roadway in a manner suggestive of a beetle with the stomach-ache.
Hoots, rude, imperative and monitory, sounded from ahead. A huge green
car manned by a huge red youth came rushing down upon them. At sight
of the tank, the car emitted a sublimated yawp of surprise and horror
followed by penetrating shrieks as the brakes bit in, the youth uttered
a whoop of desperation, the outfit hit the unmoved tank slantwise,
skimmed across the sidewalk on two wheels and sought cover in a window
placarded “Special Bargains in Lingerie” whence presently emerged the
almost total ruin of Mr. Foxley draped pinkly in a chemise. It beat
the air with frenzied hands, yelled feebly, and disappeared around the
corner in the direction of its club. Revivified later (though not by
the usual agencies, which he resolutely refused, to the alarm of his
fellows), Mr. Foxley related how, while driving quietly down the Avenue
he had been beset by a mud-turtle in armor. A very large, ferocious,
prehistoric mud-turtle, waving an American flag, which without
provocation had attacked his unoffending car, bitten off its two front
wheels and chased it through a plate-glass window. And as for him, he
wouldn’t care if July first came to-morrow! He was off it!
“Where do they come from and why did they let ’em out?” demanded Mr.
Foxley passionately.
The maligned tank, passing upon its sentimental quest, was now
spreading the echoes of Bedlam through peaceful Park Avenue. At number
eight-seventy-seven, the equipage stopped. The clamor didn’t. A
surprised and extremely attractive face beneath the cap of the National
League for Woman’s Service Motor Corps appeared at a third-floor window.
“Shut off! Shut off!” yelled Reuben Renssalaer Watts. “I want to talk
to her.”
“Can’t,” bellowed the flit. “She’s jammed.”
The face at the window became indignant. It made urgent gestures like a
policeman.
“The lady wants us to move on,” the gob informed the perspiring Mr.
Watts.
Out upon the sidewalk stepped the sike. He faced the lovely and
indignant apparition overhead and squared his manly form. With his
right hand he majestically indicated the zenith; his left he placed
tenderly upon the pit of his stomach. Immediately he thrust his left
north-northeast and started a pivot-blow with the other. He then boxed
the compass in swift, successive two-arm movements. The ornament of the
window nodded and disappeared.
“See here!” said Mr. Watts. “Do you _know_ that lady?”
“I do not,” returned the sike, “though I live in hopes.”
“Then why the convulsions?” demanded Mr. Watts severely.
“Semaphoring, my dear sir. I simply wigwagged the lady that if she
would descend to Mother Earth, a communication of semi-official import
having a vital bearing on her prospects in life would be made to her.
_Or_ words to that effect,” said the sike. “The rest is up to you.”
The final observation might well have been addressed to the Mayor of
New Rochelle, as, coincident with its utterance the chauffeur had
stilled his engine. He joined the sidewalk group, followed by the gob.
The girl emerged.
“Is it an ambulance job?” she asked professionally.
“No, madam,” answered the sike.
“Then why did you S. O. S. me?”
Mr. Reuben Renssalaer Watts stepped forward. “Renny!” she exclaimed and
turned to a pink so delicate and bewitching that the gob hastily and
surreptitiously extracted his beloved quid and tossed it under the iron
monster.
“A social call,” said that gentleman. “Good evening, Carey.” He stepped
forward and with nonchalance and promptitude kissed the newcomer fair
and full upon the lips.
“Renny!” gasped the girl; and the pink deepened to a fiery red.
“Wh-Wh-What--how--are you crazy?”
“I’ve joined the tanks,” exclaimed Mr. Watts urbanely. “‘Treat ’em
rough’ is our motto. Come and have a joy-ride on me.”
The girl recovered herself. “Who are these gentlemen?”
“Hanged if I know. I hired the crew with the ship and they are now my
fellow piratical voyagers on faerie seas forlorn. Fellows, this is Miss
Carey Vail.”
“Pleased to meetcher,” said the flit, stepping forward courteously. “My
name’s Mr. Slayter. The gob, here, is Chaw Veeder. He’s rough stuff
from the gas-house, but with ladies present he’ll kindly soft-pedal.
