"The courts havin' decided," continued Breede, in staccato explosions,
"that the 'quipment is nes'ry part of road, without which road would be
tot'ly crippled, you will note these first moggige 'quipment bonds take
pri'rty over first-moggige bonds, an' gov'n y'sef 'cordingly your ver'
truly--"
He glanced up at Bean, contracted his brows to a black menace and
emitted a final detonation.
"'S all for 's aft'noon!"
He bit savagely into his unlighted cigar and began to rifle through a
new sheaf of documents. Bean deftly effaced himself, with a parting
glare at the unlighted cigar. It was a feature of Breede that no
reporter ever neglected to mention, but Bean thought you might as well
chew tobacco and be done with it. Moreover, the cigars were not such as
one would have expected to find between the lips of a man whose present
wealth was estimated at a round hundred million. Bulger, in the outer
office, had given up trying to smoke them. He declared them to be the
very worst that could be had for any money.
Before beginning the transcription of his notes, Bean had to learn the
latest telephone news from the ball-ground. During the last half-hour he
had inwardly raged more than usual at Breede for being kept from this
information. Bulger always managed to get it on time, beginning with the
third inning, even when he took dictation from Breede's confidential
secretary, or from Tully, the chief clerk.
Bean looked inquiringly at Bulger now. Bulger nodded and presently
strolled from his own desk to Bean's, where he left a slip of paper
bearing the words, "Cubs, 3; Giants, 2; 1st 1/2 4th."
Bean had envied Bulger from the first for this man-of-the-world ease. In
actual person not superior to Bean, he had a temperament of daring. In
every detail he was an advanced dresser, specializing in flamboyant
cravats. He would have been Bean's model if Bean had been less a coward.
Bulger was nearly all that Bean wished to be. He condescended to his
tasks with an air of elegant and detached leisure that raised them to
the dignity of sports. He had quite the air of a wealthy amateur with a
passion for typewriting.
He had once done Breede's personal work, but had been banished to the
outer office after Bean's first try-out. Breede had found some
mysterious objection to him. Perhaps it was because Bulger would always
look up with pleased sagacity, as if he were helping to compose Breede's
letters. It may have been simple envy in Breede for his advanced
dressing. Bulger had felt no unkindness toward Bean for thus supplanting
him in a desirable post. But he did confide to his successor that if he,
Bulger, ever found Breede under his heel, Breede could expect no mercy.
Bulger would grind him--just like that!
Bean dramatized this as he wrote his letters; Breede pleasantly
disintegrating under the iron heel of Bulger: Breede "The Great
Reorganizer," as he was said to be known "in the Street," old "steel and
velvet," meeting a just fate! So nearly mechanical was his typewriting
that he spoiled one sheet of paper by transcribing two lines of
shorthand not meant to be a part of the letter. Only by chance did a
certain traffic manager of lines west of Chicago escape reading a
briefly worded opinion of the clothes he wore that would have puzzled
and might have pained him, for Breede, such had come to be his
confidence in Bean, always signed his letters without reading them over.
Bean gasped and wisely dismissed the drama of Bulger's revenge from his
mind.
At four-thirty the day's work ended and Bean was free to forget until
another day the little he had been unable to avoid learning about high
railroad finance; free to lead his own secret life, which was a thing
apart from all that wordy foolery.
He changed from his office coat to one alleged by its maker to give him
the appearance of perfect physical development, and descended to the
street-level in company with Bulger. Bean would have preferred to walk
down; he suffered the sensations of dying each time the elevator seemed
to fall, but he could not confess this to the doggish and intrepid
Bulger.
There were other weaknesses he had to cloak. Bulger proffered cigarettes
from a silver case at their first meeting. Bean declined.
"Doctor's orders," said he.
"Nerves?" suggested Bulger, expertly.
"Heart--gets me something fierce."
"Come in here to Tommy's and take a bracer," now suggested the
hospitable Bulger. But again the physician had been obdurate.
"Won't let me touch a thing--liver," said Bean. "Got to be careful of a
breakdown."
"Tough," said Bulger. "Man needs a certain amount of it, down here in
the street. Course, a guy can't _sop_ it up, like you see some do. Other
night, now--gang of us out, y'understand--come too fast for your Uncle
Cuthbert. Say, goin' up those stairs where I live I cert'n'ly must 'a'
sounded like a well-known clubman gettin' home from an Elks' banquet.
Head, next A.M.?--ask me, _ask_ me! Nothing of the kind! Don't I show
up with a toothache and con old Tully into a day off at the dentist's to
have the bridge-work tooled up. Ask me was I at the dentist's? Wow!
