him, the tears streaming down over her smile and her lips moving.
Then, sighing out like a child, she lay back on the pillow, turned
over, and went to sleep.
* * * * *
And this is the story of Hester which so insisted to be told. I think
she must have wanted you to know. And wanted Gerald to know that you
know, and, in the end, I rather think she wanted God to know.
_Everybody’s Magazine_
“CAB, SIR?”
BY
SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS
“CAB, SIR?”[6]
By SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS
Reviewing the facts candidly, the sike now attributes his part in the
crime to the stimulus of a third cup of tea. The first two he took
because he was lonely. The third he had, for fellowship, on invitation
from a gob and a flit who perceived his condition. They explained
that they were lifelong friends, having originally met last week at a
sing-song while waiting for their final discharge papers; and why not
see New York first?
The sike said that he had no place to go short of College City,
Missouri. The gob, it appeared, had plenty of places to go in the near
vicinage, but did not wish to resume his old way of life which, he
hinted, was ignominious if not actually criminal. The flit had to go
to the dental clinic in the morning, so he didn’t care; he was feeling
reckless and suicidal. The hour was that of slacktide on Broadway, when
the chorus is just opening the second act.
“What is that which it is that we make to do this evening?” inquired
the gob, as they emerged from the War Camp Community Service Club on
Twenty-seventh Street.
Having taken the cantonment course in Uncle Sam’s French Idioms for the
Idiotic, the others comprehended at once.
“Would a bus ride be a good start?” suggested the sike.
“Take a walk and get the kinks out of us,” amended the flit who still
suffered from transport cramp.
“What-ho about a roof-show?” queried the gob.
Madison Square Garden loomed flatly beside them while they were still
debating it by the ambulant method. A shaft of light from a side exit
fell across their path. The flit blinked into the aperture and withdrew
his tongue from his most peevish tooth for the purpose of remarking:
“Whoa, Dobbin!”
“It’s a tank,” observed the sike, following his gaze. “What does the
sign say?” He pointed to a placard, pendent from the creature’s neck.
“‘To be returned,’” read the gob.
“To return it, you first got to take it out,” argued the flit. “It
spoke just in time. Maudie, I’m your little return ticket.”
“You!” said the gob incredulously. “Where do you come in? Can you run
that thing?”
“I can run anything that drinks gasoline.”
“It looks like Providence by special arrangement,” observed the gob.
“What do _you_ say, Buddy?”
“I told you I was for a bus ride,” returned the sike under the
influence of the third cup of tea.
“D’you reckon this reptile’s got a keeper?” asked the flit. He entered
the passageway and looked about, but found no one. “Or a mouth?” he
proceeded. “We’ve got to persuade it to swallow us. Hey, gob; you’re
tender and juicy. Tackle its whiskers.”
“Those aren’t whiskers. Those are machine guns. Hi! Eureka! Here’s the
door with ‘welcome’ on the mat.” At his touch a panel at the front
slowly unfolded outward, displaying a lighted interior.
“Who’ll join me in the Jonah Club?” invited the flit, plunging down the
wide gullet. “It’s my idea we’d better get moving before our little
whale gets to whinnying and raises its master. All aboard that’s
going aboard. Public Library, Eagle Hotel, Soldier’s Monument and way
stations to the Guard-House!”
The others clambered into the monster’s interior. Its mouth closed
after them.
“Now, I hope the dum thing responds to gentle treatment,” the flit
said. “I see how she starts, but I gotta take a chance on how she
steers. Are you ready? Grab and stick; she may buck. Go!”
He did something intricate and skilled to some levers. With a noise as
of a boiler-shop attacked by convulsions, the tank moved majestically
forth and, after a moment of doubt, which nearly cost a taxi its life,
turned to the left and the bright lights. The voyage had begun.
Here, for the benefit of those who have been living, since the war
began, a retired life in Tierra del Fuego or Spitzbergen, it may be
well to explain the terms of the fellowship. A sike is a private of the
Psychological Division of the Army Medical Corps. Morale is his special
concern; he is the man who keeps things stirring in camp when it has
rained for three solid weeks and the mail has gone wrong and war is all
that Sherman said of it and more. He is usually a college professor who
has seen a great light. This one was, and had. His name is Follansbee
James. A flit is a flying and prying person who snoops about in an
airplane of low elevation and manners, poking his nose into matters
which it is undesirable that he should know. Such is the shamelessness
of our Government that our flit, Frederick Slayter by name, had
actually been decorated for his ill-bred performances. A gob is, of
course--though nobody knows why--an able seaman. Mr. “Chaw” Veeder was
unusually able. He had other names, but they had vanished owing to his
propensity for conserving a plug of tobacco unobtrusively in his cheek.