The other guy is a stuffed professor at home, at present considerable
alive. Name, Perfessor James.” He turned to address Watts. “Now, where
to, sir?”
“Where do you suggest?”
* * * * *
“If this is a ladies’ game,” responded the flit tentatively, “there’s a
party named Miss Nora McSears who cashes at an all-night restaurant on
East Fifty-eighth Street, very clean and respectable.”
“Right! Go to Fifty-eighth Street. Will you get in, Carey?”
Miss Carey Vail sniffed the air daintily and observed the tank with
doubt. “Do you think your steed is safe?” she asked.
“He’s uncertain when hungry,” explained the gob; “but he’s just fed.
He’s had one small dog, one large fruit-stand, three cans of garbage,
a corner of the Waldorf-Astoria and a chew of the best plug. You could
trust him to tow a baby-carriage down Peacock Alley.”
Miss Vail embarked. Her next observation, “Do behave yourself, Renny,”
was inferred rather than heard, in the commotion of their turning. Nor
was their converse thereafter, though earnest, of import to the others,
who considerately concentrated their attention upon the outer world.
The Recherché Restaurant was doing a languid, ten-cent-to-a-quarter
trade, when East Fifty-eighth Street burst into “The Anvil Chorus.” Its
entire clientèle rushed to the door, followed by a tall, calm-eyed
girl with the cash-register in her arms. The tank brought up with a
lurch opposite her.
“Good evening, Miss Nora,” said the flit, emerging.
“Good evening, yourself, and who are _you_?” returned Miss McSears
placidly.
The flit assumed an air of profound injury. “Did you or did you not,
one year back, come St. Patrick’s Day, after the Club dance at camp,
take my regimental pin to wear and say you’d never forget Private F.
Slayter, now corporal?”
“Maybe I did,” admitted the girl. “But your face was clean then.”
“I’ve joined the tanks since,” said Corporal Slayter. “Treat ’em
rough.” Selecting the nearest dimple in Miss McSears’s piquant face, he
saluted it in form.
“Move on!” cried that young lady, helpless by reason of the
cash-machine, but wrathful. “My father’s a policeman and I’ll be
telephoning for him.”
“Ask him can I keep company with his daughter,” suggested the
unperturbed flit. “We’ll move on when you move with us.”
“In _that_?” retorted the girl, bestowing a scornful look upon the
monster. “I don’t believe it’s even respectable. Who’s in there?”
Responding to the flit’s unspoken appeal, the woman passenger stepped
out. “I’m Carey Vail,” she began in her quiet, assured voice. “You may
know--”
“Hello, Vail,” interrupted Miss McSears.
“Why, Mac! Bless your old heart! How are you?”
The two did not fall on each other’s neck. They shook hands in manly
fashion. “This is one of our emergency volunteers for the ‘flu’ work,”
explained the girl in uniform. “They don’t make them any better.”
“They don’t need to, as far’s I’m concerned,” murmured Mr. Slayter,
relieving the bearer of the cash-register. “Are you on for our little
party, Nora?”
“Wait till I telephone for a substitute,” said Miss McSears. “And do
you behave yourself, you with your ‘Nora’!”
Upon her return, after some delay, there was heard issuing from the
tank’s interior dolorous music, in the sike’s plaintive baritone:
“No one to pity him, none to cay-ress
No one to help _him_ in his sad dy-stress.”
“The Sweet Singer of Michigan has broken his parole,” observed the gob.
“Hey, you inside, what’s on your bursting chest?”
“I’m lonely,” stated the sike. “All my lovely companions are faded and
gone. Captive to the fair sex.
“Oh, bury me on the lone pray-_ree_!
Where the wild ki-yotes can’t pester me.”
“Goodness gracious! What’s that?” queried Miss McSears.
“I believe it’s some kind of a professor,” explained Miss Vail, as the
flit obligingly turned an interior light upon the sike. Miss McSears
viewed the exhibit with critical approval.
“It looks good to me,” she said. “Couldn’t we get somebody to take care
of it for the evening and make this a real party? Any of your crowd on,
Vail?”
“Eleven twenty-five,” said the corps-girl, examining a wrist-watch.