Not!--little old William J. Turkish bath for mine!"
Bean was moved to raw envy. But he knew himself too well. The specialist
he professed to have consulted had put a ban upon the simplest
recreations. Otherwise how could he with any grace have declined those
repeated invitations of Bulger's to come along and meet a couple of
swell dames that'd like to have a good time? Bulger, considered in
relation to the sex not his own, was what he himself would have termed
"a smooth little piece of work." Bean was not this. Of all his terrors
women, as objects of purely male attention, were the greatest. He longed
for them, he looked upon such as were desirable with what he believed to
be an evil eye, but he had learned not to go too close. They talked,
they disconcerted him horribly. And if they didn't talk they looked
dangerous, as if they knew too much. Some day, of course, he would nerve
himself to it. Indeed he very determinedly meant to marry, and to have a
son who should be trained from the cradle with the sole idea of making
him a great left-handed pitcher; but that was far in the future. He
longed tragically to go with Bulger and meet a couple of swell dames,
but he knew how it would be. Right off they would find him out and laugh
at him.
Bulger consumed another high-ball, filled his cigarette case, and the
two stood a moment on Broadway. Breede, the last to leave his office,
crossed the pavement to a waiting automobile.
"There's his foxy Rebates going to the arms of his family," said Bulger,
disrespectfully applying to Breede a term that had more than once made
him interesting to the Interstate Commerce Commission.
"See the three skirts in the back? That's the Missis and the two squabs.
Young one's only a flapper, but the old one's a peacherine for looks. Go
on, lamp her once!"
Bean turned his diffident gaze upon the occupants of the tonneau with a
sudden wild dream that he would stare insolently. But his eyes
unaccountably came to rest in the eyes of the young one--the flapper. He
saw only the eyes, and he felt that the eyes were seeing him. The motor
chugged slowly up Broadway, nosing for a path about a slowly driven
truck; the flapper looked back.
"Not half bad, that!" said Bean, recovering, and speaking in what he
felt was the correct Bulger tone.
"Not for mine," said Bulger firmly. "Big sister, though, not so worse.
Met up with her one time out to the country place, takin' stuff for the
old man the time he got kidneys in his feet. I made a hit with her, too,
on the level, but say! nothin' doing there for old John W. me! I dropped
the thing like it was poison ivy. Me doin' the nuptial in a family like
that, and bein' under Pop's thumb the rest of my life? Ask me, that's
all; _ask_ me! Wake me up any time in the night and ask me."
Again Bean was thrilled, resolving then and there that no daughter of
Breede's should ever wed him. Bulger was entirely right. It wouldn't do.
Bulger looked at his watch.
"Well, s'long; got a date down in the next block. She's out at five.
Say, I want you to get a flash at her some day. Broadway car, yesterday,
me goin' uptown with Max, see? she lookin' at her gloves. 'Pipe the
queen in black,' I says to Max, jes' so she could hear, y' understand.
Say, did she gimme the eye. Not at all! Not at _all_! Old William H.
Smoothy, I guess yes. Pretty soon a gink setting beside her beats it,
and quick change for me. Had her all dated up by Fourteenth Street.
Dinner and a show, if things look well. Some class to her, all right.
One the manicures in that shop down there. Well, s'long!"
Looking over his shoulder with sickish envy after the invincible Bulger,
Bean left the curb for a passing car and came to a jolting stop against
the biggest policeman he had ever seen. He mumbled a horrified apology,
but his victim did not even turn to look down upon him. He fled into the
car and found a seat, still trembling from that collision. From across
the aisle a pretty girl surveyed him with veiled insolence. He furtively
felt of his neutral-tinted cravat and took his hat off to see if there
could be a dent in it. The girl, having plumbed his insignificance, now
unconcernedly read the signs above his head. There was bitterness in the
stare he bestowed upon her trim lines. Some day Bulger would chance to
be on that car with her--then she'd be taken down a bit--Bulger who, by
Fourteenth Street, had them all dated up.
Presently he was embarrassed by a stout, aggressive man who clutched a
strap with one hand and some evening papers with the other, a man who
clearly considered it outrageous that he should be compelled to stand in
a street car. He glared at Bean with a cold, questioning indignation,
shifting from one foot to the other, and seeming to be on the point of
having words about it. This was not long to be endured. Bean glanced out
in feigned dismay, as if at a desired cross-street he had carelessly
passed, sprang toward the door of the car and caromed heavily against a
tired workingman who still, however, was not too tired to put his sense
of injury into quick, pithy words of the street. The pretty girl
tittered horribly and the stout man, already in Bean's seat, rattled his
papers impatiently, implying that people in that state ought to be kept
off in the first place.