There is a deal of hidden vice in our Navy. Having thus satisfied, I
trust, inquiring minds of a scientific and philological bent, I will
now return to the deliberate and uproarious conveyance wherein I have
left the trio.
Bhoong - barrang - whroo - oo - oom - prrrrawng - bomp - clink -
whang - oomble - gawmmle-_BOOM_! The tank proceeded westward on
Twenty-seventh Street at a breakneck pace of three miles an hour.
Windows flew up. Pajama-clad figures, and others more frilly,
appeared therein, making somnolent and wrathful gestures. Scandalized
inhabitants rushed out of doorways and rushed in again, for the tank
was steering wildly. The gob funneled his hands toward the flit.
“Where you going?” he bellowed above the riot.
The answer came back faint and fragmentary,
“Don’t--how--’amthing--steers.”
In a spirit of misplaced helpfulness, the gob seized a lever and pulled
it. Straightway the tank paused, turned on its heel, executed a couple
of airy pirouettes and with a metallic roar rushed up on the sidewalk
and totally obliterated three garbage-cans which had been playing the
extrahazardous rôle of innocent bystanders. It then cut obliquely
across the corner, gently but firmly removed an electric-light pole
which sought to stay its pace, debouched into Fifth Avenue, and
pointing its nose up-town, resumed its sedate progress.
“Don’t--excite--agin,” bawled the flit at the wheel reprovingly to the
gob. “Flighty--little--whiffet. Letter--own--way.”
Ensconced at a peep-hole the sike now delivered tidings in a strained
yell, “Cavalry attack.”
The flit threw off the power so suddenly that his two companions came
and sat on his neck. Amidst the ensuing peace the night roar of Fifth
Avenue was as the splash of ripples upon a gently sloping beach.
“Get off me!” protested the engineer. “I’m going to chin with the law.”
He opened the door and a policeman’s head appeared. At the same moment
the sike retired and was dimly seen behind a stanchion busily writing
what the gob surmised to be a long farewell to home and loved ones. The
cop opened a mouth upon which lurked the suspicion of a grin.
“Where are you boys trundling your little alarm-clock on wheels?” he
inquired.
“Back to quarters,” replied the flit glibly.
The officer’s glance fell upon the spread wings of the flit’s service.
“Looka-here,” he observed. “You belong to the flying, don’t you? You’re
in the wrong kind of bus.”
“I’m goin’ to fly this,” asserted the operator blandly, “as soon as we
come to a good take-off.”
“Sure!” agreed the cop. “I’d like to go up with you. Just the same,
I’ll take a look at your papers. Hand ’em out.”
The flit’s hand started to his head to scratch for ideas, when it was
arrested midway by another hand pressing into it a sheet of paper. A
whisper from the sike did the rest. The document was duly presented
to the representative of the civil law who read therein, under the
insignium of the War Camp Community Service, which looks very official
and authoritative, if not too closely scrutinized, that Corporal F.
Slayter of the Aero Service, Able Seaman Veeder, and Private James
of the Sanitary Corps, U. S. A., were specially detailed to operate
Tractor Tank No. 13 in such highways of New York City as they might
select for demonstration purposes.
“That gets by with me,” announced the officer. “And I’ll pass the word
up the Avenue. But look out for the side-streets. Some of the cops on
duty there are mean, suspicious guys that wouldn’t be above spoiling a
pleasant evening.”
“Jesse James,” observed the flit, turning admiringly to the sike, after
the obstacle to progress had withdrawn, “as a psychologist you’re a
high-class forger. That touch about ‘demonstration purposes’--that’s
bad, I guess! We could swim the tank in Central Park Reservoir or shin
it up the Obelisk on the strength of that.”
“And to think,” sighed the sike, “that next week I’ll be burbling about
ethics in a stuffy classroom.”
“Maybe not,” returned the gob. “If Slayter does any more of his fancy
evolutions, you may be in the hospital.”
