruin them in Texas,” said the stranger.

Albert’s answer was cut short by a sudden shout winging across the lawn from the direction of the outhouses. I looked up and saw a negro, running with great concentration; coming in our direction. He was leaning so far over in his efforts to separate himself from some still unrevealed peril that he gave the impression of a six-day bicycle racer. then something happened which I am sure must have come upon everybody as a complete surprise to put it mildly. Before our astonished eyes the negro was borne down and blotted out beneath an onrushing avalanche of dogs. The air was disturbed by eager yelpings and churned by innumerable jauntily waiving tails. In another moment the hunt breakfast had been reduced to a shambles. One imperishable vision of our colonel staunchly defending a chunk of fried chicken was vouchsafed me. Then he, too, disappeared, emulating the negro, as the dogs danced giddily over his recombent form. After that my impressions became somewhat clouded. I remember a large dog neatly removing a sandwich from my fingers and breathing appreciatively in my face. Sandwiches seemed to be moving through the air like things of life. The once spotless table cloth was leaping weirdly under the stress of greedily searching muzzles. Figures of men and women as they rolled and struggled on the grass were caught in the most undignified, not to say comprimising positions. The element of surprise was all in favor of the raiders. The famous hunt breakfast was theirs without a struggle. I remember hearing quite distinctly Mrs. albert as if lost to decency, ironically cheering the pack on to still greater endeavors. From their utterdisregard of all those little niceties of deportment that give life its subtle fragrance I decided that it had been many a long day since those dogs had enjoyed a square meal.

Then above the din and the barking, the cries of the insulted and injured and – I regret to say – the shocking blasphemy of out colonel, my host, Albert, who should have been master of this hunt, lifted up his voice in command.

“Grab sticks!” he shouted. “Grab anything and beat them off!”

Then began a grim struggle, man facing defiant beast, for the honor and supremacy of the human race. We fought those dogs bitterly and oftentimes unfairly. For example, I saw one gentleman deliberately enticing one of the enemy to accept a peace offering of chicken – a delicious bit it looked – and then when the poor animal had been betrayed by its oen greed this man, this southern gentleman, squared off and kicked the dog quite severely in the rump. Foot by foot the dogs yeilded and were driven backin the direction whence they came. One inspired sportsman accelerated their departure by firing off a shotgun. This horrid noise entirely demoralized the dogs, all of whom must have been born gun shy. With yelps of nervous alarm they sheathed their once valiant tails and deployed in the direction of the barn.

Mrs. Albert was sitting calmly on the grass. Her husband was rushing from one guest to another, assuring everyone that everything was all right, and begging them not to let this slight interruption mar the pleasure of the hunt.

“Pleasure?” one forthright gentleman – obviously a novice – demanded indignantly. “How did you get that way? You mean the horror of the hunt.”

“What’s the matter with you?” Mrs. Albert asked defensively before I had opened my lips. “There’s nothing unusual about this hunt breakfast. Only last week the dogs broke loose and one of the fresh things had the nerve to snatch a cocktail right out of my hand. Think of that.”

I did. I looked steadily at Mrs. Albert’s innocently turned up face and thought of that as well as other things. This made me think of Albert, the last person in the world I wanted to think about at that moment.

IV

I was being introduced by Albert to the mount upon which I was to pursue foxes for the reminder of the day.

“This is Molly,” he said with Jefersonian simplicity. “Your horse.”

It had to be my horse because most certainly no one else would have taken Molly as a gift. As I studied this disillusioned featuresof this venerable wreck I feared that she was going to take advantage of her sex and weep on my shoulder. Nevertheless, I mounted to her back and awited with closed eyes the inevitable crash. Molly braced herself, quivered along her keel, but managed to remain erect.

The lawn now became the scene of fresh activity. The colonel, still dazed, with the help of three strong men was being elevated to the top of his horse, an operation in which neither the colonel nor the horse seemed to be the least bit interested. Presently the sweating huntsmen were safely if not securely installed in their saddles while the women stood about and made unhelpful but irritating suggestions, as women always do and always will when men are striving to maintain their dignity in the face of overwheling odds.

Once more the pack appeared. Its mood had now shifted from one of famished activity to satiated greed. Leisurely the hounds ambled across the lawn and slipped past us with many a futive backward glance, as if expecting a sudden kick. Their respective rumps were guiltily shrunken. Once safely out of reach they broke into a run and speedily absorbed themselves into the landscape, severalsecretly amused negroes pretending to pursue them.

“Are you all ready?” cried Albert, holding up his hand. “If you are, let’s go.”

“Just a minute now,” came the querulous voice of the stranger. “Go where, Mr. Green? I’ve gotten me up on the top of this dumb beast like you said but damned if I enjoy the prospect of jouncing all over the countryside on it without any idea where I’m going or when I’m coming back.”

In the face of this reasonable question the hunting party fell into a depressed silence. Obviously many of its members were asking themselves the same thing. Albert rushed gamely into the breach.

“We go wherever the fox goes,” he explained.

“What fox?” demanded the man.

“I don’t know what fox,” said Albert. “Just any fox – the fox we’re after.”

“What’s this fox gone and done, Albert” another unknown inquired mildly.

“He hasn’t done anything,” said my host.

“Then why are we after him?” continued the voice.

“Well, you can’t very well have a fox hunt without some sort of fox, can you?” asked Albert bitterly. “It’s all very simple. We just sit on our horses and go where the fox goes.”

“If you think it’s so simple sitting on this animated file,” someone indignantly observed, “I’d like you to change places with me and let him chafe you for awhile. I’m tow-thirds ruined already and we haven’t even started yet.”

“Let’s hope this old fox goes to bed, then we can all do likewise,” the weary stranger offered hopefully.

As the company straggled through the gate, a sudden cry of warning brought us to a stop. It seems that our colonel with the aid of a low-hanging limb had somehow managed to unhorse himself. Turning quickly, I caught a momentary glimpse of that stout gentleman decending earthward with terrific speed where he landed in a sitting position and remained as if atrophied. Horses and riders alike gazed down at him with concentrated attention as if wondering why their colonel had taken it into his head to act in such a peculiar manner.

“What’s the meaning of all this?” asked Albert pushing his horse through the circle. The colonel regarded him balefully.

“What the hell do you think it means?” he demaned in a high, thin voice. “That I’m playing mud pies? Young man, it means foul play. I was struck from behind.”

“Well,” said Albert at last, “we can’t very well leave him sitting there like that all day. Get him back on his horse and we’ll make a fresh start.”

The colonel accepted a drink and once more allowed himself to be heaved into the saddle, where he sat in stunned silence.

“I say, Mr. Green,” a third stranger to Albert cried out, “What are we supposed to do with this fox once we catch him?”

“Which is very doubtful,” the first one added.

Albert laughed with false heartiness. “Have your little joke,” he called back.

“It’s no joke,” said the other earnestly. “Swear to God I wouldn’t know how to act with a real live fox.”

“Cut off his brush,” grated Albert.

“His what?” came the startled rejoiner in a shocked voice. “Oh, Mr. Green.”

“You know as well as I do,” replied Albert.

“Oh,” exclaimed the other. “You don’t like to talk about it. I think I know know.” Albert flushed furiously.

“Say, Mr. Green,” asked a rider rather plaintively. “Why are you so mean to foxes, anyway? You must certainly hate ’em to do a thing to’em – you know - like you said.”

At this moment I reminded Albert that unless we looked for the dogs we might lose them forever, not that I greatly cared. A startled expression added to the unhappiness of his features. He held up a hand and listened.

“Now where do you rekon those dogs could have gotten themselves to?” he asked at last.

“Let’s make it a dog hunt instead of a fox hunt,” a bright young man suggested.

Albert wineed, then suddenly his face cleared. From far down the road came an awful sound. I had begun to doubt the existance of Henry, but now I changed my mind.

“Yonder’s Henry!” exclaimed the delighted Albert with as much pride as if he were emitting all those terrible sounds himself. “Hear him!”

We did. Henry had a shocking voice.

“Glad I’m not a fox,” someone piously observed. “I’m scared even to hunt with that dog lose.”

“Henry’s giving tounge,” exclaimed Albert.

“Giving!” exclaimed the accurate rider. “Henry’s doing heaps more than that. He’s fairly tossing tongue away – lavishing tongue on the countryside.”

When finally we found the dogs they were in various reposeful attitudes while they idly watched one of their members trying to get at a negro clinging to the topmost limb. This dog was beyond description. Canine obscenities gushed from its throat. Its fangs were bared and foam flecked its lips. Henry, without a doubt. Upon seeing Albert, the negro in the tree let out a yell.

“Fo’ Gawd’s sake, Mr. Albert, take dat dawk away or I’sa gone nigger.”

Albert looked up at the negro, then transferred his attention to the frantic beast. “Josh,” he said at last, “that dog isn’t Henry. Where do you suppose he came from?”

“I don’t care who the hell he is,” one of our little group complained, “if he doesn’t stop making those awful noises I’ll climb one of those trees myself.”

“No, suh,” responded Josh. “Dat dog sho ain’t no Henry. Dat dog’s Fanny. Mr. Albert, Fanny’s by the way of being a bloodhound. We sort of invited her over last night just to fancy up the pack a bit.”

“A charming piece of garnishing, Fanny,” remarked a gentleman on my left.

“Well, Josh,” said Albert wearily, “I reckon you’d better get Fanny home or she’ll be treeing every damn nigger in the countryside and then we’l never get any foxes.”

“Foxes,” I quietly inquired.

“Certainly,” shot back Albert. “I said foxes. Henry must be looking for some now.” The subject was changed by a sudden groan from our colonel.

“Gentlemen,” he announced, “I can stand it no longer. I fear I’m bleeding to death.” “Where?” demanded Albert, turning to cope with this new disaster.

The colonel seemed reluctant to take us into his confidence concerning the exact location of his mortal wound.

“I must have sat on my flask,” he replied after some hesitation. “When I fell, you know. I’ve been sitting on the pieces ever since.”

“My God,” breathed Albert. “What next? Help the colonel down, some of you, and I’ll see what I can do about it.”

Our colonel asked Albert, now assuming the role of glass picker, retired among the bushes with old fashioned southern modesty. Presently Albert reappeared.

“I am happy to announce,” he said, “that the colonel’s injuries were more demeaning to a gentleman of his high spirit than serious to his person. He has decided to continue with us. Let us hope and pray that this will be the last interruption. We must now find Henry, leader of the pack.”

An ironical cheer greeted this fine speech. The colonel was placed delicately on his horse. The negro attendants beat the dogs into a reluctant state of activity. Once more the hunt was in motion. For an hour or more we cantered along the roads pleasantly enough, stopping occasionally to let the pack catch up with us. The dogs were friendly, courteous and even playful. They seemed to nourish no grudge against us, but it was plain to see that no one had taken the trouble to tell them what it was all about. To the pack it was an outing – a casually informal affair.

“Just wait till they catch up with Henry,” Albert kept assuring us. “then just watch ’em go.”

We did. From somewhere far down the road the ravings of a mad dog were bourne to us. Albert’s face became radiant.

“Yonder’s Henry!” he shouted. “Hear him!”

The dogs, exerting their last ounce of energy, broke into a run and sped down the road. Fresh hope returned to our hearts as we thundered after. Perhaps there might be something to this fox-hunting business after all. The pack was now in full cry. We rounded a curve and saw the dogs streaming across an open field in the direction of some woods. A large and elated rabbit was cutting insulting capers in their faces. Albert’s own face looked a trifle dismayed.

“Shucks,” he said, “that fool rabbit just crossed the fox’s trail, but he won’t put Henry off. Follow on.”

Follow on we did, and in short time crashed into the woods. Then consternation reigned. Close to my ear a shotgun suddenly exploded. It exploded very close to my ear.

“Moonshiners!” someone shouted, and the effect was electrifying.

From behind the most innocent looking trees bearded faces appeared. In a methodical manner the owners of these faces began to discharge lead into the ranks of the disorganized hunt. In an instant, dogs, horses and men were fighting democratically together for mere survival. There was a great thrashing of branches and a complicated entangling of man and beast. The moonshiners seemingly had an inexhaustable supply of ammunition and a passionate desire to use it. I now saw the reasonalbeness of our clubs and guns, although our party used neither.

Personally, I sustained no loss other than Molly and a large quantity of breath. From the safety of a slight elevation I observed the component parts of the hunt break from the woods and dash across the field. Men who had known each other for years passed without the slightest recognition, so occupied were they with their own thoughts. the field was dotted with horses, dogs and men, some of the men in their impatience even pushing horses out of their way. I felt that I was look at an old English hunting print suddenly thrown into reverse. Some of those dogs, I dare say, are still running.

The last to withdraw from the woods were our colonel, Albert and my Molly. The colonel was leaning on Albert’s arm. Molly appeared to be trying to hold his other hand. I was joined by this little group and with Albert’s help put our colonel on to Molly. He sat well forward and practiced soul stirring groans. Foxes would have little to fear from our colonel for many days to come. Very little was said. There was hardly anything either fit or safe to be said unless we talked about the weather. Albert steadily refused to meet my eyes.

After an interminable walk we at last approached the smooth green lawn of my host’s home. Several members of the hunt were grouped round the rumpled tablecloth. They were looking down sadly on a large inert body. Mrs. Albert was saying things. We listened.

“Would you believe it?” she was saying. “Ever since you all got out of sight he’s been sleeping there just like a lamb. Must have eaten too much hunt breakfast. Isn’t he sweet?”

We, too, gazed down at the slumbering figure. The expression in Albert’s eyes was too terrible for man to behold. I felt inclined to withdraw quietly to leave him alone with his sorrow. The figure, as if feeling our eyes upon it, feebly attempted to raise its head. Slumber overcame it. A gnawed chicken bone slipped from its mouth as it drifted off to sleep. A tail moved with propitiatory intentions. A gentle sigh fell upon the evening air.

Then our colonel lifted up his voice.

“Yonder’s Henry!” he howled, and then there was a touch of madness in his eyes. “Hear him!” He paused, squared his shoulders, then confronted Albert.

The rest is silence…

BIRTHDAY PRESENT

The Galts as a family are emotional about the doorbell. It seems to appeal to their lowest instincts. Whenever it rings they revert, losing all poise and frequently some clothing. Dropping whatever they are doing, forgetting whatever they are saying – and the Gaits are forever saying something – they rush to the front door, impelled thither by the two fundamental impulses of curiosity and fear. In every stage of dress or undress save the final one in either direction, they converge from their various rooms in the narrow reaches of the hall. There, forming themselves into a sort of flying wedge of Galts, they advance to discover who on earth could have conceived the astonishing idea of ringing their bell. From their actions one would be led to believe that no one ever rang their bell; whereas, in truth, the Gaits’ bell is always being rung for some irritating reason or other.

Inevitably there is much fumbling and fussing with the door latch. It is doubtful if the Galts’ front door has ever been opened in one swift and decisive motion. The deed is usually accompanied by a certain amount of rattling and muttering, caused by a characteristic lack of teamwork. Too many nervous hands.

Rarely does the caller have a chance to grow impatient. He becomes far too absorbed in what is going on behind the Galts’ door.

“You look a sight,” he hears someone whisper. “Drag your stocking up.”

“You’re not so hot yourself,” the criticized one snaps back.

“Either pull your wrapper together or turn your back to the door.”

In between these exchanges, as well as during them, the other Galts ask questions such as, “Who is it?” “Is somebody there?” “Who rang our bell?”

These questions take on the monotonous rhythm of a chant.

“Why doesn’t the person speak?” a Galt demands the moment the door is opened.

“He just stands there looking,” another one complains.

One Galt alone has refused to become a party to these unseemly exhibitions of undisciplined curiosity. This one is Galt himself. He has remained decently above the battle and contemplated his flesh and blood with repugnance made endurable only by the philosophy of despair. With a mixture of pain and unwilling admiration he has time and again noted that the woman who has so casually presented him with all these unsatisfactory children is always well up in the lead in these impassioned stampedes to the door. As harassed and exhausted as she vigorously proclaims herself to be, she nevertheless seems to possess a sufficient reserve of energy to make herself a serious contestant for first-place honors whenever the doorbell rings…

On a certain day not completely buried in the past Red Galt was seated dispiritedly before his drawing board, brooding over the vast futility of all creative effort. He was doing this in the privacy of a small back room which he was allowed to use as a studio whenever no one else had need of it. At his right was the back door, which gave uninviting access to the gloom of the outer hall. In front of him a series of equally gloomy rooms telescoped into a sort of dim obscurity. Those rooms alone were sufficient to make any sensitive spirit break out into violent protest; but being an eminently unsuccessful artist, Red Galt was the only member of the household who was given no opportunity to express his temperament in public. Little good would it have done him had he attempted to do so. In that family he could seldom make himself heard and but rarely understood. For the simple reason that his wife and his children shared the same sort of lunacy, they considered themselves entirely normal, while to their way of thinking he – the only sane member of the family – was as mad as a hatter. They rather liked and pitied him for it.

From the front of the flat came the clamorous voices of his contentious brood. In loud, exacting voices his sons were demanding coffee, his daughters passionately accusing each other of both grand and petty larceny, while the twins – the youngest of the lot – were being implored by everybody not only to get out of the way but also to remain always and forever out of the way. Exactly where such a place could be was somewhat obscure to the twins, because wherever they went they seemed to encounter a seething mass of Galts. Consequently they stayed where they were and contributed their share to the general confusion.

From time to time the distracted voice of the artist’s wife could be heard assuring the entire family that the good God in the press of business had seen fit to give her only one pair of hands, that everyone very well knew how nervous and shaky she was, and that someday in the almost immediate future the whole confounded lot of them was going to be immeasurably sorry for the way they had treated her and this prediction also held for that disgusting lump of a father of theirs, who did nothing all day but sit comfortably in his chair pretending to be an artist, while others slaved and died at his great ugly feet.

Galt was desperate, because on the morrow his wife would come into another birthday. Even though she had passed an unpleasant remark about his feet, he still felt the desire to give her a present. Every member of the family save himself would be giving her a little something. To this end, his children one after another had levied heavily on his small supply of cash. He was now completely deflated. The money thus wheedled from him he had planned to expend in the purchase of a pair of shoes for those same great ugly feet. Now there would be no shoes, and his feet would continue on in their unlovely condition. Looking at them, Galt found it difficult to bear with them himself. What chance would they have with the office boys and reception clerks who guarded the sacrosanct corridor of the better advertising agencies?

The small amount of money remaining in the house was in the possession of his wife Sue. Only too keenly did he realize how impossible it would be to pry any of this loose from that one. So long as he had enough tobacco for his pipe Sue considered the man well fixed. After all, he was little better than a semidomestic animal with red hair at one end and big feet at the other. Money would do him no good. It might give him delusions of grandeur.

Impatiently Galt unfolded himself from his chair and began prowling about the small room. His slipping on a short length of lead pipe almost put an end to this mild emotional outlet. Cursing the pipe bitterly, be stooped and picked it up. Idly he tapped it against the palm of his left hand; and as he did so a desperate enterprise sprang full-armed into his mind.

Was not this an era of violence and direct action? It was. All over the country, all over the world, individuals no less than nations were taking by force what they wanted. Why should he alone of all the human race remain at peace with his fellow men? No, he should not. At this moment he needed money, needed it desperately. Not for himself did he need this money, but for the mother of his children. What simpler way to get it than through the medium of a lead pipe?

In this dangerously exalted frame of mind he recommenced his prowling. He was plotting evil against mankind for the first time in his life. He was quite impersonal about it. Little did it matter to him whom he hit upon the head with that lead pipe, as long as it was an expensive head with lots of cash on hand.

While engaged in these dark meditations Galt became vaguely aware of the sound of refined tapping on the door of the outer hall. He stopped in his tracks and looked at the door. He even scowled at the door as if it were a living adversary. Who could be standing on the other side of it? No one ever used that door. Had Providence provided him with a victim?

Without further hesitation Galt crossed the room and opened the door. A surprisingly well-preserved face, for the amount of russet beard that adorned it, presented itself to the momentarily unhinged artist. A pair of mild but myopic eyes peered into Galt’s. The artist with his keen perception noted that the face looked like an expensive face, and that the body to which it belonged appeared to be expensively garbed. Then the mouth of the face opened, and words came from it.

“I beg your pardon,” began the face in a cultured voice, “I was wondering if —”

At that moment the face ceased to wonder about anything. With the precision of one who had been slugging heads with lead pipes since early adolescence, the desperate artist now slugged this one. Automatically he reached out with his left hand and snatched a wallet from the gentleman’s breast pocket. Then, completely losing his nerve, he slammed the door on his victim’s expressionless face, idiotically muttering as he did so the single word “Beaver.”

For a moment Galt leaned weakly against the door while on the other side of it the assaulted gentleman did likewise, but with more justification. Then, pulling himself together in all his trembling parts, the criminal artist, now thoroughly cowed, thrust the wallet from his sight as if it were already accusing him of murder. He hid the wallet behind a picture – not behind one of his own pictures, but behind a large photograph of a family group which he especially disliked. He had no desire to have either himself or anything he had ever created associated with the mute witness of his one criminal act.

In the meantime the assaulted gentleman, accompanied by his beard, rolled rather than staggered along the wall of the outer hall, eventually bringing up with a thud against the front door of the Galts’ flat. With his rapidly failing strength he pressed a limp finger to the bell push, then abandoned himself to a vacuous twilight which at last grew dark…

At the sound of the bell the strident voices of the Galts were hushed as if all tongues had suddenly been gagged.

Then came the rush for the door, the sound of piercing whispers, and the fumbling of many hands. Finally the door was opened, and all the Galts looked. Then they blinked and looked again. Here was something indeed worth looking at, something to break the monotony of the daily routine – of which there was scarcely any in the Galts’ establishment.

“Ooo!” breathed a thin girl of seventeen. “He’s all bluggy.”

“It’s a murder,” pronounced Mrs. Galt in the voice of one who had been long suspecting just such a contingency. “A corpse, no less.”

“Then shut the door,” some callous soul suggested.

“Oh, look at the murdered gentleman’s beard,” the twins chanted in unison. “Isn’t there a lot of it?”

“Altogether too much of it,” someone said fastidiously. “I loathe such facial adornments.”

“It would be just our luck,” Tom, the eldest son, was heard to mutter. “A murdered body would have to call on us! Let’s have a cup of Java.”

“He’s in our flat,” objected Mrs. Galt’s spinster sister in a slightly outraged voice. “Somebody push him out.”

“It’s against the law to disturb a dead body,” proclaimed Tom, who knew his detective stories and very little else.

“Well, this dead body started in disturbing us first,” argued seventeen- year-old Fanny. “Does the law expect private families to keep open house for any old corpse that feels like dropping in?”

“Maybe he’s just drunk,” suggested the spinster sister. “Most men are, you know.”

“His beard is doubled up,” one of the twins morbidly observed.

“It continues to grow after death,” contributed Dora, a plump child of fifteen. “I forget how long it grows, either in time or space.”

In spite of having associated with her family for so many demoralizing years, Mrs. Galt still managed to retain a small shred of decency. She knelt and examined the crumpled results of her husband’s enterprising act.

“He doesn’t smell drunk,” she announced, looking up at the others with her large, slightly wild eyes.

“What does he smell like?” Dora wanted to know.

“Why, I don’t know,” she replied innocently. “He smells like a man, I suppose.”

“How horrid!” murmured the spinster sister.

“He’s still breathing,” Sue Galt suddenly announced. “Quick, everybody! Help me to get him into bed.”

“Into whose bed?” several voices aggressively demanded.

“Into my bed, then,” Sue replied wearily, not wishing to start a family brawl.

Motivated more by a desire to close the front door than out of any consideration for the potential corpse, the Galts dragged the body into the room, and after nearly dismembering it in their general carelessness and lack of co-ordinated action, finally succeeded in dumping the unconscious man on the bed jointly shared by Galt and his wife.

“Dear me!” panted Mrs. Galt. “That was a battle royal. If he wasn’t dead already he should be now.”

“I’m strained for life,” declared Dora. “I had practically all of his left leg.”

“I had what it grew out of,” said Fanny.

“Why, I had his feet – one foot, anyway,” replied Tom.

“I wasn’t referring to his feet,” the girl told him with quiet dignity.

Eventually Mrs. Galt succeeded in gathering her family round her in the front room.

“What are we going to do next?” she asked helplessly. “We should get a cheap doctor – don’t you think so?”

While this conference was in progress in the front room the cause of it was growing increasingly terrified in the back one. He was afraid to be alone with himself. For the first time in years he preferred the company of his family to his own. On passing through his room he saw in the dim light the form of a perfect stranger seemingly sleeping comfortably in his bed. Not noticing the stranger’s beard, Galt rushed to the front room and confronted his wife.

“What do you mean by letting a stranger go to sleep in my bed?” he demanded. “Haven’t I any place left in this house? Why, I’ll tear the beggar limb from limb. I’ll —”

Galt stopped suddenly and swung round to face Fanny.

“What the devil are you laughing at?” he demanded.

“I don’t know,” declared Fanny, struggling to throttle her mirth. “It just struck me funny, that’s all. You see, that man in there is dying, and when you mentioned tearing him limb from limb – well, I don’t know – we’ve just had a go at that.”

“What does she mean?” asked the mystified artist, turning once more to his wife.

“She means,” said Mrs. Galt coldly, “that some homicidal maniac has hit that man on the head with a blunt instrument. And I hope you give me credit for having better taste than to prefer a man with a couple of yards of beard – although I shouldn’t expect much, seeing that I married you.”

Galt was too stunned to take up the insult. When he reached the bed he roughly turned the body over. Then with shrinking eyes he looked down on the bearded face of the ruin he had created.

“Quick!” he called out. “Somebody run for a doctor. If this chap dies your father is a murderer.”

Immediately the room was jammed with Galts, all talking at the same time.

“How do you mean, you’re the murderer?” his wife wanted to know.

“I did it,” said Galt hoarsely. “I nipped him over the head with the twins’ lead pipe.”

Mrs. Galt’s furious eyes sought for and found the twins.

“What did I tell you about that pipe?” she cried. “Now see what you have done! You’ve made your father a murderer, that’s what you’ve done; and God knows he was bad enough as he was. I’ve thrown that pipe away, and what happens? Back it comes. Back comes the pipe. Right into the house.” Pausing for a much-needed breath, she turned on her husband: “Why did you nip him over the head?” she inquired in a perfectly matter-of-fact voice.

“Well, you see, my dear,” Galt began in a weak voice, “tomorrow is your birthday, you know, and quite naturally I wanted to give you a bit of a present, and I didn’t have any money at all; so when this chap —”

“Don’t go on,” interrupted Mrs. Galt. “Don’t reconstruct the crime. Save it for the judge.” Helplessly she looked at the assembled faces. “Isn’t this terrible?” she demanded. “Isn’t it? Think of it, children! Your father has given your mother a bearded cadaver for a birthday present! Nice of him, wasn’t it? Jolly. Many happy returns of the day.” She laughed hysterically.

“But, Susie,” protested the artist, “I didn’t have any money, and —”

“Don’t call me Susie at a time like this,” his wife cut in. “Don’t call me Susie at any time unless you want to start a riot; I won’t be called Susie by a man with blood on his hands. And he gives me a corpse for a birthday present! I can’t get over that. A corpse with a flaming beard. And I’m just fool enough to tuck it into our bed, beard and all. What a birthday present!”

With a pained expression Galt gazed back at his wife.

“A nice family,” he muttered. “Just a lot of pals. There you stand, the lot of you, callously laughing your father into the electric chair, when you should be getting a doctor.”

Sue Galt doubled up and pointed to the still figure in the bed.

“My present!” she gasped. “All mine.” She straightened herself again, and with brimming eyes regarded the demoralized face of her husband.

“Had I known you enjoyed murders so much,” he re-marked, “I’d have taken up the practice earlier.”

To the infinite surprise of everyone present Sue Galt suddenly flung her arms around her husband’s neck and hugged him ruthlessly.

“What a man!” she said to his neck. “What a man! To give his wife a birthday present he’d actually commit murder! I must have at least one kiss.”

She had it, while Galt remained stupefied. Such endearments had become rare.

“We haven’t any time for all these goings on,” he said rather feebly. “Must get a doctor.”

“You go,” replied his wife. “Look for a cheap one.”

“I can’t be seen on the streets in these shoes,” he protested, looking at his feet.

Sue’s eyes followed his gaze, then fairly snapped to the feet of the man in bed.

“Borrow his,” she said. “They’re dandy. Might just as well make some use of him.”

“Do you mean,” said Galt, “that you actually suggest I step into a dead man’s shoes?”

“Easier to step into a dead man’s shoes than a live one’s,” his wife logically replied. “And anyway, he’s not dead yet – not entirely.”

Fearfully the artist allowed his gaze to rest on the feet of his victim; and as he did so he experienced a pang of envy. Those turned-up feet were shod in exquisite boots. And they looked to be about the right size. As if fascinated, he moved to the bed and began to unlace the shoes.

“I’ll just try them on,” he muttered. “Just to prove to you they won’t fit.”

While Galt was straining at the injured man’s feet the stranger suddenly opened his eyes and gazed at the artist with an expression of dying reproach. Breaking out into a cold sweat, Galt sprang from the bed.

“He opened his eyes,” he quavered, “and he rolled them at me.”

“Nonsense,” said Sue briskly. “The way you go on, one would think he flung them in your face. Here, let me at those feet.”

In a businesslike manner she began to tug at the man’s shoes. A hollow groan escaped his lips.

“Oh, God!” exclaimed the artist, clapping a hand to his forehead. “I can’t stand here watching this. The poor chap is groaning in anguish.”

“He’s got nothing on me,” complained Mrs. Galt. “I’m actually grunting. Ah! Off they come! Did you ever see snappier shoes?”

In the privacy of his studio Galt put on the shoes of the wounded man. They fitted his feet perfectly; and in spite of his self-repugnance, his spirits rose a little. When he re-turned to the bedroom they fell with a decided thud. It seemed to him that all the hands in the Galt family, including those of the twins, were on some part of the man’s person, the majority being in his pockets.

“He’s practically penniless,” complained Sue. “So far we’ve been able to find only three dollars and seventeen cents. A man who wears such expensive shoes should carry a fat wallet. We must have money, you know.”

At the mention of the missing wallet Galt turned even paler than he had been before. He had not the heart to tell his wife that in addition to brutally assaulting the man he had also stolen his wallet. It seemed to him that there was a little more dignity in being a murderer than a common thief.

“I’d leave him to his own devices,” he said, “until the doctor gets here. If you keep on tossing his body about we won’t need a doctor.”

A quarter hour later, when Galt returned with a doctor, the artist was both gratified and surprised to find his victim still alive and intact. The first thing the doctor wanted to know was the name of the patient.

“It doesn’t matter who he is so much as how he is,” Mrs. Galt answered.

“Madam,” said the doctor sharply, “I’m not going to argue with you.”

“Thank God for that!” said Mrs. Galt.

The little doctor made no reply. Instead he devoted a vast amount of nervous irritation to the man in the bed. When he had finished examining the wound and dressing it he turned and faced the standing army of Galts.

“What,” he demanded in an exasperated voice, “are all these strange- looking people doing in here? It looks like a mob scene. Those small, soiled children should be removed at once.”

“It’s affection,” said Mrs. Galt promptly. “Pure affection. How is he, Doctor?”

“The patient is a very sick man,” replied the doctor. “Must have absolute quiet. Can’t be moved or disturbed in any way. A slight concussion, but it can be dangerous. Very.”

“How long will he be in my bed?” Red Galt wanted to know.

“Our bed,” corrected his wife.

“Maybe two weeks. At the least, ten days,” said the doctor. “That is, if he lives.”

Galt drew a quick breath.

“Who is he?” asked the doctor.

“He’s our uncle,” was Mrs. Galt’s unexpected reply, while the rest of the Galts stared at her in astonishment.

“Whose uncle?” snapped the doctor. “There are all sizes and ages present.”

“Oh,” replied Sue vaguely, “you know. He’s everybody’s uncle. It’s like that.”

“He isn’t my uncle,” retorted the doctor. “What’s his name?”

“Uncle Galt,” said the artist’s wife.

“It isn’t enough,” replied the doctor with rapidly rising impatience. “Hasn’t he any more to his name than that?”

“No,” said Mrs. Galt. “He might have had once, but we just call him Uncle Galt. You know how it is.”

“I do not,” retorted the doctor. “And I can’t bring myself to write out prescriptions just for Uncle Galt. It would look silly. Can’t you remember the rest of it?”

“George Washington,” said Mrs. Galt explosively. “That’s it, George Washington Galt.”

“That’s something,” replied the doctor as if talking to himself, which was a much wiser thing to do when one was dealing with Galts. “George Washington Galt,” he went on. “Sounds a lot like Harlem. It doesn’t matter.” Here he ceased muttering, to scribble off several prescriptions, which he handed to Mrs. Galt. “Get these filled at once,” he told her, “and follow instructions closely. Take his clothes off and put him to bed. No noise at all. How did it happen?”

“He ran into a door,” said Mrs. Galt.

“They all do,” replied the doctor cynically. “I’ll be back this evening.”

“Must you come back?” asked the lady in tones of deep anguish.

“Certainly,” snapped the doctor. “Unless you want George to die.”

“That would never do at all,” hastily put in the artist. “We want George to live. You don’t know how much we do, Doctor.”

“Well, he may pop off anyway,” the little man heartlessly observed. “I know I would, with all these faces around me. Chuck ’em out of the room. That will be five dollars.”

“If everybody will stay here,” said Sue Galt, “I’ll go get it.” At the door she paused and looked archly back at the doctor. “I have to keep the money hidden,” she explained. “There are so many thieves about.”

The little doctor started slightly, then surveyed the assembled thieves with professional interest. The thieves in turn calmly surveyed the doctor.

That evening the stranger unexpectedly regained consciousness. The circumstances attending his return to reason were not auspicious. It so happened that the twins had selected that moment for a minute examination of this new and altogether fascinating face. The room was quite dark when the patient came to and found himself being unwinkingly stared at by two pairs of large round eyes. In his fevered imagination the man concluded that these eyes, so close to the ground, could belong to nothing less than a couple of wild animals. Uttering a shriek of mortal terror, he fell back into bed in another dead faint. The Galts, always willing to run in any direction, ran madly in the direction of the shriek and began to chatter round the bed with all the sparkle and animation of a French picnic.

“Has he passed beyond?” asked the spinster sister in a hollow voice.

“I hope so,” replied Mrs. Galt, “if he’s going to kick up a racket like that.”

“He’s passed beyond the limits of good taste,” observed Fanny. “I hate shrieks in the night.”

Galt laughed mirthlessly.

“That’s one of the few things this house is ever full of,” he said. “Shrieks by day, and shrieks by night.”

“You’d better go shrieking for that doctor,” Mrs. Galt told him.

This time the little doctor was even more disgusted than on his first visit.

“Why don’t you ask in the neighbors,” he inquired in a nasty voice, “and make a real party of it?”

Not a Galt answered. They were impervious to any form of sarcasm or insult. Then a voice spoke weakly from the bed, and all eyes turned in that direction.

“Doctor,” complained the voice, “is this place a railroad station or a skating rink? More people come dashing back and forth through this room than in the Grand Central Terminal. A moment ago I caught a couple of animals trying to crawl into bed with me. I never saw such people. Don’t they ever sit down?”

“Don’t you call my children animals,” Sue Galt cried, angrily confronting the sick man. “I’ll have you to know they’re my twins. Look at them, Doctor.”

“Why?” demanded the doctor. “Why should I look at your twins?”

“I don’t know,” replied Sue. “I’m rather tired of looking at them myself; but just the same, they’re not animals.”

“Madam,” said the doctor severely, “I have neither the time nor the inclination to discuss your twins. My duty in this house is to protect this patient. I must have a nurse.”

Had the doctor deliberately striven to drive the Galts into an emotional frenzy he could not have set about it more expeditiously. He was almost mobbed.

“A nurse!” cried Mrs. Galt. “That’s just great, isn’t it? And what are we going to use for food – the nurse? And who is going to pay her wages? The NRA, I suppose.”

“By rights,” said the doctor calmly, “you should have two nurses.”

“Did you hear that?” Mrs. Galt whispered. “If that man keeps it up I’ll need a couple of nurses myself. What does he think this is – a death watch?”

While this was going on Red Galt was trying to avoid the eyes of the stranger. At any moment now the artist expected to be discovered and denounced. Once he caught the man gazing intently at his feet. Galt broke into a cold sweat.

“Doctor,” said the stranger, “I don’t seem able to remember a thing. I don’t even know who I am.”

“That’s easily settled,” the doctor told him. “Your name is George Washington Galt, and, according to this lady, you’re all these people’s uncle. Does that make you feel any better?”

“My God, no!” said the man. “It makes me feel worse. Can’t I go home?”

“You are home,” continued the doctor soothingly. “You live right here with your family.”

For a full minute the stranger savored the honor of this shocking information, then turned his eyes to the doctor.

“I must have led a terrible life,” he observed. “Perhaps it’s just as well I’ve forgotten most of it. It’s better to be among one’s own, I dare say. I’d not like to be obligated to strangers.”

“What’s that he said about not being obligated to strangers?” Sue Galt broke in. “Why, that man owes me five dollars already, not including the prescriptions; and now with the expense of the nurse —”

“Madam,” interrupted the doctor, “your own flesh and blood, remember.”

“I won’t have any of his flesh and blood,” Mrs. Galt answered furiously. “He’s my husband’s brother. He’s not mine.”

“And he’s not our uncle,” put in one of the twins – only to have his mouth covered by half a dozen hands.

