XIII
As the little old last year's car bore them to the north, some long sleeping-image seemed to stir in Breeders mind.
"Got car like this m'self somewheres," he remarked.
Bean was relieved. He didn't want the name of a woman to be brought into the matter just then.
"'S all right for town work," he said. "Good enough for all I want of a car."
"'S awful!" said Breede, obviously forgetting the car for another subject.
"What can I do? She says she's got the right," suggested Bean.
"She'd take it anyway. I know her. Pack a suit-case. Had times with her already. Takes it from her mother."
"Can't be too rough at the start," declared Bean. "Manage 'em of course, but 'thout their finding it out—velvet glove." He looked quietly confident and Breede glanced at him almost respectfully.
"When?" he asked.
"Haven't made up my mind yet," said Bean firmly. "I may consult her, then again I may not; don't believe in long engagements."
Breede's glance this time was wholly respectful.
"You're a puzzle to me," he conceded.
Bean's shrug eloquently seemed to retort, "that's what they all say, sooner or later."
They were silent upon this. Bean wondered if Julia was still fussing back there. Or had she sent to White Plains for some more? And what was the flapper just perfectly doing at that moment? Life was wonderful! Here he was to witness a ball game on Friday!
They were in the grandstand, each willing and glad to forget, for the moment, just how weirdly wonderful life was. A bell clanged twice, the plate was swept with a stubby broom, the home team scurried to their places.
"There he is!" exclaimed Breede; "that's him!" Breede leaned out over the railing and pointed to the Greatest Pitcher the World Has Ever Seen. Bean sat coolly back.
The Pitcher scanned the first rows of faces in the grandstand. His glance came to rest on a slight, becomingly attired young man, who betrayed no emotion, and, in the presence of twenty thousand people, the Pitcher unmistakably saluted Bunker Bean. Bean gracefully acknowledged the attention.
"He know you?" queried Breede with animation.
"Know me!" He looked at Breede almost pityingly, then turned away.
The Pitcher sent the ball fairly over the plate.
"Stur-r-r-r-ike one!" bellowed the umpire.
"With him all morning," said Bean condescendingly to his admiring companion. "Get shirts same place," he added.
His cup had run over. He was on the point of confiding to his companion the supreme felicity in store for Breede as a grandfather. But the batter struck out and the moment was only for raw rejoicing. They forgot. Bean ceased to be a puzzle to any one, and Breede lapsed into un consciousness of Julia.
The game held them for eleven innings. The Greatest Pitcher saved it to the home team.
"He was saying to me only this morning" began Bean, as the Pitcher fielded the last bunt. But the prized quotation was lost in the uproar. Pandemonium truly reigned and the scene was unquestionably one of indescribable confusion.
Outside the gate they were again Breede and Bean; or, rather, Bean and Breede. The latter could not so quickly forget that public recognition by the Greatest Pitcher.
"You're a puzzle t'me," said Breede. "Lord! I can't g'ome yet. Have't take me club."
"Can't make y'out," admitted Breede once more, as they parted before the sanctuary he had indicated.
"Often puzzle myself," confessed the inscrutable one, as the little old last year's car started on. Breede stood on the pavement looking after it. For some reason the car puzzled him, too.
Bean was wondering if Julia herself wouldn't have been a little appeased if she could have seen the Pitcher single him out of that throng. Some day he might crush the woman by actually taking the Pitcher to call.
At his door he dismissed the car. He wanted quiet. He wanted to think it all out. That morning it had seemed probable that by this time he would have been occupying a felon's cell, inspecting the magazines and fruit sent to him. Instead, he was not only free, but he was keeping a man worth many millions from his own home, and perhaps he had caused that man's wife to send over to White Plains for some more. It was Ram-tah. All Ram-tah. If only every one could find his Ram-tah
Cassidy was reading his favourite evening paper, the one that shrieked to the extreme limits of its first page in scarlet headlines and mammoth type. It was a paper that Bean never bought, because the red ink rubbed off to the peril of one's eighteen-dollar suit.