“Dolly Barrett’ll just be coming off duty. She’d fit in.”
“Great!” assented Miss McSears, and the two girls retired to telephone.
“Did you get her?” chorused the crew of the tank, when they returned.
“Of course,” said Miss Vail. “We told her to meet us at eleven-fifty on
the south side of Columbus Circle where Broadway comes in.”
“That’s a nice, retired spot for a tryst,” said Mr. Watts sardonically.
“Did you tell her how we were coming?”
“No. I just said we’d pick her up in a car.”
“She’ll be surprised.”
“Surprise will do her good. She’s been overworked lately and needs
livening up.”
Surprise was obviously the trysted one’s portion when, with the sound
of earthquake and avalanche, battle, murder, and sudden death, the
“cab” arrived. Nor was the initial surprise the only one. A perfect
stranger with a long, lean, pleasant face stepped out and regarded
her with appreciative and twinkling eyes. In the background she
dimly apprehended Miss Vail and Miss McSears. On his part the sike
contemplated a small, trim young person with very black hair, very gray
eyes under black brows and lashes and a mouth that was an enticement
to disorderly conduct. His bedazzled regard failed to note certain
features of her costume. His once professorial spirit was in a turmoil,
a reckless, desperate glow.
“Good evening,” he said rapidly. “We’ve come to take you riding. Let me
help you in. My name is Follansbee James. I’ve joined the tanks. Treat
’em rough.” Smack! The disorderly conduct was committed.
“Attention!” snapped the enraged victim of the caress.
The sike fell into a rigor, a paralysis, intended for a salute. His
horrified eyes were riveted on the newcomer’s nearest shoulder. A
silver bar shone there.
“Lord help me! I’ve kissed my superior officer,” groaned the sike, and
collapsed into the waiting arms of the gob.
The others immediately supplied a chorus of explanation and apology,
greatly enjoyed and appreciated by the gathering crowd. “Let’s get
out of here,” said Lieutenant Dolly Barrett, bewilderedly rubbing the
corner of her chin (for the sike had been nervous and his marksmanship
below par). “Go into the Park, where it’s quiet.”
Their progress spread a horrific stridor through the peace and
decorum of the Park’s ordered avenues, and the squirrels awoke in the
tree-tops, gibbering with terror, and the birds took wing and fled
into the unknown, and the new hippopotamus of the Zoo, surmising that
the day of judgment was upon him, repented of his sins in a wail that
scarred the ear-drums of the sleeping neighborhood; and policemen,
singly and in squads, rushed to the scene and retired before the
sight of a moving fortress displaying the American flag, and Reuben
Renssalaer Watts chose that time as propitious for a whirlwind advance,
under cover of the riot, upon the heart of Miss Carey Vail. As he
pleaded earnestly, and with vast expenditure of lung-power, which did
not reach beyond the attentive ear of the girl, who was listening with
an expression somewhere between happiness, panic, and surrender, the
flit tactlessly and abruptly shut down the power to inquire his way,
and Mr. Watts was heard (from the Battery on the south to the Bronx on
the north) proclaiming the finale and climax of his wooing:
“--GOING TO MARRY ME THIS VERY NIGHT, AS IS!”
A dead, blank, dismayed silence supervened. The unintentional
eavesdroppers stared at each other and away from the pair. Ten
blocks distant the hippopotamus laughed raucously. Mr. Watts, justly
indignant, turned upon the chauffeur.
“Keep her going, you fourth-rate, donkey-engine misfit!” he roared, in
tones which proved that he didn’t care who heard him this time.
“What church?” inquired the flit promptly.
“Not any church,” cried Miss Carey Vail. “I want to go ho-o-ome.”
“Oh, be a sport, Vail,” adjured her superior officer. “He looks all
right to me. Why not marry him and put him out of his misery?”
“Go on; do!” urged Miss McSears. “It’ll be so romantic.”
“Maybe it’d be catching,” hopefully suggested Corporal Slayter, who
appeared to be holding Miss McSears’s hand.
“Happy thought!” contributed the sike. “Don’t spoil the evening’s fun
just because of a weak prejudice about formality.”