He had meant to leave the car and try another, but there at the step was
another too-large policeman helping an uncertain old lady to the ground,
so he slinkingly insinuated himself to the far corner of the platform,
where, for forty city blocks, a whistling messenger boy gored his right
side with the corners of an unyielding box while a dreamy-eyed man who,
as Bulger would have said, had apparently been sopping it up like you
see some do, leaned a friendly elbow on his shoulder, dented his new hat
and from time to time stepped elaborately on his natty shoes with the
blue cloth uppers. Also, the conductor demanded and received a second
fare from him. What was the use of saying you had paid inside? The
conductor was a desperate looking man who would probably say he knew
that game, and stop the car....
Something of the sort always happened to him in street cars. It was bad
enough when you walked, with people jostling you and looking as if they
wondered what right you had to be there.
At last came the street down which he made a daily pilgrimage and he
popped from the crowd on the platform like a seed squeezed from an
orange.
Reaching the curb alive--the crossing policeman graciously halted a huge
motor-truck driven by a speed-enthusiast--he corrected the latest dent
in his hat, straightened his cravat, readjusted the shoulder lines of
the coat appertaining to America's greatest eighteen-dollar
suit--"$18.00--No More; No Less!"--and with a fear-quickened hand
discovered that his watch was gone, his gold hunting-case watch and
horseshoe fob set with brilliants, that Aunt Clara had given him on his
twenty-first birthday for not smoking!
A moment he stood, raging, fearing. His money was safe, but they might
decide to come back for that. Or the policeman might come up and make an
ugly row because he had let himself be robbed in a public conveyance. He
would have to prove that the watch was his; probably have to tell why
Aunt Clara had given it to him.
With a philosophy peculiarly his own, a spirit of wise submission that
was more than once to serve him well, he pulled his hat sharply down,
braced and squared such appearance of perfect physical development as
the eighteen dollars had achieved, and walked away. He had always known
the watch would go. Now it was gone, no more worry. Good enough! As he
walked he rehearsed an explanation to Bulger: cleverly worded
intimations that the watch had been pawned to meet a certain quick
demand on his resources not morally to his credit. He made the
implication as sinister as he could.
And then he stood once more before the shrine of Beauty. In the
show-window of a bird-and-animal store on Sixth Avenue was a
four-months-old puppy, a "Boston-bull," that was, of a certainty, the
most perfect thing ever born of a mother-dog. Already the head was
enormous, in contrast, yet somehow in a maddening harmony with the
clean-lined slender body. The colour-scheme was golden brown on a
background of pure white. On the body this golden brown was distributed
with that apparent carelessness which is Art. Overlaying the sides and
back were three patches of it about the size and somewhat the shape of
maps of Africa as such are commonly to be observed. In the colouring of
the noble brow and absurdly wide jaws a more tender care was evident.
There was the same golden brown, beginning well back of the ears and
flowing lustrously to the edge of the overhanging upper lip, where it
darkened. Midway between the ears--erectly alert those ears were--a
narrow strip of white descended a little way to open to a circle of
white in the midst of which was the black muzzle. At the point of each
nostril was the tiniest speck of pink, Beauty's last triumphant touch.
As he came to rest before the window the creature leaped forward with
joyous madness, reared two clumsy white feet against the glass (those
feet that seemed to have been meant for a larger dog), barked ably--he
could hear it even above the din of an elevated train--and then fell to
a frantic licking of the glass where Bean had provocatively spread a
hand. Perceiving this intimacy to be thwarted by some mysterious barrier
to be felt but not seen, he backed away, fell forward upon his chest,
the too-big paws outspread, and smiled from a vasty pink cavern. Between
the stiffened ears could be seen the crooked tail, tinged with just
enough of the brown, in unbelievably swift motion. Discovering this pose
to bring no desired result, he ran mad in the sawdust, excavating it
feverishly with his forepaws, sending it expertly to the rear with the
others.
The fever passed; he surveyed his admirer for a moment, then began to
revolve slowly upon all four feet until he had made in the sawdust a bed
that suited him. Into this he sank and was instantly asleep, his
slenderness coiled, the heavy head at rest on a paw, one ear drooping
wearily, the other still erect.
For two weeks this daily visit had been almost the best of Bean's
secrets. For two weeks he had known that his passion was hopeless, yet
had he yearned out his heart there before the endearing thing. In the
shock of his first discovery, spurred to unwonted daring, he had
actually penetrated the store meaning to hear the impossible price. But
an angry-looking old man (so Bean thought) had come noisily from a back
room and glowered at him threateningly over big spectacles. So he had
hastily priced a convenient jar of goldfish for which he felt no
affection whatever, mumbled something about the party's calling,
himself, next day, and escaped to the street. Anyway, it would have been
no good, asking the price; it was bound to be a high price; and he
couldn't keep a dog; and if he did, a policeman would shoot it for being
mad when it was only playing.