Cassidy, who for thirty years had voted as the ward-boss directed, was for the moment believing himself to be a rabid socialist.
"Wall Street crooks!" he began, in a fine orative frenzy. "Dur-r-rinkin' their champagne whilst th' honest poor's lucky t' git a shell av hops! Ruh-hobbin' th' tax-pay'r f'r' t' buy floozie gowns an' joold bresslets f'r their fancy wives an' such. I know th' kind well; not wan cud do a day's bakin' or windy-washin'!"
He held the noisy sheet before Bean and accusingly pointed a blunt forefinger. "Burly Blonde Divorcée, Routed Society Burglar," across the first two columns, but the proceeding was rather tamely typed and the Burly Blonde's portrait in evening dress was inconspicuous beside the headlines "Flurry in Federal Express! Wild Scenes on Stock Exchange. Millions made by Gentlemen's Agreement."
"Gentlemin!" hissed Cassidy. "The sem agreemint that two gentlemin porch-climbers has whin wan climbs whilst th' other watches t' see is th' cop at th' upper ind av th' beat! Millions med whilst I'm wur-r-kin' f'r twinty per month an' what's slipped me—th' sem not buyin' manny jools ner private steamboats! Millions med! I know th' kind well!" Bean felt his own indignation rise with Cassidy's. He was seeing why they had feared to have him on the board of directors. Apparently they were bent on wrecking the company by a campaign of extravagance. The substance of what he gleaned from Cassidy's newspaper was that those directors had declared a stock dividend of 200 per cent, and a cash dividend of 100 per cent.
They were madly wrecking the company in which he had invested his savings. Such was his first thought. And they were crooks, as Cassidy said, because for two years they had been quietly, through discreet agents, buying in the stock from unsuspecting holders.
"Rascals," agreed Bean with Cassidy, having but slight gifts for character analysis.
"Tellin' th' poor dubs th' stock was goin' down with one hand an' buyin' it in with th' other," said the janitor, lucidly.
Bean was suddenly troubled by a cross-current of thought. When you wrecked a company you didn't buy in the stock—you sold. He viewed the headlines from a new angle. Those directors were undoubtedly rascals, but was he not a rascal himself? What about his own shares?
"Maybe there's something we don't understand about it," he ventured to Cassidy.
"I know th' kind well," persisted Cassidy. "Th' idle rich! Small use have they f'r th' wur-r-r-kin man! Souls no wider than th' black av y'r nail!"
"Might have had good reasons," said Bean, cautiously.
"Millions av thim," assented Cassidy with a pointed cynicism. "An' me own father dyin' twinty-three years ago fr'm ixposure contracted in County Mayo!"
Bean returned the paper to its owner and went slowly in to Ram-tah. One of the idle rich! Well, that is what kings mostly were, if you came down to it. At least they had to be rich to buy all those palaces. But not necessarily idle. The renewed Ram-tah would not be idle. It was not idleness to own a major-league club.
For the first time in their intercourse he felt that he faced the dead king almost as an equal. He was confronted by problems of administration, as Ram-tah must often have been. He must think.
If the flapper quite madly brought about an immediate marriage they would, for their honeymoon, follow the home club on its Western trip, and the groom would not be idle. He would be "looking over the ground." Then he would buy one of the clubs. If he proved to be not rich enough for that, not quite as rich as one of the idle rich, he would buy stock and become a director. He was feeling now that he knew how to be a director; that his experience with the express company had qualified him. He wondered how rich he would prove to be. Maybe he would have as much as thirty thousand dollars.
And he was a puzzle to Breede. He looked knowingly at Ram-tah when he remembered this. Ram-tah had probably puzzled people, too.
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He went to the office in the morning still wondering how rich he might be. The newspaper he read did not enlighten him, though it spoke frankly of "Federal Express Scandal." If the thing was very scandalous, perhaps he had made a lot of money. But he could not be sure of this. It might be merely "newspaper vituperation," which was something he knew to be not uncommon. The paper had declared that those directors had juggled a twenty-million dollar surplus for years, lending it to one another at a low rate of interest, until, alarmed by clamouring stockholders, they had declared this enormous dividend, taking first, however, the precaution to buy for a low price all the stock they could. But the newspaper did not say how rich any one would be that had a whole lot of margins on that stock at Kennedy & Balch's. Maybe you had to hire a lawyer in those cases.