“Oh, I think you’re all mad!” declared Miss Vail tremulously, and
suddenly, despite her uniform, she looked very small and feminine and
helpless. “You, most of all, Renny, I don’t know what’s come to you.”
“I’ve joined the tanks,” said Reuben Renssalaer Watts promptly, “And--”
“Don’t!” wailed Miss Vail, half a second too late to forestall the
action which went with the statement. “I want to go ho-o-ome!” she
faltered. But there was more bewilderment than conviction in her appeal.
“Directly after the ceremony,” promised the progressive wooer. “We’ll
ride up in my special taxi and break the news to the family.”
“Look here, folkses,” broke in the gob. “I’m all for this
Lohengrin-Mendelssohn stuff. But it’ll take some scheming. We’ve got
the rest of the night, free of entanglements and engagements, except
the one we’ve just been witness to, is it not?”
“It is,” responded a chorus, minus the voice of Miss Carey Vail who was
temporarily speechless.
“All right, I’m going to blow to supper.”
“Not at twelve-fifteen, in this man’s burg,” corrected Mr. Watts. “It’s
closed.”
“If you can give a wedding party, I guess I can give a supper party,”
retorted the gob. “And I’m going to if I have to hold up somebody
else’s. Corporal, conduct Airy Fairy Lillian up Mr. Fifth’s well-known
avenue while I man the lookout, and be ready to stop on signal.”
The signal was given, opposite a house of modest size (for that part of
the thoroughfare) with evidences of activity in the front rooms. The
gob ran up the steps and was met by a flustered-looking person who made
gestures of expostulation, which presently were mollified to gestures
of deprecation.
“Come one, come all,” invited the gob, returning. “There’ll be a short
wait while my friend in the shirt-sleeves--”
“Who _is_ this guy, Chaw?” demanded the flit.
“He’s the butler.”
“Whose butler?” queried Miss McSears.
“Don’t make any odds whose. He’s ours at present.”
“How did you get him?” questioned Watts.
“It’s a long story of my seamy past,” answered the gob. “He’s an
ex-con, and I’ve got a strangle-hold on him. So he’s invited us to
supper and when the family gets home from the country in the morning
he can fix up his own explanation of the ice-box to suit himself and
them. I’ve ordered fizz.”
“That’s all very well,” observed Miss McSears with firmness. “But I
don’t go to midnight suppers in other folks’ houses, with a bunch of
strangers--”
“Strangers once but lovers now,” stated the flit firmly, “speaking for
self _and_ lady friend.”
“--and no chaperon,” pursued the spokeswoman of the proprieties,
reddening but obstinate. “So you count--”
“Silence in the ranks!” ordered Dolly Barrett. “I’m an officer and a
widow. Is that enough?”
“Plenty for me, and praise to Heaven for the good news,” said the
sike, enthusiastically. “I don’t mean the officer part,” he added
significantly, “but the other.”
Mr. Watts regarded him curiously. “There may be more in these Western
universities than a Harvard man would suspect,” he murmured.
“And to think,” sighed the sike, “that a few weeks hence I shall be
pouring pious platform platitudes into the happy ears of inattentive
youth!”
“Forward in light foraging order!” commanded the gob.
* * * * *
The party entered the house, which was evidently being hastily
cleaned for the return of the owners. A subdued noise as of servants
in commotion could be heard in the rear. On a hall stand stood a
collection of mail in three piles. The flit chancing to glance at it,
stood petrified. Selecting a post-card he advanced upon the rear of
the unheeding gob, turned up the bottom of the wide and floppy left
trouser-leg, read from the sewn-in slip the name inscribed thereon,
compared it with the address on the post-card, turned down the
trouser-leg to one fold and with a sudden, sardonic inspiration not
only left it so, but adjusted the other one to match it.
“Mr. Schuyler Tappan Veeder,” he observed with concentrated bitterness,
straightening up.
“Here,” responded the gob, cheerfully. “What about it?”
“This is _your_ joint,” declared the flit in solemn accusation.
“Not while my fond parents enjoy their present health,” was the genial
reply.
But the soul of Corporal Slayter was hot with suspicion. “What kinda
con game you been workin’ on me?” he said, surlily. “Call yourself Chaw
Veeder.”