But some time--yet, would it be this same animal? In all the world there
could not be another so acceptable. He shivered with apprehension each
day as he neared the place, lest some connoisseur had forestalled him.
He quickened to a jealous distrust of any passerby who halted beside him
to look into the window, and felt a great relief when these passed on.
Once he had feared the worst. A man beside him holding a candy-eating
child by the hand had said, "Now, now, sir!" and, "Well, well, _was_ he
a nice old doggie!" Then they had gone into the store, very
businesslike, and Bean had felt that he might be taking his last look at
a loved one. Lawless designs throbbed in his brain--a wild plan to
shadow the man to his home--to have that dog, _no matter how_. But when
they came out the child carried nothing more than a wicker cage
containing two pink-eyed white rabbits that were wrinkling their noses
furiously.
With a last cherishing look at most of the beauty in all the world--it
still slept despite the tearing clatter of a parrot with catarrhal
utterance that shrieked over and over, "Oh, what a fool! Oh, what a
fool!"--he turned away. What need to say that, with half the
opportunity, his early infamy of the shell would have been repeated. He
wondered darkly if the old man left that dog in the window nights!
He reached for his watch before he remembered its loss. Then he reminded
himself bitterly that street clocks were abundant and might be looked at
by simpletons who couldn't keep watches. He bought an evening paper that
shrieked with hydrocephalic headlines and turned into a dingy little
restaurant advertising a "Regular Dinner de luxe with Dessert, 35 cts."
There was gloom rather than gusto in his approach to the table. He
expected little; everything had gone wrong; and he was not surprised to
note that the cloth on the table must also have served that day for a
"Business Men's Lunch, 35 cts.," as advertised on a wall placard.
Several business men seemed to have eaten there--careless men, their
minds perhaps on business while they ate. A moody waiter took his order,
feebly affecting to efface all stains from the tablecloth by one magic
sweep of an already abused napkin.
Bean read his paper. One shriek among the headlines was for a railroad
accident in which twenty-eight lives had been lost. He began to go down
the list of names hopefully, but there was not one that he knew.
Although he wished no evil to any person, he was yet never able to
suppress a strange, perverse thrill of disappointment at this
result--that there should be the name of no one he knew in all those
lists of the mangled. His food came and he ate, still striving--the game
of childhood had become unconscious habit with him now--to make his meat
and potatoes "come out even." The dinner de luxe was too palpably a
soggy residue of that Business Men's Lunch. It fittingly crowned the
afternoon's catastrophes. He turned from it to his paper and Destiny
tied another knot on his bonds. There it was in bold print:
COUNTESS CASANOVA
Clairvoyant ... Clairaudient
Psychometric.
Fresh from Unparalleled European Triumphs.
Answers the Unasked Question.
There was more of it. The Countess had been "prevailed upon by eminent
scientists to give a brief series of tests in this city." Evening tests
might be had from 8 to 10 P.M. Ring third bell.
The old query came back, the old need to know what he had been before
putting on this present very casual body. Was his present state a reward
or a penance? From the time of leaving the office to the last item in
that sketchy dinner, he had been put upon by persons and circumstances.
It was time to know what life meant by him.
And here was one who answered the unasked question!
Precisely at eight he rang the third bell, climbed two flights of narrow
stairs and faced a door that opened noiselessly and without visible
agency. He entered a small, dimly lighted room and stood there
uncertainly. After a moment two heavy curtains parted at the rear of the
room and the Countess Casanova stood before him. It could have been no
other; her lustrous, heavy-lidded dark eyes swept him soothingly. Her
hair was a marvellously piled storm-cloud above a full, well-rounded
face. Her complexion was wonderful. One very plump, very white hand
rested at the neck of the flowing scarlet robe she wore. A moment she
posed thus, beyond doubt a being capable of expounding all wingy
mysteries of any soul whatsoever.
Then she became alert and voluble. She took his hat and placed it in the
hall, seated him before the table at the room's centre and sat
confronting him from the other side. She filled her chair. It could be
seen that she was no slave to tight lacing.
Although foreign in appearance, the Countess spoke with a singularly
pure and homelike American accent. It was the speech he was accustomed
to hear in Chicago. It reassured him.
The Countess searched his face with those wonderful eyes.
"You are intensely psychic," she announced.
Bean was aware of this. Every medium he had ever consulted had told him
so.