Entering the office, he was rudely shocked by Tully.
"Good-morning, Mr. Bean!" said Tully distinctly.
"Good-morning!" returned Bean, stunned by Tully's "Mr." "Uh! pleasant day," he added.
"Yes, sir!" said Tully, again distinctly.
Bean controlled himself and went to his desk.
"'Mr.' and 'Sir'! Gee! Am I as rich as that?" he thought.
Half an hour later it no longer seemed to him that he was rich at all. He was seated opposite Breede taking letters in shorthand as if he were merely a thirty-dollar-a-week Bunker Bean. Breede was refusing to recognize any change in their relationship. He made no reference to their talk of the day before and his detached cuffs stubbornly occupied their old position on the desk. Was it all a dream—and the flapper, too?
But the flapper soon called him to the telephone.
"Poor old Pops came home late, and he says you're just perfectly a puzzle to him," she began.
"I know," said Bean; "he says he can't make me out."
"And Moms began to say the silliest things about you, until I just had to take her seriously, so I perfectly told her that woman had come into her own in this generation, thanks to a few noble leaders of our sex—it's in Granny's last speech at the league—and that sent her up in the air. I don't think she can be as well as she used to be; and I told Pops he had to give me some money, and he said he knew it as well as I did, so what was the use of talking about it, and so he just perfectly gave me fifty or sixty thousand dollars and told me to make it go as far as I could, but I don't know, that grocer says the cost of living is going up every day because the Senate isn't insurgent enough; and anyway I'll get the tickets and a suite on that little old boat that sails Wednesday. I thought you'd want a day or two; and everything will be very quiet, only the family present, coming into town for it, you know, Wednesday morning, and the boat sails at noon, and I'll be so perfectly glad when it's all over because it's a very serious step for a young girl to take. Granny herself says it should never be taken lightly, unless you just perfectly know, but of course we do, don't we? I think you'll like fumed oak better, after all—and poor old Pops saying you're such a puzzle to him. He says he can't make out just how many kinds of a perfectly swear-word fool you are, but I can, and that's just deliciously enough for anybody. And you're to come out to-morrow and have tea and things in the afternoon, and I'm going to be before sister is, after all. She's perfectly furious about it and says I ought to be put back into short skirts, but I just perfectly knew it the very first time I ever looked at you. Stay around there, in case I think of something I've forgotten. G'bye."
Wednesday—a little old steamer sailing at noon! A steamer, and he couldn't swim a stroke and was always terrified by water. And the trip West with the home team! What about that? Why had he not the presence of mind to cut in and just perfectly tell her where they were going? But he had let the moment pass. It was too late. He didn't want to begin by making a row. And Breede was puzzled by him that way, was he? Couldn't make out how many kinds of perfectly swear-word fool he was?
He regretted that he had not been more emphatic about those cuffs. And Breede had said it after witnessing that salute from the pitcher's box! He must be a hard man to convince of anything. What more proof did he want?
Buzz! Buzz! Buzz!
The man who couldn't make him out was calling for him. For an hour longer he took down the man's words, not sneering pointedly at the cuffs, yet allowing it to be seen that he was conscious of them. A puzzle was he?
"Hopin' t'ave promp' action accordin' 'bove 'structions, remain yours ver' truly she's got it all reasoned out," concluded Breede.
"She just told me," said Bean; "little old steamer sailing Wednesday."
"Can't make y' out," said Breede.
That thing was getting tiresome.
"You're a puzzle to me, too," said Bean.
"Hanh! Wha's 'at? What kinda puzzle?"
"Same kind," said Bean, brightly.
"Hum!" said Breede, and pretended to search for a missing document. Then he eyed Bean again.
"Know how much you made on that Federal stuff?"