“Oh, I’ve got her now,” asseverated the helmsman confidently, starting
up the machinery. “--levers,” he yelled, “control-caterpillars.
Pull--right--and--” He did so, and the tank, executing a right about
face, chased a horrified limousine half-way up a flight of brownstone
steps. “Come back!” vociferated the exasperated flit, and hauled
the left lever with such telling effect that (so the gob and the
sike solemnly declare) the Waldorf-Astoria leaped a foot from its
foundations and then escaped annihilation only by a fraction of an inch.
“For Mike’s sake!” howled the gob. “Stick to the straight-and-narrow.”
They lurched back into the main current, with a noise as of cosmic
dissolution, and the traffic broke and fled before their measured
progress. As they went, there came from the rear of the interior a
sound faint, faraway, and vague like the plaint of a discouraged
cricket. It was the sike singing:
“We don’t know where we’re going
But we’re on--our--way.”
“That reminds me,” said the flit, shutting off. “Where _are_ we going?”
“Rubbernecking,” suggested the gob.
“I’ve got an idea,” offered the sike. “If the captain of this buoyant
craft could steer around a corner--”
“I can steer around any number of corners,” asserted the flit with a
shade of offense in his tone.
“Simultaneously,” added the gob.
“Looka-here, Chaw!” cried the operator hotly. “If you don’t like the
way I run this bus--”
“Calm yourself, corporal,” adjured the sike, “and tell me, do you
think you could negotiate the perilous straits that lead to the stage
door of that sprightly ragtime operetta, taken from the French without
opposition on their part and entitled ‘Cherchez la Chicken’? I have
important business there.”
“Cutie in the chorus,” surmised the flit, looking pained and moral.
“Oh, Perfessor! I bid for an introduction. We’re off!”
Cautiously manipulating the controls, the chauffeur contrived to
achieve the turn into the side street with no incident or accident
other than the conversion of a too torpid fruit-stand into a mixture
of wood-pulp and citrus juices, the proprietor barely escaping with
his life. The last act of “Cherchez la Chicken” had reached that point
of delicate and original humor where the comedian, seated in a custard
pie, sings a farewell to his mother-in-law while the chorus dances,
when the side-alley which leads up to the stage burst into thunderous
reverberations. There are numerous exits from the place--it is the
one redeeming virtue of the show--and all of them promptly jammed.
The comedian arose from the pie. The soprano fainted. The chorus
dispersed. The management, wringing its already overringed hands,
rushed out into the alley, now being patrolled by the tank, back and
forth, amidst horrible echoes.
“Go away!” he shrieked. “What you want? Shut your noise.”
The monster fell silent. From the orifice which should have been its
mouth, the serious face of the sike emerged.
“Sir,” said he, “last night I attended your performance.”
“Who are you?” demanded the manager. “You spoil my show!”
“Four days’ pay you mulcted me. And you seated me behind a pillar.”
“Tell your troubles to the box-office,” retorted the manager brutally.
“I ain’t inter--”
“I willingly concede,” continued the sike calmly, “that the pillar was
preferable, from any view-point, to the performance. But I want my four
dollars back.”
“A fat chance!” retorted the manager.
“Half speed ahead, if you please,” requested the sike.
“Phsrang - bang - guzzoom - wurrong - kong-hong-whang!” clamored the
monster, advancing upon the manager.
“Yi-yi-hi! Whoo-oo-ee-ee-ee!” sounded in piercing antiphony from
within, where the soprano was having hysterics.
From the fourth rung of the fire-escape ladder the manager waved
surrender with a roll of bills. “Blackmail!” he moaned as the sike
selected a five and returned a dollar. “Please go away quietly.”
The sike, turning, was intercepted by a small, fattish gentleman in
evening clothes.
“On behalf of self and friend,” said the man, “I thank you.”
“You are attending the performance?” inquired the sike politely.
“I am. Less fortunate than yourself I did not draw a pillar. As for my
friend, whom I was seeking to distract from a depression of the soul,
he insulted me and fled. He is now doubtless wandering about the city,
a prey to unrelieved melancholy.”
“What’s biting your friend?” queried the flit, projecting an interested
face into the dialogue.
The stranger accepted the interrogation in the spirit of metaphor in
which it was offered. “Woman,” he stated succinctly. “If you should
happen to encounter six-foot two of correctly attired manhood baying
the moon on a street corner, that is him. Or, if not him, he. Be kind
to him, address him as Reuben Renssalaer Watts, and play him your
little anvil chorus. It might cheer him up. I return to my martyrdom.”