“How did this happen?” asked the stranger. “Was I in an accident?”

“We won’t worry about that now!” said the doctor.

“No,” agreed the artist quickly. “Don’t worry your head about how you got hurt. It’s important to all of us that you get well.”

“You might as well tell him,” said Mrs. Galt in a malicious voice. “He’s your brother, and he should be told.” She turned to the man in the bed. “If you must know, George,” she continued, “you came home that way again, and after falling all over the place you ran into a door.”

“Do I get drunk?” asked the stranger, his eyes bright with alarm.

“Do you get drunk?” Sue Galt repeated, and answered her own question with a harsh laugh.

This was too much for Fanny. She covered her face with her hands and leaned weakly against her father.

“Is that girl one of my nieces?” asked the stranger. “She is,” replied the doctor.

“Then I have very little to live for,” murmured the man.

As a result of the presence of a nurse in the house, the spinster sister was forced to sleep on the sofa, while the artist and his wife occupied chairs. Whenever Sue awoke during the course of the nights that followed she made a point of thanking her husband for his lovely birthday present. The children with their customary generosity remained comfortably in bed.

In compensation for the discomfort she was forced to endure Mrs. Galt succeeded in borrowing every penny the nurse possessed, so that the poor woman was forced to become a part of the family, whether she liked it or not.

At the end of his first week in bed the stranger was eating his head off. As a consequence the Galts became more deeply indebted to the local provision dealers. The doctor insisted that George Washington Galt should be given only the best and most nourishing of food.

Red Galt was by this time wearing his victim’s suit as well as his shoes. Sue wanted him to make use of the man’s socks and underwear, but this the artist refused to do. Attired in this borrowed outfit, he had made the rounds of the advertising agencies and had landed a few cash jobs. In spite of this slight relief, however, the problem of maintaining the recently acquired uncle was daily becoming more serious.

As soon as the man had regained his strength Galt made a daily practice of taking him out for long walks and trying to lose him. Frequently it was the stranger who found his way home first.

“You can’t tell me there’s anything wrong with that chap’s memory,” Galt complained to his wife after one of these unsuccessful expeditions. “I’ve left him in every out-of-the-way corner of this city, and damned if he doesn’t get back like a homing pigeon. He must have been a postman once.”

Mrs. Galt grinned at her husband.

“Next year,” she said sweetly, “I’ll be satisfied with just a couple of elephants for my birthday. Nothing elaborate, you know.”

Then the arrival of a long letter from their eldest daughter Bonnie, who was studying music in Rochester, momentarily created a diversion – not that diversion was necessary in the crowded days of the Galts. The young lady wrote to inform her mother that she would be almost immediately among them. Something had happened which was worrying her greatly, and she felt sure that her mother would be helpful.

Sue put down the letter and looked thoughtfully at her family, including Uncle George.

“I hope,” she said quite distinctly, “I’m not about to become an illegitimate grandmother.”

On the day of Bonnie’s arrival Red Galt played his last card. He took the stranger to one of the busiest places he knew. It was a railway terminal where trains, subways, taxicabs, and humanity struggled for survival. Here he excused himself for a moment, and never came back. When the artist got back to the flat he was jubilant over his success. The stranger had not preceded him. But as the hours passed he found himself strangely missing the man he had both assaulted and abandoned. His feelings seemed to be shared by the other members of the family.

The nurse, who by this time had been taken almost too fully into the confidence of the family, sat rocking placidly.

“It leaves me in a difficult position,” she observed. “Here I am a nurse without a patient.”

“We’re all patients,” declared Mrs. Galt. “This family should live under observation, especially its criminal head.”

“Mr. George, or whatever his real name is,” went on the nurse, “admitted to me that he didn’t dislike you all too much. I don’t myself. Do you think there’s ever going to be any money?”

Mrs. Galt thought not, but a sudden ringing of the front doorbell put an end to the conversation. Everyone save the artist hurried nervously from the room. He rose and stood listening anxiously.

“Dear, dear me!” he heard his wife exclaim in the hall,

“My birthday present is back again. Where have you been, George?”

Before George could say where he had been Red Galt heard the voice of his eldest daughter.

“He’s been wandering around the station dressed like a tramp,” she said. “That’s where I found him.”

“Why, Bonnie,” said Mrs. Galt reproachfully, “he’s wearing your father’s best and only suit. You shouldn’t say such things, even though they’re true.”

“Well, I’d like to know,” the artist heard his daughter say, “why on earth my fiancé is wearing my father’s suit?”

“He’s been doing more than that,” came Sue’s reply. “He’s been sleeping in your father’s bed. Tell me, dear, just who is this gentleman?”

“His name is Worthing Wright Taylor, and —”

“You don’t mean the famous art critic and collector?” broke in Mrs. Galt in an appalled voice.

“None less,” replied her daughter. “And he is going to become a member of your family.”

“He already has,” said Mrs. Galt.

“On the day he so strangely disappeared,” Bonnie continued, “he was coming to call on you. He doesn’t know what happened to him.”

“Now I do,” came the familiar voice of the erstwhile George. “The pleasant shock of so unexpectedly encountering you, Bonnie, has completely restored my memory of things past and present.”

Upon the reception of this news a low groan escaped the artist’s lips. Retreating to the next room, he hastily divested himself of his borrowed clothing and placed it on the bed. It was quite a blow to his feet to be separated from the shoes. Then he stood listening fearfully as the family trailed into the front room. Mrs. Galt was laughing softly.

“Do you remember everything?” she asked the restored mind.

“Too much,” replied the great man.

“That’s just wonderful,” said Mrs. Galt. “Then you can appreciate how funny it all is.”

“Oh, fully,” replied Mr. Taylor. “In all its phases. But it’s hard to figure out who the joke is on.”

“My husband will be so happy when he hears about all this,” added Mrs. Galt. “He has a remarkable sense of humor.”

“Why does she torture me?” Galt miserably asked himself.

He was stricken by the enormity of his crime. He had assaulted his future son-in-law, one of the wealthiest and most influential art collectors in the country. Not content with that, he had stolen the man’s wallet, bereft him of his clothing, and repeatedly tried to lose him. One man could hardly do more to another fellow creature.

It was at this low tide in the life of Red Galt that his twins came staggering in from the outer hall with their arms laden with toys and their mouths filled with candy. With a suppressed exclamation Mrs. Galt collared them.

“Where did you get all those things?” she demanded.

“A nice man gave them to us,” mouthed one of the twins without the slightest hope of having his invention accepted.

As he spoke a fat wallet slipped from his blouse and fell with a dull plop to the floor.

“At last!” exclaimed Mr. Taylor, stooping to pick it up. “I remember this too. It’s mine.”

When he opened the wallet Mrs. Galt turned pale at the sight of so much money.

“God will never forgive you,” she said in a choked voice to the twins, “for keeping all that money from your mother.”

Unable to look on the scene longer, Galt removed his eye from the slit in the portières and fled in his underwear to the studio, where he stood looking about like a trapped animal. A voice from the doorway made him whirl about.

“My brother!” said Mr. Taylor, smiling at him enigmatically from the doorway. “Don’t you recognize your brother George? I drink, you know.”

Without attempting to reply to this playful greeting, Galt picked up the lead pipe and handed it to the man.

“Go on,” he said. “It’s your turn now. You will find your clothing neatly folded on the bed.”

With the lead pipe nicely balanced in his hand, Mr. Taylor followed the artist across the room.

“You perhaps are not aware of it,” he said, raising the pipe to a striking position as Red Galt flinched, “but that oil thing over there is a little masterpiece. Splendid, really. What price?”

“Absolute silence,” answered Red Galt in a low voice. “Is it a deal?”

“Done!” cried Mr. Taylor. “And I’ll throw in my shoes to boot.”

LAZY BEAR LANE

DESCRIPTION

An unhappy elderly couple are transformed back into children by a magical bear who takes them down the road to share new adventures, gathering up cowardly lion twins, redundant circus performers and a ship with an all-penguin crew. Lazy Bear Lane was Thorne Smith’s only children’s book, and its wonderland of innocence deserves to be read again and again.

Dedication

DEDICATION

For My Daughters
June and Marion

In memory of Cabane Bambou and a Lazy Bear with a Lively Squirrel wandering now in spirit among the pines of Esterel Plage. Also for all other nippers who like slightly peculiar animals and people with just a touch of magic to help the author out of difficult situations.

Chapter 1

The Unwanted House

Peter and Mary lived in the little old house. It was a square house and not at all interesting. To Peter and Mary it had never been interesting. And what’s more, it never would be interesting.

It was just like having too much of something you didn’t want or wanting too much of something you didn’t have – and never could get.

It was a house that nobody wanted.

And Peter and Mary could not find it in their hearts to blame anyone for not wanting the house. They didn’t want it themselves.

Certainly not. Why should they?

Even the field mice, who were not at all particular about the houses they visited, turned up their noses at the house in which Peter and Mary lived. Of course the field mice might have done this because there were never any refreshments in the house to make a visit worth the time and trouble, but for all that it does not make you feel any better to have a field mouse turn up its nose at your house. And you don’t have to be so very fond of field mice to feel this way about it, either. It’s just a feeling you get.

“The least they could do,” complained Peter to Mary one Thursday in August, “would be to creep in and take a quiet look about on the off chance that just possibly there might be a little something worth nibbling.”

“And if one ever found anything,” she replied, “it would be that field mouse’s last meal. The poor thing would never leave this house alive. You’d fight for that nibble to the bitter end.”

“And why not?” asked Peter. “If it’s a mouse’s life against mine, I intend to do my best.”

But no. It seemed to be generally understood among local field mice that there was never anything worth nibbling in that house.

“Never waste your time on it,” one old dowager field mouse kept reminding her grandchildren, her great-grandchildren, and incidentally her great-great grandchildren. “It’s not that they don’t know how to set a good table, but they never have anything to set, the poor dears. Just a table, and not much of a table at that. I’m sure I don’t know how those two old people ever manage to keep body and soul together.”

This so worked upon the sympathies of a certain young field mouse that one day when it found a nice piece of cheese in a rich man’s pantry it nearly brought it to Peter and Mary. It nearly did so, but while thinking of how much they were going to enjoy it, the little fellow grew so excited that it ate the cheese all up. The heart of the little field mouse was in the right place, but unfortunately, so was its stomach. And that’s where the cheese went.

So the field mice kept away from the house. Not even passing tramps came to the back door to beg for food. There was just as much back door to the house as there was food inside it, which means there wasn’t any back door at all.

This made no difference anyway. The moment a tramp set eyes on the house, he would lose his appetite. This, in a way, was a good thing because the tramp wasn’t hungry any more, which is nearly as good as having had a delicious dinner, but not quite so good. The tramp would go away without his appetite but also without the pleasant memory of having tasted anything nice to eat. This would make him feel puzzled, and tramps hate to feel that way because it makes them tired, which they always are anyway, so after all, perhaps it made no difference. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Not much.

To begin with, no magic could ever happen to such a house. Peter and Mary were sure of that. This was one of the reasons why they had never been so fond of the house. Both Peter and Mary, as old as they were, still believed in magic and had believed in it through all the long years of their lives. Every day and every night they had hoped for magic, but so far no magic thing had ever happened to them.

Magic had passed them by.

On this day, Mary was looking out of the window.

She could see nothing much but sun-baked mud and old tin cans. She had seen those same old tin cans so long that she knew them all by heart. That is, she knew exactly where each one of them lay and just how many there were. Peter refused to look at them, because they made him even more hungry than he was. There was nothing green near the house, no grass or bushes, but far off Mary could see tall trees, rolling fields, and green hillsides. They were happy places to be in, cool, amusing places, but the rich farmers and their families lived over there.

And as Mary looked she was thinking of the days when she and Peter had green fields and trees around them and a nice house of their own. And somehow the old smile would not come back to her lips when she turned to look at her husband, for in her heart she was sad and wanting a bit of a change for both of them.

Peter was sitting cheerfully on his stool. He was cheerful because he was making up a poem about the house. He never grew tired of doing this, because it always made him feel better.

Mary listened to him as he announced in a loud voice:

THE UNWANTED HOUSE
By Peter

“This house is only a box –

Oh, dear, what a horrible house! –

It will fall if anyone knocks,

It’s too bare for even a mouse.

“This house has only one room,

So it’s easy to keep the place neat.

There is no space for a broom –

It’s nearly too small for our feet.

“This house has nothing on top.

There isn’t even a cellar.

Wherever you go you must stop –

It simplifies life for the dweller.

“There is nothing to carry or fetch.

A stamp would carpet the floor.

My legs, whenever I stretch,

Must wait till I’ve opened the door.

“My wife, my silly old spouse,

Is feeble and foolish and lame,

She brought me to live in this house.

I hold her entirely to blame.”

There is no telling how long Peter would have kept on with this poem if Mary had not interrupted him.

“Listen to me, old, old man,” she said, “it’s time we were thinking about supper.”

“Very good,” replied Peter, agreeably. “Let’s think about supper.”

So Mary sat down opposite Peter on another stool and both of them thought about supper, which was quite easy to do because there was no supper to think about.

“I’m all tired out thinking about supper,” said Peter at last. “Let’s think about no supper. That’s much more reasonable. I’m no good at thinking about something that isn’t. How do you do it?”

“You just keep on thinking until it is,” said Mary, “or until you see that it’s going to stay isn’t or not.”

“Do you mean,” asked Peter, “that if I sat here and kept on thinking of a nice beef stew for supper we’d really have that stew?”

“If you had any brain to think with,” said Mary, and added, “but you haven’t.”

Now, while Peter was thinking, he was looking at the pages of a seed catalogue. In this book there were lovely pictures. There were pictures of big red tomatoes, pearl white onions, and slim golden carrots. On another page there were pictures of spinach and peas and beans and ears of corn all in their real colors.

And Peter kept looking at these pictures so hard that he began to feel they really were real. They seemed to pop right out of the pages at him and to fall plop into his lap. It was wonderful – almost like magic.

Peter was paying little attention to Mary. He had lived so long with her that he knew the only way to stop her was to let her talk herself tired or until her face became quite blue from lack of breath. So instead of listening to her he got up from his stool and began to get busy.

“I’ll make her a stew for supper,” he said to himself. “I’ll make her a delicious stew and I know just what I’ll call it. I’ll call this stew I’m going to make:

“Catalogue Stew

Created by Peter

Chief Chef of the

Unwanted House

(patent pending)”

Peter had no idea what the last part meant, the “patent pending” part, but he put it down because he had seen it somewhere and also because it made the whole thing sound more and better.

Peter was like that.

Chapter 2

Catalogue Stew

Now, as hard as it may be to believe, it just so happens that Catalogue Stew is one of the easiest things in the world to make – that is, if you have a catalogue from a reliable seed house. Peter had the catalogue, and so he found it easy.

First he filled a pot with water and put it on the stove to boil. Then he grabbed the seed catalogue and ran a trembling finger through its pages until he came to the one numbered thirty-two. On this page was a lovely colored picture of some tomatoes, carrots, and onions. With a scream of delight he tore out this page and plunged it into the boiling water, stirring it furiously with a long-handled spoon. As if there weren’t a moment to lose he rushed back to the catalogue and, with a finger trembling more nervously than before, searched through it until he had found page forty-five. This was the page that showed a picture of some spinach, peas, beans, and some beautiful ears of corn.

“In they go,” he shouted as he tore out this page, too, and plunged it into the bubbling water.

After stirring it as furiously as he had the other one, he stooped over the pot and thrust his twitching nose into the rising steam.

“What fragrance!” he murmured, showing the whites of his eyes. “What aroma!”

“You’ll burn it,” cried Mary.

“What?” asked Peter.

“Your nose,” said Mary.

“I have,” said Peter, “but not the stew.”

He rubbed his nose recklessly and once more showed the whites of his eyes, which made him look like a horse that had lost all self-control and didn’t care.

“I can hardly wait until it’s done,” he said, waving the spoon in the air. “Burn, nose, burn. I must smell that stew.”

And once more he plunged his burned nose back into the steam.

Of course, all this sort of thing was more than a little trying for Mary. She was sure now that her husband was far gone in madness.

“Potatoes!” he called out suddenly in a hoarse voice, kicking the stool out of the way in his excitement. “Must have potatoes. Can’t get along without them.”

With this he seized the seed catalogue, and with a finger that fairly danced with nervousness, ran through the pages until he found one showing a handsome group of a large family of potatoes.

“Just the thing!” he cried, and snatching out the page he flung himself at the stove and tossed it into the pot.

“Skins and all,” he shouted gayly. “What do we care!”

His eyes darted about the room until they came to rest on a calendar pasted to the wall. Many years ago the butcher in the village had given Mary this calendar. She had brought it home because there was on it a beautiful picture of a stout-looking leg of lamb. Peter’s eyes lighted up as they studied this picture. The very thing!

“You don’t want that old calendar any more, do you?” he asked. “It’s a used-up year. We spent all the time on it ages and ages ago.”

“Oh, not at all,” said Mary huskily. “Not at all. Go right ahead and take it. Take whatever is left in the house. Why not toss in the curtains for good measure?”

But Peter paid no attention to this last remark. He sprang at the calendar and clawed it from the wall. Then he tore the picture of the leg of lamb into small strips and dropped them into the steaming pot.

“There goes the stew meat,” he explained to Mary with a greedy leer. “Won’t it make a beautiful stew?”

“Magnificent,” said Mary. “Gorgeous.”

She sniffed the air delicately, and for a minute or more she felt quite dizzy. The room smelled of paint and glue and printer’s ink and all sorts of eye-smarting odors. She clung on to her stool to keep herself from falling off it, and through the thick air she tried to smile at her husband.

Suddenly Peter clapped one hand to his head. Then he thought. Then he opened his mouth as wide as it would go. Then noises began to come from his mouth, and these noises turned into words. Peter was singing. He was singing this song which later he called:

CATALOGUE STEW
Also By Peter

“Catalogue Stew. Catalogue Stew.

It’s really quite simple and easy to brew.

Just tear out some pages and toss in the pot

And you will have something as likely as not.

“Catalogue Stew. Catalogue Stew.

Delicious and pungent was page thirty-two,

But page forty-five was the best of them all.

The leg of the lamb I removed from the wall.

“Catalogue Stew. Catalogue Stew.

It’s turning a deep and a desperate blue.

Perhaps it will kill us. Perhaps we will live.

I only regret I’ve but one life to give.

“Catalogue Stew. Catalogue Stew.

It smells not unlike an old bottle of glue.

Just stir with a ladle until it gets thick,

Then gulp it down steaming before it can stick.

“Catalogue Stew. Catalogue Stew.

You swallow a mouthful and then you are through.

The thought came unbidden and lodged in my brain.

That’s why I suspect I’m a trifle insane.

“Catalogue Stew. Catalogue Stew.

Someone may like it – I’d like to know who?

A dog wouldn’t touch it, nor even a cat.

But we will because we’re as hungry as that.”

Mary, who was forced to listen to this noise with words, couldn’t decide which was worse, the song or the stew. Peter seemed to think that both were pretty good.

“For a first sing,” he proclaimed, “that’s not such a bad song. As a matter of fact it’s a splendid song and with each singing it will get splendider and splendider.”

Presently he picked up the pot and carried it to the table.

“Bowls! Bowls!” he cried. “Lucky Mary, she gets first whack.”

Mary looked unhappily around her. She felt that this was about the last healthy moment she would ever know. She wanted to remember it. This terrible stew would certainly be the end of her. Even the smell of it made her feel faint.

Mary dipped the spoon into the bowl and raised it slowly to her lips. Nearer and nearer it came. She closed her eyes and was about to swallow down the stew when there came a loud knocking on the door.

“Let me go,” said Mary quickly, as she put down the spoon untouched. “It’s my place to open the door.”

“Who can it be?” said Peter. “No one ever calls on us.”

Mary did not care much who it was. She would have rather faced anything than that terrible stew. Whoever it was, was welcome.

She threw open the door and almost fell right smack into the mouth of a large bear who was politely trying to hide a yawn behind his paw.

Mary suddenly decided that she much preferred stew – even Catalogue Stew – to bears. She wished she had let Peter open the door. And she couldn’t tell you right now if you asked her how she managed to get under the bed, nor could Peter tell you how he managed to get into it and all covered up. Everything happened too quickly. But there they were just the same. Mary was under the bed and Peter was in it. Both of them were shaking so much from fright that the bed began to dance on all four legs, not gracefully but earnestly.

“My word!” said the bear when the yawn had spent itself. “Where did they all get to?”

He looked about the room in a nearsighted manner, then hesitated as if not knowing what to do next.

“I wish that bed would stop shaking,” he said to himself. “It’s making me real nervous.”

Again he knocked, this time on the open door, and waited. He received no answer, but the bed began to dance and shake more frantically than ever.

“Pardon me,” said the bear at last, speaking to the bed as the nearest to a living thing in the room. “Many pardons,” he continued. “They told me you were living here so I took the liberty of looking you up. May I come in?”

“Now I wonder who ‘they’ were?” thought Peter. “I wish they’d mind their own business. I suppose he’ll come in anyway if he wants to. Might as well be polite. Persons shouldn’t tell strange bears about other persons.”

He lifted the blanket just enough to be able to see with one eye.

“Can you come in?” he asked the bear, hoping that he couldn’t.

“In either one of two ways,” replied the bear thoughtfully. “I can make myself smaller or make the door larger. Which would you prefer?”

“The first,” said Peter, wishing the bear would make himself so small that he wouldn’t be there at all.

“Is he coming in?” whispered Mary from under the bed.

“He’s trying to,” said Peter as he watched the efforts of the bear to squeeze himself through the little door.

“Oh, dear, oh, dear,” whimpered Mary. “I wish now I’d swallowed that stew. It’s better to die eating than to die being eaten.”

“Where’s everybody?” asked the bear cheerfully, when he had succeeded in squeezing himself into the room.

“Have some stew,” came invitingly from under the bed. “It’s wonderful stew, Mr. Bear. You can have the whole potful and the bowls, too. Just help yourself. Guzzle!”

“Thanks a lot,” replied the bear quite civilly. “I think I could do with a helping of stew.”

He sank wearily to the floor, stretched his great arms, and let his head sink on his chest. He seemed to have fallen asleep, but presently he sighed deeply and raised his head.

“You know,” he observed dreamily, “there’s a sort of lilt to that last remark of mine. More should go with it. For example:

“I think I could do with a helping of stew.

I’m grateful to you – so grateful to you.

You see, I repeat it because when I eat it

I’d like to know whoever thought of this stew.”

“Not a bad thing at all,” admitted Peter, becoming interested. Then he whispered to Mary, “This bear appears to be a bit of a poet. Also he seems quite lazy. The two things go naturally together. Now poets, whether they walk on four legs or two or carry a cane, seldom eat people. They seldom eat anything at all. Poets are harmless almost to the point of helplessness. You go out and talk to him. As long as we can’t boost him out we might as well make him feel at home.”

“No, you go out,” said Mary.

“I’d much rather you went out,” said Peter.

“I won’t,” said Mary. “That poem was only a lure.”

“What is a lure?” asked Peter.

“A lure is something that makes you believe you want to go somewhere you don’t or to eat something you hate.”

“Oh, I see,” said Peter thoughtfully. “It’s like a sugar-coated pill that gets bitter if you hold it too long in your mouth.”

“More so,” replied Mary. “It’s like playing Open Your Mouth And Shut Your Eyes – then pop! – in goes the castor oil. That’s a lure.”

“I remember,” said Peter. “That happened to me once when I was a small boy.”

“But this is a much more dangerous lure,” said Mary, “because that animal would open his mouth instead – and pop! – in we would go head over heels, shoes and all. He has a terribly big mouth. When he yawned just now the whole room turned red.”

“Oh-o-o-o-o,” groaned Peter at the thought and began to shiver so much that the bed turned over on its side. Mary rolled out on the floor and Peter fell down on the floor. Both of them sat up and held their hands to their eyes.

“Ah, there you are,” exclaimed the bear in a pleased voice. “I was wondering when you were coming out. Come on over and let’s all eat the stew.”

So Peter and Mary picked themselves up from the floor and timidly approached the table.

“Won’t you sit down on the stool instead?” Mary asked politely.

“Instead of what?” asked the bear, blinking.

“Instead of where you are,” replied Mary.

“Thank you, no,” said the bear in a firm voice. “The combination doesn’t work. Either the stool is too small or I am too large. Don’t know which it is, but there is something amiss somewhere.”

“Oh,” said Mary, “I see. Something amiss.”

“Amiss, yes,” repeated the bear sadly.

“If we took the legs off the table,” suggested Peter, “we could all sit on the floor.”

“A splendid idea!” cried the bear admiringly. “I would never have thought of that.”

Peter, much pleased with himself, took the legs off the table while the bear roared his approval. Mary brought another bowl, and then she and Peter sat down on the floor with the bear, but on the other side of the table and as far away from him as they could manage with good taste.

“My teeth fairly ache with hunger,” said the bear, showing his long white teeth and looking first at Peter and then at Mary. He seemed to be trying to decide which of them was the fatter, or rather, which of them was not the thinner.

“You’d be surprised,” remarked Peter carelessly, “but my wife manages to keep her weight wonderfully for a woman of her great age. In fact, she weighs much more than I do.”

“That’s interesting,” said the bear, snapping his jaws and greedily licking his lips. “I was just wondering about that very thing myself. I’m greatly interested in the weights of people, you know.”

“Do try some stew,” said Mary hastily. Then she added in a lower voice: “My husband is a great joker. You mustn’t pay any attention to what he says. There’s lots of good meat on his old bones yet, but perhaps you’d prefer some stew meat first.”

“First!” cried Peter, turning pale. “Why, I’m a mere shadow, a wreck, a skeleton. After the stew no one will want anything more to eat.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” said Mary.

“You begin,” urged the bear courteously.

“Company first,” said Mary and tried to laugh gayly, but her throat only rattled.

“Certainly,” put in Peter. “To be sure. Our guest must be the first to try the stew. We can’t forget our manners.”

“Well, if you insist,” replied the good-natured bear as he dipped up a great spoonful of the stew. “Down it goes.”

And down it did go while Peter and Mary looked on with a show of interest and no little fear.

Suddenly the bear began to act in the strangest manner. At first he looked stunned. Just as if a mountain or some other heavy object like a flatiron had been dropped on his head. Then he shut his eyes tight and tears ran out of them. After this he began to roll from side to side and the most unbearable noises came from his mouth. And when he had finished doing all these queer things he opened his eyes and first held up one paw and then the other as if trying to make sure he could still see them. Finally, he attempted to smile, but his lips only twitched.

“Delicious,” he muttered in a cracked voice. “Overpowering. Did you call it stew?”

“Certainly it is,” replied Peter. “I made it myself.”

“Oh, did you,” said the bear, giving him an odd look. “I never tasted anything quite like it. What sort of name does it go by, may I ask?”

“I’ve named it Catalogue Stew,” said Peter in careless voice as if it didn’t really much matter.

“Oh,” said the bear. “I see. For a moment I thought it might be something you rub on or in. For a sprain, perhaps, or a sore throat. It had the queerest effect on my eyes. I can still see, though. May I have a glass of water? I find it difficult to swallow. Something wrong with my windpipe. Must have caught a sudden cold. Thanks so much.”

He gargled the water Mary brought him and then shook himself.

“Ah,” he said brightly. “I feel much better. First Catalogue Stew I’ve ever eaten. May I see the catalogue?”

Peter brought the catalogue to the bear and the bear looked at it carefully.

“It should make a good stew,” he said at last, then added politely, “not that I mean to imply this is a bad stew. These pictures are beautiful pictures and the company is an old and reliable one. Let me make a suggestion. I think this stew needs just a wee bit more seasoning to make it perfect. Suppose we pour our bowls back into the pot and let me have a try. I have a way with stews.”

So they poured the stew back into the pot and put the pot back on the stove. Then the bear took the catalogue and tore out a number of pages and threw them into the pot. After stirring the stew for several minutes he dropped in the whole catalogue, gave the spoon a last twirl, and turned to Peter and Mary.

“Now try it,” he told them. “And don’t be afraid. This, you will find, is real stew.”

When Mary and Peter tasted the stew they looked at each other with delighted eyes. Never had they even so much as hoped to be in the same room with such a delicious stew. And as for eating such a stew – well, they had never been able to think as far as that. In it they found everything real – corn, potatoes, carrots, beans, spinach, onions, peas, and great fine encouraging pieces of tender meat. Something not everyday had happened to that stew, something magic and unexpected.

So once more Mary and Peter and the bear sat down on the floor. But this time there was no conversation. There was no room in their mouths for conversation. No room for a single word, not even for a short one. Every nook and corner was completely occupied by stew.

Instead of speaking they just kept nodding their heads at one another and swallowing fast and hard.

Peter slapped the bear on the back, and everything seemed just about right.

Catalogue Stew makes things seem that way.

Chapter 3

The Lane That Knocked

When Mary had made the empty pot ring like a bell in her efforts to scrape one last spoonful from it, the three of them sat back and agreed that perhaps they had eaten enough. And when after listening closely to the ringing of the pot they were sure that it was empty, they all declared they couldn’t eat another mouthful. They had had quite enough stew for one day.

“But we must get some more catalogues,” said Peter.

“Lots more,” replied Mary. “A whole stack of them.”

“You won’t need any more catalogues for a long time,” said the bear, looking very mysterious, but neither Mary nor Peter understood his meaning.

“I feel like singing,” said Peter.

“Must you?” asked Mary.

“I’m afraid I can’t stop it now,” said Peter. “It’s been on its way for the past ten minutes. It’s almost here now.”

“Then hurry through it,” urged Mary.

“By all means,” said the bear.

“Don’t rush me,” said Peter. “I must think before I sing.”

“You sing,” suggested the bear, “and let us do the thinking.”

“I’ve finished,” said Peter. “Now for the song, the best part of it.”

And here is the song that Peter sang:

STOMACH SONG
Likewise By Peter

“O stomach mine, fair stomach mine,

My joy, also my pride,

I’ve nourished you with lovely stew –

I hope you’re satisfied.

“O stomach mine, sweet stomach mine,

How long has been the pull!

Do you feel strange that for a change

You find your hollows full?

“O stomach mine, brave stomach mine.

You never once complained

When nothing new was put in you

Although it must have pained.

“O stomach mine, stout stomach mine,

For tears I cannot see.

Through thick and thin you’ve always been

More than a stomach to me.”

“He loves his stomach,” said Mary when she was quite sure Peter had finished. “Always has.”

“Quite tenderly, it seems,” replied the bear, “but that fact doesn’t excuse the last line. There’s something wrong with it. The line doesn’t scan.”

“Doesn’t scan!” cried Peter. “Doesn’t scan!”

“No,” said the bear. “There’s something amiss with the meter.”

“Meet her?” inquired Mary. “Meet whom?”

“Oh,” said the bear. “I see how it is. I won’t go on.”

“You must go on,” urged Peter.

“I can’t go on,” said the bear. “It’s all too hopeless.”

“Someone hasn’t understood something,” said Mary. “I don’t know who or what.”

“It’s all my fault,” said the bear.

“Don’t mention it,” said Mary.

“It doesn’t matter,” added the bear.

And Peter sang:

“Oh, it doesn’t matter

If you chin and chatter,

I feel I’m fatter

So it doesn’t matter.

I know but a smatter

Of this or that, er –

But it doesn’t matter,

Though the rain drops spatter,

For I feel I’m fatter,

For I know I’m fatter.”

“Where were we?” asked the bear, slightly elevating his eyebrows and looking coldly at Peter.

“We were about to change the subject,” said Mary, also looking coldly at Peter.

“Let’s do it,” said the bear.

“Go right ahead,” said Peter, cheerfully. “I can make up a song about anything.”

“Don’t,” said the bear.

“Let’s talk of when we were young,” suggested Mary.

“I’ve never been young,” replied the bear, shortly.

“Strange,” observed Peter. “How did that happen, or should I say, not happen?”

“Well, you see,” replied the bear quite simply, “I’m magic.”

“Magic!” breathed Mary.

“Magic!” whispered Peter.

The thing had happened at last. Magic had come into their lives. They were in the presence of magic. Their eyes grew big and bright with excitement.

“Oh, dear me, yes,” continued the bear. “I’m very magic. I fairly bristle with magic. I’m extraordinilyilyilyily magic. But I can’t magic myself from being lazy. That’s why I’m known as Lazy Bear.”

Mary reached out one hand and Lazy Bear gave a sudden start.

“Ouch!” he cried, looking reproachfully at her. “What did you want to pinch me for?”

“I wanted a magic hair,” said Mary. “And I got it.”

“You must have gotten a handful,” grumbled Lazy Bear, rubbing himself delicately.

“I did,” said Mary. “At least two dozen. See them.”

She held out her hand and showed Lazy Bear a tuft of his own brown hair.

“I don’t think it was at all nice of you,” he said, “but now that you have them, I hope they bring you luck.”

“We need it,” replied Mary. “We’ve been out of luck for years.”

“What would you consider good luck?” asked Lazy Bear.

“To leave this house and to be young again,” replied Mary.

“How young?” asked Lazy Bear.

“A beautiful young girl,” said Mary.

“No,” put in Peter. “That would mean that I’d have to be a young man and that would mean that I would have to go to work. Let’s be younger.”

“How old would you like to be?” asked Lazy Bear.

“Well,” said Peter, seriously considering the question, “I’d like to be old enough to eat anything I wanted and to be able to stay up past eight and to go on adventures and things.”

“That sounds reasonable,” said Mary, “because I could still have time to grow up to be a beautiful young girl on the way back.”

“Yes,” replied Peter, “and we would be able to lead a different life so that when we grew old again we would never have to live in a miserable, uninteresting old house like this one.”

“And we would be able to go to fair, green places instead of being surrounded by flat, sun-baked mud decorated with old tin cans,” said Mary, and added: “How I long for the sight of trees and bushes and a cool, sweet-smelling winding lane.”

“Lilacs, perhaps?” suggested Peter.

“Daisies and hay and blackberry bushes,” said Mary.

“All the lovely old lost things,” said Peter. “The things we used to know.”

While Mary and Peter spoke about the things they loved and wanted, Lazy Bear listened with a kindly light in his great eyes and something very close to a smile on his lips. Suddenly he leaned forward and held up one paw.

“Listen!” he commanded. “Do you hear anyone knocking?”

Mary and Peter listened. Sure enough someone was tapping gently on the door. It was a friendly sort of a tap. It made Peter and Mary feel all warm and eager inside. Their hearts beat a little stronger and their eyes grew brighter and felt less filled with the years they had looked on.

“Shall I answer it?” asked Peter.

“Yes,” said Mary. “You go.”

Peter went to the door and slowly opened it. Lazy Bear looked on with a cheerful expression on his grizzled face. Mary gave a little cry of surprise. And what they saw was really surprising.

At the door stood a beautiful tree. One of its limbs was like an arm crooked at the elbow. And it was this limb with a handful of leaves on the end that had been tapping so gently upon the door.

But there was much more than the tree to be seen.

Where the flat sun-baked mud had once been, and all the ugly old tin cans, now ran a green, sweet-smelling lane. At the end was an open place where fields and meadows could be seen. Far away were forests of trees stepping up the hillside until their branches were filled with stars. And a breeze was running through the lane like a stream of cool fragrance. There was the scent of lilacs in the breeze mingled with the smell of hay and moist blackberry bushes at night.

The tree stood as if waiting.

Everything seemed new to Peter and Mary. Everything seemed new and beautiful. Yet Peter and Mary felt that at some time in their lives they had seen it all before, had lived it all before. And with this feeling came a feeling of youth. They were no longer tired, no longer unhappy. Magic was upon them.

And one by one the wrinkles melted from their faces as the snow of old Winter melts from the hills when young Spring warms the land.

Mary and Peter looked at each other with happy eyes. They joined hands and slowly moved to the door.

The tree stood waiting. The lane was calling to them. And the night was singing with stars and wind.

Slowly they moved to the door until they stood upon the threshold. Then they stopped and looked back.

Chapter 4

More Magic and Mr. Budge

“Never look back,” said Lazy Bear. “If things have been unhappy for you in the past, look forward to better things ahead, and keep working for them.”

“But aren’t you coming, too?” asked Mary.

“Not now,” said Lazy Bear, “but I’ll meet you somewhere along the lane. We’re going to see a lot of each other.”

“But we hate to leave you behind in this horrid old house,” said Peter.

“No house is horrid to me that has a bed in it,” Lazy Bear replied with one of his widest yawns.

He got up from where he was sitting and, going over to the bed, set it upon its legs. Then he lay down in it and pulled the covers up to his chin. Slowly the bed settled to the floor. The top and bottom fell off and only the spring and mattress were left.

“It makes no difference, really,” observed Lazy Bear. “A bed is still a bed to me even when it’s in pieces.”

“Can we do anything to make you feel more comfortable?” asked Mary.

“No one could do anything to make me feel more comfortable,” said Lazy Bear. “I am comfortable. Just the idea of being in bed is enough to make me ooze with comfort.”

“Then goodbye,” said Peter and Mary.

And Lazy Bear, leaning on one elbow, said a Goodbye Poem. This is the way it went:

GOODBYE POEM
By Lazy Bear

“Once a neighbor said to me

While I rested in a tree,

That I was very dull and also crazy.

So I said unto this neighbor

That I loathed the thought of labor,

That I wasn’t dull at all, but merely lazy.

“Here’s the burden of my song

As you tread the lane along:

If you can’t be good at least you can be careful.

Make an effort to remember

Every month is not December.

In all your ways endeavor to be bearful.