"I was going to ask a lawyer," confessed Bean. "I got a whole lot of margins or whatever you call 'em around at that broker's. Maybe he wouldn't mind letting me know."
"Stock'll be up t' six hundred before week's out; net you 'round four hund' thous'n'," exploded Breede in his most vicious manner.
"Four hundred thousand margins?" He wanted to be cautious.
"Dollars, dammit!" shouted Breede.
Bean was able to remain cool. That amount of money would have meant nothing to him back on the Nile. Why should it now?
"It wasn't the money I was after," he began, loftily.
"Hanh!"
"Principle of the thing!" concluded Bean.
Breede had lost control of his capable under jaw. It sagged limply. At last he spoke, slowly and with awe in his tone.
"You don't puzzle me any more." He shook his head solemnly. "Not any more. I know now!"
"Little old steamer—can't swim a stroke," said Bean.
"'S all," said Breede, still shaking his head helplessly.
At his desk outside Bean feigned to be absorbed in an intricate calculation. In reality he was putting down "400,000," then "$400,000," then "$400,000.00" By noon he had covered several pages of his note-book with this instructive exercise. Once he had written it $398,973.87, with a half-formed idea of showing it to old Metzeger.
As he was going out Tully trod lightly over a sheet of very thin ice and accosted him.
"The market was not discouraging to-day," said Tully genially.
"'S good time to buy heavily in margins," said Bean.
"Yes, sir," said Tully respectfully.
In the street he chanted "four hundred thousand dollars" to himself. He was one of the idle rich. He hoped Cassidy would never hear of it. Then, passing a steamship office, he recalled the horror that lay ahead of him. Little old steamer. But was a financier who had been netted four hundred thousand dollars to be put afloat upon the waters at the whim of a flapper? She was going too far. He'd better tell her so in plain words; say, "Look here, I've just netted four hundred thousand dollars, and no little old steamer for mine. I don't care much for the ocean. We stay on land. Better understand who's who right at the start."
That is what he would tell the flapper; make it clear to her. She'd had her own way long enough. Marriage was a serious business. He was still resolving this when he turned into a shop.
"I want to get a steamer trunk—sailing Wednesday," he said in firm tones to the clerk.
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It was midnight of Tuesday. In the steam-heated apartment Bean paced the floor. He was attired in the garments prescribed for gentlemen's evening wear, and he was still pleasantly fretted by the excitement of having dined with the Breede family at the ponderous town house up east of the park.
He tried to recall in their order the events of those three days since he had left the office on Saturday. His coolest efforts failed. It was like watching a screen upon which many and diverse films were superimposing scenes in which he was an actor of more or less consequence, but in which his figure was always blurred. It was confounding.
Yet he had certainly gone out to that country place Sunday for tea and things, taking Nap. And the flapper, with a sinful pride, had shown him off to the family. He and the flapper had clearly been of more consequence than the big sister and the affianced waster, who wouldn't be able to earn his own cigarettes, say nothing of his ties and gloves. Sister and the waster, who seemed to be an agreeable young man, were simply engaged in a prosaic way, and looked prosaically forward to a church wedding. No one thought anything about them, and sister was indeed made perfectly furious by the airs the flapper put on.
Mrs. Breede, from one of the very oldest families of Omaha, had displayed amazing fortitude. She had not broken down once, although she plainly regarded Bean as a malignant and fatal disease with which her latest-born had been infected. "I must be brave, brave!" she had seemed to be reminding herself. And when Nap had chased and chewed her toy spaniel, named "Rex," until it seemed that Rex might pass on, she had summoned all her woman's resignation and only murmured, "Nothing can matter now!"
There had seemed to be one fleeting epoch which he shared alone with the flapper, feeling the smooth yielding of her cheek and expanding under her very proudest gaze of ownership. And a little more about fumed oak panels and the patent laundry tubs.