He saluted and retired.
In deference to the manager’s entreaty, the tank backed out discreetly,
making hardly more commotion than the average railway collision, and
retired along Forty-fourth Street toward the Avenue. It roused a
corpulent and fluffy dog, lolling richly in a waiting motor-car, who
leaped out through the window with terrifying growls, and undertook
to harry it, performing just in front of the left caterpillar that
progressive three-legged canine dance familiar to all motorists. But a
tank is not a motor-car. The fluffy dog conceived a misplaced contempt
for its speed. He loitered on the way. There was a surprised and
pained exclamation in the canine language, and the fluffy dog, ceasing
to exist in the customary three dimensions, passed to the fourth,
leaving as a souvenir only the first and second--to wit, length and
breadth--upon the asphalt. He that so lately had been a beribboned and
pampered darling was now as the shadow of a dream, a breath upon glass,
a highly impressionistic silhouette limned against the unsympathetic
pavement, above which a fat blond lady tore her costly hair, uttering
tragic and vengeful cries. Hastily checking the juggernaut, the flit
descended, and was promptly addressed as a murderer by the blond lady.
The gob came to the rescue, and learned something to his disadvantage
and that of his parentage. Then the sike tactlessly offered his
hard-wrung four dollars in reparation. Him she smote upon the ear with
violence, and after one ineffectual attempt to scrape Pettie from the
bosom of Mother Earth retired, wailing, to her car, where she ordered
the chauffeur to take her to her lawyer.
“And to think,” murmured the sike, tenderly caressing the spot where
the assault had taken place, “that next month I’ll be instilling moral
precepts into the minds of the rising generation. Such is life!”
“This is where we oil up,” announced the flit, and, having herded his
passengers in, went at it.
The delay was untimely. Hardly had the tank, refreshed and lubricated,
resumed its way, when above the uproar was heard a sharp “ping!” It was
twice repeated.
“Somebody applying for admittance,” surmised the sike, in a
well-attuned howl.
The gob applied his eye to a rear peep-hole. “It’s one of those
side-street cops; the bad ones our friend down the Avenue told us
about. He’s shooting at us.”
“A hold-up,” observed the flit. He stopped the engine, just as a fourth
bullet, deflected from the upper armor, crashed through a brightly
illuminated second-story window. There was the sound of a meeting
adjourning _sine die_, and an oratorically-garbed gentleman, thrusting
his head out of an upper window, sounded the alarum, “Bolshe_vee_ki!
Bolshe_vee_ki!” in a melancholy and monotonous shriek.
The pursuing policeman rushed around to the front of the tank. “Lady
says you killed her dog,” he announced. “Open up.”
The flit obligingly opened the door to explain. Straightway the
officer’s gun was brought to bear upon his head. “Now, you stay put,”
came the grim order. The flit stayed.
But not for long. Acting, apparently, quite on its own initiative, the
machine gun of the forward turret deliberately and noiselessly swung
about until it pointed accurately at the third button, counting upward,
of the policeman’s tunic. It is very disconcerting to have a machine
gun aim itself at the pit of one’s stomach, particularly when there is
no evidence as to whether it is loaded or not. And a machine gun always
looks loaded.
The cop blinked and wavered. A solemn voice emerged from the hollow
interior:
“‘Who touches a hair of yon red head
Dies like a dog! March on!’ he said.”
“Whaddye mean, ‘red head’?” indignantly demanded the flit, who was
sensitive on the subject; and he ducked inside seeking explanation.
The gob immediately pulled-to the steel door. “We will now parley,” he
announced.
The officer took off his helmet and fanned a wrinkled brow. “You gotta
keep off this street,” he said, but without conviction.
“Why?” demanded the gob.
“You’re a truck,” said the cop.
“You’re another,” retorted the flit hotly. “We’re a pleasure-car;
that’s what we are!”
“Well, you’re a heavy traffic, anyway,” argued the cop. “You got no
right here.”
“Lightest tank in the service,” declared the gob. “Less than six tons
on the hoof. Stripped down for speed, in light marching accouterment
with one day’s ammunition and a marked-down meal ticket, we’re only--”
“For Gawd’s sake!” broke in the harassed officer; “git off my beat
before I report yer, if I can think of somethin’ to report that the Cap
would believe.”