“Barring the presence of ladies, you’re a liar,” retorted the gob
promptly. “It’s my pals call me Chaw. Which reminds me.” Producing a
rich-hued bar from his pocket, he bit off a generous chunk and expertly
stowed it. The angry eyes of his pal flickered a little. But he was
unconvinced.
“You’re phony,” he growled. “A masqueradin’ dude.” He pointed to the
trousers which he had left “cuffed.” “That’s your style,” he asserted.
“Me, I’m through. I’ll not be made a guy of. C’mon, Nora.”
* * * * *
The gob stretched forth an iron-muscled hand which he inserted forcibly
and affectionately between the flit’s neck and his collar. “Pause a
moment, Claude,” he besought. “Girls, will you kindly muffle your
ears? Thanks. Now, Freddie, you lop-sided, cross-grained, bone-headed,
swivel-eared, pizen-souled descendant of ten generations of
mule-thieves, before I break your jaw in three places at once, listen
while I tell you what you are.” And he told him. But of the telling
there is no record, because after the preface, Mr. Watts retired for
air and the sike ran out to seek a pencil and paper and returned too
late for the exordium. The flit, spell-bound, relaxed his expression
of disfavor. When it was over he bent down and readjusted the gob’s
trouser-legs to the regulation straightness. Apology could go no
further.
“You win, Chaw,” said he shamefacedly. “Speed up the wedding feast.”
It is recorded in the unwritten history of Fifth Avenue’s most costly
and exclusive section, that there came, upon a midnight clear, a din as
of ten thousand structural riveters in progressive action, giving place
to sounds of revelry by early morning, which in turn was succeeded by
the Anvil Chorus, above the surface of which soared a valiant barytone
proclaiming, “The Voice that Breathed O’er Eden.” Mr. Chaw Veeder’s
supper-party, back in the tank, was adjourning to night-court to seek
a marrying magistrate. For, as in the old song, love (in the person of
Mr. Reuben Renssalaer Watts) had found out the way, and the telephone,
reaching a friendly judge, had arranged a special emergency license.
Many queer equipages with strange cargoes visit night-court on sundry
errands; but the tank with its wedding-party broke the record.
Court adjourned informally, to rush out and ascertain who was bombing
the locality and why. When the party entered, they beheld two policemen
struggling to extricate the magistrate from the frantic embrace of Mr.
Bingle Foxley, who was yelling:
“Save me! It’s coming after me. I hear it. Don’t let it get me, Judge!”
When at length his Honor was released, the sike greeted him with
surprise.
“It’s you, is it?”
“It’s me,” agreed the magistrate. “Or if not me, I.” He was the bearded
victim of “Cherchez la Chicken.”
“We found him,” remarked the sike, indicating Mr. Reuben Renssalaer
Watts.
“So I perceive. It’s a small world.”
“Small like a Harlem flat,” confirmed Miss Nora McSears discontentedly.
“You can’t turn around in it without rousing the family. _That_,” she
pursued, pointing out to Corporal Slayter one of the policemen engaged
in preventing Mr. Foxley from crawling into the commitment file, “is
Pa.”
“Howdy, Pa!” said the flit.
“Whaddye mean, ‘Pa’?” demanded the thunderstruck officer.
“In-law,” explained Mr. Slayter. “To-be,” he added.
“Perhaps,” amended Miss McSears.
“Sure thing,” asseverated the flit blithely. “It’s in the air. You
can’t dodge it.”
“Other things difficult to dodge are in the air,” observed the
magistrate. “Reuben, as friend to friend and unofficially, how did you
get these?”
“By the hour,” replied Mr. Watts. “I hired ’em.”
“Are you responsible for their actions?”
“Upon and after the hour of 11:05 P.M., I am.”
“You escape,” pronounced the magistrate. “At 11:02 P.M. I am informed,
an armored tank filled with desperadoes, I. W. W. Bolshevists,
anarchists, nihilists, prohibitionists and other enemies of the
public welfare, invaded West Forty-fourth Street and did there and
then interrupt an orderly meeting of the Society for the Abolition
of Tobacco, Bridge, Dancing and other Hellish Habits, by felonious
means, to wit: firing upon it with machine guns, gatlings, howitzers,
hand-grenades, rifles, revolvers and sundry lethal weapons, against the
ordinances duly made and provided for the maintenance of the peace.”