The Countess gazed dreamily above his head.
"Your spiritual aura is clouded by troubled curnts, as it were. I see
you meetin' a great loss, but you mus' take heart, for a very powerful
hand on the other side is guardin' you night an' day. They tell me your
initials is 'B.B.' You are employed somewheres in the daytime. I see a
big place with lots of other people employed there--"
The Countess paused. Bean waited in silence.
"Here"--she came out of the clouds that menaced her sitter--"take this
pad an' write a question on it. Don't lemme see it, mind! When you got
it all wrote out, fold it up tight an' hold it against your forehead.
Never leggo of it, not once!"
Bean wrote, secretly, well below the table's edge.
"_Who was I in my last incarnation?_"
He tore the small sheet from the pad, folded it tightly and, with elbows
on the table, pressed it to his brow. If the Countess answered that
question, then indeed was she a seer.
She took up the pad from which he had torn the sheet.
"Concentrate," she admonished him. "Let the whole curnt of your
magnetism flow into that question. Excuse me! I left the slate in the
nex' room. My control will answer you on the slate."
She withdrew between the curtains, but reappeared very soon. Bean was
concentrating.
"That'll do," said the Countess. "Here!" She presented him with a double
slate and a moist sponge. "Wipe it clean."
He washed the surfaces of the slate and the seer placed it upon the
table between them, enclosing within its two sections a tiny fragment of
slate pencil. She placed her hands upon the slate and bade her sitter do
likewise.
"You often hear skeptics say they is sometimes trickery in this," said
the Countess, "but say, listen now, how could it be? I leave it to you,
friend. I ain't seen your question; you held it a minute and then put it
in your pocket. An' you seen the slate was clean. Now concentrate; go
into the Silence!"
Bean went into the Silence without suspicion, believing the Countess
would fail. She couldn't know his question and no human power could
write on the inside of that slate without detection. He waited with
sympathy for the woman who had overestimated her gifts.
Then he was startled by the faintest sound of scratching, as of a pencil
on a slate. It seemed to issue from beneath their hands at rest there in
plain sight. The medium closed her eyes. Bean waited, his breath
quickening. Little nervous crinklings began at the roots of his hair and
descended his spine--that scratching, faint, yet vigorous, did it come
from beyond the veil?
The scratching ceased. The ensuing silence was portentous.
"Open it and look!" commanded the Countess. And Bean forthwith opened it
and looked a little way into his dead and dread past. Apparently upon
the very surface he had washed clean were words that seemed to have been
hurriedly inscribed:
"_The last time you was Napolen Bonopart._"
He stared wonderingly at those marks made by no mortal hand. He thrilled
with a vast elation; and yet instantly a suspicion formed that here was
something to his discredit, something one wouldn't care to have known.
He had read as little history as possible, yet there floated in his mind
certain random phrases, "A Corsican upstart," "An assassin," "No
gentleman!"
"I--I suppose--you're sure there can't be any doubt about this?"
He looked pleadingly at the Countess. But the Countess was a mere
psychic instrument, it seemed, and had to be told, first of the
question--he produced it with a suspicion that she might doubt his
honesty--and then of the astounding answer. Thus enlightened, she
protested that there could be no doubt about the truth of the answer;
she was ready to stake her professional reputation on its truth. She
regarded Bean with an awe which she made no attempt to conceal.
"You had your _day_," she said significantly; "pomps and powers and--and
attentions!"
Bean was excitedly piecing together what fragments of data his reading
had left him.
"Emperor of France--"
But some one else had rung the third bell, perhaps one of those
scientists coming to be dumfounded.
"He was," the Countess replied hurriedly, "the husban' of Mary Antonett,
an' they both got arrested and gilletined in the great French
revolution."
He was pretty certain that this was incorrect, but the Countess, after
all, was a mere instrument of higher intelligence, and she now made no
pretence of speaking otherwise than humanly.
"An' my controls say they'll leave me in a body if I take a cent less 'n
three dollars."
One of the controls seemed to be looking this very threat or something
like it from the medium's sharpened eyes.
Bean paid hastily, thus averting what would have been a calamity to all
earnest students of the occult. The advertisement, it is true, had
specifically mentioned one dollar as the accustomed honorarium, but this
was no time to haggle.
_Napoleon!_
"Don't furgit the number," urged the Countess, "an' if you got any
friends, I'd appreciate--"
"Certainly! Sure thing!" said the palpitating one, and blindly felt his
way into the night.
The same stars shone above the city street; the same heedless throng
disregarded them; disregarded, too, the slight figure that paused a
moment to survey the sky and the world beneath it through a new pair of
eyes.
_Napoleon!_