“As a parting word to you,

That stuff you thought was stew,

Was about the vilest dish I ever tasted,

But I tried it all the same

Just to show that I was game,

Though my stomach felt a trifle worse than pasted.

“Fare thee well, pip-pip, adieu,

And before the fun is through

We shall meet, I’m sure, in many pleasant places.

Though this parting brings me pain,

I must tell you both again,

Don’t forget to wash your hands as well as faces.

“As you stroll along the lane

You’ll return to youth again

And happy dawns will greet you every morning.

You’ll forgive me now, I pray,

When I most politely say,

Trot along, shove off, good-night, for I am yawning.”

Peter and Mary took the hint and stepped out into the lane. Lazy Bear fell back on the bed and began to snore. His snores grew fainter and fainter as Peter and Mary, hand in hand, walked between the bushes and the trees. They were very happy.

Presently they came to an open place at the end of the lane. Here the path ran across a meadow full of sleeping daisies. Walking quietly and speaking in whispers so as not to awaken the daisies, Peter and Mary passed through the meadow. This may seem funny to some people, but Peter and Mary had not been near flowers for so long they weren’t quite sure how to treat them. They had an idea that the daisies might be very cross if awakened out of a sound sleep. Most people were, they knew.

At the edge of the meadow they came to a cow. They stared at it in astonishment.

“What’s that?” asked Peter.

“Something with a leg at each corner and a head at one end,” said Mary, helpfully.

“And a tail at the other end,” added Peter.

“And horns,” said Mary.

“Then it can’t be a horse,” said Peter.

“So it must be a cow,” decided Mary.

“Don’t hornets have horns?” asked Peter, doubtfully. “And orchestras and shoes? I think I remember hearing about shoe horns.”

“Shoes don’t grow horns,” said Mary scornfully. “They need horns. And, anyway, you can’t milk a hornet.”

“Have you ever tried?” asked Peter mildly.

“Don’t be foolish,” said Mary.

“Then it must be a cow,” said Peter, hoping to impress Mary. “I never take things for granted. It’s not the height of wisdom.”

“Don’t worry about the height,” replied Mary, “but do try to scrape along on the bottom.”

“I’ll try,” said Peter. “Let’s have words with this cow.”

“You have them,” said Mary. “I won’t.”

“Why are you a cow?” asked Peter.

“Why are you a goose?” asked the cow.

“But I’m not a goose,” said Peter, “and you are a cow. Why deny it?”

“I don’t choose to deny it,” replied the cow.

“You can’t deny it,” said Peter.

“I can deny it,” said the cow.

“Then what are you?” demanded Peter.

“I’m a cattle,” said the cow.

“You’re only a part of a cattle,” corrected Peter.

“The better part,” said the cow, with a toss of her head.

“Why?” asked Peter.

“Because I give milk,” replied the cow.

“Bulls give bellows,” said Peter.

“You can’t drink bellows,” said the cow, triumphantly.

“And you can’t hear milk,” cried Peter, thinking he’d gotten the better of the cow.

“Oh, yes, you can,” shouted the cow excitedly. “You can! You can!”

“How?” asked Peter, very much puzzled.

“When you gulp it down,” snickered the cow, dancing on all four legs.

“It’s not polite to gulp,” retorted Peter.

“But you do it just the same,” said the cow, unpleasantly.

“Let’s hear you go moo,” said Peter, hastily changing the subject.

“Let’s hear you go away,” replied the cow.

“I was going anyway,” said Peter.

“Well, go any way, any way you like,” replied the cow, “but don’t stand still. I’m going to sleep.”

“I didn’t mean I was going any way,” said Peter. “What I meant was, anyway I was going.”

“Well, any way you go is agreeable to me,” replied the cow. “ ‘Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once!’ Bet you don’t know who wrote that.”

“Bet you I don’t,” replied Peter.

“You win,” said the cow. “William Shakespeare, a great admirer of cows.”

“He must have been crazy,” said Peter.

“He was – crazy about cows,” replied the cow.

“It all means nothing,” said Peter, bitterly.

“Nothing means anything,” answered the cow, sadly. “Let’s part as friends and never meet.”

“I agree to that,” said Peter. “Come along, Mary.”

As they walked away from the cow they could hear it singing tearfully, “Farewell, farewell, my own true love.”

“I wonder if she means me?” said Peter. “If I thought she did I’d go back and give her a good talking to.”

“That cow has more brains in one of her horns,” replied Mary with a nasty laugh, “than you have in the whole of your skull.”

“Well, just the same,” said Peter cheerfully, “I’m glad I haven’t a horn to have any brains in.”

“If you had you wouldn’t have,” answered Mary, and Peter could think of nothing to reply, so he walked on in silence which he thought was much more dignified. Instead he muttered:

“A cow has more brains in one horn of its head

Than I have in all of my skull,

Yet from all of the things that that silly cow said

I think her exceedingly dull.”

This made Peter feel much more pleased with himself, and after he had repeated it several times, each time louder, he became quite cheerful again.

They walked along through a field of hay until at last they came to a haystack. At the sight of the haystack Peter felt suddenly sleepy. He remembered how that haystack had always made him feel like that.

“Let’s spend the rest of the night here in this haystack,” he suggested.

For once Mary was agreeable.

“All right,” she said. “I’m tired and sleepy, too.”

So both of them lay down in the haystack and started to go to sleep, but just as they were about to drop off they were startled by the sound of a sleepy voice.

“Push over,” said the voice. “Give me room. Give me air.”

“I won’t budge,” replied Mary, stubbornly.

“But you’re sleeping on my face,” protested the voice, then added thoughtfully, “Both of you.”

“I won’t budge,” repeated Mary.

“Nor I,” said Peter. “Not a budge.”

“You will budge,” continued the voice, then added thoughtfully, “Both of you.”

And with that Peter and Mary found themselves tumbled through the hay.

“I won’t budge,” said Mary.

“You have budged, my dear,” replied the voice more mildly, “but don’t budge any more if you can help it. I really must get some sleep.”

“Then I will budge,” cried Mary. “I’ll budge and budge and budge.”

“You seem to have taken quite a fancy to that word,” observed the voice. “If you’d like to know it, my name is Budge, Mr. Budge. If we all budge at the same time we won’t disturb one another.”

“Then I won’t budge,” said Mary, who was not going to let Mr. Budge get the best of her.

“Don’t you see, my dear,” said the voice patiently, “that amounts about to the same thing? Really, now, let’s try to get some sleep.”

“I want to sing,” announced Peter.

“Do you sing?” came the not greatly interested voice of Budge.

“He does not,” replied Mary emphatically.

“I thought not,” said Mr. Budge.

“Well, I do,” shouted Peter furiously.

“My dear fellow,” protested Mr. Budge, “you’ll wake up all the cows, not to mention the countryside.”

“Why ‘side’?” asked Peter.

“I don’t know,” admitted Mr. Budge. “It’s always been said that way, although now that you bring up the point I don’t see why ‘countryback’ or ‘countrymiddle’ wouldn’t sound just as well after you got used to either one of them or both – but really I must get some sleep.”

“First my song,” said Peter. “It’s a lament, and this is the way it goes:

HAYSTACK AT NIGHT
By Peter, As Usual

“Hurrah! Hurray!

For our bed of hay

Hurray! Hurrah!

For our bunk of straw.”

“I don’t know which is the more unspeakable – I mean remarkable,” Mr. Budge hastily broke in, “the voice or the words. Both are exceptional. But really now, do let us get some sleep.”

“Glad you like it,” said Peter. “There was more, but—” And he promptly fell asleep himself.

In the morning the three of them woke up at the same time. They dug themselves out of the hay and stood looking at one another. Mr. Budge was worth looking at. He was a short, little stout man with a round friendly face. He wore dust-colored knee breeches, a red vest, a short green jacket, red stockings, and black shoes with silver buckles. On his head was a top hat, spotlessly white. He carried a long, straight cane of black wood. It had a silk tassel.

“Good-morning,” he said, in a cheery voice. “Did you sleep well?”

“Hardly any,” replied Peter.

“I feel splendidly,” cried Mary. “Never felt better in my life.”

“Tell me,” said Peter. “Is your name Budge, Mr. Budge, or is it just Budge or is it Mr. Budge? Last night you claimed it was Budge, Mr. Budge, which seems almost too much.”

“To children like you,” said the strange little man with dignity, “it’s Mr. Budge.”

“Children!” exclaimed Mary indignantly. “Why, I’m old enough to be your—”

She stopped suddenly when she looked at Peter. During the night the magic must have worked more wonders. Instead of the old, bent, wrinkled Peter she had become so used to, stood a jolly-looking boy of twelve. And Peter, looking at Mary, saw a dainty little girl of ten. For a moment both of them opened both their mouths and their eyes as wide as they would open, then they closed them with a pop to see if they were asleep and dreaming or really wide awake as they hoped they were.

“For a couple of children,” said Mr. Budge, “you certainly took up a lot of room. I had no idea I was talking with a fine little boy and girl. Somehow you seemed different.”

“We were—” began Mary.

“Yes,” interrupted Peter. “We grew young during the night.”

“And I hope more agreeable,” observed Mr. Budge, with just a suggestion of severity in his voice.

“Lazy Bear did it,” explained Mary. “He’s magic, you know. Fairly bristles with it.”

“Lazy Bear,” said Mr. Budge, with a smile. “Know him well. Fine fellow. Splendid chap. Remarkable character – but he certainly deserves his name.”

“He doesn’t seem to mind,” said Peter.

“No,” sighed Mr. Budge. “I fear he has no shame. Well, how about some breakfast?”

“Yes,” said Mary, rather wistfully. “How about some breakfast?”

“To be sure,” said Peter hungrily. “How about some breakfast?”

The two children looked hopefully at Mr. Budge, who looked back at them and smiled happily into their wondering eyes.

“Why, I have it right here,” he said. “Everything good in the world to eat.”

He reached into the haystack and pulled out a great basket. It must have been a magic basket, because among lots of other things it contained strawberries and creams, hot buttered biscuits, seven different kinds of jams, cereal, bacon and eggs, milk, hot chocolate, fruit – but why go on? Everything was there, and more.

Peter and Mary and Mr. Budge made a vigorous go at it.

Hay-sleeping is hungry work.

Chapter 5

The Left-Behind Circus Tent

When everyone had done a great deal of tooth and jaw exercising and swallowed until their throats had not one swallow left between them, Mr. Budge closed the magic basket and looked about him beamingly. He took the children to a near-by brook where they washed their hands and faces in the clear, cool water. As it ran over rocks and pebbles it seemed to be chuckling and laughing about something, but just what it was neither Peter nor Mary had the slightest idea. Perhaps, like them, the little brook was merely glad to be young and alive.

Then Mr. Budge, with his high hat and cane, and Mary and Peter, with the magic basket between them, set out along the roads and country lanes to see what the day had to offer in the way of adventure and excitement. Mr. Budge was just as eager as either Peter or Mary to have a jolly time all day long, and he never seemed to grow tired in his search for anything that would amuse them all. Budge was a man in a million. He seemed to have been especially made for children. Peter and Mary had already grown very fond of him and equally fond of his magic basket. So fond had they become, in fact, that Peter now began to sing a song as they marched gayly through the rollicking young morning:

IN PRAISE OF MR. BUDGE
By Peter, Of Course

“We love to trudge

With Mr. Budge

Along the country lanes,

Because we know

That as we go

He’ll feed us for our pains.

“Our Mr. Budge

Is quite a judge

Of food and other things.

And so I sing

Like anything,

Because the morning sings.

“There is no smudge

On Mr. Budge –

No cleaner man alive.

Because he’s such

We love him much.

We hope his fortunes thrive.

“Oh, Mr. Budge

Did you know ‘mudge’

Means just the same as you?

There is no doubt

I found it out –

It wasn’t hard to do.

“Our Mr. Budge,

He bears no grudge.

We found him in the hay.

The light was dim

We sat on him –

Too bad it wasn’t day.

“Dear Mr. Budge,

Have you some fudge

Within this magic basket?

We love to eat

When things are sweet

Forgive us if we ask-et.

“With Mr. Budge

Through slush and sludge

We’ll take adventure’s way.

We’ll eat and sing

And rip and fling

And with the sun make hay.”

So pleased was Mr. Budge by this little song Peter had made up in his honor that he took the basket from the children and, reaching inside, drew out two bags of warm chocolate fudge with nuts in it. These he gave to Peter and Mary, having first taken a piece of fudge for himself from each bag.

“You know,” he said, quite frankly, “I like that song because my name comes into every verse. That’s businesslike. There can be no mistaking for whom it was meant. I like that.”

Peter, with his mouth full of fudge, nodded his appreciation of this praise.

“But,” continued Mr. Budge, “is it true about ‘mudge’? Does it really mean the same as my name, ‘Budge’?”

Peter swallowed hard and nodded once more.

“Mudge means to move; shift; budge,” he announced in a grand manner. “The word comes from Scotland. It is a good word.”

“You’re a clever fellow,” said Mr. Budge.

“I am,” replied Peter.

Mary cast him a withering look.

“Words, words, words,” she said. “Nothing but words – all empty.”

“Not at all,” reproved Mr. Budge. “I’ve learned something new today. Now I can have printed on my visiting cards:

Mr. Budge or Mudge
Take Your Choice
They Mean the Same.

“That makes two of me instead of one. It’s very important. If I forget one name I’ll be able to use the other. Then I’ll never get lost. I’m very much pleased – delighted. May I borrow a piece of fudge?”

Mary silently extended her bag, thinking to herself as she did so that men were easily pleased. All one needed to do was to say something flattering about them, and they were as happy as larks. She almost felt sorry for Mr. Budge.

They went swiftly along past lakes and castles and through deep, quiet forests in which there were cool springs from which they quenched their thirst. Fudge makes one very thirsty, even magic fudge. And it’s jolly to be thirsty when there’s something cool to drink.

Suddenly at a turn in the path they came upon an unexpected sight. Standing in a field was a small circus tent that looked as if it had been left behind by the main part of the circus.

“We shall have to investigate this,” said Mr. Budge importantly.

“It looks interesting,” observed Peter.

“It is interesting,” said Mary who hated a halfway sentence.

They approached the tent and looked inside and were amazed at what they saw. A real live circus clown with his face painted in the funniest way was sitting on a box. He was holding his head in his hands and looked very sad and dejected. The next moment they saw two lions. A beautiful circus girl in a short fluffy skirt was trying to make them jump through a hoop.

“It’s much too high,” complained one of the lions.

“You must remember we haven’t eaten for days and days,” said the other.

“But we must do something to keep our spirits up,” said the pretty circus girl.

“Then let’s do something else,” suggested the first lion.

“Using up my last ounce of energy to jump through that much-too-high hoop certainly does not keep my spirits up,” observed the second lion.

“Yes,” said the first lion. “Why doesn’t the clown do something to make us laugh?”

“He’s much too sad,” the girl replied. “He never made anyone laugh in his life. That’s why he’s so sad.”

“Well,” said the first lion, “if you hold that hoop about one inch from the ground I’ll try to drag my hollow shell through it just to please you.”

“I’ll do my bit,” said the other lion gloomily.

The girl held the hoop so close to the ground that its rim nearly touched it, and one after the other the lions wearily struggled through. After this, both of them lay down and panted heavily.

“Now I hope your spirits are up for the day,” said the first lion.

“Please take that hoop away and break it into one million small, unmendable parts,” pleaded the second lion.

This was too much for the three watchers. All of them began to laugh. At the sound of this sudden laughter the lions jumped up and tried to hide behind the girl. One of the lions was trembling from head to foot. Its tail shook so fast you could not see it. The clown looked up with a surprised expression on his face, while the circus girl stood her ground bravely as if she were protecting the lions and the clown.

Mr. Budge soon made her understand that he and the two children were friends and not enemies. The girl smiled and shook hands, then she introduced them to the others.

“This is Albert,” she said, pointing to one of the lions. “Stop shaking, Albert, and say something.”

A deep groan was all Albert was able to manage.

“He’s very nervous,” explained the girl. “That’s why the circus left him behind. He can’t stand company. It upsets him. Rudolph, his twin brother, stayed with him so that he wouldn’t feel so lonely. Come here, Rudy, and say something to our guests.”

Rudolph threw back his head and tried to strike such a noble attitude that he lost his balance and fell heavily on his nose. All he was able to say was, “Gr-r-r-r.” It did not sound at all fierce, but Rudolph hoped it did.

“And this is Mr. Bingle,” continued the girl, leading them up to the clown. “He was never able to make anyone laugh, so the circus left him behind. I stayed with Mr. Bingle because I love him in a sort of way, and someone had to take care of him. My name is Floret. I used to ride bareback on the horses, and everyone used to clap their hands and cheer. But there,” she added quite simply, “there was Bingle. The circus left us all behind. Where’s your tongue, Bingle?”

Mr. Bingle heaved a deep sigh and extended a limp hand.

“Very happy to meet you,” he said, brokenly, looking anything but happy.

“His spirits are very low,” said Floret, seriously. “It must have been terrible trying to be funny when you didn’t feel like it.”

“It wouldn’t have been so bad if I had only made one person laugh,” said Mr. Bingle. “Just one person, but I never succeeded.”

“And now that he can be as sad as he wants to,” said Floret, “I think he’s happy in his own strange way.”

“I am,” replied Mr. Bingle. “I’d much rather be sad than not funny. Yes, I am almost happy even though I may not look it.”

By this time Albert and Rudolph had joined the party. They were sitting looking down fixedly at the basket.

“It might have,” said Rudolph to his brother.

“If it hasn’t now it had,” replied Albert. “I’m sure of that.”

“I wonder if there is?” said Rudolph.

“Perhaps we’ll never find out,” sighed Albert.

Rudy glanced up to discover that Mr. Budge had been listening to what they had been saying.

“Just a private conversation about the weather,” the lion murmured, and looked demurely away. In a short time his eyes returned to the basket. His nose began to quiver.

“I know there is,” he whispered to Albert. “I’m absolutely certain. I damaged my nose severely when I unfortunately fell on it just now, but I can still smell food when it is as close to me as that.”

Mr. Budge looked about him with a smile so bright that it almost tinkled like a bell.

“Has anybody had luncheon?” he asked, as if it really didn’t matter. “I haven’t, for one.”

“I haven’t for another,” said Rudy promptly.

“Here’s a third,” chimed in Albert.

“No,” said Floret, in a voice that trembled a little. “We hadn’t got around to luncheon yet.”

“Be honest,” put in Mr. Bingle. “I hate false pride. We haven’t eaten for ever so long save little snatches here and there that Rudy was able to frighten from passers-by. He’s so gentle, though, he wouldn’t hurt a kitten.”

“ ’Pon my word,” said Rudy, “I can’t bear violence. The very thought of it disturbs me.”

“I can well understand that,” replied Mr. Budge, approvingly. “Well, now we must make up for past days of hunger until they are entirely forgotten.”

He placed the basket on a long table and asked everyone to sit round. He did not have to ask twice. Everyone sat round. Then Mr. Budge took from the basket grapefruit, which the lions eyed with disapproval. Next he produced steak, chicken pie, mutton chops, and baked ham. After this came rice, sweet potatoes, and all sorts of vegetables. The twin lions had to rest their chins on the edge of the table to keep their tongues from falling out. Mr. Bingle covered his eyes with his hand. Floret sat at the end of the table like a beautiful little fairy queen. Peter and Mary waited eloquently. Mr. Budge was at his best. He chuckled and buzzed and buzzed and chuckled and nearly exploded when he tried to do both together.

There were milk, tea and coffee, lemonade, ice cream, cup custard, cakes and candy. That was about all. There might have been several other things, but Mr. Budge made sure there was enough.

Oh yes, there were grapes.

Big, glowing bunches of them.

Chapter 6

Winter City At Christmas

It was a remarkable sight to see – a real Clown and a beautiful Circus Rider, two Lions, two children and the beaming Mr. Budge, all eating as fast and as furiously as their arms and jaws would allow them. Floret ate like a little lady, but the rest, I’m afraid to say, were unrestrained to the point of violence. Mr. Budge not only loved to see others eat, but also he loved to do exactly the same thing himself. He set the example so that everyone should feel at home. A desperate eater was Mr. Budge. None better. None more hospitable. A born host.

When Mr. Budge was able to make his voice heard above the gnashing of teeth and the snapping of jaws, he made a suggestion.

“Floret,” he said in a kindly voice, “since the circus has left all of you behind, why not come with us?”

“Hear! Hear!” cried Rudolph.

“Why not?” cried Albert, too full of food to be timid any longer.

Mr. Budge bowed politely.

“You see, my dear,” he continued, “we are going nowhere in particular and everywhere in general and—”

“Does that basket go with you?” interrupted Mr. Bingle rather rudely.

“Always,” smiled Mr. Budge.

“Then, I say, don’t ever let him out of our sight. Let’s go, Floret.”

“Are you going with Mr. Budge or his basket?” asked Floret.

“With Mr. Budge and the children, of course,” Bingle and the lions answered in one voice, but not convincingly.

“Then,” said Floret, “I think I should be delighted to join the party. I’m ready to start at any time. I’m tired of this old tent.”

“Troupers again!” cried Mr. Bingle.

“But it will be ever so much more fun than trouping with that circus,” said Albert.

“Well, it couldn’t be worse,” admitted Mr. Bingle, quite frankly.

“Then it’s all settled,” announced Mr. Budge. “Let’s start.”

And off started the strange party along the winding road. Rudy and Albert kept well in the rear, from which position they would be able to hide themselves in the bushes in case of danger. In the highly strung minds of Rudolph and Albert there was always a chance for something dangerous to happen. As they walked sedately behind the others along the strange road they were already beginning to regret they had been so eager to start out on this adventure. Albert looked timidly from side to side, as if fearing each bush concealed an enemy.

“Do you think it was quite wise of us to have trusted ourselves to this unknown person?” he asked his brother.

“Perhaps not wise,” replied Rudy, “but otherwise we would have starved.”

“Wise and otherwise,” murmured Albert. “I see it. You’re so clever. I never could have thought out that pun. You have all the brains of the family, Rudy.”

“Never mind, Albert,” said the other. “You have the personality – the disposition that attracts.”

“Do you think I please people?” asked Albert, feeling grateful to his brother.

“Yes,” replied Rudolph. “You have what they call charm. Now take me, for example. I’m a sort of rough-and-tumble chap, a fighting, scuffling, knock-down-and-drag-’em-out fellow. People fear me, but they don’t love me as they do you.”

At this moment a branch snapped with a loud noise in the woods, and Rudolph, the brave, once more fell on his nose from fright. Albert gave one gasp and, sinking to the road, covered his eyes with his paws.

“What’s happened to the Twins?” asked Mary, looking back at the terrified lions lying in the road.

Everyone hurried back to Rudolph and Albert and asked them what had happened.

“Ten men with guns came out of the woods and tried to shoot us,” declared Albert.

“Twenty men, brother,” corrected Rudolph. “I counted the gleaming barrels. I just gave them one look – you know, like this” – Rudy lifted his head and tried to look fierce, but only succeeded in looking foolish – “and they ran away.”

“What, the barrels?” demanded Peter.

“Certainly not,” replied Rudy with great dignity. “Barrels can’t run. You know that as well as I do.”

“But barrels can roll,” said Peter. “Did these barrels roll away?”

Rudy tossed his head and refused to answer.

“What a remarkable story!” observed Mr. Budge.

“The Twins are full of remarkable stories,” said Floret, with a smile. She patted the two lions. “Come along,” she told them. “Both of you did splendidly. Peter was only fooling.”

The Twins got up and followed the party.

“I’m dying on my feet already,” said Rudy, in a low voice.

“So am I,” complained Albert. “When we traveled with the circus we always had a wagon to go in.”

“Our present method of locomotion, I think, is vulgarly known as Shanks’ Mare,” remarked Albert. “Frankly, I don’t care for it. I’m exhausted, absolutely done in.”

“It’s snowing,” announced Mr. Bingle with a sigh. “That makes everything better and brighter. I’d love to perish in the snow.”

“But how can it snow in the middle of Summer?” asked Floret.

“The way it is,” answered Mr. Bingle sadly.

“Now that’s a most unusual thing,” said Mr. Budge. “I can’t account for it unless we’re on the road that leads to the Winter City.”

“What is the Winter City, Mr. Budge?” asked Peter, greatly excited at the prospect of a snowstorm.

“It is a city that has but one season. No Summer, no Spring, no Autumn, only Winter – Winter all the year round.”

“What a peculiar city,” said Mary, “I never heard of such a place. Do you think we are going there?”

“It seems so, dear,” replied Mr. Budge, looking troubled. “And we haven’t any Winter underwear or anything.”

At this moment the Twins came padding up in an overwrought condition. “It’s snowing,” they complained, “all over us.”

“And not only you, my lads,” said Mr. Bingle. “It’s snowing all over everybody.”

As a matter of fact it was. The snow was falling faster and faster. In a short time the road was covered with snow. The way twisted ahead of them like a white ribbon. Soon the branches of the trees had gathered in armfuls of soft white flakes. Poor Floret, in her thin short dress, shivered but said nothing. No complaining from her.

“We must hurry to reach the city before the road becomes choked with snow,” said Mr. Budge. “I must find shelter for you all somewhere. The trouble is I haven’t much money.”

“We have no money,” shouted the Twins. “We never have any money.”

“There, there,” said Floret soothingly. “We’ll take care of you.”

“To perish in the snow,” murmured Mr. Bingle. “How beautiful!”

“How horrible!” retorted Albert.

“Bingle, I wish you’d keep those remarks to yourself,” said Rudy. “They don’t help matters at all.”

Peter began to sing. This was his song:

SIMPLE SNOW SONG
In sort of Verses
Another By Peter

I

“The flakes fall

On all.

II

“They’re not large

Nor yet small.

III

“The snow falls.

For snowballs.

IV

“The flakes call:

‘Let’s blot all.’

V

“A white pall

At nightfall.

VI

“That’s all.

That’s all.”

“It’s too much,” commented Rudolph.

“There’s a lovely hopelessness about it,” said Mr. Bingle. “I like the ending, ‘That’s all. That’s all,’ and then there was that bit about the ‘White pall at nightfall.’ Charming, Peter. You’re a poet.”

This praise was quite enough to keep Peter warm until they reached the streets of the Winter City. At first they walked through the Rich Part where all the houses were well lighted and everyone was snug and dry and warm. And as they passed along the streets they saw that the store windows were filled with Christmas trees and wonderful presents. There were all sorts of toys and beautiful decorations. The rich homes had holly wreaths hung in their windows, and occasionally the cold, snow-covered little party could see beautifully lighted Christmas trees inside. Men and women hurried by them with their arms laden with interesting-looking books and packages. No one seemed to notice them. Even the Twins failed to attract any attention.

“Is it Christmas Eve?” Mr. Budge politely asked a man who was waiting at a street crossing.

The man looked at Mr. Budge for a moment, then laughed unpleasantly.

“No,” he said. “It’s the Fourth of July.”

“It’s Christmas Eve,” announced Mr. Budge, turning to the rest of the party, “and I haven’t any presents or anything for you – not even a tree.”

“Not even a roof,” added Albert.

“Don’t mind about us,” said Mary, placing a hand on Mr. Budge’s arm. “You have done your best for us all.”

“Thanks, child,” said Mr. Budge, his eyes looking round and wistful as they dwelt on the beautiful trees and toys in the shop windows. “We all of us love Christmas, though. I wish we could do something about this one. You see, I wasn’t expecting Christmas and so I came totally unprepared.”

“A cheerless Christmas,” muttered Mr. Bingle. “What could be sweeter!”

In the Poor Part of the city the streets were not so bright nor the people so snug and warm, yet even here there were signs of Christmas everywhere. The windows were filled with presents, and tradesmen were delivering trees. Even the poorest person was doing something about Christmas.

Mr. Budge had just enough money to rent a large room in one of the houses on a dark side street. There was a certain amount of trouble about the Twins, but as the old lady who rented the room was almost blind she mistook them for dogs and let them come in. Both of them were in a state of collapse, and had to be helped up the long narrow stairs that led to the room.

Everyone was tired and dispirited and cold and wet. A nice warm supper taken from the magic basket helped a little, but not much. They all knew that it was Christmas and that they couldn’t do anything about it. Their hearts were sad when it seemed that all the hearts in the Winter City were gay. It was Christmas and there was nothing Christmas-y for them, no toys, no tree, no stockings to hang up – nothing.

After supper everyone went to bed. Floret took the children in with her. Mr. Budge and Mr. Bingle shared the other bed. The Twins were given two pillows and a blanket each. They lay down on the floor and grumbled.

“Some folks sleep in beds,” said Albert.

“I know,” replied Rudy. “They’re the lucky ones.”

“You mean the selfish ones,” retorted Albert.

“Walking our feet off the livelong day for what? For this, this hard, cold floor,” went on Rudy.

“Because we’re lions,” said Albert bitterly.

“That’s funny, isn’t it? I ask you. Ha! Ha! Just because we’re lions,” put in Rudy.

“I wish I’d been born a doormat so they could walk on me, wipe their feet on me. They’d enjoy that,” said Albert, with deep feeling verging on tears.

“Aren’t you two ever going to keep quiet and go to sleep?” demanded Mr. Bingle.

“Oh, pardon us,” replied the Twins. “We know we are only lions. Just lions – that’s all. We don’t count.”

As soon as the light was put out they began to shout: “Cover us up! Cover us up!”

“I’ll not cover you up,” growled Mr. Bingle.

“What’s the matter with those lions anyway?” asked Mr. Budge. “We really must get some sleep.”

“They must get some sleep,” remarked Rudy to his brother. “It doesn’t matter about us. Oh, no. We’re merely low, untutored lions – jungle fodder.”

And once more they began to shout: “Cover us up! Cover us up!”

They kept this up so long that at last poor Floret was forced to slip out of her warm bed and to tuck the blankets around the Twins.

“Thanks,” they said. “At least there is one person who cares whether we live or die.”

They were sound asleep and snoring before Floret had gotten back to bed.

In the darkness Mr. Bingle could be heard murmuring mockingly: “Silent night. Oh, what a night! Merry Christmas, all. Thanks a lot for no socks.”

He kept it up for a long time.

It was a strange sort of a Christmas Eve.

The Twins snored in the darkness.

Chapter 7

The Enchanted Christmas Tree

They had a terrible time waking the Twins in the morning. When Floret had gotten Albert to open one eye she showed him the magic basket. At that he opened the other eye and seemed to be thinking – trying to remember something. Then he began to nudge his brother.

“The basket!” he shouted. “The basket!”

Rudolph, at the sound of his brother’s voice, opened his eyes and looked at the basket.

“Didn’t sleep a wink!” he announced. “Might just as well get up as to lie here and ache all over.”

“Terrible headache,” said Albert. “Very nervous. One of my usual spells. I feel like screaming.”

“Don’t,” said Mr. Bingle shortly.

“I hope your bed was comfortable,” replied Albert.

“It was,” said Mr. Bingle.

“Mind if I try it?” asked Rudy, with an immense yawn.

“None of that,” said Floret severely. “You two are going to get up and stay up. This is Christmas.”

“And just what does that mean in our young lives, may I ask?” Rudy demanded.

“Well, you can act as if it were Christmas,” said Mary.

“Act?” put in Albert. “Bah! I’d much prefer to tear my hair and scream.”

Mr. Budge was gazing with sorrowful eyes at the children. They were sitting on the edge of the bed trying to look cheerful, but Mr. Budge could tell they were silently wanting Christmas with all their hearts.

Mr. Bingle also was looking at the children. There was an odd expression in his eyes. He seemed to be looking back through the years to his own childhood, to the days when he had been a little boy waiting with his sisters to see what had found its way into his stocking and to be allowed one glimpse of the Christmas tree before bathing and dressing for breakfast. And then the day of excitement, tasting and examining. At night the lights on the tree. Tired eyes. Happy eyes. Sleep. Dreams of Christmas trees and toys. What a day!

Bingle came back to his miserable surroundings with a start. He could almost catch the spicy scent of his Christmas tree of years ago. He could see that Floret was sitting on the bed with her arms around the children. She was holding them tightly to her. Little Mary’s shoulders were shaking, and Peter had doubled up one small hand into a fist. No, he would not cry. Mr. Budge had turned his back and was looking out of the tiny, dirty window. Even the Twins, who were good sports after all, had given up grumbling. Albert was sitting with his head in Mary’s lap, and Rudolph had laid a friendly paw on Peter’s knee. From next door came the laughter and shouts of children. From the streets drifted a faint murmur of gladness.

Mr. Bingle, in his costume of a clown, with his oddly painted face that looked for all the world like a mask, slapped his hands together and began to walk restlessly up and down the room.

Something had to be done to make it Christmas for the children. For Floret, too.

What?

After breakfast Mr. Budge took the children for a walk. Floret would have liked to go with them, but she had no proper clothing for cold weather. So she stayed at home with Mr. Bingle and the Twins. Two full-grown lions parading the streets on Christmas day might give the wrong impression to many of the jocund burghers, and Mr. Budge had no desire to frighten half of the population of Winter City indoors and the other half outdoors. Anyway, neither Albert nor Rudolph could have been induced to stir from the house. After their fatiguing walk of the previous day they were quite content to remain at home, quietly but steadily complaining about life in general, the state of the nation, and the weather in particular.

Mr. Budge took the children to a great dim church where, far in the distance, at the very end, banks of candles mounted like stars on the black curving roof of the sky. Here they heard the singing of many voices. Music fell like raindrops from the high, mysterious roof of the church. And the hymns of Christmas rose and fell tenderly on the air like waves of kindness.

After they left the church they wandered round the streets and just looked, looking being free of charge and everyone being too happy to care very much whether they were looked at or not. It was cold, dreary business, but at least it made Peter and Mary feel that they were sharing a little in Christmas and not entirely cut off from the general joy and friendly feelings of the day. Occasionally people would stop to look at the queer figure of Mr. Budge with his high white hat and his long black walking stick as he led the children through the streets, a little hand held warmly in each of his. But for the most part those who looked and smiled did so in a kindly way that made Mr. Budge and the children smile back. After such meetings the three of them would feel a little warmer inside and less lonely.

“Did you ever have a Christmas, Mr. Budge,” asked Mary – “with a tree?”

“Oh, yes, my dear,” replied Mr. Budge. “I’ve had many a merry Christmas with a tree.”

“Well, you see, Mr. Budge,” Peter explained, “since we’ve grown young we’ve almost forgotten what went before and we can’t remember very well what happened after. Our minds are all mixed up. So perhaps we’ve had a real Christmas with a tree like other boys and girls sometime somewhere. Do you think so?”

“I’m sure you have,” replied Mr. Budge heartily.

“I’d like to think so,” said Mary rather wistfully.

“I can just remember a horrid little square box of a house with mud and tin cans all around it,” Peter went on. “I can remember that and being hungry all the time.”

“I hope we never go back to that place any more,” said Mary. “It was horrid living there.”

“We must see to it that you never go back,” replied Mr. Budge. “I wouldn’t be afraid of that happening if I were you.”

They were standing in front of a toy shop window, looking in at all the wonderful toys.

“I don’t think I’d like that doll,” said Mary, gazing with big, bright eyes at the most beautiful doll she had ever seen. “I am sure I wouldn’t like that doll at all. Not even a little bit. Its hair is too soft and silky and it’s too dressed up.”

“And that sailboat,” observed Peter, his eyes glued to a splendid sailboat that looked just like a real one. “It isn’t quite right, somehow. I wouldn’t want it. Not for a minute. It’s no sort of a boat at all.”

“There’s not much in this window that interests me,” said Mary, hardly able to take her eyes from all the lovely things she wanted.

“Hardly a thing,” replied Peter, his glance returning to the sailboat. “Let’s move on.”

“Yes, let’s,” agreed Mary. “This is a waste of good time.”

Mr. Budge had listened to this conversation with a mixture of amusement and regret. He knew how badly the children wanted just those toys they had said they didn’t want. He was sorry he could not buy the doll for Mary and the sailboat for Peter, but he could not help being amused at the way they had tried to make both themselves and him believe they did not really want them.

“Hungry?” asked Mr. Budge.

Both Mary and Peter agreed that they were.

“Seen enough?” he asked them.

“We can have just as much fun in our own room,” replied Peter, “as everybody else is having.”

“Well, at least we can eat,” announced Mr. Budge, not without pride. “That magic basket of mine can provide us with as smacking a Christmas dinner as can be set on any table in all of Winter City.”

Cheered somewhat by this thought, the three of them returned to their room.

“Ah, the merry-makers return,” said Albert, gloomily, on seeing them.

“We poor old misfits must stay at home and get our news second-handed,” remarked Rudolph to no one in particular. “I hope everyone everywhere is having a happy Christmas. As for myself, I don’t mind at all. I’m used to being miserable.”

“It’s an old story with me,” sighed Albert.

Mr. Budge patted the two lions, for he knew they were only talking just to hear themselves talk. They enjoyed it.

“You’re remarkable fellows,” he told them. “Never met a finer set of lions. Priceless, absolutely priceless.”

The Twins were delighted by this little speech, but they tried not to show it.

“No, my dear Mr. Budge,” replied Albert, modestly. “I fear you give us too much credit. We are just as you find us. No better or worse than the average run of lion. Of course, if we have some exceptional gifts we mustn’t feel too proud of them. A modest bearing and a humble heart, that’s what I say.”

“Those and courage,” added Rudy, lifting his head nobly.

“And fortitude,” said Albert.

“What’s fortitude?” asked Peter.

“It means, my dear young man, to bear one’s suffering without complaint,” replied Albert impressively. “Always, always remember that. Do we never eat? My stomach is catching on my spine, it’s so empty.”