Monday there had been a mere look-in at the office, with Tully saying "Sir"; with Breede exploding fragments of words to a middle-aged and severely gowned woman stenographer who was more formidable than a panorama of the Swiss Alps, and who plainly made Breede uncomfortable; and with Bulger saying, "Never fooled your Uncle Cuthbert for a minute. Did little old George W. Wisenham have you doped out right or not? Ask me, ask me; wake me up any time in the night and ask me!"
Tuesday afternoon he had walked with the flapper in the park and had learned of many things going forward with solely his welfare in view—little old house surrounded on all sides by just perfectly scenery—little old next year's car—little old going-away rag—little old perfectly just knew it the first moment she saw him—little old new rags to be bought in Paris—and sister only going to Asheville on hers.
And the dinner in town, where he had seemed to make an excellent impression, only that Mrs. Breede persisted in behaving as if the body was still upstairs and she must be brave, brave! And Grandma, the Demon, confiding to him over her after-dinner cigarette that he was in for it now, though she hadn't dared tell him so before; but he'd find that out for himself soon enough if he wasn't very careful about thwarting her. It made her perfectly furious to be thwarted.
Nor did he fail to note that the stricken mother was distinctly blaming the Demon for the whole dreadful affair. Her child had been allowed to associate with a grandmother who had gone radical at an age when most of her sex simmer in a gentle fireside conservatism and die respectably. But it was too late now. She couldonly be brave, brave!
And he was to be there at nine sharp, which was too early, but the flapper could be sure only after he came that nothing had happened to him, that he had neither failed in business, been poisoned by some article of food not on her list, nor diverted by that possible Other One who seemed always to lurk in the flapper's mental purlieus. She just perfectly wanted him there an hour too early; all there was about it!
These events had beaten upon him with the unhurried but telling impact of an ocean tide. Two facts were salient from the mass: whatever he had done he had done because of Ram-tah; and he was going to Paris, where he would see the actual tomb of that other outworn shell of his.
He thought he would not be able to sleep. He had the night in which to pack that steamer trunk. Leisurely he doffed the faultless evening garments—he was going to have a waistcoat pointed like the waster's, with four of those little shiny buttons, and studs and cuff-links to match—and donned a gayly flowered silk robe.
With extreme discomfort he surveyed the new steamer trunk. Merely looking at a steamer trunk left him with acute premonitions of what the voyage had in store for him. But the flapper was the flapper; and it was the only way ever to see that tomb.
The packing began, the choice garments were one by one neatly folded. A light tan overcoat hung in Ram-tah's closet, back of the case. Ram-tah was dragged forth and for the moment lay prone. He was to be left in the locked closet until a more suitable housing could be provided, and Cassidy had been especially warned not to let the steam-heated apartment take fire.
He found the coat and returned to the half-packed trunk in the bedroom where he resumed his wonderful task, stopping at intervals for always futile efforts at realization of this mad impossibility. It was all Ram-tah. Nothing but that kingly manifestation of himself could have brought him up to the thing. He dropped a choice new bit of haberdashery into the trunk and went for another look at It prone on the floor in that other room.
A long time he gazed down at the still face—his own still face, the brow back of which he had once solved difficult problems of administration, the eyes through which he had once beheld the glories of his court, the lips that had kissed his long dead queen, smiled with rapture upon his first-born and uttered the words that had made men call him wise. It was not strange—not unbelievable. It was sane and true. He was still a king.
He reached down and laid a tender, a fraternal hand upon the brow. The contact strengthened him, as always. He could believe anything wise and good of himself. He could be a true mate to that bewildering flapper, full of understanding kindness. He saw little intimate moments of their life together, her perplexities over fumed oak and patent tubs and marketing for pure food; always her terrific earnestness. Now and then he would laugh at that, but then she would laugh too; sometimes the flapper seemed to show, with an engaging little sense of shame, that she just perfectly knew how funny she was.
But she was staunch; she had perfectly well known the very first moment she saw him. And she had never spoiled it all, like that other one in Chicago, by asking him if he was fond of Nature and Good Music and such things. The flapper was capable but quiet. With his hand still upon Ram-tah's brow in that half-timid, strange caress, he was flooded with a sudden new gladness about the flapper. She was dear, if you came right down to it. And Ram-tah had brought her to him. He erected himself to look down once more. They knew, those two selves; understood each other and life.