“So help me God,” intoned a large, solemn, pulpy person, rising in his
seat.
“That’s the guy,” cried the flit, “that called us ‘Bol-she-_vee_-ki!’
Lemme attim.”
“Then you admit that you are them,” said the magistrate. “Or, if not
them, they.”
“We do,” said the gob; “with mitigating circumstances.”
“There is a warrant out against you.”
A blond and frescoed portent projected itself upward from a side bench.
“Make it two, Judge. And make the second one for murder.”
“Saints preserve us!” groaned the sike. “The sorrowing protectress of
the silhouetted pup!”
“It is a small world,” repeated the magistrate. “This gentleman
(indicating the stricken Mr. Foxley) who originally came here for
the purpose of taking the pledge, now prefers the charge that you
instigated to attack him without provocation a prehistoric monster
of the dragon or fire-spouting persuasion which, after destroying
his automobile, chased him through a plate-glass window and totally
wrecked his nerves. Comparing his description of the monster with my
own impression of your vehicle, and remembering that the female of the
species is more deadly than the male, I conclude that it is her. Or, if
not her, it. What have you to say?”
“Just this,” answered Mr. Watts with annoyance, “I came here to be
married, not prosecuted. Come now, Hartley, as friend to friend, can’t
you fix this? It may be my last chance.”
“Your friend with the talent for blackmail seems to be a person of
infinite resource,” said the magistrate, glancing toward the sike. “Has
he any suggestions?”
“If I may be permitted,” said the sike, modestly rising, “I suggest,
first, that Mr. Foxley is too good a sport to spoil a wedding, if
assured that the groom will never again travel Fifth Avenue in a tank.
(Mr. Foxley grunted.) As for the noble cause of Suppression of Tobacco
_et cetera_, I propose a generous epithalamic contribution thereto by
the happy bridegroom. We now come to the ill-fated canine, and its
sorrowing owner. Though myself in a state of genteel poverty, I will
gladly start a subscription to bury it, or if that prove impracticable,
to have it pasted in a scrap-book, with appropriate honors.”
“Nothin’ doin’!” asserted the bereaved blonde in angry tones. “I wanta
tell you--”
“One moment, please. Would it not soothe your injured feelings to
be invited to the wedding and to sign as legal witness? There is
a reporter present, and I assume that the nuptials of Mr. Reuben
Renssalaer Watts with Miss Carey Vail will receive a meed of desirable
publicity extending to all who participate.”
“Not _the_ Miss Carey Vail!” exclaimed the awe-struck blonde, who went
into Society eagerly, though vicariously, through the medium of the
daily press.
“The same,” declared Mr. Watts. “Positively last appearance in that
rôle. That is,” he added anxiously, “if you accept our earnest
invitation to come to the wedding.”
“Chawmed, I’m suah,” murmured the lady, and proceeded to powder her
nose from an apparatus concealed in a dangling bag.
The sike felt a soft touch on his elbow. Lieutenant Dolly Barrett’s
large gray eyes glowed warmly up into his.
“You ought to be running the Peace Conference,” she opined.
“And to think,” mourned the sike, “that next month I’ll be acting the
melancholy mentor to a flock of corn-fed prairie-rubes.”
“Court will convene in my private room for matrimonial purposes at
once,” proclaimed the magistrate.
The ceremony was brief and business-like. The witnesses were the sike
and Mrs. Barrett, quite close together, the flit and Miss McSears
(bracketed by the former), the gob, with rating and ship attached, Mr.
Foxley in a shaken hand, and Mrs. Eudora Fotheringay in letters half
an inch high and ninety degrees slant. The whole party attended by
the court officials went out to see the pair off. The flit, saluting,
stepped forward.
“Cab, sir?”
“Certainly,” assented the bridegroom.
“Certainly not,” amended the bride.
“Not?” queried the flit, crestfallen.
“Taxi,” said the new Mrs. Watts decisively, hailing one as it rounded
the corner.