Floret was sitting on the bed mending her dress, and Mr. Bingle was making inner soles for her thin shoes. He had found some cardboard and was cutting out neat little soles with his pocket knife.

Floret was glad to see Mr. Budge and the children. Mr. Bingle greeted them with a cheerful sigh.

“How goes Christmas on the streets?” he asked.

“Right merrily,” replied Mr. Budge. “We saw lots of things we didn’t want. Isn’t that so, children?”

“There was nothing much in the stores,” replied Peter. “Just a lot of toys and stuff. Trifles.”

“That’s all,” said Mary, in a hollow voice. She was still thinking of the doll with the soft, silky hair.

“Well, I’m glad you didn’t want them,” said Mr. Bingle. “It makes me feel a little less worse.”

“You didn’t happen to run across an old piece of wire, did you?” Floret asked in an easy voice. “Just an old bit of wire no one could possibly want?”

“What on earth do you want to do with an old piece of wire?” asked Mr. Budge.

Floret was looking thoughtfully at the Twins, who were dozing peacefully in a corner.

“You see,” she replied, “I’d like to make a hoop.”

“Hoop!” shouted Rudy, his head jerking up with a snap.

“Hoop!” whispered Albert, so overcome he could scarcely speak at all. “Another hoop! Tell me I was dreaming. Tell me it isn’t true. My ears must have deceived me. Did she dare say ‘hoop’?”

“I think they need a hoop,” continued Floret, disregarding the Twins. “Don’t you? Something to keep them happy.”

“We are happy!” cried the Twins, passionately. “Look at us. See our smiles.”

The Twins drew back their lips and looked simply awful.

“I think I saw an old bit of wire knocking about in the hall,” said Mr. Budge. “Go get it, Peter.”

Peter, enjoying the despair of the lions, hurried to the door.

“Don’t open that door!” screamed Rudolph.

“Come back! Come back!” howled Albert.

When Peter came back with the wire, the lions looked at it once and hid their eyes with their paws.

“It will work,” moaned Rudy.

“It will make a hoop,” sobbed Albert. “A good hoop. A lasting hoop.”

“Jumping, jumping, jumping, all the day long,” groaned Rudy.

“Always in the air,” complained Albert, forgetting all about fortitude. “What does that girl think we are, a couple of birds?”

“Or fleas, perhaps,” added Rudy. “No bird would stand for it.”

It was not until the table was heaped with the most delicious food in all the world that the Twins gave up complaining. They only stopped then because their mouths were too tightly packed to speak. Mr. Budge was right when he said that no table in all of Winter City could hold a better Christmas dinner. When at last it was over, everyone agreed he had spoken truly. No one could think of anything that had been forgotten. Not a thing. Not even plum pudding, nuts, and candy. Mr. Budge had done even better than his best. So that, after all, things might have been worse. For the moment the Twins had forgotten all about the hoop, but Floret had not. She fully intended to make that hoop. The Twins needed something to keep them in their places. Without a hoop they moaned and groaned altogether too much.

So Christmas day wore on and nothing happened – nothing exciting. The children kept hoping against hope that something would. Even Floret began to lose her cheerful spirit. Mr. Bingle could stand it no longer. Suddenly he jumped up.

“I’m going to get a Christmas tree,” he announced, “if I have to grow one. Wait here, everybody.”

He left the room and hurried downstairs. The old lady loaned him an ax. Throwing it across his shoulder like a gun, he marched through the streets. After a long, long walk he came to the open country where the fir trees grew. He entered the forest and looked about him for the right sort of tree. It would have to be a very beautiful tree, because they had nothing to hang on it. After a little searching he found just the tree he wanted, and cut it down. Then he returned to Winter City with it. But as he walked through the Poorest Part of the city he lost all his happiness, for here so many of the little children did not have a Christmas.

“They’re worse off than we are,” thought Mr. Bingle. “We, at least, have food and lots of it. These little nippers look as if they’ve never had a real good meal in all their lives.”

“Give us a piece of your Christmas tree, Mr. Clown,” one of them pleaded. “Just one branch, won’t you please?”

Mr. Bingle had not the heart to refuse. He broke off a branch and handed it to the little boy, who with shouts of delight ran away home with it.

“Mr. Clown, Mr. Clown, give me a branch from your beautiful tree,” begged a little girl holding a baby in her arms.

“How are you going to carry it?” asked Mr. Bingle. “Your arms are full of baby.”

The little girl thought.

“I’ll drag it,” she said at last.

“What, the baby?” demanded Mr. Bingle.

“Yes,” said the little girl. “I mean, no.”

“Oh, you’ll drag the branch?” smiled Mr. Bingle.

“Yes, sir,” replied the little girl. “I’ll drag it.”

So Mr. Bingle gave the little girl a branch from the tree and watched her dragging it home, happier than she had been in many a day just to have something green at Christmas.

As Mr. Bingle continued on through the Poorest Part of Winter City, he stopped many, many times to give away branches to the little girls and boys. And each time he stopped the Christmas tree got thinner and thinner until at last poor Bingle was horrified to see that there was not a branch left, not a single one. What was he going to do? It was too late for him to return to the woods for another tree. He could see the children and Floret and the Twins and Mr. Budge waiting for him back in the room. What would they say to him when they found out he had given their beautiful Christmas tree away?

Mr. Bingle looked at the long, straight, branchless part of the tree that remained. He sighed deeply.

“I might as well bring this back with me,” he said to himself, “just to show them that I really did go to the forest and cut down a tree.”

So with the ax over one shoulder and the limbless tree over the other he returned to the room, first leaving the ax with the old lady who had loaned it to him.

“My word,” observed Albert as Mr. Bingle timidly entered the room, “what a tree!”

“Something must have snapped in the poor man’s brain,” remarked Rudolph.

“Well, for goodness’ sake—” began Floret.

“Wait a minute. Wait a minute,” Mr. Bingle interrupted her, and he started to tell them all what had happened, but he had to stop before he had finished, for Peter, after having looked at Mr. Bingle for a long time and then at the tree, began to laugh. It was the silliest Christmas tree he had ever seen and Mr. Bingle was about the silliest-looking man. Mr. Bingle was so serious about everything that Mary, after giving the tree one look, hid her face in her knees and began to laugh, too.

“What’s the matter with them?” asked Mr. Bingle, looking from one to the other with a puzzled expression on his face.

At this, Floret began to laugh and presently Mr. Budge joined her. Bingle looked at the lions.

“If you start laughing,” he said fiercely, “I’ll tie your tails full of knots.”

But it was too late. The Twins had already started.

“My dear, my dear, did you hear that?” wheezed Albert. “Full of knots, he said. Why full, I ask you?”

“Oh, my stomach. How it aches!” howled Rudy, between spasms of laughter. “Take him away. Take him away. That man will be the death of me.”

Every now and then someone would point at the tree, and then the whole party would break into fresh gales of mirth.

Suddenly Mr. Bingle realized what had happened. He was actually making people laugh. He was more than making them laugh. He was knocking them off of their feet. Mr. Budge had been forced to fall down on the bed. The Twins were rolling about the floor in a state of complete helplessness. Floret and the children were convulsed on their bed and seemed to be trying to cram the pillow down their throats.

Mr. Bingle was delighted, so delighted that he himself began to laugh. He had not laughed in years, so it took him some time to get started, but when he did, his laughter sounded like the neighing of a wild and carefree horse. For a moment everyone stopped in surprise and looked blankly at Mr. Bingle, who was holding to the tree for support and swaying dangerously from side to side. At the sight of Mr. Bingle they all started in again. It was some minutes before they had laughed themselves into an exhausted silence.

At last Mr. Budge found enough breath in his lungs to enable him to talk.

“I say, Bingle,” he said, “that remarkable tree of yours has cheered us all up so much that I suggest we set it up anyway. I’ll wager there’s not a Christmas tree in the city that has given so much happiness to so many people – to so many poor forsaken children, including ourselves.”

“That’s a splendid idea,” agreed Peter. “Let’s set it up in the middle of the room.”

Mr. Bingle had never been so happy in his life as when he saw his Christmas tree, stripped bare of branches and looking very ridiculous, solemnly set up in the middle of the room. Peter had borrowed a hammer and some nails from the old lady. With the help of these and two pieces of wood the tree was soon in place.

“Anybody walking into this room would think we were crazy,” said Albert as he looked at the tree.

“Perhaps we are a little,” replied Mr. Budge. “It’s good to be crazy every now and then.”

Peter jumped up and, sitting down cross-legged before the tree, recited the following poem:

OUR CRAZY CHRISTMAS TREE
One of Peter’s Many

“Our Christmas tree is just a pole.

It’s like a shoe without a sole.

It has no limbs, but what care we?

We love our crazy Christmas tree.

“Our Christmas tree is just a stick,

It’s not so high nor yet so thick.

There are no pretty things to see,

And yet, we love our silly tree.

“Our Christmas tree is just a rod.

It’s like a horse that isn’t shod.

It has no toys nor mistletoe,

In spite of which we love it so.

“Our Christmas tree is woebegone.

It has no limbs to hang things on,

And if it had, no things have we,

But just the same we love our tree.

“Come, gather round our Christmas tree,

And sing a song of what care we!

We’ll nail it down and make it fast –

It’s straight and strong and sure to last.”

This poem was received with great approval by everyone, including the Twins, who as a rule did not altogether approve of poetry, because they never could understand it. They were always too busy counting the rhymes to find out what the poem meant. But in this case they couldn’t help but know that the poem was about the Christmas tree, and although some parts of it were not quite clear to them they liked it because they had been able to understand it a little.

Mr. Bingle was the most pleased of all. He insisted on Peter repeating it so that he could write it down on a piece of paper. This in turn pleased Peter. So everyone was quite pleased and set up and happy. Christmas was not turning out so badly after all.

But when night came over the Winter City and darkness found its way into the room, the most wonderful thing of all happened. Beautiful silver branches suddenly sprang out from the Christmas tree, and the limbs were filled with glowing light. Not one of them, not even Mr. Budge, had ever seen such a truly lovely tree. All they could do was to gasp. The light from the tree shed a soft, tingling radiance over the room. And in this light they could not help feeling happy. It had that effect on them. Then slowly the silver Christmas tree began to turn round, and as it turned, soft, sweet, tinkling music came from it and filled the room. Never, thought Mr. Bingle, had Floret looked so beautiful as she did then sitting there listening to the music of the Christmas tree.

Peter and Mary listened, too, but they also looked, for under the silver, glowing tree were a beautiful doll and a sailboat. There were other things, too, presents for everyone, but Mr. Budge and Mr. Bingle were so happy for the sake of Floret and the children that they would not have cared whether they had a present or not.

After the Twins, who had been terribly upset by this strange, unexpected tree, had been induced to come out from under the bed, they sat on the floor round the tree and listened to the music tinkling through its branches.

“Not bad,” observed Albert, trying to look bored.

“I’ve seen worse,” remarked Rudolph.

“It won’t hurt you,” said Mr. Bingle.

“Who said it would?” demanded Rudolph.

“Then why did you hide under the bed?” asked Mr. Bingle.

“Hide!” answered Albert, scornfully. “That’s good. Did you hear that, Rudolph? He said we were hiding. Why, you silly clown, we were merely looking for something.”

“What?” asked Mr. Bingle, shortly.

“That’s our affair,” replied Albert, mysteriously.

At that moment a knock sounded on the door.

As if moved by clockwork, the gallant Twins returned to look for something under the bed. It must have been something they needed very badly, because they moved with great speed and determination.

“Now who can that be?” asked Mr. Budge of everyone in general. “We’ve paid for the room.”

The Christmas tree kept turning.

Chapter 8

The Return of Lazy Bear

“Shall I go?” asked Peter of Mr. Budge. “No-o-o-o,” came from under the bed in two different keys. “Lock the door. Bolt it.”

“Yes, Peter,” replied Mr. Budge, “you might as well. I can’t imagine who could be calling on us in Winter City.”

“Madness,” shouted Albert from his place of concealment. “It’s an act of sheer madness to open that door.”

“Have you found it?” asked Mr. Bingle, sarcastically.

“What?” came the muffled voice of Rudolph.

“That thing you lost, that valuable thing,” replied Mr. Bingle, gloatingly.

“This is no time for joking,” answered Rudolph, rebukingly. “Perhaps our finish is at this very minute standing outside that door.”

Peter, feeling all excited inside, started for the door, but was saved the trouble. The door flew open and on the threshold stood Lazy Bear yawning tremendously over the top of an armful of bundles. On his shoulder was perched a sharp-eyed squirrel dressed neatly in green.

“How do you do?” said Lazy Bear, quietly, when his yawn had shrunk to the size of a smile. “Squirrel wouldn’t let me sleep, so I thought we’d call on you. May we barge in?”

“May you?” cried Mr. Budge. “Why, you and Squirrel are as welcome as the flowers in May. Come in, come in, my dear fellow. Come in, Squirrel, come in.”

“When he does,” replied Squirrel, pointing at the left ear of Lazy Bear.

“Naturally,” replied Mr. Budge.

“Inevitably,” said the Squirrel.

“What does that word mean?” asked Peter.

“It means something that’s going to happen whether you want it or not,” Mr. Budge told him.

Lazy Bear came into the room and stood swaying on his feet as he looked about him.

“I smell animals,” he remarked at last. “Good! I’m hungry.”

“Save me the pieces,” said Squirrel.

At this, the bed made one wild dash for the door.

The bed was too wide to get through, and striking the wall it fell over on its side. The two lions were left crouching almost at the feet of Lazy Bear.

Albert raised his eyes to one of the bear’s huge, hairy legs. It was too much for Albert. He rolled over on his back in a dead faint. His four paws dangled limply in the air. Rudolph did not quite faint, but he was so frightened that he completely forgot he was a lion and began to meow like a cat. This both surprised and amused Lazy Bear. He stooped over and looked at Rudy. It was then that Rudolph joined his brother in a dead faint. His paws, too, dangled limply in the air.

“I’m pretty good at sleeping,” observed Lazy Bear, “but I’ve never been able to pop off as quickly as all that. They must have sat up all night.”

“They’re not sleeping,” Floret explained. “They’ve fainted. Get some water, Bingle. The Twins are so timid.”

“Easily frightened, are they?” asked Lazy Bear. “I’m surprised. Really, I am. Such big, strapping lions, too! Squirrel, see what you can do about it.”

Squirrel, only too pleased at the opportunity to annoy someone, skipped down from Lazy Bear’s shoulder and began to tickle the noses of the Twins. In a few minutes both of them were sneezing violently, and presently they opened their eyes.

“I’m a nervous breakdown,” murmured Albert to his brother.

“Wreckage,” whispered Rudolph. “Just wreckage. Beyond repair. Finished.”

“Tell that small thing to leave our noses alone,” said Albert.

“Nothing is too small,” replied Rudolph. “You tell it. I take no chances.”

Floret knelt down between the lions and explained to them that Lazy Bear and Squirrel were good friends and that they had brought no end of presents for Christmas.

“How can a creature so awful-looking not be dangerous?” Albert whispered in Floret’s ear.

“Why, that squirrel alone is enough to set me all atwitter,” whispered Rudolph.

At last Floret was able to convince them that Lazy Bear and Squirrel were not dangerous. They got to their feet and said, “How do you do?” very timidly and very respectfully to the visitors. Lazy Bear greeted them in a friendly, soothing voice and gave them each a package, which Floret opened for them. When they saw what was inside, their hearts beat faster with pleasure. In Albert’s box was a lovely piece of wide pink ribbon with a silver bell on it. In Rudolph’s box was a beautiful piece of wide blue ribbon. This also had a silver bell on it.

“Charming,” murmured Albert.

“Just my shade, too,” said Rudolph. “Tie them on us, Flory.”

The Twins held up their heads delicately while Floret tied the ribbons round their necks, making a big bow in each. The silver bells tinkled merrily.

“There,” she said, when she had finished. “Now we can call you Pinkie and Bluie.”

The lions looked a little sheepish at this, but they rather liked the idea.

“Just in fun,” said Albert.

“Yes,” said Rudolph. “Among ourselves.”

“But you must be able to know which is Pinkie and which is Bluie,” Floret told them.

“As if we didn’t know that,” said Rudy, scoffingly.

“I’ll try to remember,” replied Albert. “I’m Pinkie, aren’t I?”

“Right,” said Mary.

And for a long time Albert kept whispering to himself, “I’m Pinkie. Pinkie. Not Bluie, but Pinkie. That’s who I am.”

He kept it up so long that he became all mixed up and had to go to Floret to find out which one he was.

Lazy Bear had brought presents for all. Gloves and new shoes for Mr. Budge and a magic pipe that always refilled itself with the finest tobacco. For Mr. Bingle there was a wonderful watch that never had to be wound and that chimed the hours and half-hours. Floret’s package contained a new dress, new stockings, new slippers, and everything new. And so did Peter’s and Mary’s. There was a pocket knife for Peter, too. And a painting set for Mary. And then, too, the enchanted Christmas tree was filled with other presents. You never saw such a happy roomful. No one was happier than Mr. Budge, for he was busy setting the table. The Twins did not need a mirror to see how fine they looked, because all they had to do was to look at each other. This they did almost steadily, except when they were looking at Mr. Budge and his basket. They were very busy.

Peter decided it was the right time for a bit of a poem in honor of the occasion. This is Peter’s poem for Lazy Bear and Squirrel on Christmas day:

WORDS OF WELCOME
AND INTRODUCTION
By Peter, the Inexhaustible

“Welcome, Mr. Lazy Bear.

Take a chair – any chair.

Welcome, Mr. Squirrel, too. Howdy do.

How are you?

“Welcome, one and welcome, all

Jolly of you both to call.

Hence this effort at a jingle.

– Shake the hand of Mr. Bingle.

“Christmas comes but once a year.

Rent time, though, is always here.

Landlords never do forget.

– This sweet girl is Miss Floret.

“Come, let’s slide our eager feet

Underneath the place we eat.

Careful of each other’s shins.

– Gaze upon our noble Twins.

“Hurry! Let us snap our jaws,

Wave our hands and wag our paws.

Up and at it, tooth and toe.

Mary and myself you know.

“Hardly need for getting rough,

There is sure to be enough.

Do not push and do not budge.

Trust in your good luck and Budge.

“Welcome, Mr. Lazy Bear.

Take a chair anywhere.

Welcome, Mr. Squirrel, too.

How are you? I am through.”

Once more, Peter seemed to have struck a popular note, because, you see, he had very cleverly managed to work in the names of everyone present. This is one of the secrets of successful writing. And because everyone felt complimented, everyone was only too ready to compliment Peter.

“One of your best!” cried Lazy Bear.

“Beautiful and mysterious,” chimed in Squirrel, who had never heard a poem before.

“With the exception of one,” said Mr. Bingle, thinking of Peter’s poem about the Christmas tree.

“How can he keep it up?” breathed the Twins, doing their utmost to look noble in their pink and blue ribbons.

“Take your places at the table,” sang out Mr. Budge, and then the clatter began. A second Christmas dinner was eaten, and this time it was a banquet, which sounds better but doesn’t taste any more so.

“I have a suggestion to make,” said Lazy Bear, after the banquet had been gnashed, chewed, gnawed, and nibbled down to the last crumb. “Let us each collect an armful of Christmas packages and give them to the children in the Poorest Part of the city. Mr. Bingle did the best he could with the Christmas tree. Now let us try to follow the generous example he set.”

“But where are the packages?” asked Peter.

“The enchanted tree will provide,” replied Lazy Bear. “You all had better take your own presents along, because it’s about time for you to return to summer. It isn’t far away, as the crow flies.”

“How does the crow fly?” asked Albert, a little suspiciously.

“Splendidly,” replied Lazy Bear. “Splendidly.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” said Albert, without any show of gladness, “but neither my brother nor myself have a drop of crow blood in our veins, and the others don’t look very crow-like to me. I just can’t stand any more snow-trudging. That last experience was nearly the last of me. And then,” added Albert, coyly lowering his eyes, “there are these beautiful ribbons you gave us. We don’t want to ruin them.”

Lazy Bear patted Albert gently on the head and smiled.

“The trouble with you, Albert,” he said, “is that you worry too much. The first thing you know you’ll be turning gray and getting wrinkles.”

Albert was horrified at the thought, and for a long time he kept telling himself: “Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Everything is going to be all right.”

All the time the enchanted Christmas tree had been turning round and round, and as it turned, more packages gathered beneath its silver branches. Soon there were so many that it was as much as everyone could do to carry them. The Twins carried their packages in baskets which they held in their mouths. The pink packages were for the little girls and the blue ones for the little boys. Both Albert and Rudolph insisted that their baskets were much too heavily filled.

“They will soon be lighter,” said Lazy Bear.

“And in the meantime?” asked Albert.

“Have a mean time,” replied Lazy Bear, and was very much pleased with his merry quip.

With Lazy Bear at their head they all left the room and found their way to the Poorest Part of the city where, a few hours before, Mr. Bingle had given away his Christmas tree.

“I’m dying of sheer neck-break,” complained Albert through his clenched teeth, because the basket was in his mouth.

“My spine is so contorted it looks like a storm at sea,” replied Rudolph. “It’s a mere matter of dips and waves.”

When the packages were all distributed and the streets were empty of children, the party moved away. Lazy Bear and Mr. Budge walked arm in arm. The Twins were greatly annoyed because Squirrel insisted on taking turns at riding on their backs.

“Did you ever hear of the straw that broke the camel’s back?” asked Albert.

“No,” replied Squirrel. “What about it?”

“You’re it,” said Albert.

“I never rode on a lion before,” remarked Squirrel, jumping up and down excitedly.

“Well, this is your last chance,” answered Rudy. “We’re getting lower to the ground all the time. Already my stomach is leaving its footprints in the snow.”

“And don’t jump up and down so,” pleaded Albert. “If you must ride, try to do so calmly, quietly, and decently. Make yourself light.”

“Oh, I must jump! I must jump!” cried Squirrel, bounding high in the air and coming down with a thud on Albert’s back.

Albert was shaken in every bone. He staggered and nearly fell on his nose.

“A thing like this would happen,” he observed to his brother.

“At the end of the day, too,” said Rudy.

“It seems to be the start for us,” answered Albert, bleakly.

“Now,” said Lazy Bear, when they had come to open country and the white road ran beneath the stars into the whispering darkness of the forest, “it’s as easy as falling out of bed.”

“Which can be very painful,” interrupted Albert. “You should try it.”

“I have,” replied Lazy Bear, “but that’s not what I started in to say. Don’t interrupt me. All you have to do is to stick to this road and turn to the left whenever you think of it.”

“Whenever who thinks of it?” asked Albert.

“Whenever any of you think of it,” replied Lazy Bear.

“But suppose the road turns to the right at the same time that one of us thinks of turning to the left?” demanded Rudy. “What then, I ask you?”

“Then just stop thinking,” replied Lazy Bear, good-naturedly.

“That’s easy to do,” said Albert, “and it’s about the most sensible thing you’ve said so far.”

“Just keep turning to the left,” continued Lazy Bear, “and soon you’ll come to Summer.”

“As the crow laboriously plods along,” remarked Albert, nudging his brother.

“By the way, Mr. Budge,” said Lazy Bear, “if you don’t mind my asking, did you pay for your room in advance?”

“I had to pay a week in advance,” replied Mr. Budge. “That’s what took all my money.”

“That reminds me,” said Lazy Bear, giving Mr. Budge a neat leather wallet. “I meant to give you this before. It will never get empty. Now you can take care of the children and everybody. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll go back to your room and sleep until the week is through. Do you know the way, Squirrel?”

“Surest thing you know,” said Squirrel, snappily.

“Then good night, all,” said Lazy Bear with a yawn. “I’m fatigued.”

And before anyone could thank him, Lazy Bear and Squirrel were gone. The white road ran ahead. The night was cold. Summer was somewhere in the night. They must find it.

“Forward!” cried Mr. Budge.

The party moved forward down the soft, noiseless road.

“Fatigued,” murmured Albert. “Fatigued.”

“He must be sound asleep by this time,” said Rudolph. “Warm and snug in bed.”

The Twins padded after the others, keeping close to them as they entered into the shadow of the forest.

Chapter 9

The Forest of Floating Melody

As they passed through the forest they could hear the trees talking in their sleep. This did not make the Twins feel any more comfortable. And from some of the remarks the trees made it would seem they were not quite asleep. The remarks were altogether too personal and to the point.

“Imagine them taking a walk at this time of night,” grumbled one old tree.

“And such a mixed company, too,” grumbled another tree. “They have a couple of brutes with them – brute beasts.”

“Take one good look at them, then thank your stars you’re a tree,” said the first old tree to speak.

“Do you hear what they’re saying about us?” asked Albert, under his breath.

“Perhaps,” replied Rudolph. “What if I do hear them? Do you expect me to tear a tree down with my bare teeth? Anyway, we’ve passed it.”

“There’ll be others,” said Albert.

“Listen, brother,” answered Rudolph. “If all of the trees in all of this forest insult me at the top of their voices, I’m going to keep on moving quietly along this road and mind my own business. I don’t want to get into any trouble with a tree. That’s that. If you want to tree-fight, just help yourself.”

“I don’t want to tree-fight,” hastily replied Albert.

“I didn’t think you did,” said Rudy.

At this moment Peter began to sing a marching song. Here are the words:

THE BUDGE BRIGADE
By Peter, the Poet

“Oh, we belong to the Budge Brigade.

We plunge through shadow. We dash through shade.

The road is lonesome and long and white,

And we’ll be walking the livelong night.

“Oh, we belong to the Budge Brigade.

We meet all dangers quite undismayed.

Our gallant lions will face the foe

While we make tracks in the fallen snow.

“Yes, we belong to the Budge Brigade.

Our noble leader is unafraid.

In search of Summer we slip and slide –

We use our feet, for we cannot ride.

“Oh, we belong to the Budge Brigade.

We have to climb and we have to wade.

The task is equal for one and all.

If one of us slips the rest of us fall.

“Oh, we belong to the Budge Brigade.

We can play any game that was ever played,

And one of the things we can do among

Is to sing any song that was ever sung.

“For we belong to the Budge Brigade.

We walk for pleasure. We are not paid.

Pinkie and Bluie, they love to walk.

They hate to rest and they hate to talk.

“Oh, we belong to the Budge Brigade.

We’ll walk till the stars in the heavens fade.

When we get tired we’ll ride the Twins

And make them run till they lose their skins.

“Oh, we belong to the Budge Brigade.

We’ll make them hustle up hill and grade

We’ll run them ragged. We’ll make them trudge,

Those brother lions. Hurrah for Budge!”

“Stop!” screamed Albert. “Stop!”

“Enough!” shouted Rudolph. “You’re breaking my heart.”

Peter tried to continue, but the lions set up such a din that his voice could not be heard.

“That’s a terrible song,” said Albert. “It gives the wrong impression entirely.”

“You know very well that we hate to face the foe,” protested Rudy. “And as for riding us up hill and grade,” put in Albert, “that would be impossible.”

“You’ll have to drag us up hill and grade,” put in Albert. “I’m dying on my feet as it is.”

“Don’t torment us,” pleaded Rudy.

“Don’t be grim,” urged Albert.

“If you must sing,” added Rudy, “sing something comforting – a cradle song, perhaps.”

“I think,” remarked Mr. Budge, “that it is a very good song, an exceptionally good song, especially the last part, the ‘Hurrah for Budge!’ part!”

“He didn’t suggest riding you,” retorted Albert.

“Nor leaving you alone to face the foe,” said Rudy.

“He has more sense,” replied Mr. Budge.

“He has no sense at all if he thinks I’m going to face the foe,” said Albert.

“And he has much less sense than that,” put in Rudy, “if he thinks I’m going to let anyone ride me.”

“It was only a song,” explained Peter.

“It was more than a song,” replied Albert. “It was a form of torture. Do something about it, Floret. Never let him sing that kind of song again. It hurts, I tell you, it hurts.”

Mr. Budge suddenly turned to the left, and before they had time to draw another breath they were back in Summer. It was the most surprising thing. The Twins lay down and rolled in the sweet, fresh grass, and Floret went dancing across the fields while the children ran after her. It was Summer again.

Mr. Bingle sat down on a log and looked at his watch. Mr. Bingle was always looking at his watch. Mr. Bingle loved his watch.

“It’s Summer,” he said, “and it’s six o’clock in the morning. Hear the chimes.”

Mr. Budge stooped over and listened to the tiny music of the watch.

“It’s a great watch,” said Mr. Budge.

“Yes,” replied Mr. Bingle, “it’s a grand watch.”

And he put it away.

Sunlight was dancing among the blades of grass and painting the trunks of the trees. Birds flashed through the clear air and made musical remarks about one another. There was a feeling of life and well-being all about them. They had returned from the snow of Winter City to the flower-dappled fields of Summer. All of them were well pleased.

Mr. Budge picked out a smooth strip of grass near a brook and took from his basket a large tablecloth. This he laid on the ground, and there busied himself setting out breakfast. The Twins stopped rolling and sat as close to the tablecloth as they could. Their paws just barely touched the edge. But the Twins did not touch any of the good things on the cloth. They just looked at them long and thoughtfully, then looked at Mr. Budge. They loved Mr. Budge. He was a real good man. And they loved Mr. Budge’s basket, which was almost the same thing, for the basket was a part of Mr. Budge. Without the basket he would have been a different man. He would not have been the same Mr. Budge. The Twins could not bear the thought.

When everything was ready, Mr. Budge called to Floret and the children. The Twins called to Floret and the children. Mr. Bingle called to Floret and the children. Then Mr. Budge, Mr. Bingle, and the Twins called to Floret and the children. And presently Floret and the children appeared.

“Were you calling us?” they asked innocently.

Albert gave them a sick look.

“No,” he said, “not exactly calling, nor could it honestly be said we were whispering. We were wondering aloud, let us say. Wondering at the top of our lungs. Does my voice sound hoarse? Don’t worry about it. That comes from wondering out loud about people and where they are. Wondering at the top of my lungs, that’s all.”

“Hope you had a real nice time,” remarked Rudolph. “It must be pleasant to dance while others starve. Bah!”

“Oh, don’t go on so,” exclaimed Floret. “The way you two talk, one would think you never had a thing to eat in your lives.”

“There you go,” replied Albert. “I knew it. I expected it. Begrudging us the few snacks we’ve been able to snatch here and there. Mr. Budge, we are all present.”

Then they all sat down to breakfast. And when Mr. Budge served breakfast he used his brains. If you had tried for the rest of the day to think of something you wanted you wouldn’t have been able to think of a single thing. Mr. Budge had already thought of it.

After breakfast they all lay down and went to sleep. The snoring of the lions mingled with the singing of the birds until at last the birds became discouraged and gave it up or went somewhere else. What was the good in trying to sing against a pair of snoring lions? The birds were disgusted.

The party slept until luncheon time, then everyone woke up and ate luncheon.

“This,” remarked Albert, stretching himself lazily, “is the pleasant way to live.”

“The civilized way,” commented Rudolph.

“Persons of culture and refinement always live this way,” went on Albert.

“Trudging through the snow and listening to Tormenting Songs is no way to live,” said Rudolph. “Note the difference – how jolly and bright we are.”

“Fix your bows,” was all Floret said.

“After luncheon,” replied Albert. “We might get all untidy while at it.”

“You will,” remarked Mr. Bingle. “No doubt about it.”

“There was no call for that remark,” replied Rudolph.

“Fall to!” cried Mr. Budge, and for some time after that the Twins were unable to continue their constant chatter. They were too busy with their luncheon.

When the meal was over they all went to the brook to wash their hands and faces. Neither Albert nor Rudolph liked this very much, because they were afraid of the fishes that were swimming round in the clear, chuckling water.

“I like my fishes cooked,” protested Albert.

“Well, you won’t cook me, funny-face,” snapped an old trout who was lurking under an out-jutting stone.

“You’re too tough and old to cook,” retorted Albert. “I’ll bet you’ve been tossed back into that stream so often by disgusted fishermen that your skin is like rubber. And another thing, as long as you insist on talking, my face is not funny. We’re lions.”

“What are those?” asked the trout.

“What ignorance!” replied Albert. “If you don’t know that already, how are we going to tell you?”

“By word of mouth,” said the trout.

“Naturally,” retorted Albert. “That goes without saying.”

“Not naturally at all,” snapped the trout. “You might write me a letter about it. That would be by word of hand.”

“Pen, pen, pen,” screamed Albert, losing his temper.

The trout merely smiled.

“You might use a pencil, you know,” he observed.

“Oh, you’re so irritating,” Albert almost sobbed. “So exasperating. Always arguing.”

At this moment Rudolph leaned far over the pool in the brook and looked fiercely at the trout.

“I think I’ll bite your head off,” he said.

“Who’s your sweet young girl friend?” asked the trout. “Yo-hoo, dearie!”

“I’m not a girl!” yelled Rudolph. “I’m a he-lion, full-grown and dangerous.”

“Now, sweetheart, don’t upset yourself,” warned the trout.

“I’ll upset you if I gnash your head off!” cried Rudolph.

“If and when,” jeered the trout. “Let’s see you do it.”

By this time the Twins had become so excited that both of them were leaning far over the edge of the pool. Suddenly there were two loud plops. The Twins had fallen in. They were no longer on the bank. They were thrashing around in the water.

“Help!” cried Rudolph. “Help!”

“Floret!” shouted Albert. “Mr. Budge! Everybody!”

Peter was the first to reach the spot. He was quickly followed by Mary and Floret. Mr. Budge and Mr. Bingle brought up the rear.

“What shall we do?” asked Floret, jumping up and down in her excitement.

“Nothing, my dear,” replied Mr. Budge. “It’s not over their heads in that pool. A good bath won’t hurt them.”

“Don’t just stand there looking at us,” called Albert. “We’re drowning.”

“This isn’t an exhibition,” yelled Rudolph. “It’s a fatal accident – two valuable lives lost, and all that sort of thing. You’ll read of it in tomorrow’s papers.”

“In the funnies,” said Mr. Bingle, unfeelingly. “Have you tried to stand?”

“What do you think we are, mermaids?” gasped Albert. “Standing! What a question!”

“No,” replied Mr. Bingle. “You certainly are not mermaids, but if I were you I would really try to stand.”

“Isn’t it over our heads?” asked Rudolph.

“It’s not even up to your necks,” Mr. Budge assured them.

“Oh,” said Rudolph. “That’s altogether different.”

He stood up and looked sheepishly about him. Albert also stopped thrashing and sat down suddenly.

“We were trying to bite the head off a certain party,” he explained, “but the coward has run away.”

“No, he hasn’t,” came a breathless voice from the brook. “You’re sitting on me with all your weight.”

Albert looked startled. He rose hastily.

“I have no desire to sit on a fallen fish,” he said with dignity. “Fish-sitting is not among my other failings.”

He crawled out of the pool and Rudolph followed him. Both of them fell down on the grass and lay there panting.

“Well, this finishes us for the day,” breathed Albert.

“Forever,” groaned Rudolph.

“Get up,” commanded Mr. Bingle. “We must be on our way. Mr. Budge is starting already with his basket.”

The Twins struggled to their feet.

“The next time I’ll sit on you twice as hard,” shouted Albert in the direction of the pool, but not daring to go near it.

“Ha-ha!” called the trout, mockingly. “It didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt. Goodbye, little girl, goodbye. Don’t cry, little girl, don’t cry.”

He sang the last part, and the Twins were furious, but they followed Mr. Budge down the road because he had the basket.

They walked for a long, long time, so long, in fact, that the Twins forgot how long it was. They couldn’t remember things very well any more, because they were so occupied listening to the tinkling of their silver bells they were unable to pay much attention to anything else.

Presently they came to the largest and loftiest forest they had ever seen. The trees seemed to be sweeping up the clouds in the sky with their branches. And the trees were not close together, but far apart. They were so big they needed lots of breathing space. So it was easy to walk in this forest. The road ran through it. Mr. Budge led the way in among the trees.

“It’s just like a mighty church,” said Peter, in a quiet voice.

“Isn’t it like a church?” replied Mr. Budge. He too spoke quietly. The forest made you feel that way.

And the farther they went the more like a church it seemed. The trees met high, high above their heads and the road ran straight between the tall trees like the aisle of a church. And the trees looked like columns holding up the high dim roof. There were splashes of sunlight among the trees. They looked for all the world like the beautiful stained-glass windows you always see in a church.

“Very church-like,” observed Albert, “or at least I imagine so. They’ve never let me go to church.”

Suddenly they heard the sound of mighty music. At first it was at a great distance. Then like a flood of water the music came rushing towards them through the forest. Soon they were surrounded by music. It came from the trees around them. It floated in the air and whirled among the branches over their heads. It was the music of an organ. The trees were its pipes. At times the music was soft and low. At other times it crashed like thunder. The Twins were trembling from head to foot. They did not know what to do, so they did nothing but stick close to Mr. Budge because he was the most magic of everybody.

Presently the road widened, and then they saw a remarkable sight. An old man in a green robe was sitting at an organ. He had bright, piercing eyes and a long white beard. Sitting quietly on benches on each side of the organ were all kinds of animals and birds. They were listening to the music of the old man at the organ. There were rows of rabbits, squirrels, hedgehogs, foxes, badgers, beavers, deer, and all the other animals of the streams, fields, and forests. And then there were birds – swans, wild geese, ducks, storks, owls, peacocks, ravens, eagles, blue jays, and every other bird you could think of or remember. They were all sitting in rows and everyone was well behaved. There was no fighting, and the birds and the animals were not at all afraid of one another. They were under the spell of the wonderful, enchanted music of the old man with the flowing white beard.