It occurred to him for the first time that Ram-tah, too, must have liked dogs, must have been inexpressibly moved by the chained souls that were always trying to speak from their brown eyes. He looked over to Nap, who fiercely battled with a sofa cushion, and was now disembowelling it through a rent in the cover. He wondered what Ram-tah's favourite dog had been like.
He went back to the bedroom to finish his packing. Ram-tah could lie until the moment came to lock him again in the closet, to leave him once more in a seclusion to which he had long been accustomed.
He worked leisurely, stowing those almost advanced garments so that they should show as few wrinkles as possible after their confinement. Occasionally Nap diverted his thoughts by some louder growl than usual in the outer room, or by some noisier scramble.
The trunk was packed and locked for the final time. Thrice had it been unlocked and opened to receive slight forgotten objects. The last to be placed directly under the lid was the entirely scarlet cravat. He was equal to wearing it now, but a sense of the morrow's proprieties deterred him. The stricken mother! In deference to her he laid out for the morning's wear the nearest to a black cravat that he possessed, an article surely unassuming enough to be no offence in a house of mourning.
He fastened the straps of the trunk and sighed in relief. It was a steamer trunk, and he was to sail on a little old steamer, but other people had survived that ordeal. Ram-tah would have met it boldly. Ram-tah!
He stood in the doorway, his attention attracted to Nap, who had for some moments been more than usually vocal. In a far corner Nap had a roundish object between his paws and his sharp teeth tore viciously at it. He looked up and growled in fierce pretence that his master also wished to gnaw this delectable object.
A moment Bean stood there, looking, looking. Slowly certain details cleared to his vision: the details of an unspeakable atrocity. He felt his knees grow weak, and clutched at the doorway for support.
The body of Ram-tah was out of its case and half across the room, yards of the swathed linen unfurled; but, more terrible than all, the head of Ram-tah was not where it should have been.
In the far corner the crouching Nap gnawed at that head, tearing, mutilating, desecrating.
"Napoleon!" It was a cry of little volume, but tense and terrible. Napoleon, destroyer of kings! In this moment he once more put the creature's full name upon him. The dog found the name alarming; perceived that he had committed some one of those offences for which he was arbitrarily punished. He relaxed the stout jaws, crawled slinkingly to the couch, and leaped upon it. Once there, he whimpered protestingly. One of the few clear beliefs he had about a perplexing social system was that nothing hurtful could befall him once he had gained that couch. It was sanctuary.
Bean's next emotion was sympathy for the dog's fright. He tottered across to the couch, mumbling little phrases of reassurance to the abject Nap. He sat down beside him, and put a kindly arm about him.
"Why, why, Nappy! Yes, 'sall right, yes, he was—most beautiful doggie in the whole world; yes, he was."
He hardly dared look toward the scene of the outrage. The calamity was overwhelming, but how could dogs know any better? Timidly, at length, he raised his eyes, first to where the fragmentary head lay, then to the torn body.
Something about the latter electrified him. He leaped from the couch and seized an end of the linen that bound the mummy. He pulled, and the linen unwound. He curiously surveyed something at his feet. It was a tightly rolled wad of excelsior. The swathing of linen—he had unwound it to where the hands should have been folded on the breast—had enclosed excelsior.
Dazedly he looked into the empty case. Upon one of the new boards he saw marked with the careless brush of some shipping-clerk, "Watkins & Co., Hartford, Conn."
Again, as with the unstable lilac-bushes, his world spun about him; it drew in and darkened. He had the sensation of a grain of dust sucked down a vast black funnel.
Outside the quiet room, the city went on its ruthless, noisy way. In there where dynasties had fallen and a monarch lay prone, a spotted dog sporting with a papier-mâché something, came suddenly on a cold hand flung out on the rug. Nap instantly forsook the sham for the real, deserted the head of Ram-tah, and laved Bean's closed eyes with a lolloping pink tongue.