Thus delivered from the Philistines, the equipage proceeded, amid the
wonder and consternation of an ear-smitten public. But there was one
who paid no tribute of notice to its thunderous progress. He stood on
the corner of Fifth Avenue, and gazed into vacancy. The gleam of his
candid shirt-front attracted the eye of the gob, who was acting as
lookout.
“Lighthouse off the port bow,” he informed the chauffeur. “Seems to be
deserted. Run alongside; I fain would hail it.”
The tank, after a preliminary wobble, drew up, facing the abstracted
individual. He deigned to droop an uninterested eye at it, and
straightway resumed his contemplation of nothingness. The gob
semi-emerging from the tank’s door, addressed him.
“Cab, sir?”
“Eh? What?” said the other vaguely.
“Taxi, sir? Fine night for a ride,” said the gob persuasively.
“Certainly,” assented the bystander with the air of one who welcomes
any diversion, however slight. He stepped inside.
“Where to, sir?”
The fare considered. “Eight-seventy-seven Park Avenue,” he said at
length.
“What for?” interposed the flit with suspicion.
“To make a polite and formal call on a young lady.”
“Look at the time,” protested the flit. “Won’t she be asleep?”
“Not after little Pussyfoot enters the block,” said the fare with
conviction. “Besides that--have I hired this hack or haven’t I?”
“You sure have,” confirmed the gob. “Montmorency, behave!” he
admonished the flit. “We are about to go into Society. I can tell it by
the address. By the left wheel, _hrrumph_!”
“One moment,” said the passenger. “It is my duty to tell you that
Bingle Foxley will be coming down the Avenue drunk and chiefly on the
wrong side, about this hour.”
“Who’s he?” demanded the chauffeur.
“The Demon Motorist. Traffic rules are a red rag to him. As a cousin of
the Big Chief he’s immune from arrest, and gets a clear path.”
“What’s the big idea?” demanded the flit.
“Just so that you can slide out the way when you hear his siren,”
returned the fare, with apparent innocence.
The flit grinned. “Ick hobby dick, Steefen, as we say in Coblenz,” he
observed. “We’re off.”
* * * * *
The Fifth Avenue traffic obligingly made way again. After essaying
several polite and casual observations in a stentorian tone, with the
effect of a microbe’s whisper, the passenger gathered together his
vocal powers, and stuck his voice into the gob’s ear.
“I want to explain. I’m going to LET YOU INTO A LITTLE SECRET,” he
bellowed into a suddenly developed stillness, consequent upon the
flit’s shutting off power at a crowded corner.
“One little tone louder,” suggested the gob, “and you’ll let in South
Norwalk and the Oranges.”
“Let me explain to you all,” said the passenger while the gathering
crowd outside passed the word that the tank was conveying a violently
mad German spy to the asylum. “I’m very much interested in--”
“Not me!” expostulated the flit. “The last guy in a dress suit that
explained what he was very much interested in, got me very much
interested too, and stung me four months’ pay for four cents’ worth of
phony stock.”
“This is a young lady,” said the other, with dignity. “She objects
to me because she says I am too proper and conventional to be really
human.”
“Are you?” inquired the sike with interest.
“Before the war, possibly. I admit it.”
“And the war cured you?”
“Judge for yourself. The third day of the Argonne debate I nearly got
court-martialed for biting a chunk out of my captain’s ear. It was
dark, and I thought when we came together after the charge and he tried
to gouge my left eye out, that he was a Fritzie. Now I put it to you as
pals, _is_ that overrefined and finicky?”
“Pals is right,” stated the flit heartily, “if you was at Argonne
Woods. And as man to man and one having experience, I’d advise you to
handle her likewise. Not bite her ear off, you get me? But join the
tanks and treat ’em rough.”
“Precisely why I hired this cab.”
“So woman is your trouble,” observed the sike. “I salute you, Mr.
Reuben Renssalaer Watts.”
“The devil you do!” retorted that gentleman. “When did you graduate
into the Intelligence Department? Or have I met you in a previous
existence?”
“Neither. It is quite simple,” began the sike, when a swelling,
soaring, blare from up the Avenue cut him short.
“Mr. Foxley requests the courtesy of a clear path,” said Mr. Watts.
“Sure,” remarked the flit between his teeth. “Sic ’em, Maudie!”