“Marvelous!” breathed Mr. Budge. “An experience never to be forgotten.”

The music was soft and low now, so low it could hardly be heard at all. Then a terrible thing happened to Mary. It was like a bad dream. Her shoes began to squeak. As she walked down the aisle towards the organ the penetrating squeaking of her shoes followed her. Every bird and animal present seemed to be looking at her. There were sharp eyes on all sides. Poor Mary didn’t know what to do.

“My dear,” she heard a blue jay remark to her husband, “this really is too bad.”

“Why doesn’t she walk on her hands?” demanded her husband crossly.

Mary thought this was a good idea, but unfortunately she did not know how to walk on her hands.

“There will have to be very much less of that,” called out the old man, looking severely at Mary, then added as if in afterthought, “practically none at all.”

Mary took a few steps forward and stopped in despair. Her shoes were squeaking louder and louder. An usher who happened to be a badger came hurrying up to her.

“The shoes! The shoes!” he wheezed. “Do something about the shoes.”

“I can’t,” replied Mary, at her wit’s end. “Shall I take them off?”

“What!” cried the badger. “In church? Where are your parents?”

“I haven’t any,” Mary explained.

“What! No parents? No parents?” exclaimed the badger. “This gets worse and worse.”

“But I have Peter and Mr. Budge and Floret and the Twins and Mr. Bingle,” said Mary, timidly.

“What do I know about them?” demanded the badger.

“I don’t know,” admitted Mary.

“Nothing,” replied the badger, bitterly. “Nothing less than nothing. They might be anyone for all I know. You see how it is?”

“Yes, sir,” said Mary, although she did not see how it was at all.

“Have you any money for the collection?” the badger asked suddenly.

“No, sir,” replied Mary, startled.

“Then what will you do when the plate is passed?” asked the badger.

“Have you any money yourself?” demanded Mary, growing tired of the fussy old badger’s questions.

“Badgers are not supposed to have any money,” he replied with dignity. “And anyway, I’m an usher. So don’t be so smart.”

“Mr. Budge has lots of money,” said Mary, triumphantly. “Enough for all.”

“You mean the stout party with the cane?” asked the badger, looking a little impressed.

“Yes,” replied Mary. “He’s very rich.”

“He does look distinguished,” admitted the badger, who was an awful snob after all had been said and done. “I imagine you must be respectable if you belong with Mr. Budge.”

“Bring her to me,” suddenly shouted the old organist. “Bring her to me this instant.”

Chapter 10

The Old Man of the Forest

When the strange little usher had led Mary up to the old man at the organ he regarded them both sternly.

“Yes?” snapped the old man, turning abruptly to Mary. “Go on. Go on. Don’t moon at me. What have you got to say?”

“About what, sir?” asked Mary.

“Anything in the world,” gritted the old man between his clenched teeth. “I’m holding myself in,” he continued. “Don’t push me too far.”

“Nothing, sir,” replied Mary hastily. “Nothing to say.”

“I thought not,” said the old man, looking a little more pleased. “Neither have I.”

He turned his gaze from Mary and looked for a long time deep into the forest. Mary waited patiently.

“Did you want to see me about anything?” he asked presently. “Anything in particular?”

“Why, no, sir,” replied Mary. “I thought you wanted to see me.”

“Well, I have,” said the old man, simply.

“Shall I leave?” asked Mary.

“Yes,” replied the old man. “No. One minute now. Let me not forget – which is much like remembering. Wasn’t there something else – something in particular?”

“Yes,” answered Mary, falteringly. “My shoes. They squeak. You wanted to see me about them.”

“Oh, yes,” said the old man. “It all seems years ago. I thought they were worn out by this time. Where did you buy those shoes? Name me the store.”

“I didn’t buy them,” replied Mary.

“Then how on earth, child, did you ever get them?” asked the old man, deeply interested.

“I woke up one morning,” explained Mary, “and found them on my feet.”

The old man gasped.

“Found them on your feet!” he said at last. “That’s one of the strangest things I’ve ever heard. I’ve put many a pair of shoes on my feet but I’ve never found any there. Some people have all the luck. Tell me all about it.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” replied Mary. “I just woke up and there they were – on my feet.”

“Now isn’t that odd!” said the old man. “On your feet, you say? Do you think someone could have crept up during the night and put them there, sort of sneaked them on?”

“Perhaps that’s just what happened,” answered Mary, hoping to please the old man.

He dropped into a spell of thoughtfulness. For some minutes he remained silent. He was brooding about the shoes.

“Yes,” he said at last, “that was the way it must have been. How did we get on the subject of shoes, anyway?”

“Mine squeak,” Mary reminded him.

“So they do,” he said. “So they do. Now I remember quite clearly. Let me see them.”

Mary held up one foot, and the old organist inspected the sole closely.

“I can fix them for you,” he said at last, “and it won’t cost you one penny more than a dollar and seventeen cents or twenty-five cents in cash down.”

Mary asked Mr. Budge for a quarter, which she gave to the old man. He immediately grabbed her by the foot and held her upside down between his knees while all the animals and birds cheered and set up a great clatter. Very much pleased, the old man bowed left and right.

“Half a minute,” he told Mary. “It won’t hurt – much. Not much.”

He seized a wooden hammer and a handful of tiny pegs. These he drove into the soles of Mary’s shoes very skillfully. Then he flipped her back on her feet. Mary was a little bit dazed – it had all happened so quickly.

“Now see if they squeak,” he commanded.

Mary took several steps. No squeaks came from the shoes.

“They’re splendid,” said Mary. “Thank you ever so much. All the squeak is gone.”

“You mean all the squeaks are gone,” corrected the old man. “Well, I’m glad not to hear that or those or whatever the saying is. Whenever you or your friends have any shoes to mend, don’t forget to bring them to me. Nobody can beat my prices. Now go somewhere and sit down. We’ve kept them waiting long enough.”

Mary found a place between Floret and Mr. Budge on a bench, and the old man returned to his organ. The most wonderful music rolled and thundered, played and whispered through the forest. Sometimes the birds and animals sang and at others they just sat still and listened to the music. The playing of the old man was so beautiful and inviting that even Albert tried to join in the singing. He was so shocked at the sound of his own voice that Floret had to hold his paw for the rest of the time. After the animals and birds had sung and listened until they were tired, the plate was passed. Mr. Budge took out his wallet and put in a crisp green bank note. That was all the money there was in the plate. The birds and the animals gave nuts and berries and fruit and vegetables. When the badger had brought the plate to the old man at the organ he got up and made a little speech.

“My friends of the forest,” he said, “for the first time in my experience, there is actually real money in the plate. You don’t know how pleased I am. Now you can’t eat this money although it is green and crisp, but I know how to make use of it when the time comes. It looks like a lot of money. I am very grateful.”

The old man lifted up the plate and looked at it closely.

“I notice,” he continued, “that there are several worms in the plate. Now what did I tell you about worms? This worm business must stop. It’s not fair to the worms or very agreeable for me. I suspect some bird, and I want that bird to know right now that I won’t stand for it, not for a moment. If you must eat worms try to do it in private. The collection today will go to Mrs. Beaver. She is quite ill and has six hungry children. Her husband, the scalawag, hasn’t done a stroke of honest work for months. She hasn’t seen him for a long time. If any of you know where he spends his evenings please tell him for me he’d better pull himself together. We’re pretty easy-going here in the forest and I shut my eyes to lots of wild life, but once get me started and I’ll tear things wide open.

“And just a word to you birds,” continued the old man. “Sing in the morning if you must, but don’t raise such a racket. Don’t shout and don’t scream and don’t call one another names. This forest will be getting a bad reputation the first thing you know, and besides it keeps me from sleeping.”

Once more the old man looked at the plate.

“I suspect that some of these vegetables were not come by honestly,” he said. “To be blunt about it, some of us are getting a little light-fingered. Try to restrain yourselves after a certain point. The vegetables are very good this week. The berries have fallen off a little.

“There’s got to be a great deal less fighting and ill-will among you animals. Now hear me, animals. Hear me and remember. If I catch one of you stalking and creeping around after some other animal, I’m going to lose my temper so badly that I might never find it again. Remember that. No scuffing and lying in wait. And this goes for all of you: there must be less gossip and scandal. People’s private lives are just exactly what the word means – private. Keep out of them and don’t talk about them. I have a couple of little secrets of my own that I wouldn’t like to have passed about from nest to burrow. All of us have.

“Now, I’ve found a lot of new traps, and I know exactly where these traps are. Anyone interested can talk to me later. I’ll sound the warning on the organ when the men with guns are out. This is particularly important for the deer.

“Now, get out of my sight, all of you, and try to act like halfway decent, self-respecting birds and beasts.”

There was a flutter of wings and a thrashing of bushes and in a moment the forest seemed empty. The old man stepped down from his organ and approached Mr. Budge.

“I want to thank you for the money,” said the old man. “It may surprise you, but we have a great need of money here in the forest. Animals and birds get caught in traps or wounded and then I have to fix them up. This money will enable me to buy a first-aid kit, splints and bandages. Also, I’m going to buy myself some tobacco. I haven’t had a good smoke in months. Of course, I’ve gotten quite used to dry leaves and some herbs I’ve found, but still, tobacco is tobacco. Nothing can equal it.”

Mr. Budge gave the old man lots of tobacco for his pipe. The old man was delighted. He was more delighted when he was asked to stay for dinner. He did not eat a great deal, but what he did eat you could tell he was enjoying.

After dinner he told them stories of the forest. Then he played the organ softly until they fell asleep. In their dreams the gentle, soothing notes of the great organ floated round them and made them sleep a happy, restful sleep under the singing branches of the trees as the starlight trickled through.

Chapter 11

Lazy Bear’s “At Home”

Peter and Mary awoke early next morning. So did the rest of them. Even the Twins were soon astir. But the old man was up before them all. He was instructing a class of young deer, teaching them how to take care of themselves and to keep out of the way of the hunters. The class was just ending as Mr. Budge and the others came up.

“The trouble with you young deer is,” the old man was saying, “that you think you know it all. And you don’t know a thing. Not a thing. The minute you are able to stand on your own feet and to jump about a bit, off you go. Your mothers call you. What do you do? Answer me that. What do you do, I ask you? Stop that fidgeting, Willy Jones! Do you know what you do? I’ll tell you. You don’t answer. That’s what you do.”

The young deer did not look at all ashamed.

“That’s what we don’t, you mean,” said one of them, well hidden at the back of the class.

“Who said that?” shouted the old man. “Who said that? I suspect McGregor.”

No one answered.

“If I catch the young upstart who said that I’ll skin him alive,” the old man fumed.

From somewhere in the class came a loud, insulting noise. The old man was furious, but all of the deer looked innocently at him. He was unable to pick out the culprit. At last the old fellow got himself in hand again and continued with his instructions.

“Now don’t go near the edge of the forest,” he told them, “and keep out of the way of the men with guns. You may be a deer to your mothers, but you’re only a piece of venison to them. Remember this. Don’t take salt from strangers and don’t go larking about the forest in crowds. During the hunting season you’ll have to keep separated. If you don’t pay attention, Rosano, I’ll have to do something about it.”

The old man paused and looked over the deer, with a disgusted expression on his weather-beaten face.

“You’re about the worst lot of young deer I’ve ever had anything to do with,” he continued, bitterly, “and that’s saying a great deal. You’re useless, you lack ambition, and you don’t pay attention. I feel like washing my hands of the lot of you, but I’m too sorry for your mothers. Your fathers are a mob of loafers. All they do is to hang around and fight and talk and show off. In this forest it’s the women who do all the work with the exception of Abe Levensky’s father. He’s a hard-working deer. He will succeed. Watch him.”

Suddenly the old man pointed a long skinny finger at a small but active-looking deer at the end of the front row.

“Come here, you on the end,” he called.

The little deer came slowly up to the old man and stood looking at him out of large, boggling eyes.

“Is your name Sullivan?” asked the old man.

The little deer nodded.

“I thought so,” said the old man. “I feared as much. Now listen to me, Sullivan. I had a brother and sister of yours last year and I had to keep them tied up to trees. Any monkey business from you and out you go. I’ve stood enough from the Sullivans. They’re a disturbing element – unreliable. Now get out of my sight. I can’t bear looking at you. If that brother and sister of yours aren’t shot yet, they should be, understand?”

“Yes, sir,” replied the little deer, apparently in hearty agreement with the old man. “Out I go.”

“Class dismissed!” cried the old man. “Leave quietly. No scuffling or squalling in the halls. Fritz Schmidt, stop that prancing!”

When the little deer had scampered away, the old man, apparently in the best of humor, approached Mr. Budge and his party.

“Good-morning,” he said, pleasantly. “Just where were we?”

“I didn’t know we were anywhere in particular,” replied Mr. Budge.

“Perhaps you’re right,” said the old man. “That makes it easier to start afresh. What do you think of my youngsters?”

“They struck me as being a very fine group of young deer,” answered Mr. Budge.

“They are, sir,” continued the old man, greatly pleased, “I assure you. One of the most promising classes I’ve had in years, but of course it would never do to let the youngsters know it. The moment I did they’d get out of hand and try to take advantage of me. I’ve given them real names. This amuses me and pleases them. I had to do it so they’d come when I called. It avoids confusion. The deer never had real names until I came to the forest. They just wandered aimlessly about, not knowing who they were. Now they’re quite fond of their names. Proud of them, in fact.”

“Why do you live here all alone in the forest?” Floret asked timidly.

“My dear,” said the old man, with a kindly smile, “I’m not alone in the forest. The birds and animals and even the insects are my friends. They keep me company. They depend on me, and I am able to help them a little. With men it’s different. They are so clever it’s difficult to get at their hearts. My birds and animals are a hard lot, and there are some pretty rough characters among them, but taking them all together, they’re more simple-hearted than men and more gentle. They’re more like children. I’ve always loved children. I miss them in the forest.”

Here the old man laid a hand on Mary’s golden head and Peter’s dark brown one. And he gave them each a little whistle that would call the birds when they wanted them.

Albert and Rudolph came forward to be patted. The old man stroked their heads and told them they were magnificent lions.

“Kings of the forest,” he said. “That’s what you are.”

“Hear that, Bingle?” asked Albert. “Kings of the forest. That’s what we are.”

“Listen,” retorted Mr. Bingle, “you two lions are so lazy that if you had to wear crowns you’d tell the world your necks were breaking.”

“Nothing of the sort,” replied Rudolph. “You’re wrong as usual, Bingle.”

The old man had already taken breakfast, but he sat down with them and drank several cups of coffee. They said goodbye to him when they were finished. Mr. Budge gave him some more money and tobacco. The old man was very happy. As they left the forest, the music of his great organ followed after them.

Lovely melodies floated in the air like songs with wings and cheered them on their way.

They walked all day through a fair green land. There were rolling meadows and wooded hills. The way was smooth and pleasant to the feet. The children went wading in lakes and streams, and Floret made two wreaths of wildflowers for the Twins. Mr. Budge, with his long black walking stick, marched along at the head and talked with Mr. Bingle about many things, none of which mattered the least little bit, although he pretended they were very important.

After luncheon they set out again. Albert and Rudy complained loudly about this, but no one paid the slightest attention to them. Floret showed them the wire hoop she had made back at Winter City, and that was enough. It was almost too much. The Twins nearly became hysterical at the sight of it. They promised to stop complaining if Floret would not make them jump through the hoop.

In the middle of the afternoon they met Squirrel. He was waiting for them on the stump of a tree, and he was neatly dressed in a cook’s white hat and apron.

“I haven’t a moment to spare,” he began at once. “I’m rushed to death. You’re invited.”

“We accept,” said Mr. Budge, shortly.

“To what?” asked Albert, suspiciously.

“To an ‘At Home’,” replied Squirrel. “He’s at home resting – as usual. Follow me.”

They left the road and followed Squirrel into the woods. The trees climbed up the side of a hill, and at a spot where they were the thickest and bushes grew close about, Squirrel stopped. He pulled aside some bushes and branches and scraped away a pile of dead leaves. He was a very busy Squirrel. When he had finished, Mary gave a little cry of surprise. Squirrel looked pleased.

“I thought you’d be surprised,” he said.

Everyone was surprised. There, set in the hillside, was a door with a knocker on it. The door was very strong and just large enough for Lazy Bear to squeeze through.

Squirrel opened the door and invited them all to enter. As the Twins passed through he pinched their tails with his sharp little claws.

“Get a move on, slow-pokes!” he cried.

The lions set up a wail.

“Make him stop, Floret,” they pleaded. “He’s pinching our tails and it’s not at all funny.”

“I have my own private entrance,” Squirrel explained to Mr. Budge. “I will join you as soon as I have covered up the door.”

He closed the door, and Mr. Budge led the way into a large comfortable room that had been dug out of the side of the hill. A kettle was boiling on a stove in one corner, and in the center of the room a large table was laid for tea. The rest of the room was taken up by Lazy Bear himself. He was reclining on a great couch and humming a bit of a song to himself. At the sight of his guests he struggled to his feet and greeted them with a lazy smile.

“So glad you were able to come,” he said pleasantly. “Squirrel will have everything ready in a minute. Where is the rascal, anyway?”

At this moment Albert let out a wild cry and whirled around as if he had gone mad. No wonder. Squirrel had dropped on his back through a little door in the roof. Poor Albert didn’t know just what had happened.

“Faster!” shouted Squirrel. “Faster! You’re so useless. Speed, O lion! Speed!”

“Take him off!” cried Albert. “Take him off! I’m going to faint.”

Lazy Bear picked up Squirrel and gave him a little shake.

“Was that nice?” Lazy Bear demanded. “Was that kind and thoughtful?”

“Well, they irritate me,” explained Squirrel. “They’re so fat and foolish. I can’t stand seeing them comfortable.”

“They’re our guests now,” said Lazy Bear. “Try to remember that.”

“Oh, I won’t forget them,” answered Squirrel. “And they won’t forget me – ever.”

He skipped across the room and became furiously busy at the stove. First he made the tea, then he opened the oven and brought out several pans of delicious little cakes. These he hurled across the room to the table.

“Look out below!” he shouted.

Rushing to the icebox, he took from it a high pile of sandwiches.

“Catch!” he yelled, and began to fling the sandwiches about the room. One of them hit Albert in the eye. He sank to the ground.

“You’ll have to dodge quicker than that,” called Squirrel. “Quicker and better, my boy.”

“Does he always go on like this?” asked Mr. Budge.

“No,” replied Lazy Bear, good-humoredly. “He just gets fits at times. He’s showing off now.”

“Oh, is that so,” cried Squirrel, and threw a sandwich right at Lazy Bear’s nose, but Lazy Bear quickly opened his mouth and caught it. Then he laughed annoyingly at Squirrel, who was jumping up and down with rage.

“Listen, Peter,” cried Squirrel. “I’ve made up a poem. It’s my first real poem, and I want you to hear it.”

Taking a pie and throwing it at Rudolph, who dodged too late, Squirrel jumped to the table.

“Low comedy, but still good,” he remarked. “Must do better than that, Rudy, if you want to play with the big boys.”

“But I don’t want to play,” replied Rudy, wiping the pie out of his eyes and then licking his paws, because Rudy believed in the old saying: “Waste not, want not.”

“All right, don’t play,” said Squirrel. “Just listen to my first real poem.” This is Squirrel’s poem, name and all:

ABOUT A CERTAIN PERSON
Squirrel’s First

“I am the slave of a Lazy Bear.

I brush his clothes and I comb his hair.

His bed I make and his house I keep,

While he does nothing but sleep and sleep.

“I am the drudge of a useless oaf.

He loves to loll and adores to loaf.

He lumps all day in an easy chair –

I never knew such a Lazy Bear.

“I am the slave of an awful lout.

He keeps me working the daylight out.

I must get this and I must get that.

No wonder I’m bony and he is fat.

“I am the slave of a silly thing.

He loves to lie on his back and sing.

He loves to giggle and puff and pant.

When it’s time to get up he declares he can’t.

“I am the drudge of an awful trial,

A Lazy Bear with a lazy smile.

I get so mad I could swallow nails,

But his good humor, it never fails.

“I am the drudge of a languid brute

Who snores all night through his silly snoot.

This is the finish and this is the end:

A worm doesn’t break but a worm can bend.”

No one seemed more pleased with the poem than did Lazy Bear himself. Not even Squirrel could have been more tickled. Lazy Bear smiled broadly and looked with pride upon his little friend.

“Isn’t he a remarkable Squirrel?” he asked of no one in particular and everybody in general. “There’s not another one like him. He has all the brains and I have all the beauty.”

“For a first poem,” admitted Peter, “it shows a great deal of promise.”

“To tea! To tea!” cried Squirrel, and everyone sat down at the table.

It was a rough sort of tea because Squirrel was in one of his rough moods, but everyone seemed to enjoy it. The tea was cold and something had happened to the cakes. Perhaps the sandwiches might have been good once, but Squirrel had thrown them about so roughly that they looked rather bruised and battered. These little drawbacks did not at all dampen the happy spirits of the party. Nobody noticed them.

“Best cakes I ever ate,” said Mr. Budge.

“I never fail,” replied Squirrel. “My cakes are always best. Have a sandwich, Albert,” and he skillfully hit Albert on the nose with a cheese and tomato sandwich. The dressing was so highly spiced with pepper that poor Albert fell to sneezing and had to be supported by Floret and Mr. Bingle.

“If he doesn’t pull himself together soon, there’ll be one less king of the forest,” observed Squirrel, without any trace of regret.

This remark of Squirrel’s so frightened Albert that he immediately stopped sneezing and looked with moistly reproachful eyes at his small tormentor.

“And I suppose you’d be just as glad,” he gasped, accusingly.

“Not yet,” replied Squirrel. “We’re going to have a lot more fun with you.”

Albert looked appealingly at Floret.

“Make him leave us alone,” he pleaded. “I can’t stand much more of this sort of thing.”

After tea had been dashed off they went into the next room, which Lazy Bear called the library. This was a much larger room than the first one. There were a lot of soft, comfortable couches in it and the walls were lined with books. The table was littered agreeably with pipes, tobacco, cigar and cigarette boxes. There were ash trays everywhere. Lazy Bear took them to a secret closet and showed them a chest full of gold pieces that he and Squirrel had discovered when they were digging out the library. For a long time he looked at Floret and Mr. Bingle. Then he took a handful of gold pieces from the chest and handed them to Mr. Budge.

“This will be a present when that happens,” said Lazy Bear. “You keep it for them until then.”

Floret was pink to the tips of her ears, she was blushing so furiously. Mr. Bingle was busy studying a spot on the floor. No one could see his face, he was stooping so far over.

“Do you think it will happen?” asked Mr. Budge.

“Certainly,” replied Lazy Bear, heartily. “It’s sure to happen. Look at them. You can see for yourself.”

This was a little too much for Floret. She ran out of the room and busied herself clearing away the tea things. This added to Squirrel’s spirit of gayety because it meant less work for him. He pinched the lions’ tails and frisked wildly about the room. After dinner was over, Lazy Bear invited them all to stay for the night.

“There’s no end of room,” he urged. “Look at all these couches. That’s one thing I always make sure of – lots of beds and couches.”

Mr. Budge readily accepted the invitation. Those couches were so comfortable to look at and even more so to sleep on.

“I want to sleep with the Twins!” cried Squirrel.

“We don’t want you,” the Twins shouted in one voice. “Keep him out.”

“Thanks then, I will,” said Squirrel, pretending he hadn’t heard rightly. And sleep with the Twins he did. For a long time after the lights were put out the three of them could be heard whispering and giggling in the darkness.

Chapter 12

The House of the Waiting Toys

In the morning Mr. Budge and Squirrel were up at the same time. Squirrel was rather tired because he had stayed awake later than usual playing with the Twins.

“You can take things easy this morning, Squirrel,” Mr. Budge told him when he saw the little fellow preparing to put on his cook’s hat and apron. “I’ll take care of the breakfast, and you won’t have a thing to do. You won’t even have to wash the dishes. How’s that?”

“You can’t make me mad,” Squirrel replied. “Why don’t you come here and live? I might be able to go to the movies sometimes if you did.”

Squirrel glanced over at the huge couch on which Lazy Bear was sleeping heavily.

“Look at him,” continued Squirrel, bitterly. “Look at him. Isn’t it terrible! That’s what I have to stand for. This is my life. Standing over a hot stove and slaving the livelong day.”

Suddenly he forgot what he was saying, and dashed from the room. He had just thought of the Twins who were still sleeping peacefully. Just to think of how peacefully they were sleeping drove him frantic. He took a quick run, and jumping high in the air came down with a thud on Albert’s face, claws all spread out and working. Albert emitted such a piercing scream that everyone instantly sprang up and went running excitedly about the room.

“I can’t bear it! I can’t bear it!” Squirrel cried. “The sight of them sleeping drives me mad.”

“Murder! Help! Fire! Police!” screamed Albert.

“Floret!” shouted Rudolph, which was a much more sensible thing to shout.

There was such a din and clatter, with everyone rushing about only half awake, that Lazy Bear decided to get up. He had caught the inviting smell of fresh coffee, and this made getting up a lot easier. He swayed over to Squirrel, who was still busy with the Twins, and picking him up, dropped him into a deep pocket of his dressing gown.

“You big hulk,” shouted Squirrel. “No more work out of me today. No more work ever. I’ll get even with you.”

But Lazy Bear only smiled and yawned cheerfully at his guests.

“Everybody sleep well?” he asked.

“Never better in my life,” said Mr. Bingle.

“Breakfast! Breakfast!” called Mr. Budge from the next room.

The Twins forgot their fright and raced through the door. Squirrel poked his head out of Lazy Bear’s pocket and sniffed the air.

“I’ll work,” he said. “Let me out. What chance has a Squirrel in this world anyway? This is a Bear’s world. No place for a Squirrel. Let me out. I give in – but remember this, you great, dumb beast, it’s only because I’m hungry.”

Lazy Bear grinned at Peter and allowed Squirrel to escape. They all sat down to breakfast and ate great quantities of delicious food. The Twins kept an eye on Squirrel and Squirrel kept an eye on the Twins. He could out-stare them every time. All he had to do was to make his little eyes look fierce and sharp over the edge of his spoon and the Twins would drop their lashes with a little shiver. Squirrel was altogether too rough and ready for them.

After breakfast the dishes disappeared from the table, so that there was nothing for Squirrel to wash. Everybody said goodbye and thanked Lazy Bear for a most enjoyable “At Home”.

“I’ll see you later,” said Lazy Bear. “You haven’t seen the last of me yet.”

“Nor me either,” said Squirrel, looking wickedly at the Twins. “And when I do see you, look out. I’ll make you suffer. I’ll make you flinch. I’ll make you call me Uncle.”

The Twins looked the other way and tried to pretend they had not heard him, but they had heard and they did not like it a little bit. Squirrel’s words would make them feel uncomfortable for a long, long time.

Lazy Bear came to the door in the hillside and waved goodbye as the party moved away through the trees. Just as they were about to step out onto the road the Twins gave a wild cry. Squirrel had dropped on them unexpectedly from a tree.

“That’s so you won’t forget me,” he said as he scampered away.

As they went along the road they could hear him calling: “I’ll make you suffer. I’ll make you flinch.”

For the first time in their lives the Twins hurried willingly. They were eager to leave the voice of Squirrel behind them.

This morning Mr. Budge walked as if he really had somewhere to go. He did not linger by the wayside or halt for a moment to talk comfortably and rest. As soon as they were sure that Squirrel was nowhere about, the speed at which they were going became very irksome to the Twins.

“I wonder what all the hurry is about?” Albert wondered aloud.

“Perhaps there’s a fire somewhere,” replied his brother, in a loud, hinting sort of a voice.

“Don’t smell any smoke,” said Albert.

“Nor see any flames,” added Rudy.

“Maybe someone is calling us at a great distance,” suggested Albert.

“I can hear no voices, and my ears are tip-top ears,” replied Rudy.

“Well,” said Albeit, looking directly at Mr. Budge, “perhaps it’s just because some people love to see other people suffer. I’ve heard of such types.”

At first Mr. Budge paid no attention to the hinting of the Twins, but presently he began to smile. Albert and Rudy were too silly for words. He could not help being amused by their remarks.

“I’m hurrying,” he told them, “because I’ve just remembered something – something that both Mary and Peter must have forgotten years ago before they grew young.”

“Did those two grow young?” inquired Albert.

“They did,” replied Mr. Budge.

“I always thought there was something peculiar about them,” observed Albert. “It’s improper.”

“I’ve had my suspicions all along,” said Rudy.

Suddenly without warning, or by your leave or any given signal, Peter began to sing. He sang in a loud voice, and here is his song all written out:

SLIGHTLY PROTESTING
ROAD SONG
By the One and Only Peter

I

“The road slips. The road dips.

The road is smooth and long,

With lovely nooks for jovial quips

And loud, uncultured song.

I do not like to spend the day

Without a stop or pause.

I like to linger on the way

And take my time because . . .

The road slips. The road dips.

The road is smooth and long,

With lovely nooks for friendly quips

And loud, uncultured song.

II

“The sun sings. The sun swings

Along the lofty sky,

And there are many pleasant things

To please the passer-by.

What good is gained in rushing through

Long leagues of silly space?

I’d much prefer a rest or two

In some sweet-scented place.

The trees sway. The birds play.

A happy heart is mine,

And when a body feels that way

One really ought to dine.

III

“The blue skies and bird cries,

The fragrant breeze that blows.

I’d like a chance to use my eyes

And exercise my nose.

Let’s stay our swiftly flying feet,

Let’s stop and try to think;

We have no end of things to eat –

Let’s eat and also drink.

The time flies. The hills rise.

The way will soon be dark,

And ere the singing sunlight dies,

I urge you, let us park.

IV

“The road slips. The road dips.

The road is smooth and long,

With lovely nooks for rest and quips

And loud, uncultured song.

I do not like to walk all day

Without a stop or pause.

I like to linger on the way

And take my time because . . .

The road slips. The road dips.

The road is smooth and long,

With lovely nooks for jovial quips

And loud, uncultured song.”

“He has expressed my feelings exactly,” said Albert when Peter had finished singing.

“I have never heard a song I’ve agreed with more than,” answered Rudy.

“The ‘than’ is not needed,” corrected Albert.

“Well, ‘than’ or no ‘than’, I certainly do feel just like that song,” replied Rudolph.

“Wonder if he heard it,” said Albert, much louder than was necessary.

“What?” asked Rudy. “You mean that song begging a certain person not so far away to give us a chance to rest?”

“That’s what I mean,” replied Albert, “but I don’t think he heard it.”

“Some people certainly do act like their names,” suggested Rudolph.

“They do that,” agreed Albert. “It’s budge, budge, budge all Summer long.”

“Be careful,” Rudolph almost shouted. “The person with a name exactly like that might hear you.”

But Mr. Budge paid no attention to the chatter of the Twins. He kept on budging and they kept on budging after him.

Presently they came to an inviting old house that looked somehow as if it had been forgotten. The grass on the lawn was high and wild, and the house itself badly needed a painting.

Mary stopped suddenly and looked at the house with a funny, puzzled look in her eyes.

“Peter,” she said in a remembering voice, “isn’t that my house where we used to play when we were young before everything happened?”

“It looks like it to me,” replied Peter. “It makes me feel queer all over to come upon it so unexpectedly. Mary, I can almost see you now running across the lawn to meet me just as you used to do ever so long ago.”

“Oh, Mr. Budge,” pleaded Mary, “may we go in for just a minute?”

“That’s what I want you to do,” replied Mr. Budge, with a kindly smile. “That’s what I remembered you had forgotten.”

“Let’s all go in,” suggested Albert. “It looks cool and restful in there.”

So they all went across the lawn and up the front steps to the veranda. A rag doll was propped up in a chair. She seemed to be asleep, but at the sound of footsteps she quickly opened her little black button eyes.

“All this must stop,” she started in severely, addressing her remarks to Mary. “There must be no more of this. No more gadding about. Since you left me here there’s been no living in this house with Queen Elizabeth. She keeps calling me the livelong day.”

“I’m sorry, Susie,” said Mary, tenderly picking up the old, shabby rag doll. “I didn’t want to leave you behind, but we just grew up and then we just grew down.”

“Sounds all very fishy to me,” snapped Susie, “but you’d better go in and try to make it up with the Queen. I never did like to see you get into trouble, and she’s in a mean mood.”

“Who’s out there?” shouted a shrill voice. “Is it she? Is it she? Tell her to come to me this minute, you lack-wit.”

Everybody went inside the house, and Mary looked around for Queen Elizabeth.

“Here I am,” screamed the Queen. “Can’t you remember anything or do you remember nothing? That at least would be less humiliating. Don’t ask me why.”

Then Mary remembered. She had left the Queen, her most splendid doll, in the wood box. She hurried to the great box and lifted the lid. There lay the Queen in a state of great disorder. She had once been a very handsome doll, but now her white wig was full of cobwebs and her black satin dress with its fine, delicate lace had been spotted and eaten by dust and dampness. Mary had named her Queen Elizabeth because she had once been such a grand lady, but now she looked as if she’d gone through the wars most unsuccessfully.

“Well, young lady, explain yourself,” scolded the Queen, the moment she set her eyes on Mary.

“We – we – grew up, Queen Elizabeth,” replied Mary timidly.

“You don’t look a day older to me,” grated the Queen. “No cock-and-bull stories for me. You’re not a day older. Don’t falsify fact.”

“No, ma’am,” replied Mary, respectfully, not quite knowing what the Queen meant.

“Take me out of here this instant and dust me off,” commanded the Queen. “Such a place to leave a person! Tidy me up quickly. I see we have visitors.”

When Mary had done her best, which helped a little but not much, the Queen looked with dignity first at Floret, then at Mr. Budge, then at Mr. Bingle, then, finally, her eyes rested on the Twins.

“What are those?” she demanded in a harsh voice.

“Those are lions, your majesty,” replied Mary.

“Then tell them to stop,” said the Queen.

Albert and Rudy looked at each other questioningly. They weren’t doing a thing.

“Stop what?” asked Mary.

“Stop being lions,” replied the Queen.

“They can’t help it,” Mary explained. “It’s the way they are.”

The Queen looked thoughtful.

“Well, if they can’t help it they can’t help it,” she said at last, “but all I can say is that it’s a terrible way to be.”

“What an obnoxious old woman she is!” said Albert.

“Who called me that?” screamed the Queen. “Who used that long, difficult, and disagreeable word?”

She looked so angrily at Albert that the poor lion began to tremble.

“I was speaking of someone outside,” he chattered.

The Queen looked at him a long time with a peculiar smile on her lips.

“Not bad,” she said at last. “I accept your apology. Shall I make you a duke? Shall I make you a couple of dukes?”

“We’d be very grateful, I’m sure,” replied Rudolph, who liked the sound of the word.

“Then you’re a couple of dukes,” said the Queen. “How do you feel?”

“Much better,” the Twins answered, “thank you.”

“You’re very welcome,” said the Queen. “What are their names?”

“Albert and Rudolph,” replied Mary, very much relieved that everything was going along so nicely.

“Well, Al,” continued the Queen, playfully, “you can have the attic for your dukedom, and you, Dolphy, can have the cellar, or vice versa. Fight it out between you. I love a good fight. Now, Mary, put me down on a chair. I want to talk with that little fat man. What does he call himself?”

“His name is Mr. Budge, your majesty,” Mary told her.

“Budge,” repeated the Queen. “How very, very odd! Almost impossible. Well, I fancy he can’t help it, either. Come over here, Budge, and let’s get acquainted.”

While the Queen was conversing with Mr. Budge, Mary and Peter and Floret ran all over the old forgotten house. They found dolls and toys everywhere. They were lying in corners and hiding in closets. There were balls and tea sets and stoves and doll houses and everything. And they all looked neglected and were covered with dust. And Peter found a rocking horse.

At the sight of Peter the horse began to rock as well as it could.

“I’m not so sprightly as I used to be, master,” said the horse, “but I can still carry on if you want me.”

“Of course I want you,” answered Peter, giving the horse an affectionate pat. “You’re just as sound and gay as ever.”

And he mounted the rocking horse just to make the poor thing feel happy again.

Mary collected all the dolls, and Peter picked up the horse, and then they went downstairs. Mr. Budge suggested a real tea party, and the Queen shrieked with delight.

“Now, you’re talking, Budge,” she shouted, and all the dolls set up a great noise and clatter. They were very happy now that Mary and Peter were back again. Queen Elizabeth was so pleased with everything that she made them all princes and princesses and gave them the entire world for a kingdom with the exception of Perth Amboy, certain sections of Brooklyn, and the extreme tip of the North Pole.

“We have to banish people somewhere,” she explained, “and these places seem about as good as any. And tomorrow,” she continued, turning to Mary, “you must take us on an excursion on the lake. The boat leaves at eight-thirty, daylight-wasting time. Be prompt. Be punctual. Be there.”

Chapter 13

Aboard the Penguin Ship

Promptly at eight-thirty by daylight-wasting time, Mr. Budge and his party were on the dock. The dolls were carried in two baskets. Queen Elizabeth occupied one basket all by herself, while her recently created princesses were tumbled together in the other one. Peter was carrying Carrots, the rocking horse, because he did not have the heart to leave the poor old thing at home.

“There’s something about this ship I don’t like one little bit,” Albert confided to his brother. “It seems to be run entirely by birds. What kind of birds are they, anyway?”

“They’re penguins,” called Queen Elizabeth, who had overheard Albert’s question. “A very high type of bird indeed. I think I’ll make them all earls.”

She put two fingers between her teeth and whistled piercingly.

“Hear that, you penguins,” she shouted. “You’re all earls.”

The penguins were so confused and upset by this piece of news that they ran about giddily and kept falling over one another. The Captain penguin got so mixed up that he shouted, “All ashore,” instead of “All aboard,” but as everyone knew what he meant it made no difference.

When Mr. Budge had got his party safely on the ship, everyone went to the upper deck, from which they could get a good view of the lake.

It was a large lake and a beautiful lake, but a little too large for the Twins.

“Why, you can’t even see the other side,” Albert exclaimed. “That doesn’t seem at all as it should be.”

“No,” snapped the Queen, “but that’s how it is. If anything happens, it’s sink or swim for all of us.”

“For us,” replied Albert, “the thing is much more simple than that. It’s just sink. That’s all. No swim.”

“Is that all?” replied the Queen. “Then I’m sure you should be satisfied. You don’t have to make up your minds whether to sink or swim. All you have to do is just sink.”

“Yes,” agreed Rudolph, with the smile of an ill lion. “That’s all we have to do – just sink.”

“And sink and sink and sink,” added the Queen.

“This lake is very deep. It’s a jolly lake for sinking.”

“Shall we talk about something else?” suggested Albert.

The ship was far out on the lake now. Land had faded away on either side. There was nothing but water all around them. The Captain waddled up very busily.

“We’re about to have a most important drill now,” he told them. “Want to see it? It’s called, ‘Man Underboard’ – and after that we’re going to have another even more important drill called, ‘Man Overboard’.”

“I’ve heard of ‘Man Overboard’,” said Mr. Budge, “but never of ‘Man Underboard’. How does it go?”

“Well, you pull up some boards in the deck,” explained the Captain, trying his best to remember it himself. “You make a sort of a hole or space, you see. Then you get a man and cram him into the hole or space as the case may be. The boards are put back and everyone goes away and pretends that nothing has happened. Then, suddenly, someone – usually myself – comes rushing up, shouting: ‘Man underboard! Man underboard!’ Then we all hurry about and wonder just where that man could be. We tear up a lot of planks where the man isn’t, and then we take them up where he is and someone says: ‘Why, here’s the man underboard.’ And there he is.”

The Captain looked anxiously at Mr. Budge and the others.

“Do you think it’s an important drill?” he asked. “Do you think it’s indispensable?”

“Absolutely,” replied Mr. Budge, keeping a serious face. “It’s an amazing drill, simply amazing.”

“I’m glad you think so,” said the Captain, looking greatly relieved. “I’ve never been able to see much sense in it myself.”

When the space had been made in the deck, the Captain called for volunteers.

“Who wants to be the man underboard?” he shouted.

Apparently nobody did. Not a voice could be heard.

“It’s always like this,” the Captain complained. “Everything goes splendidly up to this point, then when we call for a man to go underboard we can’t get the man.”

“Will a lion do?” asked Mr. Bingle.

“Certainly not!” screamed Albert.

“Are you mad?” demanded Rudolph.

“Wouldn’t a pillow do?” suggested Mary.

The Captain’s face brightened.

“Just the thing!” he exclaimed.

He rushed into his stateroom and came back with a pillow on which he had drawn a face. This he crammed into the hole and covered it over with the boards. Then everybody went away and walked about, pretending it hadn’t happened. Suddenly, the Captain went rushing about the deck, shouting at the top of his lungs, “Man underboard! Man underboard!” At this signal the penguins began to tear up the deck so furiously Albeit became afraid there would be nothing left of the ship. Then suddenly one of the penguins shouted, “Oh, here’s the man underboard!” All the other penguins hurried to the hole and cheered loudly as the Captain pulled out the pillow. The Captain then made a short speech of thanks, and the drill was over. The penguins waddled back to their places, glancing proudly about them. They were all very happy and puffed up.

“Well, I’m glad that’s over,” said the Captain, mopping his brow. “Did everything go off all right?”

“Splendidly!” cried the Queen. “I nearly laughed myself sick.”

“It’s not supposed to be funny, you know,” said the Captain, rather sadly.

“Yes, I know,” answered the Queen. “That’s what makes it funny.”

“Well, ‘Man Overboard’ is much more serious,” the Captain said.

“How do you go about doing that?” asked Mr. Bingle.

“It sounds simple but it isn’t,” replied the Captain. “First we get a man. Next we hurl him overboard. Then we lower a boat and try to pick him up. That’s all there is to it.”

“How do you catch the man?” asked Albert. “It sounds very desperate to me.”

“That’s always been the trouble,” admitted the Captain. “None of the crew ever seems willing to be the man.”

“I can well understand that,” put in Albert.

“The members of the crew have some sense, after all,” remarked Rudolph.

“Most of the time we use a bit of wood,” said the Captain. “That makes it simpler.”

“And easier,” suggested the Queen.

“And safer,” said Mr. Bingle.

“Must get it over with,” sighed the Captain, and hurried away.

“Man Overboard Drill!” they heard him shouting. “All hands to the rail for ‘Man Overboard Drill’.”

The penguins rushed excitedly to the rail and began to cheer.

“Not now,” shouted the Captain. “We must get a man overboard first.”

The cheering instantly stopped. The crew seemed to have lost interest.

“Who wants to be the man overboard?” asked the Captain.

Again there was a dead silence. No one wanted to be the man overboard.

“Thanks!” said the Captain bitterly. “If so many of you volunteer, I’m afraid I won’t have any crew left.”

“We’ll hurl the pillow over,” cried a penguin, lifting the Captain’s pillow above his head.

“Stop!” screamed the Captain. “Stop! It will get all wet, and I hate wet pillows. Use a bit of wood.”

So a piece of wood was tossed overboard, and after a long wait a boat was lowered to pick it up. When the boat came back one of the penguins handed the bit of wood to the Captain and said, “Here is the Man Overboard.” Then the Captain said, “Thank you very much indeed,” and the drill was over. The penguins cheered, the Captain made a short speech of welcome, and the members of the crew hurried busily to their places. The Captain retired to his stateroom and took a nap. He felt that he deserved it. When they last saw him he was hurrying to his cabin, fiercely straining his pillow to his heart. He had been able to save that, at least, from the perils of the deep.

Peter had been watching the penguins closely. He found them very amusing, with their short little waddling walk, their dignified bearing, and their little, peering, nearsighted eyes. He decided that something should be done about penguins and that no time was like the present. Without word or warning he stood up and recited this poem which he called:

SLIGHT OBSERVATIONS
ON THE MANNERS
AND MOODS OF PENGUINS
By Peter (Why More?)

“When a penguin’s feeling chilly

For a cover, willy-nilly –

Do not ask the question, silly –

It will snatch it.

It will creep upon your blanket,

It will haul at it and yank it.

If you try to rise and spank it,

You won’t catch it.

“When a penguin’s feeling happy

You might think that it was scrappy,

But it’s merely that it’s snappy

In its bearing.

It will strut and it will swagger

Like a boulevarding bragger.

It will even wear a dagger

When it’s daring.

“When a penguin’s feeling dreary

It will call you ‘dear’ or ‘dearie’

And proclaim that it is weary,

Also, tearful.

You will have to run and get it,

Put it on your lap and pet it,

And you mustn’t once forget it

Till it’s cheerful.

“When a penguin’s feeling brutal

It will flap its flips and tootle.

It is all so very futile,

All so fruitless.

If you say, ‘Please don’t be foolish,’

It will try to look so cruelish

And succeed in looking mulish,

It is bootless.

“When a penguin has no dinner

You should hear the little sinner Scream,

‘I’m getting thin and thinner,’

Till you feed it.

It will gulp and it will gobble,

It will swallow food and hobble

Till it isn’t fit to wobble –

You must lead it.

“When a penguin’s in a hurry

It will fuss and it will worry,

It will rush about and scurry,

It will splutter.

Through its silly little eyes

It will frown and look so wise

While it utters feeble cries

All aflutter.”

“You’re wrong!” cried a passing penguin, white with anger. “You’re just like all the others – always picking on penguins.”

“In what am I wrong?” asked Peter.

“We don’t steal blankets,” replied the penguin bitterly. “Why, many’s the time I’ve given my last blanket to a friend. And I heard of other penguins doing the same thing, especially in the Summer. Another thing, a penguin never gulps or gobbles his food unless he’s in a great, great hurry or other penguins are around. We are very dainty eaters, really. And remember this: we are not brutal. We never attack another penguin unless there are at least a couple of dozen of us to see that the unpleasant affair is quickly finished.”

By this time the penguin was sobbing and gasping hysterically. His face was bathed in tears. They gathered in a pool at his feet.

“There,” he whimpered, “I’ve gone and gotten my feet all wet. If I catch a cold and fall down dead it will be your fault. Why, oh, why did I ever follow the sea? Why did I ever run away from home? Lend me a handkerchief, somebody, or a blotter, or even a coat sleeve.”

Mary gave the heartbroken penguin her handkerchief. It had three little rabbits embroidered in one corner, and the penguin became so absorbed in looking at them that he forgot to use the handkerchief.

“It’s a pretty thing,” he said, with a sigh, as he passed it back to Mary.

“Would you like to have it?” asked Mary.

“Oh, so much,” breathed the penguin. “I’d be the envy of the ship.”

When Mary gave him the handkerchief the poor little penguin became so excited he couldn’t stand still.

“What are those?” he asked, pointing a trembling flipper at the rabbits.

“They are little rabbits,” Mary explained.

“Nice-looking animals, those,” murmured the penguin. “Nice, neat-looking animals. Splendid ears. I’ve always been a great admirer of ears – ears and elbows. Well, goodbye. What did you say their name was?”

“Rabbits,” replied Mary.

“Rabbits,” repeated the penguin under his breath, and waddled off whispering to himself: “Rabbits, rabbits, rabbits. When they ask me I’ll just say, ‘Rabbits’.”

“Crazy, plumb crazy,” commented the Queen. “They all are. I knew his father.”

Peter, Mary, and Floret were enjoying the trip hugely. So were the others. The dolls were delighted with everything and Queen Elizabeth was in one of her playful moods. Three times she had raised the penguins to a higher rank of nobility. They were now all dukes. She had to be content with that because she could not make them kings.

In the middle of luncheon a terrible storm arose and the ship was immediately plunged into a great state of confusion. It rolled and tossed and shivered and pitched. Spray drove across the decks and great, grinning waves showed their white teeth all around them.

The Twins were in a terrible condition. They were unable to stand on their feet.

“Is this to be the end?” moaned Albert.

“No,” chattered Rudolph. “The sinking part is the end.”

Queen Elizabeth was cheering and catcalling. She loved the storm.

The Captain dragged himself sleepily from his cabin.

“Looks to me like a storm,” he remarked to Mr. Budge. “I’d better issue an order.”

He yawned and stretched and then shouted furiously: “Penguin the rail! Penguin the rail!” Turning to Mr. Budge, he asked, “Does that sound like a good order? I have lots of others.”

“Then issue them,” pleaded Albert. “Issue all the orders you have and think up a couple of new ones.”

“May I borrow your newspaper?” the Captain quietly asked Mr. Bingle. “I always read the paper at a time like this. It keeps my mind off the storm.”

Mr. Bingle let the Captain have his paper. He sat down and began to read.

“What shall we do?” cried the penguins. “What shall we do?”

Presently the Captain looked up over the edge of the newspaper and frowned impatiently.

“Don’t annoy me,” he shouted. “How on earth should I know what to do? The way you penguins go on, you’d think I’d made this storm. Do something. Do anything, but leave me alone. Haven’t seen a paper in a week. I’m doing a pleasant word puzzle. Never could abide the cross ones.”

Not being able to get any sense out of their Captain, the penguins began to flap their flippers nervously, and in a short time the ship rose from the tossing waves and sailed away high into the sky.

“Keep to your course!” shouted a big black cloud as the ship approached it.

“I beg your pardon,” replied the Captain.

“Keep to your course,” repeated the cloud in an angry voice.

“Now what on earth does he mean by that?” the Captain asked Mr. Budge. “We’re not eating.”

“Then tell him so,” suggested Mr. Budge.

“But won’t he know it already?” asked the Captain, nervously.

“It won’t matter,” said Mr. Budge.

“We’re not eating,” called the Captain.

“Oh, fish!” exclaimed the cloud, scornfully.

“Not even fish,” the Captain replied. “Nothing at all.”

“What a lark!” shrieked the Queen.

“You know,” said Albert to his brother, “sometimes I could hate that woman. She thinks this is a lark. Imagine!”

“I’m going to rain all over you,” screamed the cloud.

This made the Captain angry. He carefully folded up the newspaper and returned it to Mr. Bingle, thanking him courteously for the use of it. Then he began to dance in a perfect frenzy of rage up and down the deck.

“If you do,” he shouted at the cloud, “I’ll drive my ship clean through your bloated body.”

“Bah!” yelled the cloud.

“I’ll teach you to say that to me,” cried the Captain, and he steered the ship right through the center of the cloud.

The cloud uttered a wild cry and began to rain heavily on the ship.

“It’s raining! It’s pouring! The old cloud is roaring,” the penguins spluttered.

“Back to the dock!” ordered the Captain. “Back to the dock! Steward! My umbrella. Quick!”

In a twinkling the ship was back at the dock. The penguins rushed to their cabins and returned with bath towels, with which they rubbed themselves vigorously. Already a number of them were sneezing. They felt much better after Queen Elizabeth had made them all princes. So did Queen Elizabeth. Albert and Rudolph were glad to leave the ship.

“How did you enjoy yourselves?” asked Mr. Budge.

“Miserably, thank you,” said Albert.

“Not quite as much as Queen Elizabeth,” was Rudolph’s answer.

Chapter 14

The Twins Leave Home

“Would you?” Rudolph asked earnestly of his brother.

The Twins were lying on the front lawn of their new home. They were resting after no exertion behind a row of bushes which screened them from the road and chance observation. It was a favorite sport of the Twins. Albert was always upset by chance observation. One never could tell whether people were thinking up a Friendly Act or a Hostile Act. And there was a vast difference between the two, Albert had found.

“Would you?” repeated Rudolph.

“Would I what?” lazily inquired Albert.

“Would you have, of course?” Rudolph was a little impatient.

“Still I don’t quite see,” remarked Albert, “and the ‘of course’ point doesn’t make it any easier. Would I have what, Rudolph?”

“The courage,” snapped his brother. “Under the circumstances would you dare?”

“Oh,” said Albert, looking disturbed. “Oh, that,” he repeated. “What sort of circumstances, Rudy?”

“The circumstances surrounding us,” replied Rudolph.

Albert looked even more disturbed. He greatly disliked being surrounded by circumstances. One never could be sure about circumstances. Albert much preferred to be surrounded by safety.

“Rudolph,” he said at last, “you are making yourself somewhat clearer, but still I don’t quite see my way to the end of your sentence. Much remains obscure. Even more seems to be implied. But, of course, if it is a question of courage and daring there is no need to ask. I have plenty of both and to spare – that is, let me add, within reason. I have always disliked rashness, Rudolph, always. Shall we change the subject? This one is not comfortable.”

Rudolph looked severely at his brother, who was idly admiring his highly polished toenails.

“I forgot,” remarked Rudolph. “You don’t know.”

“Should I know, Rudolph?” inquired Albert, delicately elevating his eyebrows.

“Perhaps not,” said Rudy slowly. “You see, I was only thinking about something, but if it hasn’t struck you—”

“Rudolph,” interrupted his brother emphatically, “say no more. If it is a matter of striking or of being struck, then I most assuredly don’t dare. Free your mind of all such vulgar thoughts. In the first place, I can’t bear even the thought of being struck, and in the second place, I invariably miss and fall on my nose whenever I strike back. The Good Book says, turn the other cheek. Rudolph, I say, keep both cheeks well out of everything.”

“You may be right,” replied Rudolph, “but just the same when a lion’s honor is involved—”

“I say, save the lion and let the honor go,” Albert once more interrupted. “One live lion without honor can lick any ten dead ones with. There are lots of amusements open to a thoroughly dishonored lion so long as he keeps himself alive and in good health. Why not use a little tact? Tact, Rudolph, is a priceless possession. It saves so much wear and tear.”

“Just the same,” persisted Rudolph, “it is rather trying, this business of not being appreciated. I can stand almost anything but that. One hates to be undervalued – to be taken, as it were for granted.”

“Dear boy,” said his brother, “I hadn’t thought you’d noticed. I have, of course, but then I’m so sensitive. It’s been going on for some time, and it’s discouraging. Quite.”

“It is,” replied Rudy gravely. “Not every family can lay claim to a couple of real live lions.”

“Not nice lions,” added Albert.

“Certainly not to lions of our refinement and distinction,” put in Rudy.

“Few lions have our accomplishments,” agreed his brother.

“None has our social background,” went on Rudolph.

“Or our little ways,” replied the other.

“Or our charm,” put in Albert. “If there’s anything we have, it’s charm, Rudolph.”

“And we instinctively know what is smart and comme il faut!” declared Rudolph. “They’re too crude to realize what treasures they have in us. Bingle, Budge, that great bear and his scamp of a Squirrel – all crude characters, unappreciative.”

“And Peter and Mary are too young to realize, and Floret is too head over heels in love with Bingle to notice anything,” said Albert. “You’re right, Rudolph. You’re right, dear boy. How seriously do you think our honor is involved?”

“I’m afraid it’s terribly tarnished,” said his brother.

“Then I think I have the courage and the daring,” replied Albert after a pause. “But what shall we do, Rudolph?”

“Run away,” said Rudolph presently.

Albert started violently and turned pale beneath his tan.

“That would require no end of courage and daring,” he observed. “There seems hardly enough of either in all the world to drive me to such a desperate act, but I’ll try, Rudolph, I’ll try. Couldn’t we bring it to their attention in some less dangerous and fatiguing manner?”

“They wouldn’t understand,” retorted Rudolph, “and that would be even more humiliating. No, we must run away. You wait here for a moment. I must see about something.”

When Rudolph returned, Albert was looking as if he had been trying without success to collect all of the courage and the daring in the world. Rudolph himself was looking rather odd, especially about the mouth. It was puckered slightly, giving its owner a much sillier expression than he suspected.

“What’s wrong with your mouth?” asked Albert. “I certainly will not run away with you if you’re going to wear a mouth like that.”

At this Rudolph proudly stuck out his tongue, on the end of which was a large gold coin. Then, being unable to speak with his tongue so impeded, he carefully placed the coin on a nice clean leaf and turned to his brother.

“We must have some money,” he explained. “Can’t get along without money. There it is.”

“Did you—” began Albert rather nervously. “Did you simply walk in there and stea— I mean, is it ours?”

“Certainly it is ours,” declared Rudolph stoutly.

“I can see that,” remarked Albert, “but what I really mean is, if we are running away to save our honor we don’t want to lose it before we start. We don’t want to – you know, Rudolph – to take things.”

“That money is rightly ours,” protested Rudy. “It’s our regular weekly spending money.”

“Yes, yes, I know that,” Albert hastened to reply. “I know it seems so to you, but you see, Rudolph, you’re so rash. We don’t want to give the wrong impression, and I’d hate to be arrested for a common thief – that is, for the sake of only one coin. If you had taken the whole bag now, but of course . . .”

Albert paused as if trying to clear his mind. He looked archly at Rudolph, then lowered his eyes. “We are not entitled to our weekly spending money for two days – Saturday, that would be – and if we are not here on Saturday the question is, are we entitled to money today we will not be present to receive two days hence?”

“We are merely hypothecating it,” asserted Rudy.

“What’s that?” inquired Albert.

“It’s the counting your chickens before they’re hatched,” his brother replied, with a vague wave of his paw.

“What chickens?” demanded Albert.

“There aren’t any chickens,” said Rudolph.

“Then why should we count them before they’re hatched?” insisted Albert.

“But you can’t count chickens before they’re hatched,” protested Rudolph. “That is, not really.”

“You just said we could,” replied Albert.

“I didn’t say we could,” explained Rudolph. “I said it was like that.”

“I don’t think it’s like that at all,” declared Albert.

“Like what?” asked Rudolph.

“I don’t know,” replied Albert.

“Do you know what we are talking about?” asked his brother.

“I don’t know that, either,” answered Albert.

“Neither do I,” agreed Rudolph. “It’s all too confusing.”

“And I don’t like chickens,” put in Albert. “They have sharp, painful-looking beaks that peck.”

“Then let’s go,” suggested Rudolph, scraping up the coin with his long red tongue.

With a wistful look back at the house, Albert rose and crept across the lawn after his brother. Already he was wishing that they had not run away. When they slipped into the dusty road and left the house behind he kept wishing even more wishfully that they had not run away.

“This is coming to no good end,” declared Albert.

Rudolph was unable to speak because of the coin on his tongue. He merely made queer noises which sounded quite shocking to Albert.

“I hope he isn’t saying rude things,” Albert thought to himself as he paddled down the road.

Chapter 15

The Adventures of Albert and Rudy

The Twins had not proceeded very far down the road before they met a boy. But the meeting was not for long. No sooner did the boy lay eyes on the two lions than he tried earnestly to be somewhere else. With a wild cry he jumped up in the air, spun around three times, and dropped back to the road with his feet already running. In almost less than no time at all that boy was not there any more, but you may be sure that wherever he was he was still running as fast as his bare brown legs could get in front of one another.

“A most peculiar way for a boy to act,” observed Albert, looking down the road after the flying speck of a boy.

“Not necessarily,” replied Rudolph. “Perhaps he just remembered something.”

“Then it must have been a very important something,” said his brother. “I hope he doesn’t forget it on the way. He gave me a fair start, he did.”

They padded down the road and next met a jackass who was looking at them with large, horrified eyes over the top of a wire fence. The poor little creature’s long ears were trembling with excitement.

“Who are you?” asked Albert, with a gasp of fear.

“I’m an ass,” chattered the frightened animal.

“We can see that at a glance,” replied Albert, “but what sort of an ass are you?”

“I – I – I – I’m a jackass,” stammered the other, no longer able to hold up his ears, which flopped down over his forehead and made him look, if possible, more foolish than before.

“Are you sure you’re not a silly ass?” asked Rudolph, who had dropped his golden coin to the road when he had first answered Albert.

“No,” replied the little fellow, “I’m not at all sure of that. But whatever I may or may not be I’m not quite so silly as to stay here any longer. What mugs!”

And with that he kicked his small, neat heels high in the air and dashed off across the field.

“Rather slangy, that last bit,” commented Albert.

“Crude, I’d call it,” replied Rudy.

At this moment an automobile came toward them down the road. When it drew near and the driver saw the Twins his hair flew straight up on its ends and pushed his hat clear off his head. Then the automobile made the queerest noises and began to go backwards much faster than it had gone forward. Soon it disappeared from sight, but the chattering of its engine could still be heard.

“Don’t tell me he just remembered something, too,” said Albert, with a thoughtful pause.

“I don’t know,” answered Rudolph. “Something seemed to have occurred to him quite suddenly.”

“Has it occurred to you, Rudy,” asked Albert, “that people might possibly be trying to avoid us?”

“That impression is being forced on me,” admitted Rudy.

“Yes,” continued Albert, “instead of our running away from people it looks as if people were running away from us.”

“I was beginning to wonder myself,” replied Rudy, “just whose runaway this is – whether it is ours or everyone else’s.”

It was then that Rudolph just became aware of the fact that someone or something was breathing heavily on his left ear. He turned his head and looked into the nearsighted eyes of a mean-looking old man.

“Rur-rur-rur-eruff!” gasped Rudolph, relapsing into his native speech.

“Give me that golden coin, you bad dog,” croaked the old man, who just happened to be about the meanest miser that had ever put tooth to a kopeck.

“I don’t see it any more,” said Rudy huskily.

Rudy did not see it for the simple reason that Albert, too shocked with terror to stand, was sitting on the coin.

“Then that other bad dog has it,” grunted the mean, nearsighted old man. “Give me that coin, dog.”

And with that he began to claw and scrabble with his skinny fingers at Albert’s tail. Albert found the miser’s conduct too offensive to be borne in silence. In spite of his overtaxed nerves he was forced to protest.

“My dear sir,” he murmured, “I wish you would stop doing that. It’s not quite nice and besides it’s not the sort of thing I’m accustomed to – not at all the sort of thing one would expect from a total stranger.”

“Then get up, you dog,” cried the miser. “You’re sitting on the golden coin.”

“I can’t get up,” said Albert with great dignity. “I’m much too frightened, and let me once more remind you that you are taking liberties I would not permit of a close friend. A lion’s tail is not to be twisted lightly. Ask any Englishman.”

“Lion,” grumbled the old man, “who’s talking about lions, you foolish dog?”

“Nobody is talking about lions,” replied Albert. “I was talking about a lion’s tail. I was talking about my tail, to be specific. And I’ll have you to know that I am neither foolish nor a dog.”

“Go on and get up,” coaxed the miser in a pleading voice. “What does a dog want with a golden coin? I’ll give you a nice bone instead.”

Albert shuddered at the coarseness of the man’s mind.

“Don’t get up, Albert,” said his brother.

“Have no fear of that, Rudy,” replied Albert. “I can’t get up. It’s the knees. You know how I am.”

The miser in his eagerness to find the coin was peering into Rudolph’s mouth, which Rudy most accommodatingly opened to its full width. The nearsighted old man paused and blinked rapidly several times. Something seemed to be telling him that no mere dog could be carrying around with him a mouth of such generous proportions. It looked more like a cave to the miser, a cave lined with red plush and furnished with white, pointed stools. The Twins had lovely teeth – but not to look at. They gave one an uncomfortable feeling. With trembling fingers the old miser took his spectacles from his pocket and set them on the end of his long, thin nose. Then he looked at the Twins and closed his eyes. The miserable old man felt quite convinced that at last his sins had found him out.

“I don’t want that coin,” he shouted so suddenly that both Rudy and Albert fell all in a heap and thought they were going to die right there on the spot. “You can keep your golden coin,” shouted the old miser. “All I want is this,” and he straight away showed them what he wanted, which was as much of the road as he could put between himself and the Twins. With arms flapping and legs pumping and lungs puffing, he flew down the road so fast that soon he became only an unpleasant memory to the lions wallowing in the dust and trying to hide their heads in each other’s neck.

“This running-away idea of yours has its drawbacks, Rudy,” said Albeit. “How about giving it up and returning home? We’ve gone quite far enough to show them we’ll stand for no nonsense. My honor feels much better already. As a matter of fact it’s more than satisfied.”

“Mine doesn’t seem to be so seriously involved as it was before,” replied Rudolph, “but still we should be able to do a little better than this. Let’s try again.”

So they slowly got to their feet and Rudolph scooped up the golden coin, together with a lot of dust which made him cough and sneeze until it turned into mud pies on his tongue, which did not make him feel any better – if anything, worse.

And after walking for a long, long time they presently came to the village. Here all the people seemed so busy that they did not notice the lions at first. One man did notice them, but he refused to believe his eyes, although, just to take no chances, he quietly withdrew into his house, locked and bolted his door, hurried upstairs, and got into bed, where he stayed for a whole week with his head covered up and refused to say even so much as “good-morning” or “good-night” to any member of his family. He was thinking.

All unconscious of what the mere sight of them had done to this man, the lions walked down the street and stopped in front of an ice cream soda shop. They looked through the window and admired the lovely pink and brown colored sodas that men, women, and children were drinking through long straws as if their lives depended on what they were doing. The Twins looked at the lollipops and other candies separated from them only by the thickness of the window against which their noses were pressed, and their mouths watered – that is, Albert’s mouth watered while poor Rudolph’s, because of the pies on his tongue, merely muddied and felt untidy.

“I’ve never had a soda through a straw,” said Albert wistfully. “Do you imagine it would be difficult?”

“I could manage a harder trick than that if it would only get the horrid taste of a public highway out of my mouth,” Rudolph complained thickly.

The sight of so many sodas being sucked up by so many straws and swallowed down so many bobbing necks greatly excited the Twins. They were standing now with their front paws against the window and their noses flattened against the glass. Their general appearance was not improved thereby.

“It’s a hot day,” murmured Albert.

“And we have come far,” said Rudolph.

“Running away on hot days is thirsty work,” went on Albert.

“Righto, brother,” replied Rudolph. “How true that is!”

“I wonder—” began Albert, but he never finished.

A lady seated next to the window lifted her eyes for a moment from her rapidly vanishing soda and met the envious glances of the two lions. The lady was at first so surprised that she sucked up the straw instead of the soda. It disappeared down her throat with an unpleasant swish, like an arrow shot from a bow only not quite so fast. After that the lady was so frightened that all she could say was, “Oh, look at the big lions. We will all be murdered in our beds.”

This was not much to say, but it was quite enough to make everyone stop sucking sodas and look up at the lions. At this moment the glass broke with an enormous crash and the Twins tumbled through the window. Now the people in that shop would not have felt at all happy had the lions entered in the usual way through the door, but to see them come flying wild-eyed through the window to the accompaniment of falling glass made them feel even less happy. It made them feel simply awful. They did not even stop to finish their sodas. Some were left almost untouched. Where all of those people went to so quickly remained a mystery to Albert and Rudolph, who were feeling none too happy themselves. Some of the people went through one window and some went through another. Some of them hid behind the counter, while others climbed up the electric light fixtures. However they did it, they all managed to get out of the way with amazing promptness. The Twins had the shop to themselves as well as everything in it. Luckily they had not been cut by the falling glass, but as they lay among the ruins they had created you would have thought that their accident had killed them a thousand times over.

“This will teach me never to be thirsty again,” declared Albert, wiping a bar of chocolate out of his left eye.

Rudolph, looking quite frosty about the eyes and mouth, withdrew his head from a large cocoanut cake and looked miserably at his brother.

“This is really too bad,” he said very slowly. “A terrible thing has happened. I think I swallowed the coin.”

“Easy come, easy go,” replied Albert, who, in spite of the shock he had received, could not help being amused by Rudolph’s cake-smeared face. “I wonder where everyone’s got to. Let’s look.”

Daintily shaking off the glass from their bodies, the Twins arose and stepped onto the floor of the shop. But instead of looking for the vanished soda suckers, the Twins climbed up on the two high stools and became soda suckers themselves. They parted their lips with cultured delicacy, then closed them over the straws.

“Do you blow out or blow in?” asked Rudolph.

“In,” answered Albert through the side of his mouth.

“I thought not,” said Rudy indistinctly. “It gets into your eyes the other way.”

At first they sucked quietly and slowly, but as the sodas seemed to get better and better and because the day was really very warm indeed they began to suck louder and faster until the air was filled with a liquid sound.

“Do you hear a noise?” asked Rudolph.

“What sort of noise?” asked Albert.

“Like something gurgling,” said Rudolph.

“That’s us,” said Albert, then added, “I regret to say.”

“Why?” asked Rudy innocently.

“It’s not refined,” said his brother. “Not in company.”

“Oh,” replied Rudolph. “It doesn’t matter then. We’re just a family here – just twins, you know.”

They moved over to two other stools and wrapped their lips around two more straws. The sucking began again, but this time they made even better and bigger noises.

“S’good,” breathed Rudy.

“Very,” replied Albert.

“S’very good,” repeated Rudolph.

“Very, very good,” agreed Albeit.

Once more they moved to two fresh stools and began to gargle down two more sodas.

“The brown’s best,” gasped Rudolph.

“I like the pink,” declared Albert.

All in all, those two lions consumed twenty-four sodas, twelve banana splits, eight nut sundaes, and six malted milks. That’s the way lions carry on when they get real thirsty after running away from home. When they waddled out of the soda shop they were splashing about inside like a couple of friendly waves.

A few minutes later they were peering through the window of a fish and meat store.

“Here’s our chance for a spot of steak,” suggested Rudolph.

“What are those?” demanded Albert, pointing with his nose. “They look as if they should belong in a hardware store.”

“Those are lobsters,” replied Rudolph.

“There’s a look about them I don’t much fancy,” observed Albert. “It’s a sinister, painful look.”

“If you’ll just turn your head a little to the left,” whispered Rudolph, “you’ll see something with an even more sinister and painful look.”

Albert followed his brother’s frightened gaze and began to tremble violently when his eyes encountered those of the owner of the sinister and painful look. This look was owned by a small dog who was coming down the street in their direction. He was one of those extremely busy and jaunty little dogs who make up in general information what they lack in size. It was plain to see that he fully intended to find out all about those two lions that had so strangely appeared in his village. It was equally plain to see that the lions strongly suspected the little dog’s intentions. They had no desire to be found out about. They were afraid of little dogs. They were afraid of all dogs. And of this little dog they were especially afraid. This was because of the ice cream sodas and all. Ice cream sodas are not the best things in the world to inhale into one’s system before facing an enemy. They have a dampening effect.

“He’s coming,” muttered Rudolph.

“Fast,” chattered Albert.

“He’s coming fast,” said Rudolph.

“Too fast,” whispered Albert.

“Let’s go just as fast,” suggested his brother.

“No,” said Albert, “let’s go faster.”

Together the Twins backed into the fish and meat store. Now it is never a reassuring sight to see a lion approaching you head first. It is even less reassuring to see a lion approaching you tail first. The sight makes you feel that perhaps the lion has gone mad, and a mad lion, of course, is even less dependable, even less enjoyable, than a lion in full possession of his faculties. And when you take another lion and add him to the first lion and both of them come at you with their tails where their heads ought to be, then everything becomes quite confusing and very disagreeable. So thought the people in the fish and meat store when they saw Albert and Rudy backing into them. The people let out a terrible whoop and got busy. There was a big icebox such as you see in butcher stores. Many of the people went into that and tried to hide themselves behind legs of lamb and sides of beef and pork chops and strings of sausages and all sorts of perfectly good but hardly fascinating parts of various unfortunate animals.

At the sound of the whoop Albert and Rudy turned quickly with pained expressions on their faces. As luck would have it, Albert’s tail hung alluringly over a large, vicious-looking lobster. The lobster looked at the tail and the tail tempted the lobster. It is a well-known fact that lobsters have very little self-control. This lobster had none at all. To see the tail was to want the tail, and to want the tail was to take it. This the lobster did. He opened one of his claws just as wide as it would open, then closed it with a sickening click on poor Albert’s innocent tail. It was not as if poor Albert did not have enough to think about already, what with the dog and the people and the noise and everything. The lobster was more than he could bear. With a roar of pain he turned and looked at his tail with horrified eyes.

“I’m choking,” he gasped to his brother. “Can’t you do something, Rudy?”

But Rudy either could not or would not do a thing. He was far too distressed himself. Together, but not alone this time because the lobster was very much with them, they rushed out of the store. As they did so they stepped all over the little dog, who no longer seemed important to them when they thought of the lobster, a thought they were thinking all the time. Especially Albert. As his tail swung from side to side the lobster became a little dizzy. To steady himself he reached out and clamped down on Rudolph’s tail with his other claw. Although this may have helped the lobster a little, it did not help the lions at all. It merely added to their troubles. Also it made them run faster. As they sped through the village they looked exactly like two lions being driven by one lobster. And that is about the way it was.

While this was going on, all of the men in the village had run home and armed themselves with guns, pitchforks, dishpans, carving knives, corkscrews, and whatever other dangerous weapons they could lay their hands on. Then, forming themselves into a solid mass, they set off to hunt the lions. On the outskirts of the village they came upon the Twins dragging the lobster along from one end of them and their tongues along from the other. They were very, very tired. One of the men with guns shot the lobster off their tails with the first bang, but left a lot of shot behind in the tails of the lions. This set them off again at a great pace, and they did not feel any better for exchanging two tailfuls of lobster for two tailfuls of shot. Worse, if anything, for toward the end they had become sort of used to the lobster, which had been a hard thing to do. Now they had to get used to the shot, which was even harder.

The Twins rushed across a wide, smooth field and saw in the distance what looked to them like a small house with wings. They made for the house at top speed and dashed through the door. Then they hid themselves under two seats and lay there, wishing they had never run away. Presently several people came into the house and the house began to shake and make a tremendous noise. Then, worst of all, the house began to move. It bounced across the field, and on the last bounce it stayed bounced and went right up into the sky. The Twins were never the same after that. Streaks of gray hair were already appearing in their tawny coats. They had to come out from under those seats and see what was going on or up. They did, and as soon as the people saw them the house began to wobble and dip and dive and duck in the most alarming manner.

“We’re not wild lions—” began Albert.

“I don’t care what you are,” cried a lady. “I’ll be a wild woman if I have to look at you much longer.”

“We’re a couple of hard-pressed lions,” put in Rudolph.

“I’m so hard-pressed,” said a man, “I’m about to pop out of this door.”

“We don’t want to force ourselves on you,” remarked Albert timidly.

“Neither do we,” said everybody.

“Is there any way to get out?” asked Rudy politely.

“Oh, there are lots of ways to get out,” said a voice. “It’s the getting down that’s the trouble.”

“Oh,” said Albert, “are we up?”

“Very far,” said the man.

“Oh,” said Albert again. “Did you hear that, Rudy? We’re up very far.”

“I feared we were somewhere,” said Rudy.

“We are,” replied Albert.

“Well, we’re all in the same boat,” said Rudy, looking pleasantly at the company.

“That’s just the trouble,” replied a man who seemed to be driving the house. “There’s too many of us in the same boat and two of them are lions.”

“We’d be glad to leave if we could,” Albert replied with dignity, “but unfortunately our tails are heavy with shot.”

“That would get you down all the quicker,” said the driver. “Won’t you go? You are making this lady nervous.”

“Everything is making me nervous,” Albert observed moodily.

“There’s a safe way down,” a man suggested.

“Are you convinced?” asked Albert.

“We know,” replied the man. “Will you let us strap the parachutes on your backs?”

The Twins consented and the parachutes were fastened to them. Then, before they had time to know what was happening to them, they were pushed through the door and found themselves dropping through space. They were so frightened they didn’t even know they were frightened. They were over with, done for and through – finished lions. But presently the parachutes opened and they found themselves floating gently side by side down to earth.

“I just passed a bird,” shouted Rudolph.

“I just gave one the shock of its life,” yelled Albert. “He thinks I’m a flying lion.”

“This will teach us a lesson,” called Rudy.

“Yes,” sang out Albert, “my honor is overwhelmed.”

“Those people up there didn’t even say goodbye,” shouted Rudy.

“No manners,” replied Albert.

“Uncouth,” agreed Rudy.

Thus chatting pleasantly, the Twins at last settled gently to the earth and came to rest in a neglected-looking back garden. They must have fallen asleep then, because when they woke up some hours later Floret and Mary had taken off their parachutes and were standing there looking down at them.

“How did you get here?” asked Albert.

“We live here, you foolish lion,” said Floret.

“What’s that!” shouted Rudolph.

“Of course, silly,” put in Mary. “This is the back of the house – the back garden.”

“Oh,” said Albert slowly. “We never come here. It’s not nice. Not cultivated, if you get what I mean.”

“Have you noticed anything?” asked Rudolph.

“Nothing much,” replied Floret innocently.

“You mean, nothing has been missed all day?” demanded Albert.

“Nothing that I know of,” said Floret.

“Oh,” remarked Albert thoughtfully. “Nobody has been away?”

“Bingle took a short walk,” said Floret.

“Oh, Bingle,” observed Albert. “You noticed that. And does everybody feel the same way about it?”

“About what?” asked Mary.

“It really doesn’t matter,” said Rudolph, with withering dignity. “Come, Albert, we’re not needed here.”

“I can see that,” remarked Albert. “We’re not what you might call necessary.”

Together the Twins stalked off to the front lawn.

“And after all we’ve been through!” was the last thing they heard Albert say as two limp tails disappeared around the corner of the house.

“A nice reception indeed for a couple of tailfuls of buckshot,” Rudolph replied.

“Now I wonder what has gotten into the Twins?” mused Floret, looking anxiously at Mary.

“They’ve been up to something, stupid,” Mary replied. “We’ll hear all about it soon enough.”

The two girls neatly folded up the parachutes and carried them into the house. Albert and Rudolph sighed and went back to sleep.

Chapter 16

Mr. Bingle Takes a Bride

Mr. Bingle and the Twins were sitting on the veranda. Peter, Mary, and Floret were busy taking care of the dolls and toys, and Mr. Budge was inside reading the morning paper.

“Bingle,” Albert demanded suddenly out of a clear sky, “when are you going to marry the girl?”

Mr. Bingle was so startled he almost fell out of his chair.

“What girl?” he managed to get out.

“You know very well what girl we mean,” said Rudolph. “Come, come, man. Pull yourself together. When are you going to marry her?”

“Have you gone mad?” asked Mr. Bingle, in a weak voice.

“No, Bingle,” replied Albert coldly. “When we go mad you’ll know it.”

“And that might happen at any moment,” added Rudolph, darkly.

Mr. Bingle looked at the Twins and they met his eyes without flinching. Albert even bared his teeth a little.

“We have a duty to perform for Floret,” he said importantly. “In a way we are responsible for her. We want to see her happy and we want to be sure that she associates with the right people. Now, of course, you’re not much of a person, Bingle, but if she wants to marry you we won’t stand in her way. There’s no accounting for tastes, you know, especially in matters like these and where women are concerned.”

“We fully expected you would marry her at Christmas,” said Rudolph, “and when Christmas passed and there was no wedding then we naturally assumed you were waiting for New Year’s day. Even then you failed to do the proper thing. Even then you held back. Still we said nothing. Now, here it is Easter already, and we want to know just what you are going to do about it. What are your intentions, Bingle?”

The Twins moved very close to Mr. Bingle and bared their teeth fiercely.

“We don’t want to seem unpleasant, Bingle,”said Albert through his teeth, “but one of your legs is about to part.”

“Why, I’ve always wanted to marry Floret,” Mr. Bingle gasped. “Always.”

“Then go ahead and do it, man. Go ahead and do it,” cried Rudolph.

“Floret!” called Albert loudly. “I want you immediately.”

When Floret ran out on the veranda the Twins looked at her affectionately.

“We’re only a couple of Lions,” said Rudolph, “but we’ve got more brains than a Clown. We are going to leave you two together. Bingle has something to ask you.”

“Snap to it, Bingle,” said Albert from the doorway. “No shilly-shallying.”

“Nor beating around the bush,” put in Rudolph. “Ask your question clearly and get it over with. We’ll be waiting inside for your report.”

A few minutes later Mr. Bingle burst into the room.

“What did she say?” asked the Twins, who were really very elated.

“She said ‘yes’,” cried Mr. Bingle.

“Brief, but to the point,” observed Rudolph. “When?”

“Tomorrow!” replied Mr. Bingle.

“Good,” said Albert, hurrying from the room. “We must make all preparations.”

•   •   •

And the very next day Mr. Bingle and Floret were married. Lazy Bear and Squirrel arrived early. Both were smartly dressed in frock coats and gray striped trousers. They were even wearing gray spats. Squirrel was on his good behavior. Mr. Budge was acting as Mr. Bingle’s best man. Lazy Bear gave the bride away. The Twins with fresh, new ribbons acted as flower boys. They carried baskets of flowers in their mouths.

When the rector arrived he objected to the presence of the Twins and Lazy Bear. The poor man’s knees were trembling. But the Twins soon put an end to this. They crept up behind him and roared. That was enough for the rector. Into the house he popped.

“What are you trembling about, parson?” asked the Queen sarcastically.

“It’s hardly customary to have beasts of the forest at weddings,” protested the rector. “If it were, there would be very few weddings.”

“There always has to be a first time, you know, parson,” drawled the Queen.

“And a last time, unfortunately,” replied the rector.

“How true!” sighed the Queen. “Perhaps this is yours.”

“I fear it is,” said the rector, turning very pale.

When everything was ready Floret, looking very lovely in her new dress, Mr. Budge, Mr. Bingle, and Peter and Mary rushed from the house and tumbled into a carriage. They thought it would be nice to drive to the wedding, so they drove around the block and came back. And all the people in the street cheered and shouted:

“Hurrah for Floret!” they cried.

“Atta girl,” they shouted.

“Good old Flo,” they screamed.

And they threw things. Anything. Floret was too happy to mind a few bricks and, besides, being a circus rider she could easily dodge them.

Then came the wedding. The rector’s hands trembled so violently he could hardly read the service. After it was over he left the house at a dead run. Perhaps he is running yet.

Lazy Bear gave Floret a magic tongue which would always enable her to get the upper hand of Bingle in an argument. He gave Mr. Bingle a magic memory so he wouldn’t get all mixed up when he explained things to his wife. A happy married life was thus assured them. Mr. Budge gave them a bag of gold, and everyone else gave them cheer after cheer.

“Thank goodness we have a home at last,” said Albert.

“Perhaps we’ll be able to enjoy a little peace and quiet now,” replied Rudolph.

And at that minute Squirrel pinched their tails so wickedly that both of them nearly jumped out of their skins.

“Wow!” roared Albert.

“Wow!” screamed Rudolph.

“Whee!” shouted Squirrel.

And they all flew around in a circle.

Then there was a wonderful wedding banquet, but we all know what Mr. Budge can do in the way of serving food, so we don’t have to talk about it.

After the banquet they all joined hands in a circle, and dancing round Mr. Bingle and Floret, they sang Peter’s latest song. Here we are:

WEDDING SONG
By Peter, the Incomparable

“Mr. Bingle, take your bride.

Sing it far and sing it wide.

You are now no longer single,

So be careful, Mr. Bingle.

“Mr. Bingle, take your bride

On this happy Eastertide.

You’re our Clown and she’s our pet.

Mr. Bingle, take Floret.

“Mr. Bingle, take your bride.

You’re our joy and she’s our pride.

Let us dance and let us sing,

Let us have an awful fling.

“Mr. Bingle, take your bride.

Sing it far and sing it wide.

Do not weep and do not cry

When time comes to say goodbye.

“Mr. Bingle and Floret

We will love and not forget;

So we’ll sing the old refrain:

‘Luck until we meet again.’”

For a long time they sat up singing that night. People passing in the street could hear floating from the windows:

“We belong to the Budge Brigade

We plunge through shadow.

We rush through shade.”

They sang all the old songs and then they went to sleep.

Peter and Mary and the Twins lived with Floret and Mr. Bingle. Lazy Bear, Squirrel, and Mr. Budge are always knocking about the place.

You will always be able to tell the house when you happen to pass it. There are usually two lions on the lawn.

If you say, “Bo!” and one of them faints, that will be Albert.

And if you say, “Bah!” and the other one faints, that will be Rudolph.

— THE END —

HAUNTS
AND BY-PATHS

DESCRIPTION

A collection of poetry — an unusual collection, illustrating the complex soul of an author who usually sheltered behind laughter, satire and farce. Here are verses about the sea, of romance, and unexpectedly of the horrors of the Great War. Not all the poems here are equally worthy – some are a little labored for modern tastes – but they capture a range of emotions which demonstrate that Thorne Smith was never just a comic writer.

Dedication

TO
THE COMMODORE
– GOD BLESS HIM!

SONGS
OF THE SEABOARD

Sea Song

There are those who love the reaching plains

And those who love the crags,

And those who love the twilit woods where melancholy Autumn lags

On sad reluctant feet.

And there are those who love the street

Where arc lights sputter in the rain

And traffic lifts a shrill refrain

Where counter-currents surge and meet.

But I am not of these,

Such haunts my fancy flees

Out to the sea, the open sea,

The pouring, roaring, soaring sea,

The wind-whipped, tearing, flaring sea,

The sea that never rests.

I love its lonely smoke-hung trails,

Its battered hulks and singing sails,

Its lifting, surging hills and dales

With fleecy, foam-plumed crests.

I love the quiet, moon-swept sea,

The softly breathing, star-plunged sea,

The wistful, pleading, darkling sea

Whose brawny spray-tipped breasts

Roll ever onward endlessly

Into a dim infinity,

A misty, gray obscurity

Beneath the trailing stars.

I love the thrashing, smashing sea,

The leaping, crouching, waiting sea,

Its bitterness and ecstasy,

Its bull-necked charges blind and rude,

Its silence and its solitude,

Its drifting masts and spars.

•   •   •

For there are those who love to feel

A horse beneath them as they ride

Bespurred and decked from head to heel,

Across the pleasant countryside;

And there are those who roam

Away from hearth and home

In search of romance, wealth and fame

To distant cities where men game

With human souls as pawns to win

A gilded ease which soon wears thin

When rubbed with life’s rough hand.

And there are those who till the land

And those who blast the rock and stone

And those who seek for buried spoil

In some fast wilderness alone.

And there are those who toil

Their lives away in man-made caves,

Poor harried, economic slaves,

They fill untimely, unmourned graves

Too weary to regret

A world that never had been kind,

A life not hard to leave behind,

To finish and forget

•   •   •

But those who ever sailed the sea

And felt its rugged grip

Will always turn back wistfully

To seek another ship.

Another ship to bear them out, the old song on their lips

Across the long, green, endless waves,

The rolling, curling, mounting waves,

To where the sunset dips

And cools its flaming face in spray,

Its ebbing colors, gold and gay

Still lingering in the clouds,

As one by one the windy stars

Prick through the velvet sky

And fire-tip the swaying spars

And dance among the shrouds,

While through the swift descending night the seagulls wheel and fly.

•   •   •

Thus men return unto the sea,

Their great, gray mother on whose breast

They labor long and valiantly

And often find their final rest

Beneath her foam encrusted waves

In coral-fluted, deep sea graves,

While calm, impassive, stern and grim

She lifts her massive, wind-lashed head

And chants a mighty deep-toned hymn

In honor of her honored dead,

A hymn that echoes through the waves,

The ponderous, long, green, endless waves,

The waves that writhe and twist

Like great, green snakes across the sea

Into a dim infinity

Of surging, spray-torn mist

Flood Tide

It’s a long time to flood tide, the tide when we pull out.

It’s twilight in the harbor now and wind is in the trees

That drowse along the cobbled streets where couples stroll about,

And there is the scent of tar and the hum of bees.

It’s a long time to flood tide, the tide when we embark.

It’s quiet in the harbor now and pleasant to the eye.

There’s whispering in the hidden lanes and running through the dark,

And there is a broken laugh and a swift goodbye.

It’s a long time to flood tide, the tide that clears
the port, The night is in the harbor now and lights among the spars;

But those who wait upon the tide will find it all
too short For there is an end to love in a night of stars.

It’s a long time to flood tide, the tide when we return.

All silent is the harbor now, the shrouds intone a hymn.

Along our lean foam-smothered sides the flame-touched rollers churn,

And there is a hint of dawn and the stars are dim.

Sailor – Sailor

Swinging solid on his feet,

Gaunt beneath his coat of tan,

Children hail him in the street –

“Hello, Mr. Sailor Man!”

Tom or Larry, Dick or Dan,

Ladies think him just too sweet,

Sailor, sailor from the fleet,

Get your pettings while you can.

Primed for laughter, love or loot,

Money jingling in his jeans,

Gamins give a stiff salute

As he pipes the dizzy queens.

Hero of the submarines,

“Honest, Mamie, ain’t he cute?”

Call that great big devil cute,

Why the beggar scrubbed latrines!

Golly, what a burly brute,

Friendly as the summer sea,

Sand Street made his nifty suit,

Forty-eight ashore has he.

Shy at times, a trifle mute,

Always with a yarn to spin –

“Naw, I ain’t no raw recruit,

“Talk o’ women, talk o’ gin –

“Now, when I was in Marseilles

“I could open up your eyes—”

“Anything from subs to whales

Sets him off on salty lies.

Folks can hear them every day,

Take the tale for what it’s worth,

In his honest sailor way

He’s the salt of all the earth.

Booming gaily down the street,

Hat aslant upon his head,

Looking for a place to eat,

Earnest searcher for a bed,

Comes a sailor from the fleet,

Shaved and shorn and shiny red,

He’s a merry sight to meet

When he’s paid and when he’s fed.

Sailor, sailor from the sea,

Proud beneath your Navy blue,

Bound upon a modest spree,

Buddy, Admirals envy you.

Dawn

Last night I stood and saw a sentry pace,

A shadow moving through the shades of night,

And as the fleeting moonbeams touched his face

And blocked it out inscrutable and white

Against the lifting curtain of the sky,

He challenged Dawn; as clear toned as a bell

Upon the waning night his lonely cry

Reechoed through the silence, rose and fell.

And then as if in answer to his call,

The Eastern sky shook off her robe of stars

And bared her coral breast, a faint, pink wall

Behind the leafless trees that swayed like spars

And shrouded masts of some old spectral fleet

Along whose decks Dawn stole on silver feet.

Sunset from the Hospital

Across the darkling bay the fresh green glades

Were soft with shadows. Like a scarlet frieze

The sunset flared, a scarf of many shades,

Its burning fringes tangled in the trees.

Along the sky’s vast cloudless vault of blue

A single seagull winged in graceful flight,

And as it sailed it seemed as if it drew

Across the earth the shadow of the night

How cool and quiet over there it seemed,

The dark trees banked against the fiery wall

The glory of it filled my eyes. I dreamed

My soul took wings – a haunting bugle call

Came drifting down the wind and died away

As I fled on and outward with the day.

The Station

“Lights out!”

– and row on yellow row fades out;

Upon the low lined barracks night shuts down

And sudden silence falls upon the camp,

Which by the bugle calls alone is pierced

With quivering notes which sob and break and flow

Into the mist-hung silence of the night.

“Pipe down!”

– a horde of men in canvas cased

Turn on their sides and whisper through the dark

To some chance comrade of the day before,

Some pal, who like themselves, the hand of fate

Has plucked from distant parts and peaceful ways

And tossed into his small allotted space

Beneath the sloping gables of the roof

Now dipped in gloom through which strange visions float,

Called from the past by man’s remembering eyes

To lull them in a deep, dream laden sleep.

“Say, Buddy,” breathes a lad, a baker’s son,

“got a letter from my girl who says

She’s sending up a box of cakes and stuff.

It ought to get here by tomorrow’s mail,

So you and Jim and Mike just stick around;

We’ll divvy up and have a reg’alar feed,

Us four, just you and Mike and me and Jim.”

And “buddy,” who had owned his car and been

The toast at many gay, resplendent boards,

In fact a sort of “tosh” who knew New York’s

Best dining places and their brilliant throng

And yet who never had possessed a friend

Who freely gave and asked naught in return,

Stretched out his hand across the lines and said,

“You’re on, old man, and when you’re out of smokes

I have a pile that’s drying up for lack

Of someone else to help me smoke them up.”

“Pipe down!” the P.O. cries; the men grow still

And gaze into the dark with staring eyes,

Their brains still busy with the mighty change

The war has wrought in their once placid lives.

They muse upon the happenings of the day

And speculate about the days to come.

And in their speculations memories stir

The dust of other days – old friends appear,

Loved faces of the past, a voice, a laugh,

And fleeting vistas – well remembered haunts,

Until dread loneliness weighs down the soul

In this still battle with the Then and Now.

Then like a strengthening draught of some rare wine

A warm and friendly bit of comfort creeps

To thrill them with a knowledge that they share

Alike with other men their trials and hopes,

The grip and glory of a common cause,

A life devoted to a single end,

In which forgetfulness of self comes first

Along with kindness to one’s fellow men.

And thus as sleep comes on, the visions fade.

They touch perhaps the first time in their lives,

The spirit in the word – Democracy.

Now all is still. The sentries walk their posts,

Occasionally their calls drift through the night.

Upon the road without the world hums by;

A honking horn is heard, a woman’s laugh

Floats like a strain of some forgotten air,

While in their creaking hammocks dream the men,

Their weary bodies yielded up to sleep.

“Rise and shine!”

The bugles blast the night

Into a million agonizing bits,

Its shattered pieces fall around the ears

Of men too dazed by slumber save to swear

A hardly audible yet heartfelt oath

Against the kaiser, all his horrid works

And every institution save sweet sleep.

“Up hammocks, all!”

Six thousand pairs of feet

Resound upon the decks, confusion reigns,

The lashings whir and hands are thrust about

In search of this and that much needed bit,

Remarks are passed and someone dares to laugh.

In desperation one man seeks a shoe,

Another finds it looking for his sock.

The bugle blows again and all is dropped

As in a swearing, tearing, laughing throng

The men pour out into the early dawn,

To fill their lungs with sharp, frost-kindled air.

•   •   •

Wild eyed and careless, fearless, meek and proud,

The millionaire, the farmer, poet, clerk,

The East Side, West Side, Williamsburg and Bronx,

The Southerner, the Favorite Son, the Yank,

A crude, mad polyglot democracy

Flows out, disgruntled, cursing-cold and glum

To gaze in deep dejection at the stars

Still shivering wanly in the brooding sky.

Men need an Irishman at such a time

To warm their flagging spirits with a jest,

And always at such times one finds him there.

The Station stands, a youth of mingled strains,

Stripped to the loins, prepared, alertly poised,

Whose wondering eyes turned towards the waiting sea,

Are lit with laughter, eagerness and hope –

Whose lips are parted in a joyous song.

Liberty Song

I’ve washed me neck

An’ I’ve cashed me check

An’ I’ve got me Forty-three.

An’ I’m light and gay

As a mule in May

For I’m bound on liberty.

An’ I’ve got a date with Mamie an’ I got a date with Sue

An’ I’ve got a date with Nancy an’ wi’ Kate

An’ I’m going to be so busy that I won’t know what to do,

An’ I’m that confounded anxious I can’t wait.

So, roll, roll, roll along, roll on, sailor, roll.

Roll, roll, roll along, shove off, blast yer soul!

Goodbye Buddy, an’ goodbye Bo,

Me dogs are itching an’ I got to go

So, roll, roll, roll along, roll on, sailor, roll.

Me tapes are white

An’ me boots are bright

An’ me hat is stiff and straight

An’ I’ve brushed me bean

An’ I’ve shaved blue clean

An’ the list is at the gate.

Oh, I’m going to spend me money an’ I’m going to spend it right

Buying sweeties for me wild Canarsie pigs,

An’ sometime in the morning or very late at night

I’m going to a pub and dance some jigs.

So, roll, roll, roll along, roll on, sailor, roll.

Roll on, roll along, shove off, blast yer soul!

So long, Buddy, and goodbye Bo.

Am I happy? Well, I’ll tell yer so.

So roll, roll, roll along, roll on, sailor, roll.

I Saw a Ship Today

I saw a ship today,

An old ship with sails

That sang and seemed to say:

“We have fought with gales,

And our lee-side rails

Have been white with spray

As we beat at bay

Down the storm-swept trails,

Where the North wind wails

And the great seas flay.”

And I sighed and turned away –

I saw a ship today.

I saw a ship today,

An old ship with sails

That sang and seemed to say:

“We could tell you tales

Of a school of whales

Where the icebergs play,

If you’ve time to stay

We have songs of nails

And of sweet spiced bales

That would make you gay.”

But I sighed and turned away –

I saw a ship today.

The Rocks of Loam

I’ve heard the cry of crag born things

Around the rocks of Loam

And heard the hurried beat of wings

And seen the tides drive home

Like buffalo along the beach,

In swift stampeding herds,

But there is neither song nor speech,

Nor melody of words

To sing of those great roaring rocks

When far from sound of voice,

One felt the earth made drunk with shocks

Tumultuously rejoice.

And where the sea comes tumbling in,

And where the white-caps play

The rocks of Loam

Beneath the foam

Gave battle through the day.

I dream about the rocks of Loam,

But visit them no more.

In dreams my face is wet with foam,

I hear the breakers roar,

And, waking, ring within my ears

Dim echoes of the past,

So faint that foam is turned to tears

For dreams that did not last.

The sky was very fair and blue,

No sky has been so fair,

Nor has life’s truth been half so true

As dreams that hovered there

Around those gaunt, embattled rocks

That roared a wild refrain –

The dreaming ends

Old battered friends,

But always you remain.

And always where the sea sets in

Will your deep voice impart

Above the wild barbaric din

A message to the heart

Of battle and of ceaseless strife,

Of faith and fortitude,

The glory and the grip of life

And courage unsubdued.

More vital than the words of men

And all the creeds they preach,

And wise beyond all mortal ken

The wisdom of your speech.

So sing, ye wave-washed warriors,

Beneath the fields of foam,

Your battle song,

Your struggle song,

Old rugged rocks of Loam.

I’ll Sing No More of the Sea

I’ll sing no more of the sea, but hear it sing

Under the smother and foam

A free-flung song.

Stronger than love of maid or the ties of home

Is the song of the sea, and the sea is where I belong.

Loafing around on land isn’t good for me,

So, I guess, by gad, I’ll ask to be shipped to the sea.

There’s more of a song of the sea in a night of wind

Harping the chords of the shrouds

To sob and wail;

The moon aloft in the sky in a spume of clouds

As the ocean leaps to attack like a mighty flail,

Than anything I can sing on the quiet shore,

So I’ll hark to the song of the sea, but I’ll sing no more.

Friends of my days farewell, I have stayed awhile –

Luck to you all and goodbye; I’m bound away

Out where the sun and sea and the tumbling sky

Mingle and merge and dance in a field of spray,

Mingle and merge and dance to a flying song,

As the ship meets true to her course and the wind is strong.

I’ll sing no more of the sea but hear it sing

Ballads that never could flow

From out the brain.

Songs that hover like tears when the south winds blow

And ease a man of his care and his heart of pain –

Out where the dawn is frank and the day is crude

And the soul leaps clean like a star in the solitude.

THE  STORM

The Storm

I – The Ship

Her joy and pride and duty was to sail

Upon the sea, and play a valiant part

Against the tyranny of wave and gale

With all the courage of her gallant heart.

Her crew sang loudly paeans in her praise

And fought along the docks and bragged and lied.

Her skipper’s features softened when his gaze

Ran lovingly along his slim white bride.

The First Mate’s wife was there to see her leave,

The First Mate’s Wife remains at home to pray,

For where the great green rollers plunge and heave,

A spray born thing returns unto the spray

In stricken state, to fill an unmarked grave

Among the billows that she loved to brave.

II – The Crew

The crew came swearing on at break of day

And stowed its gear and took each others size,

Turned to and watched the roadstead fade away

Through bleared, indifferent, bright and brooding eyes.

Then followed many days of open skies,

When sailors’ hearts were light and songs were gay

And sailors vied, as every sailor vies,

In planning how to dissipate the pay

That they would never spend. It came at last

Across the sea on swift, foam-cushioned feet,

A raving thing, that struck away the mast

And tore men’s bleeding hands from line and cleat,

As through the night they fought to save, but failed,

“The fairest ship, by God, that ever sailed.”

III – The Beast

From ice-lipped caverns looping down to hell

The reeling wind fled clamorous, released,

And sprang among the rigging, screamed and fell

Along the tangled spars, a blinded beast

With wreckage in its claws. A sailor cried

And someone cursed the wind, the wind increased.

The spent ship groaned and turned upon its side,

The sea came crashing down and cursing ceased.

But yesterday men laughed along the deck,

Talked wistfully of women, grog and home,

And now amid the smother of a wreck,

All peacefully in caskets carved in foam,

Like tired children slumbering safe in hope,

They moved in silence down a dim-lit slope.

IV – The Haven

Beyond the starflecked fringes of the seas,

An island lies where old sea captains sit

And lie most mightily, while through the trees

Great sailors lounge and neat-limbed maidens flit,

And there are roaring songs and rugged wit,

And wine to quaff, and honey from the bees,

And there, if I aright remember it,

A brave fleet rides at anchor and at ease.

From out of grizzled throats and bearded lips

Astounding tales are told in lavish ways

Of sails and salvage, storms and sinking ships –

One lie alone lasts several thousand days

In this green mantled garden in the West

Where men go after storms, to laugh and rest.

BROKEN DAYS

The Turning

As one who at the closing of the day

In open spaces spent, beneath fair skies,

Looks westward where the sunset’s vast array

Casts glowing beauty deep into the eyes;

And gazing thus thinks back across the hours,

The golden hours caressed by sun and wind,

Perfumed by heather bloom and wildwood flowers,

Is loath to turn and leave it all behind.

So now I turn my feet from idle ways

And leave all things that I have loved before.

No more the uneventful, dream-touched days,

The fireside and friendly book no more

And rough the road until I earn the right

To claim the peace for which I dared to fight.

What Do I Know of the War?

What do I know of the battle-field?

Nothing at all but there he lies

Where harvest winds once blew their yield

And moonlight falls on his eyes.

That’s what I know of the battle-field

And that I know and nothing more,

His song is hushed, his lips are sealed –

That’s all I know of the war.

Nations may fall on the battle-field,

Victor and vanquished come and go,

And flowers bloom where the cannon pealed,

But only this do I know.

A Hill in Flanders

We rested on the hill, young men grown old

In war, and watched the breath of battle mass

Against the slate gray sky where thunder rolled

Above the sluggish ribbons of the gas.

Poor battered hulks were we from pain untold,

The yellow husks of war, turned hard, alas,

And in our sunken eyes our youth lay cold –

Then someone idly shrilled a blade of grass.

That one sharp note fled deep into the brain

And stirred the dust memory till it blew

Around our heads like blossoms in the rain

Across the years from orchard lands we knew

Once long ago, and stung with swift surprise,

We turned and gazed through fixed, remembering eyes.

That Doctor Fellow

We never knew he lived until he died

And left a record that was hailed with pride

By those who gazed on him with vague surprise

As comprehension slowly dimmed their eyes.

It seems our boys were in a bit of hell

And being badly splattered up by shell,

And that this doctor fellow, lately made,

Was under fire, dishing out first-aid,

When suddenly across the tarnished grass

The Boches sent in wave on wave of gas

That wrapped around the wounded and the dead,

And brought a gas mask whipping to each head.

It seems he kept the thing upon his face

Until he struck a rather nasty case,

When by the way he cocked his head and peered

They saw the darned contraption interfered.

He jabbed around at random for a while

Then gave it up, and with a casual smile

He took and tossed the nagging mask aside

And went on saving lives until he died.

Just calmly went on working in that hell

And coughed and wheezed until at last he fell

And lay there clinging to his old tin hat –

Whoever thought he’d do a thing like that?

And then they picked him up from where he lay

And carried him quite tenderly away

Along with those he’d lost his life to save –

A tilting cross marks out another grave.

Soldiers Never Found

Lying on the frozen ground,

Soldiers, soldiers never found,

Staring at the smoky skies,

God stoop down and touch their eyes.

Now so helpless, once so bold,

Soldiers, soldiers in the cold;

Master, from thy mercy seat,

Bend and warm their hands and feet.

Hard and rough and cold their beds –

Savior kneel and ease their heads,

Victims of the last barrage,

God, we leave them in Thy charge.

Short the shrift and swift they fell,

Those who gave their lives so well.

Now at last from warfare free,

God, we give them up to Thee.

Make them laugh and love again,

Still their hate and ease their pain,

Touch with joy each ragged breast,

Jesus give them peace and rest.

To a Certain Contingent

To a certain contingent from over the seas,

(Tired and weary from over the seas),

That took what it wanted with infinite ease

From the Huns it almightily blighted;

For all of the wrongs that you righted,

And the flame in our hearts that you lighted

This cover of sadly inadequate lines in honor of you is indited.

For you slaughtered the swine of young Willy-be-damned,

Along with their murderous arts,

And taking your bayonets you capably crammed

The fear of a god in their hearts.

So, here’s to you fellows from over the seas,

(Tired and weary from over the seas),

You belted the Boches – the world’s at your knees,

You’re the people, by gad, you’re the people!

To a certain contingent from over the seas,

(A tired contingent from over the seas),

They went out and took it and failed to say please

To the Boches it smote and confounded;

For all of the Huns that you hounded,

And all of their hopes that you grounded,

And all of the Fritzies you basted and slammed, till the welkin with “Kamerad” resounded,

These lines are intended directly for you,

Ye wielders of bayonets and butts,

Who blasted an opening and hurried on through

With an admirable showing of guts.

So, here’s to you fellows from over the seas,

That cuddled the cooties (called commonly fleas),

Though tired and weary from over the seas,

You’re the people, by gad, you’re the people!

The Planes

The planes set wing and take the sky,

The planes are out and bound away.

Majestically they wheel and fly,

Bent on the business of the day,

On which upon a balanced breath

Hangs swift oblivion and death.

The planes are out – the army lies –

A giant crouching at their feet –

They are its penetrating eyes,

Like straining hearts their motors beat

As through the dizzy heights they race,

But some shall not return to base.

For he who flies with man made wings,

Where clouds to burning shreds are blown,

Does casually heroic things,

And takes his chances quite alone

To set the crouching giant free

And help the big, blind guns to see.

Aloft to him men turn their eyes,

And throats grow tight and sight grows dim

As through the gray, shell spattered skies

They see him poise his plane and skim

Above the battle’s ragged shroud

To meet death darting from a cloud.

Alone a man goes forth to fight

Where man has never fought before,

Alone with death he rides the night

Above the cannons’ distant roar,

Alone he comes to grip with fate,

While far below the armies wait.

There’s death that swims beneath the seas,

And death that leaps from flashing steel,

And death that slips across the breeze,

But there is none to know or feel

The pang when foe meets foe in air

And one must plunge and perish there.

Upon the man on high depends

The fate of many men below,

And so he calmly serves their ends

Because to him it must be so.

His is the harder task and grim,

And being such, men honor him.

With careless grace they dip and wheel

Above the battle’s drift and surge,

Yet who can feel the things they feel

Or know the wild homeric urge

Of those who fight with cool, clear brains,

The men who man the aeroplanes?

•   •   •

The planes set wing and take the sky,

The low sun paints their pinions red

As restlessly they mount and fly

Above the campus of the dead.

Like gulls across the ocean spray

The planes set wing and stream away.

To Three Dodgers

They sat them down secure in their exemption,

Three wise young men to quaff their wine and gloat

Above their costly plates. Beyond redemption

Were they for whom contempt made warm my throat.

They spoke of war, eyes never meeting eyes,

Complained because the Germans still were gaining.

They drank and gazed on me with pained surprise,

Then turned to plays and universal training.

Beyond their well-groomed heads I saw a plain

That ran through lands of murky hell and smoke,

And there the wounded lay and there the slain

Gazed up at hopeless skies where shrapnel broke.

I saw wan women bathing soldiers’ feet,

Then, all three cursed – their cocktails were too sweet.

The Junker

He shares alone dominion with the brute,

Yet in a subtler way procures his spoil.

The world is his to ravish and to loot

And backward lands to glut him with their toil.

The serpent crushes soft wings in its coil,

The panther kills the lamb with hateful blows,

Yet he alone slays people for their soil

And calls it patriotic – so it goes.

There was a man named Christ who walked the earth,

A sort of universal poor folks pal,

Who never cared how much a man was worth,

But, like good fellows, quite impractical,

Or so it seems, in these stout junkers’ eyes,

Who envy man the earth and God the skies.

The Motherland

Come, close your eyes in unremembering sleep

My weary ones, my breast is wide and deep.

My arms are strong enough to clasp you all,

The ones that falter and the ones that fall.

Unstrap your heavy packs and sink to rest,

Soldiers of France, upon your mother’s breast.

I sent you forth to fight; you did not know

The agony it caused to see you go,

My singing sons, so dapper and so slim,

Now worn with war, your faces pale and grim.

I sent you forth to face a rising horde,

Soldiers of France, and kissed your desperate sword.

You bled for me, but did not bleed alone;

For you I hushed within my heart the groan

And strove to sing those songs when in retreat

That once made merry music for your feet

Before you marched from me with martial tread;

Soldiers of France, your mother also bled.

Come back to me my sons and learn to smile

As in the happy past, come, rest awhile,

My pleasure loving children once so bright

Who used to sing and dance away the night.

Come, lose your bitterness, forget your pain,

Soldiers of France, and learn to laugh again.

My tattered children, proud beneath your blue,

My little singing sons, I call to you.

The boulevards you loved are once more gay,

The maidens wait and night is turned to day.

Across the golden dawn return to me,

Soldiers of France, the Motherland is free!

Recompense

Across the dawn the cannon spoke

And tore the ancient church apart.

Methodically it struck and broke

An age-old heart

A robin with a rusty breast,

Preoccupied with work was he,

All day with care contrived a nest

Within a tree.

And as the sun fell down the sky

The lovely western windows bled,

The ruin stirred and seemed to sigh

And then lay dead.

At twilight time the fields grew dim,

The murdered church sank in a pall

Of smoke, and from a ragged limb

There came a call.

Another robin homeward flew,

The sky was desolate and wild.

Yet God looked down upon the two

With eyes that smiled.

A Poilu Speaks

It’s mine, that stuff that falls upon the field,

Drawn painlessly from some unfeeling part

Of my spent body. Hail the crimson yield,

The final token of a failing heart!

How strange to think it once belonged to me,

This blood, that surged within my singing veins

But yesterday when I was treading free

At home among the meadowlands and lanes.

Death’s not the thing, my friend, for death is swift,

And I shall live when Spring returns again,

For this my welling blood, my vital gift,

Shall glow in cheerful flowers on the plain

Among the hedges where the children dance,

A breath of fragrance and a bit of France.

By the Old Château

We died last night by the old château

Before the boches fled;

Downed in the barbs in the gulch below,

But the boys swept on ahead

Into the smoke and we saw them go,

And a cheer rose from the dead.

We died last night in the burning woods –

Men, did you hear us cheer?

Caught where the breath of the battle broods

Still are we waiting here;

Waiting behind in the burning woods –

We wait till the woods are clear.

We died last night by the old château

Before the boches fled.

We cannot rest and we cannot go,

Our bayonets were never red.

We watch and wait and we will it so,

We are the waiting dead.

We fell last night and they sent us West

At the turn of another day.

We have not gone to our final rest

Though ye wished us luck on our way.

The faith still flames in the spirit breast,

We’re here, and we’re here to stay.

Men who followed us through that night,

Men of the first advance,

We who no longer can share the fight

Wait where the gas wreaths dance,

Never to lift our wings in flight

Till the Boches are clear of France!

The Liberators – 1918

They’ve taken Bruges, they’ve taken Thielt, they’re marching down the coast;

They’re mopping up the Kriemhild line, they’ve liberated Lille,

And the mighty Prussian army fades before the Allied host

That is hewing ground from underneath the bloody Prussian heel.

And the grim, relentless anguish of the unrequited years

Like a shadow moves across the stricken land;

Turn ye back ye peasant people and ye women dry your tears,

For the freedom of your country is at hand.

They’ve taken Lens and Le Cateau, they’re at the gates of Ghent;

They’re marching on Valenciennes, they moved across the Scheldt

And the vaunted blood and iron ring is broken and is bent

As the Allies battle forward and the Prussian legions melt.

There is sorow in the meadow, there is famine in the field,

In a pall of ragged smoke the village lies

As before their ruined holdings, once so glorious with yield,

The peasants stand with wonder in their eyes.

They’ve crossed the Serre, they’ve crossed the Oise, they’ve breached the Hunding line;

They’ve taken Thun and Pont a Chin, they’re pushing through the mud

And across the soggy meadow lands the homing missiles whine

As the Prussian boots are battered till the spurs are dripping blood.

There is death among the hedges, there is grief among the lanes

Where the bitterness of war has cast its blight,

But the peasants seek their homesteads as the autumn glory wanes

And the ruins soften in the shades of night.

They’ve taken Pecq and Herpy Mill; they’ve cleared the Belgian coast;

They’ve taken Marle and Wassigny – the armies still advance –

And they’ve bent the Prussian circle, and they’ve nailed the Prussian boast

To the everlasting glory of the Allied arms in France.

Now across the furrowed country lie the legions of the dead,

From the shadow of the mountains to the sea,

And an ancient peasant standing in the twilight lifts his head,

In the ruins of his dwelling he is free.

The Hand in the Sky

The chalice of our days now lies in bits,

And twilight settles down upon the soul,

The scheme by which we lived no longer fits

The sorry facts of life – no longer whole

And undisturbed our happy old beliefs,

But rent by secret fears and secret griefs.

Like children frightened in a dismal wood

We lose our gathered flowers one by one.

We stand no longer now where once we stood

And now we falter where we used to run.

Our visions fade and vanish from our sight

For some great hand is held before the light.

Along the whispering galleries of our fear

The dust of memory stirs and ghosts are blown

From out the Golden Once to plead and peer

Until we dare not trust ourselves alone.

Across the hostile gloom the silence sighs

And trembling curtains shadow watching eyes.

The echoes of the years on padded feet

Fall stealthily, a swift, pursuing sound,

Like panthers creeping in to block retreat,

Black panthers leaping valleys at a bound.

We turn to flee, but still the hand remains

Across the sky – its fingers sear our brains.

The world is locked in labour. Grief and hate

And wrath and bitterness unknown before

Brood in the heart, while Death, insatiate,

Lays hands upon the latchstring of the door

Of silent homes from which all joy has flown,

Where those within dwell in their souls alone.

When laughter left the earth the Dark Host came

Across the dawn, a gray, relentless horde,

And laid our lovely villages in flame

And leveled all before its searching sword,

While high above our murdered maidens’ screams

The cannon spoke and tore away our dreams.

We dream no more. Our star-blown dreams are done –

Trailed in the dust With dim, remembering eyes

We search the lifting gloom to find the sun

Lost in the cloud-locked valleys of the skies.

Not dead our dreams! Not dead! Grim, unafraid,

Men fight for dreams, blade leaping out to blade.

Not dead our tattered dreams. Our sacred blood

Shall flow unchecked for them until release

Is won and we can weave from out the flood

Our dreams into an everlasting peace.

Not dead our dreams. The hand shall be withdrawn

And men shall lift their eyes and see the dawn.

HAUNTS  AND  BY-PATHS

The Road to Chalmodie

The road that runs to Chalmodie

In Whittleshire that lies among

The hills is very dear to me.

Though little known and seldom sung

The names are proper to the tongue

And there are many things to see

By those whom fate or fame has flung

Along the road to Chalmodie.

Along the road to Chalmodie,

I met a face bespread with smiles,

A rugged sailor man was he

Who spoke of fairy fashioned isles

And maids of hardly righteous wiles;

His talk was very loose and free,

And as we trod the dusty miles

He sang some wicked songs to me.

I met a man of humble rank

Who staggered slightly as he went.

His wife was pretty when he drank,

He said, and so he often spent

In buying rum his final cent,

And thus became a mighty tank.

She liked, said he, the compliment,

And only had herself to thank.

And there was one whose verbal flow

Was adequate to say the least.

His eyes were wild, his hair was tow,

His dissertation never ceased.

A barrister, perhaps, or priest?

With crushing scorn he answered “No.

A poet I.” His scorn increased;

I fawned on him and murmured “Oh!”

When asked for rhymes I saw him wince.

“I never rhyme,” replied the bard.

“I do,” said I, “the rhyme is quince,”

And left him breathing very hard.

I met a noble, spurred and scarred,

Who swore about a neighboring prince.

He offered me his calling card.

I haven’t seen the fellow since.

Oh, there are many things to see.

And there are many things to do

Along the road to Chalmodie,

But most of them are scarcely true.

A maiden tripped across the dew

At dusk and blew a kiss to me

And there were only just we two

Along the road to Chalmodie.

And no one ever hurries by,

But stops awhile to rest his load,

And ask the which and where and why,

One’s state of health and last abode;

And once I met a talking toad

Who failed to wait for my reply –

You know of no such silly road,

You say? Oh, well, no more do I.

Green Lawns

I love green lawns, green rolling lawns,

With trees nearby,

Where one can catch the tread of fawns.

I never try

To see them, but I know they’re there,

And maidens, too, with flowing hair,

And goblins and a sleepy bear

That blinks one eye.

I think green lawns, green rolling lawns,

A pleasant sight;

Brushed clean by silver singing dawns

All fresh and bright,

And glad beneath a scarf of dew

Reflecting lofty skies and blue,

Where purple stars come trickling through

The trees at night.

I love green lawns where pine trees are

And water spills,

A drowsy voice that flows afar

Among the hills.

I love green lawns where blossoms blow,

And shadows come and shadows go,

Where goldenrod and wild things grow

And daffodils.

I think that I shall search someday

For such a place,

Where quite contented I can stay

And press my face

Against the fresh and fragrant grass,

The while the golden hours pass,

As cloud flotillas wheel and mass

And ply through space.

I feel I know of such a spot,

Or so it seems;

Perhaps I saw it from my cot

Last night in dreams –

This land that I am looking for,

Where one can rest and burn no more,

And limbs are never throbbing sore,

And sunshine streams.

I saw green lawns and slanting skies

That seemed to meet,

Where cool-armed maids with starry eyes

And voices sweet,

Sang songs among the swaying trees,

And danced with neat and nimble knees

To vagrant gipsy melodies

On silver feet

St. Vincent’s Hospital –
October, 1918.

Near a Pine Forest

So that you may enjoy the beauty

Of the light that falls on the mountains,

I give you your freedom now,

And I place in your hand

A reed still wet from the lake

From which I drew it

In the hush of the morning mist

For I knew you would go

Outward today on a path that I could not follow

And I feared for you lest you might weary

Along the way.

And because I knew you would want for the sound of music

I have notched a hole in the reed

And fashioned a flute,

So that you might play as you pass through the criss-cross shadows

That swarm so heavy and silent among the trees

And that those who await your coming

Might hear your music

And hasten to meet you

And play with you on the way;

But tarry not long in the woods

For One will be waiting

At the end of the path to welcome you back to His fields,

His woods and His lakes and His hills and His silent places

For which you have longed

And which you have gone to find.

I place a rose at your breast,

See, little traveler,

For you to bear on your way

As a gift to Him

From one who would fain have kept you a little longer,

But being unworthy has let you return again

To that land from which you departed

One singing morning,

One morning all drenched with the singing of
boughs and of birds.

So that you may travel unbruised

Through the rugged country,

I cover your feet with sandals

And bind them with thongs,

And, see, I drape on your form

With reverent fingers

A scarf of purple and scarlet and green and gold,

As gay as the heart

That sorrowed awhile at the ending

Because it was burdened with things

That it could not bear.

And now you are well arrayed

For the glad outgoing,

And He, when He sees you, will know

I have treasured you well,

For you are more fair and more beautiful

Now at the leaving

Than when you came singing your way

Through the spreading dawn,

A song that was laden with faith

And glowing with dreams.

You will leave me now to the past

In a haunted vista,

Where the pine trees whisper your name

To the stars at night;

So, I shall press on your lips

This kiss at the parting.

Now it is over and ended;

I turn away;

But the sound of your song

Is following, following after

And the tread of your feet falls close

And I see your eyes

And feel the breath of your lips,

And among the shadows

You have hidden yourself from me.

You were fond of hiding.

It is over and ended now,

And the ending is over.

I turn my back,

See, I have turned away.

If you fear the shades in the woods

When the night is falling

Remember to call, and Love, I shall answer your call

Though you will not hear,

For you will be far from hearing

The cry that breaks and tears itself from my heart

For the traveler so little and lonely among the trees.

Be gay as you go

And take care in your flight to remember

The reed, and the rose, and the beautiful scarf, that you wear,

For He will be happy and pleased

When He sees you are near Him

To know that I treasured you well

And clad you in raiment

As fair as the dawn

Out of which you came to me singing

A song that washes like sobs

In the vaults of my ears.

You are gone! You are no more here,

And the light is ebbing.

Is it dark where you tread, little traveler,

And strange and cold?

Play loud on your flute, play loud!

Perhaps they will hear you.

Play loud, little one, play loud,

And send back an echo.

Is it dark in the woods?

Play on, I shall not grieve!

Rose Gatherers of the Night

They pluck at night the roses that are left

By those who pluck the roses in the day.

Quite furtively they pluck with fingers deft,

Then steal away;

A little rose hid warmly in each breast

So none would ever know that it was there.

And as they hurry frightened to the West

They loose their hair,

Which is so light and fairy-thistle spun

It floats like mist across the fields and hills,

And if by chance you rise to greet the sun

When nature thrills

With dawning you will see them in their flight,

A silver haze swept on before the wind,

The ones who gather roses in the silence of the night

As if they’d sinned.

Back to the Day

Dawn is hiding among the hills, shall we look for it together

Where the great crags rear and the valley fills with mist from the distant sea?

Already the wind is running its hand through the tousled hair of the heather –

Love, will you run to the hills and away with me?

Stars and shadows and balsam boughs, a loon on the lake is crying

And the pine-steeped wind as it sifts and soughs through the reeds is alert with dawn;

The heathery hills inveigle the moon, a hawk from his nest is flying,

Stars quiver out like the dew on a dusky lawn.

See, the wings of the night are spread, the bird in the bush is waking,

And the dim, gray vault of the east is red-awake; it is time to run

Together across the rim of the dawn to the shore where the waves are breaking;

Up, let us shout to the sea and salute the sun!

In the Woods

Were they the sounds of fairy feet?

Oh, I hope they were;

The hurried patter, the hush and beat

And the gentle stir

Of the old crisp, crinkled winter leaves

In the fresh green wood.

Were they the sound of fairy feet,

Wee, small and pink,

Dancing a merry swift retreat?

I would love to think

Of the Old Things playing among the leaves

And the solitude.

Were they the sounds of fairy feet?

Oh, it must be so!

The breathless scamper so soft and fleet,

And the heel and toe

Racing among the old brown leaves

In the fresh green wood.

This Place

Here I kissed her, here we fought.

Here we parted, here made up.

Here we ate the things we brought,

Drinking from the selfsame cup.

Here she made a wreath for me

Trimmed with fern and roses red.

Here I carved upon the tree,

Here I chased and here she fled.

Here we lay upon the grass,

Here we planned the unborn years,

Here we saw the summer pass,

Here I laughed away her tears.

Here she blossomed, here she grew,

Here she withered, here she died.

Here a world was rent in two,

Here I cursed my God and cried.

Here she lies beneath the mold,

Here at last in lonesome state.

Weary of the world and old

Here I think of her and wait.

The Little Shop That Was

For Claire

How cheery was the little shop and what a snug retreat

And what a pleasant thing it was to ponder there and search

Among the friendly rows of books, while, just across the street,

One saw the sparrows bathing in the fountain of the church.

The little shop has gone away, and so I go no more

To dip and delve and lose myself in tales of yesterday,

But sometimes, when I’m passing by, I falter at the door

To think of it as once it was and watch the fountain play.

I knew the niche for every book and took a certain pride

In joining in the heated search when one had been misplaced.

Suspiciously we groped about and eagerly we vied

Until at length the missing one triumphantly was traced.

Neil Lyons, Jacks, Hillaire Belloc – I knew them every one—

Hugh Clifford, Hudson, Beresford, Wells, Walpole, G. B. S.

And Kenneth Graham’s “Golden Age” and G. K. Chesterton

And, lower down, the Russian row – a sweetly morbid mess.

The poets shared the other side, among them Frost and Yeats,

John Masefield, Housman, Oppenheim – then many shelves of plays.

And here I’ve fled and locked myself behind these friendly gates

And in the old gloom of the shop explored enchanted ways.

There was a little cubby-hole, secreted in the rear

That breathed a proper mystery of life behind the scenes

And often of a winter’s night would we foregather here

Unravelling rare philosophies and figuring ways and means.

In silence lay the outer shop – extinguished were the lights,

Occasionally the wandering wind sniffed at the door and whined.

How mellow was the little place on those mid-winter nights

When all the world went rumbling by and left us far behind.

The little shop has gone away and so I go no more;

Deserted are the dusty shelves; the walls are stark and bare,

But sometimes, when I’m passing by, I falter at the door

And picture it as once it was, when all the books were there.

The Old Book Worm

God gave his arm a natural crook

To snuggle and contain a book.

His eyes a little dim, yet quick,

A battered hat, a pipe, a stick,

I’ve often watched him hurry home,

His shoulders, hunched above some tome,

To leave the warring world behind

Within the pages of his find.

He loved to read his books in bed

And there one day they found him dead.

A jolly way for him to go.

I’m sure he must have wished it so;

His soul cut loose and winging free

Across some fine romantic sea

To friends and scenes he loved and knew.

For one, I hope his dreams came true.

And yet our street is not the same –

I think perhaps that he’s to blame.

Autumn in the Subway

I watched her eyes, for they were fixed afar

Where sky and crag and flaring sunset meet,

And there before me in the fetid car

A river glided and the woods smelled sweet

And wind swam in the trees. The night came on

And through the singing dusk I saw her face

In Autumn foliage framed. Then she was gone

And there came one with dark eyes to her place.

Her heavy perfume drifting up to me

Swept out the night wind through the sobbing trees,

A shadow crossed the woods and stealthily,

There came the swift caress of silken knees.

Then beauty died, I sought another strap

And thought of one with red leaves in her lap.

To a True Prophet

Men make a mockery, Martin, of your name,

And why is that and why are many things?

You fanned the flame and others stole the flame

And when you learned to fly they took your wings.

From out our midst the prophets, priests and kings

Have gone away; remains with us the shame,

In spite of which to you some credit clings,

Because of which men hold you much to blame.

But nothing Martin, now is quite the same

The fearless words which made men turn on you

Weak brothers shout, and swear that they are new;

Continues still the sickening search for fame.

And still we ply the practice of our trade

Of politics with vision stale and dead,

And sometimes, Martin, sometimes I’m afraid

When I recall how solemnly you said –

A party or a people lost to truth,

With courage gone to rot, bereft of dreams

Are dying things – for Martin so it seems.

We’ve done dishonor to our dreams of youth.

Men win the game who never play the game

While other men are prisoned in the dark,

And there is none to hear the things they claim

And there is none to bear to them the spark

Of hope as once you bore the spark to me

When mouths were unafraid and tongues were free.

Those hidden ones that turned on you the knife

Now hew the tree to which you gave your life.

And that’s about how things are with us here.

Old friend, our stately ship has drifted far

From off the course and there is much to fear.

You’re lucky, Martin, lying where you are.

To a Modern Woman

She lived in books and dreams, yet loved the earth.

She said a lot of silly things and died

And no one ever really knew her worth

And no one cared and no one ever tried.

She smoked her cigarettes with reckless pride

And talked artistically her Freudian gush.

Yet there were flowers underneath the slush

Still fragrant though perhaps a trifle dried.

One smiled at her, yet one could not deride.

The soul of her, one felt was much too brave

And large with love and, yet, no creature’s slave –

One felt this more, of course, when she had died.

She said a lot of things she did not know,

She knew a lot of things she did not say.

She said that this was thus and that was so
nd said another thing another day.

As true as gold her heart and golden gay.

Her busy brain was very much alive

With dizzy thoughts, with which she loved to play,

Like bees abubble in a lofty hive.

Perhaps that’s why her thoughts could not survive,

Perhaps that’s why remained no lasting trace

Of all the things for which she used to strive

And yet, as we stood gazing on her face

With all its lovely animation dead

We all remembered something she had said

That we had used as ours. We turned away

And stealthy silence fell upon us all;

Before that frail accusing bit of clay

One felt quite furtive and a trifle small.

To the Other Woman

Across the great confusion of my mind

You came to me like Hebe through the night,

A pagan thing beyond all wrong or right,

Abundant in your love yet strangely kind;

Who called forgotten things long left behind,

A vagrant song, wild flowers, lost delight –

When was it now that beauty took its flight

And left a soul at war and unresigned?

Perhaps my lips were dumb, my eyes were blind,

Perhaps I killed the thing I sought to find.

The way is short to climb, but far to fall

And this might be the reason for it all.

Perhaps it’s wiser after all to ask
o questions here, nor further strive to task

A mind that plugged the saw with all its might –

Why curse-a bug because it bears a blight?

The facts are thus and other reasons pall.

We shake the hand, yet seldom hear the call.

So let it end.

Because your singing voice

A little while lulled shame within my soul

And made a jaded heart awhile rejoice

And see the glory of a vanished goal;

Because you snatched a thought beyond a dream

And made it live again before my eyes,

A song at dusk beneath fair -summer skies

That rendered mute awhile the frightened scream

Of my remorse, I show no great surprise,

Nor ask your name, nor weigh your moral worth,

Nor question what it was that brought rebirth

To things long dead, nor shall I strive to cloak

That when your song was hushed and daylight broke

Departed from my breast the wings of peace

Across the faint pink gables of the town

And with the dawn the darkness settled down

More fiercely for one fragrant night’s release.

It happened so and things are as they are,

And there is room for mockery and mirth.

We see the stars, yet cannot touch a star.

We tread the earth, yet cannot prove the earth,

And who can find the spot where beauty dwells?

And who can find the dwelling place of Good? –

In what distorted souls or looping hells,

Or say that this is false or that is true,

The clearest spring lies in the darkest wood,

And there is none to judge or pity you

Or me or anyone, for no one knows

From what dark pit a breath of beauty blows,

What withered hands the stars of kindness strew,

Or in what cave a hidden blossom grows.

Within a word of yours, a fleeting thought

I caught, or so it seemed to me, I caught

A breath of love and pity more profound

Than all the words that echo and resound

Through windy domes where men to mortals preach

And stultify their souls through human speech.

It is not this. There is some other thing –

A crumpled bird that bears a broken wing

Perhaps has sweeter music in its breast

Than all the world and all the singing rest

Who fly unmaimed.

Within the flaming West

I saw a thing that called aloud to me,

And that one thing my eyes shall ever see,

And that one thing my ears shall ever hear.

I shall not give it name, nor name the year,

Nor try to analyze how much it meant.

Since then in devious ways my feet have trod

Across the world through leagues of discontent,

So, after all, perhaps that thing was God.

The Listener

I told him my ambition was to write

And thereupon produced and read some stuff.

With sympathetic patience all that night

He listened; but my verse was not enough.

I thought that he should hear at least my play.

And so he did. “It’s very good,” he said.

Then rising, for the night was growing gray –

“It must be nice to write. Well, I’m for bed.”

Alone, I rummaged through his stuffy files

Of legal papers couched in jargon terse,

And strangely there among those dusty piles

I chanced upon a wistful bit of verse

Of honest poetry worthy of the name

And, as I read, my eyes grew bright with shame.

The Unedifying Five

The five of us frequented many bars,

And often spent entire evenings so,

Consuming cigarettes and black cigars

And other things, the while a steady flow

Of argument accompanied each drink,

So fiercely that a stander-by would think

We hated one another, which was true

Quite frequently, but most the time we quaffed

Our heady beverages the evening through,

And spent our hard-earned pay and cursed and laughed

And talked philosophy and dizzy schemes

Of how to make the world a better place,

Or how to renovate the human race,

And as we talked our rosy-tinted dreams

Became quite real to us, and time and space

Fell from our shoulders like a heavy cloak,

As we sat drinking in a haze of smoke;

Our god-like souls released on soaring wings

And though I fear we looked quite dissolute,

We felt that we were poets, priests and kings,

As Bacchus played upon his liquid flute,

Or syphon bottle, which is much the same

In these drab days, in fact, a substitute

For his once mellow reed. At five we came

Hot-footed from our offices and burst

Upon the scene to satisfy a thirst

Made keen by an uninteresting day,

Through which we toiled rebelliously to earn

Our beggarly but sadly needed pay

In order that the candle light might burn

At either end. Good God, the time we spent!

The rum we drank! The speeches wildly spoken!

The dissertation and the argument,

When future rows were brewed and dates were broken

And we resorted to the public booth

And phoned wild words, but never phoned the truth,

Which was unnecessary, for the friend,

Or wife or sweetheart at the other end,

Could gather by a strangely honeyed tone

The blackness of the lies so glibly told,

But yet we did not fear the telephone –

The distance somehow made us all feel bold.

A wretched lot were we if all were known –

“Good evening, Steve, has Chick or Bud been in?”

And Steve would set the Scotch or rye or gin,

And every man would grasp and pour his own.

A wretched lot, in truth, but not the worst.

Desk-ridden fags who toiled and dissipated,

Like other youths whom destiny had cursed

With both imagination and a thirst

That city life had hardly satiated.

When I recall those whiskey-drinking nights,

Those unregenerate, futile, drifting days,

The laughter and the arguments and fights,

The streets and taxicabs and gilded ways,

I see across an alcoholic haze

Familiar once, but long since vanished faces

Encountered here and there in sundry places,

In restaurants and lobbies and cafés –

The faces of young men who, like ourselves,

Paid tribute to the white-clad Irish elves

Who passed the bottles neatly o’er the board,

And gave us checks that we could ill afford

To settle for; young men around the town,

Wild, wayward youths, unedifying fives,

The spendthrift, tippler, sensualist and clown,

Who drank with us in those unsavory dives,

And turned each night into a sordid day.

We knew them all and liked them in a way.

Unedifying fives, where are they now,

Those roisterers that brawled around the bars,

Who loved to sing and dance and drink and row

And flash from pub to pub in creening cars?

Though thirsty still, they are no longer here.

And nothing now is as it was before;

The bars have lost their warmth, the cup its cheer

The fives have broken, some to meet no more,

And older men now toast their absent sons,

And strive to laugh and crack half-hearted puns

And keep a cheerful eye. It’s not the same.

There is no zest, the bars seem very tame.

The wicked ones have gone, those wretched boys,

Who raised such howling hell and made such noise,

Have gone, all gone. Their once familiar haunts

Resound no more with their unseemly taunts,

And business is a little more than slack,

Yet many more than bar-keeps wish them back.

Where are they now, those youthful rakes and gay,

Those wild, marauding, unregenerate fives,

Who took their final drinks and strolled away,

And loving laughter, laughing gave their lives?

IDLERS

I Must Live Today

I must live today,

The sun is in the sky,

The world is good, and I

Must hasten on my way.

The roads are cool and gay,

The hawk is flying high,

The wind and branches play,

The precious moments fly,

Too soon, too soon to die.

No longer can I stay,

All life Is running by

And life is good I say!

Ahead the mountains lie,

Where little cloudlets stray

The silver birches sway.

The village maidens sigh,

The sun is in the sky,

The roads are cool and gay,

The world is good, and I

Must live my life today!

Dusk

Over the purple hills

The sun has sped away,

Dusk, and a swallow thrills,

So ends the day.

Up from the darkling seas

A swift star wings its flight,

Voice of the wind in trees;

So comes the night.

The Wayfarers

Those old spent men who moved across the hill

Among the trees were yesterdays of mine.

Above their heads I heard the branches whine

As sunset burned and all the world grew still.

Along the path I watched them weave until

They passed from view and he who led the line

Turned back on me and made a feeble sigh

Of meek acceptance of some greater Will.

The flowers that they bore had once been sweet,

Their songs that fell like sobs had once been gay,

Their withered, slowly moving fragile feet

Had leaped as light as wine but yesterday

When those old men of whom I am the last,

Like singing gods, set forth into the past.

Old Laughter

Remember old laughter to keep it alive

To gleam like the sun in the heart of our tears;

Let echoes of laughter long silent survive

And ring down the years.

Remember old laughter, its floating refrain

Of people and places and years that have fled

Will stroke with kind fingers the chords of our pain

When laughter is dead.

Remember old laughter and cling to the mirth

Of the past, it is all that we have – withered flowers

That bloomed in the glory and spring of the earth

When laughter was ours.

Remember old laughter, its haunting appeal

Will hover around us and tenderly twine

Like tendrils of ivy when sadly we kneel

In the dust of its shrine.

The Lost Singer

I heard a song when the day was done

And clouds flamed over the setting sun,

I heard a song in the glowing skies

That brought the tears to my eyes.

I heard a song at the end of day

Lifting and drifting so far away.

I heard a song and I longed to see

Who the singer might be.

I heard a song and I turned to gaze

Back through the vista of vanished days

And the singing soul of a lad passed by

And lo, the singer was I.

The Rhyme of the Lost Romance

In Avalon they say that witches are.

Odysseus had a witch to bed with him.

Beneath the water cool-armed maidens swim

As fair as swans and happier by far

Than we who cling to earth with mortal fear.

There is no doubt that drifting on a star

A fairy waits, tender to man, and dear.

In Avalon, hushed island realm of green,

There was a garden wet beneath its weeds.

Poppy and lotus, slim pomegranate seeds

Laughed in the earth and later leaped between

The singing grass and brought bright colors there.

And in this place there dwelt a fairy queen

As warm as rose, fairer than pearls are fair.

And there is one who sits beneath the rain

Amid a grove of dripping willow trees.

A golden harp is placed across her knees

From which she draws a lifting low refrain.

And it is said men seek her for release

From broken hearts made dark with fear and pain,

And when she plays melody brings them peace.

In Proserpine realm where mortals fell

A maiden sits clear eyed among the flame

And hears them speak whose souls are sick with shame,

Who came from earth to her enthroned in hell.

She hears and smiles and holds to them a bowl

That drips with waters from her sacred well,

And when they drink visions reclaim each soul.

In Chalmodie there moves a living dream,

A maiden whom the hungry heart may seek.

And when you kiss her lips the tree tops speak

And night comes on and all the heavens gleam

With dancing stars that bring the mortal sleep

As o’er his face her golden tresses stream,

And murmur trees, tender in tone and deep.

Where Ariadne sits a long green wave

Laughs in the sun and leaps against the rocks.

Red are the maiden’s lips and wet her locks,

Her watching eyes with wonderment are grave.

“Alone and lost Alone and lost are you,”

Intones the wind that moves within her cave

As thus she sits, watching a sea of blue.

A lover lost is somewhere on the sea

With purple sails aslant against the sky.

“Ever away from you,” the sea gulls cry.

“Love of mine return once more to me.

“Round are my waiting arms and red my lips,”

The maiden cries, and silence takes her plea

As thus she waits, scanning the sea for ships.

Among the pines a pool looks to the skies

And in this pool a lovely maiden swims.

With flashing arms and smooth foam gathered limbs

And shakes the laughing jewels from her eyes.

At last the dusk comes on, the woods grow cool

And fair upon the green the maiden lies,

Her golden hair floating upon the pool.

The evening sun lies lightly on the leaves

And gives the quiet woods a yellow sheen.

The still white body lying on the green

Moves lazily and dreamily perceives

The lofty trees through which faint shadows fall

As Night her web of drifting starlight weaves,

And then she laughs, hearing a distant call.

A twilight glow falls through the craggy ice

And lights the emerald splendor of a glade

Wherein there stands a stately green clad maid

Who bears a jeweled wand of rare device.

Across the purple sky soft colors stir

As through the deep her summons echoes thrice

And white forms leap out of the foam to her.

The loveliness of merriment is there

Within the still white vistas of the North,

Where maidens dip their hands in ocean froth

In search of gems to cluster in their hair,

Which splash the cave with wildly dancing light

And fall on flashing arms and bosoms bare

As thus they dance, tossing away the night

But why go on? There is none who believes

The things I say were ever really true.

It would be nice, I think, and so do you,

To find the haunts a vagrant fancy weaves.

Alone is man at best, and bound to earth,

And so in solitude his soul conceives

Such idle tales, knowing their fragile worth.

Wonder Refound

Her wondering eyes were lit with dreaming blue

When she was young, that is, before she knew.

And when one day she knew, the wonder fled –

Her blue eyes burned with other things instead

That were not dreams. You would not have supposed

They’d once been sweet to look on. Now they’re closed.

But just before they closed, her dreams of youth

Flamed through the fading blue and found the truth.

This much I know. For when at last she smiled,

Her eyes held all the wonder of a child.

My Wayward Goddess

My wayward goddess, banished from on high,

You must have brushed the sunset in your flight

And drawn its glowing colors from the sky

And all the splendor of the stars at night,

Which clustered in your lips and hair and eyes

And clung to your fair body as you fell,

A scarlet poppy through the saffron skies: –

Some god had made and loved you all too well.

Ah, lovely outcast, lawless in your love,

How lightly your white feet caress life’s mire,

Your feet that fled star-littered paths above

Before the fury of a god’s desire

And came to earth in glorious retreat

Where, Love, I stooped and kissed your wayward feet.

Dawn in the Ward

Kindly balm to tired eyes,

Heavy hearts and -bodies numb,

Peace that floods the eastern skies,

At last you come.

Shafts of gold across the gloom,

Pillows of the weary mind,

Fresh and fragrantly you bloom,

And cool and kind.

Slowly now the long grim drain

Leaves the body weak and still.

Thirsty eyes made bright with pain

See light and thrill.

All along the aching line

Hope returns to hopeless hearts.

Cots emerge and glasses shine

As pain departs.

Carts and drays go rolling past,

Paves awake and sparrows sing,

Traffic clangs – the day at last

Breaks comforting.

Distant domes and spires appear,

Water tanks and mounting roofs,

Hucksters call and one can hear

The clip of hoofs.

Gone the silence of the night,

Brighter now the glowing skies.

Faint and gaunt and ghastly white

The long ward sighs.

One that moaned the deep night through

Wipes the sweat from off his brow,

Whispers, and his lips are blue,

“I’m better now.”

Whispers as his broken frame

Sinks into a cool repose.

Gone the fever and the flame,

His eye-lids close.

Pallid souls with faces drawn,

Masks that pain has furrowed deep,

Wanly smile and bless the dawn,

Then fall asleep.

Sleep in peace and throb no more,

Children of a tortured night;

See, the sun spills on the floor,

The day is bright

Through the dawn in golden bands,

All the mothers that have died,

Now return with dew-cooled hands

And stand beside

Cots wherein the sick ones lie,

Bringing them a swift release

From the region of the sky,

And sleep and peace.

Gone the stalking night alarm,

Gone the heavy heart’s distress;

Gentle as a rose and calm –

The dawn’s caress.

St. Vincent’s Hospital –
October, 1918.

To a New Day

There is no sound in dreams, but yet I heard

The liquid fluting of a distant bird,

And though I could not see the sky, I knew

That there were clouds in it and it was blue.

A vagrant sunbeam moved across the sheet

And licked my wrist with unaccustomed heat.

And through the window stole a faint perfume

That spoke of peach and apple trees in bloom.

Like petals caught in sweet shrub-scented rain,

Familiar songs long lost, returned again.

The shadows fell away like things of lead

As golden shafts of light caressed my bed

And fluttered gently there until they met.

I smiled and touched my cheek and it was wet

The Call

Love, I am ready now

To hear thy call.

All that I am art thou,

And thou my all.

Twilight Waters

Twilight waters, evening sky,

Deep tranquility,

Shafts of sun that flush and die

On a darkling sea,

Mist scarfs wavering far away

Through the ebbing light,

Shadows drape the dying day,

Swift wings flee the night.

Leaves

Brown leaves and gold,

Gold leaves and red,

The woods are cold

And the trees have shed

Brown leaves and gold,

Gold leaves and red.

Bleak skies were bright

When leaves were green,

Swift falls the night,

And the wind is keen;

Sad hearts were light

When leaves were green.

Brown leaves and gold,

Gold leaves and red,

The woods are old

And the joy has fled –

Brown leaves and gold,

Gold leaves and dead.

Three Trees

Three little trees

In the brisk summer breeze,

Family of fir were they,

Swayed to and fro

In a gay little row

Locking their arms in their play.

And the crickets that sang

When the vesper bells rang

And the frogs with the queer crooked knees

Sported and played

In the checker board shade

Of the three little, gay little trees.

Beneath the Rain

I stood beside a tree beneath the rain

And as I stood I thought how lone and small

Was I and how that tree was great and tall

And bound to earth till I had lived again;

And thinking thus I felt a trill of pain

Which made me gaze across the voiceless night

In search of some faint gleam, some kindly light,

To guide my feet. I searched the night in vain.

There was no light and so I turned away

And moved beneath the rain across the sod

Alone that night and cried aloud to God

To send the day.

Derelicts

They have fallen low,

Tasted the dregs of things,

Honor and shame forgotten,

All that was clean and good.

Like birds in a dismal wood,

Beating with broken wings

In a night that is hell begotten,

In a night that will never go,

They have fallen there and they know

That the woods will always remain,

The woods of terrible night,

The woods of terrible pain,

Where the broken are stayed in their flight,

Never to mount again

The cloud lanes of the sky

To the silver lawns of the sun.

They are broken, they cannot fly,

They know that their flight is done.

By Way of Reproof

In God’s great, deep, imponderable laws

’Twas writ that thou shouldst have gigantic paws,

And it was further writ in slabs of stone

That thou shouldst love, above all things, a bone.

Thou art, indeed, a mystery dog to me.

Thy silly face seems honest, frank and free

From subterfuge, but yet with mine own eyes

I’ve seen thee chew a dog but half thy size

And steal rare dishes from our saintly cook;

In fact, it seems there’s naught thou wouldst not hook

To satisfy thy vulgar appetite.

Thou raisest too much moan, oh, dog, at night

Thou canst not sleep with me, I tell thee now,

Thou art too large, thou great, ungainly cow.

Remember, pray, how thou hast been “brought-up”;

Thou art no longer now a puling pup.

Hast thou but small regard for man’s esteem,

No spark of honor left, no feeble gleam?

Art thou a pirate dog, a Bolshevist?

Roll not thy goggle eyes at me and twist

Thy large, expressive rump – we are not friends

Till thou hast made to me complete amends.

Why didst thou eat my brave maroon cravat,

I ask thee frankly, dog, why didst thou that?

What hellish impulse made thee choose my bed

For thy repose and splash across the spread

The tell-tale tracks of thy great muddy feet;

Was that quite fair, was that refined or sweet?

Oh, yes; my slippers, too, I quite forgot.

Thou filched those slippers, dog, come, didst thou not?

I have not seen my slippers for a week

What lies thy tongue would tell if thou couldst speak!

I give thee comforts, luxuries, a name

Which thou hast linked with horrid deeds of shame.

Thou art the scandal of the countryside,

Thou low, carousing dog, bereft of pride.

Go, quit my sight, and try to mend thy ways;

I cannot stand thy moist, adoring gaze.

The Trucksters

I love the trucksters’ voices

Outside my humble door.

When Dawn alone rejoices

I love to hear them roar.

They wake me in the morning

With a wild Homeric oath,

And I rise, all slumber scorning,

For I cannot be a sloth

When I hear the voice of trucksters

Booming forth at break of day.

Oh, I love the voice of trucksters,

And the violent things they say.

The Old Brick Walk

They planted purple violets here before the bricks were laid,

And later when the spring tide came and all the world grew fair,

The violets struggled through the chinks the swollen earth had made

And gave the drowsy fragrance of their petals to the air.

All this was very long ago, and those who placed the seed

Have lain these years behind the hedge in shrub embowered gloom.

Forgotten is the garden now beneath the grass and weed,

But still upon the blood red bricks the purple violets bloom.

The garden is a silent place alive with hidden things,

And sometimes on the old brick walk there squats a great green toad.

Occasionally a lazy bird bestirs itself and sings, while from afar an ancient cart comes creaking down the road.

This old lost spot I now behold through disillusioned eyes.

The mound that once a mountain was is scarce a fairy hill,

And all my lovely vista-glades in mystery and size

Have shrunk, yet on the crumbling bricks the violets cluster still.

The Out Road

When I have gone away and left behind

Familiar things well loved, old haunts and friends,

Let those who think of me in friendship find

Gay colored thoughts as when the sunset sends

Across the quiet dusk its parting rays

And leaves a promise glowing in the sky

Of brighter days to come, far brighter days,

And memories of golden days gone by.

So would I have them think of me and hear

The echoes of my laughter and my song

Across the tranquil twilight ringing clear,

As merrily I take my way along

The winding road, until at last I rest

Beneath green trees where comrades laugh and jest.

The Quest

I’m going out to dig for beauty with my bare, bare hands.

I’m going to dig the soil and scoop the singing sands

And scratch among the rocks and roots and wade through mire and mud.

I’m going out to dig until my hands are quick with blood.

I’m going out to touch beauty,

See beauty,

Live beauty,

I’m going out to look for beauty and dream of it no more.

I’ve made a hunting park of beauty, stocked with fat, drab birds.

I’ve sallied forth in search of it and bagged a brace of words.

I’ve sought to tame it in a rhyme and snare it in a phrase

Of clever unreality that critics damned with praise.

I’m going out to touch beauty,

See beauty,

Live beauty,

I’m going out to look for beauty and dream of it no more.

I’ve had my fill of lamp lit salons with their green jade talk,

Where women bare their burning souls, and poets slouch and stalk.

The coffee cup and candle light, I’ve had enough of these.

I long to tread where silence is and solitude and trees.

I’m going out to touch beauty,

See beauty,

Live beauty,

I’m going out to look for beauty and dream of it no more.

I’m going out to look for beauty in the hearts of men

Wherever it may chance to be in palace, hedge or den,

To labor and carouse with them and share the common weal,

To laugh and love and lose with them and feel the things they feel.

I’m going out to touch beauty,

See beauty,

Live beauty,

I’m going out to look for beauty and dream of it no more.